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.

At number 9 on this year’s list is a choice installment of Puddin’, a YouTube series described as follows by its creator:

Monday thru Friday I upload a live action cartoon. Racist, self hating, morbid, yet ironically very family friendly.

I have yet to see an episode of Puddin’ that struck me as having a racist intent. I assume he means that it’s racist in the same way that it’s “family friendly” — i.e., it’s not. At all. This particular installment is relatively tame, with only a single word rendering it NSFW. The description of Puddin’ continues,

The setup is simple. Guy sits in an office break room eating a pudding cup. Eddie Pepitone enters, or is already there. He does something. You react by laughing, wincing, asking for your 20 seconds back, or watching over and over. Easy.

Puddin’ is most obviously a showcase for Eddie Pepitone, at least at first glance. I first discovered Pepitone’s brand of New York-tinged comic umbrage on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron, where he is regularly featured as the closing guest on live-audience episodes recorded in Los Angeles.

The auteur of Puddin’, however, is Matt Oswalt, a.k.a. the guy sitting in the break room eating the pudding cup. He writes all the material, and in every episode performs the silent “slow burn” in response to Pepitone’s outrageous antics. That’s no easy feat; as you may have noticed in the video above, Oswalt appears to just barely maintain a straight face.

Recent episodes of Puddin’ have featured various others as third (or fourth) occupants of the break room, including Andy Richter, Laura Silverman, James Urbaniak, and the creator’s brother Patton Oswalt. The only comment by Matt Oswalt I have seen on the subject of his increasingly famous brother was this:

My inclusion of this video rather than one of Colbert’s more ballyhooed 2010 moments (the previously-mentioned Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and his testimony on behalf of migrant farm workers before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship and Border Security) may seem counter-intuitive. Taking the satirical brickbat to hypocrites is hardly new for him — in fact, it could be declared as his primary stock in trade since the Report began in 2005. However, it has not become less necessary in that time. I would argue that it is more necessary than ever.

“What I like best about Bill’s argument,” Colbert declares in the video, “is its complete factual inaccuracy.” Funny, cutting, and true enough to be chilling if you think about its implications. With the campaign and eventual election of Barack Obama as U.S. President, the tide of truthiness has risen to unforeseen levels of absurdity: need I even mention birthers, or ludicrous accusations of socialism and “death panels?” While these falsehoods have been of greater consequence than Bill O’Reilly’s quasi-Christian bullshitting, they represent the same syndrome: the determination of conservative ideologues to create a post-factual America.

Conventional American news media, whose objective is not accuracy but profit, therefore does nothing to stem the tide of misinformation and demagoguery. The premise of “balanced” news coverage (or news commentary, often conflated with coverage) is itself a fallacy. The presentation of opposing viewpoints on a news issue under the imprimatur of fairness is a disservice to the viewer when only one of them is factually sustainable, but both are given equal weight… as is usually the case.

The succinct sub-title over at The Reality-Based Community reads, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Fortunately, we also have satirists like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart on TV to remind us of this.

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.

I imagine there are probably a lot of catholics who would find this video offensive. It may even rub some of Silverman’s fellow jews the wrong way as well. To be clear, I would never try to convince someone who doesn’t laugh at this piece that they were mistaken or wrong not to do so. The late film critic Gene Siskel said that you can’t hold someone to account for what they find funny, and I think the reverse is also true.

I find this video, and Sarah Silverman in general, to be hysterically funny in part because her humor begins with poking fun at herself. Her comic persona—an overprivileged, underinformed, hopelessly shallow Jewish Californian Princess—gives her the necessary setup to be quite pointed from her fundamentally inappropriate worldview. Like, say, solving world hunger not because it’s the right thing to do, but because she doesn’t want to look at the images of starving children on relief-agency ads. It’s not as if the Pope and the Catholic clergy are the only ones getting skewered here.

Am I wrong? Is there a justification for the Pope living in old-world royal opulence while preaching humility and storing your treasures not here on Earth? Do you find Sarah Silverman as funny as I do, or do you (like some others) think she’s irritating and lowbrow? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

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:

