And now, ladies and gentlemen, after the most protracted virtual drumroll in history, here it is: my numero-uno favorite web video of the year 2010. Which by now may seem like a long time ago, but the hell with it.

Apparently xtranormal.com has been live on the web since 2008, but I didn’t encounter it until 2010. It’s a site that enables users to create animated video clips with stock characters. The user’s script is “spoken” by the characters via text-to-speech technology; the user can further manipulate the product with a limited shot selection and range of character movements. Pixar it ain’t — but as the following video proves, the constraints of the Xtranormal toolset can provide a unique brand of deadpan comedy.

Like most any other actor I have ever known, I have on innumerable occasions been obliged to carry out the conversation depicted in this video with remarkably few variations. The video cracked me up in part because it is auto-spoken by robots, but in much larger part because it’s true. We laugh as an alternative to weeping.

Back me up, fellow show folk — and while you’re at it, got any amusing, painful, or amusingly painful permutations of the dreaded so-what-have-I-seen-you-in chat? Put ‘em in a comment, whydontcha!

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.

It has come to pass that my friend Todd, he of my blogroll, has seen fit to mock me in the comments section of my last post for my lack of new content. He is lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on one’s personal taste) to have caught me in a particularly sarcastic mood. I might even call it a particularly snark-castic mood, but that would just be too fucking precious. Anyway, the following is very likely going to sound much more surly than usual for me; rest assured that I mean it to be tongue-in-cheek. I’m feeling a little Denis Learyish.

That’s correct, Todd, I haven’t posted in awhile — and my, aren’t you a keen observer of detail. Wanna know why? Because I’ve been busting my ass building a site for the theatre company I’m in. Need proof? Fine, here are a couple of screenshots:

[PHOTOS REDACTED]

Not exactly a slapdash half-hour-with-FrontPage kind of a job.  Put it this way: in the last month alone, I’ve spent enough time building and administrating that site to fulfill my company volunteer hours quota for the next three years. That is, if we were allowed to carry over extra hours to the succeeding year, which we’re not. But it doesn’t matter, because as long as I’m running the website I’ll never have to wonder if I’ve done enough volunteer hours.

So then Todd informs me that I’ve been “tagged in a meme,” and to find out the meaning of this memeing I need to visit his site. Deciding to play along for the moment, I click over to his blog post and find the answer to be as follows (grammatical corrections are mine, and included for no good reason):

1. Link back to the person who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 following bloggers by linking [to] them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’sbloggers’ blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

As I said in a comment to Todd’s post: oh, jaysus.

First of all — and I don’t fault Todd for not knowing this — here’s the thing about me: I don’t follow memes. I start memes. I am the natural source from which memes flow; that’s why I call them MEmes. If somebody else came up with it, then by definition it is not a meme — it is a THEMe.

To be completely honest, I’m usually not even aware of it when I start a meme. I never set out with the purpose of producing the latest Thing You Have to See, the internet touchstone-du jour, the virtual face that launched a thousand forwarded emails. I don’t wake up in the morning going, “Let’s see… I think I’ll have some breakfast, feed the dogs, shower, and set the zeitgeist aflame.” It just happens. Such is the nature of being mightily influential.

That aside, I find this so-called meme’s question thoroughly mediocre. Six “unspectacular” quirks? It’s such a mediocre question that it specifically calls for mediocre answers! And not just one, but SIX of them. Well, be careful what you wish for. After two or three of anyone’s unspectacular quirks, it’s a sure bet that the rest of the list is going to get more and more unspectacular.

One or two spectacular quirks — now that would at least be worth forwarding to your MySpace friends.  Who cares if you prefer crushed ice to ice cubes or whatever — I want to read about your quirkiest, weirdest foibles. Like, say, if you perpetually emit static electricity, no matter where you are. Or how you have one toenail that grows four times faster than normal. Or perhaps how you smashed your genitalia between two handheld freeweights while doing standing flys, and now the brand “Everlast” is permanently embossed on your penis. You know, that kind of thing.

