Comedy Geeks

i love good comedy and loathe bad comedy - defining both as i wish. i do like analysing what it is that makes certain jokes funny esp. on The Simpsons but my enthusiasm/obsession doesn't stretch to wanting to argue with people on sotcaa about why My Family/Spaced is the absolute nadir or our culture or somesuch.

i have been working on a major Comedy Geek project lately tho i.e. a list of post-Comic Strip British comedy performers running vertically down and horizontally across the page like a mileage chart or football fixture list, the meeting point being the programme they first or most famously appeared in together (ideally at the same time)

i have pretty much already done this on ILE of course

That site looks scary, like if ILM turned to the Dark Side.

I don't know. Most jokes DON'T hold up to scrutiny, and they're not supposed to. I always get mad at my dad when he points out the incongruities of my jokes.

it's a mystery to me -- someone like will ferrell who seems to be making it up as he goes along i find hilarious, but i can't stand eddie izzard.

Which seemed like very good advice.

their messageboard included an incredibly unpleasant thread about myself and everett true, when we launched careless talk costs lives, about how, as thriving members of the music press (of course, ET and i were barely making a living/getting published at the time, because this WASN'T ACTUALLY TRUE) we were actually part of the problem we were trying to cure. it soon became clear that the SOTCAA readership were actually just interested in rereading the NME of their youth and delighting in andrew collins' bon mots about Carter USM.

some of the accusations thrown at ET and I there were hilarious in just how off-the-point they were.

I hate them.

When I was in middle school I NEVER bought music albums; only comedy albums. I had 5 or 6 George Carlin albums, all of Adam Sandler's albums, 2 Chris Rock albums, and a giant Monty Python box set.

I had tons of SNL Best ofs on VHS, a huge amount of Def Comedy Jam tapes I specially ordered, and I would stay up late at night to watch old SNLs and SCTVs.

Ive seen every episode of In Living Color, Kids in the Hall, at least a dozen seasons of SNL, every Monty Python movie and Flying Circus episode you can rent.

I could relate to comedians more than anybody. They were rock stars in my eyes. The reason I'm into literature at all is I started going to Borders for the sole purpose of buying books from the "humor" section. I bought Steve Martin's book, Jon Stewart's book, Drew Carrey's book, Chris Rock's book any book by a comedian I could. I wanted to get into their heads. I didn't discriminate between good and bad comedians (although I did have comedians I enjoyed and comedians I didn't; it didn't matter however, I wanted to know how all of them thought.)

For my bar mitzvah, I had to do a research project (it was a secular-humanistic judaisim kind of thing) and I did it on the Marx brothers.

They shaped my life profoundly and I don't care if that makes me a comedy geek.

Dude, my little brother did this. His project was on Benny Goodman, and he presented it at like this group secular bar mitzvah. I was kind of creeped out. I'm glad that someone else knows about this.

A small group of my friends get together about 3x annually and watch comedy film shorts from the silents to the '50s. (Acquired mostly through bootlegs and swaps. In one case, guy who video'd one off an Amsterdam museum screening.) We used to do this on celluloid/projector up til about 10 years ago.

Oh, you're right. But I also can't take anti-comedy geeks too. The type that completely lacks any sense of irony and always complains that comedic movies are "stupid."

So you could have been one of the people who helped me out when I was wondering what to buy my brother for Christmas. Not directly, but one of the Lost Threads during December was one about great comedy albums. I bought him a couple of the early Cosby ones and he was very happy.

That site is actually an archive of old posts from a now no longer existing forum. The SOTCAA lot now post on the Cook'd & Bomb'd board.

Incidentally, their new site has a fascinating article on Sir Christopher Mayhew, the member of parliment who took mescaline in front of a BBC film crew as an experiment in the 1950's.

Chers penis wrote:
Forgive me but i have to ask, what is SOTCAA?

Imagine if Richard Littlejohn swallowed a Blackadder box set.