The following is a repost of my September 4, 2015 discussion of "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," an episode of Rick and Morty. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" can be streamed in its entirety on Hulu.
"The Ricks Must Be Crazy" feels like somebody on the Rick and Morty writing staff had a chip on his shoulder about Tron: Legacy, especially the ways it handled its premise of Jeff Bridges creating an entire universe full of sentient life inside a computer, and he didn't care for what he felt was a simplistic screenplay. Tron: Legacy is a good example of both the story serving the visuals rather than vice versa--however, director Joseph Kosinski's style-over-substance approach still couldn't stop me from watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D twice because, holy fuck, that movie looks mesmerizing in IMAX 3D--and those visuals being made to look so sumptuous that they're able to distract the audience from thinking too long about the story's plot holes or unexplained details. Some of the questions that arose from those unexplained details included "How's it possible for Jeff Bridges and his family to enjoy a meal of lechon if fresh meat is impossible to bring into the Grid?" and "Was there a Filipino chef in Jeff Bridges' family whom we never knew about?"
A lot of why "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" is a highlight of Rick and Morty's second season is due to how much fun Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and credited episode writer DanGuterman are clearly having over imagining if Jeff Bridges could leave and re-enter the Grid freely instead of being imprisoned there by his evil doppleganger/digital avatar Clu and what would happen if Jeff Bridges craved power as much as Clu does and he turned out to be an even bigger dick than the marginally flawed, almost Fred MacMurray-like Zen inventor dad we saw in Tron: Legacy. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" reveals that Rick has created an entire infinite universe inside the battery in his space car, and its inhabitants' only purpose in life is to power Rick's car battery. "That's slavery!," counters an appalled Morty when Rick introduces him to what he calls the microverse.
Instead of the more simplistic scenario of a completely evil duplicate of the universe's creator betraying that creator by enacting ethnic cleansing and plotting to rule the world outside the universe's barriers, one of the microverse's inhabitants, a Frank Grimes-ish scientist named Zeep Xanflorp (special guest star Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report writing staff happened to include Guterman), refuses to fall for Rick's white savior act like everyone outside the scientific community in the microverse. Zeep is on to some of Rick's deceptions. Those deceptions range from Rick disguising himself as an antennaed alien savior whenever he visits the microverse to Rick telling the microverse's inhabitants that the middle finger is a peaceful greeting.
Zeep plans to oust Rick from the microverse and free the microverse from servitude, but Zeep's no saint either: he has secretly created his own infinite miniverse in a box to provide the energy for his microverse and make obsolete the technology Rick brought to Zeep's microverse, and he's exploiting the people in that miniverse just like Rick is doing to the people in the microverse. In fact, one of the leading scientists in the miniverse, Kyle (special guest star Nathan Fielder from Comedy Central's Nathan for You), has also secretly built his own teenyverse in a box and...
This famously angry person on Twitter should never be allowed near either Twitter or the nuclear codes.
The following is a repost of my May 30, 2014 discussion of the director's cut of Margaret.
Because so many film critics have been in awe of it as if it's that secret Wu-Tang album with the guest feature by Cher, I recently borrowed from a library in San Francisco the three-hour extended cut of playwright/filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. It was filmed back in 2005--which is so long ago that John Gallagher Jr. (from Short Term 12 and HBO's The Newsroom) looks like an eight-year-old boy in the film--but it wasn't released until 2011 in a slightly shorter cut due to legal squabbling.
As former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson astutely noted in 2012, "Sure, [Margaret's] focus is entirely on a certain demographic slice of human beings--mostly middle- to upper-class, educated, New York-dwelling, Judeo-Christian-atheist white people--but these people are alive and ragged and messy in ways few movie characters are allowed to be."
The best performance in Margaret comes from neither the frequently shouty Anna Paquin nor her co-star J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan's wife. It comes from Jeannie Berlin, who nicely underplays her role as the brash best friend of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) who was killed in a tragic Manhattan bus accident caused by the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), because he was distracted by a high-schooler (Paquin) who was trying to ask him for directions while he was driving.
