comedians
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Are there things that cannot be joked about? It’s the question at the center of a debate that has been going on for quite awhile. In fact, I personally hope it never stops being debated. It goes to one of the best things about comedy—its ability to help us understand one another. I say that at least in theory, there is nothing that cannot be joked about. It’s all about context and intent.
Case in point: the video that comes in at number four on my list of the top ten videos of 2009. It was made as in interlude for Real Time with Bill Maher, and features Sarah Silverman with a solution for global hunger. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bill Maher, catholicism, comedians, comedy, holocaust, Judaism, lists, religion, Sarah Silverman, the Pope, top ten, videos
What’s funny about the current economic crisis? At the root of it, nothing. I have spent most of 2009 as one of the who-knows-how-many millions struggling with unemployment and dwindling resources. One side effect of unemployment is that it gives you additional time for pondering (a mixed blessing, to be sure). I’ve periodically wondered whether the crumbling of public education in America is the chicken or the egg (so to speak) relative to our national economic woes… which leads me to number eight on my Casey Kasem-esque video countdown, the Colbert Report clip “The Word: Learning is Fundamental.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: comedians, comedy, economic crisis, education, Jon Stewart, lists, Obama, satire, Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, top ten, unemployment, videos
Earlier today I came across a blogger with a weekly feature called The Sunday Seven, wherein each Sunday he posts a question for which there can be up to seven answers. He invites people to leave their answers in his comments field, or post them on their own blogs with a link back to him. I always intend to post more often here at C&B, so I say a random guy named Patrick’s Sunday Seven is as good a reason as any to do so. 
THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name your seven favorite late-night talk show hosts.
Heh heh… not exactly a matter of earth-shattering importance, is it? Of course, there are plenty of earth-shattering things going on in the news right now without me bringing down the room even more. So here we go: Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Bill Maher, comedians, comedy, Conan O'Brien, David Letterman, gay marriage, Hollywood, Johnny Carson, Jon Stewart, lists, Lynn Westmoreland, Mike Huckabee, punditiots, same-sex marriage, Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, Tonight Show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, videos
George Carlin is gone. Damn it. I never got to meet him.
People who know me well will attest that in a normal conversation, it’s quite common for me to quote George Carlin. It’s no accident: he was so prolifically funny and insightful for so long that he covered the majority of topics relevant to our lives at one time or another. More than any other individual source, George Carlin’s stand-up formed the basis of my comedic sensibility. He showed me what comedy could be—that its full effect extends well beyond what is merely funny. His wit was restless, impatient; it tugged persistently at the uneven corners of our society.
When I was about 11 or 12, his 1972 album Class Clown became the first comedy recording I ever owned. I brought that LP home, listened to it, and then listened to it again. And then again, a few more times. Soon his brilliant riffs were committed to my memory (where they remain), and I returned to Tower Records in Mountain View to repeat the process with another opus from the Carlin catalogue. LPs gave way to cassette tapes – easier to store, useful for my new, bitchin’ bright-yellow Walkman, and good for comedy recordings because the eventual decline in audio fidelity didn’t matter so much.
As I’ve mentioned, his penetratingly funny insights are too numerous and wide-ranging to recount. Here’s just a few, off the top of my head. George, forgive me if I paraphrase.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: audio clips, censorship, comedians, comedy, deaths, George Carlin, golf, profanity, recommendations, religion, sports, words
When I was a kid I would read and re-read the two or three volumes then in circulation of The Book of Lists, a repository of trivia compiled by the producers of The People’s Almanac. Thus began my career as a walking archive of mostly useless information. The books did, however, establish in me an early appreciation for lists which may now finally pay off: many respected authorities in the field of blogging have advised that lists are a device which tends to enhance blog readership.
I’ve started a new category here at C&B, cryptically titled “Lists.” Some of the lists will be ordered, some will be unordered, and some will be not what you ordered. Maybe at some point if I get really fancy with it, some of them may even have items AND sub-items! If you want to see all of the lists together on one page… well, for the moment just click on the “Lists” category (or tag, once I either get UTW to work again or switch plugins… if you have no idea what I’m talking about, just ignore this). My grand visions of this blog’s future will have a much cooler solution, but for now yadda yadda yadda. Without further ado, here’s my inaugural list:
My Favorite Pithy Quotations*
* Specifically, quotations of real people speaking as themselves, as opposed to characters in movies. Except possibly for things said in documentaries, lines from movies or other works of fiction will have to get their own list.
- "I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member."
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
- "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t."
attributed to Robert Benchley (1889-1945)
- "I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not tell a lie; I can, but I won’t."
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
- "I got fired last year in Las Vegas, from the Frontier Hotel for saying ‘shit,’ in a town where the big game is called ‘crap.’ That’s some kind of a double standard, you know? I’m sure there was some Texan standing out in the casino yelling ‘Aw, shit, I crapped!’ And they fly those guys in free, you know? Fired me. Shit."
George Carlin (1937-2008)
- "As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty &endash; to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855
- "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined… could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years… If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln, addressing the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838
Tags: censorship, comedians, comedy, George Carlin, George Washington, Groucho Marx, hypocrisy, Lincoln, lists, Mark Twain, plugins, quotations, words
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