[Rated NSFW]

Somebody give those two girls a series. Although they get all the laugh lines, I would be remiss to not also recognize the excellent “straight-man” work of Brad Holbrook and Tracy Toth as the Today Now! anchors.

“Whole Foods Parking Lot” was the splashy debut of Fog and Smog, described on their web site as “a collective of creative culture vultures from The SF Bay Area and Los Angeles… directors, writers, producers, editors, composers, musicians, designers, deejays, and generally enthusiastic creative folks.” The principal performer in the video is DJDave, a.k.a. David Wittman, a Berkeley-bred, LA-based commercial and film composer. Wittman’s main cohorts in the video (and on its production)¹ include Jake “J Pusha” Pushinsky, DJ Spider and George Woolley.

WFPL went viral enough to prompt mainstream media coverage from outlets like The Hollywood Reporter and the Wall Street Journal. Fog and Smog were even hired to make a couple of TV ads for Hyundai. However, Wittman has expressed trepidation about F&S becoming a commercial venture; the group formed as a bunch of extended friends making something for fun, apart from their pre-existing careers in media and entertainment.

They have continued doing so, and have quite successfully produced more fun. If I had known before today about their second music video, “Yoga Girl,” it would probably have had its own spot in this top ten list… but I didn’t, so I’m including it here as a bonus feature. Enjoy!

I dig this lyric so much I wanna see it in text format:

We could hit up Rawvolution or the Urth Caffe,
Have a vegan cookie and talk about your day
Or we could take a walk down by the ocean,
I heard those hip openers release a lot of emotion
It’s all good though, you know, like either way…
You feel like going with me???
(Na, am-a-ste)

At fogandsmog.com or their YouTube channel, you’ll also find their third and fourth music videos. The third, “Berkeley Enough,” also came out in 2011 — but I gotta end this post sometime, and the fourth has gone into the hopper for 2012 list consideration.

“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]

Per IMDb, I am pleased to inform you that the stars of GOOMF are Robb Pruitt as Kenny Kennedy and Levan Reid as Doc Brooks.

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.

Starting from the bottom:

• I said foreign, you guys. People from North America aren’t frightening, because even if they’re batshit crazy, we know them. All of us know a few Michelle Bachmanns or Glenn Becks or Fred Phelpses,¹ and they look like us. As do Canadians — who, moreover, are simply not threatening.
• Castro hasn’t scared anybody for decades. Plus, he’s now like 99 years old and mostly concerned with his pipeline of black-market Depends undergarments. That brother of his who’s supposedly doing the dictatoring now is a total empty shirt. How empty? If dictators were legendary comedians, it’d be like Groucho Marx handing his role over to Zeppo.
• Daleks, huh? I must admit I hadn’t thought of that, so props for being outside the box. OK, this may be geek heresy to some but I’m going there anyway: Daleks dream about being as badass as Cylons, and then they wake up and apologize.
• OMG — Ahmadinejad, right! How could I forget?! Now I feel stupid. Well, he’s clearly The Man now in the scary crazy-ass foreign despot category.

"Beard still there? …Yep, still there. Phew!"

I feel dumb for having forgotten about him, since only last week our ball accidentally went into his yard and he paraded it on TV like it was a fucking UFO or something.

I was like, “Hey, a little help? Could you toss that back over here?”

And he was all, “Look! Look, everyone! I have captured his ball! The accursed imperialist ball that was menacing the skies over my house is in my hands, wretched and defeated! Victory is mine!”

So I’m like, “DUDE. Keep it in your pants, OK? Just chill. Look, it was a bad throw. Oops! Sorry about that. But… what is your problem? ‘Menacing?!?’ Whatever. And it’s not like it hit your car, or broke a window or something. Muthafucka, what are you celebrating for — you didn’t even catch it! You fished it out of your damn hedge after like, five minutes of rooting around, for shit’s sake.”

But dammit if A-jad doesn’t just keep standing there posing, holding it up over his head. So I go, “You know what? FINE. Keep it if it means so much to you. I hope you and the ball have a beautiful life together. I’ve got a whole box of other ones just like it.”

The guy is a nutjob. And get this: the next day I saw him picking my oranges. Can you believe that shit?

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. “Is this another satirical sendup of the ludicrous extremity of Republican obstructionism? Is rape the asteroid in this joke? …NO?!? Oh my God. Get me some comic cushioning, stat!”

A legitimate case is often made that there are certain things that cannot be joked about, and that rape is one of them, because rape is not funny. I agree — with the last clause. Rape, in and of itself, is no laughing matter. I respectfully disagree, however, with the statement as a whole. There are times when even things as terrible as rape must be joked about, lest we lose our humanity.

I didn’t even laugh at the above clip when I watched it, but I did find it funny. So funny, in fact, that it kept me from breaking down into unabated primal protest. Losing my shit, as it were. And that, I think, may be the very definition of “pretty goddamned funny.”