I think it’s very easy to misjudge Patrice O’Neal as a comic, I certainly never expected to like him as much as I do. But the first time I saw Patrice perform live, I had that moment when you lean forward in your chair, transfixed. I had the same sensation when he did his HBO Special a couple years ago. He’s brutally funny - honest in ways that make a lot of people uncomfortable. One of my favorite parts of his act is how loose it is. I’m sure he has an act built in his head, but he’s one of the few comics I’ve ever seen who can create the illusion that everything he’s saying is off the top of his head. It makes the funny stuff all the more surprising because he appears to have just thought of it - he could be surprising himself.
In the spirit of the age, Patrice O’Neal has hooked up with some white people to do a podcast. It wisely appears to be more about the making of a sketch than a sketch itself - Patrice riffing with his comedy buddies, cracking on their ideas and slips of the tongue. The second installment is below, featuring Patrice and his sketch players working out a sketch about cockfights. And they ain’t talking chickens. Do I need to say it’s NSFW?
The point Patrice O’Neal makes about not being clever about it reminds me a lot of what Louis CK said when he was working on Lucky Louie. Dancing around a topic rather than bluntly dealing with it comedically. (BTW, I dig For Your Imagination’s player - the bar using a condensed picture of the video to create a timeline. It makes very easy to seek and find parts of it.)
Super Deluxe debuts the first installment of “Derek and Simon” - the Bob Odenkirk directed and produced series. “Derek and Simon” started off as a TV Show for HBO, turned into a pair of shorts for Sundance after the network failed to pick it up. I like how “Derek and Simon” has a Maxim-ish bros-before-hos feel and then turns into something far more nuanced and uncomfortable. The silent movie style titles are also right—for a reason I can’t put a finger on.
I love how the buddy “forgot” that little detail about his girlfriend - it looks like a regular world, but logic doesn’t get in the way of a good joke (and even becomes the foundation for another).
Among the other changes of the redesign, one thing I’ll be doing with Dead-Frog is opening it up to voices besides my own. Here’s the first of those voices, Mo Diggs talking about the intersection of comedy and technology today.
The list of categories for the 11th annual Webby Awards speaks volumes about what flies on the web. To boot: two categories for comedy (series and shorts) and one category for drama. The bias does not signal a sophomoric groupthink amongst academy members; for every Matt Groening, there is an Arianna Huffington. This reflects the web’s proclivity for sharp sketches and brilliantly executed pranks rather than ruminations on death or tone poems about alienation. College Humor is huge; college drama is nowhere to be found except Vassar.
That and a buck fifty gets you a subway token in Metropolis until you look at television. NBC’s Thursday night comedy lineup got its lowest ratings since 1987. 30 Rock gets mauled by CSI and Grey’s Anatomy. Bob Sassone of TV Squad suggests that NBC make Thursday night drama night to stay afloat. Things obviously do not look good for prime-time television comedy.
The shift becomes apparent when you look at the hit prime-time comedies of the past five decades
50s: I Love Lucy
60s: Gilligan’s Island
70s: Diff’rnt Strokes
80s: Family Ties
90s: Seinfeld, Friends
This decade: Should have been Arrested Development; should have been The Office.
So the Internet makes us laugh, the TV makes us cry.
What about lonelygirl15? Isn’t that a big Internet drama. If only it were about the content and not the production; viewers dropped when they found out that it was a fictional narrative not a genuine voice of repressed despair.
Why is more serious fare a tougher sell online? I can think of several reasons.
Production values: a dramatic work with a z-movie budget will come off as pretentious
The workplace: most people, depressed and numbed by their jobs, do not want to open their e-mails and watch Method acting
Relatively objective response:Acceptable TV and Funny or Die run on the premise that funny videos survive and unfunny videos languish in justified obscurity. Drama deals with more nuanced emotions. Imagine voting on the value of Lost or The Wire after watching five minutes?
Time: “Dick in a Box” takes five minutes of your life. Hamlet doesn’t.
OK, but why is it harder for television comedy than internet comedy? The Internet, unlike TV, delivers long tail laughs. Different people laugh at different things. For years we’ve pretended to laugh at each other’s shows. But office ladies find funny cat photos online, boomer grampas are finding old Laugh In clips, hipsters are laughing at the latest alt-comedy video. Their paths rarely cross. Edna, the curmudgeonly old lady from accounts payable, never goes on The Onion, opting for all the Ziggy cartoons her heart desires. Now do you expect all these different types of people to find the same show funny? No. Is TV aggressively pursuing all these demos? No.
