Danger Blog!

2009-10-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

Duck: A Version

It was late summer, 1986. I'd soon be starting ninth grade. But, more important, Howard the Duck was now, finally, in theaters. For weeks, I'd been eagerly awaiting the film's arrival. I plunked down my money and attended a screening. Afterward, the disappointment I felt was roughly the size of Lake Huron. Why had I so looked forward to seeing this famously terrible movie? I'll tell you why: earlier that summer, I'd read the novelization of Howard the Duck, and, I'll be honest, I loved it.

Fifteen to twenty years later, in a used-book store, I found a book called Decade of the Year, a collection of funny essays by a guy named Ellis Weiner. The book, published in 1987, featured blurbs from Veronica Geng and Paul Shaffer. That was good enough for me, and I snapped it up. I enjoyed Decade of the Year, and I became curious about this Ellis Weiner fellow. As it turns out, he used to be an editor at National Lampoon and a columnist for Spy, and he's published several other books, including the novelization of Howard the Duck. More recently, he wrote this Shouts & Murmurs piece, which appeared in the October 19, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.

2009-10-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

Photo, Finish

This photo of S.J. Perelman was shot by the great photographer Irving Penn, who died yesterday at the age of 92. Perelman, who died in 1979, displayed a dazzling command of the English language in his humor pieces, which appeared in The New Yorker for 45 years, starting in 1930. He also contributed to the scripts of two of the Marx Brothers' best movies: Monkey Business, which was released in 1931, and Horse Feathers, which came out a year later. Woody Allen once called him "the single funniest human of my lifetime." The Paris Review interviewed Perelman in 1963; that interview can be read, in a PDF file, here.

2009-10-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

Gates of Heaven

I wouldn't really be me if it weren't for Woody Allen, not just because of his own work but also because of the work of others he's led me to. When I was in high school, learning about Woody led me to discover some of my favorite things: Robert Benchley's funny essays, Buster Keaton's silent comedies, the Marx Brothers. (In Eric Lax's 1975 book On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, Woody says that the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup is the only funny movie he can think of that doesn't have any slow spots. In Hannah and Her Sisters, seeing Duck Soup leads Woody's character, who's been fretting about his mortality, to decide that life isn't so bad after all.)

In the summer of 2008, I listened to this interview with Woody, in which he discusses his love for the early jazz recordings of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton.

I'd heard the interview before, but this time I thought, "You know what? I should listen to those old recordings. If Woody likes 'em, I bet they're great." So I immediately set about finding as many of those old recordings as I could. Those three guys and their music became my new obsession.

I'm always obsessed with something or other. I've always been that way. My childhood was one long string of obsessions: Disney animation, magic, the Beatles, juggling, breakdancing, the Rubik's Cube. I'll get interested in something and it'll take over my life. Then one day something else will catch my attention and suddenly I'll have a new obsession. A couple of years ago, I was obsessed with Stanley Kubrick. Now my days are spent listening to, and reading about, Armstrong, Bechet, and Jelly Roll.

I've been obsessed with this music for over a year now, and in that time I've heard a lot of recordings. I've collected 37 of my favorites in a playlist, Playlist 2 it's called, on my MySpace page, which can be found here.

From Playlist 2 I selected 10 songs for my profile playlist. They are listed below, with notes to enhance your enjoyment.

1. "Everybody Loves My Baby" by Clarence Williams' Blue Five
(Recorded November 6, 1924, in New York City)

On this song, the cornet (an instrument almost exactly like a trumpet) is played by Louis Armstrong, who was 23 at the time. On some Blue Five recordings, the soprano sax is played by Sidney Bechet, but on this one it's played by a fellow named Buster Bailey. The vocalist is Eva Taylor. She was married to Clarence Williams, who played piano on the Blue Five records and organized the recording sessions.

2. "Lazy River" by Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra
(Recorded November 3, 1931, in Chicago)

This is one of just a handful of recordings Armstrong made in the early '30s. During that time, he was on the run from gangsters, so he largely avoided Chicago and New York. In Chicago some months prior to this session, a gangster pulled a gun on Armstrong and made him agree to be on a train to New York the next morning for a gig. Armstrong wasn't on that train, and ended up spending much of the next few years in Europe. He returned to America in 1935, at which point he hired as his manager his old friend Joe Glaser, a tough cookie who, it was said, had worked for Al Capone. Glaser resolved Armstrong's problems with the gangsters, and remained Armstrong's manager until he, Glaser, died, in 1969. Armstrong died two years later.

3. "Cake Walking Babies From Home" by the Red Onion Jazz Babies
(Recorded December 22, 1924, in New York City)

The Red Onion Jazz Babies and Clarence Williams' Blue Five were basically the same band. Both were organized by Clarence Williams and they featured most of the same musicians. Alberta Hunter, rather than Eva Taylor, sang on the Jazz Babies records. (On this tune, she's joined on vocals by Clarence Todd.) And, instead of Clarence Williams, the pianist for the Jazz Babies was Lil Hardin, who'd recently become Armstrong's second wife. (His first wife was an insanely jealous New Orleans prostitute named Daisy Parker. Daisy always carried a razor and wasn't shy about pulling it out.) Seventeen days after this Jazz Babies session, the Blue Five did their version of "Cake Walking Babies," which you'll find in Playlist 2. On both versions, Armstrong plays cornet and Sidney Bechet plays soprano sax.

4. "Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me" by Sidney Bechet
(Recorded November 5, 1951, in New York City)

Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi, have two adopted children. Both are girls; one's Asian, one's white. The Asian one is named Bechet, after you-know-who; the white one is named Manzie, after Manzie Johnson, the guy playing the drums on this recording.

5. "Potato Head Blues" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven
(Recorded May 10, 1927, in Chicago)

Toward the end of Manhattan, Woody's character lists 11 things that, in his opinion, make life worth living. This recording is one of them.

6. "Polka Dot Stomp" by Noble Sissle and His International Orchestra
(Recorded August 15, 1934, in Chicago)

Sidney Bechet plays clarinet and soprano sax on this jaunty number, which he wrote with bandmate James Tolliver, who plays clarinet and tenor sax on this. Woody Allen once called a Bechet concert he attended in the '50s "the most fulfilling artistic experience of my life." "Bechet was a startling musician," he said. "His ferociousness was incredible. I was struck by the intensity and total majesty of his playing." After watching one of his friends buy his first Bechet album, Woody told him, "I'd give anything to be you and hear that for the first time."

7. "Squeeze Me" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five
(Recorded June 29, 1928, in Chicago)

Armstrong did some scat singing on "Lazy River," but on this recording his entire vocal is scat. Another good example of Armstrong's scatting can be heard on "Hotter Than That," which is in Playlist 2. Before Armstrong popularized it, scat singing was virtually unknown outside New Orleans.

8. "Muskrat Ramble" by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five
(Recorded February 26, 1926, in Chicago)

The Hot Five that recorded "Squeeze Me" was a different Hot Five from the Hot Five that recorded this tune. The only musician who was in both bands was Armstrong himself. When trombonist Kid Ory left this earlier version of the Hot Five, Armstrong replaced him with John Thomas and added a tuba player and a drummer and the band became the Hot Seven. The Hot Five and Hot Seven records were Armstrong's first recordings where he was in charge. They're widely considered to be the most important records in jazz history. The Hot Seven recording "Melancholy Blues" was included on the Voyager Golden Record, which was launched into space in 1977. The Golden Record's contents were selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan, who wrote, "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."

9. "Wolverine Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers
(Recorded June 10, 1927, in Chicago)

This recording features a scaled-down version of the Red Hot Peppers. It's just three musicians: Jelly Roll on piano, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and Johnny Dodds's little brother, Baby Dodds, on drums. Johnny Dodds was a member of the original incarnation of Armstrong's Hot Five, and both Dodds brothers were members of the Hot Seven. They'd known Armstrong in New Orleans, where they'd spent a few years playing alongside him on a riverboat called the S.S. Sydney.

10. "Too Busy" by Lillie Delk Christian with Louis Armstrong and His Hot Four
(Recorded June 26, 1928, in Chicago)

Lillie Delk Christian, who sounds a bit like Snow White, was nothing special as a singer, but at the time of this session Louis Armstrong was at the height of his powers. Near the end of this song, we get a little sample of the kind of scat singing he'd do on "Squeeze Me" just three days later.

2009-10-06T00:36:00.000-07:00

Foreign Correspondent

Paul Simms was a writer for the funniest talk show in history, the late, great Late Night With David Letterman. More recently, he wrote the following humor piece, which appeared in the September 21, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.

Attention, People of Earth

We are on our way to your planet. We will be there shortly. But in this, our first contact with you, our "headline" is: We do not want your gravel.

We are coming to Earth, first of all, just to see if we can actually do it. Second, we hope to learn about you and your culture(s). Third—if we end up having some free time—we wouldn't mind taking a firsthand look at your almost ridiculously bountiful stores of gravel. But all we want to do is look.

You're probably wondering if we mean you harm. Good question! So you're going to like the answer, which is: We mean you no harm. Truth be told, there is a faction of us who want to completely annihilate you. But they're not in power right now. And a significant majority of us find their views abhorrent and almost even barbaric.

But, thanks to the fact that our government operates on a system very similar to your Earth democracy, we have to tolerate the views of this "loyal opposition," even while we hope that they never regain power, which they probably won't (if the current poll tracking numbers hold up).

By the way, if we do take any of your gravel, it's going to be such a small percentage of your massive gravel supply that you probably won't even notice it's gone.

You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there's a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don't really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we'll watch Earth TV sometimes—if it happens to be on already—but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.

Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.

Speaking of a vast wasteland, you might want to start picking out and clearing off a place for our spacecraft to land. Our spacecraft, as you will see shortly, is huge. Do not be alarmed; this does not mean that each one of us is that much bigger than each one of you. It's just that there were so many of us who wanted to come that we had to build a really huge spacecraft.

So, again, no cause for alarm.

(Full disclosure: each of us actually is much bigger than each of you, and there's nothing we can do about it. So please don't use any of your Earth-style discrimination against us. This is just how we are, and it's not our fault.)

Anyway, re our spacecraft: it's kind of gigantic. The deceleration thrusters alone are sort of, like ... well, imagine four of your Vesuvius volcanoes (but bigger), turned upside down.

We don't want to hurt anyone, so, if you could just clear off one continent, we think we can keep unintended fatalities to a minimum. Australia would probably work. (But don't say Antarctica. Because we'd just melt it, and then you'd all end up underwater. Which would make it virtually impossible for us to learn about your hopes and your dreams, and your culture, and to harvest relatively small, sample-size amounts of your gravel, just for scientific study.)

A little bit about us: our males have two penises, while our females have only one. So, gender-wise, if you use simple math, we're pretty much identical to you.

And, as far as protocol goes, we're a pretty informal species. If you want to put together a welcoming ceremony with all your kings and queens and Presidents and Prime Ministers and leading gravel-owners, that's fine. But please don't feel like you have to.

Technically, it would be possible for us to share our space-travel technology with you, so that you could build a spacecraft and travel to our planet also. But, for right now, it just feels like it would be better if we came to your place.

Speaking of gravel, one thing we can't tell from our monitoring of Earth is how your gravel tastes. It's just something we're curious about, for no real reason. Is it salty? It looks salty.

Maybe you could form a commission of scientists/gravel-tasters to look into this and let us know. Just have them collect all the gravel you have and put it in one big pile. (There are some pretty big empty parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Russia that might be good spots for such a large gravel pile, but that's just an F.Y.I.)

Then, if you could have your top scientists/gravel-tasters go through this gravel pile, tasting each and every piece, that would be great. Also, if it's not too much of a hassle, have them put all the saltier-tasting pieces in a separate pile.

Anyway, that about wraps up this transmission! Looking forward to seeing you very soon. (Sorry we couldn't have given you more notice, but we didn't want you Earth people going crazy and looting stuff and having sex in the streets out of panic about losing all your delicious gravel, which is something that is definitely not going to happen, because, when it comes down to it, what is gravel really but just a bunch of baby rocks?)

Our E.T.A. on Earth is sometime in the next four hundred and fifty to five hundred years, which we know is a blink of an eye in your Earth time, so start getting ready! Let's have fun with this.

Yours,

A Species from a Galaxy You Haven't Even Noticed Yet

P.S.—We saw that you sent some people to your moon recently. Good job! But, just to let you know, don't waste your time with the moon. There's no gravel there. We already checked.

2009-06-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

Little-Read Writing: "Hood"

In 1925, Ring Lardner published a handsome little volume called What of It? Here's that book's preface:

Preface

Readers of this book, if any, may get to wondering before they are through with it, why it was named What Of It? instead of What For? Well, the name was not selected by the writer, but by Grantland Rice, the poet, and the circumstances were as follows:

We were waiting for something to eat, at Nassau or somewhere, and the conversation had sort of flopped, so I said I was about to publish another book. Mr. Rice started to say something, but didn't. I went on that the publishers were after me for a suitable title and I couldn't think of one.

"It ought to be on the order of 'Hash' or 'Melange' or 'Medley,'" I said. "The stuff in the book is miscellaneous magazine and newspaper stuff, on all kinds of subjects."

Mr. Rice seemed to be pondering, after which he said:

"Didn't you write a thing for 'Liberty' called 'What of It?'"

"Yes," I replied.

"Well," said Mr. Rice, "I think 'What Of It' would be a good title for that kind of book."

So the suggestion was sent in and approved, and the boys at Scribners' thought Mr. Rice ought to be congratulated for what they considered a stroke of genius. But it wasn't much of a strain on my mind to figure out that when I told Mr. Rice I was publishing another book, the thing he started to say and politely didn't was "What of it?" and that's how the phrase happened to be in his head.

It has been my favorite phrase since back in 1913 or '14, or whatever year it was that Hank O'Day managed the Cubs. A modern big league baseball manager is supposed to observe the social amenities, but Mr. O'Day had been an umpire so long that the chip on his shoulder had become a permanent growth.

The Cubs were making their first eastern trip of the season, and with them went their owner, Charles W. Murphy. Mr. Murphy and Mr. O'Day were standing by the desk in the Aldine Hotel at Philadelphia one evening when the hotel's genial manager, whose name I have forgotten, joined them.

"Hello, there, Mr. -----!" said Mr. Murphy cordially. "Have you met my friend, Mr. Henry O'Day?"

"I haven't had that pleasure," replied Mr. -----.

"Mr. -----," explained Mr. Murphy to Mr. O'Day, "is the manager of this hotel."

"What of it?" said Mr. O'Day.

R. W. L.
March, 1925.

Here's a story from What of It? It comes from a section called "Bed-Time Stories."

Red Riding Hood

Well, children, here is the story of little Red Riding Hood like I tell it to my little ones when they wake up in the morning with a headache after a tough night.

Well, one or two times they was a little gal that lived in the suburbs who they called her little Red Riding Hood because she always wore a red riding hood in the hopes that sometime a fresh guy in a high power roadster would pick her up and take her riding. But the rumor had spread the neighborhood that she was a perfectly nice gal, so she had to walk.

Red had a grandmother that lived over near the golf course and got in on most of the parties and one noon she got up and found that they wasn't no gin in the house for her breakfast so she called up her daughter and told her to send Red over with a bottle of gin as she was dying.

So Red starts out with a quart under her arm but had not went far when she met a police dog. A good many people has police dogs, and brags about them and how nice they are for children and etc. but personly I would just as leaf have my kids spend their week-end swimming in the State Shark Hatchery.

Well, this special police dog was like the most of them and hated everybody. When he seen Red he spoke to her and she answered him. Even a dog was better than nothing. She told him where she was going and he pertended like he wasn't paying no tension but no sooner had not she left him when he beat it up a alley and got to her grandmother's joint ahead of her.

Well the old lady heard him knock at the door and told him to come in, as she thought he must either be Red or a bootlegger. So he went in and the old lady was in bed with this hangover and the dog eat her alive.

Then he put on some pajamas and laid down in the bed and pertended like he was her, so pretty soon Red come along and knocked at the door and the dog told her to come in and she went up to the bed to hand him the quart. She thought of course it would be her grandmother laying in the bed and even when she seen the dog she still figured it was her grandmother and something she had drank the night before must of disagreed with her and made her look different.

"Well, grandmother," she says, "you must of hit the old hair tonic last night. Your arms looks like Luis Firpo."

"I will Firpo you in a minute," says the dog.

"But listen grandmother," says Red, "don't you think you ought to have your ears bobbed?"

"I will ear you in a minute," says the dog.