Like I've said before, whenever there's a news story that involves race, I've lately found myself saying, "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say." The controversy over Melania Trump's 2016 Republican National Convention speech sounding exactly like Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech may not be tied to a thornier current subject like racially motivated bullying or police reform, but her act of plagiarism is yet another example of a white woman stealing from a black woman, so I was wondering when The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore would distinguish itself from other late-night comedy shows and point out how the former supermodel's RNC speech reeks of cultural appropriation. The Nightly Showdid not disappoint.
For a couple of years, whenever moments of appalling racism would dominate the news cycle for an entire week, I'd think to myself either "I can't wait to hear what Totally Biased has to say" or "What would be Jon Stewart's exasperated but largely funny response to all this, and could he please not sing again like he tried to do at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear?"
Well, Totally Biased doesn't exist anymore (although a couple of weeks ago, Totally Biased alums W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu started joining forces again for a new podcast, Politically Re-Active, so Kamau has now hosted so many different 30-to-120-minute shows in the podcastosphere that he makes Guy Smiley look like a lazy douche), and Stewart left The Daily Show in the hands of Trevor Noah. So these days, it's "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say" or sometimes "How will Noah's non-American and more global perspective handle this one?"
I don't care for variety shows, except for Muppet Show clips (or the occasional Carol Burnett Show sketch clip) and sometimes SNL, which, if you think about it, is really just a '70s-style variety show, but without a scantily clad resident dance troupe, and that makes you wonder about an SNL in a parallel universe where, since 1975, a goateed Lorne Michaels implemented a group of Fly Girls on his show, and all those Fly Girls are white. Variety shows are such an outdated and creaky form of TV. I always feel like I need to be 78 years old and fond of prune juice in order to enjoy a variety show from start to finish.
When the Miami-based Sábado Gigante said "¡Adiós!" after 53 years of old-fashioned TV, it was a sign that even non-English-speaking variety shows are doomed. Yet that hasn't stopped NBC from pushing for the variety show to come back to American TV, first with the now-defunct Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris and now with the summertime replacement show Maya & Marty. The Tuesday night show pairs up two great comedians from completely different eras of SNL: Martin Short and '00s SNL regular Maya Rudolph. She's a Prince song-covering, TCM-watching pre-'90s-showbiz nerd type who genuinely enjoys the cheesiness of variety shows (Maya & Marty is her second attempt at a variety show, after the one-off Maya Rudolph Show special). Meanwhile, Short's best shtick, prior to his one season on Dick Ebersol-era SNL, took place on SCTV, the classic sketch show that constantly ripped apart the cheesiness of variety shows, whether it was through Short's Jackie Rogers Jr. character or Eugene Levy as Gene Shalit incongruously doing musical numbers with Catherine O'Hara as Rona Barrett and Joe Flaherty as Gene Siskel. Despite the pairing of Short and Rudolph, which sounds nice on paper, Maya & Marty does not look enticing to me, except for one element, and it's the only part of Maya & Marty I've been watching online: the return of celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick.
Way before Ali G trolled politicians or Zach Galifianakis embodied fake awkwardness between two ferns or Eric Andre caused a genuinely uncomfortable Lauren Conrad to walk out on him or Stephen Colbert pretended to know nothing about hip-hop while interviewing an in-on-the-joke Eminem, there was Glick, Short's funniest character and an interestingly late addition to Short's repertoire. Glick and his weird, Merv Griffin-ish voice didn't appear first on either SCTV or mid-'80s SNL and instead emerged from a much later and completely forgotten venue: Short's 1999 daytime talk show. I tuned in to The Martin Short Show for only one reason: to see Short badly interview the likes of Ted Danson and a Dharma & Greg-era Jenna Elfman as Glick. It was far more entertaining than Short doing polite interviews for real as his normal self.
Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.
