Entries Tagged 'Humor' ↓

Finally, after 63 years—children’s toy Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots were created in the late 1940s—Red Rocker and Blue Bomber have decided to stop fighting…just in time for the “gay marriage” debate. Designer Paul Burgess‘s “Make Love Not War” T-shirt, $18, is available in all sizes from the usual suspects: Threadless.com.

In Detroit-based filmmaker Matthew J. Tait‘s animated short, Zygote, above, Bob has talked his teenage girlfriend into coming over so he can claim her virginity. Unsure she’s ready to take their relationship “to the next level,” the girl wavers. So Bob deftly parries, observing that his previous girl, a mature woman, wouldn’t have had all these issues.

It’s a despicable, caddish move, played thousands of times a day. So why does this 2:05 piece have me howling with tearful cackles at the plight of these losers?

Blame it on Tait and Xtranormal Text-to-Movie web-based software. With it, users create their own shorts, complete with avatars lip-synching dialogue you keyboard in. (“If you can type, you can make movies,” says the company’s motto.)

By coupling the application’s wonkiness—a gentle arm around shoulders leaves Bob’s limb hanging in mid-air—with tightly warped dialogue (“My hymen…I’m embarrassed..it’s thick…like a disc of thick-cut Canadian bacon”), Tait fashions 125 seconds of rogue puppetry, where you know the actors are controlled by entities that truly mean them ill.

[via Logan Walters]

How is it that even small children have a built-in notion of justice and balance? Why is my old employer—I briefly worked as a cashier for GMAC, now Ally Bank, in my 20s—playing on that sense of fairness in a series of new spots?

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He’s called “GreatWhite Clown,” by furfree, one of 48 entries from Worth1000.com’s recent “Animal Clowns” Photoshop competition. Plus, if you think that’s amazing, you should see this guy and 11 of his friends squeeze into a tiny car.

It’s no secret that Katie Couric, above, had some serious problems with the ratings when she took over the CBS Evening News in 2006. For a couple of years, there, her future didn’t look good, and management reportedly started speaking in low tones about pulling the plug on her broadcast.

But that was until she triumphantly body-slammed Republican VP hopeful Sarah Palin in September 2008, with a series of interviews that almost certainly helped nominee John McCain lose the November election, that boosted Couric’s viewers by millions, and that proved she was not to be messed with.

So: Where do you go from there? You go where Hillary Clinton, FOX’s Sean Hannity, CNN’s Kiran Chetry, and The Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus have all gone: With Auto-Tune, the so-called “T-Pain/Cher-style” vocal processing technology that’s sweeping the nation.

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Beloved as the Emmy Award-winning Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood has been for decades—my sis couldn’t get enough of the show when we were kids—and rightly honored as creator Fred Rogers, above, was in his lifetime—he died in 2003—ya gotta admit that there’s something just a little…odd about his persona.

I mean, think about it: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is a show where, ostensibly, kids, unaccompanied by adults, go to the house of a single, middle-aged man, who is there, alone, on his lunch hour.

A guy whose middle name is McFeely.

That Rogers’ intentions were, of course, so honorable only makes writer/scholar/media critic/co-sponsor of my recent Iowa lecture Kembrew McLeod‘s disassembly of the TV host’s airy monologues just that more wicked. By isolating Rogers’ trademark, singsong platitudes (“I’m glad you’re my friend…I like you very much”), and adhering them to droning drum tracks, a kind of loopy hypnosis takes over…certainly Rogers’ nefarious intent. It’s long (9:15), but worth staying with to the final utterance.

“Beer goggles”—sexual judgement impaired by booze—is the excuse millions will be pushing this weekend, in order to explain why the eager hottie they eagerly shagged the night before looks like blechh in the golden morning’s light.

Well, if that’s your steez, why not just do you? “Beergoggles” are by Chicago-based custom eyeglasses maker Scott Urban of Urban Spectacles. They’re crafted out of spent containers of actual ale. That’s them to the right, and perched delicately on the suds-sucking lovely, above.

Explains Urban,

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They’re not being hostile, with their loud noises and passionate facial expressions. They’re excited about inviting you over! That’s what I realized after looking at Greenpoint, Brooklyn-based Cosmic Arts Enterprises‘ Penis NYC Subway Map. It imagines one of the world’s biggest rail mass transit systems as an even bigger male sex organ. (Go ahead: Click on the image to to, um, enlarge it.) Not only does the graphic rudely, though perhaps poetically, cast the most populous borough as the meaty scrotum of our great metropolis. Do you think I’ll see going from Harlem to Wall St., down the city’s flaccid shaft, to get to WBAI quite the same way ever again? Fuggedaboutit!

[via bangocibumbumpuluj.blogspot.com]

Now, the world don’t move! To the beat of just one drum
What might be right for you, may not be right for some….

To folks familiar with cheesy sitcoms from the late ’70s and early ’80s, the theme music to Diff’rent Strokes is so well-known that merely reading its lyrics, above, not to mention hearing its earnest strains, is enough to trigger soppy memories of the show’s early opening visuals. There, each week, good-hearted millionaire Phillip Drummond (Conrad Bain) would escort his new charges, brothers Arnold (Gary Coleman) and Willis (Todd Bridges), above, from a basketball game in the hood, past the wonders of late 20th century New York, to his luxurious apartment building, all in his chaufferred limousine.

Indeed, the gentle innocence and curiosity of children, coupled with the wizened kindness of their doting patron, is what makes UK YouTuber MontyPropps’ “Disturbing Strokes” so unsettling. By switching the spirited soundtrack to a mysterious, mood-laden instrumental, then slightly desaturating the colors in the footage, Propps turns the classic intro into something vaguely hinting at pederasty. By the time Arnold and Willis look up at the towering, phallic structure Drummond calls home, giving only furtive backwards glances as he leads them inside, if nothing else, you’ll believe, as said one poster on Propps’ YouTube channel, that, in film, there is truly no such thing as “incidental music.”

Somewhere amidst the urbane yet cannibalistic hogs of the Boost Mobile ad—hands down my favorite commercial of the not half-over year—and the knife-wielding ne’er-do-wells of Woonsocket, RI artist Jason LaRose’s t-shirt design, above, pigs just started turning on each other. (Favorite detail: Those coins the unnerved swine has dropped in fear.) Guess the recession is making all banks a little timid, and a little mean. “Piggy Bank Heist”: t-shirt, $18, men’s XS-3XL, women’s XS-2XL; zip-up hoodie, $40, S-2XL. By Threadless.