My Favorite Late-Night Talk Show Hosts

Johnny Carson. It feels a little odd to be putting him on this list of “favorites,” because there were a few things about Johnny that put me off a little. For example, sometimes with the “regular folks” guests (a bird-calling champion, a 90-year-old postmaster, a guy who’d had the hiccups for 30 years, etc) he would make jokes at their expense – just little asides or takes to the audience that struck me as cheap and mean-spirited. That said, there’s no denying the influence The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson had upon television, and the whole entertainment industry. It was the gold standard among late-night talk and variety shows. It was the show to be on, and stop number one for big-name stars with new movies coming out. A Tonight Show booking was the big shot every stand-up comedian hoped for. Indeed, the comedy boom of the 1980′s was composed largely of performers whose names were made when they cracked up Johnny Carson – Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, Roseanne Barr, Steven Wright, Ellen DeGeneres, and Drew Carey, to name just a few. It was entertaining and tremendously popular show, and the credit is due mainly to Johnny Carson. Plus, he had the grace to get out while he was still in good form; the same cannot be said of his successor Jay Leno, no matter if he is still ahead of Letterman in the ratings nor how many gazillions of dollars NBC pays him for continuing to suck.

David Letterman. I was a solid fan of Letterman beginning well back in his 12:30AM-after-The-Tonight-Show years. I always cottoned to Dave’s un-slick and un-polished, self-effacing kind of humor. Letterman was a little riskier at 12:30AM than he can be these days in the competitive 11:30PM slot. Back in the day there wasn’t always a top ten list – sometimes they’d instead do an inventively silly segment like “What Object Would You Like to See Dropped Off a Ten-Story Tower?” (As I recall, when viewed from above a load of watermelons look like fireworks going off as they hit the pavement, whereas bowling balls go about 3 stories back upward on the first bounce). I also treasure the memory of Dave looking out a Rockefeller Center window at Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley taping a live program in the plaza below, and then picking up a bullhorn to call out, “Citizens of New York! I am Larry Grossman, president of NBC News. This outdoor broadcast was my idea – and I’m not wearing pants!” I still like Dave, and although I don’t see his show too often anymore, I would credit his show for forming a lot of my comic sensibility when I was a kid.

Conan O’Brien. I’ll further admit that I see Conan’s show even less often than I see Letterman these days. Over the years, I have appreciated the unique flavor of humor his show has established. I don’t know about Conan being a great interviewer or anything, but I imagine he’s more concerned with entertaining his audience than being compared to Barbara Walters. Conan’s show has given the world the comedic masterpiece known as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, which alone would be a worthy legacy. But beyond it all, Conan earned my eternal respect and admiration by having balls enough to tape an entire episode of his show before a live studio audience composed entirely of six-year-olds.

Bill Maher. Speaking of balls… I’m glad that Bill Maher has found the right TV home for himself at HBO. I’ve long been a fan of his comedy, especially because of its challenging and topical nature. Likewise, his show is consistently both substantive via its panel discussions, and funny via its set-piece segments. The odd thing is that even though I mainly agree with Maher politically and philosophically, I’ve become slightly weary of a few of his main beefs. I want to say, “OK, Bill: I get it. I may not necessarily share some your opinions, or share them only to an extent, but I certainly respect them. It’s just… does it really help the situation to mock religious people, married people, or people with children so bitterly?” There absolutely are issues there worth talking about, and worth joking about (of course). But Bill Maher occasionally crosses the line into demagoguery, and the world definitely doesn’t need more of that.

Jon Stewart. I could sit a very long time trying for an original combination of words to praise the brilliance of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. I think if the past five or so years of TV have proven anything, it’s that the satire is mightier than the shout (even in the case of Stephen Colbert’s shouted satire). Aside from how penetratingly funny Jon Stewart routinely is, he can also be more just plain penetrating as an interviewer than anyone on I can think of on TV. I could struggle further to describe what I mean, but it wouldn’t be half as effective as simply posting this clip:

Stephen Colbert. I see Colbert as a separate category because The Colbert Repot really isn’t a talk show as such. The show does always have a guest, but Colbert upends the usual talk-show conceit by interviewing guests in character, the same way he is during the rest of the show. Most guests end up serving mainly as comic foils. Their “interviews” often don’t reveal much about them or their work, but they are quite often hilarious. If anything is consistently revealed by the interviews, it is how the subject reacts to a ludicrous moron who is nonetheless very sure of himself. As a conservative pundit in the O’Reilly/Hannity mold, the Colbert character’s unflagging ideological passion is fueled by pure “truthiness,” the term he famously coined on the first episode. “I love the truth,” he later explained to a guest, “but I hate facts.” The latest challenge for Colbert, it would seem, is to avoid becoming a victim of his own success. By now, almost all of his guests come in knowing what to expect from him and play along. Colbert is a sharp enough improviser to provide a lively exchange anyhow, but it’s hard to escape nostalgia for the days of his sit-downs with congressmen unaware of what they were in for:

Is that still only six? Aw, screw it – I’m going carpal tunnel from how long this post became anyhow.