Probably the funniest thing I’ve seen on SNL in years. Really dumb people who think they’re smart is always one of my favorite comedic genres. However, Cecily Strong positively nails it, from the deliberate, thick-tongued way of speaking to the distracted mannerisms to the strongly held convictions about concepts she has no clue about. Positively brilliant.
While Paul Bartel’s “Eating Raoul” was distributed by the “classics” division of a major studio (in this case, 20th Century Fox) back in 1982, it’s still one of the best “indie” films of that decade (when “indie” actually meant something). It’s also one of the funniest. The premise is genius. A financially struggling couple, Paul and Mary Bland (played by Bartel and Andy Warhol/Roger Corman regular Mary Woronov), can’t seem to break out of their dead-end jobs to achieve their dream of opening a restaurant. Since their apartment building is overrun with rich perverts and swingers, they come up with the genius notion of luring these lovely folks to their apartment with an ad in a swingers newspaper, killing them, and then stealing their money. Trouble ensues when they bring in locksmith/burglar Raoul as a business partner who helps them dispose of the bodies. Despite “Raoul”‘s grim, blacker-than-black subject matter, the movie is actually very sweet (though it feels odd to say that, given the perverse subject matter). A great example of how you can handle otherwise offensive subject matter in a funny, relatively non-offensive way. However, it still more than earns its R-rating, so probably not the best film to show your parents or people you don’t know that well. The Criterion Collection just released a lovely Blu-Ray version of “Raoul” with all the extras you would expect from them. Dave says check it out.
Do you remember participating in gross-out contests when you were younger? For example, someone would hock up a loogie full of spit and throat mucus and say “Top that.” The winner would then pull out a straw. (Joke borrowed from “The Adventures of Ford Fairlane”). Poop-eating, self-mutilating GG Alllin was the ultimate example of this phenomenon in the rock and roll world. GG took the nihilistic on-stage antics of Iggy Pop and took them to even farther extremes. Aside from eating his own human waste, throwing it at the audience, or smearing it on his body, he would also physically assault his audience … randomly beating the snot out of people, cutting himself up, dragging women onstage by the hair … you get the picture, right?
Anyway, towards the end of his life in 1993, GG started getting more and more mainstream exposure. He was discussed on both Howard Stern’s and Rush Limbaugh’s radio shows. He was the subject of a really good documentary by then-NYU film student Todd Phillips called “Hated” (Phillips later became a multi-millionaire Hollywood mogul when he directed “Road Trip,” “Old School,” and the blockbuster “Hangover” series.) Also, GG made appearances on many talk shows including “The Jerry Springer Show,” “Geraldo,” and “The Jane Whitney Show.” While his appearances were always memorable, there’s something about his “Jane Whitney Show” appearance that was particularly stellar, even for GG. This is GG meeting middle America with all the hysterical overreaction that you would expect from a middle-of-the-road audience. Yes, as a parent, I do find this troubling, but it’s also one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. It truly is a John Waters film come to life.
Unfortunately, I can not find clips of his complete appearance. But what’s here from YouTube is pretty funny. For obvious reasons, not safe for work.
I can’t tell if this is the most boneheaded example of corporate marketing ever or deadpan comedic genius on the level of Andy Kaufman. It’s likely the former, but if you were a comedian trying to design something that would make hipsters lose their collective minds, you couldn’t do any better than this TV ad. Even better than the infamous “Freedom Rock” commercials of the late 1980s.
One of the sad by-products of the explosion of the internet was the virtual disappearance of public access cable TV shows. No, they haven’t gone away completely, but the sheer variety of lunacy that used to be prevalent just isn’t there any longer. With phones being able to record video in 1080P HD and uploading to the internet, it’s just too easy these days. Before this technology became accessible, you had to go down to your local cable provider and if you had $20 and didn’t violate local community standards, you could do whatever you wanted to for a half-hour or so and have it broadcast. Watching public access cable TV back in the day was like a Whitman’s Sampler of insanity … you never knew what you were going to get, but more than likely, it would at least be interesting enough to finish.
