Hotel La Rut [Kids In The Hall]

Not all comedy is this timeless.

"Patriarchal Omniscience" Or Something

I think if you want (me) to identify a single thread in Tina Fey's work—from creating the long-running SNL parody of the View to writing Mean Girls to helming 30 Rock—it's that she seems to have marshaled her amazing personal disdain for other women into comedy. If you think for a moment about other depictions of misogyny (e.g. In the Company of Men), and compare them to this montage of Jack Donaghy, it's hard to ignore that what makes his statements unique are the fraction of the time that they more resemble the mean things women think about themselves and other women.

It adds to this authoritative, "patriarchal omniscience" aspect to his character—an aspect I recognize as interesting, but shouldn't waste any more time on today.

In Your Face, Unwarranted Influence, Whether Sought or Unsought, From The Military-Industrial Complex!

I was incensed a while back by a particularly lame SNL cold open where Fred Armisen's Obama rattles off the lack of accomplishments so far. (It hasn't even been a year.) GITMO may still be open, but less flashy positive developments are under way:

White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Wednesday that the plan was to threaten a veto over a prominent program — in this case, the F-22 fighter jet — “to show we were willing to expend political capital and could win on something that people thought we could not.”

Once the Senate voted in July to stop buying F-22s, Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, that success “reverberated down” to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs.

[Via the NYFT,B's!]

PSA: "Mafia Wars" and "Farmville" Are Probably Going To Scam You

This Goes Out To All My Friends Who Routinely Invite Me To "Zombie Gangster Vampire Bite Them" or Sign Up For Some Other Mind-Numbing App On Facebook: Your credulousness is going to lose you money and is, in fact, a large part of Facebook's lazy, dishonest revenue stream. Just listen to Gawker's Ryan Tate:

[S]ocial network games like Mafia Wars and Farmville disguise old-school scams, Mike Arrington has been demonstrating over at TechCrunch this weekend. High-revenue don of social networking games Zynga, which makes the aforementioned Mafia Wars and Farmville, gets one-third of its revenue from various shady "commercial offers" and lead-generation systems, Arrington reports. Here's how HotOrNot founder James Hong described the social networking cash scene in a TechCrunch comment:

The offers that monetize the best are the ones that scam/trick users.... i'm pretty sure most of the money ended up getting our users hooked into auto-recurring SMS subscriptions for horoscopes and stuff.

Examples, via TechCrunch:

• "Users are offered in-game currency in exchange for filling out an IQ survey... They are told their results will be text messaged to them... and are texted a pin code to enter on the quiz. Once they've done that, they've just subscribed to a $9.99/month subscription."
  
• "Users are offered in game currency if they sign up to receive a free learning CD... The user is told they pay nothing except a $10 shipping charge. But the fine print, on a different page from checkout, tells them they are really getting a whole set of CDs and will be billed $189.95 unless they return them."

[Via Valleywag]

ACORN Videomaker James O'Keefe's Funder: Facebook Investor Peter Thiel

I'm really glad this aspect of the story is out now.

Leftovers from the reported volume of money "Paypal don" Peter Thiel gave O'Keefe for his previous stunt in February could have easily been used to fund the ACORN videos filmed this summer.

There's just no way that the February "Taxpayers Clearing House" thing cost $30,000. [via The Village Voice; another fun story about Thiel's politics here at Valleywag]

Wasting My Time: 9/11 Edition

Question: Why did I take the time to weigh in (again) on this unsatisfying film adaptation of Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare At Goats?

Answer: I'm probably avoiding real life issues a bit.

Great Moments In Manufactured Youth Culture

Also: I strongly consider looking at my friend's piece on the last Polaroid film in existence being sold at Urban Outfitters.

Invitation To Derisive Laughter

The backstory: This guy used to teach one of my brother's math in high school. According to my brother, this "toolbag [...] was a turd bucket."

In this video: By re-showing a clip The Daily Show took out of context, Bill O'Reilly proves that The Daily Show had judiciously re-packaged the clip in a pretty accurate and funny new context. Then some CNN pundits ignore that fact and say inane things.

Is Sky Mall Embracing The Humiliation Of Its Brand?

Given the popularity of Sky Mall and Sky Mall-esque products as an object for derisive laughter [Exhibit A; Exhibit B; and Exhibit C From the Onion itself], this banner ad purchase is a genius move. People looking for a sardonic laugh at Sky Mall's expense—literally on a money-per-click basis—will not be able to help themselves!!!

