30 Rock actor and former SNL writer John Lutz is selling his body to science for an upcoming book, as reported by The New York Times. Lutz is collaborating with Jamil Zaki, an assistant professor in psychology at Stanford on a book called The Lutz Experiment, which will run Lutz through a ton of scientific experiments. The book is being published by a division of Simon & Schuster, and Lutz worked with Zaki previously on a piece for Men’s Health and one for Wired magazine to get ready for the book. With any luck, one of the experiments will involve Lutz running into a wall [...]
Self-diagnose away: "Comedians are all afflicted with a personality disorder that drives our pursuit of impracticality. Personality disorders can be broadly defined as fixed fantasies, where a person functions with core beliefs that result in behaviors different from the norm. Unlike chemical imbalances which cycle in severity, the symptoms of a comedian remain constant. Attention seeking behavior, difficulty in relationships, and the inability to self regulate can all afflict comics, while falling under existing diagnoses like narcissist and histrionic personality disorder. But the engrained goals of a comedian combined with a stimulating environment creates additional symptoms that can be defined as Comedian Personality Disorder (CPD). Like most personality disordered [...]
Screw all these other posers, science has gone and solved the issue of who should replace Michael Scott on The Office: a computer program designed to make double entendres. The program is called Double Entendre via Noun Transfer, or DEviaNT, and was created by two computer scientists at the University of Washington, Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun. The program is based on an analysis of two bodies of text: 1.5 million erotic sentences, and another with 57,000 from standard literature. They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a "sexiness" function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS [That's What She Said]. Examples of nouns with [...]
Pitchfork, the indie music review juggernaut, occasionally reviews comedy albums for some inexplicable reason. Today, they took on Louis CK's Hilarious. The review is fine and straightforward, but who actually reads Pitchfork's reviews? Nobody! You just look at the number. And Hilarious got a 7.8! That's pretty much smack dab in the middle of Pitchfork's curve, as nearly all of their reviews fall in the 7 or 8 range. Let's take a look at how his comedy album compared to some notable music albums released in 2010, shall we?
The most common thing you hear about the lasting Simpsons franchise is that the show has “lost its touch,” that while it remains popular, viewers continue to tune in only because of nostalgia for the series’ “golden years” (which most fans place between seasons 3 and 8). Granted, Bart evading Sideshow Bob for the umpteenth time, Homer and Marge re-writing their romantic history, and the Simpson family traveling to Tokyo just feels a little exhausting when we remember the days Bart sold his soul and Homer “did it for her.”
Has the show gotten any less funny, though? Any less edgy, witty, silly, surprising, or relevant? For some [...]
