Tag: Comedy

  • If You Know, Then You’re a Nerd

  • ODDS and ENDS: Couch or Sofa, Tottenham Fans, and “Hundreds of Beavers”

    (‘Cuz you woke up in the mornin’ with initiative to move…)

    Do you use the term couch or sofa? Do you use them interchangeable? In fact, a couch is an informal – less structured piece of furniture, while a sofa is more formal in function and design. I say all of this because I am going couch/sofa shopping this weekend. Yeah, our livingroom couch is on its last leg being that it’s kind’a broken just enough to let us know it needs to be replaced, but not broken so much as to be unusable. The wife and I are about the spend a morning, and possible an afternoon, asking ourselves the “Fight Club” question; “What kind of couch defines me as a person?” I’m going with gray, or a navy blue; That defines me quite well as a person.

    I have written before about my odd interactions with other Tottenham fans in New York. Most of the time, I see someone with Tottenham gear on, and I’ll say something to them about the team, or say “Come on you, Spurs!” They react by saying, “What?” or “This isn’t mine, I’m borrowing it.” But the other day, as I had my Tottenham scarf on, a woman yelled at me, “How about that Liverpool match!?!” She was talking about the Carabao Cup match on Wednesday where the most confusing team in all of football, Tottenham Hotspur, managed to beat one of the best teams in the world – Liverpool. But… I wasn’t able to watch the match or see the highlights, yet I knew that they had won… All I could say to the woman was, “I didn’t watch it, but I know they won!” Not the stirring response she was looking for, I know.

    And I want to end with a movie I just watched, and I might review later. It is one of the most original comedies I have seen in a very a very long time. It’s called “Hundreds of Beavers.” Just… just watch the trailer, is all I ask.

  • ODDS and ENDS: That’s Some Good Sentencing, Rewatching Baking Show, and Red Pants

    (I think I’m starting to peak now, Al…)

    Do you know who Tina Peters is? Long story short, she was a MAGA county clerk in Colorado who help a person break into Dominion voting machines after the 2020 election. She has been unrepentant in her actions, has even become a semi-celebrity in ultra-conservative conspiracy circles. Well, she got put on trial for the crime of breaking into voting machines, was found guilty in August, and was sentenced the other day. Below is the video of the judge sentencing her, and also laying out a very good case of why these conspiracies and the people who propagate them are extremely dangerous to our democracy.

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    So, the new season of Great British Baking Show started last week, and I may or may not write more about this season. Or I may wait until it’s all over with to write about it, or I might not write about it at all. Either way, for me and the wife, the lead up to the new season means that we go through and watch the past seasons. Funny the things we remember and the things we forget. The one thing that I remember and never changes is that Sandi Toksvig was the best host of that show, hands down and unquestioned. But the things we forget, like who won, and who made it to the finals, we very often misremember (is that a word?) those details. I would have to say that I am 50% when it comes to remembering who won a season, or who got voted out on a certain episode. But I will never forget the awful mispronunciation of the word “taco.” Paul kept calling it a “Tack-oh.”

    I now have a pair of pants whose color name is “Nantucket Red.” (I am aware that Nantucket Red is a specific type of pant from Murray’s Toggery Shop in Nantucket, and what I am referring to is a pair of red pants I got in a thrift shop a month ago, but the tag called the pant color by that name.) I like the pants because they fit well, and go with several shirts that I own. Yes, there is a WASP-ness to the pants, which I feel I pull off ironicy. But at the end of the day, they are a pair of red pants, which can feel like a bold step for a person as modest as me. The only other guy I knew who proudly had a pair of red pants was the comedian/improv performer down in the Lower East Side. He was funny enough for a guy who was 22, right out of college, and trying to make their way in NYC. And his thing was the red pants. He always had the red pants on, and would tell people he always wore these red pants. I took it to mean that he wore the pants when he was out performing, like a costume. No, his girlfriend confirmed that he wore the pants all the time. He even wore them in the shower to “wash” them, she said. I still think it was a bit.

  • I Think About This Sketch Often

    Everything in this sketch is great. The writing, the acting, theme; all of it.

  • The South Bank Show – Discussing Art

    I am not as disciplined as I would like to be. I say this because last night I was going to be a good boy – watch a little tv, and then finish reading Rachel Cusk’s new short story in The New Yorker.

    But then my brain says to me; It says, “You remember the theme song to The South Bank Show?”

    “I do,” I says. “I think it was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, of all people.”

    “You should look that up.”

    “I will, and, switching subjects here, a good night’s sleep is for losers.”

    “Tell me about it.”

    So, YouTube has a shit ton of South Bank Show videos. And I hope you know what I am talking about. See, back in the early 90’s when BRAVO was the greatest cable channel for the arts and people who couldn’t sleep, they would show the documentary series The Show Bank Show which was originally broadcast on ITV in Great Britain. The show covered all subjects that had to do with art and pop culture. You could get an episode on Gore Vidal, and then one about The Talking Heads. For a very impressionable junior high kid, these shows were mind altering because they exposed me to different viewpoints, and arts, and lifestyles, things that I would never run into living in the suburbs outside of Dallas.

    I found the intro music of The South Bank Show (It was in fact written by Andrew Lloyd Webber for his brother, a cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber. Here’s a full version of the song) and here is a compilation of all the intro versions. (The 1989-1990 is my favorite.) Just hearing the music again, and seeing the animation, I was reminded how I would get a genuine deep curiosity thrill of what was about to be shown on that program. For that thirteen-year-old me, I was being shown a world of creativity that I knew must exist, but was just beyond my fingertips. It was a world that I wanted to be in, and that show made me feel like it was completely accessible.

    I decided that I couldn’t just stop at the theme song, and I should watch an episode. I went with the one on Steve Martin, which I remember seeing way back when. It’s when Martin was transitioning out of his “Wild and Crazy Guy” persona, and was beginning to make smarter comedies, such as Roxanne and LA Story. The documentary gave him a good platform to explain how his “crazy” persona was more like a comedy experiment where he was trying to write jokes that were just funny, and didn’t have traditional punchlines or set ups. I read his memoir, Born Standing Up, which covered his start in comedy, to when he quit doing standup, and he goes into more detail on his reasoning and thought process of what makes a joke work. What I took away then, as I did now, was how smart Steve Martin is, and how he knows the balance of thinking about, but not over thinking, comedy.

    See. Stuff like that is what makes The South Bank Show still interesting to watch. How the art and the artist are entangled, and what they go through, and how they view the world around them.

    I got about five hours of sleep last night.