Tag Archives: comedy

Patton Oswalt, I hate your tiny little guts.

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Okay, that was mean. I’m sure his guts are normal-sized. Sorry.

But goddamn it! He’s just too fucking funny. It ain’t right. I’ve got angst.

Oswalt’s been all over the interwebs lately. First with this piece he wrote about the Boston bombings, and then with this little nugget of awesome. Yeah, that’s right. It is a nine-minute improv performance about combining the Star Wars and Marvel universes into one uber-movie. (Since they’re both owned by Disney now, it would be totally possible. And amazing. Let us all hope that J.J. Abrams takes note.) Oswalt’s done a ton of weird little parts. You may not know you’ve seen his stuff, but you probably have. I recently saw him in Young Adult and I think he was the heart and soul of that movie, even if he wasn’t in it that much. I think I first heard of him when I watched The Comedians of Comedy. Bunch of brilliant, crazy weirdos, those people. Love it.

Anyway, I just read Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Oswalt’s book. Mind. Blown. I knew he was funny on stage and great on screen. This book, though, is a whole different kind of funny. I really like the way he uses a bunch of different formats: essays, poetry, scripty bits, comics, greeting cards, and (probably my favorite) a wine list. Even the list of “other books by this author” at the beginning is a joke, and a good one. He doesn’t just play around with format or genre, he plays to them, uses their tropes and conventions, which makes everything even funnier.

One thing Oswalt talks about in great detail is the intricacy of surviving nerdism in the 1980s. He’s about the same age as my sister, who is *mumblemumble* years older than me, and through whom I lived an early, vicarious teenagerhood. Bitch made me watch all the Freddy/Jason slasher-type movies and listen to Metallica when I was six, is what I’m trying to say here. It’s probably why I’m so twitchy. And so delightful. Anyway, point is, I get a lot of the references in Oswalt’s book, but there’s definitely a little bit of a generation gap as far as group enjoyment or cultural appreciation of those things goes. My generation didn’t get that stuff when it was new and being hyped in the media, so we had to discover it later on our own. Much like we did with Star Wars or Led Zeppelin or chat rooms. His R.E.M. experience was my Nine Inch Nails experience. Either way, there are so many references to books and music and movies here that I’m going to be busy for quite a while looking them all up. Good times.

The book is simultaneously memoir and pop culture commentary. It’s interesting, and very well done. He talks a lot about being a nerd and nerdy stuff, but all that stuff? That’s life stuff. Those books and movies and games and people made him what he is. It’s all inseparable, it’s all one thing. Seamless. And where he could have gotten angsty or whiny about it, instead he seems to really value all that stuff, all those experiences, and it comes across as pure enthusiasm. It’s pretty touching. His putting a positive spin on these potentially bottom-of-the-barrel moments is fucking impressive. “At least I learned something” or “It made me want something better” or “It could’ve been worse, so I wrote a script about the worst possible scenario and made a ton of money.” Dude’s an inspiration, whether that was his intention or not.

And it makes me raging jealous.

I was talking to a friend the other night and she said something about how what I write on my blog makes me seem like I’m just this one thing. Like it’s a character I’m doing or that I’m cherry-picking aspects of my personality to show here. And to a point, that’s true. Mostly for the sake of the writing. Picking a nerdy pop culture thing to talk about and then expanding that conversation into a bigger idea gives me something to nail the bigger idea to. It gives me an in, a reason. Maybe that makes me a hack or whatever, but it also keeps me reined in so I don’t go off all half-cocked about every little thing. Could I talk about non-geek stuff here? Well yeah, it’s my space. But I think putting bigger issues into the context of these small cultural things makes both more interesting, doesn’t it? All art is just a reflection of the culture that created the people who made the art, and then that art becomes a part of the culture, so the people change and grow, and then we get new and exciting art. It’s a vicious, beautiful cycle.

Sure, I could wax philosophical about something else. I find a lot of things interesting. Politics, religion, gender issues, economics, abandoned mental hospitals, etc, etc. Could I talk about, say, the war or socialized health care or right-wing theocracy on the blog? I could. It would probably be boring. Whereas if I put it sideways, tell it slant, maybe slip it into an analysis of dystopianism via scifi or horror, you’ll already be paying attention and when I get boring and ranty, perhaps you won’t notice quite so quickly. But I guess assuming that I have to have some nerd bait to lure you in to my discussion trap is pretty shitty of me. It underestimates you as an audience, so I’m sorry if it seems like I do that. I should be able to just go off about whatever for no reason, even if it is boring. And if you don’t like it, it’s only a thousand words. You can click away and come back next week. It’ll be ok. No hard feelings.

