Splitsider

 
0

The Vine 5 Film Festival: Has Anyone On Vine Ever Even *Seen* a Chicken?

Vine is a toy from Twitter that challenges users to make the most profound work ever committed to video in exactly six seconds. Or at the very least, challenges comedians to bring a little more laughter into this world. Every Tuesday we showcase five of the funniest short shorts of the past week.

Your RSS feed might be difficult and not show the videos, but trust us – they are there. READ MORE

TV
12

12 More TV Comedies That Netflix Should Resurrect From the Dead

Funded by the collective prayers and wishes of the internet hive mind, with possibly some help from dubious business practices in Iraq1, Arrested Development will be brought back from the dead next early Sunday morning on Netflix. The critical and financial success of this unprecedented experiment in TV resurrection will decide if other shows will be able to continue to tell their stories long after a broadcast or cable network had canceled it, thereby cheating death, defying nature. To save Netflix, or Amazon Instant, or any current or future video streaming service the burden of thinking too much when they decide to play God, here are 12 comedies whose corpses should be dug up and brought back to life.

But first, the very necessary disclaimer: There are of course plenty of programs that most of the world would be happy to see continue to churn out original material, but there are a particular few that that were clearly cut off before their primes. Those comedies are the shows that are going to be highlighted. Also, any live action show that was axed before 2003 — the first year Arrested Development was on the air — were not considered, to maintain a probably naive sense of feasibility to this list of demands suggestions. READ MORE

0

'The Goodwin Games' Might Benefit From the Time Limit

The Goodwin Games premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. eastern on Fox. Check your local cable box for confirmation. Or you can just watch the episode right now.

The Goodwin Games is a cute, fun show that has a 99.9 percent chance of not lasting beyond its seven episode order. Which is a good thing.

You probably know the names of Carter Bays and Craig Thomas – they are the creators and executive producers of How I Met Your Mother, a comedy that is about to continue to extend a cool, lofty premise even longer past the point of diminishing returns for a final, ninth season. Well, along with HIMYM writer Chris Harris, they came up with The Goodwin Games, which also involves a big idea. This time around, Scott Foley, Becki Newton, and T.J. Miller are three siblings competing against one another in a New Hampshire town to win a $23 million inheritance from their recently deceased father, Beau Bridges. READ MORE

0

Follow Friday: Jeff Lyons (@usedwigs)

Everybody fancies themselves as some sort of wizard that can conjure up laughter by a few strokes of a keyboard, but only a few tweeters are truly worthy enough to have all of their witticisms transmitted to you, the ever busy comedy fan trying to navigate through an increasingly congested internet. Every Friday we'll make your life a little bit easier by introducing you to an individual that you might not know about who consistently makes us laugh and momentarily forget that other days of the week exist.

(If you're reading this from an RSS feed, jump on over to the website where you can actually view the tweets for an optimal level of enjoyment.)

Jeff Lyons (@usedwigs) is the funny man proprietor of usedwigs.com, and the host of the UsedWigs Radio podcast. Most relevant to Follow Friday, Jeff is a funny tweeter who was enough of a gentleman to elaborate on a few of his classic tweets.

When Facebook friends post about their kids' sports victories, I always comment "He cheated. I was there. Very disappointed in your family."
@usedwigs
Jeff Lyons

"The feedback from my 'you cheated' comments has been 100% positive, most parents fess up and thank me profusely like, 'Thank you Jeff, we had a sneaking suspicion that our little Colby and Pepper Jack were cheating and playing dirty and maiming other children during their pee wee lacrosse games. It took great courage for you to call us out on a public platform and we no longer allow the boys to play organized sports, in fact, we’ve completely disowned them. They now live with their karate instructor, Keith. Thanks again!' It feels good to help." READ MORE

1

'New Girl's Season Two Was Great, No Thanks to the Parents

New Girl concluded their excellent second season by making one of the world's most awful songs briefly profound.

