Brothers of Different Mothers

Separated at Birth? You decide.

Newt Gingrich:




Damon Wayans as "Oswald Bates" from In Living Color:

Tell me you've never done this.

I can't tell you how many times in my life I've been convinced I have cancer. The infected hair follicle that I was convinced meant I had leukemia. The headache that lasted 3 days that had me convinced I had a brain tumor. Ovulation pain that had me convinced I had ovarian cancer. For someone who hates to go to doctors, I've sure put up with a lot of anxiety to avoid going to them. And meanwhile, I come from a family where we're so mean the Goddess does't want us and keeps us here a long, long time. My mother has survived 18 years after lung cancer surgery. You know what the 5-year survival rate for lung cancer is? 15%. And Mom is still kicking 18 years later. And still smoking. I'm serious. Don't fuck with us, because we are made out of tough stuff.

So after obsessing about cancer my entire life, what do I do now? Work on oncology clinical trials. Don't ever let it be said that the Goddess (or Jehovah, if you like) doesn't have a snarky sense of humor.

So after watching Marc Maron on Conan at the top of this post (actually not pissing off the right, more's the pity), don't you dare tell me you've never gone through exactly what he describes. In fact, tell me about when you did.

I need a Maron fix

Sometimes I forget how much being able to listen to Marc Maron on the radio used to keep me sane.

And because sometimes we need a break from the horror of life in America in the 21st century...

If you haven't checked out WTF yet, maybe this will pique your interest:

Recognition that's long overdue

And to think we knew him when.

The 10 Funniest People, Videos and Things of the Coming Year

7/10

'WTF With Marc Maron'

Acid-tongued, rage-prone satirist Marc Maron has been a stand-up-circuit fixture since the Eighties, hosting Comedy Central shows and befriending guys like Judd Apatow and Conan O'Brien along the way. But his new podcast, "WTF," may be his greatest achievement yet: a series of unvarnished shit-shoots with comedians that move from laugh-geek joke anatomy to quasi-therapeutic venting (Louis C.K. wept during his epic two-part interview).

And there's more, from the New York Times:

On his show, whose title includes an exclamation that can’t be printed here, Mr. Maron, a stand-up comic by trade, has cast himself as an unlikely celebrity interviewer — one who is angry, probing, neurotic and a vulnerable recovering addict. And somehow he’s able to elicit from his guests, mostly other comedians like Sarah Silverman and Ben Stiller, the same level of vulnerability.

The interviews, usually taped in his garage in Los Angeles, often end up feeling more like therapy sessions. Take, for example, Robin Williams talking to Mr. Maron about the dark side of dealing with audiences: “I guess it’s that fear that they’ll recognize — as you know — how insecure are we really? How desperately insecure that made us do this for a living?”

Thanks to moments like these the podcast has, over the last year or so, become a cult hit and a must-listen in show business and comedy circles. The success of the show has everything to do with its perceptive, prickly host and his ability to coax surprisingly revealing things from his guests.

Thirty years from now, people will look at the late, great Morning Sedition the way some people look at Jean Shepherd's show. What most people won't realize is that one short-lived radio show is what allowed Marc Maron to cut his interviewing teeth with some policy heavy-hitters -- people like journalists Michael Ware and Borzou Daragahi, politicians like Howard Dean, policymakers like Robert Reich. Maron may no longer even remember the call letters of Air America's then-flagship station, but it's the experience he got there that laid the groundwork for him to finally find a niche. He's a really good standup comic. But he's a GREAT interview show host.

Blogrolling In Our Time

Say hello to Morning Remembrance, the great Jim Earl's resurrection of the Morning Sedition comedy bit of the same name. We're blogrolling Jim's creation in the -- where else? -- "In Memoriam" category.

Original clips can be found here. Look for the ones with "MR" in the file name.

This is what happens when you privatize services

This one comes to us via Gaius Publius:

Yes, that's "House" up there with the divine Stephen Fry.

Still funny after all these years

Stiller and Meara take on Jersey Shore:

Episode 2: "The Jersey Shore" @ Yahoo! Video

(h/t: Elayne)

Everything old is new again

Even the Firesign Theatre.

When coffee is spilled at a BP meeting

We've all attended meetings where someone knocks over a cup of coffee. Usually there's some napkins left over from a baby shower from six months ago, and the problem is solved in minutes.