Meanwhile, if you have a single comedy-loving bone in your body, check out Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. It’s incredible. And if you don’t know Patton Oswalt’s standup stuff, you should watch My Weakness is Strong! or No Reason to Complain. He’s a genius. An itty bitty genius. Damn it.

Puppets are people, too.

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Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the Henson generation, but I just love puppets. So much. They’re an easy and cheap way to instantly increase the awesome of pretty much anything that sucks: Musicals. Birthday parties. The Renaissance Fair. Therapy. Some people are freaked out by puppets. These are, in my experience, the same people who are terrified of masks, clowns, and circus performers. Oddly, all things I find endlessly fascinating. Which is not to say that I revel in other folks’ silly little phobias, but I do tend to go on and on about things which, for me, provide a certain degree of whimsy. Said conversations (or monologues, usually, if I’m being honest) serve only to bug out my friends and loved ones. Sorry about that. But think about how many great things had puppets! MST3K, Alf, Mr. Rogers, Sifl & Olly, anything with a Muppet in it.

Why am I talking about puppets (again)? Let’s back up a second. Last year YouTube started supporting original programming and created a bunch of content-specific channels. I’ve talked about this before when I heaped much praise on Geek & Sundry. One of these channels got bequeathed unto Chris Hardwick, creator of Nerdist Industries and target of much vitriolic internet hate. I really can’t figure out why so many people dislike Hardwick. I won’t say he’s the funniest comedian ever, but I quite enjoy his podcast and his book was pretty alright. Anyway, Hardwick has tons of cool friends and he gave some of them webshows. Because that’s just what you do when you’re building a media empire, right? Use your resources. Especially when your resources include Weird Al Yankovic, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, the Sklar brothers, Rob Zombie, and The Kids in the Hall. So, the Nerdist channel is partners with the Henson company, and Chris Hardwick is friends with Neil Patrick Harris, and Neil Patrick Harris is a puppet enthusiast (he’s also a magician – who knew he was so talented in such quirky ways?). All of this adds up to Neil’s Puppet Dreams.

It’s weird shit. Really weird. But hilarious. And kind of hypnotic, actually, with its trippy dream-state aesthetic. The basic premise is that NPH has this disorder which seems like a bizarre type of narcolepsy – he falls asleep all the time and dreams exclusively in puppet form. In the realm of the delightfully fucked-up, this is my new favorite thing. I never knew one could come up with so many puppet-centric double entendres and sexual innuendos, but Harris manages to cram a ton of them into each short episode. Apparently hand-up-your-butt jokes are way funnier when you’re hanging out with puppets. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

After Doogie Howser we didn’t see much of Harris on television, with the exception of a couple of (awful) made-for-tv movies. We sort of forgot about him (unless you’re into theater). Thing is, I knew he was funny, but I didn’t realize he was this kind of funny. Once again, I blame Joss Whedon. I loved Dr. Horrible so, so much, but I think I attributed all the humor to Whedon’s writing. I’ve got to stop doing that. Also, I’ve recently started watching How I Met Your Mother, in which Harris’s Barney Stinson is by far the funniest character. It’s another dumb sitcom, but the writing’s actually pretty great if you can get over the repetitiveness of that I’m-in-my-late-twenties-and-the-dating-scene-is-really-hard-and-I-just-want-to-find-true-love blah blah bullshit that every show seems to be about. If you’re going to feed your brain junk food, it may as well have good writers. Actually, I think I’m missing out on a lot of NPH-related awesome because I do so loathe musical theater. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns do I hate musicals (except for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, but that’s a movie and the book is by Roald Dahl so that doesn’t count). So that’s my fault.

My point is that Harris has good writers and show runners around him. But they answer to the network, right? So now he can stretch some comedy muscles in a new and exciting way. This YouTube channel situation gives content creators the room to say any damn thing they please. That has to feel good, doesn’t it? To not have censors and executives and whatnot watching your every move? To get to make jokes that are your jokes? Finding your own audience on your own terms? I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and I’ve said this a thousand different ways but: Art for art’s sake!

