Ernie Pesci and Bert deNiro (not safe for work!)

LOLbacklash

This guy is going to change the way we think about cute animals on the Internets.

Hat tip: Morgan.

Windows 7 Update

Courtesy of xkcd:

You think it's easy for an elf to reverse-engineer an iPod?

Santa needs a bailout, too.



National Lampoon, via Reason's Hit and Run blog

Sesame Street Rube Goldberg

via Boing Boing

(previously on enrevanche)

Proposition 8, The Musical

...book and lyrics by Marc Shaiman, with an all-star cast:



Wow, a lot of multimedia around these parts lately. But you gotta admit that was funny.

Hat tip: deVille

Real-life Rube Goldberg machine

Fabulous.


Best Rube Goldberg Ever - Watch more free videos

Hat tip: Greg

OK, this was funny

McCain brought the funny last night on SNL.

• On a purely objective basis, Johnny Mac is funnier than Obama. (Obama is wittier, which is different.)
• Cindy McCain is a hell of a good sport.
• Tina Fey must be very relieved at the prospect of going back to just writing for and appearing in 30 Rock after 4 November.

A willingness to engage in self-deprecating humor is a very becoming trait in a public figure. With a few significant exceptions, conservatives seem to be better at that than liberals.

I wonder why? Not a rhetorical question, I genuinely do.

Nixon, who nobody thinks of as funny, appeared on Laugh-In, which I hope I won't insult by describing it as the Saturday Night Live of its day; LBJ, a scabrously funny man in private (LBJ on lobbyists: "...if you can't eat their steak, drink their whiskey, [enjoy carnal knowledge of] their women and vote against 'em the next morning, you have no business in this business") wouldn't have done it in a million years.

Hedge Fund

On a morning where there's nothing but bloodletting in the financial markets, a little comic relief, courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger?:

Sales Guy v Web Dude

This is good. (Video.)

Tough crowd

Significant arrests for joke-telling probably began in 1933, when “anekdot-telling” is first described as an anti-Soviet activity in the proceedings of the Communist Party at the Central Committee Plenum of January 1933. Matvei Shkiriatov, a Stalinist zealot and future member of the Central Committee, gave a speech which presaged the purges of the Great Terror, warning of “those within our ranks who ... go about clandestinely organising operations against the party”. Among the activities of these unwelcome communists he declared: “I would like to speak of one other anti-Party method of operation, namely, the so-called jokes [anekdoty]. What are these jokes? Who among us Bolsheviks does not know how we fought against Tsarism in the old days, how we told jokes in order to undermine the authority of the existing system? ... [Now] this has also been employed as a keen weapon against the Central Committee of the party.”

As the arrests began, the joke-tellers imagined the following scenario:

A clerk hears laughing behind the door of a courtroom. He opens the door. At the other end of the room the judge is sitting on the podium convulsed in laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asks the clerk.

“I’ve just heard the funniest joke of my life,” says the judge.

“Tell it to me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just sentenced someone to five years’ hard labour for doing that.”

Comedy of terrors (Financial Times, 30 May 2008)

Sesame Street represent

Doubtsourcing

Set mostly in an office in India, "Doubtsourcing" aims to be to the outsourcing world what "Dilbert" has been to the U.S. cubicle set. Making fun of Indian workaholism in one cartoon, a job candidate receives an offer after boasting that he hasn't "seen the sun for 7.5 months."

In another, a U.S. manager criticizes the India team for being slow and uncreative. An Indian worker says the U.S. firm has changed its business model three times in three months, from online dating to insurance to pornography. "You just need to deal with ambiguity better," the U.S. manager says.

[Comic strip author Sandeep] Sood says that though "there's a lack of humor in the outsourcing industry," he finds it very funny.

LA Times: Finding the funny in outsourcing (10 February 2008)

Related: Doubtsourcing

Hat tip: Greg

The Year in Newsbreaks (The New Yorker)

Noted in the nation's press in 2007... this time, from The New Yorker.

Excerpts:

Advertisement in the Battle Creek (Mich.) Enquirer.

Full service hotel looking to expand its existing food operation with a quality Sioux chief. Salary range 25KO, commensurate with experience.

The place must serve a lot of buffalo burgers.

*****

THERE’LL ALWAYS BE ENGLAND

From the Washington Post.

After he was exposed, Lambton told an intelligence officer that he had thrown himself into a “frenzied” round of “gardening and debauchery” to get over the fact that he had lost a three-year battle over the use of his father’s title.

*****

FOR ONCE, WE’RE SPEECHLESS DEPT.

From an advice column in the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal.

For fun and to try to mix this up a little, you two might develop a verbal or visual cue that is subtler than simply asking for sex. For instance when one of you mentions Vice President Cheney, that’s your code.

*****

EVENTS WE DIDN’T ATTEND

From the St. Helena (Calif.) Star.

St. Helena urologist Dr. James Woolley will present the facts on basic bladder health, and Glenn Ratterree from Steves Hardware, will present advice on the basics of do-it-yourself plumbing during a free course in basic home maintenance and a lesson on the challenges of midlife bladder control.

Meet the Beatnix

via John Scalzi, a very funny amalgam of Led Zeppelin and The Beatles.

Country-punk band Dash Rip Rock sometimes performs a Lynryd Skynyrd/Led Zep mashup, creating the ur-song of my youth spent listening to album-oriented rock stations in the American South: "Stairway to Freebird." Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be YouTube video available.

---

Updated and bumped: Stairway to Freebird (mp3), via WFMU's Beware of the Blog (thanks, Chap!)

The best comedic concepts are often the simplest

http://menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com/

How not to discourage meth use

A parent [at a school-sponsored drug education program] asked why anyone would take meth, given all the downside risk and side effects. One of the policemen answered that meth releases 50 times more serotonin in the brain than an orgasm. Then they showed a before and after picture that looked a lot like this one...

So I’m sitting there, doing the calculations in my head: Okay, that’s 4.5 years of meth use, once a day, 365 days in a year, 50 times more serotonin than an orgasm…that’s the equivalent of 80,000 orgasms.

On the downside, your teeth rot out, your skin itches until you scratch it off, you vomit, have withdrawals, possibly burn down the neighborhood, and roll around in your own filth while your life becomes a living Hell. And there is the jail thing.

Still, 80,000 orgasms…

I wanted to raise my hand while the “before and after” pictures were up and ask, “Isn’t that what anyone would look like after 80,000 orgasms?”

Or maybe, "So, on balance, you’re saying it’s totally worth it? Or am I doing the math wrong?"

Why You Can't Take Me Anywhere (Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog)

Bad day at the office

Darth Vader breaks the news about the Death Star to Emperor Palpatine:

Colbert pinch-hits for MoDo

I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert, The New York Times, 14 October 2007

Obituary euphemisms

From this week's edition of the Popbitch newsletter:

Obituary euphemisms
"Free spirit" - unemployable
"Vivacious" - drunk (female)
"A character" - drunk (male)
"Fun loving" - drank more than worked
"Down to earth" - born working class
"Utterly carefree" - senile