Kids In The Hall Season 1 Notes

By now, I think most everyone is aware of how good the troupe is at playing rich female characters. Something I don't hear enough people say, though, is how good Scott Thompson is at making fun of heterosexual machismo. This bit is admittedly broad, but he sells it well. I mean, hey, I LOL'd:

Bruce Sterling's "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature"

SUMMARY: Easily, not the dumbest thing Bruce Sterling has ever written.

Naturally, everything he says applies just as urgently to cartooning and ought to have been on the agenda for MOCCA's Making Good Comics in a New Era panel.

Below are a few of the challenges* that I have comments about:

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

Also true for printed text paired sequentially with images. It's also conceptually indistinguishable from Sterling's #14, which is more a corollary than its own independent "challenge." (Who is editing this blog? Was s/he laid off?)

Something to keep in mind with this point is that: until you become a famous graphic novelist (whose very name is a Brand unto itself), film, TV and animation are your mortal enemies in the attention economy marketplace. Like the other losers (e.g. literature, nonfiction writing and the static visual arts) your twin hopes used to be that your production cost was still relatively lower and that the flexible pacing of your medium's consumption afforded audiences the breathing room to digest smarter, and thus more significant and lasting, idears.

Needless to say, the (relative) democratization of the means of video production, as well as the cheapness of digital distribution, have undercut those hopes significantly. Film, TV and animation will always be more expensive, but by much less than they used to be. And further, the public's ability to parse, edit, repost and generally scrutinize moving images has radically improved thanks to these technologies. The "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions" musical sketch from the 2009 MTV Movie Awards, should tell us something about the ascendancy of cinema studies in academia and its convergence with homemade YouTube montages. Namely: the shelf life of every genre convention in the moving picture medium has been dramatically reduced. If that's not a recipe for exponential sophistication, than I don't know what is. (However, I would be willing to debate the amount of drag force that a glut of "lowest common denominator" Reality TV, YouTube response videos and the like are effecting on this exponential up tic.)

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

This is probably the only leg up we have on our rivals in moving images, whose work can "follow the vernacular" as it hightails it (heh) into the universe of cellphones and streaming video. Comics will always be cheaper and can pour themselves into all kinds of niches faster and deeper. Provided, of course, that they can stop trying to appeal to their own limited niche audiences. You know what they are!

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

Okay. So, clearly, this is not a challenge, but an artfully elucidated statement of fact. Can I attribute this to laziness on Sterling's part? A bit of creative license that forces the critical reader to re-evaluate his entire blog post as capital "P" Poetry? And, if the latter, why not use the cooler British spelling, "spectre"?

There's more (#'s 3-7 obviously), but I'm reticent to spend more time on it.

[Link via Wired]

* ("Challenges" sounds like self-help to me—but I realize that it can also sound like some "NASA-grade inspiring," Camelot-era bullshit.)

Paul Krugman: Inflation Unlikely

According to his Op-Ed today, which I found comforting:

[...] don’t such actions [i.e. buying lots of debt both from the government and from the private sector] have to be inflationary sooner or later? No. The Bank of Japan, faced with economic difficulties not too different from those we face today, purchased debt on a huge scale between 1997 and 2003. What happened to consumer prices? They fell.

[...] it’s hard to escape the sense that the current inflation fear-mongering is partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal seems to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts.

Needless to say, the president should not let himself be bullied. The economy is still in deep trouble and needs continuing help.

Boom! Rebutted!

On The Plastic Jesus Scene From Cool Hand Luke

There was a period when the two middle brothers in my family would sing this around the house a lot. Then my dad would sing it to himself while doing dishes. The Newman performance that inspired this fad in my immediate family is pretty cathartic and suitably ambiguous.

I, for one, can't tell if Newman's weepy banjo playing is actually meant to transform the Jesus statue's glow-in-the-dark plasticity and the Madonna's rhinestones from the mild parody songwriters Ed Rush and George Cromarty had intended into a poignant contemporary analog for the cheap poverty and humility Christianity is notorious for.

Ultimately, I know I'll have to rewatch the whole movie (which I haven't done maybe since high school) to know for sure. However, what I want to think is that this is just a perfect encapsulation of how useful even empty rituals and religious trinkets can be when you are down in the dumps.