But here’s the even bigger question: puppets making satisfyingly dirty jokes works for webshows but would not, sadly, make it on American prime time. Why is that? We keep them relegated to kids’ shows in the morning or adult shows late at night. I guess there was Alf, back in the day, but that was the 80′s when every show was squeaky clean. I think our sense of humor has changed pretty dramatically since then. I mean, that was twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five. That’s a whole generation. Think about that for a second, you guys. The difference between Alf, Full House, and all those horrible TGIF shows and what’s on now? That’s the same as the difference between I Love Lucy and Saturday Night Live. Big jump. Not that we can’t still appreciate any of that old stuff, but the change in what’s acceptable is really interesting. I think webshows have had a big hand in that, even if it’s only kind of sideways.

So check out Neil’s Puppet Dreams (and the rest of the Nerdist shows on YouTube, while you’re at it). I think this episode is my favorite, but that might just be because it’s got Nathan Fillion in it. It is weird, puppety goodness. And I love that I get to use that sentence. Thanks, internet.

“Not all martyrs see divinity…”

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Bill Hicks would have turned fifty-one this week, you guys. I went on a little bit of a kick for his birthday and listened to all his albums again. Man, that’s good stuff. I’ve talked about Hicks a couple of times here on the blog but then realized in hindsight that I’ve taken it for granted that other people know who he was. So here I am to spew a lot of fangirl stuff about the greatest comedian who ever lived.

William Melvin Hicks was born on December 16th, 1961. He died of pancreatic cancer that spread to his liver on February 26th, 1994. And luckily there was enough awesome in between to make for some amazing comedy. I’m sure not all of it was great. The isolation and suffering of living on the road is a big theme in his work. And he wrestled with substance abuse quite a bit, but that’s not uncommon for great comedians. They’re damaged people. It’s part of what makes them tick. But some of his best material came from those experiences, both good and bad. To be able to see the difference between a useless drug experience and one you can learn from is a skill I think a lot of people don’t recognize exists. But it does, and that’s an important distinction. Hicks was controversial in that regard and in many others. He talked openly about his drug use, about sex and religion and politics. He cursed and screamed and crossed the line into the land of the intentionally offensive often and well. It’s hard to tell sometimes if he was doing it to be satirical or just to fuck with people. Either way, he was brilliant. And I probably think that because, by and large, I agree with what he had to say. Were I on the other side of the fence I doubt I would have ever listened to his points. That’s the problem with controversy, isn’t it? If you can’t even listen to an opinion or have a constructive argument with someone who disagrees with you, then you’re living in a self-made homogenized bubble. Kind of worthless.

I realize now that I’m writing this that it’s really difficult to sum Bill Hicks up without talking pretty extensively about his material. Should’ve seen that coming. “Why do we like what we like?” is one of those unanswerable questions, isn’t it? Without examples. Oh, good. Look at that. I just happen to have examples. A small disclaimer: most of these clips are from his 1993 show Revelations, filmed in London, which is why some of the references seem decidedly British. Anyway, in no particular order:

Dead rock stars
Dinosaurs
Drugs and evolution
Conspiracy theory
Little Miracles
It’s just a ride

Awesome, right?

So, by the time I got around to becoming a big fan of Hicks, he was already dead. And he never achieved superstardom, which is sad but that’s how it goes in comedy. You’re either a household name or you’re not. He was huge in Europe, especially England, where their comedic sensibilities are quite unlike ours. They understand irony and satire differently (although I won’t say better) than Americans. But his status as someone obscure was fixed by the time I even found out about him. He was never going to do something new and big and become famous, even though his cultish following has continued to grow. Thanks, internet. You know those things that you start talking about and they pretty quickly polarize the conversation? Bill Hicks is one of those figures for me. You can always tell the temperature of a group by whether they A) know who he was and, if so, B) love or hate him. Because I’ve found that, in my experience, comedy is only easy to talk about with a pretty small percentage of people. And of that little group, surprisingly few folks have heard of Hicks. He’s a meter for how deep your comedy nerdism runs, basically.

Another downer about Hicks dying so young is that some of his material will always seem a little dated, as relevant as it may still be. But, if you think about that topical stuff as obsolete, remember that history repeats itself. There are a lot of things that he talks about that have come around again, right? Another Bush in the White House, another war in the Middle East, etc, etc. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. Also, those things, those cultural touchstones, that make social commentary a useful tool have changed in really interesting ways since the early 90′s. Things like reality television and the internet have made the world a much weirder place and I often wonder what Bill would have to say about it these days.

