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Looking Back at Michael Ian Black's Untraditional Career

by | August 3rd, 2011

Michael Ian Black is very famous. Well, he’s not that famous, but he keeps telling the world he is. In fact, his upcoming Comedy Central special on Saturday August 6 is actually titled “Michael Ian Black: Very Famous.” Whether or not Black is actually famous is up for debate, but there is no debating that he is an incredibly funny comedian.

The weird thing about Black’s career is that it has been somewhat in reverse for the past 20 years. He hasn’t become less famous, but he has slowly become a bigger star by using different mediums to achieve this fame. Many comedians start out their careers by doing stand-up and hope one day to get noticed by Comedy Central where he or she will get a stand-up special. If all goes well, he or she might get a television development deal and could in fact even become an actor or actress. This is where Black has done things backwards. He started out on television in 1993 with MTV’s The State. He then went on to act on a successful NBC show. He continued this reversal of a career by trying stand up, writing books, co-hosting a podcast, and now having his own Comedy Central special. If Howard Stern is the “King of All Media,” Michael Ian Black is the “Sardonic Court Jester of All Media,” yet is still widely unknown to the general public. READ MORE

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The Sexual Proclivities of Friends

by | July 27th, 2011

Most television sitcoms are obsessed with sex. Typically, there is at least one character that continually brags about his or her sexual conquests. Some well-known lotharios include Barney from How I Met Your Mother — although Ted is getting up there since after six seasons he has still not actually talked about who the mother is — and GOB from Arrested Development, even though many of the women he has “sealed the deal” with have been out of spite for his brother Michael. This doesn’t stop with men though, as female characters have also been use for comedic sexual exploitation like Elaine’s “sponge-worthy” theory on Seinfeld and Samantha from Sex in the City — a woman who makes her partners leave within an hour of her climaxing.

But one show has truly broken the barrier of sexual conquests by an ensemble: Friends. Along with Sex in the City, Friends was cited in a 2008 study published in the American Journal of Pediatrics for “glamorizing sex while hardly mentioning its downsides, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” But, how much sex have the “friends” actually had? READ MORE

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