Unless that meeting is full of BP executives. Then all bets are off:

Best. Rant. Ever.

Who cares that he doesn't write his material on The Daily Show? No one delivers a rant like Lewis Black:

Please...don't give her any ideas

Sure, it's funny when Tina Fey does it. But how funny is it going to be when it inevitably becomes a reality?

Massa; Tickling as Abuse

I hate to break my perfect silence here, but I have something to say. With all the crap flying round my life, I am happy to report that I knew little of this Massa issue that is buzzing in the background everywhere I go. But there is one thing that Ive been hearing, that has been sticking out and gnawing at me, and its making me pretty crazy: ticklefight...it was only a ticklefight.

Whatever really happened in this case that seems to have caught the attention of the main stream media, I haven't heard anyone commenting on the fact that tickling someone until they cant breathe is, in fact, abuse. Tickling children is abusive bullying and besides siblings going through phases of evenly matched tickling, its not something that people really do anymore. There is something inherently sexual in tickling, and there is a dominance issue, considering that its actually painful. I don't think that people should do this to anyone who isn't a willing participant, and to hear an adult talking about something like this is downright creepy
That's all, really....Massa is a freak and he belongs on the supermarket checkout news, not the national news!

On the other hand, as Larry O'Donnell just said on Countdown, he gave the comedians of the world a huge gift with the funniest sex scandal ever. I haven't laughed out loud like this since I don't know when. Maybe I have to start paying attention again.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sour Gropes
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at least to Jon Stewart...

c/p RIPCoco

No I will not just let it go

If you weren't one of the people who turned on the radio on March 31, 2004 at noon and had the sense of "Yes! I'm home!", you can go read something else. Because there is no way you can possibly fathom what the millions (and yes, there were millions) of people who were Air America listeners went through as they watched various permutations of management run something fresh and potentially wondrous into the ground because they couldn't see past their own noses.

Melina, who knows more about the business of radio than you and I ever will, for reasons it's up to her to reveal, wrote about the final stake in the rotting heart of Air America yesterday. But there is something else going on that has angry Air Americans, specifically Morning Seditionists, coming out of the woodwork like zombies risen from the grave.

As Melina wrote, Danny Goldberg, who is perhaps the person most responsible for wrecking the programming that Air America offered in the early days, must have been feeling pretty guilty lo these last four years (assuming he has a conscience, which is doubtful), because he posted this laughable screed over at Down with Tyranny. Now, here at B@B, we loves us some DWT, but giving space to this revisionist scumbag has to have grown of nothing but the chumminess of two music industry vets and nothing approaching reality.

95 comments later, insiders from Air America in general and Morning Sedition in particular are starting to tell their stories, and they aren't pretty. From original producer Jonathan Larsen (now a producer on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, proving beyond a doubt that living well is the best revenge) to the zany Jim Earl (of Sammy the Stem Cell, Morning Remembrance, and Rapture Watch fame), to the anonymous staffers, the people who were there are using Goldberg's Variations as a springboard to finally, after four years, tell their stories.

WWRL here in New York is showing signs of a revamped drive-time lineup that includes ex-late-AAR-er Jack Rice until 6 PM, followed by, yes, Morning Sedition's straight man, Mark Riley, from 6-8, which would be a not-half-bad lineup if the memories of Randi Rhodes, Marty Kaplan, and Sam Seder weren't still so fresh and raw.

So go read what really happened, then come back and click the audio player in the right-hand sidebar....and listen to the Best Damn Show Ever on Radio as its sounds hopefully haunt Danny Goldberg to madness. Then maybe you'll understand why, after four years, we're still angry.

Still the best.

Here at B@B, we loves us some Keith Olbermann, but this is hilarious:

Christmas Video Blogging: A Very Maron Christmas

Christmas. Ur hearin it wrong:

Christmas Video Blogging: Yeah. What Sarah Said.

Yeah, Santa. What DO you have to do with Jesus anyway?

Sunday Night Comedy:

Tonight one of the local UHF channels that sits at the bottom of the Dish Network channel guide ran a documentary about the Smothers Brothers' battles with the CBS censors during the late 1960s. For all that my everyday speech is still littered with expressions I picked up from The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, I'd forgotten just how subversive and edgy that show was.