So what’s so special about him? Why single him out specifically from all the other comedians that I adore? I don’t really know. Something about him just really struck a chord for me. Maybe it was the age at which I became a fan. You know that horrible mid-adolescent stage when you’re full of questions and scared to answer them? Bill had all the answers I needed. On top of which, he consistently spoke his mind and gave me the confidence to do the same. Eventually. After the bullies forgot about me, anyway. I think I related to him because he was an outsider of sorts. A rock star in a time when comedians were all aspiring to be Seinfeldian and sitcom-ish – clean, vastly wealthy, and universally appealing (read: gives you a chuckle but is overall pretty fucking boring). Hicks was doing alternative comedy before alternative comedy existed. He was also skeptical about the same sorts of things as I was. Politics, religion, sex, drugs, media, the human condition. These are the things that keep you on the fringes if you don’t conform in a small town. And he was Southern. Way more Southern than I am, for sure, rocking that whole Texan cowboy thing, but Southern nonetheless. I think it’s harder to be an oddball in the South. But that could be me overgeneralizing again.

What’s most interesting about Bill Hicks, I think, is not what he said but the conviction with which he said it. Political, religious, and social commentaries are a dime a dozen, right? But Hicks was hardcore about his beliefs and such an articulate speaker that, given a different set of circumstances and talents, I’m sure he would have been just as comfortable preaching from a pulpit as he was from the stage. The man is a wonder to watch. Which is pretty interesting for me, because I fell in love with him via audio. I started listening to his albums in high school and never actually saw one of his performances on film until I had already memorized all that material. To see it performed is so different from just hearing it, but I must say that his physicality and poise really add another layer of awesome.

Maybe it’s because he died young, or because he was so outside the mainstream media boundaries of the time, but Hicks has had an influence on popular culture in ways that are surprising for someone who achieved such a small degree of fame. He was a huge influence on the young comedians who looked to him for the inspiration to start the alternative comedy scene of the 90′s (people like Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho, David Cross, and Denis Leary, who straight up stole half of the set that made him famous from Hicks, word for word, as well as his delivery and his chain smoking/leather jacket wearing image). He was also a musician, and had some pretty famous fans in the hard rock community. He’s the voice at the beginning of Tool’s song Third Eye, as well as the “he” in their song Eulogy, and that album was dedicated to his memory. He was in the Preacher comics. He’s at the center of an odd set of cultural ripples in an increasingly strange pond.

Anyway, if you’re a comedy fan, or just a fan of sociocultural satire in general, check out Bill Hicks. Revelations and Relentless are my favorite of the longer specials. And his albums Philosophy and Rants in E Minor were revelatory for me as a young person and they still are, honestly, some of the most insightful and inspiring pieces of comedy I’ve ever heard. Because comedy shouldn’t just make you laugh. It should, ideally, make you think about why you’re laughing.

Logic! Science! Atheism! Pianos?

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Hooray for a post that’s not a downer! Fucking finally, right?

If any of you are my friends on Facebook, you’ve probably noticed the obscene number of Tim Minchin videos that I’ve posted in the last six months or so. (Did you watch them? Weren’t they great?) I may have mentioned him on the blog before. I think it was in my comedy post. Maybe just in the Pointless List box. Anyway, we all know I love comedy. And I love music. But somewhere in the middle there’s a weird cross-section of people who can do both. At the same time. These people are mutants. Hilarious mutants (and really, if you’re going to have mutants, those are the best kind to have, aren’t they?).

The reason I love Tim Minchin is that he’s fucking smart. Perhaps not in a typically booksmart way (no offense, there’s just no other way to say that), but in an important-subject-matter, Bill Hicksian sensibility kind of way. Intelligent, logical humor. Which is hard to do. Harder still to do whilst banging away on a grand piano, singing really complicated lyrics in a sort of baroque jacket with tails, the entire time maintaining an irresistible redheaded Australian adorableness. Logic plus adorable plus funny equals smart-girl bait. Oh, also barefoot. Barefoot smart-girl bait.