"But listen grandmother," says Red, "you are cock-eyed."

"Listen," says the dog, "if you had of had 1/2 of what I had last night you would of been stone blind."

"But listen grandmother," says Red, "where did you get the new store teeth?"

"I heard you was a tough egg," says the dog, "so I bought them to eat you with."

So then the dog jumped out of bed and went after Red and she screamed.

In the mean w'ile Red's father had been playing golf for a quarter a hole with a couple of guys that conceded themselfs all putts under 12 ft. and he was $.75 looser coming to the 10th. tee.

The 10th. hole is kind of tough as your drive has to have a carry of 50 yards or it will fall in a garbage incinerating plant. You can either lift out with a penalty of two strokes or else play it with a penalty of suffocation. Red's old man topped his drive and the ball rolled into the garbage. He elected to play it and made what looked like a beautiful shot, but when they got up on the green they found that he had hit a white radish instead of a golf ball.

A long argument followed during which the gallery went home to get his supper. The hole was finely conceded.

The 11th. hole on the course is probably the sportiest hole in golfdom. The tee and green are synonymous and the first shot is a putt, but the rules signify that the putt must be played off a high tee with a driver. Red's father was on in two and off in three more and finely sunk his approach for a birdie eight, squaring the match.

Thus the match was all square coming to the home hole which is right close to grandmother's cottage. Red's father hooked his drive through an open window in his mother-in-law's house and forced his caddy to lend him a niblick. He entered the cottage just as the dog was beginning to eat Red.

"What hole are you playing father?" asked Red.

"The eighteenth," says her father, "and it is a dog's leg."

Where-at he hit the police dog in the leg with his niblick and the dog was so surprised that he even give up the grandmother.

"I win, one up," says Red's father and he went out to tell the news to his two opponents. But they had quit and went home to dress for the Kiwanis Club dance.

2009-06-23T20:04:00.001-07:00

Sacha Barin' Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen's grandmother, a ballet dancer, fled Nazi Germany in 1936. Years later, Sacha studied history at Cambridge University and wrote his thesis on the American civil-rights movement. In this Fresh Air interview, originally broadcast on January 4, 2007, he discusses his characters, his comedy, and prejudice. His new movie, Brüno, opens on July 10.

2009-06-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

Benny Ha-Ha

This photo shows the stars of Jack Benny's radio program, which debuted in 1932 and ended in 1955. From left to right, we have Eddie Anderson, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, Mary Livingstone, Jack Benny, Don Wilson, and Mel Blanc. You can listen to many, many episodes of the program here.

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Addendum: This episode, from May 9, 1943,features the great Louis Armstrong.

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Addendum: This episode was broadcast, on April 30, 1944, from the Puget Sound Navy Yard, in Bremerton, Washington, the city where I was born. My dad worked at the navy yard from 1957 to 1992.

2009-06-09T17:43:00.000-07:00

The Finish Master

Robert Benchley (pictured) wrote the following essay in 1930, for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate. It can be found in the 1949 collection Chips Off the Old Benchley, where it's accompanied by the Gluyas Williams illustration seen below.

How to Get Things Done

A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is "Don't you wish you knew?" and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question.

But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country are wondering how I have time to do all my painting, engineering, writing and philanthropic work when, according to the rotogravure sections and society notes, I spend all my time riding to hounds, going to fancy-dress balls disguised as Louis XIV or spelling out GREETINGS TO CALIFORNIA in formation with three thousand Los Angeles school children. "All work and all play," they say.

The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. I have based it very deliberately on a well-known psychological principle and have refined it so that it is now almost too refined. I shall have to begin coarsening it up again pretty soon.

The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.

Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a basketful of letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928 (2) some bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books (3) a hair-cut to get (4) a pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting all references to tropical fish that I can find, with the idea of some day buying myself one) and (5) an article to write for this paper.

Now. With these five tasks staring me in the face on Monday morning, it is little wonder that I go right back to bed as soon as I have had breakfast, in order to store up health and strength for the almost superhuman expenditure of energy that is to come. Mens sana in corpore sano is my motto, and, not even to be funny, am I going to make believe that I don't know what the Latin means. I feel that the least that I can do is to treat my body right when it has to supply fuel for an insatiable mind like mine.

As I lie in bed on Monday morning storing up strength, I make out a schedule. "What do I have to do first?" I ask myself. Well, those letters really should be answered and the pile of scientific magazines should be clipped. And here is where my secret process comes in. Instead of putting them first on the list of things which have to be done, I put them last. I practice a little deception on myself and say: "First you must write that article for the newspaper." I even say this out loud (being careful that nobody hears me, otherwise they would keep me in bed) and try to fool myself into really believing that I must do the article that day and that the other things can wait. I sometimes go so far in this self-deception as to make out a list in pencil, with "No. 1. Newspaper article" underlined in red. (The underlining in red is rather difficult, as there is never a red pencil on the table beside the bed, unless I have taken one to bed with me on Sunday night.)

Then, when everything is lined up, I bound out of bed and have lunch. I find that a good, heavy lunch, with some sort of glutinous dessert, is good preparation for the day's work as it keeps one from getting nervous and excitable. We workers must keep cool and calm, otherwise we would just throw away our time in jumping about and fidgeting.

I then seat myself at my desk with my typewriter before me and sharpen five pencils. (The sharp pencils are for poking holes in the desk-blotter, and a pencil has to be pretty sharp to do that. I find that I can't get more than six holes out of one pencil.) Following this I say to myself (again out loud, if it is practical) "Now, old man! Get at this article!"

Gradually the scheme begins to work. My eye catches the pile of magazines, which I have artfully placed on a near-by table beforehand. I write my name and address at the top of the sheet of paper in the typewriter and then sink back. The magazines being within reach (also part of the plot) I look to see if anyone is watching me and get one off the top of the pile. Hello, what's this! In the very first one is an article by Dr. William Beebe, illustrated by horrifying photographs! Pushing my chair away from my desk, I am soon hard at work clipping.

One of the interesting things about the Argyopelius, or "Silver Hatchet" fish, I find, is that it has eyes in its wrists. I would have been sufficiently surprised just to find out that a fish had wrists, but to learn that it has eyes in them is a discovery so astounding that I am hardly able to cut out the picture. What a lot one learns simply by thumbing through the illustrated weeklies! It is hard work, though, and many a weaker spirit would give it up half-done, but when there is something else of "more importance" to be finished (you see, I still keep up the deception, letting myself go on thinking that the newspaper article is of more importance) no work is too hard or too onerous to keep one busy.

Thus, before the afternoon is half over, I have gone through the scientific magazines and have a neat pile of clippings (including one of a Viper Fish which I wish you could see. You would die laughing). Then it is back to the grind of the newspaper article.

This time I get as far as the title, which I write down with considerable satisfaction until I find that I have misspelled one word terribly, so that the whole sheet of paper has to come out and a fresh one be inserted. As I am doing this, my eye catches the basket of letters.

Now, if there is one thing that I hate to do (and there is, you may be sure) it is to write letters. But somehow, with the newspaper article before me waiting to be done, I am seized with an epistolary fervor which amounts to a craving, and I slyly sneak the first of the unanswered letters out of the basket. I figure out in my mind that I will get more into the swing of writing the article if I practice a little on a few letters. This first one, anyway, I really must answer. True, it is from a friend in Antwerp asking me to look him up when I am in Europe in the summer of 1929, so he can't actually be watching the incoming boats for an answer, but I owe something to politeness after all. So instead of putting a fresh sheet of copy-paper into the typewriter, I slip in one of my handsome bits of personal stationery and dash off a note to my friend in Antwerp. Then, being well in the letter-writing mood, I clean up the entire batch. I feel a little guilty about the article, but the pile of freshly stamped envelopes and the neat bundle of clippings on tropical fish do much to salve my conscience. Tomorrow I will do the article, and no fooling this time either.

When tomorrow comes I am up with one of the older and more sluggish larks. A fresh sheet of copy-paper in the machine, and my name and address neatly printed at the top, and all before eleven A.M.! "A human dynamo" is the name I think up for myself. I have decided to write something about snake-charming and am already more than satisfied with the title "These Snake-Charming People." But, in order to write about snake-charming, one has to know a little about its history, and where should one go to find history but to a book? Maybe in that pile of books in the corner is one on snake-charming! Nobody could point the finger of scorn at me if I went over to those books for the avowed purpose of research work for the matter at hand. No writer could be supposed to carry all that information in his head.

So, with a perfectly clear conscience, I leave my desk for a few minutes and begin glancing over the titles of the books. Of course, it is difficult to find any book, much less one on snake-charming, in a pile which has been standing in the corner for weeks. What really is needed is for them to be on a shelf where their titles will be visible at a glance. And there is the shelf, standing beside the pile of books! It seems almost like a divine command written in the sky: "If you want to finish that article, first put up the shelf and arrange the books on it!" Nothing could be clearer or more logical.

In order to put up the shelf, the laws of physics have decreed that there must be nails, a hammer and some sort of brackets to hold it up on the wall. You can't just wet a shelf with your tongue and stick it up. And, as there are no nails or brackets in the house (or, if there are, they are probably hidden somewhere) the next thing to do is to put on my hat and go out to buy them. Much as it disturbs me to put off the actual start of the article, I feel that I am doing only what is in the line of duty to put on my hat and go out to buy nails and brackets. And, as I put on my hat, I realize to my chagrin that I need a hair-cut badly. I can kill two birds with one stone, or at least with two, and stop in at the barber's on the way back. I will feel all the more like writing after a turn in the fresh air. Any doctor would tell me that.

So in a few hours I return, spick and span and smelling of lilac, bearing nails, brackets, the evening papers and some crackers and peanut butter. Then it's ho! for a quick snack and a glance through the papers (there might be something in them which would alter what I was going to write about snake-charming) and in no time at all the shelf is up, slightly crooked but up, and the books are arranged in a neat row in alphabetical order and all ready for almost instantaneous reference. There does not happen to be one on snake-charming among them, but there is a very interesting one containing some Hogarth prints and one which will bear even closer inspection dealing with the growth of the Motion Picture, illustrated with "stills" from famous productions. A really remarkable industry, the motion-pictures. I might want to write an article on it sometime. Not today, probably, for it is six o'clock and there is still the one on snake-charming to finish up first. Tomorrow morning sharp! Yes, sir!

And so, you see, in two days I have done four of the things I had to do, simply by making believe that it was the fifth that I must do. And the next day, I fix up something else, like taking down the bookshelf and putting it somewhere else, that I have to do, and then I get the fifth one done.

The only trouble is that, at this rate, I will soon run out of things to do, and will be forced to get at that newspaper article the first thing Monday morning.

2009-06-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

By Hook or by Crook

The following is from Love Conquers All, a 1922 collection of essays by Robert Benchley (pictured).

Trout-Fishing

I never knew very much about trout-fishing anyway, and I certainly had no inkling that a trout-fisher had to be so deceitful until I read "Trout-Fishing in Brooks," by G. Garrow-Green. The thing is appalling. Evidently the sport is nothing but a constant series of compromises with one's better nature, what with sneaking about pretending to be something that one is not, trying to fool the fish into thinking one thing when just the reverse is true, and in general behaving in an underhanded and tricky manner throughout the day.

The very first and evidently the most important exhortation in the book is, "Whatever you do, keep out of sight of the fish." Is that open and above-board? Is it honorable?

"Trout invariably lie in running water with their noses pointed against the current, and therefore whatever general chance of concealment there may be rests in fishing from behind them. The moral is that the brook-angler must both walk and fish upstream."

It seems as if a lot of trouble might be saved the fisherman, in case he really didn't want to walk upstream but had to get to some point downstream before 6 o'clock, to adopt some disguise which would deceive the fish into thinking that he had no intention of catching them anyway. A pair of blue glasses and a cane would give the effect of the wearer being blind and harmless, and could be thrown aside very quickly when the time came to show one's self in one's true colors to the fish. If there were two anglers they might talk in loud tones about their dislike for fish in any form, and then, when the trout were quite reassured and swimming close to the bank they could suddenly be shot with a pistol.

But a little further on comes a suggestion for a much more elaborate bit of subterfuge.

The author says that in the early season trout are often engaged with larvae at the bottom and do not show on the surface. It is then a good plan, he says, to sink the flies well, moving in short jerks to imitate nymphs.

You can see that imitating a nymph will call for a lot of rehearsing, but I doubt very much if moving in short jerks is the way in which to go about it. I have never actually seen a nymph, though if I had I should not be likely to admit it, and I can think of no possible way in which I could give an adequate illusion of being one myself. Even the most stupid of trout could easily divine that I was masquerading, and then the question would immediately arise in its mind: "If he is not a nymph, then what is his object in going about like that trying to imitate one? He is up to no good, I'll be bound."

And crash! away would go the trout before I could put my clothes back on.

There is an interesting note on the care and feeding of worms on page 67. One hundred and fifty worms are placed in a tin and allowed to work their way down into packed moss.

"A little fresh milk poured in occasionally is sufficient food," writes Mr. Garrow-Green, in the style of Dr. Holt. "So disposed, the worms soon become bright, lively and tough."

It is easy to understand why one should want to have bright worms, so long as they don't know that they are bright and try to show off before company, but why deliberately set out to make them tough? Good manners they may not be expected to acquire, but a worm with a cultivated vulgarity sounds intolerable. Imagine 150 very tough worms all crowded together in one tin! "Canaille" is the only word to describe it.

I suppose that it is my ignorance of fishing parlance which makes the following sentence a bit hazy:

"Much has been written about bringing a fish downstream to help drown it, as no doubt it does; still, this is often impracticable."

I can think of nothing more impracticable than trying to drown a fish under any conditions, upstream or down, but I suppose that Mr. Garrow-Green knows what he is talking about.

And in at least one of his passages I follow him perfectly. In speaking of the time of day for fly-fishing in the spring he says:

"'Carpe diem' is a good watchword when trout are in the humor." At least, I know a good pun when I see one.

2009-06-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

Spouse Mountain

The following is from Love Conquers All, a 1922 collection of essays by Robert Benchley (pictured).

Noting an Increase in Bigamy

Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. During the past week bigamy has crowded baseball out of the papers, and while this may be due in part to the fact that it was a cold, rainy week and little baseball could be played, yet there is a tendency to be noted there somewhere. All those wishing to note a tendency will continue on into the next paragraph.

There is, of course, nothing new in bigamy. Anyone who goes in for it with the idea of originating a new fad which shall be known by his name, like the daguerreotype or potatoes O'Brien, will have to reckon with the priority claims of several hundred generations of historical characters, most of them wearing brown beards. Just why beards and bigamy seem to have gone hand in hand through the ages is a matter for the professional humorists to determine. We certainly haven't got time to do it here.

But the multiple-marriages unearthed during the past week have a certain homey flavor lacking in some of those which have gone before. For instance, the man in New Jersey who had two wives living right with him all of the time in the same apartment. No need for subterfuge here, no deceiving one about the other. It was just a matter of walking back and forth between the dining-room and the study. This is, of course, bigamy under ideal conditions.

But in tracing a tendency like this, we must not deal so much with concrete cases as with drifts and curves. A couple of statistics are also necessary, especially if it is an alarming tendency that is being traced. The statistics follow, in alphabetical order:

In the United States during the years 1918-1919 there were 4,956,673 weddings. 2,485,845 of these were church weddings, strongly against the wishes of the bridegrooms concerned. In these weddings 10,489,392 silver olive-forks were received as gifts.

Starting with these figures as a basis, we turn to the report of the Pennsylvania State Committee on Outdoor Gymnastics for the year beginning January 4th, 1920, and ending a year later.

This report being pretty fairly uninteresting, we leave it and turn to another report, which covers the manufacture and sale of rugs. This has a picture of a rug in it, and a darned good likeness it is, too.

In this rug report we find that it takes a Navajo Indian only eleven days to weave a rug 12 x 5, with a swastika design in the middle. Eleven days. It seems incredible. Why, it takes only 365 days to make a year!

Now, having seen that there are 73,000 men and women in this country today who can neither read nor write, and that of these only 4%, or a little over half, are colored, what are we to conclude? What is to be the effect on our national morale? Who is to pay this gigantic bill for naval armament?

Before answering these questions any further than this, let us quote from an authority on the subject, a man who has given the best years, or at any rate some very good years, of his life to research in this field, and who now takes exactly the stand which we have been outlining in this article.

