Entries Tagged 'Humor' ↓

Patton Oswalt is an actor / writer / voiceover artist / comedian perhaps best known, at least to me, for playing “Spence Olchin” on The King of Queens, and the lead rat, “Remy,” below, on Pixar’s animated 2007 hit, Ratatouille.

In short, he’s a funny guy that I notice from time to time, probably once every three months. That’s pretty much it.

At least, that was it. I just read Oswalt’s commencement address to the 2008 graduating class of Broad Run High School in Ashburn, VA, his alma mater, and…whoa…it’s one of the most profound graduation speeches I’ve ever come across.

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That’ll teach those kids to sneak through your rhododendrons: This spastic The Zombie of Montclaire Moors sculpture, by artist Alan Dickinson

will claw his way out of your garden plot or family room corner, pleading for assistance with the most lifelike eyes you’ve ever seen. His macabre expression is captured in such great detail in quality designer resin and finished so realistically that you’ll swear you can hear him breathing!

Plus, wait ’til slugs start crawling out of its mouth!

Life-sized. $89.95 from designToscano, via the unstoppably awesome BoingBoing.

As written, the comic strip Garfield—cartoonist Jim Davis’ look at the travails of an eponymous cat and its owner—is kind of like the funny pages equivalent of tourists: In the background, not bothering anybody, always there, and quietly looked down upon by people who think they’re much smarter.

So, perhaps it’s appropriate that it took a foreigner, Dan Walsh—and a Dubliner yet!—to turn Garfield from wallpaper into something truly hip: a darkly ironic reflection on “schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life.” Walsh did it, not by rewriting dialogue but, via one genius move: He completely stripped the cat and his unfunny thought balloons out of every panel.

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Here you go, just in case you, like I, missed that ridiculous Fake Obama Kia commercial, as it was originally seen on The Daily Show. I guess this also implies that an Obama win “promises” four years of work to Black actors with floppy ears.

More and more women are belly-dancing to lose weight, get in shape, improve their self-image, liven up their relationships, or simply to learn a beautiful form of traditional expression. If they dance like this woman does though, they’ll get none of those benefits, boyee.

There’s little I can add to this wonderful, 24-second clip, in which a cute blonde with a delirious life-zest makes beauty out of riding an escalator. Agreed, Gizmodo: We love you, Spinning Lady.

I think part of why I so dig Go Fug Yourself is that, while I love fashion—the creativity of it—I detest the fashion business. I detest the hype and flakiness of what surrounds the marketing of apparel.

I detest listening to women on TV talk in that breezy way they do about the “shapes” that are “in” “this year” or “this season,” and the color that “everyone’s going crazy for.”

Why? When I think about it, what I most dislike about that way of speaking is that it lacks precision. It sounds like someone trying to sway people with words they’re making up on the fly, hoping that the audience won’t catch on by the time that they’re done.

It’s like, for example, the way some musicians will say, “Yeah, man, everything’s cool and laid back. I’m just rollin’, man. (Big smile lights up his face.) Takin’ it easy.”

Huh?

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Is there anything more inspiring than seeing the man next in line to the throne popping and locking?

Yeah, probably.

I dig anything that shoots holes in celebrities and the myth that they’re smarter, better, prettier, or, in any way, superior to regular people. So, I gets down for TMZ on the daily; love the “celebrities without make-up” subgenre; but Go Fug Yourself is the celeb site that I most want, somehow, to get on TV and satellite.

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To a great extent, George Carlin is being remembered today for his “Filthy Words” routine, from his album, Occupation: Foole. In 1973, my radio station, WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM, played the bit over the air, resulting in a complaint and, ultimately, in a landmark Supreme Court ruling on free speech and the First Amendment. (“Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” on the 1972 album, Class Clown, is a similar piece. Its live recitation on a Milwaukee stage got the comic arrested in that year.)

To me, however, Carlin is possibly most significant in that he was the only white comedian I ever heard use the word nigger in a joke who actually made me really, deeply laugh. (The piece appears in his 1990 “Euphemisms” sketch.)

This is less a testament to his hipness or coolness—he had none, from my perspective—or any acceptance I reserve for white people using that word. All I reserve for any white person, without exception—including Carlin—is the suspicion of racism.

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