Marc Maron’s Must-Hear Podcast for Comedians - NYTimes.com

I was going to mention at some point that Marc Maron's WTF podcast has quickly become my favorite. But the Times beat me to it. He is indeed raw and angry, and he understands the self-destructive impulse in human psychology that leads to comedy. It's interesting that so much art comes from this dark place and that the artistic journey is one where the wounded self seeks out imaginative engagement with the source of all inner turmoil. To what? To heal, to break with the past, to reengage, to go forth once more.

The brilliant thing about Maron's show is that comedians share all the same demons of artists and poets and they're good talkers. They turn all that anger outward, they express it with full voice, and inject humor as a way to say, look, I survived. I persist. Whereas most writers turn inward and are in danger of being eaten alive.

As he says of his ill-fated tenure at Air America:

“I really began to believe that the struggles of most people are existential, not political,” he said, “and my biggest struggles were existential.”

Which is to say, politics is fine if all you want is dialectic and the rigors of partisan logic. But if you really want to know what's going on, you need to engage with all the messy, unresolved, patently absurd aspects of life. You have to face up to the fact that you're here, alive today, and decide what you're going to do about it before you die.

Paul Scheer | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club

Paul Scheer comes off as such a smart, like-able guy in his interviews. It makes it that much more painful to watch him as Andre in "The League".

Also this: WTF interview with Marc Maron

And this: Wonderful Terrific on JJGO!

Comedian Mike Birbiglia on His New Book, 'Sleepwalk With Me,' and One-Man Show, ‘My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’ -- New York Magazine

Stand-up as storytelling as art:

Birbiglia road-tests his material with a trio of trusted advisers: older brother Joe, who serves as his manager and co-writer; Seth Barrish, director of Sleepwalk With Me; and Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.” “If a minute goes by without laughs, Mike’s learning to quiet the part of him that says, ‘This is sucking’—those minutes in a story that are there just for the feeling you’re not going to get a laugh,” says Glass, who discovered Birbiglia through the “Moth” storytelling series. The two are working on a film adaptation of Sleepwalk With Me. “He’s learning the more specific and personal a story is, the more universal it is,” adds Barrish, who speaks to Birbiglia several times a day, “so he can say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking.’ Mike thinks and dreams big, but not in a way that’s remotely obnoxious.”

In 2008, Birbiglia wrote a script for a CBS sitcom loosely based on his blog, Mike Birbiglia’s Secret Public Journal. It had a Seinfeld conceit, only this time the comedian lived in Brooklyn with his girlfriend. It got as far as the pilot stage. “I can’t even begin to describe the degree to which I had no control; it’s the reason I haven’t attempted to do a TV show since,” he says. “They didn’t want all of me, they wanted this part they perceived to be likable, which ended up being wrong. I tested unlikable. Can you imagine a worse scenario? I tested poorly in something that few people on Earth can quantify, yet was quantified for me, and I failed.

“In a way,” he adds, “my whole career is an accident. I tried to sell out, then when they didn’t buy it, I decided to be artistic.” Birbiglia credits failure with the comedy renaissance going on now. “Few people are above selling out, but the difference between the highest and lowest bidders isn’t much anymore. People are like, ‘Fuck it, if I’m not going to make a lot of money, I might as well do something I’m proud of.’ ”

Laughter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The cause of laughter in human beings:

Philosopher John Morreall theorizes that human laughter may have its biological origins as a kind of shared expression of relief at the passing of danger. Friedrich Nietzsche, by contrast, suggested laughter to be a reaction to the sense of existential loneliness and mortality that only humans feel.

For example, this is how this theory works in the case of humor: a joke creates an inconsistency, the sentence appears to be not relevant, and we automatically try to understand what the sentence says, supposes, doesn't say, and implies; if we are successful in solving this 'cognitive riddle', and we find out what is hidden within the sentence, and what is the underlying thought, and we bring foreground what was in the background, and we realize that the surprise wasn't dangerous, we eventually laugh with relief. Otherwise, if the inconsistency is not resolved, there is no laugh, as Mack Sennett pointed out: "when the audience is confused, it doesn't laugh" (this is the one of the basic laws of a comedian, called "exactness"). It is important to note that the inconsistency may be resolved, and there may still be no laugh. Due to the fact that laughter is a social mechanism, we may not feel like we are in danger, however, the physical act of laughing may not take place. In addition, the extent of the inconsistency (timing, rhythm, etc.) has to do with the amount of danger we feel, and thus how hard or long we laugh. This explanation is also confirmed by modern neurophysiology (see section Laughter and the brain).

