I figured out how to embed non-YouTube videos, so if you read Tuesday’s post, you can now play that video right in the post.
Also a little late, I figured out how to insert animated gifs too! So the awesomeness of the Jump Back! gif can now be seen in the original post.
Just figuring out all this new-fangled media that the kids today are talking about. Someday I’ll ride in a flying machine too!
Have a great weekend.
Ladies and gentleman, I have uncovered one of the great secrets of that dark and twisted world we know as comedy. Lengthy treatises have been written on just what makes people laugh, and entire tomes are devoted to the debate over whether high-brow or low-brow humor is funnier. The answer to the latter is both, obviously, but for my money, nothing makes me laugh so instinctively and delightedly as a well-executed pratfall.
What makes a pratfall well-executed, you may ask. (As I hope you might, since this is the great secret I promised to share with you. If you did not ask, then you probably already know the secret but shh, don’t ruin it for the rest of the class.) I’m glad you asked! A pratfall can take many forms, but its basic definition is someone taking a fall in a way that makes people laugh. Someone falling down the stairs in a Lifetime movie = not funny. Someone falling down the stairs in a Three Stooges movie = funny. You hear “pratfall,” you think “banana peel.”
And that’s funny, of course it is. People falling down is inherently funny. I don’t know if it appeals to me so much because my natural grace and style manifests in tripping over invisible objects and walking into doorframes, but I love it when a casual conversation or stroll down the street on stage or in film is interrupted by a sudden slip-n-slide. Much of the humor comes from the unexpectedness of the fall (at least unexpected to the person falling), but even when we in the audience know it’s coming, we love watching the norm literally upended.
Chevy Chase takes a fall for the president
Which brings me to Chevy Chase, whose weekly (and therefore very expected) cold open pratfalls on SNL elevated the act to a whole new level. His genius? He never stopped falling down. He didn’t just trip and land on his butt. He tripped, windmilled his arms, fell on his knees, reached wildly for support from whatever was handy, took down an entire bookshelf in the process, and landed on his butt. He could fall from any height and still find something to destroy on his way down, all with the most dignified look on his face, like, “I am not falling, I am momentarily off-balance.” The dignified look is part of it; he was playing straight man to the funny man of the fall, almost making the few moments of falling into a double act starring himself and gravity.
This insight struck me as I was watching Season 1 of “Community,” in which Chevy gets to perform a couple of his patented Neverending Pratfalls(TM). He trips over an instrument in a band room, and sure enough, the entire jazz combo setup comes crashing down in a glorious rain of cymbals and drums. He trips in a dorm room with a giant bowl of popcorn in his hands, and next thing you know, he’s grasping at the door handle, the desk, anything, while popcorn rains down on him and his friends laugh hysterically. He’s still got it!
SNL and NBC in general keep a tight grip on their video content, so I was unable to find either of those “Community” clips online or some of Chevy’s more classic how-are-you-still-falling moments from the ’70s. But this clip below is still excellent, with a festive fall as performed by Gerald Ford. (For the young kids in the audience, President Ford was portrayed in the media as clumsy and kinda dim, and Chase regularly played Ford as a bumbling buffoon on SNL. This clip is no exception; we don’t get the fall til the end of the 2:30 minute video, but all the record playing and tree trimming before it is wonderful to see as set-up.)
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmas-eve-at-the-white-house/29163/
Vodpod videos no longer available.Hello, dearest fellow travelers. I’ve been compiling a weekly The Good, The Bad, and The Silly for you since August 6 of last year, and most of the time I’ve enjoyed it. I read a lot of articles online each week anyway, so for a long time it was a good way to reflect on the information gleaned therein and write a short summary, then share that information with the world. But lately I’ve been feeling some bad news fatigue. It seems much harder to find good news to help balance out the bad, and the bad is so soul-crushingly bad. I’m still reading up on current events and smart people’s analyses of those events, but for now, I’m not going to compile them in a GBS anymore.