I know it’s the internet, but holy shit, people — aim at least a little higher. So, I’m sorry, Todd. I won’t be tagging six other bloggers and perpetuating this chain-letter posting thing. Whatever, call me Ebenezer. I’m taking a principled stand for the cause of better content.  Demand more from your internet questionnaires!

Or don’t. Seriously, do whatever you like. I like to agitate for a better internet, but, you know, that’s just me.

Over at the august hypertext confines of McSweeney’s there has appeared a new piece by one Sarah Schmelling, entitled “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition).”  A sampling:

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- – - -

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

Click on over there to read the whole piece.

Bob Fosse‘s masterpiece isn’t merely a self-portrait: it’s a self-referendum, so revealing that it feels like an act of penance. One imagines that by surviving for another eight years after the film’s release, Fosse surprised himself. All That Jazz is fraught with an confessional urgency, as though his eventual death of a heart attack at age 60 were actually right around the corner – or indeed, already past.

The film establishes a netherworld meeting between Fosse alter ego Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider, in his finest performance) and a dulcet-voiced Angel of Death (Jessica Lange), and from there refers back to Gideon’s earthly life and its merits and demerits. The glib assessment would be to say that there are more of the latter, but this would both oversimplify and mis-characterize the object of the film, namely: is there redemption for Joe Gideon?

There’s a lot to redeem. The real-world, present-day bulk of the film establishes Gideon in the process of working himself to death by directing and choreographing a new Broadway musical and simultaneously directing a feature film. He puts his dancers through marathon rehearsals and butts heads creatively with the show’s producers, and then heads across town to burn the midnight oil in the editing bay with his film. All the while he smokes relentlessly and pops pills regularly (and does both during the repeated “getting ready in the morning” montages, each of which end with Gideon announcing to the bathroom mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!”).

Yet Joe Gideon is not a complete asshole. Obsessive and intense though he is, he inspires loyalty in his dancers, and even reciprocates it a little. His estranged wife Audrey (Leland Palmer), pre-teen daughter Michelle (Erzsebet Foldi) and live-in girlfriend Kate Jagger (Ann Reinking) all adore him, even though the latter two end up spending a disproportionate amount of time with each other while Joe neglects them both.

Their affection for him — and each other — is well evidenced in this clip:

Speaking of loyalty and affection for Gideon/Fosse, consider the fact that the role played by Ann Reinking in All That Jazz was based directly on herself, i.e., her own role in Bob Fosse’s life. She was a dancer in one of his shows and became his live-in girlfriend, while he remained married to Broadway star Gwen Verdon (represented in the film by the Leland Palmer character), the mother of his daughter Nicole (the Erzsebet Foldi character; Nicole herself has a non-speaking cameo in the movie). Furthermore, by the time of All That Jazz Reinking and Fosse’s romantic relationship had ended — not that it stopped her from playing the role in the movie. In fact, both Verdon and Reinking worked with Fosse multiple times after their personal breakups with him. In further fact, when Verdon eventually left her role in the original Broadway production of Chicago, Fosse hired Reinking as her replacement; later, Fosse cast Reinking in the lead of the Broadway revival of Sweet Charity, a role created in the original production by Verdon.

Bob Fosse’s early triumphs (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, etc) contained little of the somber cynicism would characterize his mature works (Cabaret, Pippin, Lenny, et al.). Significantly, it is the opening number of Fosse’s 1975 show Chicago – the cheeky vaudevillian tale of nihilism and murder – that is echoed in this film’s title. The “jazz” of Fosse parlance doesn’t simply refer to the so-named genre of American music, but rather to a broader type of expressive distortion. Jazz is the spiky prism through which the plain nature of things is twisted and refracted. Throughout the Fosse oeuvre, “jazz” is used variously as a euphemism for sex, greed, dance, music, alcohol, drugs, and so on. Jazz is everything fun, naughty and a bit dangerous, the stuff we all like a little more than we’re willing to admit. All of us, that is, except for Bob Fosse, who was perfectly willing to admit just how jazzy he was.