"I would not," he says in a speech delivered before the Girls' Friendly Society of Laurel Hill, "I would not for one minute detract from the glory of those who have brought this country to its present state of financial prominence among the nations of the world, and yet as I think back on those dark days, I am impelled to voice the protest of millions of American citizens yet unborn."

Perhaps some of our little readers remember what the major premise of this article was. If so, will they please communicate with the writer.

Oh, yes! Bigamy!

Well, it certainly is funny how many cases of bigamy you hear about nowadays. Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. (That sounds very, very familiar. It is barely possible that it is the sentence with which this article opens. We say so many things in the course of one article that repetitions are quite likely to creep in.)

At any rate, the tendency seems to be toward an increase in bigamy.

2009-06-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Sounders, Drew, a Crowd

2009-06-04T00:37:00.000-07:00

Pete: Best

This show about Peter Cook features John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Miller, Eleanor Bron, Ronnie Wood, John Lennon, and Peter's widow, Lin.

2009-06-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

Sky Writing

2009-06-02T15:02:00.000-07:00

Rock Star

2009-06-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

Buoyancy

2009-05-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Thar She Blows!
The following poem was written by the great George Meyer, who, according to The New Yorker, is currently at work on a novel. You can hear him read this poem on this CD, which was recorded in Los Angeles in 2003 at Beth Lapides's Un-Cabaret show "Say the Word."

Desperate Flapper

Shivering, thrashing,
Quivering, lashing,
Gnashing, and twisting askew;
Flapping profanely,
Snapping insanely:
Car-mounted red, white, and blue.

Whipping along
On a white plastic schlong,
The buffeted banner of dreams.
Fluttering madly,
Jittering badly,
Down San Vicente it screams.

When was our flag
So rapidly dragged?
When was Old Glory
So undulatory?

"Hey there," says Flaggy,
"I hate to be braggy,
But Americans don't run in fear.
You're not gonna budge us,
Flip us over and fudge us,
'Cause all of our stuff is here.

"You envy our freedom,
Our films by Hal Needham,
Like Hooper and Cannonball Run
And Stroker and Smokey.
You lie like Pinocchi-
O if you deny their good fun."

Now Flaggy's battered,
Ripped up, and tattered,
Trailing its star-spangled dreds,
Looking bedeviled,
Wild, and disheveled,
Just like Anne Heche off her meds.

Can't bear to chuck it
In the trash bucket.
That almost seems like a sin.
Ah, hell, let's face it --
It's time to replace it:
The new Lakers pennants are in.

2009-05-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

Craft Superstar

I first encountered the work of Steven Millhauser about 10 years ago, and, ever since, he's been my favorite living writer of fiction. He's rather a mysterious fellow. When, in 1997, his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer won the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Times reported the story under the headline "Shy Author Likes to Live and Work in Obscurity." Despite his penchant for spotlight-shunning, he has, over the years, granted a handful of interviews, all of which are well worth reading. There's this one, with Jim Shepard, for Bomb; this one, for Transatlantica; and this one, for failbetter.com.

Here's how his conversation with Jim Shepard begins:

Jim Shepard: Perhaps as much as any American writer I can think of, you've been drawn to the novella. Are there aesthetic advantages and disadvantages peculiar to the form? Does it even have a form?

Steven Millhauser: Is it possible not to be drawn to the novella? Everything about it is immensely seductive. It demands the rigor of treatment associated with the short story, while at the same time it offers a liberating sense of expansiveness, of widening spaces. And it strikes me as having real advantages over its jealous rivals, the short story and the novel. The challenge and glory of the short story lie exactly there, in its shortness. But shortness encourages certain effects and not others. It encourages, for instance, the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment. In the little world of the story, many kinds of desirable effect are inherently impossible—say, the gradual elaboration of a psychology, the demonstration of change over time. Think of the slowly unfolding drama of self-delusion and self-discovery in Death in Venice—a short story would have to proceed very differently. As for novels: in their dark hearts, don't they long to be exhaustive? Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.

The novella wants nothing to do with the immense, the encyclopedic, the all-conquering all-devouring prose epic, which strikes it as an army moving relentlessly across the land. Its desires are more intimate, more selective. And when it looks at the short story, to which it's secretly akin, it says, with a certain cruelty, No, not for me this admirably exquisite, elegant, refined—perhaps overrefined?—delicately nuanced, perfect little world, whose perfection depends so much on artful exclusions. It says, Let me breathe! The attraction of the novella is that it lets the short story breathe. It invites the possibility of certain elaborations and complexities forbidden by a very short form, while at the same time it holds out the promise of formal perfection. It's enough to make a writer dizzy with exhilaration.

2009-05-21T01:11:00.001-07:00

Brand Identity

Russell Brand talks about comedy and his autobiography, My Booky Wook, on this week's episode of The Treatment.

2009-05-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

Regarding Henry

Thierry Henry is one of the greatest soccer players in the world. When he played for the English Premier League club Arsenal, the club went on a 49-game unbeaten streak, the longest unbeaten streak in the history of English professional soccer, which dates back to 1888. The previous record was 42 games. A Premier League season is 38 games. Arsenal's unbeaten streak included the entire 2003-2004 season. Soccer is a team sport, and Arsenal had several other great players at the time, but none was better than Thierry Henry. Like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Louis Armstrong, he was simply an order of magnitude better than everyone else and everyone knew it. With catlike cunning and elegance, he'd dazzle and surprise, besting the world's best defenders and scoring astonishing goals.

Henry left Arsenal in 2007 to play for what is probably the best soccer team in the world right now, F.C. Barcelona, a team that, if they manage to beat Manchester United in the Champions League final in Rome next week, will have achieved a historic treble, proving themselves to be the best team in all of Europe after having already proven themselves to be the best in their league (La Liga) and, by winning the Spanish Cup, the best in their country.

Freddie Ljungberg left Arsenal the same year Henry did. Ljungberg had been with Arsenal since 1998, a year before Henry joined the club. Ljungberg now plays for my hometown club, Seattle Sounders F.C. On August 5, at Qwest Field, the Sounders will play a friendly against Barcelona. That means that in Seattle this summer, unless something unforeseen should happen, Freddie and Thierry will once again be sharing a soccer pitch.

------

Update: Barcelona did indeed beat Manchester United in the Champions League final, beat them 2-0, becoming the first Spanish team to achieve a continental treble.

------

Update: On August 5, Freddie and Thierry did end up sharing a soccer pitch. Here they are embracing before the game.

2009-05-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

To the Manor Airborne
George Meyer has written another funny essay for The New Yorker:

The Privileged Few

Good afternoon. This is your pre-boarding announcement for Flight 505 to Milwaukee. All first-class and business-class passengers, passengers needing special assistance, and families travelling with small children may now board the aircraft.

We also invite any Platinum Club, ProTravel Select, Apogee Plus, and Sigma Alliance cardholders to board at this time.

Thank you for waiting. We now welcome members of Skyline Advantage, Priority Partners, Front Row Preferred, Exclusa, Summit V.I.P., Head of the Line, A-List Connections, Imperial Privilege, InCrOwD, Icarus Prime Choice, Top Rank Silk, and Top Rank Crystal Reserve. You may now board the aircraft.

We appreciate your patience. We now welcome members of Focus^One, Altius PremierPlan, Silver Platter, Jet Pack Invicta, Above and Beyond, Screaming Eagle, Canadians of Distinction, e-Go Trip, Express Wishes, Superba/FasTTraKK, Freedom Rider Élite, ¡Por Supuesto!, The Circle of Enchantment, Hegira, Hegira Mach Five, Wanderlu$t, Godhead Supreme, Godhead Burnt Offerings, Qomfort Qlub, MeFirst, MeFirst Deluxe Rewards, Out of My Way, and VelourPass. You may now board the aircraft.

The rest of you? Beat it.

------

That's George's second New Yorker piece. His first, a little something called "My Undoing," was published almost exactly two years ago, in the May 28, 2007, issue.

2006-01-29T15:39:00.000-08:00

The Joy of Sacks
Mike Sacks's "Whoops!," which was recently published on the McSweeney's website, is hilarious.

2005-10-31T03:11:00.000-08:00

Handey Man
Today McSweeney's celebrates Halloween with a piece by Jack Handey called "The Legend of Me."

2005-10-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

Buddy Love

Jerry Lewis has written a book called Dean and Me: (A Love Story).

He was recently on The Leonard Lopate Show to promote the book. You can listen to the interview here.

He was also on Fresh Air recently. You can listen to that conversation here.

2005-09-17T22:24:00.000-07:00

Playing House

The brilliant English comedian Hugh Laurie (pictured above, on the left, with Stephen Fry) was interviewed on The Treatment recently. You can listen to the interview here.

2005-08-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

The Little Match Girl

Scarlett Johansson will be starring in Woody Allen's next two movies.

The first one, Match Point, is a dark drama about infidelity and murder in upper-class London society and is scheduled to be released in December. The above image of Scarlett is a still from the film.

The second one is a comedy and is as yet untitled.

Here you can watch video clips of Woody and Scarlett discussing Match Point at Cannes.

Here is a stunningly beautiful photo of Scarlett from the August 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.

2005-07-26T21:17:00.000-07:00

Stella's Fellas
Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and David Wain. Together, they do a half-hour Comedy Central show called Stella. I've seen only the first episode, which is on a free DVD that comes with the June/July issue of Index magazine. That first episode is hilarious.

Here is an old, outdated Yale Herald interview with the three Stellians.

2005-07-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

Chicks 'n' Chuckles
The following is an excerpt from this interview with Jill Davis, who wrote for Late Night with David Letterman:

When I asked how she became a writer for the David Letterman show, for example, she wisecracked, "I won a radio contest, so I packed up the Winnebago and moved to New York." The real story is that she was writing a humorous column for a paper in Lynn, Massachusetts, when she saw Letterman complaining about a writer's strike one night and mailed a bunch of her columns to the show. Her submission caught the attention of then–head writer Steve O'Donnell, she was invited to send in a more formal submission, and was eventually told she had a new career in TV comedy writing if she wanted it. Only then did she pack the Winnebago.

By her recollection, she was perhaps the second female staff writer for the show after Merrill Markoe; she was present for the last two years of Letterman's run on NBC and stayed with the team for approximately four years when they moved to CBS. Since leaving the Late Show, Davis has written television pilots and (as yet unproduced) screenplays, in addition to what looks like a promising career as a comic novelist.

What were your favorite bits from your time writing for Letterman?

First, let me say, it was the greatest job. I spent a lot of time working on remotes that took Dave out of the studio. I wrote the ideas involving Dave and Zsa Zsa Gabor. In the first one, Dave and Zsa Zsa went to a small neighborhood in New Jersey and started knocking on doors and asking if anyone had a question for Zsa Zsa. They didn't. And they were confused about who Dave was. But one thing they knew was that Zsa Zsa was the most beautiful and glamorous woman they'd ever seen, so the piece became "Everybody Loves Zsa Zsa." It featured lots of montages of very nice people from the Garden State letting Zsa Zsa try on their shoes and stuff.

We did remotes with her in London and L.A. too. In L.A., she and Dave spent the day driving through fast food drive-thrus eating fast food. Pounding french fries on camera—Zsa Zsa has to be the best sport in the world. In London, her sportsmanship was tested once again and she rose to the occasion by saying yes to eel pie and bangers and mash.

If you saw any remotes with psychics in them, I wrote those too. One of my favorites was a piece that featured a psychic and Dave going to various New York delis. They had a competition seeing who could most closely predict the expiration dates on dairy products. I think Dave won that one—I was also responsible for the first few "Dave Talks to Kids" remotes.

Below is an excerpt from this interview with Jennifer Crittenden, who has written for Late Night with David Letterman, Seinfeld, and The Simpsons.

In the middle of your college education, you took a summer off to work as an intern on Letterman. How did that turn into a yearlong gig?

While working as a gofer, I started submitting monologue jokes to head writer Steve O'Donnell, who liked them. He passed them on to Dave, who started to use them. I put off going back to college at summer's end because I was earning $100 a joke. In a good week, I would write one of the three nightly "opening remarks" that he used. I'd write 10-20 jokes a day and Dave would usually put a couple on cue cards, along with jokes from other writers. He'd pick six jokes from those, and then right before the show he would go through the six cards and pick three to do on the air. Just getting on the cards was great, but you didn't get paid until he used your jokes on the air.

What did you do after graduating from Wesleyan?

I moved to L.A., wrote lots of spec scripts and sent them to an agent I'd met at Letterman: Jeff Jacobs. He didn't sign me then, but he was nice enough to return my calls, and he later became my agent. At first I worked in a bookstore. I gave myself a year to get work as a writer, and in the twelfth month I got into 20th Century Fox's Young Writers Program. There I observed their two comedy shows, including The Simpsons. I found The Simpsons incredibly intimidating, because it had many great writers on the staff of 15--people I had long worshipped from watching their work on TV. Show runner David Mirkin allowed me to submit story ideas at their annual story conference, and they liked one, so I got hired on staff. I spent two seasons ('93-'95) writing for The Simpsons. That was a trial by fire. I was so intimidated that I had to force myself to speak in the writers' room. My work did get into scripts, however. The Simpsons is so dense, so intelligent and well written--with so many jokes, layers and meanings--that it was very challenging to write. Fortunately, the very slow animation process allows lots of time to put things in, add things and change things--so you get a lot of shots at it. After the script is written, you do a version with the storyboards and can add jokes there. Then there is the animatics stage--black and white stop-action film you watch. The next stage is color. Then, even at the last minute, if you really want to change a joke, you can do so, if it can fit into the character's mouth movement. We only did that if a reference got dated or had some sort of bad association. For instance, we once changed a reference to Mt. Hebron, because there had been recent violence there that would have killed the joke.

How did you get onto Seinfeld, and what was it like working there?

I submitted story ideas to Seinfeld and got assigned a freelance script. Then I was hired on staff. I started as executive story editor and rose to co-producer. I worked there during the last two seasons. The writing process was similar to that on Raymond, in that we would take things that happened to us and expand them into their exaggerated, silly form. I was the only woman among 10 writers. Seinfeld required the most writing per script of any show I've worked on, and scripts were very long. We always had to cut about eight minutes--versus one or two minutes on the average show. The reason the scripts were so long was that each of the four main characters had a story each week. On Raymond, there was one story per script, and other series have A and B stories. It was hard to find four stories each week, because a lot of stories had already been created for the show in the seven previous years. When I came aboard, Larry David had departed, and Jerry Seinfeld was the head writer.

What was he like as a head writer/executive-producer?

Jerry ran the room, approved the stories, oversaw the rewrites and performed; I don't know how he did it all. He was very generous to and supportive of the other writers. If the writers thought something would work and he didn't, he would still try it. He didn't have to always have the jokes; he was happy to set up other characters. One difference from Raymond was that there were no emotional moments or learning moments for the characters. I find that interesting, because on Raymond we would discover why something mattered to the characters and was emotionally important to them. We do that on Bram and Alice, too. It makes it more of a challenge and more fun to write. I find it rewarding to sneak in an emotional moment when people are laughing. On Seinfeld, we worked long hours, seven days a week. Because the show was so popular, the network and studio never said "no" to us. If we dreamed up a parade, they said, "OK" and we went out and shot it--so we were on a hellish schedule and never got ahead. Another reason we never got ahead was that Jerry had so many jobs that he could only do so much in a day.

------

How do you assess the situation of women writers in television?

Well, I haven't found it to be an exclusionary old-boys' network, but I haven't found a supportive old-girls' network either, possibly because there may not yet be enough of us. On the shows where I've worked, I haven't felt pigeonholed. They accept that a good writer can write for male or female characters. Although, on reflection, I did get more than my share of Marge stories on The Simpsons, but that may have been because I particularly liked her character.

What advice do you have for young writers?

Don't become creepy. Don't send a script to someone's home or include a picture or a cartoon. For your spec script, pick a show you like and spend the most time deciding what the story will be. If it is an inventive story, even if the reader doesn't like the writing they will recognize an original take. I got two good pieces of advice when I was starting out. One: Don't wait for inspiration. Just sit down and write, even if you don't feel like it. And two: Don't be afraid to cut things and start over.

2005-07-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

Satire Plier

Jon Stewart was on Fresh Air Friday. You can listen to the interview here.

2005-07-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

Popular Science

The following is from The Harvard Lampoon Big Book of College Life, which was co-edited by George Meyer (and Steven G. Crist), and which contains the writing of such top-flight comedy writers as Jim Downey, Ian Frazier, Tom Gammill, Max Pross, Henry Beard, Mark O'Donnell, and, of course, Meyer himself. The book was published in 1978.

