Lately I’ve made a particular effort to notify readers of this blog when videos in my posts are NSFW (and to make clear that “NSFW” is web shorthand for Not Safe For Work). I wouldn’t like for C&B to get anyone in trouble by blaring ribaldry into the ears of your humorless work supervisors, or, as the case may be, your young children.

Video number 4 on my 2011 list may well be the most NSFW thing I’ve ever posted. Remember “The Committee” from last year’s list? “You’re So Hot” surpasses that level of dirtiness not by a wide margin, but by a clear one nevertheless. Don’t freak out — it’s not pø®n or anything. Nothing at all graphic is shown in the clip, but a whoooole lot of very graphic things are said. Which is, as you’ll see, kind of the whole point. A point, I might add, which I continue to find hilarious.

In case you’re wondering, yes, Chris Mintz-Plasse (with the bowtie) was McLovin in Superbad. And yes, Dave Franco is the younger brother of James Franco. They made a really funny series of instructional acting videos for Funny or Die a few years ago, in case you haven’t seen them.

Trivia tidbit: the brothers Franco and I grew up in the same town, Palo Alto, California (the age gap is wide enough that I don’t know them or anything, though).

Back in January of 2011, the reliably hilarious satirical web site The Onion branched out into broadcast TV. Onion News Network was renewed for a second season and can be seen on IFC. A second show, Onion SportsDome, appeared on Comedy Central but was cancelled in June. SportsDome can’t be called a total loss, however, because it produced at least one terrific segment which has continued as a weekly feature on the web.

“Get Out of My Face” (often referred to by the delightful acronym “GOOMF”) is a brilliant parody of the dick-swinging, rapid fire sports pundit barking match shows which have become a staple for ESPN — ones like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.¹ The Onion’s first installment of GOOMF appeared in the summer of 2011, and it laid me out laughing:

[rated NSFW]

One of the things I love about GOOMF is the deliberate graphic overload, which is barely an exaggeration of the number of shiny bells and whistles that often clutter up the screen on SportsCenter. It’s impossible to catch all of the silly headlines that scroll by on the bottom-margin news ticker and pay full attention to the characters’ dialogue in a single viewing; if you don’t have time for multiple viewings of the clip, I transcribed them all here for your quick reading convenience.

For the slightly more serious-minded, the style being parodied in this video was recently the subject of a trenchant article in The Atlantic by Patrick Hruby, entitled “The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism.” The jist:

Turn on ESPN. There are score tickers and headline crawls, slick graphics and constant teases for upcoming stories, everything creating a sense of urgent immediacy. Now switch to Fox News. Visually speaking, it’s the same eyeball-grabbing formula. (Well, replace scores with stock prices, and garrulous sportscaster Chris Berman with a frosted blonde news babe). This is the SportsCenter-ization of the news, in which coverage of Washington — and the world, really — apes a glossy entertainment product dedicated to spectacular touchdowns, gee-whiz statistics, prefabricated drama, insta-debates waged by a nattering, revolving-door athletic punditocracy and the very latest updates on Brett Favre’s various bodily appendages.

If the Broncos beat the Patriots later today, watch tomorrow for Fox News to start ginning up a Tim Tebow write-in campaign for the remaining GOP primary states.

Kevin Pollak has an online chat show, helpfully called Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show. The show regularly includes a bit called “The Larry King Game” in which the guest is asked to do a bad impression of Larry King making an unlikely personal revelation, and then throwing to a phone call from a city with a funny name.

Even for naturally funny comics and actors, it’s a daunting enough task that the bit usually lasts for under thirty seconds. Comedian and former Simpsons writer Dana Gould, however, is no usual guest:

[Mildly NSFW]

For more Dana Gould, I guess his web site would be a logical place to start. He did a great episode of WTF with Marc Maron, although he did it long enough ago that it’s no longer available for free.¹ I also find him to be well worth following on Twitter, where he is @DanaJGould.

I clicked through some of the other Larry King Game clips on the KPCS YouTube channel. None of them approached Dana Gould level, but a few I can recommend for a quick giggle are comedian Paul F. Tompkins, musical parodist Weird Al Yankovic, poker champion Annie Duke, and comedian Greg Proops. To watch all four as a playlist (2:18), click here.

To be completely honest, I haven’t yet watched a full episode of The Kevin Pollak Chat Show. But I definitely plan to, because among the show’s extensive archives are chats with some people of whom I am a big fan. Apart from the full Dana Gould interview and the four mentioned in the preceding paragraph, I am psyched for the ones with Christopher Guest, Garfunkel & Oates, and Bryan Cranston.

