The Genius of Neil Hamburger

My recent brush with British stand-up's had some kind of knock on effect whereby I went and hunted out a bunch of American stand-up. Not quite sure how that works, but still: Paul F. Tompkins' live CD is awesome (there's nothing to match in on youtube though, sadly), and it also helped me remember America's Funnyman - Neil Hamburger:

That I sat through a whole hour of a comedian being deliberately unfunny, is a sign of some sort of twisted genius. Also:

Ah, jokes.

Moments from The Ten

So. Bunny, Ben and I were galavanting around Brighton and some turn of events prompted Ben to compare the situation to "The Ten, where Liev Schreiber is buying all those CAT scan machines to keep up with his neighbour." He dropped it into the converstation so smoothly, as if this was a movie that everyone knew, so it would be an easy shared reference point - but neither of us had ever heard of the movie. In fact as he continued to outline it - the bit where Adam Brody falls out of a plane and gets embedded in the ground, the bit where Winona Ryder runs away with a ventriloquist's dummy - we just flat out started calling shenanigans. There was no way this movie could have been released without us clocking it.

Well, turns out since it was something of a flop with about half of the feedback I saw starting "this movie sucks" I guess it might have been buried a little bit. In fact when Bunny finally saw it she warned me off, saying she didn't understand how Ben could like the movie. However having now watched it twice (Yuki was intrigued, so I agreed to watch it again with her) I can reveal that... it ain't as bad as all that.




I laughed out loud about five times, which is pretty good going, but I also physically winced at some of the jokes. I liked the running gags, but often the more free associating jokes fell flat, and the musical number at the end was atrocious. That said it was a bizarrely unique piece of goofy Hollywood comedy and I would... cautiously recommend it, if you don't mind checking out something that sucks in an interesting way.

Cautiously mind you.

Englanding #22 : Funny Men

So, hi, well, yes. I remembered something that had changed when I went back to England, to wit: Comedians! YES! Apparently while I had been over here filling my head with Japanese comedians and celebrities in order to... oh, I dunno, facilitate my ascension to some kind of pop culture God-Node, a whole bunch of British comedians "came up through the ranks". Most of them seem to have started their careers while I still lived in England, but only to have come to prominence in the last two years. Also the show on which many of them seem to appear: Mock the Week, which I think I saw a couple of times before I left and thought was sort of crap, but seems to have found its feet and, y'know, can't argue with 7 series and counting, can you?

And there was a whole new stand-up show "Live at the Apollo"! Man, leave the country for two years, the things you miss out on. Here's Michael McIntyre, who is unfeasibly popular and whom I had never heard of before I left:

My parents were both like: "You've never heard of Michael McIntyre!?" Here's Russel Howard, whose name rings a bell but I don't think I'd ever seen:

And here's Frankie Boyle, who I had never heard of and now apparently he's famous enough to get his autobiography in Tesco. He's offensive!:

Which sadly seems to get in the way of him being funny all the time. That's a pretty spectacular one though.

Watching British panel-show comedies, it does strike me now that they do operate in a fairly similar way to a lot of Japanese comedy shows - essentially just acting as a showcase for stand-ups, but in a slightly different way (team based quiz shows as opposed to variety free-for-alls).

Oh, I should mention, all these guys seem to be pretty funny too! Good show!

Let's have a movie review! The Aristocrats (2005)

Look what I did up there, writing the year after the name of the movie. So professional. Why do people do that anyway? Is it really important? Does it place the movie in it's appropriate historical context? Jeez, I feel like a shill.


So I suddenly realised I never got round to watching The Aristocrats, and I kinda wanted to. So I watched it. Ah, a happy ending! Let's just savour that for a moment.

OK, but, y'see, it wasn't very good. The movie, as I'm sure everyone knows, is a documentary about a kinda comedians' inside joke that works by building up a shocking level of filth and depravity and topping it off with a silly, unexpected punchline. I won't go into it, it's explained in about the first thirty seconds of the movie, and the other hour and a half is devoted to people's opinions and anecdotes about the joke, and the glaringly obvious point that the reason the joke is funny is how you tell it.

That's pretty key right there: the reason the joke is funny is because of the flair, imagination and timing of the person telling the joke. No, wait, that's integral to the entire movie. And of course the movie is then edited so that HARDLY ANYONE IS SHOWN JUST TELLING THE GODDAMN JOKE. Holy smokes, I want to grab whoever edited this mess by the lapels and thrust him face first into the faeces that are so often mentioned. There are a few good laughs in there, but all the biggest ones are when a comedian is just ALLOWED TO TELL THE DAMN JOKE, THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH, WITH THEIR TIMING. But for most of the time you see punchlines, build-ups and asides spliced together in a way that somehow adds speed and kills any momentum at the same time. I understand, most people go overboard and tell the joke for ten minutes so they couldn't fit them all in, and the key performance, Gilbert Gottfried's set on Hugh Hefner's roast, would cost a small fortune to license, so there are limitations on what they were able to do; but what they ended up with is a movie that is no damn good. It's like a bunch of guys geeking out over something that I'm sure is pretty awesome, and stripping away all the magic and fun. It made me pretty mad by the end.

This extended clip of Bob Saget's piece (I assume from the DVD) tops the one they show in the film, but you can still feel that if they just put a camera on him and rolled it would be better still. Oh and STRONG, STRONG CONTENT WARNINGS! Absolute brain-searing filth from here on out: