comedy

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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 »

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Another reliable fake-news tonic for the real news during 2009 has been, of course, The Onion. In my opinion, The Onion’s video segments are a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition, but one subset of them cracks me up pretty consistently: “In The Know,” which sends up the kind of four or five-way pundit scrum the cable news outlets so adore.

A fine example is number five on my top ten videos of 2009, “In The Know: Giant Money Hole,” which festoons the economic bailout in absurdity. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the early part of 2009, American TV airwaves were polluted by a particular commercial that became known as the “Gathering Storm” ad. Made by a group calling itself the National Organization for Marriage, it was a clumsy, mendacious message of anti-gay fear-mongering. I don’t care to put the original ad here on my own blog, so if you haven’t seen or don’t immediately recall it you can fill yourself in by clicking this link.

The ad could have been a milestone of unintentional comedy were it not for the fact that so many Americans actually buy its central falsehood that same-sex marriage could impose anything whatsoever onto heterosexual marriages and families. Needless to say, the ad’s overblown, portentous bigotry practically begged to be parodied. I made calls to a few filmmaker friends with a mind toward producing one myself, but to do it right ended up being logistically impossible.

Fortunately, the popular comedy site Funny or Die soon rolled out their version, which more than filled the comedic void. Entitled “A Gaythering Storm,” it comes in at number six on my list of the top ten videos of 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

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No top ten list of my favorite 2009 videos could possibly be complete without a representative from the delightful, beautifully simple oldjewstellingjokes.com. Due credit once again to my friend and blogroll-ee Michael Fox, and his original post at The Moving Target. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

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