"Where do we come from? Where do we go?" mumbled Nick Miller in the closing moments of last night's season finale. He was paraphrasing "Cotton Eye Joe," which he justifiably denied enjoying earlier in the episode, betrayed by his involuntary fistpumping. The first question was something that was on the minds of all of the main characters all season long, influencing their decisions as they traversed through the murky, angsty wilderness that is living as a late 20s/early 30s year old with slapstick, pregnant pauses, and a lot of yelling, sometimes in name-calling, sometimes in Sam and Diane Cheersian lust, driven by taking, or going against, the advice given to them by their parents, while trying hard to not be like them at all. READ MORE

5

12 Funny People on Vine Worth Watching For More Than 6 Seconds

It has been a little over one hundred days since the Vine app made its debut. While Twitter (the owner of Vine) made the transition from a curious and mocked social media application to a respected and recognized fertile ground for creativity after a couple of years of existence, Vine has already made comedic stars out of illustrators, art directors, musicians, and other walks of life that aren't normally directly associated with comedy. And of course, there are the Rob Delaneys of Vine: veteran comedians that found themselves to be uniquely suited to the new app, finding it almost too easy to tell a joke in six seconds or less, essentially mocking those that make an effort.

Here are twelve Viners that consistently bring the laughter, in alphabetical order, because height order would be hard to accurately research. These funny people and others are featured on our weekly Vine column, The Vine 5 Film Festival. READ MORE

0

The Vine 5 Film Festival: You Should Eat Something

Vine is a toy from Twitter that challenges users to make the most profound work ever committed to video in exactly six seconds. Or at the very least, challenges comedians to bring a little more laughter into this world. Every Tuesday we showcase five of the funniest short shorts of the past week.

Your RSS feed might be difficult and not show the videos, but trust us – they are there.

Usually when I report on the ascending popularity of Vine it is good news, but sadly this is not one of those times. Vine has become so popular that it has entered the putrid, ridiculous, bullshit conversation about gender and inherit comedy chops. The name of the guilty will not be mentioned, but all you need to see is this funny and great Vine by Gillian Jacobs in immediate response, and this just as great tweet by @imkateward.

Moving on… READ MORE

6

'How I Met Your Mother': Still Occasionally Funny, Frustrating as Hell

I…

Well…

Huh…

So…we didn't meet the mother last night in "Something New", so much as we got a look at her cute, possibly too young for Ted visage. Cristin Milioti's face, to be more specific. I thought after watching the show on a week-to-week basis for over five years that when the moment finally came when the titular mother would be shown, it would be a bigger deal to me emotionally. But I think I had assumed that when I first saw what this supposedly amazing woman would look like, I would then hear and see how she would respond to her future husband, what kind of sense of humor she had, if she truly thought The Unicorns held up after all of these years. Instead, a face, and one sentence to a faceless station clerk. And for some fans, that was an emotional moment. For others, it was a license to mock the show even more. I…was whatever the equivalent to using too many ellipses is.

It was not anger, or betrayal, or anything overtly negative that I felt. Some of it was jealousy I guess for not feeling swept up in an epic romantic comedy's conclusion. Mostly it was because I know too much about how the television world works. I know that Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the co-creators and showrunners from day one until the series ends, and Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Neil Patrick Harris, Alyson Hannigan, and Cobie Smulders, all stand to make more money the longer they stick around, and having money is important. Bays and Thomas know that no matter how talented they are1, that doesn't guarantee that they'll ever be able to write for a successful project again, let alone one that they created. The five actors know that to be cast on a television show for what will be nine years is a huge blessing, something far more actors than not will never be able to experience. And while economics tends to prolong television shows much longer than their artistic and natural expiration date, it balances out sometimes when a network realizes that it would end up costing more money to keep paying a growing licensing fee to the studio, and to sign the ever increasing paychecks of all of the actors, than it would to let a long-running franchise go and throw on something different in its place instead.

But also? Fuck that shit. READ MORE

0

Follow Friday: @EmilyMayaMills

Everybody fancies themselves as some sort of wizard that can conjure up laughter by a few strokes of a keyboard, but only a few tweeters are truly worthy enough to have all of their witticisms transmitted to you, the ever busy comedy fan trying to navigate through an increasingly congested internet. Every Friday we'll make your life a little bit easier by introducing you to an individual that you might not know about who consistently makes us laugh and momentarily forget that other days of the week exist.

(If you're reading this from an RSS feed, jump on over to the website where you can actually view the tweets for an optimal level of enjoyment.)

Emily Maya Mills (@EmilyMayaMills) is an actor, writer and standup, who LA Weekly recently said could be the next Carol Burnett. She was kind enough to stop tugging her ear for a few minutes to talk about a few of her funniest tweets.