He’s one of those comedians that you either love or hate, as is usually the case when someone tries to base an entire career on making people laugh at controversial issues instead of being all profound and serious about them. Religion comes up a lot in his work, as well as other spiritual or ethereal (read: not provable) belief systems. He’s a staunch atheist, and consistently comes back to the point that logic and science should trump blind faith based on nothing. For the record, I’m not an atheist (you can stop having a panic attack, Mom). But I am pretty devoutly pro-logic and pro-free-thought. I have no issues with other people’s beliefs or faith, so long as they can find their peace or happiness or whatever in a quiet, unobtrusive, keep-it-to-yourself kind of way. Just because you think you’re right doesn’t automatically mean that I’m wrong, does it? I’d like to think it doesn’t. Live and let live. You keep your Jesus magic, and I’ll keep my space aliens and theory of evolution and we’ll just agree to disagree and continue to go about our business and love each other unconditionally and unabashedly in spite of our differences. Ok? Ok.

Hello, weird digression. Where did you come from? I should stay on topic.

The problem with combining any kind of social commentary with comedy (or music, for that matter), is that so often people can’t overlook the medium for the sake of the message. Like people who don’t listen to heavy metal or hip hop saying that it’s a bad influence on their kids. Or that all risqué photography is porn. Or that graffiti isn’t art. (“Stay on topic, Vanessa.” Ok.) Probably the best relevant example of this is Minchin’s The Pope Song, which is about the Pope (the last one, not the Nazi Emperor Palpatine-looking one we have now) covering up for priests who sexually abused children. In two minutes he manages to say the word “fuck” 92 times (by my count, could be wrong). Outstanding. Brilliant. Tremendous. The word itself doesn’t offend me in the least. Fuck fuckity fuckfuck. I can listen past it, right? Past the fact that “fuck” is just another word, to get to the point of the other lyrics, which are quite clever, considering that not much actually rhymes with “fuck.” It’s like a test. A battle of wits. And at the end you’re either offended on a shallow level by mere language, or you’ve understood the satirical juxtaposition of a word that shouldn’t be offensive (but so often is) with words that are seemingly more benign but illustrate something far more disturbing.

That last sentence got a little out of control. Just listen to the damn song and you’ll see what I mean.

Politics aside, Minchin is an excellent pianist and a great singer (you’d think that would go without saying, but in the world of musical comedy a lot of people are funny or technically talented but not both). Apparently he doesn’t read music or write his stuff down. Which I find both impressive and annoying. I’m trying to learn his song Not Perfect on the ukulele. But when I went to look for the chords there were about 800 different versions because everybody who ever put one on the internet had to figure it out for themselves. Also, piano to guitar to ukulele is a bizarre little game of Telephone to play with chords. But it turned out ok, I think I’ve figured it out. (Now I just have to learn to sing. Duck and cover folks, this is not going to be pretty.) He’s super versatile, too. An incomplete list:

Satire (for lack of a better word) – Fuck the Poor, Woody Allen Jesus, Prejudice
Straightforward social commentary – Fat Children, Canvas Bags, Peace Anthem for Palestine
Love songs – If I Didn’t Have You, White Wine in the Sun, Drowned, You Grew On Me
Ridiculousness – Cheese, So Fucking Rock, Doctor Who theme song (performed on a keytar while wearing a Prince Charles mask – yes, I’m serious)
Beat poetry (for real) – Storm, Mitsubishi Colt
Musicals – Won an Olivier Award for his lyrics and music for the stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda

That should keep you busy on the old YouTube for a bit. Mwahahahaaa. I’ve imposed my timesuck upon you. You’re welcome (unless you’re easily offended, in which case: don’t blame me, you clicked on that shit of your own free will). Tim Minchin’s blog and tour/merch/news/etc info are at timminchin.com. I’ll leave you with this one, because it’s my absolute favorite (insert obligatory “I’m not a pirate, all rights belong to the artist” blah blah – I couldn’t get it to embed, you’ll have to click on it, sorry): Tim Minchin – Rock and Roll Nerd

Where’d I put my brick wall?

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I go through these weird periods of obsession. Just various and sundry odd things that I think about constantly for about six months at a time and then move on to the next. It’s one of my less charming quirks. Lately I’ve been kind of preoccupied with comedy. Which felt new and exciting and different until I realized that this has happened before. It’s not amnesia or anything. I mean, I hope not. If I’ve got selective cultural amnesia, you’d think I would at least do myself the courtesy of forgetting about the Bush administration. Or Chumbawamba.