"The Ricks Must Be Crazy" feels like somebody on the Rick and Morty writing staff had a chip on his shoulder about Tron: Legacy, especially the ways it handled its premise of Jeff Bridges creating an entire universe full of sentient life inside a computer, and he didn't care for what he felt was a simplistic screenplay. Tron: Legacy is a good example of both the story serving the visuals rather than vice versa--however, director Joseph Kosinski's style-over-substance approach still couldn't stop me from watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D twice because, holy fuck, that movie looks mesmerizing in IMAX 3D--and those visuals being made to look so sumptuous that they're able to distract the audience from thinking too long about the story's plot holes or unexplained details. Some of the questions that arose from those unexplained details included "How's it possible for Jeff Bridges and his family to enjoy a meal of lechon if fresh meat is impossible to bring into the Grid?" and "Was there a Filipino chef in Jeff Bridges' family whom we never knew about?"
A lot of why "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" is a highlight of Rick and Morty's second season is due to how much fun Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and credited episode writer DanGuterman are clearly having over imagining if Jeff Bridges could leave and re-enter the Grid freely instead of being imprisoned there by his evil doppleganger/digital avatar Clu and what would happen if Jeff Bridges craved power as much as Clu does and he turned out to be an even bigger dick than the marginally flawed, almost Fred MacMurray-like Zen inventor dad we saw in Tron: Legacy. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" reveals that Rick has created an entire infinite universe inside the battery in his space car, and its inhabitants' only purpose in life is to power Rick's car battery. "That's slavery!," counters an appalled Morty when Rick introduces him to what he calls the microverse.
Instead of the more simplistic scenario of a completely evil duplicate of the universe's creator betraying that creator by enacting ethnic cleansing and plotting to rule the world outside the universe's barriers, one of the microverse's inhabitants, a Frank Grimes-ish scientist named Zeep Xanflorp (special guest star Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report writing staff happened to include Guterman), refuses to fall for Rick's white savior act like everyone outside the scientific community in the microverse. Zeep is on to some of Rick's deceptions. Those deceptions range from Rick disguising himself as an antennaed alien savior whenever he visits the microverse to Rick telling the microverse's inhabitants that the middle finger is a peaceful greeting.
Zeep plans to oust Rick from the microverse and free the microverse from servitude, but Zeep's no saint either: he has secretly created his own infinite miniverse in a box to provide the energy for his microverse and make obsolete the technology Rick brought to Zeep's microverse, and he's exploiting the people in that miniverse just like Rick is doing to the people in the microverse. In fact, one of the leading scientists in the miniverse, Kyle (special guest star Nathan Fielder from Comedy Central's Nathan for You), has also secretly built his own teenyverse in a box and...
Whether it's Zeep--or the space car security system Rick programmed to keep Summer safe within the space car when she's not allowed to accompany her grandpa and her brother at a certain point during the trio's night out for ice cream and a PG-13 movie on an alternate Earth--Rick's creations all inherited their creator's dickish and easily bored personality. When Summer expresses her objections to the talking space car (Kari Wahlgren) about the bloodshed and cruelty the space car is willing to resort to in order to protect Summer, the space car responds to her with "My function is to keep Summer safe, not keep Summer being, like, totally stoked about, like, the general vibe and stuff. That's you. That's how you talk." They really are their creator's children.
Tron: Legacy and a much more detestable animal than Tron--all those self-aggrandizing movie star vanity projects in which white stars imagine themselves as saviors of less civilized classrooms or neighborhoods or nations or microverses--aren't the only things that appear to be mocked by "The Ricks Must Be Crazy." The episode also appears to be making fun of the benevolent façade the Silicon Valley tech world likes to put on to distract people from how it reinforces the same old evils and inequities of other industries or business communities like Wall Street (like Tajai from Souls of Mischief once said, "Eventually #Hipsters bathe, shave and become the 'out' republicans [sic] they are"). Doesn't that kind of "we're here to help make your world a better place" façade just remind you a bit of those aliens from the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? "Gooble boxes," the term the microverse inhabitants adopt for the technology they are unknowingly using to keep themselves subjugated, is clearly the writers' reference to a certain much-criticized corporation with benevolent-looking branding that happens to own the platform that makes this blog post possible. Whattup, Google/NSA.
