40 Years of 7 Dirty Words
It’s the 40th anniversary of George Carlin’s seven dirty words.
Forty years and a landmark Supreme Court decision have passed since Carlin first spoke out about the seven words you cannot say on television. But we’re still wrestling with the issues that Carlin raised with his monologue. How should the government define acceptable language? What can we learn from the 40th anniversary of the most famous, foul-mouthed comedic routine shortly before what could be the most substantial Supreme Court decision on profanity to date?
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/LcRwPf
Results of the Louis CK Experiment
Louis CK is being very open about how his video experiment is performing.
The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.
Louis CK Live at the Beacon Theater
Louis CK is offering a DRM-free video of his act for $5. It’s an interesting and, likely, profitable experiment. I have purchased, but not watched yet, though it’s a safe bet it’s worth your five bucks.
To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions. Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Early Mitch Hedberg
A video of Mitch Hedberg from 1995. [via]
An oral history of the rise and fall of the Dana Carvey Show.
In 1996, Dana Carvey could have taken his primetime sketch comedy show, The Dana Carvey Show, to any network he wanted. Carvey, then 40, was hot off an unprecedented run as one of the most popular cast members in Saturday Night Live history and the success of two Wayne’s World films. And he would soon be armed with what is now a who’s who of comedy names: Robert Smigel, Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Spike Feresten, 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock, Delocated star Jon Glaser, and Community writer and supporting player Dino Stamatopoulos, among many others. Not to mention a guy who would go on to write some of the most abstract and beloved films in history—including Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—Charlie Kaufman.
There’s a whole bunch of new Mitch Hedberg content on his website. The updates include his notebooks, some new video and other things compiled by his widow. [via]
The death of Osama bin Laden seems like the perfect opportunity to take to Twitter for a joke. As I said this morning, “strange times.” It never occurred to me that a side effect of Twitter would be that all news — Japan earthquake, Canadian election, death of bin Laden — becomes a race to the best 140-character punchline.
This piece on (the increasingly great-to-read) Splitsider dovetails nicely with my recent examination of the “angry ginger” YouTube channel.
Few of the unintentional comedians trapped on YouTube today are as mentally ill as the bedlamites depicted in Hogarth’s painting or as complex as Shaw’s delusional characters, but all of them share the massive blindspots Shaw describes — a wide abyss between who they think they are and how everyone else perceives them. That lack of self-awareness turns out to be their greatest capital when, one day, a camera catches them in blind action, and, soon after, the footage is proliferating online. They quickly find out that the public sees something in them that they had never registered themselves — an impressive ridiculousness, usually. The videos spread like bullfrogs. Millions of viewers laugh at their face and ape their unintended catchphrases. Suddenly the village idiot is standing on a global platform, a global village idiot. But remaining on that pedestal is an impossibility. Like Truman Burbank, they lose their ability to perform as soon as they become aware of their audience. Public ridicule engenders reflection, the death knell to an unintentional comedian’s act.
Splitsider looks back at one of Canada’s greatest contributions to the world, The Kids in the Hall.
The Kids in the Hall is one of the most influential sketch shows of all time. In terms of importance, I’d argue it’s right up there with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live. The show pushed the envelope in a number of ways, with its bizarre, surreal sense of humor that hadn’t been seen on sketch shows since Python. Additionally, it touched on sensitive topics like homosexuality that were at the time largely absent from TV shows.
Portlandia looks fun. (Also: Put a Bird On It and Portland: Dream of the 90s.) [via]
The 10 most irreplaceable performances in comedies. On Curtis Armstrong’s role as Booger in Revenge of the Nerds (agreeably one of the most under-rated movie performances of all time):
He starts to close the door, but gets stopped by a giant hand. There’s a group of stragglers — a group of enormous women whose acting reels are used as Bigfoot proof. As each one squeezes past, Curtis Armstrong gets more and more into it. The subtle, unspoken way he transitions from disinterest to eye-fucking should be taught in every theater class. It’s nothing short of amazing. If there was a category for it, it would have won the Academy Award for Greatest Performance of an Actor in a Fat Joke.
Erik Voss on joke stealing and parallel thinking. (Side note: The epic saga of Joe Rogan vs. Carlos Mencia’s joke stealing is far more entertaining than Carlos Mencia. Also, Dane Cook is not funny.)
The problem I’m having with the debate over comedians stealing jokes is that the argument is drowned out by extremes. It’s either “I don’t know many comedians, but this guy makes me laugh and I love him, so I don’t care what he does as long as it’s funny,” or “This guy said a joke that sounds a lot like this other comedian’s, and that means he’s an untalented hack, so fuck him.” Meanwhile, the possibility of parallel thinking is often dismissed as a cop out or refuted by the claim that it’s a professional comedian’s responsibility to be aware of every joke ever written.
Did South Park steal from a College Humor sketch with their Inception parody?
I am VERY careful about accusations like this, because parallel thinking happens all the time in comedy (i.e. the “Tiny Hat” SNL thing, which I didn’t think was an issue at all). And certainly, many people have made fun of Inception’s complicated plot. Even the fact that it’s based on the same scene in the movie, I could ignore. But our sketch is lifted almost line by line.
