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Top 10 Videos of 2011: 6. “Dana Gould Plays the Larry King Game”

January 8, 2012 | 2 comments

6Kevin Pollak has an online chat show, helpfully called Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show. The show regularly includes a bit called “The Larry King Game” in which the guest is asked to do a bad impression of Larry King making an unlikely personal revelation, and then throwing to a phone call from a city with a funny name.

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]

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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.


It Must Be True – The Internet Says So

July 15, 2010 | Comment

All I did was plug in text from this post and this post, and it was definitively confirmed…

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hey, Dr. Karl Hufbauer – you and your C+ dismissal of my Freshman Billy Budd paper can kiss my baby tuckoo!

What can I say? I try to keep C&B more on the Dubliners/Portrait of the Artist end of things than going all Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake up in here. Read the rest of this entry »


Peter Gammons on McGwire

January 13, 2010 | Permalink

gammons

Peter Gammons (Flickr/Trev Stair)

Sagely baseball writer Peter Gammons, asked by MLB Network analyst and former big-league pitcher Mitch Williams whether he will now vote for Mark McGwire’s induction into the Hall of Fame:

I think it’s going to be hard now to vote for Mark. I reserve the right to change my mind. I voted for him this time because, you know, he never was suspended… but once you’ve admitted [to using steriods], I believe that… I mean, you guys know how hard it is to be a Major League player. The Hall of Fame is an honor, not a statistical right. I really do look at it that way, and for [you] and all the people we know that did not use any performance-enhancing drugs, I find it hard to vote for him.

What’s going to be fascinating to me–and I hope it doesn’t impact–but I think there are going to be some people that just because writers say, “My eyes tell me he must have done steroids,” that there are going to be one to five people that were innocent that don’t make the Hall of Fame because of the people that did cheat. And that really breaks my heart, knowing how hard all of you worked to get where you are.


Bye Bye, Two Thousand

January 9, 2010 | Permalink

Hallelujah. Somebody with a much bigger name than mine (in every sense) blogged this so I don’t have to. Now I can simply linkblog it, which is ever so much quicker.

Hendrik Hertzberg:

We can finally drop the “thousand.” Last year may have been two thousand nine, but this year, mercifully, is twenty ten. And next year will be twenty eleven. And so on until—well, until the year 3000.

Sing it, Rick. I for one am in favor of anything that signifies departure from the last decade.

Everybody got that? “Twenty ten.” Woohoo! Our long extra-syllable nightmare is over!


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