[The following copy
appears below a photo
of a smiling college girl
sitting at an outdoor lunch table
with several boys.]

Do You Want to Be
MORE POPULAR?

She's smart, she's confident, she radiates energy and cheer. She's turned on by exciting people, places and ideas -- the kind only a top-notch school can provide. Most of all, she has something to say -- and when she says it, people listen.

How does Kristi do it? Ask friends who surround her -- if you can pull them away! They'll tell you that she does drugs. Hard drugs. The rugged, durable, we-mean-business drugs that only the folks at Benzene Labs can give you. Because we care.

You see, we're the only people who deal strictly with students. That means if you want "red devils," "blue demons," "yellow sunshine" or any other showy pill -- head straight to our competitors. They're good people too. But if you're looking for honest amphetamines at a modest cost -- from crosses to crystal -- then come to us. That's why we're here.

BENZENE LABORATORIES
Since 1927

2005-07-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

Auteur Talk

No doubt some Faustian deal was made, but nonetheless, when Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda was released earlier this year, the Suicide Girls website scored an interview with the legendary filmmaker.

Excerpts:

Daniel Robert Epstein: Do you prefer to write the dramas or the comedies?

Woody Allen: It's always fun to write the heavy stuff for me because over the years I've done a lot of movies and almost all of them have been comedies. So it's occasionally fun to do something heavy just for the change. But then when I realized I was going to be working with Will [Ferrell] I went back over the script and started to customize it for him and that became fun.

DRE: How did you customize it for him?

WA: First of all, he's so physically different. He's a big silly person and everyone including me has laughed at him in these broad ridiculous comedies. The question was, could he act and be believable. It turned out; I guess because of his size, his face or whatever talent he has, he's vulnerable. There's something sweet about him so your heart goes out to him. There were things in the script, the actual dialogue, that he couldn't do. Since I'm writing the dialogue, my tendency is to write it for myself even though I knew I'd never be playing it. But I write it instinctively for myself and I had to cut some lines and dialogue out of the thing because he couldn't do it. It never sounded funny when he did it. But there were things he did do that I could never imagine when I was writing it. Before I met him, I never could have imagined it for the script or the contributions he would make sort of built in to his ridiculous persona. The way he moved, there's something in the look of his face, it's intangible, but it's silly and sweet.

DRE: Is there a good example of something you cut?

WA: I can't give you an example of exact lines I cut, but they were one-liner jokes that I do that are easy for me but they don't sound like a joke when he does it. Rather it sounds like dialogue rather than a joke. It comes naturally to me, but it's not so natural to him. I've had that problem before with Diane Keaton. She's someone I used to write these sharp remarks for and she could never do them. She's the funniest person I ever met and always used to steal the picture from me. I always wrote the movie for me and wrote her a secondary role and when the movie came out she was always the funny star and I was always the secondary part. But she couldn't do those kinds of one-liners either for some reason. There are some people who just can do them and Will is not one of them. Will has a different comic gift and it's hard to quantify it but it's working great for him, not just on my picture but in general.

------

DRE: Do you ever miss doing standup?

WA: I miss doing standup but I'm too lazy to do it again. To write an act and be funny for 45 minutes on stage is a huge amount of work. Much more work than a movie. In order to get an hour's worth of really funny, potent material, it's a huge amount of work that I don't have the energy or patience to do it. But I do miss it because it's a wonderful medium to work in. I also love watching it so the fact that you can turn on your television set at any time of the day or night and see two or three comics working in perpetuity around the clock is wonderful.

DRE: Would you ever direct something someone else has written?

WA: I've never done that. I've really only directed because I'm a writer and I like to write but I wouldn't rule it out now that I'm getting older. It would be an interesting experience to see what it's like to direct someone else's script. But I've only directed in the past because I wrote the script.

DRE: What is your writing process?

WA: I still lay down on the bed with a yellow pad and write. Invariably I have to type it myself and that takes three days. I was taught to write on a typewriter and I think it would be healthier for me to do it because if you write on your typewriter, you act out the scene and you type it down and you sort of know it works. When you write on a pad, you're hearing it in your head and you don't know that it works when it becomes audible, but it goes so much faster that I've gotten into the bad habit and I've been doing it for years.

DRE: I've heard so many stories about actors getting fired from your movie sets. What is a fireable offense on your set?

WA: Fireable is only when it turns out to be my casting mistake because the person does no wrong. I hire them and I'm convinced they can do it and then they come in and they don't do it. I try every conceivable way to get them to do it. I talk to them, I explain it, I try and be as lucid as I can and then if that doesn't work sometimes I try and trick them transparently. Sometimes they do it and sometimes they don't. I'm not a skilled director like Elia Kazan or Mike Nichols who can get a performance out of someone who can't act. So after three days of trying to get the person to do the scene, I fire them because I don't know what else to do. I feel we're doomed if we use them and I can't think of what else to do. It's possible that someone will come in and read and they'll be very good at the reading and then for some inexplicable reason they can't do it when the time comes. It doesn't happen a lot but it does happen occasionally. It's a terrible thing.

2005-07-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

The Consecrated Host

Two years ago, to mark Conan O'Brien's 10th anniversary as host of Late Night, The Hollywood Reporter conducted this interview with the freckled Irish wag.

An excerpt:

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: WHEN YOU FIRST STARTED, WHEN YOU WERE STILL DEALING WITH THOSE 13-WEEK CONTRACTS, WHAT WERE THE HARDEST THINGS ABOUT MAKING THE TRANSITION FROM WRITER TO PERFORMER?

Conan O'Brien: The hardest thing for me was that I knew I had a funny persona and that I had a point of view. I knew it was there. I didn't become this person over the last 10 years; I was this person. But I didn't have the chops to be this person on TV every night for an hour... It was just very tricky for me to learn how to be Conan O'Brien on TV for nine-minute periods of time and then throw it to commercial seamlessly... For the first year and a half of the show, you know, you could almost see me thinking, you could see me trying to be a good talk show host. It wasn't fun to watch.

THR: WHEN DID YOU GET TO THE POINT OF FEELING COMFORTABLE ON CAMERA?

O'Brien: What happened over time is that all the things you have to know -- which camera to look at, how to begin a segment, how to end a segment, how to stand -- all those things, eventually, they become second nature, and that allowed my personality to come out. I don't have to think about it anymore. If you wake me up in the middle of the night, I'll say, "And my next guest is Fabio" ... then I'll have questions for him... So now 10 years later, you're not watching Conan trying to be a good talk show host; you're watching me in the moment, having a good time trying to be myself, having fun, you know, letting my mind go... That's always what I was doing with my friends in high school and college. For years when I was a writer, I was the guy in the room performing for the other writers.

THR: ARE YOU COMPETITIVE? DO YOU CALL IN FIRST THING IN THE MORNING FOR THE OVERNIGHT RATINGS?

O'Brien: Comedians are naturally competitive -- it started with us trying to be funniest person at our dining room table when we were growing up... There's definitely a competitive side to me, but I don't think these late-night talk shows work as a competitive sport. I don't get more creative and funnier when I watch other people's shows. It doesn't get my creative juices going. If you're obsessing and watching other people's shows, you're gonna consciously or unconsciously imitate them... The other thing is, ratings can be misleading. When they're figuring out ratings at 12:30 at night, the data's coming from like 80 people in the Nielsen sample. If two of those people get head colds and go to bed early, suddenly you don't have as good a night as you might have.

THR: WHAT'S A TYPICAL WORKDAY LIKE FOR YOU?

O'Brien: I usually work out in the morning because you don't just get a body like mine, you have to work it. I get into work in the morning, but things don't heat up until about 11 o'clock. I tend to walk from office to office on our floor. I sort of peek my head into offices, and a lot of times I have a guitar on, and I'm singing. That's how I relax. I learn a song a week to annoy people. I make up songs to tease people... The first formal meeting of the day is at 11:30. That's where we run down what the show is that day, what potential problems there are. Then I'm usually with the head writer for a bit, talking down the show, or I'm talking to Jeff Ross. That usually gets us to around 1 in the afternoon. Then I sit with the segment producers and talk about who are the guests today, what stories do they want to tell. We talk about the guests, and a lot of it is just trying to figure out what are good ways to start those conversations, what are the potential things I could be funny about. Half of the time you end up coming up in the meeting with potential ways I could be funny in an interview, then other times they are improvised. Those are the best. The audience tends to sense when it's improvised. Then maybe there's a pretape (segment) or something I have to shoot for that day's show. We try to do our rehearsal at about 2:30, but that doesn't usually happen right on time. Some rehearsals last a long time, sometimes they're very tense, and sometimes they're very easy. There are definitely not enough easy rehearsals... That takes me to around 4:30, and I go in for makeup and hair. Then just before I go out to warm up the audience, around 5:15, we pick the jokes for the monologue. And we fight over them.

THR: WHAT YARDSTICK DO YOU USE TO TELL IF YOU'VE HAD A GOOD NIGHT OR NOT?

O'Brien: For me, it's usually measured by the size of my pompadour. When it inflates, when I have a 6-inch shelf of red hair sticking over my forehead, that's a good show. When it's lying down flat like Moe on the Three Stooges, it's time to check out an infomercial... I think a good show is when the writers and producers build a jungle gym, and I go out, and the show is me jumping around and playing with it, having a good time. That to me is a good episode of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." It doesn't happen every night -- otherwise, a really good show wouldn't feel like an event. There are too many variables. The crowd, the guests, the mood I'm in, and then it's also like, what's the weather like outside? When all those things line up, that's a great show. And that's a powerful drug that just keeps you coming back over and over and over again. You'll walk over hot coals to get to another one. You'll drag your ass through four bad crowds to get to another good crowd. It feels so good.

2005-07-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

Poster Boy

The magician/historian/actor/collector Ricky Jay has published a beautiful book of bizarre broadsides that date back hundreds of years. The broadsides come from Jay's own collection, which he recently put on display in a gallery in San Francisco. Here is a San Francisco Chronicle article about the show.

An excerpt:

He started his collection more than 25 years ago during leaner times. Jay and his magic opened for Cheech and Chong, Emmylou Harris and the B-52's during the night, while he searched for learned pigs, flea circuses and an elusive armless dulcimer player by day.

"Most of them came from being on the road, visiting bookshops and print galleries while I was performing," Jay says.

He wrote about many of his greatest finds in the 1990s publication "Jay's Journal of Anomalies," which was released in book form three years ago and has been revisited on Jay's weekly radio show on KCRW in Los Angeles. The broadsides have also been made into a book, which is being sold at the museum now and will be available in bookstores soon.

With relatively few collectors of this kind of art, Jay says the broadsides often find their way to him these days, instead of the other way around. That includes an 1816 broadside for Giuseppe De Rossi, an Italian magician who boasted he could sever the head of a steer and then make the animal whole again. When a trader presented Jay with the weathered document a couple of months ago, he wasn't aware De Rossi existed.

To understand the magician's joy, imagine a collector of 20th century baseball cards in the 24th century, who discovers there was a player named Roberto Clemente by unearthing his rookie card.

"I've been researching this piece, and I've found literally no record of De Rossi at all," Jay says. "Tomorrow or 10 years from now you may run across a newspaper account describing him. Or maybe he's absolutely lost to history except for this one sheet."

While there are a few performers mainstream audiences may have heard of in the exhibition -- conjoined twins Chang and Eng come to mind -- Jay's favorites seem to be the broadsides that present more questions than answers. He's particularly fond of the prose on the advertisements, most of which seems to come before the advent of irony.

"Wonderful Remains of an ENORMOUS HEAD," one broadside reads, without giving details of whose head is on display or its current condition. "18 Feet in Length, 7 Feet in Breadth and Weighing 1,700 Pounds."

2005-07-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

Twins 'n' Grins
One of the online-only features over at the Believer website is this conversation between comedy-writing twins Mark and Steve O'Donnell. Steve was the head writer at Late Night with David Letterman from 1983 to 1992. Mark's written many funny things, including Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales and this essay, which was originally published in The New Yorker. Mark teaches comedy writing at Yale.

An excerpt:

MARK: Well, what we share is a Midwestern sense both of dubiousness and good nature. That may be what leads to a lot of comedy writers' becoming comedy writers. Good nature and skepticism.

STEVE: I agree with that, and of course we have way much more in common than distinctions. But the fact that I had a couple micro-ounces on you meant that I was born first, the larger of the two babies, and have remained the larger of the two. Then there's the sociological element, the pecking order of the family, that you were the tail end of the line, I think you have a term for it—

MARK: Low man on the scrotum pole. Yes, and though people say, "Ooh, you're both comedy writers!" and even though I wrote for Saturday Night Live, I gravitated toward books and theater, and you toward TV, even though you write beautiful prose and draw really well.

STEVE: I still think the significant question is why two different paths were taken by two people with similar upbringings.

MARK: Yeah, but in our day-to-day life we're not so wildly different. When I visit friends and make jokes about their bric-a-brac, they say, That's just what Steve said.

STEVE: Yes, I acknowledge that, but why are we conducting this interview? What insights are we supposed to be offering here?

MARK: Well, we're talking about what it's like to be writers, as well as to be brothers.

STEVE: I don't think anyone cares about that.

MARK: I assume the people who read this are likely to be writers themselves. Well. I aspired from early on to write a novel, to be in the New Yorker, to be on Broadway, and at least in a fleeting way, I got all those things. Is there anything you’re burning to do that you haven't yet done?

STEVE: Hmm. To write any complete work, be it a book or play or movie, that is most purely oneself, with as few compromises and outside interferences as possible ...

MARK: You and Letterman were a good match. Those Top-Ten books were on the best-seller list—

STEVE: Well, they weren't technically books. Even the Times listed them under "Advice, Miscellaneous and How-To."

MARK: But they were continuously funny, and as comedy goes, they had a kind of poetry to them.

STEVE: Well, that's nice to say, and I appreciate your mentioning the "Top-Ten List" as my little asterisked entry in the record books of comedy, even though it was a perfectly ordinary idea that has certainly gotten its use and re-use and re-use—

MARK: You couldn't have dreamed of being a Letterman writer as a kid, but it was a perfect realization for your sensibility.

STEVE: I felt giddy and exalted when I got the job. Our high-school guidance counselors—who, we might as well say now, in semi-print, were scandalously incompetent—did have that one chestnut about "Find that thing you do well and go out and do it." I felt that with Letterman.

2005-07-16T03:12:00.000-07:00

The Hitchin' Post
In last September's issue of The Believer, Simpsons writer George Meyer shared his views on marriage:

THE BELIEVER: I assume that you're still not married, right?

GEORGE MEYER: God, no.

BLVR: You're probably the most effective anti-marriage spokesman out there. I can still vividly recall Edna Krabappel's argument against marriage: "Most of you will only marry out of fear of dying alone." That line really shook me when I first heard it. It kept me away from marriage for years. I desperately didn't want to become the punchline to that joke. And you see it all too often. We all know people who've slipped into safety marriages.

GM: My parents are still married and I guess they're relatively happy. For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal. It's as if medicine came up with the iron lung, then stood back and said, "At last! Our work is done." Men often struggle with their attraction to other women. They don't quite understand why they have to be with the same woman forever. Marriage has a compassionate answer for them: "Oh, shut up, you selfish crybaby." Is it any wonder men have to be pressured into this nasty, lopsided arrangement?

In Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natalie Angier writes:

Women are said to need an investing male. We think we know the reason. Human babies are difficult and time-consuming to raise. Stone Age mothers needed husbands to bring home the bison. Yet the age-old assumption that male parental investment lies at the heart of human evolution is now open to serious question. Men in traditional foraging cultures do not necessarily invest resources in their offspring. Among the Hadza of Africa, for example, the men hunt, but they share the bounty of that hunting widely, politically, strategically. They don't deliver it straight to the mouths of their progeny. Women rely on their senior female kin to help feed their children. The women and their children in a gathering-hunting society clearly benefit from the meat that hunters bring back to the group. But they benefit as a group, not as a collection of nuclear family units, each beholden to the father's personal pound of wildeburger.

This is a startling revelation, which upends many of our presumptions about the origins of marriage and what women want from men and men from women. If the environment of evolutionary adaptation is not defined primarily by male parental investment, the bedrock of so much of evolutionary psychology's theories, then we can throw the door wide open and ask new questions, rather than endlessly repeating ditties and calling the female coy long after she has run her petticoats through the presidential paper shredder.