A certain segment of the TV critic community is understandably tired of narratives about middle-aged or old white anti-heroes. But when a Rick and Morty episode like "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" mines so much darkly comedic gold out of the behavior of Rick and his creations (behavior that Morty and Summer find to be appalling and sociopathic, but Rick's pragmatic way of handling things ends up being the most sane way to respond to a much more insane multiverse) and is visually and narratively inventive (and also perfectly casts a former Comedy Central prankster and a current Comedy Central prankster as pranksters on an epic scale), I say, "Bring on the anti-hero narrative again." Shit, Rick may not even be totally white--his last name is Sanchez and he's probably a white-looking half-Latino like Louis C.K.
It's a relief to see Rick and Morty reverting back to exploring moral quandaries like it has done in such episodes as "Mortynight Run," especially after the previous week's slight misfire, "Get Schwifty," which felt more like a South Park episode than a Rick and Morty episode. It was as if Trey Parker and Matt Stone guest-wrote Rick and Morty and were in the mood to insert another round of their usual barbs about either non-Lorde pop music (although the "Get Schwifty" original songs performed by Roiland and series composer Ryan Elder are amusing, "Love Power" from The Producers-ish spoofs of lyrics from either twerking anthems or EDM) or reality TV. Humor about reality TV stars like Ice-T--a favorite celebrity impression of Harmon's during Harmontown--isn't really Rick and Morty's strong suit. Also, Rick is a less interesting character when he has to play the Doctor and save Earth from disaster (in this case, the trigger-happy judges of an intergalactic reality TV pop music songwriting contest) instead of being the cause of mayhem.
It's hard not to dislike a piece of TV that takes a bit of that mayhem and uses it to briefly riff on Turbo Teen, a short-lived '80s Saturday morning cartoon about a teen who transforms into a Pontiac Trans Am whenever he perspires or eats a spicy burrito. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" also reveals that Rick implanted Morty with a subdermal chip that can trigger dormant nanobots in Morty's bloodstream to restructure his anatomy and turn him into a getaway car during emergency situations. The nanobots fail to get going--until the show's funniest post-credits tag ever, nicely presented without any dialogue. I wish I could say Turbo Teen was really a joke Robert Smigel and J.J. Sedelmaier came up with, but nope, it's what passed for Saturday car chase action fare when I was a kid. You take one look at Brett Matthews' knuckles morphing into tires, and you're like, "Wow, the things Ruby-Spears employees used to come up with after doing trail-of-tears-length lines of coke."
Other memorable quotes:
* Rick: "I guided your entire civilization! Your people have a holiday named Ricksgiving! They teach kids about me in school!"
Zeep: "I dropped out of school. It's not a place for smart people."
Morty: "Ohhhhhhh snap!"
* Rick: "Would it be possible for us to get some kind of tour of your miniverse from the inside?"
Zeep: "This isn't a fucking chocolate factory. I don't have time!"
* Zeep: "That's what you used my universe for?! To run your car?!"
Rick: "Yeah, but don't flatter yourself! There's always AAA, you fucking cocksucker!"
* Zeep: "I crafted the guy that created the planet you're standing on!"
Rick: "Yeah, and I made the stars that became the carbon in your mother's ovaries!"
* Morty: "This is Ku'ala, the spirit tree! For generations, it has guided the... [Takes Rick aside.] You have to get us the fuck outta here! These people are backward savages! They eat every third baby because they think it makes fruit grow bigger! Everyone's gross and they all smell like piss all the time! I-I-I miss my family! I miss my laptop! I masturbate [sic] into an extra curvy piece of driftwood the other day!"
* Rick: "Don't blame my ship!"
Summer: "It melted a child! It killed itself!"
Rick: "My ship doesn't do anything unless it's told to do something! I don't even wanna hear it, Summer... Your boobs are all hanging about, and you ruined ice cream with your boobs out!"
On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.
A year and a half after the airing of its fifth-season finale, The Venture Bros. returns to Adult Swim with the one-hour special "All This and Gargantua-2." Just like "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," the fifth-season premiere, did after a similarly long gap between seasons, the consistently funny one-hour special proves that The Venture Bros. hasn't lost a step despite its long absence.