Joke Dissection 1.03 [Web Exclusive for Sit Down, Shut Up]

A lot of the humor in this piece comes from the obvious gulf between the emotion that's intended to be conveyed and the one that's plainly visible through body language (something the animation department for Sit Down, Shut Up is going to have to figure out how to simulate for these two voice actors post-haste).

By now, everyone who is a Will Arnett fan is aware of what he's doing here: contrasting his gravelly, leading-man voice and general belligerence against his blatantly insecure physical presence and general stupidity. It is the man's bread and butter.

So, instead, I want to focus on Jason Bateman's performance and some of his contributions to the straight man archetype. Namely: focused, measured and self-serving rage under a gossamer onion-cloth of feigned politeness; the ridiculous extremes of his insincerity, like his repeated suggestion that, maybe, the embarrassing details he's disclosing about Arnett should be run by him and possibly cut; the conspiratorial half wink when he says, "You have to keep your eye on" Arnett's various hair pieces ...

I'm sure there are previous examples of this unreliable straight man routine (Oliver Hardy's blame-skirting moments comes to mind). However, what's interesting about Jason Bateman's anal retentive, unhappy and vindictive straight man is that he always comes across as superficially well-adjusted and successful. He's like a life-long eagle scout going through a bitter mid-life realization that working hard and following the rules hasn't gotten him where he wants to be.

(Actually, thinking about the long fallow period in the middle of his career arch, I wonder to what extent this is the comic archetype he was born to play.)

Joke Dissection 1.02 [The Simpsons]

As someone for whom The Simpsons was expressly forbidden during the show's heyday, I am pretty agnostic on the whole issue of the later seasons' lack of quality.

This 19th season clip is a case in point, because I think it's a great example of how to steal a joke:

Now, this magnet gag is at least as old as the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon Bugsy and Mugsy, but the fact that it has a Looney Tunes precursor actually makes it more plausible, and kind of endearing, for a 10-year-old like Bart to actually attempt it.

More importantly, it affords some great character-based one liners. "It's not funny; these movements are involuntary."

Joke Dissection 1.00 [30 Rock]

When Liz Lemon's bridge-and-tunnel ex-boyfriend, Dennis Duffy, calls her dummy, it's funny—but it's also brilliant.

It provides a radically concise exposition of how a comedy writer could ever have loved him in the first place. (I think they also liked eating food in bed.)

Also, like her other more recent ex—Jon Hamm as Dr. Drew Baird—Dennis has clearly been living it up in the bubble.

“A world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.”

Stanley Fish, whose new book Save the World On Your Own Time is meant as a salvo against political activism in academia, took to the New York Times recently to better define his stance in lieu of accusatory contrasts to the typical neoliberal agenda for college institutions.

He didn't mean to, but his cursory definition reinvigorated my disdain for neoliberalism and left me interested in what the hell he thinks universities are for:

The objection (which I am reporting, not making) is that in the passage from a state in which actions are guided by an overarching notion of the public good to a state in which individual entrepreneurs “freely” pursue their private goods, values like morality, justice, fairness, empathy, nobility and love are either abandoned or redefined in market terms.

Short-term transactions-for-profit replace long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society. Everyone is always running around doing and acquiring things, but the things done and acquired provide only momentary and empty pleasures (shopping, trophy houses, designer clothing and jewelry), which in the end amount to nothing. Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains, delivers a “world of pseudo-satisfactions that is superficially exciting but hollow at its core.” (”A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”)

Harvey and the other critics of neoliberalism explain that once neoliberal goals and priorities become embedded in a culture’s way of thinking, institutions that don’t regard themselves as neoliberal will nevertheless engage in practices that mime and extend neoliberal principles — privatization, untrammeled competition, the retreat from social engineering, the proliferation of markets.

Not interested enough to read his book though.

The Roger Rabbit Of Super Bowl Commercials

A popular story behind Who Framed Roger Rabbit says that it would have been impossible to get characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse onscreen together were it not for the insistence and industry weight of Steven Spielberg.

Part of me wonders if the same was true of this Super Bowl Commercial for MasterCard. (The rest of me thinks these companies were actually grateful.)

Out For Blood (or at least anwsers)

A new Gallup Poll claims that the majority of American want—at the very least—some kind of investigation into potential criminal activities by the Bush Administration.

While I agree with them, I also understand that navigating this current economic crisis means all hands on deck and that alienating the whiny babies in the GOP is a luxury we can't afford yet. [via TPM DC]