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Top Ten Videos of 2010: 3. Garfunkel & Oates, “Pregnant Women Are Smug”

January 8, 2011 | 2 comments

G&O_logo

G&O logo

Keen observers will have already spotted that Garfunkel & Oates appeared in the “Laugh It Out” section of the C&B blogroll several weeks ago. Like one of my previous list-ees, original credit for bringing G&O to my attention is due to the WTF with Marc Maron podcast — specifically, a live episode from early 2010 that featured Kate Micucci (a.k.a. “Oates,” the brunette one). Her abundant charm came through in her conversation with Maron, and I found her solo voice-and-ukelele ditties delightful.1 Googling for more, I discovered her having formed a duo with Riki Lindhome (a.k.a. “Garfunkel,” the blonde one) and I was an immediate fan.

G&O make what they call “couch videos” of new songs they write and post them on YouTube. My listing the following video of “Pregnant Women are Smug” at #3 in my 2010 Top Ten is a little bit of a cheat, because their original YouTube video of the song appeared in April of 2009. But in 2010 they made their first national TV appearances — three, in fact, on The Tonight Show — and this is my favorite of them.

UPDATE (3/20/2011): NBC, in their infinite wisdom, has taken down the G&O Tonight Show videos to make way for newer Leno clips. You suck, NBC. To fill the video void, I’m sticking in the original 2009 “couch video” of the song. Thanks to commenter Siobhan for alerting me to the situation.

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Top Ten Videos of 2010: 5. Comedy Fights Malaria, “Bobby Bottleservice Gets Serious” [NSFW]

January 4, 2011 | Comment

kroll

Nick Kroll as Fabrice Fabrice
(Photo: Flickr/gaelenh)

The twice-weekly podcast WTF with Marc Maron (see also: “Worthy Podcasts” in my home page sidebar) has given me a window into what is going on in the world of stand-up comedy, how it interconnects to the broader realm of show business, and the varying trials and triumphs of the comics from their own perspectives. On a somewhat less profound note, it has also pointed my attention to a lot of really goddamned funny people.

One of these is Nick Kroll. Many know him as a cast member of the TV series The League on FX, although I’m still not yet one of them.1 I don’t know what the correct comedy-speak term is for Kroll’s overall schtick, but I’ll take my best shot by describing him as (mainly) a bag-of-characters comic. His douchebag extraordinaire creation Bobby Bottleservice appears in several Funny or Die videos, including as part of the faux crime-fighting duo the Ed Hardy Boys. In this video, Kroll takes part in the Comedy Fights Malaria effort of Malaria No More by bringing Bobby Bottleservice to West Africa. The result is just wrong enough to be funny.

Of Nick Kroll’s other characters I personally get the biggest kick out of El Chupacabra, although by definition that one is best suited for radio. Fabrice Fabrice almost made the list this year, but I already had one Funny or Die interview video. Maybe next year, Fabrice.


Top Ten Videos of 2010: 8. Funny or Die, “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Bruce Willis” [NSFW]

December 30, 2010 | 1 comment

CDR_logo

CDR logo by Kulap Vilaysack

I came late to the Zach Galifianakis party, as I do to most every party, conceptual or actual. One exception, however, would be my early arrival at the Scott Aukerman party. Scott and I trod the musical theatre boards together at PCPA TheaterFest longer ago than I care to quantify in calendar units. Scott went on to write for the sketch-comedy landmark Mr. Show and co-create the live show Comedy Death-Ray at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles.1 CDR has launched a weekly podcast, Comedy Death-Ray Radio, which has afforded me many a guffaw.

In the web-based audiovisual realm, Scott and his writing partner BJ Porter have brought the CDR brand to the comedy video site Funny or Die. Among their video contributions to FoD is the wildly popular “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis” series, in which Galifianakis interviews celebrities in a manner that is hard to describe exactly. I guess you could say he is simultaneously sheepish and insulting. Best just to watch.

The whole catalog of “Between Two Ferns” videos is here. Others that cracked me up extra hard include the one with Natalie Portman and the one with Jon Hamm.


Six Degrees of James Burke

January 16, 2009 | 2 comments

Low on iPod fodder for the six-hour drive to my parents’ house this past Christmas, I trolled the web for new listening material.  History has always been prominent among my various geekeries, and this tendency led me to discover the podcast Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History.  Carlin’s style and delivery are a little bit AM-radio for my taste, but this is only a small quibble – the subject matter is right up my alley, and his enthusiasm and curiosity are infectious. By the time I returned to LA, I’d already devoured nearly all the available Hardcore History episodes.

Perhaps my favorite was the one devoted to a conversation with James Burke, a British historian, author and producer of TV documentaries of whom I’d previously been ignorant.  I can’t possibly do justice to all of Burke’s theses, but in the most general sense his work has emphasized the endless inter-connectivity of people and ideas down through the ages. He is critical of the modern trend of scholarly hyper-specialization:

With formal education today, learners may study either history or physics, or perhaps only Renaissance history and astrophysics. People tend to become experts in highly specialized fields, learning more and more about less and less. Unfortunately, so much specialization falsely creates the illusion that knowledge and discovery exist in a vacuum, in context only with their own disciplines, when in reality they are born from interdisciplinary connections. Without an ability to see these connections, history and science won’t be learnable in a truly meaningful way and innovation will be stifled.

His ongoing project aims to provide an antidote to this syndrome, and it is an opus about as magnus as they get: Read the rest of this entry »