This may change sometime in the near or distant future, and please let me know if the GBS was a regular part of your reading. In the meantime, I will encourage you to add the links under “The Personal is Political” to the right here to your own RSS feed or bookmarks section, and delve into these issues that way.
Leave any links you’ve collected (especially something uplifting! freezing temperatures have returned and we sure need uplifting!) in the comments.
Have a great weekend! See you on Tuesday.
Double feature comin’ at ya, dearest fellow travelers, and one of them is even a bona fide recommendation!
First up, God of Carnage at the Goodman. This is a smash hit show in Europe and New York, but it made my skin crawl. You can’t tear yourself away from it, sure, like the car crash other reviewers are comparing it to, but that doesn’t meant you don’t feel ill about it. Here’s an excerpt of the review:
Although American audiences view Yasmina Reza’s plays as non-stop comedies, Reza herself sees the plays as “tragedies that happen to be funny.” After seeing the Goodman Theatre production of her Tony Award-winning “God of Carnage,” I have to agree with her. This is no farce or comedy of manners; this is a tragedy of the human spirit, a cynical portrayal of people at their worst with the implication that they don’t even have a best to aspire to.
You can read the rest here.
I only get 300 words for my Centerstage reviews, so I didn’t get to flesh this out, but Sessily and I had a beer after the show and hashed over just why we found it so upsetting and unsatisfying. After we fumbled around with how to articulate what was so upsetting about the gender relations in the play, Sessily got to the heart of it: “The women were criticized for being a negative, while the men were criticized for not being a positive, which allowed the men to prove through their actions that they were, in fact, that positive.” That is, the men were allowed to be the neutral, from which they could prove they had characteristics that the women had suggested they didn’t have (like self-sufficiency), whereas the women were pre-defined as hysterical, controlling, flighty, flawed, etc., and so all they could do was operate within those limited definitions. This is true in the world at large, of course, as men are the default and women just get shoved into the well-known categories of whores, virgins, nags, seductresses, etc. But it was troubling to see Reza play into it, and it made the whole play harder to watch.
Next up, MilkMilkLemonade at Chicago Dramatists. I do recommend this play! So if you have a spare $20 and hour and a half, head on over. (It’s right off the Chicago blue line stop, which is convenient, and next to several low-key bars, which is also convenient.) The excerpt:
Pavement Group’s “MilkMilkLemonade” is all about bodies; whether our bodies define who we are, the secrets our bodies keep, the terrible way our bodies turn on us in illness. Fittingly, it’s a very physical production, with a grandma who walks like a sick chicken and a chicken who walks like The Fonz, and two boys punching, kissing and jumping their way through early adolescence.
You can read the rest of the review here.
It took me a few minutes to get into some of the wackier aspects of the show (the narrator translating the chicken’s quacks, the “ding” of the triangle when someone dropped a pun), but once I realized that this is how Emory sees the world, through a showbiz filter that makes the sadness of his life bearable, I dug it.
The lake wasn’t visible yesterday. It wasn’t even a cloudy day, but when I stood at the window of the 27th floor of my office building and looked out across Adams and past the Board of Trade, I saw no horizon. There was only a soft gray sky settling down beyond Michigan Ave. It didn’t bother me, because I have this view every work day, so I get to see the lake in all its changeability. But I thought about all the tourists at the Sears Tower and wondered how many of them were disappointed that they’d made it to the tallest building in the country, only to see the city slip into a gray haze instead of a blue expanse.
Travelers want to see certain sights, take pictures of the main attraction and put those pictures up on their Facebook wall and in their Christmas cards. Even travelers who say they “don’t want to do the tourist-y thing” want to take good photos of whatever sights they do see. Despite being able to buy the main views on a postcard or in a souvenir book (with, let’s face it, a way nicer camera than most of us have), we keep snapping away to have our very own version. It matters, for some reason, that we have our own. How disappointing, then, when we can’t have it.
Lucky Lucy Honeychurch--she got the view AND the man to go with it.