I smell french toast for no reason. Might be having a sassy, hyper-sexual stroke.
@emilymayamills
Emily Maya Mills

"I'd say this is pure hypochondria but hypochondria is for babies. It's more bona fide adult death anxiety. When my anxiety is at it's worst, I presume I'm dying a lot. I was probably just walking down the street, smelled toast, thought I was having a stroke and then realized it was kind of sweet smelling. Then, imagining about what kind of Frenchy-oui-oui-honk-honk stroke that would make it reminded me that I'm just an an absurd person who's stuck alive for a while and needs to f*ing relax." READ MORE

5

'Community's Fourth Season: Time to Graduate?

So here we are, waiting to hear if there will be a fifth season of Community, or if last night's "Advanced Introduction to Finality" was the final episode of the series, and not knowing which scenario we prefer.

I don't blame Andy Bobrow, Megan Ganz and the rest of the writing staff, because they were put in an incredibly untenable position when Sony fired Dan Harmon, just like I don't feel any anger towards Moses Port and David Guarascio for trying to pull off a job far more challenging than they ever could have realized. It's possible that it didn't matter who was running the ship this season. Think about the originality and ambition that came out of this series since the last batch of episodes of season one, and how we underestimated how hard it really was to balance the absurdity with reality, the subtext to the text, while still caring about the characters. How long can you maintain that?

There were times this season when Community dipped into the multiple timelines and Abed's multi-cam shows in his mind with a strong danger of never coming back from those potentially fun but ultimately pointless worlds. It also seemed like Abed was spewing a lot more exposition than in seasons past to set these up. Would a certain former showrunner have stopped that from happening? We'll never know. READ MORE

0

The Vine 5 Film Festival: Everything Old is New Again

Vine is a toy from Twitter that challenges users to make the most profound work ever committed to video in exactly six seconds. Or at the very least, challenges comedians to bring a little more laughter into this world. Every Tuesday we showcase five of the funniest short shorts of the past week.

Your RSS feed might be difficult and not show the videos, but trust us – they are there.

"Buster Keaton's Most Famous Stunt Performed On Our Kitchen Table"
By Daniel Ojantlava
READ MORE

0

'Buddies': Dave Chappelle's 'Home Improvement' Spinoff That Actually Got Made


Sometimes TV shows drag their unfunny, uninteresting, yet highly rated feet across our living rooms for years. “Who let this happen?” we cry in vain. Other times, the powers that be get things right. That’s where Brilliantly Canceled comes in, looking at the shows that didn’t make it past their first season and saved us all a ton of grief.

"It was a bad show. It was bad. I mean when we were doing it, I could tell this was not gonna work." – Dave Chappelle

(Grunt) – Tim Allen

There was a time when Timothy "The Toolman" Taylor changed lives.

On March 14, 1995, two gentleman that went by the names of Jim and Dave didn't realize that their tickets to Tool Time would lead to stardom, but as is the world's way sometimes, when you let your guard down, great things can happen. After Taylor for the umpteenth time interrupted a perfectly normal and informative lesson on how to better your home through old fashioned hard work and blue collar craftsmanship to vent about his personal life and make sweeping gender generalizations, he asked the audience if anyone could relate to women tricking them into fights, as women are wont to do. Jim and Dave knew exactly what he was talking about, and were called up to the stage. READ MORE

1

Follow Friday: @briangaar

Everybody fancies themselves as some sort of wizard that can conjure up laughter by a few strokes of a keyboard, but only a few tweeters are truly worthy enough to have all of their witticisms transmitted to you, the ever busy comedy fan trying to navigate through an increasingly congested internet. Every Friday we'll make your life a little bit easier by introducing you to an individual that you might not know about who consistently makes us laugh and momentarily forget that other days of the week exist.

(If you're reading this from an RSS feed, jump on over to the website where you can actually view the tweets for an optimal level of enjoyment.)

Brian Gaar (@briangaar) is an Austin-based standup that was kind enough to elaborate on a few of his funniest tweets. White people in their twenties who enjoy New Girl and believe everything the government tells them might have their world about to be rocked.

Zooey Deschanel always looks like she's been shown a card trick
@briangaar
Brian Gaar

"Every time I look at her, I think 'Oh my god, that IS my card!!!'" READ MORE

0

'Maron' Is Maron Being Maron

Maron premieres tonight at 10:00 p.m. eastern on IFC. The second episode, "Dead Possum", is available on YouTube.

Marc Maron and Louis C.K. are inextricably linked together, so let's just get these two facts out of the way:

A: Yes, Maron is Marc Maron's Louie.

B: No, Maron is not as funny as Louie. Not yet anyway. READ MORE

-->