I didn't become an instant Venture Bros. fan when the show, which Comedy Central turned down (brilliant move, Comedy Central), premiered on Adult Swim in 2004. The show's character designs failed to hook me at first because I was never a Jonny Quest fan and I didn't think a Jonny Quest parody could be sustainable as a TV series. Also, the Warner Bros. Animation superhero spoof Freakazoid! had already come up with the Jonny Quest parody to end all Jonny Quest parodies, a hysterically funny fake '60s cartoon called Toby Danger. I caught up with The Venture Bros. much later, via DVD rentals of the first two seasons from Netflix, and that's when I fell in love with the show.
On DVD, I saw it evolve from a one-joke Jonny Quest parody to an imaginative pastiche of all the non-Jonny Quest things creators/writers/voice actors Jackson Publick (a.k.a. Chris McCulloch) and Doc Hammer are in love with, from spy fiction to old Marvel Comics titles like Strange Tales or Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and forgotten figures from '80s and '90s music videos (for example, the girl from Republica of "Ready to Go" fame). The show is an exploration of adult disappointment and failure, built around a fully realized comedic universe of losers and costumed deviants that rivals Springfield from The Simpsons and Melonville from SCTV (so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros., and I wish McCulloch and Hammer would spin the Order of the Triad off into their own show, but I doubt they'd go for it). "All This and Gargantua-2," which centers on the disastrous opening of the titular space casino resort run by Jonas "J.J." Venture Jr. (James Urbaniak), exemplifies how the show has come a long way from its Jonny Quest riffs and humble Flash-animated roots and taken on epic proportions. The top-notch animation work by Titmouse Inc. has a lot to do with the one-hour special's epic sheen. I'm reluctant to revisit on Netflix Instant the 2004 episode "Careers in Science," the first time Dr. Venture (also Urbaniak) and his sons Dean (Mike Sinterniklaas) and Hank (McCulloch) went up into space (the deceased Jonas Venture Sr.'s Gargantua-1 station, to be exact), simply because the primitiveness of how "Careers in Science" looks would be jarring, in comparison to what Titmouse is able to achieve with The Venture Bros. nowadays.
As is the case with many other animated or live-action sitcoms, The Venture Bros. was trying to find its comedic voice when it started, so early episodes like "Careers in Science" don't have the confidence "All This and Gargantua-2" has in spades. "Gargantua-2" is The Venture Bros. firing on all cylinders comedically, whether it's Dr. Venture's gripes about both J.J.--his more confident and successful brother--and the new casino or the ability of the Sovereign, an adversary more menacing than the Monarch (also McCulloch) will ever be, to somehow find time between Guild of Calamitous Intent meetings to watch Totally Spies, which isn't exactly the kind of entertainment you'd think a criminal mastermind would be aware of. I'm also fond of the fact--which somehow goes unnoticed by the continually dissatisfied and unimpressed Dr. Venture--that J.J. blatantly copied much of Star Trek for the look of Gargantua-2. J.J.'s outfit at the casino opening is Kirk's admiral uniform from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
It's especially great to hear Stephen Colbert reprise his role--for what Hammer has confirmed will be one last time before Colbert takes over Late Show on CBS--as Professor Impossible/Incorrigible, the Mr. Fantastic-style jerk Colbert voiced in the show's first two seasons. Bill Hader was a decent substitute for Colbert in the role of Richard Impossible, but Colbert, who can play arrogant characters in his sleep, is preferable to Hader in that role.
McCulloch and Hammer refuse to talk down to the audience, which explains why there's no "Previously on..." recap at the start of the special to reorient viewers after the year-and-a-half-long gap. I love the omission of that. McCulloch and Hammer figure that their viewers must have watched the fifth-season finale either dozens of times already or right before "Gargantua-2," so why bother with the previously? The only thing McCulloch and Hammer do to reorient viewers is to repeat a scene from the end of "The Devil's Grip" where the Monarch, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (Hammer) and Henchman 21 (also Hammer) find a new home after the destruction of their cocoon headquarters.