When I was a kid, it was the 1980′s. Which, in America, was the heart of the standup comedy boom, back before all those folks got their own sitcoms. My family’s somewhat musically inclined, so when we got cable we watched a lot of VH1 (which, if you’ll recall your prehistory, actually stands for Video Hits One, from those dinosaur days of honest-to-God music videos, or short films set to music for those of you who really don’t know). VH1 had a lot of standup stuff in their lineup back in the day, and aired a lot of weird comedy shows. This is before reality television, you understand. Also, HBO had a shit ton of comedy going on back then. Whole marathons of one-hour standup specials on the weekends. So, there was comedy in my house, whether I was paying it much attention or not.

Around about high school I started listening to comedy albums pretty heavily. I had Steve Martin and George Carlin on vinyl. Although, to my discredit, that was probably just because I really love vinyl. And then came Bill Hicks. Oh, how I fell ass-over-teakettle in love with Bill Hicks. I can recite his Philosophy album word for word. When you’re that age, you tend to glom on to people who express ideas that are similar to your own, especially when your ideas are what make you feel really out of place in your community. You know, like how it feels being smart and skeptical in a small, Christian, southern town. I also had a pretty intense love for Janeane Garofalo. Smart, snarky, pretty brunette with glasses and a successful career telling people exactly what she thought? That is definitely role model material. Also Daria. I think I may actually be Daria. But I’m not sure. There was some other weird comedy shit going on in the 90′s, too, though I don’t think I was quite old enough to have a lot of it on my radar. The State, Kids in the Hall, Mad TV, Mr. Show. That transition from traditional standup to alternative comedy was a strange time. (If I were just a couple of years older, I’d be a much cooler person. I got the ass end of the 90′s, honestly.)

Fast forward to this winter, when I was trapped indoors and decided to start this blog just to get the writery demons out of my head. Through a weird chain of events and link-clicking on the interwebs, I found myself listening to a lot of comedy again. Obviously my tastes have changed since my high school comedy obsession period. But why? That’s what’s been tickling the old brain buttons lately. And now I’m trapped in this hideous tangle of existential comedy questions. What is funny? Why is it funny? And why are things that I found funny fifteen years ago not funny anymore (putting aside the obvious fact that teenagers are sociopaths)?

It’s so subjective and weird, the idea of comedy. The things that I find funny are exactly the kinds of things that shouldn’t be funny. Religion, politics, human behavior. These are heavy, heady issues, right? I’m not making that up, am I? To be able to take those things and our psychological or cultural reactions to them, turn them over, show us how they work and why they’re fucked up, and then laugh about it – I’m not sure that normal humans do that. But through some mutation in the awesome gland we’ve evolved to a point as a species where we have comics to show us how. And thank the giggle gods, because if you can’t laugh at yourself you’re fucking useless, frankly. I do this whole tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecation thing because I have low self-esteem due to years of systematic bullying and social isolation. And as fun as that is, it’s not turned itself into a marketable skill. Comedians are ninjas at exactly that, at analyzing their own behavior and the foibles of others. Really neurotic mirrors for society, these people. The good ones, at least.

Alright, alright, that’s not true. Let’s not be one-sided here. I guess this is still America. You’ve got to pander to the masses. Which is how that collection of redneck-exploiting idiots made a bajillion dollars off of “Git ‘er done” and other cerebral quips, and that racist jackass with the puppets is still going strong. Representing the majority is important, too. How else are most of these people supposed to make any money? Comedy is hard. It’s a stupid hard life that they choose for themselves, living out of a suitcase for the sake of inviting rejection from strangers night after night. I salute the balls it takes to do that, for real. I just think that a lot of it is not funny. That’s kind of my point. I don’t think fart jokes are funny, either. Or slapstick. But somebody does, which is why that shit still gets made. Contrarily, when comedians from the other end of the spectrum get close to some touchy subject like God or abortion or (every few years) an election they get told by the vast majority that they’re going to burn in some special hell for commie pinko atheist scum (what does “pinko” even mean, you guys, seriously?). The American masses are so easily offended when you try to pet their sacred cows. It’s like (in comedy as well as every other arena) there are two Americas: a smaller one living in the huge, overarching shadow of the other, struggling to get by with just our logic and secular humanism. And down here in the Neverwhere gloom we few still think Bill Hicks is a goddamned genius. Bring on the hatemail, I’m totally ready.