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The reason people like @graeyalien are funnier than “twitter comedians” is because their tweets operate in two more dimensions. They consider who is speaking the tweet, and they consider whether the tweet looks funny. They create a character, and they apply small systematic derangements of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization appropriate to that character.
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I grew up with the anti apartheid thing being a huge focus of debate.
It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way.
We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.
A few years ago I watched a documentary about life in Palestine.
There’s a section where a UN dignitary of some kind comes to do a photo opportunity outside a new hospital.
The staff know that it communicates nothing of the real desperation of their position, so they trick her into a side ward on her way out.
She ends up in a room with a child who the doctors explain is in a critical condition because they don’t have the supplies to keep treating him.
She flounders, awkwardly caught in the bleak reality of the room, mouthing platitudes over a dying boy.
The filmmaker asks one of the doctors what they think the stunt will have achieved.
He is suddenly angry, perhaps having just felt at first hand something he knew in the abstract. The indifference of the world.
“She will do nothing,” he says to the filmmaker. Then he looks into the camera and says: “Neither will you”.
I cried at that and promised myself that I would do something. Other than write a few stupid jokes I have not done anything. Neither have you.
It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way.
We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.
A few years ago I watched a documentary about life in Palestine.
There’s a section where a UN dignitary of some kind comes to do a photo opportunity outside a new hospital.
The staff know that it communicates nothing of the real desperation of their position, so they trick her into a side ward on her way out.
She ends up in a room with a child who the doctors explain is in a critical condition because they don’t have the supplies to keep treating him.
She flounders, awkwardly caught in the bleak reality of the room, mouthing platitudes over a dying boy.
The filmmaker asks one of the doctors what they think the stunt will have achieved.
He is suddenly angry, perhaps having just felt at first hand something he knew in the abstract. The indifference of the world.
“She will do nothing,” he says to the filmmaker. Then he looks into the camera and says: “Neither will you”.
I cried at that and promised myself that I would do something. Other than write a few stupid jokes I have not done anything. Neither have you.
Ducklings
Piss piss piss marines pissing on the corpses of dead Afghans. I keep thinking about S02E11 of Louie, with the duckling. I tried so hard not to cry. How is it that this season is even blacker and more surreal? He surprises me every time. By the end of that episode my tears were falling when I saw that it was dedicated to Tim Hetherington. I remembered this beautiful dedication to Tim’s memory and that raw day.
Links to two great posts I’ve read recently about Louis C.K. and his comedy and television show.
The rough magic of “Louie” In its own quiet way, the brilliant second season of Louis C.K.’s sitcom goes where no show has gone before by Matt Zoller Seitz (don’t click through if you haven’t watched Season 2 yet and want to avoid spoilers).
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I also want to report that in support of the Occupy Wall Street protesters I sent an email to my cousin who is a stockbroker. It basically said, “Give us our country back and then kill yourself.” I’m not sure how he will take it. I haven’t talked to him since we were 14. I am also beginning to write ‘Fuck You!’ on all of my deposit slips. I am planning to say ‘fuck you’ at everything in my house that is made by a corporation on the stock exchange. That seems overwhelming. I am dreading that. I might stand in my yard and say ‘fuck you’ at the house. We’ll see. Baby steps.
Zach Galifianakis
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There’s this one celebrity, Rosie O’Donnell, a talk show host, and she said this: “I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, but I know it’s full of terrorists, speaking as a mother.” So what is this “speaking as a mother” then? Is that a euphemism for “talking out of my arse”? “Suspending rational thought for a moment”? As a rational human being, Al-Qaeda are a loose association of psychopathic zealots who could be rounded up with a sustained police investigation. But speaking as a parent, they’re all eight foot tall, they’ve got lasers under their moustaches, a huge eye in their foreheads and the only way to kill them is to NUKE every country that hasn’t sent us a Christmas card in the the last 20 years!! “Speaking as a mother”.
Reggie Watts on CONAN
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A ‘diffused parodic sense’ is everywhere. The culture is flooded with ironic self-reflexivity and imitations of imitations: travesties, spoofs, skits, lampoons, pastiches, quotations, samplings, appropriations, repurposings. This has happened at the low end (television commercials that are parodies of television commercials) and the high (postmodern fiction). … When everything is quasi-parodic, when everything presents itself with a wink of self-conscious exaggeration, then it may be that parody is finished as the kind of genre you can represent within the confines of an Oxford Book. It has become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. They paved parodies, put up a parking lot. Even the puns are ostentatiously dumber.
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Sometimes I’ll do something and I say to myself, ‘That is so Raven.’ And then, other times I’ll do something and I’ll be like, ‘That was not very Raven.’
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If you read my blog you know I’m a pilates freak, and by pilates I mean waffles.
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Here your Prime Minister has an approval rating of 75%… which is—what’s he doing?! Nobody ever gets 75%! Is he coming ‘round at night, with a pot roast, touching you on the knee and telling you that you’ve lost weight? What’s going on?! This is madness, nobody gets 75%! Not even when you’re madly in love with somebody and you’re both fucking each other’s brains out do you give each other 75%! You’ve got to hold a bit back, keep the other person guessing, you know? Keep it at a steady 40…
“I’m sorry, I can’t tonight. That guy totally eviscerated me. My penis is totally recessed.”
“What?”
“When I was a little kid I used to like to push my penis in to make it look like it disappeared. Today that happened all by itself.”
My future husband. I told rumoko on Twitter I wanted to marry Zach Galifianakis and he replied, “Me too. I want to BE him. And then marry myself and have my babies. And then marry them. To each other. #SHAUNARMY”
My marriage proposal to Zach is clearly superior because it doesn’t involve INCEST.
Zach GALIFIANAKIS
| Me: | I borrowed out The Hangover. I'm going to watch it later. |
| Sister: | Oh, I've seen that! It's really funny. |
| Me: | Cool. It's got that guy I love in it. Zach Gala..Galin...Galinaifaki. |
| Sister: | Who? |
| Me: | The bearded guy? His name is Zach Galnifakas. |
| Sister: | Bearded guy? Oh, the bearded guy! Wait, there isn't a bearded guy. |
| Me: | Yes, there is. The bearded guy. Zach Galanada. |
| Sister: | Oh, you mean the fat guy? |
| Me: | He has a name, you know. It's Zach Galifinada. |
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Whenever I’m with a woman I whisper softly into her ear, “Touch my vagina,” and she’s like, “What!” and I’m like, “That’s what you’re supposed to say.
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There was one episode that never aired where we went to a real KKK rally. I got to ask the grand wizard of the KKK if he’d ever seen Big Momma’s House 3, which was probably the highlight of my career.