Drama brings in the numbers because an hour a week is the best growth rate for character development ever conceived. An hour a week online is anathema to web surfers; who wants to spend all that time on an online hospital soap?
Of course there’s hope for both genres in their respective fields. A comedy with the mass appeal of The Simpsons may make its way to the airwaves and as home video equipment improves, the quality of online dramas will impress more viewers. So there’s hope for College Drama after all.
The second episode of the Michael Showalter‘s Michael Showalter Showalter just went up at College Humor this week. His guest this time is his fellow State compatriot Michael Ian Black. Click on the pic below to watch:
This and the previous episode featuring Zach Galifianakis are wonderfully squirmy comedy. Though the uncomfortable interviewing is fun, the faux lights-off off-camera stuff gives me the most joy.
The Michael Showalter Showalter is a bit of an interesting direction for College Humor, which has a kind of (I think sometimes self-admitted) rap for being lowbrow. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair - it takes a lot of intelligence (or at least, street smarts) to do stupid stuff right. But this new webshow is an expansion of a comedic voice that’s probably a bit more flexible to begin with. It’s also quite telling that they jump in with one new show rather than dozen. Even with College Humor’s insane traffic, how could you properly service all of them?
Over the holidays, I dropped by the Super Deluxe offices (also home to Adult Swim) and checked out what they’ve been working on. I’ve been skeptical about a great deal of broadband comedy, but from what I saw these guys get it. I don’t know if their bosses at Turner are happy with how they’re spending their money, but I am.
They just launched today. Here’s what they’re starting with: the first episode of “Professor Brothers” which tells the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, the latter being a place “named after an even weirder move.” It’s by an Austin cartoonist named Brad Neely.
You should check out Brad’s other show “Babycakes” as well. Right now.
And any of you Wonder Showzen fans might want to follow the “more” link, because there’s something there called “Y’all So Stupid” which will probably make the rest of the day seem unstable and fragile.
You may remember last month when a Pauly Shore beatdown in a comedy club was quickly revealed as a hoax. It came off to many as a little desperate. Pauly recently posted on his myspace profile the “making of” the hoax, which, in my mind, kind of redeems it a little. A little. Here’s the video:
One thing that warms me to the attempt a bit more is that you can see in the new video that Pauly is aware enough of how it has to look in order for it to work, quickly chiding the audience not to laugh when he gets hit. That still didn’t stop them in the final event of course and it was one of the small tip offs in the original that things were entirely right. It’s a little fascinating to watch to see how a little detail can spoil the prank. And as a lesson that if you aren’t Andy Kaufman or Sacha Baron Cohen, you might want to stick to your punchlines and catchphrases.
There’s two interesting factors to this announcement. The first, unlike Motherload from Comedy Central and LaughLab from TBS, Super Deluxe has no ties to any cable channel. It’s living on its own merits and doesn’t have a second master to make happy. Particularly meaning there’s no existing standard & practices to limit content so they can focus on being the web rather than being TV. Almost all the successes for web comedy I can think of (The Onion, College Humor, etc.) have come not from big media but from the outside. This may be a great way to mimic that ethos but with the tentacles of a big media site.
And the second is that’s it’s being developed in the same offices as Adult Swim, and if they’re following that model, it can only mean good things. One point mentioned in the release is that their expecting the site’s “creative freedom” to be one of the main attractions for talent. If the leash is truly long for talent, that will lead to creators coming to do innovative material specifically for Super Deluxe rather than just giving them something they couldn’t get a network to buy. Experimentation with a budget, even a small one, might be the tipping point for a lot of comedic talent who’ve been ignoring the web.
As far as that talent, there’s no names mentioned in the release. But previously, Eugene Mirman mentioned he was working on some films for an upcoming Turner site. If Eugene is a marker for what they want this site to be, then it could be amazing. I’ve heard rumblings of other names but nothing I can confirm. Also, no launch date. So there’s more to come, I’m sure.
Update: There’s is a url however, and it’s superdeluxe.com. You should check it out - turn on your pop-ups. Don’t worry, they’re very playful.
Mike Judge tells MTV he's kinda warmed up to the idea of doing a live action Beavis and Butt-Head movie. He just animated a short segment with the duo for the upcoming "The Animation Show."
Andrew Dice Clay: "I think girl comics are doing better than guy comics today. They're more exciting than guy comics." Later, tells interviewer about a girl coming over who a "10-and-a-half." (AV Club)
The good: CBS adds two sitcoms to schedule. The bad: Mike Birbiglia's show appears to have not been picked up. You can watch previews of what they did order.
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