For example: Nicholas Blurton Jones, of the University of California at Los Angeles, and others have proposed that marriage developed as an extension of men's efforts at mate guarding. If the cost of philandering becomes ludicrously high, the man might be better off trying to claim rights to one woman at a time. Regular sex with a fertile female is at least likely to yield offspring at comparatively little risk to his life, particularly if sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony -- a wedding. Looked at from this perspective, one must wonder why an ancestral woman bothered to get married, particularly if she and her female relatives did most of the work of keeping the family fed from year to year. Perhaps, Blurton Jones suggests, to limit the degree to which she was harassed. The cost of chronic male harassment may be too high to bear. Better to agree to a ritualized bond with a male, and to benefit from whatever hands-off policy that marriage may bring, than to spend all of her time locked in one sexual dialectic or another.

Thus marriage may have arisen as a multifaceted social pact: between man and woman, between male and male, and between the couple and the tribe. It is a reasonable solution to a series of cultural challenges that arose in concert with the expansion of the human neocortex. But its roots may not be what we think they are, nor may our contemporary mating behaviors stem from the pressures of an ancestral environment as it is commonly portrayed, in which a woman needed a mate to help feed and clothe her young. Instead, our "deep" feelings about marriage may be more pragmatic, more contextual, and, dare I say it, more egalitarian than we give them credit for being.

2005-05-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

Hugging Mr. Ha-Ha

In January, I went to New York for the first time ever. It was amazing. I love-love-loved it.

Here's an account of something that happened on that trip:

Tuesday morning, I got up at 6 a.m. and went and stood outside the G.E. Building, where NBC Studios is located and where they hand out Late Night with Conan O'Brien stand-by tickets at 9 a.m. They hand out numbered tickets. The numbers correspond to your place in line. My ticket said "1" because I was the first in line. Then I went back to the G.E. Building at 4:15 and waited in line. After a while, everyone but the first seven people were told they had no chance of getting in and were told to either leave or go to a taping of Last Call With Carson Daly, which had plenty of openings because, well, because it's Last Call With Carson Daly. After I'd waited in line for about an hour, I was told that no stand-by people were going to be let in to see Conan, so I left.

The next morning, I got up at 6 again and stood in line again and got stand-by ticket No. 1 again. I went through the whole thing again, but this time much of the stand-by line got in to see the show. I was the first stand-by person to be let into the studio, so I got to sit in the best seat that was left, which was in the third row on the aisle.

While we waited, the band came out and played some great hoppin' tunes. The band sounds amazing in the studio. The trumpet player was especially impressive. Then the guy who plays Preparation H Raymond on the show came out and did the warm-up. He was really quick and funny. He asked some people where they were from and that kind of thing, but it wasn't corny like you'd think it would be. He was hilarious. Then Conan came out and interacted with the audience. It was about 5:15 at this point, and the show started taping at 5:30. Conan's face was a veil of makeup. He had a lot of energy and was tossing off hilarious jokes left and right. Then he looked right at me and asked if I was excited to be there (or some such thing; I don't remember exactly what he said). Then he said something like, "Excited enough to dance?" So then he had me stand up and the two of us danced to the music the band was playing. I threw myself into the spirit of the thing and really went kind of wild. Conan stopped me, saying, "Whoa! What was that?" Then he said, "Oh man. That took guts. Give me a hug. I love you, man!" I hugged him and said, "I love you, dude!" into his ear. Conan said, "Let's hold the hug until it starts to get really awkward and the audience starts getting creeped out." So we held it and held it. Finally, the hug ended and Conan had me go hug some other man in the audience. Later, Conan had another male audience member hug Max Weinberg. Conan must have been in a real huggy mood that day. Or maybe he's always like that. Who knows? Soon afterward, the show started, and Conan was great. During commercial breaks, Conan would kind of do a huddle with various people who worked on the show, discussing upcoming bits or what-have-you. During the second interview, a camera Conan tried to do a take in wasn't ready and so the funny thing Conan had tried to do didn't work. This visibly annoyed Conan, but only for a fraction of a second. During the following commercial break, Conan got up and talked to the producer about it. He was annoyed, but when the show came back from commercial, Conan was his old funny self again. During the last commercial break, I heard Conan say to a cue-card guy, "I can't see that card at all." Not that exciting maybe, but true.

Anyway, that's my Conan experience. By the way, I'd tell you who the guests were on the show that night, but I don't remember their names. I'd never heard of them before. The first guest was a singer/songwriter dude. The second was some guy in the Phantom of the Opera movie. Then there was a rap-style duo on at the end. They did a song/rap thing. I didn't care that I didn't know the guests, though. I was there to see Conan. Whom I hugged.

2005-05-23T20:53:00.000-07:00

Short Circuit
Martin Short was on The Treatment last week. You can listen to the interview here.

2005-04-03T15:24:00.000-07:00

Heart-Stopping News
Comedian Mitch Hedberg died last Wednesday of heart failure. Here you can listen to a short Weekend Edition remembrance of him.

2005-03-23T21:20:00.000-08:00

Non-American Idle

Eric Idle discusses Monty Python and the nature of comedy on today's episode of The Treatment.

2005-02-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

Stare Master
Here's a drawing I drew:

2005-01-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

The Late Great Johnny Ace

NPR's Remembrances of Johnny

Kenneth Tynan's 1978 New Yorker Profile of Johnny Carson

Johnny Carson's 1967 Playboy interview

Johnny Carson's 1979 Rolling Stone interview

2005-01-18T03:47:00.000-08:00

Oh Henry!

I saw this film, In the Realms of the Unreal, at Film Forum in New York last week. It's a good film about a fascinating artist.

The following is from the official website for the film:

In 1973, at a Catholic poor house in Chicago, an 81-year-old retired janitor quietly died. His name was Henry Darger. Just months earlier, he had moved from the rented room where he had lived for over 40 years. When his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, cleaned out the clutter room, they discovered paintings: hundreds of brilliant watercolors, some over 10 feet long. The images were disturbing and mysteriously beautiful: little girls frolicking under stormy skies, little girls fighting soldiers, little girls being rescued by fantastic winged creatures. In many images, the girls were drawn naked, with penises.

The landlords soon found the other half of Darger's life's work, perhaps the longest novel ever written: the more than 15,000 page, single-spaced typed In the Realms of the Unreal, an epic story of the virtuous Vivian girls and their religious war against the evil Glandelinian army. For most of his life, Henry Darger, a recluse whom others called "Crazy," had lived in this rich fantasy world. It was a world he had kept to himself.

Today, Henry Darger is considered to be one of America's foremost outsider artists: an untaught artist working in isolation from the commercial or public eye. IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL, an adventurous documentary feature, explores the fantastic vision and shadowy life of this enigmatic artist.

2004-12-16T19:28:00.000-08:00

Ryden High

Yesterday, I went to a show of Mark Ryden's paintings at the Frye Art Museum, in Seattle. It was breathtaking! So beautiful, so precise! So wonderfully strange! Wow! If you're anywhere near Seattle, go to this show. It's amazing and, believe it or not, it's free.

Mark Ryden, talking about his work:

In the same spirit as those earlier collectors filling their cabinets of curiosities, I feel compelled to collect quite a variety of things. I draw artistic inspiration from the treasures I find at the flea market. I like old toys, books, photographs, anatomical models, stuffed animals, skeletons, religious statues, and vintage paper ephemera. It is interesting how, from the endless sea of stuff out there, certain things jump out. They evoke a feeling of mystery in me and I am powerfully driven toward them. It is an obsession. I collect, arrange, and display them. Pieces from my collection end up synthesized or juxtaposed in my paintings.

This visual debris from contemporary pop culture contains the specific archetypes that formed my consciousness while living in this particular period in history. I often find archetypes in old children's books and toys, so these things make up a large part of my collection. I am attracted to things that evoke memories from childhood.

It is only in childhood that contemporary society truly allows for imagination. Children can see a world ensouled, where bunnies weep and bees have secrets, where "inanimate" objects are alive. Many people think that childhood's world of imagination is silly, unworthy of serious consideration, something to be outgrown. Modern thinking demands that an imaginative connection to nature needs to be overcome by "mature" ways of thinking about the world. Human beings used to connect to life through mystery and mythology. Now this kind of thinking is regarded as primitive or naive. Without it, we cut ourselves off from the life force, the world soul, and we are empty and starving.

I believe in letting imagination thrive in my art. I am not afraid of nostalgia or sentiment. I value taking the time to make a painting "beautiful." I want to breathe life into my paintings.

2004-12-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

Plum and McCrum
Robert McCrum discussed his new biography of P.G. Wodehouse on The Leonard Lopate Show today. To listen to the interview, click here.

2004-12-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

Herman's Hermit
Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) was on The Treatment yesterday.

2004-11-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

Humbird Humbird

The following piece, by Brian Doyle, is called "Joyas Voladores" and is from the Autumn 2004 issue of The American Scholar (editor Anne Fadiman's final issue). It's an excerpt from a book in progress, The Wet Engine, to be published next year.

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

2004-11-11T14:05:00.000-08:00

Chamber Made

2004-11-11T14:04:00.000-08:00

Parenting Tricks
From Defective Yeti:

Michelle: What's your kid up to these days?

Me: Crawling. Like, all over the freakin' place.

Queen: And he's losing his monkey toes.

Michelle: His what?

Queen: You know, if you touch the sole of a newborn baby's foot how his toes will kind of curl up around your finger? Like he's trying to hang onto a branch or something?

Michelle: Right, right.

Queen: His toes don't do that as much anymore.

Me: Also, we finally took him in and had his monkeytail amputated. His balance has been all screwed up ever since.

Michelle: You should totally tell him that when he gets older.

Me: Oh, I will. "Yeah, you were running and swinging all over the house when you were three months old. But then we had your tail cut off, and you had to relearn how to walk." I wonder if I could get an actual tail somewhere, put it in a jar of formaldehyde and keep it as "proof?"

Queen: He'll probably take it to school for Show and Tell ...

Me: Hah! Oh man, that will be great. I love being a parent.

Queen: Other fathers can't wait until their child is old enough to play sports or hold a conversation; you, you're just waiting until he's old enough to hornswoggle.

2004-11-04T19:11:00.000-08:00

Reflection

2004-10-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

"Choice" Words
This week, The New Yorker's entire "Talk of the Town" section is devoted to a Comment piece credited to "The Editors." The thing is titled "The Choice."

2004-10-25T13:15:00.000-07:00

An Office-er and a Gentleman
Ricky Gervais, the star, writer, and director of the BBC comedy The Office, was interviewed on this episode of Fresh Air.

2004-10-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

Play Boy

The following was written by Woody Allen and is from this article from yesterday's New York Times.

Over the years, the more I learned about comedy writing (not that there's much one can actually learn, but I suppose a little experience can sometimes help quell the panic) the more I appreciated George S. Kaufman. ...

... Groucho Marx, who was not impressed by much in this world -- he told me he found it hard to keep awake at dinner at T. S. Eliot's and held a kind of reserved view of Perelman, whom I believe to be the single funniest human of my lifetime -- was in genuine awe of Kaufman. I think that was because in addition to Kaufman's comic talent, he had such a thoroughly rigorous command of stagecraft. Kaufman could work at home or late in hotel rooms under pressure and do the hard labor, the tedious, glamourless structuring and rewriting and merciless cutting that is crucial to making comedy breathe. Hart has written about Kaufman's ability to edit and pare to the bone, to throw out jokes should they dare to impede the plot -- to kill his children. Kaufman felt that while a drama could survive with a bit of slack, a comedy had to be airtight. The story is told of a playwright suffering with his opus in Philadelphia who asked Kaufman how he could improve it. Without seeing the failing play, Kaufman replied, "Make it shorter."

======

Here's a humor piece by George S. Kaufman.

2004-10-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

Frantasy Island
Fran Lebowitz was on The Treatment Wednesday. She talked about her forthcoming book Progress, the work of John O'Hara, and many other things. You can listen to the interview here.

2004-10-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

A Wealth of Health
I have something on The Big Jewel this week. It's called "A Short Interview with Larry Sandwich, Health Nut."

2004-09-29T04:51:00.000-07:00

Site Gags
I have something up on McSweeney's today called "Combo Platter."

2004-09-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

Ren-dezvous

I saw Lawrence Weschler last night at the Elliott Bay bookstore. He had with him a prototype copy of Omnivore, the magazine he wants to start. He's trying to raise moola for it. I hope he gets the moola and starts it, because I looked at the prototype and wow! Gorgeous! Sumptuous! Delicious! Beautiful full-color on almost every page. Thick smooth sexy paper. And top-drawer design. I had about three orgasms browsing through the thing. And the contributors? Ian Frazier, Jamaica Kincaid, Oliver Sacks, Ricky Jay, Errol Morris, David Hockney, Lawrence Weschler, other people I didn't recognize but that are probably awesome because Weschler has great taste.

You can read Weschler's prospectus for Omnivore here.

You can buy the prototype issue here.

Here's a recent conversation with Lawrence Weschler.

2004-09-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

Quip Pro Quo

A DVD of the best episodes of You Bet Your Life was recently released. Here you can listen to a Morning Edition piece about the show.

Click here to listen to Groucho sing a song about window cleaning. He is accompanied by his good friend Harry Ruby.

Harry Ruby -- with his songwriting partner, Bert Kalmar -- wrote many classic songs, including "Three Little Words." Three Little Words is also the name of a movie about the duo in which Ruby is portrayed by Red Skelton and Kalmar is portrayed by Fred Astaire.

Kalmar and Ruby wrote many of the songs in the Marx brothers' movies, including Animal Crackers' "Hooray for Captain Spaulding." They also contributed to the scripts. In fact, they wrote the Marxes' funniest film, Duck Soup.

2004-08-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

Fry Guy

Click here to listen to a recent 43-minute Weekend Edition interview with the brilliant Stephen Fry. He talks about directing his first movie, Bright Young Things; the Hilton sisters; Jean Harlow; and much else.

Here you can listen to a Weekend Edition interview with Fry from 2002 in which Fry's novel Revenge (known in Britain as The Stars' Tennis Balls) is discussed.

2004-08-31T15:51:00.000-07:00

Cleese Tease
John Cleese has posted a humorous little video announcement on his website.

2004-08-31T15:19:00.000-07:00

Ban. on Books
I've never read anything by John Banville, but I was utterly captivated by him in this Bookworm interview. Banville has a beautiful voice and a deep and profound mind.

2004-08-28T06:58:00.000-07:00

March Madness

This is the cover of the March 1969 issue of Mad magazine. You can eyeball all the other Mad covers here. (Via Kingdom of Love.)

2004-08-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Babbling Brooks
Mel Brooks was recently on The Leonard Lopate Show. Listen to the interview here.

Listen to classic Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner routines on this episode of Comedy College.

2004-08-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Talking Beck
This excellent hourlong BBC Radio 2 documentary about Beck's life and work features extensive interviews with Beck and his collaborators.

2004-08-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

2004-08-20T07:09:00.000-07:00

Smooth Talk
The object of the British game show Just a Minute is simple to relate, yet extremely difficult to achieve: to speak on a given topic for 60 seconds without repetition, deviation, or hesitation.

Comedy genius Peter Cook managed to do it on a 1979 episode of the show. To listen to that episode, click here.

Just a Minute is still on the air. You can listen to the latest episode here.

2004-08-20T01:19:00.000-07:00

Future Reference

Newsday's review of The Future Dictionary of America is very favorable.

An excerpt:

"The Future Dictionary of America" enters the pantheon of satirical dictionaries like Flaubert's and Bierce's with a notable distinction: It is jam-packed with winningly offbeat suggestions for making the world a better place. Its jaundiced eye is interconnected to both a brain and a heart, not to mention a first aid kit, a hammer and a tiny vial of fingernail polish in a color called Burnt Icicle.

Published by Dave Eggers' press, McSweeney's Books, this new dictionary is meant to look like a dictionary from the middle of this century. It consists of more than 150 of America's best writers' defining words - pre-existing or newly fashioned - in an effort to "voice their displeasure with the current political leadership, and to collectively imagine a brighter future." No writer or McSweeney's staff member received remuneration for their work, and all proceeds will go to progressive causes, such as Moveon.org. (The book also includes a CD with songs by David Byrne, R.E.M. and others.)

In a world in which everyone has an opinion but no one has any advice, this book is manna. Its advice, coming as it does from disparate sources, ranges greatly, from the utilitarian to the slightly loopy. On the former front, Katha Pollitt offers the "Icelandic system ... a practice, supposedly based on child- rearing methods in medieval Iceland, of sending teenagers to live with other families in order to learn adult skills and behavior from grown-ups they have not yet learned to manipulate and despise." Jim Shepard proposes the advent of a "No 'There' There Kid": a sixth-grader, chosen from a national competition who monitors all White House press conferences and rings an electronic bell when questions have been left unanswered.