Some viewers were underwhelmed by "The Devil's Grip" as a season finale and didn't find it dramatic enough for their tastes. But I thought there was plenty that was dramatic about it: the Monarch, Dr. Venture and Dean had moments of "What am I doing with my life?," a recurring question on this show. Even Colonel Gentleman--McCulloch's inspired reimagining of both Sean Connery and his Allan Quatermain character from the mediocre movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a bisexual author with a penchant for scribbling down pre-listicle fluff like "Colonel Gentleman's Hollywood Actresses Who Need a Smack in the Mouth"--had a "What am I doing with my life?" moment in "The Devil's Grip" too. "Gargantua-2" is a cross between the kind of explosive, death-ridden season finale some viewers expected out of "The Devil's Grip" and a comic book annual. I think an annual would be a better way to describe "Gargantua-2." It's an annual where a few character arcs are wrapped up (unlike Molotov Cocktease, who faked her death at the end of the fourth season, it looks like cancer-stricken J.J., General Treister and the Sovereign will stay dead) and the primary setting is destroyed--the Monarch's theatrics and the ineptitude of Dr. Venture's security systems both cause the Venture Compound to be burnt down--in order to make way for the sixth season's New York backdrop, which is tantalizingly introduced at the end of the epilogue at J.J.'s funeral.
As amusing as all the pop-culture references are during "Gargantua-2"--I'd like to know who did uncredited work voicing Roger Moore at the baccarat table--they're, as usual, just the icing on the cake for what really makes The Venture Bros. stand out: the character writing. McCulloch and Hammer are able to take a premise that was sustainable for only 11 minutes on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and was bound to run out of gas beyond that running time--like "What if Shaggy from Scooby-Doo were the Son of Sam?," which Tick creator and current Gotham writer Ben Edlund actually once imagined during The Venture Bros.' second season--and make it work as a half-hour piece of character-driven comedy or, in the case of "Gargantua-2," longer. This show isn't merely "Spot the Reference" humor a la Friedberg/Seltzer in animated form, and the characters on The Venture Bros. aren't simply joke machines. They talk more like either ordinary people--for a guy who's an extraordinary killing machine, Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) sounds less like a quippy action hero and more like an ordinary and jaded cubicle jockey--or the self-loathing nerds McCulloch and Hammer clearly are.
I've said before that The Venture Bros. mines much of its humor and dramatic moments from how most nerds really are and the ugliness and emptiness of their behavior--the day Dr. Venture stops being so self-centered is the day this show is over--instead of being another nerd fantasy that glorifies what nerds imagine themselves to be. On The Venture Bros., that kind of fantasy gets taken down and skewered with the same kind of precision Dr. Killinger delivers while stabbing or impaling the lightsaber-wielding Investors--his own brothers--with his umbrella towards the end of "Gargantua-2." If there's any kind of message that could be found on this show, which doesn't care for talking down to its audience or delivering any form of speechifying, it would have to be "Life would be easier if you stopped drowning in your own delusions," an idea Dr. Venture is bound to ignore as he and the rest of Team Venture settle into the Venture Industries New York headquarters J.J. bequeathed to Dr. Venture in his will, during a season that will hopefully be as satisfying as "Gargantua-2" is in its 47 epic minutes.
Memorable quotes:
* "Never baccarat. It's a dead giveaway. Nobody but spies play baccarat."
* The Sovereign, attempting to lure Dr. Mrs. and her colleagues into a trap by disguising himself as 21: "The Monarch's waiting, and you guys are acting like Alex, Sam and Clover of Totally Spies!"
* Professor Impossible, after shape-shifting into a black mechanic: "Say, that doesn't count as blackface, does it?"
* Professor Impossible: "You'd have me back?"
Sally Impossible (Mia Barron): "No, idiot. But I'm not about to let our son lose his father because he joined the LARP society."
* Guild Command Dispatch Agent Watch (McCulloch), referring to the Sovereign, who enjoys shape-shifting into the Thin White Duke: "Where did David Bowie go?"
Dr. Mrs: "He's not David Bowie."
Ward (Hammer), Watch's partner: "Aw great, all my signed albums just became worthless."
My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.
