January 4, 2010Comedy Roundup
Aw, man, it's Monday and that means I have to start doing real work again. Bummer. The good news(ish) is that one of the things I need to work on is revamping this site. Here's hoping...
But at least my beloved Fox block is back, even if I have to wait another week and a half to see my NBC shows. Family Guy is still earning my devotion, and I was particularly excited about 'Big Man on Hippocampus' since I'd gotten to see a preview of the first act at Cherry Cheva's talk last week.
I'm pretty sure they changed Lois's line when she's coming on to Richard Dawson. In the original I could swear she said 'I want you to wear me like a pinkie ring.' In this it was 'I wanna be your pinkie ring'. Boo TV standards dorks! Lois's over-the-top sexuality is one of my favorite things about the show. Maybe Adult Swim will keep the line -- that was another great joke. They did keep in a few of Stewie's edgy remarks (Favorite holiday? 9/11. Things you do on a the weekend? Black guys). Tee hee. And that pretty tasteless but still-funny joke about Gene Siskel. And I actually kind of wanted Quagmire and Lois to get it on. I am deranged, I fully admit it.
But the Family Feud opener -- which, by the way, struck me as a theme aimed more at Gen-X than at the show's purported teen demographic -- provided me with a fun moment of theoretical speculation. Well, I think it's fun. You may want to skip over it.
Peter was supposed to list things you sit in, and he kept saying 'chair' even though it was already there on the board. And so it went: 'Chair...big chair...high chair...chair; until the host told him, 'Just say "pass".' To which Peter responded, of course, 'Chair.' Now most theorists agree humor comes from the unexpected. Thing is, I'm pretty sure that every fan in the library last week (myself included) knew Peter was going to say 'chair' when told to say 'pass'. It was just a question of when. Technically it shouldn't have been funny...unless it was the timing. Suspense can be fun, too, like a verbal game of peekaboo. It's such a ridiculously simple way to make a joke, but it's still so good.
Not much comedy in the news, unless you count Kathy Griffin's unsurprising use of profanity as news. There's also the Simpsons' twentieth anniversary episode to look forward to -- wow, that's almost as bad as it being 2010.
Otherwise it's been mostly unintentional comedy. Or perhaps I should say unintentional absurdity, because there are a couple of headlines that sound really funny even though the content isn't actually laughable. For instance: 'Muslim-Hindu punk bands' is an unexpected juxtaposition of words, even though the phenomenon sounds pretty cool. And something like 'Elton John Helping Eminem Kick Drugs' gave me a brief guffaw as I imagined some skit-like possibilities for what that would look like. Maybe it's just my deranged imagination -- I did just see 8½ recently and I think it wrinkled my brain.
Anyway, off to revamp, rewrite, and try to design a new class. Yee haw, the new year is already in full swing.