More off-kilter, if no less needed and well-imagined, are entries like Sarah Vowell's "garden for disappointed politicians," which, named after Alexander Hamilton's belief that a garden is a helpful refuge for a disappointed politician, would see the creation of a farmable plot "'outside the Beltway' - way outside - in Portland, Oregon."

I am proud to be among the many contributors to The Future Dictionary. Here are my definitions:

errorgance (er´ur guns), n. a feeling of smug superiority over those who do not share one's own erroneous or misguided convictions: The president's errorgance alienated most of the Western world.

non-America (non uh mer´i kuh), n. the world outside the United States. Today, thanks to improved geography education and the unprecedented ease and popularity of world travel, Americans know and love non-America nearly as much as they know and love their own country, but it was not so very long ago that most Americans were only vaguely aware that non-America even existed. In a 2009 study, only 13 percent of Americans could find non-America on a map, and, of those, 85 percent admitted it was "just a lucky guess." In a similar study conducted two years later, Americans were asked to name any country in non-America: 89 percent couldn't name one, 2 percent said "Canada Dry," and everyone else said either Narnia or the Moon.

science (sy´uns), n. systematic knowledge of the material world as obtained through rigorous observation and experimentation in accordance with the scientific method. Though responsible for the greatest technological innovations of modern times, it was inexplicably shunned by American policymakers early in the twenty-first century. This abandonment of science led inevitably to the Great Horribleness of 2010, which, in turn, set the stage for the Calamity of 2012. In the painful aftermath of these disasters, Americans realized the error of their ways and, ever since, have embraced science for what it is: a lens through which the blurry world can be seen much more clearly.

2004-08-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

Shadowlands
In this episode of Bookworm, art spiegelman talks with host Michael Silverblatt about his forthcoming book In the Shadow of No Towers. Read more about the content of the book here and here.

2004-08-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

Thomas the Prank Engine
SCTV's Dave Thomas was the guest on today's episode of The Treatment. The first season of SCTV has just been released on DVD.

2004-08-11T04:30:00.000-07:00

Tiptop Tip
The following is from the "McSweeney's Recommends" page:

Stephen Fry
Actor, director, comedian, novelist, screenwriter, aviator ... Talentwise, Stephen Fry is like a one-man Cirque du Soleil. Known both for his big brain, which is roughly the size of Saskatchewan, and for his kindness (also Saskatchewan-sized), Fry is a top-notch human being. Hugely famous in England, he is almost unknown here in the States, which is a shame, because it means that A Bit of Fry and Laurie—the hilarious sketch show he did with his pal Hugh Laurie—is not widely available here. Fortunately, Fry's memoir, Moab Is My Washpot, is available here. Read it. It is brilliantly funny, achingly sad, and wise.

2004-08-09T01:16:00.000-07:00

I Like "Ike"
Brilliant piece on McSweeney's today: "Ike Turner's Guide to Restoring America's Honor."

2004-08-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Wordy Allen
Here are seven short interviews with Woody Allen. These were first published in the September 30, 1971, issue of Rolling Stone.

2004-08-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

George on My Mind
The September issue of The Believer will contain an interview with Simpsons writer George Meyer. The issue will reproduce the entire first issue of Meyer's legendary humor magazine from the late '80s, Army Man. And, as if that weren't enough, the issue will also contain an interview with Army Man contributor Ian Frazier.

2004-08-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

The Adams Family
George Saunders has a very short, very good story in this week's New Yorker. It's called "Adams."

2004-08-05T11:16:00.000-07:00

A Defining Moment
Over at The Onion A.V. Club, Louis C.K. answers that age-old noodle-scratcher "What is funny?"

Go to louisck.com to eyeball several videos of Mr. C.K. being hilarious.

By the way, Mr. C.K. will be on Late Night with Conan O'Brien tonight.

2004-08-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

Triumph of the Will
Click here to listen to an interview with Will Ferrell on The Charlie Rose Show. The interview is from July 7, 2004.

2004-08-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

Nam de Plume
The great Don Steinberg has a hilarious quiz over at McSweeney's today. The quiz helps you answer that nagging question "Are You Another Vietnam?"

2004-07-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

Man's Best Fiend
I have a new List up on McSweeney's today: "Good Names for Vicious Dogs."

2004-07-08T02:50:00.000-07:00

Slate Knight with Conan O'Brien
Funnyman Demetri Martin recently wrote one of those weeklong Slate diaries. You can read it here.

An excerpt:

Right now my job is writer at Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I'm one of the sketch writers. That means I don't write any monologue jokes. I share an office with Kevin Dorff. He's a sketch writer, too. Our office is messy. I like it.

We don't tape shows on Mondays. So yesterday consisted of a series of writing intervals punctuated by meetings. That means sitting in chairs all day. A lot of jobs are just places people sit. Maybe that's why I like stand-up comedy. Because I can sit or stand or even crouch when I'm doing it. It's a job that has a lot of body-movement versatility. (Other examples include gymnast, stuntman, and prostitute.)

After our pitch meeting, we went to our desks to write "Celebrity Surveys" -- that's a segment Conan does from his desk. It consists of fake survey questions with fake answers from real celebrities. It will be on the show tonight. We returned to the head writer's office. His name is Mike. Each of us showed up with our celebrity survey jokes on paper. We put the papers on Mike's desk. He assembled the pile to read aloud. The ones that make us laugh he marks. If there are enough of those, then we are done with celebrity surveys. If there are not enough funny ones, we go back to our offices and write some more for half an hour or so. Mike read them aloud. We went back to our offices to write for half an hour or so. We returned, Mike read the new batch. We finished with Celebrity Surveys.

Then we had to write some "new characters." "New characters" is a segment on the show in which Conan introduces new characters to the audience. Some past new characters include Preparation H Raymond, the Coked-up Werewolf, and Pimpbot 5000. The process is strikingly similar to celebrity surveys: Go to your desk for half an hour, write a bunch, then print them out and head back into Mike's office. I did that.

Then dinner arrived, so we all headed into the conference room. Everybody had Chinese food. Except for me: I'm allergic to most of the ingredients (life-threatening allergies to peanut oil, poultry, and seafood), so I got a roast beef sandwich, yogurt, and pretzels. While I was eating, I made a mental note to avoid mixing pretzels and strawberry yogurt in the future.

Conan was there. He usually eats pretty healthy food. I think what he was eating was healthy. For him, at least. It would kill me.

After dinner, Mike read our new characters. I didn't have such a great batch. One of mine did OK -- a character named "Suzanne: Sexy Washing Machine," which would be a washing machine wearing a bikini. I'm not saying it's great, but I think it would make me laugh if I saw it. My favorite of the ones I wrote was "One Man Band on the Toilet." That would be a guy playing a few instruments while sitting on the toilet. It didn't get anything. It was a selfish pitch anyway.

After dinner, we watched the president's speech, because we might do a "clutch cargo" on Wednesday. That's when Conan talks to the television screen with a person's face on it and the lips move. The lips are Robert Smigel's. Robert was the first head writer at Conan. He also writes at Saturday Night Live. He makes cartoons and is "Triumph the Insult Comic Dog." He is funny and prolific.

I got out of the office around 9 p.m. That's early. Sometimes we stay as late as midnight. (We have to be at work at 11 a.m.) My mom was in town. She brought my air conditioner up from New Jersey. It was nice to see her. It was also nice to see my air conditioner. It was not nice to carry it. (See discussion of six-floor walk-up from yesterday.) Sometimes I feel like my life is just a series of breaks between carrying heavy things. And those breaks involve a lot of sitting. (See discussion of body-movement versatility above.)

2004-07-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

The Ring
One Ring Zero, a band that fancies unusual instruments, has released As Smart As We Are, an album of songs whose lyrics were written by writers. These writers include Dave Eggers, Jonathan Ames, Ben Greenman, A.M. Homes, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Darin Strauss, Paul Auster, Denis Johnson, and others.

Click here to listen to the two members of One Ring Zero, Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp, along with Ben Greenman and A.M. Homes talk about As Smart As We Are on The Leonard Lopate Show.

2004-06-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

Hungry Man

In August, Dave Eggers will publish a book of his short stories. The book is called How We Are Hungry.

2004-06-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

Tee-hee, Demetri

Last night, comedian Demetri Martin appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and was hilarious. I looked him up online and it turns out he's been a writer for Conan since 2003. (He also portrays the tiny stuntman on the show.) Here's a short bio of him from the Comedy Central website:

Demetri Martin began his career in comedy when he dropped out of law school. After graduating from Yale College, Demetri headed to NYU School of Law with a full scholarship. When he realized that law school was boring, Demetri started doing stand-up across the street at the Boston Comedy Club in Greenwich Village.

Since venturing into comedy, Demetri has appeared on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien", Comedy Central's "Premium Blend" and NBC's "Late Friday". He has contributed writing to The Daily Show and written for VH-1's "Don't Quote Me". In addition, he can be seen as an on-camera personality on Showtime's ShoNext channel. Most recently, Demetri was the winner of the 2003 Jury Award prize for Best One-Person Show at the Aspen Comedy Festival.

Click here to watch a Comedy Central clip of Demetri performing and discussing his standup.

Demetri has his own website, where you can read about his life and look at some of his drawings.

2004-06-09T19:38:00.000-07:00

Breathing Funny
Today, on The Leonard Lopate Show, Jay Mohr talked about his anxious two years (1993-95) as a featured player on Saturday Night Live. He has a new book called Gasping for Airtime: Two Years in the Trenches at "Saturday Night Live." Click here to listen to the interview.

2004-06-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

Smokin' 'n' Jokin'
David Sedaris was on The Leonard Lopate Show today. Click here to listen to the interview.

2004-06-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

Bierut Salute

Over at Design Observer, Michael Bierut, Steven Heller, and others are discussing Chris Ware and the design of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

Here's Bierut's original comment (posted on May 29):

The McSweeney's phenomenon is a force to be reckoned with in American graphic design. It began as – and still is – an online journal with an admirably understated visual presentation: while website designers worked themselves into grand mal seizures of hyperactivity in the late twentieth century, McSweeneys.net never abandoned its plain vanilla format. But it was when founder Dave Eggers moved into the world of conventional publishing with McSweeney's Quarterly Concern that the design world took notice. Simultaneously intricate and restrained, the dense-packed all-Garamond pages of the Quarterly refracted Victorian foppishness through a prism of ironic cool, and provoked Andrew Blauvelt to take to the pages of Eye to proclaim the arrival of a new movement: Complex Simplicity.

Eggers's brand of simplicity got ever more complex with successive issues: issue 4 was fourteen saddle-stitched books in a cardboard box; issue 7, nine perfect-bound books held in a case with a massive rubber band; issue 11, ersatz-elegant brown leatherette with gold foil stamping. The latest issue, Number 13, guest edited and designed by Chris Ware, has just been published. It goes far beyond anything McSweeney's has ever done. It is extraordinary.

Eggers is a self-taught designer who famously writes his best-selling books in Quark Xpress rather than Microsoft Word; the cover of McSweeney's No. 2 included the aphorism "If words are to be used as design elements then let designers write them." But thinking of him as a designer required quite a leap when Blauvelt did it. Now he's the perennial flavor of the month. He was featured in the last Cooper-Hewitt design biennial. At the AIGA Voice conference, he entertained the crowd by evaluating his pages in terms of the frequency of their paragraph breaks, and noted that the most recent IBM annual report had a more-than-suspicious resemblance to the design (and editorial tone) of the most recent McSweeney's Quarterly. Perhaps he began to sense that when corporate America starts appropriating you, it’s time for a change. Enter Chris Ware.

The theme of McSweeney's No. 13, not surprising to anyone who knows Ware's amazing work, is the comics. The 264-page hard cover book is bound with a giant, folded, comic-festooned dustjacket ("an enormous dust jacket that does much more than guard against dust," as it says on the website). It took me right back to the way the Sunday paper used to arrive on my childhood doorstep, and it conjured up that same sense of excitement. Inside is a feast of work: beautifully wrought pages by R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns and Richard McGuire, and of course Ware himself, to name a few. These are complemented by thoughtful essays from Michael Chabon, John Updike, Chip Kidd, and others. Finally, there are appreciations of cartoonists of the past, including Rodolphe Topffer, George Harriman, Milt Gross, and – perhaps most tellingly – Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts.

Ira Glass, the eloquent host of Public Radio International's This American Life, describing his childhood obsession with Peanuts, nails the essentially tragic tone of McSweeney's No. 13 in particular and the world of cartoons in general. He read Schulz's strip not for amusement ("I don't remember ever thinking they were funny") but for reassurance ("I thought of myself as a loser and a loner and Peanuts helped me take comfort in that"). Charles Schulz himself understood the world view he was setting forth. Glass quotes from a 1985 interview: "All the loves in the strip are unrequited. All the baseball games are lost, all the test scores are D-minuses, the Great Pumpkin never comes, and the football is always pulled away."

The artists that Ware brought together for McSweeney's No. 13 do not seem to lead enviable lives. They are, as Glass says, loners and losers, inept at human relationships, tormented by the popular kids, given to swearing, hostility, and compulsive masturbation: in short, like Charlie Brown, nerds. But drawing and storytelling is their way to connect with the world, and with us. Lynda Barry's painfully revelatory contribution, my favorite, describes the moral quandary faced by the cartoonist (and perhaps by the designer as well): "Is this good? Does this suck? I'm not sure when these two questions became the only two questions I had about my work, or when making pictures and stories turned into something I called 'my work' – I just know I'd stopped enjoying it and instead began to dread it."

In the four short pages that follow, Barry seems to overcome her dread to find a place of solace. So do the other artists in the book, and, somehow, so do we. In a hostile, uncaring world filled with senseless wrongs, McSweeney's No. 13 provides a moment of exquisite, gorgeous revenge.

2004-06-02T01:29:00.000-07:00

Piece Talks
The following interview with Ian Frazier originally appeared in the May 1996 issue of Interview magazine.

What Is Ian Frazier?: Interview with Fiction Writer Ian Frazier

Nobody looks at life the same way after reading a story by Ian Frazier.

Ian Frazier's new book of stories, Coyote v. Acme (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a collection of ten years' worth of humorous pieces, mostly written for The New Yorker. Frazier is the author of the sorrowful yet moving memoir Family, the drivin' and cryin' history-cum-travelogue Great Plains, and a previous collection of humor, Dating Your Mom, just reissued in paperback by Farrar, Straus. Known to friends as Sandy, he lives in Montana with his wife, writer Jacqueline Carey, and their two children, Cora and Thomas. Interviewer John Howell, editor and publisher of Hemp Times, a new lifestyle magazine, is a longtime Frazier fan who contributed seminal Stonewall Jackson stories to the "Civil War" chapter of Family.

JOHN HOWELL: I was reading "Stalin's Chuckle," the last story in your new book, where Comrade Stalin tells his secretary, "A comic is one who says things funny, while a comedian is one who says funny things." I wonder which category you put yourself in.

IAN FRAZIER: Mmmm . . . probably neither. I mean, I don't even know if that's really true.

JH: It sounds so authoritative, though.

IF: It sounds authoritative, but that's the point of what I try to do - write stuff that sounds authoritative. If you read it more slowly, you realize it means absolutely nothing. I don't know that that means nothing, but I think about it, and then my mind breaks down thinking about it.

JH: There's a lot of silly officialese in your stories: letters from banks, questionnaires, tax notices.

IF: You get all this stuff in the mail that frightens you. You read the whole thing, and then at the bottom, it says THIS IS NOT A BILL. [laughs] Why did you read the damn thing? What's the interchange between you and these people? It's just money, right? So if this is not a bill, what are they bugging you with it for? They say things like, "Your money has to work for you" [in his story "From the Bank With Your Money on Its Mind"]. I wrote, "Money that just sits around actually loses value, and must be cared for the way you would care for any helpless thing." You could read that in a bank statement and not notice. A lot of writing - and so much of what you read as part of your life - is just boilerplate that somebody wrote.

JH: A story like "Line 46A," which is a "Dear Taxpayer" notice, is why people stand up at political rallies now and cheer anybody who threatens to do away with anybody who has anything to do with the whole tax system.

IF: The movie ad that I based that piece on read THE GOVERNMENT GAVE HER A CHOICE: DEATH, OR LIFE AS AN ASSASSIN. [laughs] That slogan was on a billboard I saw. You just see these things. Today I saw - you used to be an editor at Elle, right?

