Bassem Youssef, who hosts a satirical news show in Egypt akin to Comedy Central's The Daily Show, payed Jon Stewart a visit last night. Being in Egypt instead of America makes his job slightly more difficult than Stewart's.
Stick it out through a few minutes of talk about comparative literature and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and you'll get to the good stuff in this TED talk from comedian Chris Bliss about the power of comedy. By "good stuff," obviously I mean "explanation of how satire with integrity uses comedic techniques to impact people's opinions."
What gives comedy its edge at reaching around people's walls is the way that it uses misdirection. A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick, where you think it's going over here, and then all of a sudden you're transported over here, and there's this mental delight that's followed by the [...]
Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America premiered last Friday at Toronto's Ryerson theater as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, and according to the L.A. Times, the audience was thrilled to watch disgruntled Everypeople Joel Murray (Bill's brother) and Tara Lynne Barr burn a streak of murder, mayhem and anti-pop culture rants across the lower 48. On the other hand, the opening sequence of the pitch black comedy does feature a fantasy sequence in which an infant is blown away by a shot gun so, you know, the audience may be a self-selecting group.
For 20 years now I’ve been locked in a test of wills with corporate publishing, trying to produce books that are just as funny as TV and movies. That should be possible, right? One would think. Sometimes I win (international bestseller), sometimes they do (they commission books, then don’t pay me). I tell myself it’s David versus Goliath…but it’s probably just Joe Versus the Volcano.
Comedy being 90% confidence, there’s often a rough equivalence between a media’s swag, and the quality of comedy found in it. But weakness and decay can yield fruit as well — Garrison Keillor on the radio, for example, or The Onion rising from the ashes of [...]
Viral success on the internet is a strange phenomenon. Marketers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to create something people will share with their friends, only to be beaten time and time again by accidents and genuine ineptitude. That’s part of the fun of the web — halfway decent singers wallow in obscurity while Rebecca Black gets 20 million hits, and your meticulously edited Tweet will never be as funny as a horse avatar poorly hawking ebooks. The content we share the most is stuff we can have conversations about, especially when the conversation goes something like, “This is weird and terrible and hilarious and I can’t look [...]
A Hot Air Balloon Captain Addresses His Crew On the Eve of a Very Important Hot Air Balloon Race: "Point is, this ain't hot air balloon racing like they taught you in kindergarten. This is the kind of blood-drinking, eye-gouging, no-holds-barred balloon racing that motherfuckers have nightmares about. We WILL be sabotaging balloons on the ground, we WILL be sniping at rival teams with rifles in the air, and we WILL be crossing that finish line first tomorrow. You see this necklace of ears that I'm wearing? Do you think I got it by following the International Balloon Association's Sportsmanship Guidelines? Guess again, dicklips."
Personality-driven reporting has become the rule rather than the exception. On Fox News and MSNBC, breaking stories come with a built-in perspective, keeping viewers loyal while helping insulate them from dissenting, challenging or complex opinions. Most blogs operate in a similar way. Try, if you can, to count how many times in the last few days you’ve skimmed over insight-free outrage at the childhood behavior of Mitt Romney. This is a question of hits, of course — a famous man being awful is news everyone wants to click on, and taking a righteous stance against him is easy, safe, and brand-building. On its own, this seems to be just [...]
For your viewing and head-scratching pleasure, here's the Taiwanese interpretation of yesterday's Onion scandal, from Next Media Animation. Wouldn't it be great if media conflicts really were solved by putting the offenders in a dunk tank, like they are in this video? And then Newsweek would buy the Onion some funnel cake, while the Capitol Police hopped around in a bouncy castle holding hands. Ahhhh I wish the world were a carnival.
Christwire.org is a satire website that features articles with titles such as "Gays Now Using Santa To Entice Man Boy Love Relations" and "Aging Liberal Jon Stewart Struggles to Stay Relevant." It is very often thought to be real by people who stumble across it! So much so that they tricked uberconservative writer Marie Jon from RenewAmerica.com (sample headline: "The homo con continues") into syndicating her articles to them. Amazing. And today, having been anonymous since the site's launch, the two founders unveiled themselves to the New York Times.
