Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab's monthly independent film festival, Channel 101, turns 10 next year, and L.A.-based filmmaker Dave Seger put together this wonderful 45-minute documentary about 101's rise and its influence on web, sketch, and television comedy. Between the monthly L.A. screenings and a sister festival in New York, Channel 101 gave a voice to rising sketch groups like The Lonely Island, Derrick, Human Giant, and Tim and Eric, and caught the eye of big-name celebs like Jack Black, Drew Carey, and Sarah Silverman. The documentary does a fine job of summing up the Channel 101 aesthetic, while scoring some insight from a lot of the fest's [...]
Which is your favorite joke in this article about humor during the Civil War? Mine is the title "An 'Off-Hand' Joke" for an amputation-humor pamphlet. It seems humor was widespread during the war, with Abraham Lincoln routinely being criticized for making jokes "too soon." And the popular method for spreading jokes sounds kind of familiar:
Newspapers passed along much of the humor, often overseen by dedicated “funny editors,” who filled their pages with war-themed jokes. They “scissored” puns and anecdotes from other publications and passed them off as their own. The best bits went viral, popping up from North Carolina to South Dakota.
Replace "newspapers" with "the Internet," [...]
Once an actor develops a character that becomes an inextricable part of the cultural zeitgeist, for example Family Matters' Steve Urkel, it can be difficult to keep that persona alive year after year without some part of the performer getting suffocated. In this case, that would be his balls. "I was getting network notes on the bulge of my sack!," Jaleel White explained in Vanity Fair. "I wore my pants so freaking tight and it was like, after awhile, we got a problem there. So, literally, the last season we loosened up his pants." Like every child star, White ran into a biological wall no love of [...]