The Four Videos You Should Watch From the Emmys -- Vulture

Please, enjoy some entertainment for the masses.

Pitchfork: Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen Bring Comedy Act ThunderAnt to TV

I wish this sounded funnier:

The IFC website reports that "Portlandia "lovingly skewers illustrates the people and values of Portland, Ore." Characters include "the owners of a feminist book store, a militant bike messenger, an artsy couple who put cut-outs of birds on everything, and a punk rock couple negotiating a 'safe word' to help govern their love life." A few of these folks have appeared in online ThunderAnt sketches, and the feminist book store owners popped up in this St. Vincent video.)

Work is Wealth

Wow, Stewart's dismantling of Cramer and CNBC was staggering. His essential argument:

• The stock market was pushed on the general public who were told it was a safe place to put their money AND they would receive huge returns.
• CEOs, Bankers, Stock-Brokers, Hedge Fund Managers, Financial Experts, and Financial News Journalists were all aware that investing was far more complex and far riskier than what they were telling the general public.
• These institutions, focusing on short term profits at the expense of long term growth and stability, were complicit in manipulating the public and creating the circumstances that led to the recent collapse.
• The absence of real journalistic practices in the Financial News industry results in reporting that is essentially an infomercial for a legal con (i.e., the selling of snake oil as vitamins). Financial reporting is worse than useless, it's actually dangerous.

The best defense that Cramer could offer was that he could provide insight into the double-dealings. Sort of like when the FBI hires a con man to help them identify the modus operandi of other con men. Brilliant.

There was also a more subtle point that Stewart made which was that wealth resides in labor, and not in the plutocrats, the bankers, or the CEOs. On the one hand you cold say it was a slippery slope in the direction of rallying the workers to unite and overthrow the slavery imposed by the bourgeoisie. But really the point was that wealth is created when workers produces goods and services that create value. Not from playing games with money and skimming a percentage off the top. Life is not a casino where the house always wins. Life is work. Life is building and creating things that are worthwhile and that stand the test of time.

What Stewart pointed out is that our notions of success as voiced by the financial wizards - who monopolized the very notion of success by conflating all human endeavours with commerce - have in their glibness and cynicism destroyed much and created very little.

Pynchonesque in Our Emptiness

The normally smart Techsploitation blog comes up with this baffling bit of non-conformity:

On The Simpsons, however, the characters are nothing but stereotype. They’re practically Pyncheonesque in their emptiness — not people, but objects who get driven through various pastiches in order to become the butt of the audience’s arch, ironic jokes. I didn’t give a shit about any of them. The only way I could enjoy these characters was to say, “Haha look at the funny dumb poor people who are so incredibly stupid that they actually work at nuclear power plants.”

I don't know what's worse: the failure to understand The Simpsons, the failure to understand Pynchon, or the over-the-top knee-jerk reaction against strawman hipsters (with their "arch, ironic" jokes).

There seems to be an assumption that there is an intellectual elite sitting somewhere in their towers mocking dumb poor people for sport and profit. When in fact, that is exactly the sort of situation that would be ably lampooned on The Simpsons (with a guest appearance from Wes Anderson and a Royal Tenenbaums spoof). Because it is the situations in The Simpsons that we are meant to laugh at and the way they expose unspoken desires and power relations in the real world (just like a Pynchon novel).

If Homer seems like a stereotype its because he is archetypal in the same way Bugs Bunny is: able to be dropped into any storyline, role, or pastiche while maintaining his core identity. More importantly we don't laugh at Homer so much as recognize that his dumbness is a reflection of the world he lives in. We sympathize with Homer for his laziness, inflated sense of importance, weakness for donuts, and talent for disappointment (d'oh!). He is us. He is our everyman. At the same time he is also all of our own worst habits, all those things that annoy us in everybody else

Perhaps good comedies exploit that same tension that we find in the fear and entertainment experienced by audiences in a horror movie: "the frisson of ambivalent feelings". In The Simpsons we have characters who remind us that life is both wonderful and stupid. We laugh with as we laugh at and that ambivalence is what makes the show so brilliant.

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As for Pynchon, his latest book, Against the Day, is a steam-punk epic and a meditation on the unnecessary violence that gave birth to the modern world. His characters begin as types, but their true humanity is revealed for those patient enough to read to the end. No joke.

Abrahamic Nutters

On the other hand, there's this little dose of brilliance from Marcus Brigstocke:



[Via Pharyngula]

(His bio says he loves the Smiths and the Cure, but hates Lily Allen. What's up with that?)