I was going to turn this post into an upbeat piece on finding the beauty in every situation, and cherishing the memories of your travels more than their digitized representations, but the truth is, I really care about my photos. I’m the self-appointed photographer of most group outings with my high school friends. I have a wall in my dining room covered in snapshots of friends and family. I don’t travel through a lens, by any means; I know how to put the camera down and be in the moment. But I like to look at the picture later and think, “that was me, I took that, I was there, I remember what it felt like to be there and take that.” So when I can’t get a good shot of some view or monument on my travels, it bugs me. Especially when I’m visiting a place I’m likely to never visit again.
It’s not that the excitement of being at the Parthenon or atop Mount Kilimanjaro is any less when the view is obscured or it’s raining. It might be a bit more uncomfortable or look a little different than expected, but that basic traveler’s thrill I feel when I approach a monument or peer out over a vista is basic and deep, and utterly disconnected from peripherals like cameras or even other people. Arriving at a destination and finally viewing a sought-after view or work of art really is its own moment of joy. A photo can’t capture it.
Still, a photo can help me remember that original thrill. It can send me back to that place and time in a way a postcard or purchased photo can’t. I’m a bit of a nostalgia junkie, and although I’m trying to kick the habit so I can live in the now, etc., a little nostalgia is good for ya, and dwelling a bit on great travel moments is one of the best ways to experience it. I feel more connected to the place when I see a snapshot of it on my wall, and I feel a sense of accomplishment as I consider how I got there in the first place.
So when I’m at a scenic spot or famous destination and the view is obscured or the building covered in scaffolding, I know that the only thing to do is shrug my shoulders, take the best photo I can, and move on with my day. But I turn my head and look behind me as I go, always hoping the clouds will part and my photographic moment will return.
The Good
Did you all see how one of the Wisconsin Republican state senators up for recall has been outed by his wife as living with his mistress? Family values! And his wife is signing the recall petition.
Here’s a great, short video of young people standing up for Planned Parenthood. You can hide your head in the sand, America, but young folks have sex, so you might as well teach them to do it safely.
The Bad
Our thoughts are all with the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, and I do hope the nuclear power plants are out of crisis soon. If you’re looking for an organization to donate money to, Doctors Without Borders is doing important work.
There was a lot of coverage this week in the feminist blogs about the New York Times‘ reporting on the November 2010 gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in a small Texas town. The NYT eventually issued a sort-of apology. But I’m most interested in Akiba Solomon’s two pieces on the issue, which delve into the complexities of race and community involved.
Charlie Sheen’s public breakdown may be funny, but his frequent history of domestic violence is anything but. Anna Holmes suggests that maybe Sheen’s exes aren’t “nice” enough for the general public to care about their abuse.
Michigan! Cut it out. Allowing a governor to take over entire towns at his whim is not good policy.
Wondering where we’re supposed to get the money to keep NPR, Planned Parenthood, and the like? Here’s a great graphic representation of just how many tax breaks large corporations get that could be applied to essential public programs instead, and fix the budget in one fell swoop.
The battle in Wisconsin is still going strong, and Abe Sauer at The Awl is doing a terrific job reporting on not just the immediate events, but the full backstory of the main players and what’s at stake. I recommend these highly, but be warned, you will be upset after reading them, because damn people do some shady things.
The Silly
Jane Austen Drinking Game! The video is funny, too. Do I hear “Saturday night fun times”?
When someone’s an asshole to you, what kind of asshole do you get to be back at them? Can you find enough in the situation to destroy their position without destroying their personhood? Such are the weighty questions I pondered after watching some videos on a comedy site. Like ya do.
The premise of Splitsider’s “Eight Types of Hecklers and the Comedians Who Shut Them Up” by Megh Wright is great–what are the different types of people who interrupt stand-up comedy routines and how do comedians respond? But too many of the comedians Wright chose as examples of great heckler shut-downs were unmitigated assholes. I don’t mean they were mean; most comedians have a scale of “a little to a lot” when it comes to being mean in their acts, and frankly that’s usually why we find them so funny. And especially if some jerk in the audience is going to interrupt your carefully crafted routine and your limited stage time with some inane comment or drunken insult, I say rip ’em to shreds. And then call security.