* "Now I pity the fool who is going to tackle with Aryan Mr. T. Now what's happening here? Now they're trying to give him some milk, and I don't think that's going to work because he knows it's going to be laced with something."--soccer-culturally illiterate Peter Serafinowicz on mohawked Portuguese player Raul Meireles, during his hilarious and awesomely deadpan live commentary with Reggie Watts on the June 22 U.S. vs. Portugal match
* "Still not sure which one's Portugal and which one's U.S.A."--Serafinowicz
* "If you're thinking the audience look a little strange, it's because they're all CG. It's a computer-generated audience today because of a mix-up with the tickets. Nobody was invited."--Serafinowicz
* "And if you're just joining us, the score is Oosa zero minus one Por. 32:10. 32:16. Goodness me! Oh no, wait, that's, that's the clock. That's how much time we have left."--Serafinowicz
* "Now this game's sponsored by Boodveiser, and that's possibly the reason for a lot of this sluggish play because they've all had about four or five pints before the match started."--Serafinowicz
* "And it's very strange for a rapper such as Common to be doing so much goalie work, but, um, you know, he's just a rapper, so let's give him a little bit of a break."--Watts on U.S. goalie Tim Howard
* "Now if this result holds, the U.S.A. stay in the game, and Portugal will all be executed, according to the rules of the Brazilian government."--Serafinowicz
* "We also want to remind you to pick up the new copy of Common's new album. It should be out in stores next week."--Watts signing off
* "Everyone is cheering their countries in their favorite sport. The rest of the world calls it football. In America, we call it... a fucking waste of time."--Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Robert Smigel), Conan
* "If you like watching porn in reverse, this sport is for you."--Triumph
(Photo source: Gavin O'Connor the actor, not the filmmaker of the same name who directed Miracle, Warrior and the Americans pilot)
Joan Rivers defended Gilbert Gottfried's controversial Twitter jokes about the disaster-stricken Japanese by saying comedians cope with tragedy through humor and then using her plastic-and-adamantium-coated face as a shield to protect Gottfried from the bullets from his angriest critics. I'm all for using humor to cope with tragedy, but when someone uses itto slam the victims of a terrible situation like Gottfried, Family Guy writer Alec Sulkin, several conservatards and countless others on Twitter did, it's not funny at all.
I appreciate how The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and my favorite new podcast Sklarbro Country handled the disaster in Japan and managed to find humor in the situation without veering into anti-Asian racism. Stephen Colbert came up with the funniest bit of disaster-related humor when he described the earthquake/tsunami/radiation crisis as a "disaster-ducken."
Meanwhile, the Sklar Brothers, whose hilarious podcast pokes fun at the often odd and insane behavior of sports celebrities, elbowed New York Liberty guard Cappie Poindexter in the face for her moronic tweets about the disaster being God's payback for Pearl Harbor and the way Japan treats their own people in "there" country.
"That's who we want commenting on this disaster. A guard from the WNBA. Yeah, we don't wanna hear from the head of the Red Cross or anybody from the State Department. We wanna hear from a women's professional basketball player," joked Randy and Jason, who were so appalled by Poindexter's tweets that they resurrected their discontinued "Douchebag of the Week" segment and picked "the Alexandra Wallace of the WNBA" as the segment's first-ever female douchebag, or "Douchebaguette of the Week."
"Now is not the time to blame Japan for anything, even Sudoku," said the twin brothers. "Leave them alone!"
Now is the time to help Japan, so I've taken part in the SIUniverse for Japan online auction to support GlobalGiving's Japan relief fund. For the next few weeks, fans of the 2009 graphic novel Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology can bid on artwork and other items donated by Secret Identities artists and writers like myself.
I've donated a couple of pieces of artwork that will be up for bid. One of the items is a poster of an illustration of Hideaki Akaiwa, an ordinary office worker in Miyagi prefecture who was named "Badass of the Week" for refusing to wait around for rescue workers and venturing out on his own with scuba gear and duct-taped-together plastic wrapped around his legs to rescue tsunami survivors like his wife.
When I first heard about this badass, I kept thinking, "Damn, this is like a real-life Sea Hunt," as in that old TV show I've never watched but I'm familiar with from the "By this time, my lungs were aching for air" running gag during Mystery Science Theater 3000's Lloyd Bridges/Rocketship X-M episode and Bridges' own spoof of his old show during Hot Shots! Part Deux. I Googled Sea Hunt, stumbled into old covers from the comic book version of Sea Hunt and drew for the auction a sketch of Akaiwa that I modeled after those covers.