Lesson #1 for agenda-driven interviewers: don’t fuck with Matt Damon. If you do, it’ll probably end up on YouTube. Case in point: Damon took time out from making a film to fly to Washington D.C. and give a speech at the Save Our Schools March on July 30, 2011. He was introduced by his mother Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education. Among the media covering the event was a libertarian outlet called Reason.tv, whose reporter and cameraman made the ill-advised choice to (you guessed it) fuck with Matt Damon. The result:

That, my friends, is what they call getting pwned. Even the jarring cut to the context-less moment from Good Will Hunting doesn’t diminish Damon’s (pardon the pun) schooling of microphone chick and the shitty cameraman.

As some readers already know,¹ I am the son of two teachers. I suppose I could therefore argue that my passion about our society’s devaluation of teachers is one teacher greater than Matt Damon’s; kidding aside, I’m very pleased that his celebrity, combined with his wit and eloquence on the subject, prompted this video to go viral on YouTube. As another actor (albeit a considerably less well-known one) born of educators, I’ll indulge the interviewer’s clunky comparison of the acting and teaching professions in another way.

The renowned actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen had the thesis that our society in general does not respect acting as a legitimate occupation. Acting is perceived as something which more or less anybody can do, but some people just have more talent for it than others. Everyone has played make-believe games as a kid, so everyone considers himself a valid critic of acting. It’s my contention that popular attitudes toward teaching have become disturbingly similar to this casual disregard for acting.

Everyone has to go to school, the perception goes, and everyone knows from experience that some teachers are more effective than others. It is thought that pretty much anyone who has graduated from school could teach, since there will always be at least a certain number of teaching jobs. Hence, everyone considers himself a valid critic of teaching. Don’t think so? Listen to microphone chick in this extended version of her Matt Damon encounter, in which she claims that having attended school in the L.A. Unified District qualifies her as an teaching expert equal to Damon’s mom.

The key difference between the acting and teaching professions is, of course, that public school teachers are paid with public money. To the libertarian/Tea Party crowd, “public money” is a hex. It’s their “Lord Voldemort.” With the ideal of eliminating essentially all taxes, these every-man-for-himself fanatics took aim in new, more pernicious ways at public school teachers during the year 2011.

Setting the tone was Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who interpreted his 52-47% victory in the 2010 election as an overwhelming mandate to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees. Not all his state’s public employees, mind you — just the ones who weren’t policemen or firefighters.² That leaves what, about 95% teachers and 5% janitors and DMV clerks.

Fortunately Governor Walker’s anti-teacher budget touched off a substantial backlash. The most immediate reaction was a protest in and around the State Capitol that went on for months, at its height involving about 100,000 demonstrators. After the budget was passed, Walker’s Tea Party allies pursued their stated intention to recall Democratic Party State Senators who had fought against the measure. This plan backfired when the eventual vote resulted in the recall of only two State Senators from office, both of them Republicans.

The situation with regard to teachers and education policy is still crucially important, of course. It calls for more Matt Damon-style pwnage, whether or not it comes from Matt Damon himself. The countryside is still crawling with ignoramuses who think that the economy sucks because some teachers are getting tenure… as opposed to, say, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks taking advantage of their industry’s deregulation to create securities out of bullshit, crash the global economy and stick us with the bill.

Number 8 on this year’s big countdown is what might be called this year’s “friend-otism” entry. Previous years’ lists have occasionally contained entries which featured, as I mentioned at the time, one or more people whom I know personally. This time I’m kicking the friend factor up a notch.

Among the actors in the following video is Assaf Cohen. To say I know Assaf personally doesn’t quite cover it: we have been friends since we were kids. Assaf and I grew up doing summer theater together during our high school years. To this day he remains one of my closest friends — one I even get to see fairly often, since we both live in Los Angeles.

More about Assaf in a moment. First, here he is with Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant (Lt. Dangle and Deputy Travis Junior, respectively, on Reno 911!) in a segment from Funny or Die Presents… called “Terrorist on Flight 77.”

Assaf’s TV roles include Hooman Jaka on Weeds, Yair Marx on Entourage and Hesam on Heroes, as well as appearances on 24, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, CSI: Miami, Burn Notice, and Ghost Whisperer, among others. His film credits include Flightplan and the Oscar-winning short film West Bank Story. He is a formidable noodge, and a consistent mensch.