But there’s being mean and funny, and there’s being a bigoted asshole. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that so many comedians choose the latter, since I don’t watch a lot of stand-up precisely because they include terrible jokes in their acts, but it still got to me. With few exceptions, if the heckler was male, the comedian joked about his supposed homosexuality and also about fucking his mother, and if the heckler was female, the comedian called her a bitch/slut/whore and usually crazy too. Ugh. I went from being on the comedian’s side to wishing the video would end sooner so I wouldn’t have to hear the audience laugh at the awful attacks.
Here’s a sample [TW, definitely]: Joe Rogan called his female heckler a “fucking crazy bitch.” George Carlin said his male heckler was “a cocksucker in disguise” and that he only had his mouth open “because he wants someone to come in it.” Bill Hicks, whose profanity is a normal part of his routine, went way too far when he screamed at his female heckler, “you fucking cunt, get the fuck out of here right now, you’re everything that America should be flushed down the toilet, get out you fucking drunk bitch.” But definitely the worst was Ari Shaffir, whose response to his female heckler was, “I wish upon you the greatest success in 2008 and hopefully you will get raped many times before you leave here tonight. But I don’t wanna give the rapist any VD that you have… what did they do? all they wanted to do was get laid, they didn’t know.”
Whew. That was a whole lotta ugly.
And there’s no need! Other comedians in the list had great comeback lines without once employing homophobia or misogyny.
Jacqueline Novak rolls right with her male heckler’s comment and explains just how wrong he is, while remaining in the same joke she had been setting up before she was so rudely interrupted. Steve Hofstetter similarly riffs on his male heckler’s stupid interruption without once making reference to the heckler’s sexuality or his mother’s sexual proclivities. Amy Schumer shut her female heckler down quickly, and then told her to be like the losing chess player in “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and “take the draw” if she felt like talking again. My favorite was Patton Oswalt, who went on a lovely long rant about what a douchebag his male heckler was and how his future was filled with douchebaggery.
Being a stand-up is hard work, I know that, but once you have an audience on your side, it’s real easy to get laughs out of them by dealing low blows to a heckler. Why be satisfied with that? Presumably you actually want to be funny, so skip the bigotry and go straight for the withering put-down.
I had a marathon theater day a couple weeks ago, during which I saw three plays by three different theater companies, all at the Garage Theatre at Steppenwolf. The theater is literally a space carved out of the parking garage, and it’s a decent attempt by an established theater company to lay claim to some of the edginess of fringe theater groups and spaces. The plays themselves varied widely, though they were all meant to focus on “an inquiry into the divide between the public/private self,” according to the program. They succeed to varying degrees. My favorite by far was the first one I saw, “The Three Faces of Doctor Crippen,” with “Heddatron” coming in an uneven second and “Sonnets for an Old Century” a distant third. Here’s a snippet of the review:
The humorous rhythm of the play is badly interrupted by the Ibsen scenes, which play far too sitcom-ready (“Take my wife! Please!”). The best part is the surreal scene just before Jane’s kidnapping, when all three timelines bleed into one another and humans and robots dance across the stage to the undeniable “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
Read the rest of the review here. The shows run through April 24, so you have plenty of time to head on over and spend $20 on an hour or two of quality entertainment. Enjoy!
The Good
This moving, and sometimes funny, and very insightful piece by Dolores P., an abortion provider in training, is worth reading in its entirety. A great conversation starter for any of your more undecided or conservative friends, too.
It seems to be all too easy for the general public to forget that prisoners are people too, so it’s good to see these Georgia prison guards arrested for their vicious beating of an inmate in retaliation for the December prisoners’ strike.
Rinku Sen explains why it’s important to support Planned Parenthood despite founder Margaret Sanger’s disgusting views on eugenics (hint: it’s a vital health care source for millions of women and men).