JH: Yeah.

IF: I saw this Elle cover line: THE SUNBLOCK BIBLE. [laughs] What is that? I can understand The Shooter's Bible, we grew up with that. And I can understand the PC Bible, but the "Sunblock Bible"? That's really getting far from the idea of a bible.

JH: We can look for Elle's "Shampoo Missal: the Common Book of Conditioner." [laughs]

IF: Mike Royko wrote about how the phrase Internet surfing is the most exciting thing about that activity. You're sitting looking at a screen! It has nothing to do with surfing. The stock market came up one-hundred points today, and they said [in deep, ominous voice], "Stock market bungee jumps." The stock market did not bungee jump. It's what writers do now; they lay a lot of language on something.

JH: Speaking of laying on the language, a couple of your stories adopt a literary attitude toward pop-culture phenomena and get a lot of laughs out of the contrast. For example, "Boswell's Life of Don Johnson." Are you a fan of Don Johnson's?

IF: Actually, the reason I did that piece was because when my previous humor book came out ten years ago [Dating Your Mom], people would say, "What are you working on now?" I would say, "Boswell's Life of Don Johnson." Mel Brooks did "Springtime for Hitler" in that movie The Producers, because when people asked, "What are you working on?" he would say, "A musical called 'Springtime for Hitler.'" So then he made The Producers, and after he made it, people would ask, "What are you working on now?" He would say, "A movie called The Green Awning," [laughs] . . . which he never did make.

JH: Your title story, "Coyote v. Acme," has the max of two of the qualities we've been talking about, the absurd officialese and highfalutin language applied to an offbeat phenomenon, i.e., Wile E. Coyote's legal brief against the Acme Company. Wile E. Coyote stands for an American kind of surrealism, don't you think? The parallels in your stories are those Insane eruptions of wacky violence that seem to come out of nowhere - like the story about the satanic college president whose commencement address is constantly being interrupted by the devil, or the one where the suburbanites are lounging in the backyard when World War II-era Germans attack. That's like a traditional New Yorker short story interrupted by history.

IF: You mean those stories that go, "I am sitting at my mother's . . ." That kind of present-tense story? I hate the first-person present. God, that's why I love history. If you can't write it in the past tense, then don't write it. Now, everybody writes in the present. The worst are stories that begin with a phone call. "The phone rings. I pick it up. 'Hello, Madonna,' I say. 'Am I waking you?' Madonna asks." [laughs]

JH: The last couple of pieces in the book, "Your Face or Mine" and "Making 'Movies' in New York" sound to me more like your own voice as I know It, as opposed to a sort of officialese or the Bob Hope-like ventriloquism of "Thanks for the Memory."

IF: About "Your Face or Mine" - I'd hoped that if I wrote a piece in which the phrase "in your face" appeared, it would disappear from the language. I thought if I made fun of it forcefully enough, people would be disciplined into taking it the hell out of there.

JH: "Making Movies" is one of those quintessential New York experiences. You come around the corner to your neighborhood deli, and you can't get in because it's been commandeered by a film crew for shooting.

IF: I got more angry mail about that piece than anything I've written in years. In that story I wrote, tongue in cheek, "And the movies never appear." And then I wrote, "Did anybody ever see a movie called Hudson Hawk?" I knew that Hudson Hawk had been made, but I was just pretending that no one had ever made it. I got a letter that said, "What is Ian Frazier? Out of it? Doesn't he know that Hudson Hawk, while not one of Bruce Willis's finest efforts, blab, blab, blab." They really belabor the hell out of it. You would be amazed at the things people take seriously.

2004-06-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Helter Swelter
The following article was written by Ian Frazier. It was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of Mother Jones. (I found it here.)

As the World Burns: When It Comes to Global Warming, the President Is a Man with a Plan -- about Planning to Plan

President Bush has called for a decade of research before anything beyond voluntary measures is used to stem tailpipe and smokestack emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are contributing to global warming. "When you're speeding down the road in your car, if you've got to turn around and go the other direction, the first thing is to slow down, then stop, then turn," said David K. Garman, the assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

--THE NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 3, 2002

PRESIDENT BUSH HAS CALLED FOR A DECADE of additional research on global warming, but needs more time to decide which decade it will be, assistants to the president announced today. So far, 2060-2070 "looks nice," said one insider, though other decades have not been ruled out. "We don't want to pick just any old decade," the source continued, perspiration beading on his forehead. "Finding just the right decade for this type of in-depth climate research might take as long as 10 years."

Privately the White House expressed regret that the decade from 1790 to 1800 is past, and thus not able to be a part of their plans. In other respects, it would be an ideal decade for the purposes of research into climate change. Most of the Founding Fathers were still alive then, and with the Revolutionary War over and much of the work on the U.S. Constitution completed, they had free time. The thought of all that talent being brought to bear on the problem is indeed exciting, as the White House likes to remind critics. President Bush himself is known to have a special fondness for many of the years between 1790 and 1800, particularly 1797, and he has asked his tech staff if anything can be done to get us there. Advances in time travel, or at least in movies about time travel, offer some possibilities, but for now those solutions aren't feasible for political reasons. Inquiries on this subject went unanswered by the White House press office, which had closed early in the February heat.

Other members of the Bush administration who have the president's ear on energy matters refused to give out any information, including where the ear is kept when not in use. They have argued, so far successfully, that that is nobody's business, not even their own. In several recent off-the-record interviews they told the media that an excellent job is being done on national energy policy, now go away. Someone who sometimes delivers their take-out barbecue says he's seen them working really hard, but adds, "Who can formulate policy, or even think, when it's s'dang hot like it's been?" According to an individual who knows this delivery person, he believes the whole process of deciding when we might want to start thinking about global warming would function better if we didn't rush around so, but just laid out by the pool and let the ideas come.

For the moment, the administration seems to agree. Simply letting yourself relax and drill for a while in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a problem-solving technique which, though counterintuitive, may produce surprising results. Similarly, when you ease clean air and water standards, often your whole mind and body eases along with them, allowing access to undreamed-of inner resources of decision making. Loosing some of the bonds of the Endangered Species Act, saying "yes" to the deeper self that wants to log, letting go of rigid, controlling attitudes toward federal lands--all these, creativity consultants teach, help to free the executive-branch imagination. Of course, mastering mental powers in this way is not done overnight. When it is complete, however, White House staffers promise that the issue of possible global warming will be fully gotten to the bottom of at last.

One proponent of such innovative thinking is David K. Garman, the assistant energy secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable-energy energy, with the Department of Energy. Using the new idea-generating method, sometimes called the Halliburton Method, Mr. Garman produced a metaphor, and he held an informal press briefing to share it with reporters. "Okay, say you've got a car," Mr. Garman began, "or no, not just a car--say you've got a really big car. Are you with me? Okay, you've got a great big car. You decide to go for a drive. First thing, you go to the convenience store and fill that car up--top your tank right off. Maybe you even bring along a few extra tanks, the ones for the dirt bike and the lawn mower and the chain saw, fill them up, too, because you never know. Then you buy a few snacks, and you're ready. You're heading right straight down that highway--can you all please excuse me for a moment while I change my shirt?"

A complete transcript of Mr. Garman's metaphor was made available after the briefing. Interpreters of figurative language have since examined the metaphor, and they now believe they know what it means. The car, they say, is America, and the driver, responsible businesspeople involved in its governance and energy extraction. The "crybabies in the backseat" are the majority of everybody else in the world. The driver firmly resists their pleas to turn around or even stop for a minute at a rest room (the Kyoto Protocol) until he is good and ready and feels it is in the best interest of the entire car. The "tantrums and whinings" that the driver ignores represent low approval ratings on this one minor isolated topic, and the happy arrival at the driver's destination equals prosperity and peace everywhere.

That this was in fact Mr. Garman's meaning White House sources would neither confirm nor deny. The assistant secretary himself, having left town until the weather breaks, could not be reached. EPA officials running out the door to beat the traffic would say only that whatever Mr. Garman or his friends wanted was fine with them. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer limited his response to blowing through his lips, whinnying, and repeatedly stomping his front foot on the floor as part of a new administration effort to communicate better with the American people by means of friendly sounds. Pressed further, however, Mr. Fleischer said it would be wrong for him to comment beyond the noises he'd just made. Some Beltway observers believe that the administration is hoping the recent news stories of weird savannah wildlife turning up in the suburban Northeast will distract national attention from complicated, wonkish subjects like climate change.

Clearly, it is time for the discussion to move on. "Junk science," as administration sources label much of the data on global warming, has already led many astray. Most laypeople do not understand that higher temperature numbers, in themselves, are not strictly scientific, because they don't use test tubes, Bunsen burners, white smocks, and other equipment familiar from high school science labs. On the contrary, in the real world, hotter weather may be experienced very differently depending on a person's metabolism and daytime job. It is stifling, as we know, in any office when the air conditioning breaks down. But to employees in a cool and pleasant work space, the same external temperature may appear completely comfortable. So-called climate experts overlook this disparity when they talk about glaciers melting, coral reefs dying, Venice going underwater, etc. Such evidence, while interesting, is not practical science.

One of these days the decade specifically set aside to look into allegations of climate change will arrive. Most of us will not be around then, so dealing with the situation, if there is one, will be up to someone else. If the Bush team has played its cards right, the people alive then either will have gotten to like year-round T-shirt weather, or else the climate will not have changed that much and there was nothing to worry about after all. Or maybe (as is more probable) they still won't know for sure what's going on, but with technology developed in the meantime will be able to air-condition a much wider section of the planet. And in the remote chance that it really does become a lot hotter, and certain unforeseeable consequences are the result, perhaps they will do as those long before them, and resolve not to think about the problem just now.

2004-05-31T21:15:00.000-07:00

Under Ware

McSweeney's Issue 13 was guest-edited by Chris Ware, creator of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (from which the above image is taken). Ware also designed Issue 13, and the result is stunningly beautiful.

The guests on this episode of The Connection are three contributors to Issue 13: Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, and Ben Katchor. This show was originally broadcast on September 28, 2000.

Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes were interviewed together again on the November 30, 2000, episode of Bookworm.

On the February 8, 2001, episode of Bookworm, Chris Ware was the only guest.

Here's a CNN article, from October 3, 2000, about Ware and Jimmy Corrigan.

An excerpt:

The compact imagery, the compacted plot and subplots, make "Jimmy Corrigan" more akin to a novel by Faulkner or Dickens than to "The Adventures of Spiderman." The book is not a quick read. Skim a page and you'll miss a tiny delight -- a Thumbelina landscape; a postage-stamp still-life; an entire treatise, in Lilliputian letters, on vinyl siding as a metaphor for life.

It took Ware seven years to do the book's scenes and sequences -- most of which initially appeared in his Jimmy Corrigan comic strips and comic books, published in Ware's "Acme Novelty Library" and sold in comic book and specialty stores. It not only takes time to draw such meticulous detail, but to research it: Ware says he can spend hours researching an image for a single frame or panel.

He collects and uses real objects as models; he draws from history books and from photographs. To get just the right look for the segment in the book where Jimmy goes to a small town in Michigan to meet his father, Ware went to a small Wisconsin town and took snapshots of the diner, the burger place, the gas station.

He worked from old photographs of 1890s Chicago for the stunning architectural drawings that illustrate the novel-within-a novel about Jimmy's grandfather. "Turn of the century -- I prefer things from that era," said Ware. "The style then seemed to have more respect for the viewer. What was presented was something handmade, something crafted with care and skill."

2004-05-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

Loona Rover
Louis C.K. is driving his dog across the country again, but he's not going to stay in any hotels this time -- instead, he and his dog, Loona, will be camping. He's blogging and posting photos for each day of this latest trip here.

2004-05-23T16:58:00.000-07:00

Dick, Jokes
Here's an interview with Dick Cavett, from Shecky magazine, in which he talks about comedy.

An excerpt:

Shecky: Since you are primarily known for your interviewing prowess, do you think most people are surprised to learn that you were a standup comic?

Cavett: They shouldn't be surprised if they've done their homework and read "Cavett" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich $8.95 1974) I'm not sure how to take the fact that there are so many copies of it on Bibliofind,etc. I assume people want to give others the chance to laugh. I recall some valuable rapping in there about comedy writing. Not to mention the laughter and tears saga of becoming a club comic. (And watching Woody become one.)

Shecky: When and where did you make your standup comedy debut?

Cavett: I debuted (funny looking word) at the Bitter End and tell in the book the gory details of how my first night was a bitter beginning. Not even triumphant later appearances there and elsewhere can erase the memory.

Shecky: How do you think your standup material would work in today's comedy climate? Have you been in a comedy club in the "modern era" (Post Comedy Boom, 1981 or thereabouts)?

Cavett: I recently found a notebook I thought was lost and there was my old act, not written out but with abbreviations ("Chinese-German food," "Wedding gifts," etc.) and in one margin I had noted: "Woody said, 'Great joke, Cavett' " It reminded me of the sweat and labor of getting a second show, something I'd not foreseen. I used to stretch my Richard Loo impression nearly fifteen minutes to have something new for the bastards who stayed to see me twice. What struck me was that virtually all of it would work today. I'm trying manfully not to say, "Funny is funny," but I'm afraid it's true. I might update the act some by uttering "motherfucker" every few minutes. Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it's painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it's extremely painful.

Shecky: When you first began doing standup, you said you could write in someone else's voice, but it was difficult to write in your own. Once you learned how to write in your own voice, was it then difficult to write for someone else?

Cavett: Very astute question. I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy. And what a rude shock it was to first sit and try to write for myself. Who am I? What am I? Those were the questions. Of course now with Scientology, all that is easy.

Shecky: Do you think it's easy for someone to write for Dick Cavett?

Cavett: I think I'd be pretty easy to write for. Anyone you've seen and heard should be writeable(sp?) for. The mistake people have made in writing for me has been to make the false assumption that I don't need hard jokes, just 'observations'. My Chinese-German restaurant joke was my most stolen joke. "Chinese-German food is wonderful. The only problem is, an hour later you're hungry for power." That's a solid joke and I needed 200 like it. That's not to say that I can't also get a laugh by something that, out of context isn't a joke--like "...and there I stood." What's ahead of that can make it a knock-out 'joke.'

Shecky: Is there any contemporary comedian that you think you would want to write for?

Cavett: Barry Humphries. His "Dame Edna," soon on tour, may be the funniest evening of my life in the theatre. I went three times and got to know Humphries. There is not a particle of female or resemblance to Dame Edna in him and thank God my inborn aversion to most drag and all camp didn't override a director friend's insistence that I go. Every student of comedy should see Dame Edna at least twice. And have your paper on my desk by Friday.

Shecky: What surprised you most about doing standup comedy?

To read the rest of the interview, click here.

2004-05-23T14:23:00.003-07:00

The Booby Prez
The following is from the London News Review.

Bush Bike Tumble: why George Jr is the unfunniest clown in town
May 23, 2004

President Bush has hurt his chin. Gave it a good old scrape on a dirt track after hitting a bump and flying face-first off his mountain bike. It must have been quite a sight – not something that his secret service bodyguards and private physician, who were pedaling along with him, will forget in a hurry. The President sprawling like a toddler, with scuffed knees and a chinful of gravel.

According to White House spokesman Trent Duffy: "He had minor abrasions and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees. Dr Tubb [his physician] cleaned his scratches and said he was fine." Duffy blamed the weather for the spill: "It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose.”

Whatever the cause of the fall, the result is going to be a load of more jokes about goonish Mr Bush and how he’s always toppling over (remember the pretzel incident? And the Segway tumble?)

And the problem with these jokes is that, no matter how barbed they are, they make us chuckle and think "what an idiot!" - and that is not the appropriate reaction to President Bush. There is something oddly indulgent about this laughter, and President Bush is not someone who should be cheerfully indulged.

Remember how he gooned around in that presentation he made for journalists in Washington? Made a joke out of the Coalition's failure to find any WMDs... here's how the Guardian reported it:

A slide showed Mr Bush in the Oval office, leaning to look under a piece of furniture. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere," he told the audience, drawing applause.

Another slide showed him peering into another part of the office, "Nope, no weapons over there," he said, laughing. "Maybe under here," he said, as a third slide was shown.

Quite amazing. And again, not funny in the slightest.