Which leads me to Reverend X’s “One Man Show” from 1997. Allegedly broadcast on Los Angeles public access TV, this minister (whose real name is Vincent Stewart) became an internet legend around the mid 2000s, when tapes of his profanity-laden sermons broadcast surfaced online. This is an 8-minute compilation from one of his shows. Yes, if you’re a fan of internet memes, you’ve probably seen this dozens of times already, but after 8 years of watching this, I never get tired of it. Simply put, it makes me laugh hysterically every time I see it. I especially love the way he yells at the callers who try to heckle him. Due to lots of profanity and what some may consider blasphemy, not safe for work, little ones, or those who take their religion too seriously.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/how-bad-can-it-be-case-file-23-saturday-night-live,84591/
Bad comedy has always intrigued me, which is why I found this article about SNL’s infamous 1980-81 season so fascinating. Part of Nathan Rabin’s endlessly terrific “My World of Flops” series, Rabin analyzes the SNL season most people believe was the series’ worst. This was the season produced by Jean Doumanian, right after Lorne Michaels (and the rest of the original cast) left, and she had to start over with a new cast and new writers. After reading the detailed account of this season’s failure in Doug Hill’s and Jeff Weingrad’s 1985 book “Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live” many years ago, I had been trying to see these episodes for a long time. Some of the episodes appeared on Comedy Central when repeats of the show were run, but many of them were severely edited. It wasn’t until some DVD-Rs of this season mysteriously fell off a truck in a town I don’t remember that I finally got a chance to watch the season.
Yes, this season is pretty bad. However, when you look at the show over its nearly 40-year history, there are other seasons that are arguably as bad. What’s easier to see now (as opposed to back in 1980) is that the show goes through severe ups and downs, the downs usually being the years when the show has to start over with a new cast and writers. It’s not that the performers/writers are bad during the down seasons, it just takes time for a new talent pool to gel, but watching that process can be incredibly painful (and interesting). The 1980-81 season was one of those seasons, and Doumanian had an incredibly thankless job. Because no one had ever seen this process before and because the first 5 seasons were so beloved, anything less than being better than the first 5 seasons would have been seen as a failure.
Despite these qualifications, the season is pretty terrible, though the obvious highlight is watching the introduction of Eddie Murphy. Watching Murphy and how fresh and funny he was back in the day, it’s astonishing to think where his career has ended up over 30 years later. Don’t get me wrong, the man still has enormous talent (“Dreamgirls”), but when you see the hacky comedies he’s become affiliated with in recent years (“Pluto Nash,” “Daddy Day Care”), it’s a sad reminder of how far he’s sunk.
The other fascinating person to watch that season is Charles Rocket. Billed as a cross between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and groomed to be the season’s breakout star by producer Doumanian, Rocket is a better talent than historians of the show would lead you to believe. However, the pressure cooker environment of the show, coupled with the sky-high expectations put on his shoulders by Doumanian, likely contributed to him being immensely difficult to work with, as Hill and Weingrad allege in their book. After being fired soon after dropping the “f-bomb” on live television, Rocket periodically popped up in character roles in movies and TV, usually very good and playing the kind of caddish roles that Wil Arnett specialized in before starring in “Up All Night” (ironically, produced by Lorne Michaels). His 2005 suicide by slitting his own throat was especially sad, considering that before SNL, Rocket was considered an important figure in the Providence, Rhode Island arts scene during the early-mid 1970s, a scene that also produced Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers and the Talking Heads. (Rocket played accordion on the David Byrne-produced B-52s album “Whammy”). Below is a link to an article from the Providence Phoenix that discusses this part of Rocket’s career.
http://www.providencephoenix.com/features/p_and_j/documents/05030762.asp
Doumanian later went on to become producer of then-best friend Woody Allen’s films during the 1990s and early 2000s, until an infamous falling out occurred, detailed in the Vanity Fair article listed below:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2005/12/woodyallen200512
One of the best pop cultural satires of all time, from the 1972 album “Radio Dinner.” When National Lampoon decided to record an audio album in the early 1970s, John Lennon was the ultimate sacred cow and they wondered how could they ultimately savage something that most people believed was above comedy. The answer was simple. Take statements he had made in various interviews over the last few years (remember, this was during Lennon’s “primal scream” days) and lay his exact words over a driving “Imagine”-style piano solo. The result is totally brilliant and hilarious. By the way, Lennon is played by Tony Hendra, the best-selling author of “Father Joe,” who eventually found himself in more than a spot of trouble over some allegations by his daughter that painted him in a less than flattering light. Again, not safe for work, because of a lot of profanity.
Negativland’s legendary “cover” of U2′s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” with the centerpiece being legendary DJ Casey Kasem’s angry, profanity-laden rants at his staff. This bit of audio “fun” resulted in years and millions of dollars in lawsuits. Lots of bad language on this one. However, if there’s one thing you need to remember, “These guys are from England and who gives a s–t?!?”
A special dedication to anyone who grew up in either Virginia, Maryland, or Delaware during the 1980s. This is the infamous (and hilarious) documentary about Judas Priest fans in 1986 waiting to go to see the band when they played the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, directed by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn. Favorite line: “Mah name’s Graham … like the dope. Huh-huh-huh-huh!!!!” If you grew up in Virginia or Maryland, you must check this out for the Delmarva accents alone.
Comedian Patton Oswalt describes a class from the College of William and Mary that he took as an undergrad. Really funny stuff about the liberal arts.
Dave's Strange World 