I didn’t know where the phrase “women of color” or “people of color” came from, but here’s a wonderful explanation from Loretta Ross, a reproductive rights activist who was there at the term’s origination. Her reminder that this was people of color naming themselves, and not being categorized once again by white people, is a vital one.
Tuesday was International Women’s Day, and there were a lot of great pieces written all over the world from the occasion, some of which can be found here and here.
The Bad
Rep. Peter King is starting his own McCarthy hearings, this time focusing on blaming Muslims for all the terrorist acts in this country, providing no statistics to back him up, and ignoring completely other domestic terrorist groups like the KKK, Operation Rescue, and skinhead groups. Guess which groups are actually killing Americans year after year? Arturo Garcia has some great questions and answers about the hearings here.
As you probably read, Wisconsin (probably illegally) passed their bill denying collective bargaining rights to its public workers, when the Democrats who were supposed to be necessary to hold a vote at all were still hundreds of miles away. One Republican state senator did vote no because it went against his conscience and the will of his constituents. A site has already been set up to recall the state senators who rammed through the vote. Instead of doing anything to balance the budget or help the workers of the state, Walker and his friends have just ensured that Wisconsin will be mired in expensive and lengthy legal proceedings for possibly years to come, as the lawsuits come out in full force. Badly done, and shame on them.
JPMorgan is the largest processor of food stamps in the country. That’s right, the same company that contributed to our country’s economic disaster and thousands and thousands of layoffs, that’s the company that is making money by processing the food stamps of the previously employed.
The Republicans’ plan to save money by cutting the budget will likely increase unemployment and slow economic growth, according to studies done by, um, Republicans. Time to change plans, guys.
Ohio has passed its own anti-union bill, and also slipped in there, apropos of nothing, a clause stating that the state shall never acknowledge any kind of same-sex union. They banned gay marriage in 2004, but lest people try a workaround like civil unions or domestic partnerships, the Ohio legislature is heading them off at the pass.
Yesterday was National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, and here are some numbers on just how dangerous it is to work in this field. Also, an interview with a doctor who has been providing abortions since they were legalized in the US.
The Silly
“James Franco’s dissertation is not a ‘contribution to the field.’ It *is* the field.” And other fun facts about James Franco’s foray into grad studies at Yale.
After consulting The Rough Guide to Indonesia and the Internet, here are some places I plan to visit when I’m in Indonesia. I also updated the map (interactive! add your own ideas!).
Jakarta, Java
The capital city’s name means “City of Victory,” which probably holds bittersweet meaning after the riots of 1998 and Suharto’s resignation. I’m interested in the colonial architecture, the puppet museum, and the wooden schooners at Sunda Kelapa.
Borobudur, Java
Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in all of Indonesia, and a major tourist attraction. It was built to represent Meru, the ordering of the cosmos, so that you start at the base–the real world–and end at the top–nirvana. Walking that literally spiritual path will be humbling, I’m sure, and all the more so because I hope to go on one of the few sunrise tours offered.
Ubud, Bali
I’m not terribly interested in the party scene on the tourist-heavy island of Bali, but Ubud, a series of linked villages removed from the main scene, does intrigue me. The villagers are known for producing arts and various local crafts, and for preserving and maintaining the ancient culture of Bali. Apparently Elizabeth Gilbert went here in Eat, Pray, Love, although I didn’t remember that from the book (oh yeah I read it, and that is for another post), so it’s getting a lot more traffic than it used to, but maybe I’ll be there in the off season. I can’t wait to see the dancing!
Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra
Bukit Lawang is the starting point for trips into the jungle in this World Heritage site. The small village was wiped out in a flood caused by illegal logging in 2002, and is only just now getting back on its feet. There’s a big conservation effort going on in the park and around this village in particular, seen especially in the rehabilitating of formerly captive orangutans and releasing them back into the wild. Other rare species are also found here, and it seems like a good place to visit on an “ecotourist” kind of trip, since it supports local businesses and encourages conservation efforts as a good alternative to logging. It also seems to be on the way from Jakarta to Singapore.
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