President Bush is no laughing matter. Gone is the time when we can chuckle about what a klutz he is. The man stole an election by dispossessing black voters in Florida. Nothing funny about that. He is carving up the environment to suit his big-business buddies. And he is ultimately responsible for the slaughter, the ongoing slaughter, of thousands of Iraqis. Not to mention the hundreds of coalition troops who have paid the ultimate price for American pride and profits.

Oh, and Afghanistan. That wasn't funny either.

2004-05-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

D'Or Prize
The following is an excerpt from this New York Times article, which was published yesterday.

'Fahrenheit 9/11' Wins Top Prize at Cannes
By A. O. SCOTT

CANNES, France, May 22 - At the awards ceremony that wrapped up the 57th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night, the jury gave "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's stinging critique of the Bush administration's foreign policies, the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize and one of the most coveted honors in international cinema.

The announcement, made by jury president Quentin Tarantino, met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where Mr. Moore's film had received what many thought was the longest standing ovation ever at Cannes when it was screened here last Monday. "What have you done?" Mr. Moore asked Mr. Tarantino as he accepted the prize, looking both overwhelmed and amused. "You just did this to mess with me, didn't you?"

It was a night of many surprises: a 14-year-old boy won the award for best actor; the first Thai film ever placed in competition shared a jury prize with an American actress; and all three French films in competition were given awards.

But Mr. Moore's victory outdid all of them. For one thing, Cannes is notoriously indifferent to documentaries. "Fahrenheit 9/11" was one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.

The meaning of Mr. Moore's Palme, however, extends far beyond the cozy, glamorous world of Cannes. "Last time I was on an awards stage in Hollywood, all hell broke loose," Mr. Moore said in his acceptance speech, referring to his antiwar remarks at the Oscars last year. His new film, which does not yet have an American distributor, has already begun to stir passions in the United States, as the election approaches and the debate over the conduct of the war in Iraq grows more intense.

With his characteristic blend of humor and outrage - and with greater filmmaking discipline and depth of feeling than he has shown in his previous work - Mr. Moore attacks Mr. Bush's response to Sept. 11, his decision to invade Iraq, and nearly everything else the president has done.

"I did not set out to make a political film," Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. "I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."

He also said that Mr. Tarantino had assured him that the political message of "Fahrenheit 9/11" did not influence the jury's decision. "On this jury we have different politics," he quoted Mr. Tarantino as saying. It is also a film financed by Miramax, which distributes Mr. Tarantino's movies.

Mr. Moore noted that four of the nine jurors were American: Mr. Tarantino, Kathleen Turner, the director Jerry Schatzberg, and the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat. "I fully expect the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media to portray this as an award from the French," Mr. Moore said. Only one juror, the actress Emanuelle Béart, is a French citizen.

"If you want to add Tilda," he said referring to the British actress Tilda Swinton, "then you could say that more than half came from the coalition of the willing." (The rest of the panel was made up of Benoit Poelvoode, a Belgian actor; Peter von Bagh, a Finnish critic; and the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark.)

2004-05-23T00:40:00.000-07:00

Johnny English
The following is an excerpt from this New York Times interview with John Cleese, which was published on May 16. (Via Return of the Reluctant.)

[JENNIFER] SENIOR: Now that "Fawlty Towers" is back in our living rooms on BBC America, I'm curious: what do you think of that network's big hit, "The Office"?

[JOHN] CLEESE: I think it's very, very good.

SENIOR: Do you think an American adaptation could be successful?

CLEESE: I doubt it. I've seen an enormous number of English shows adapted for America. They've three times tried to adapt "Fawlty Towers," and each time it was very poor. They always decided they needed to change it. The second time, they wrote the character of Basil Fawlty out of the series.

SENIOR: You're joking.

CLEESE: They got rid of Basil and gave Mrs. Fawlty all of Basil and Sybil's best lines. And that is an idea so excruciatingly bad it's absolutely astonishing anyone would have spent good money on it.

SENIOR: What is it like for you generally in Hollywood? You've been there for a while now. Have they figured out what to do with you yet?

CLEESE: I'll tell you exactly what the problem is: as I got older, I realized that I didn't want to be in the position where I put aside three years of my life for a single project. And I didn't want to do something on American television, because if it was successful, they would want 100 episodes. So I decided to be a hired gun for a bit. But then you're dependent upon people finding you a role. In the last 12 months, I think I've done half a day on a feature film.

SENIOR: That's it?

CLEESE: That was it. It's not that there haven't been other scripts sent to me. But apart from one thing, there hasn't been anything that I thought was good. Whereas I've been lucky enough to work with the "Will and Grace" people. It is a deeply disreputable show. It is morally repugnant to all right-thinking citizens, but everybody thinks it's hilarious.

SENIOR: Is it also harder to age gracefully in comedy?

CLEESE: Oh, I don't think so. I think if people know who you are . . . like if Michael Caine walks on screen, everybody knows it's Michael Caine, and they don't realize that he's 130 or whatever. Because it's Michael Caine, and we've loved Michael Caine for as long as we can remember, so we just see Michael Caine. We don't think, "Who is that extraordinarily ancient man?"

SENIOR: Among your old Monty Python cohort, Terry Gilliam has had the most success navigating the shoals of Hollywood. Is it because he's American?

CLEESE: Oh, I don't think so. You just have to want to continue to do it. I think being a film director is about as awful a job as you can have.

SENIOR: Really? But they have so much control.

CLEESE: Well, exactly. You want to be responsible for every single decision that's made over a period of two and a half years. Now, there are some people who are sufficiently megalomaniacal to want that kind of responsibility. But most of us would be very happy to say, "Not today, thank you."

SENIOR: Are you saying that Terry Gilliam is a megalomaniac?

CLEESE: I'm saying all film directors are, without exception.

SENIOR: What projects are you up to now?

CLEESE: It'll make you laugh, but I'm really, really getting interested in a Web site.

SENIOR: Really?

CLEESE: I get lots and lots of funny ideas. And I think to myself: what am I going to do? I don't have a show. So it seems to me the best thing I can do is to buy a little camera, write funny things, and then perform them very, very simply in front of this camera, and put it on the Web site the next day. Apparently, there are people who will pay 50 cents a week to download bits of funny material.

SENIOR: What will it be called?

CLEESE: Well, it can't be John Cleese because some pest has already taken that. So let me just ask my dear assistant. [Speaks to someone in the room.] Oh. Thejohncleese.com.

SENIOR: You've already got it up and running?

CLEESE: Yes. I've got a little slew of work I'm getting through at the moment, but once that's out of the way, I'm going to sit down and start creating material. I love the idea of running a kind of — what would you call it? — a sort of nanochannel.

SENIOR: Would you also want to include a blog?

CLEESE: Yes. There are all sorts of things I'd put in. I've been thinking of a funny greetings card. I can never find very good funny greetings cards anymore.

SENIOR: Such as?

CLEESE: I'm sorry I ate your gerbil.

SENIOR: Right.

CLEESE: I'm extremely sorry I murdered your aunt. I really shouldn't have done it.

SENIOR: Would you collaborate with others on this project?

CLEESE: Oh yes. I mean, I did think it would be rather funny to do a film about the War of Independence and call it "1776 1/2" and shoot it all at the ranch with three people in each army.

SENIOR: Who would play General Washington?

CLEESE: My teeth are sufficiently bad. I think Washington would be a doddle to play.

SENIOR: A what?

CLEESE: Doddle. It means something extremely easy to do. As in "The Life of Brian," when the old man says, "Crucifixion's a doddle." It's one of my favorite lines in all the Python films.

2004-05-19T20:34:00.000-07:00

Breaking News
Click here to watch some clips from the upcoming Will Ferrell film Anchorman.

2004-05-18T18:21:00.000-07:00

King of Comedy
Click here to listen to an interview with Alan King, who died on May 9. This interview was originally broadcast on New York & Company with Leonard Lopate on June 11, 1996. (From here.)

2004-05-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

Circus Fliers
Today's episode of Fresh Air featured archival interviews with four members of Monty Python, namely, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Eric Idle.

2004-05-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

Rearview Mirrors
The following was written by Dave Eggers and is from his Spin magazine review of Kings of Leon.

A week before this U.K. trip, I had one of those mind-crushing conversations with a friend who thought -- who always thinks -- everything is less good now than it once was. My friend, and people like him, need to be beaten with clubs, subdued, and then caged and poked with broom handles. I don't even know why I'm bothering to give this bastard, who never shaves his neck, the benefit of my brilliant argumentative skills. His and his ilk's pessimism is never a reflection on the actual state of the world or of any art form, but more often a mirror of their own decaying bodies and brains. They look back fondly on some time when they weren't secreting so many gases and liquids, when they didn't scare small children, when they could dance in public without looking epileptic. But are they actually paying attention now, to the changing world? Are they open to it; are they actually trying to enjoy new things but somehow failing? No, no, no. They close their ears and eyes, and they bitch about better days. There is legislation making its way through the House of Representatives that would require the removal, via carnivorous birds, of these people's tongues, and I support this legislation wholeheartedly.

2004-05-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

Hamburger: Helper
The following letter was published in the "Mail" section of the May 17, 2004, issue of The New Yorker.

I was married to Philip Hamburger for twenty-three years, after which, as the late writer William Maxwell predicted at the time of our divorce, Phil became my best friend, as did his wonderful wife, Anna (Postscript, May 3rd). Phil's death, on April 23rd, so soon after Anna's, left a void that, at eighty-seven, I can't fill. Phil and I met in 1939 in the library of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he had been a student the previous year, and which I was attending at the time. We began a conversation that lasted sixty-five years.

In addition to two delightful and loving sons, Jay and Richard, we shared an abiding belief in the greatness of the system of government in the United States. We both believed that the balance of power among the executive, the Congress, and the judiciary was the sacred foundation that made our democracy work. It was a clumsy system, sometimes out of joint, but it always seemed to right itself. After the Bush Administration began its disastrous preëmption policy, our conversations centered on the steady erosion of democracy in the United States. Each day brought new grief: the polarizing politics at the Supreme Court, the heartless legislation of the Republicans in Congress, and, above all, the misuse of the executive functions of the Presidency -- the destruction of individual rights; tax shields for the wealthy and a massive deficit that is out of control; secret agendas, distortions of truth, and outright lies; the smashing of international treaties and the contempt for longtime allies; and now a disastrous war in Iraq, with heartbreaking loss of life for all sides.

Anna's admirable way of expressing her indignation was to write a personal letter, almost every day when she felt pressed, to the President of the United States. Philip's way was to write with strength and beauty about the great diversity and marvellous qualities inherent in this country, and in its people. He cherished the right, as he often said, "to vote the bastards out." Beyond all his charm and wit -- he was the funniest person I ever knew -- Phil had an awesome regard for the grand nature of the democratic process that defines America. This was his religion.

Edith Iglauer
Garden Bay, B.C.

2004-05-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

Cross Roads
The current issue of ReadyMade features a short interview with David Cross. It's part of their series called "How Did You Get Your F*&% Awesome Job?"

Here's the interview:

ReadyMade: Hi David. How did you get your f*&% awesome job?

David Cross: I started out in Atlanta, but I wasn't really working regularly until I moved to Boston in 1983. I went to Emerson College, where I was in a sketch group. I dropped out of school almost immediately, but kept performing with them until it got to the point that I couldn't pretend to be part of Emerson anymore and started doing stand-up.

RM: So, did you just saunter in and say, "Hey, I'm funny. Put me on stage"?

DC: I got very lucky. I was coming of age in a place where there was a glut of clubs that needed to fill spots. But it was basically just doing open mics and making friends and connections, until one day you get thirty bucks to drive an hour into western Massachusetts and do some cowboy bar for 15 minutes. Eventually I made a little name for myself.

RM: How did you start working in Hollywood?

DC: When I was in the sketch group in Boston I became friends with Janeane Garofalo, who performed with us occasionally. She went out to L.A., and within a year or so she was on the Ben Stiller Show. Sometime around 1992, I got a call from her that they needed an emergency midseason writer. Initially, I wanted to stay in Boston and do my own thing. But then I took a look around at the New England winter, in my sweats with the oven door open, and I was like, "Fuck this." The next day I flew out there, dumped my shit at a friend's place, and started writing.

RM: How did Mr. Show happen?

DC: I met Bob at the Stiller Show. Alternative comedy was starting to hit, and we started doing shows together. We wrote some material and that became Mr. Show. We never pitched it; we just asked people to come down and see it.

RM: Do up-and-coming comics ever come to you for advice?

DC: Occasionally I run into somebody at a party or a show or something and they'll ask. The advice I end up giving, "Go out and do it, find your voice," is so obvious I always feel kinda lame saying it.

RM: Give us a little taste of your new CD?

DC: Well, there's my 10-minute bit about why dogs sniff each other's asses, but I do it in funny voices, like as if the cast of Will and Grace sniffed each other's asses. I can't really go into it, because I don't have the props for it over the phone. But that's really the bulk of it, getting down to the nitty and the gritty of it.

RM: If you could have any job would it be this one?

DC: Yeah, it's all I know how to do really, and mostly I enjoy it. Sometimes it's shitty.

RM: When is it shitty?

DC: Well, I was just named the 19th most loathsome New Yorker by the Press. Sometimes it's tough. There's always going to be somebody's expectations you didn't meet. But I have to be open to criticism. I dish it out, so I should be able to take it. And anyway, sometimes they're right.

2004-05-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

Allen & Company

2004-05-11T21:52:00.000-07:00

Laughing Academy
Here's an article about Harvard's impact on the comedy-writing business.

An excerpt:

In the comedy writing world, being a Lampoon (or even just a Harvard) alum at least guarantees some recognition. But being funny is an obvious prerequisite. "No one would hire a bad writer from Harvard over a talented one from somewhere else," says Michael Reiss '81, formerly executive producer of "The Simpsons." Other alums dispute the notion of a direct "pipeline" to Hollywood. "The big myth about the Lampoon is that you'll automatically get a job," says Malis, although his credibility is suspect.

talent vs. opportunity
Lampoon connections, however, do ensure that scripts get read, one of the biggest obstacles to making it big in the entertainment biz. "Talent is one thing, but opportunity is another," says Mark O'Donnell '76. While writing for SNL, a job that he landed without the help of the Lampoon, O'Donnell saw countless unsolicited scripts come in the mail, an indication of the tough market that exists for aspiring comedy writers. "There were piles and piles of them in this one room," he says. "It looked like a Staten Island junk yard." Not always on the receiving end, O'Donnell once found himself at a Christmas party chatting with the editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. "I love your humor; you should send it to us," he said. "I already have," O'Donnell replied. Where luck is key, the Lampoon can make you luckier. There's no shortage of wannabe writers, and almost everyone in the business acknowledges that being Harvard, and particularly Lampoon, helps to rise above the crowd. "The industry is connection-based," says Gail Gilmore, a councilor at Harvard's Office of Career Services. "I encourage students to use the connections." Harvard writers tend to work on shows with a number of fellow alums--"The Simpsons" employed 10 Lampoon writers out of its total of 12 at one point.

Almost all alums in hiring positions try to downplay the deference they give to other grads. "I don't necessarily give any preference to Lampoon people, but sometimes they have more experience," says Bill Oakley '88, a one-time Simpsons writer, now producing his own animated show, "Mission Hill." The large number of Lampoon grads in Hollywood and the perception of easy connections to jobs has given rise to the nomer "Lampoon mafia." "There is a definite Mafia," says Patricia A. Marx '75, the first female member of the Lampoon. "The Lampoon has a lot to do with it. We came out of college having done this for four years." The Lampoon comp is similar to getting a job in the real world, where writers produce speculative scripts, a sort-of comedy writer's resume. Says Reiss, "They really weed out a lot of people."

But not attending Harvard doesn't mean you're shit out of luck. "If you have a great script, you can even come from the University of Florida," says Adam Braun, a comedy agent out in LA. "[The Lampoon's] a leg up, but it's not the be-all, end-all." Billy Kimball '81, executive producer for "The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn," asserts that the Lampoon connection doesn't sway him in any way. "Agents call me all the time saying 'so and so is from Harvard' as if that is supposed to excite me," he says.

Some Poonsters, have had first-hand experience with the "Lampoon mafia." "They slashed my tires and beat me up; I saw them kill a guy. It's very real," says Rodman Flender '84, director of the recent film "Idle Hands." Reiss has a lighter take on the situation. "It's unfair to call it a "Lampoon Mafia" because the Mafia has a code of honor," he says.

2004-05-08T07:54:00.000-07:00

Humor, Me

This book, which will be available in September, contains a thing I wrote called "How to Make a Kitten." "How to Make a Kitten" was originally published in ReadyMade magazine.