I wonder sometimes if Tom and Dick Smothers would have been able to get away with more if they didn't look like the clean-cut college-boy singing duos and trios and quartets that dotted the music landscape in the early 1960s. They looked like college kids and played folk songs like the Kingston Trio, and Tommy Smothers had that whole Village Idiot thing nailed down. But what Smothered - The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour reminded me is that for all that television has changed a big deal, and for all that without shows like the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the all-but-forgotten Great American Dream Machine, there would be no Daily Show or Colbert Report.

Watch these excerpts of segments by the hilariously deadpan Pat Paulsen, lampooning politics in general, health care, Social Security and gun control, and weep at how little has changed:

A lot of talent contributed to the writing of the show, including this guy:

...and some guy who's the very image of Dhani Harrison stopped by once:

Seasons 2 and 3 are out on DVD. You can quick-click to them from the left sidebar.

No one does hilarity like Shatner

Watch this before YouTube takes it down:

It's like Phil Rizzuto on batshit crazy pills.

The best comment on the former governor of Alaska, and the fantasy object of conservative men everywhere, comes from Gawker:

It's like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

And she wrote this speech! In advance, on paper! What does any of it mean? It is amazing. Twenty years ago she could competently descibe a dog race, three years ago she could articulate a position on the abortion issue, and this weekend she composed a resignation speech by throwing culture war stock phrases into a hat and dumping it upside down on a copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Or maybe she, like many of us speculated about George W. Bush, has Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome.

(UPDATE: Embed changed because sure enough, YouTube took the other one down.)

Oh, SNAP!

The only thing more hilarious than listening to Barack Obama and Wanda Sykes smack the wingnuts around for a half-hour last night was listening to the talking heads on cable news beforehand speculating on the potential comic stylings of the new president. After all, what can possibly compete for pure comic gold with yukking it up about not finding weapons of mass destruction while American kids are being blown to pieces by IEDs in Iraq? They all laughed good and hard at that in 2004, didn't they. But Obama stood up last night and proceeded to say to the crowd of hacks and narcissists that populate this affair every year, "Say hello to my little friend":

I knew he was funny -- my kind of funny...the kind of dry, snarky funny that at another time could have gotten him a short-lived show on Air America Radio before Danny Goldberg decided that what the network needs is more middle-aged white guys. I think this gig is better, though perhaps before it's all over he'll WISH he was the host of the one-hour "Baracknophobia" from 2-3 AM on your local Air America affiliate, except where a rerun of "Doing Time with Ron Kuby" is running. But this was some truly fine material -- dry, snarky, with plenty of lines to have Morning Schmoe (™ DCap) Dead Girl in Office Scarborough fanning himself on a fainting couch on tomorrow's show about how mean the President was to such icons of nonpartisanship decency as Dick Cheney and John Boehner. After all, Schmoe pretends to be nonpartisan by saying that although he doesn't like Barack Obama's policies, he likes the man.

Obama was so good, especially his passionate defense of a free press to wind up, that Wanda Sykes was almost unnecessary. For those of us who will vociferously defend our position that Wanda is the funniest woman in America, this was pretty weak Wanda, whose best material is unsuitable for C-SPAN. But while nothing at this event will ever match the brilliant ambush perpetrated by Stephen Colbert in 2006, even tame Wanda is laugh-out-loud funny (even if Joe Scarborough won't think so):

I have to admit, though, that my jaw dropped when she talked about Nancy Pelosi telling Obama and Biden to go out together for a burger. You see, if we're going to get up in arms about assassination talk from the other side which they then dismiss as a joke, it's no better coming from our side. This is an exemption from the "It's OK to knock your own team" rule, especially when we have wingnuts coming out of the woodwork arming themselves to the teeth and talking about mass marches on Washington to "take the government back."

This annual event is kind of peculiar anyway; this mix of self-important press people and Hollywood types. I mean, what the hell is Ashton Kutcher doing at this event? I know he's relatively bright and he's penned the occasional piece for Huffington Post. But seriously....Kelso from That 70's Show? The Punk'd guy? It used to be that no one paid any attention to this event, until Bush decided that his lies (or incompetence, take your pick) were fodder for cocktail party yuks. And perhaps it should go back to that. But for now, it's a Very Big Deal, and even if Wanda Sykes tweaked the smug nattering classes a bit too much for their taste (and called them out on their hypocrisy, saying "You're laughing inside, you know it!"), the Washington Press Correspondents' dinner is here to stay.