Like Akaiwa has done for his family members and neighbors, go lend a hand to the disaster victims now.
APRIL 9, 2011 UPDATE: Here's my illustration of Akaiwa, entitled "Hideaki Akaiwa: A Real Life Superhero," which is now up for bid. It's a 20" x 24" poster that's printed on heavyweight coated paper.
APRIL 17, 2011 UPDATE: Sold! To Gary in Arlington, VA!
APRIL 21, 2011 UPDATE: The other item I donated to the auction is an illustration of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle that I did for my upcoming self-published print compilation of the most responded-to posts from this blog. The title of the book--and this is the first time I've posted the title here--is I Suck at Math: A Trio of 10 Articles About Pop Culture.
My Harold & Kumar drawing is a 14" x 23" poster that's printed on heavyweight coated paper. It's now up for bid.
MAY 10, 2011 UPDATE: Sold! To Quentin in Concord, NH!
Just when I thought I saw all the clever signs from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's nearly one-week-old Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, more signs continue to be collected and posted online.
But then I discovered the following four. Those of us who have been suffering from post-election blues need some cheering up, so here are some other funny signs you might have missed.
I first heard about SMITH Magazine's six-word memoirs on Facebook and wrote a few of my own on SMITH's site. The new SMITH/Harper Perennial collection It All Changed in an Instant used one of them.
I share a page with T.O. I'm on page 198:
It was inspired by an ancient Tonight Show clip I once saw in which George Gobel asked Johnny Carson if he ever got the feeling that the world's a tuxedo and he's a pair of brown shoes. I wrote those little memoirs a while ago, before I started including my middle initial in everything I do to distinguish myself from other guys with the same name.
I wish the It All Changed in an Instant editors used one of the other memoirs I wrote (like "So broke, can't afford longer sentence" or "Nothing kills boners like yacht rock") instead of the one they chose. But still, I'm honored to be in the same book with the following people whose work I've enjoyed: Andy Borowitz, Andy Richter, Bob Odenkirk, Brian Baumgartner (Kevin!), David Wain, Duff Goldman of Ace of Cakes, Eugene Mirman (his heartwarming memoir is "I've fucked at least eight people"), Henry Rollins, Henry Winkler, Joe Queenan, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, Kathy Najimy, Leonard Nimoy, Linus Roache, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, Rick Parker, Rob Riggle, Shepard Fairey, Tommy Chong and Sound of Young America host Jesse Thorn, who started out at the same radio station where I first deejayed.
Parker, whom I met at San Diego Comic-Con last year, and Fairey submitted a couple of my favorite memoirs, which they drew:
Daily Show alum Riggle's memoir "I love my big, big balls" would probably get him into a heated balls-measuring contest with a certain fellow TDS alum (I bet he'd respond with "But mine are bigger, Rob Riggle").
But my favorite memoir comes from Lalah Hathaway, a singer like her legendary father Donny Hathaway: "So I only get six words?"
Hulu finally posts something I've wanted to rewatch for so long: the 1996 Dana Carvey Show premiere, which features the controversial Clinton sketch that basically killed the series in its opening minutes. (Carvey's multiple prosthetic boobs and the hilariously oblivious animal actors are Robert Smigel trademarks that would later resurface in Smigel's Triumph bits on Conan.) The Clinton sketch is left intact, but the Taco Bell-bashing musical number has been deleted, perhaps due to pressure from some corporate entity (Could it be... PepsiCo? Pepsi-owned properties like Taco Bell and Mountain Dew agreed to take turns sponsoring episodes of The Dana Carvey Show, not realizing that Carvey's writers would bite the corporate hands that fed them).
I watched The Dana Carvey Show in college and thought the series' funniest bit was "The Ambiguously Gay Duo," which resurfaced the following season on SNL. Stephen "Ace" Colbert and Steve "Gary" Carell were part of the cast and were members of the now-legendary writing staff, which also included Smigel, Louis C.K., Charlie Kaufman (the Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind screenwriter) and Conan staffers Jon Glaser and Dino Stamatopoulos. (The show is also available for Netflix subscribers at the site's PC-only "Watch Now" feature.)
