httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQycQ8DABvc
Today is Hegel’s birthday (posts here and here), so that’s as good a time as any to roll out this burnished little chestnut by Monty Python.
TGIF: The Philospher’s Drinking Song
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Category Archives: TGIF
TGIF: “You vicious bastard”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a23irJlpjT4
No case needs to be made for the genius of John Cleese’s portrayal of Basil Fawlty as a study in anger mismanagement, and anybody who knows Fawlty Towers will have their favorite moment or two. But I defy anyone to come up with a funnier moment than this one from “Gourmet Night.” Technically, it’s a little masterpiece, something that’s nothing on paper but brilliant in execution: a stalled car, a single stationary camera, a flood tide of verbal abuse from someone who, for a good portion of the sequence, we can hear but cannot see. And then the payoff. . .
If this whets your appetite, you can watch the full episode here.
TGIF: “Absolutely Fabulous”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiG30xF9nAs
“The Last Shout,” part 1
The great Jennifer Saunders as Eddie Monsoon and Joanne Lumley as Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous.
The other side of the Second Wave. And meanly, savagely funny, in that particularly British way.
The rest of the episode after the jump.
TGIF: “The worst penis, probably, in the world”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qOaZ4CQqKI
Ricky Gervais and Louis C.K. — together at last. (Video not embedded: click on the image and then hit the YouTube link)My previous posts on “Andy Warhol” and on “Frye and Obscenity” are good preparation for this master class in the liberatingly obscene element in comedy: Ricky Gervais here makes an appearance on Louis C.K‘s new show on HBO. (Ricky’s father was a Canadian veteran of the Second World War, if an appeal to patriotism might help.)
And, of course, I come armed with a relevant quote from Frye:
Comedy is moral insofar as it expands the range of response; obscenity, for instance, is profoundly moral. (CW 15, 28)
“Obscenity is profoundly moral.” So that’s that, then.
After the jump, a clip from Ricky’s show, Extras, in which Kate Winslet, playing herself playing a nun, provides some sound advice on playing with oneself during phone sex.
TGIF: Jane Austen’s Fight Club
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2PM0om2El8
“The first rule of Fight Club: One never mentions Fight Club.”
TGIF: Russell Peters
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ&feature=related
Indian accent
It was hard not to be moved by the testimonials for the Centre for Comparative Literature this past week. Olga Bazilevica, for example, cited the Centre as representing everything she’s come to love about this country: our peaceful diversity, our generous expressions of tolerance.
Nice.
But it’s Friday and this is our comedy slot, so let’s laugh a little at Canada (affectionately, of course) by way of our hottest standup comedian, Russell Peters — the guy who, even though he is of Indian descent, has the name of a WASP banker.
After the jump, Peters on the white Canadian accent, racial mixing, and gay Indians.
TGIF: University Funding
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E
From an episode of Yes, Minister, the perennial problem of adequate university funding.
TGIF: Three by Andy Kaufman
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C570byQCLpI
Mighty Mouse
Andy Kaufman died of cancer 26 years ago at the tragically young age of 35. These performances are more than 30 years old but they still retain their liberating strangeness: mime-singing the refrain from a Mighty Mouse record, reading The Great Gatsby to an audience that doesn’t want to be read The Great Gatsby, and conducting a variety show in a sort of Mediterranean/Aegean gibberish, and then leading his audience through a sing-along in the same language.
TGIF: “A Man’s Gotta Eat”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJZCHZ2wV7U
Now that the pride of Nova Scotia’s Trailer Park Boys really is history, it just gets easier and easier to identify the very best episodes. “A Man’s Gotta Eat” has gotta be one of them: “Drunk and pissing on a dumpster behind The King of Donair.” Sigh. They just don’t write dialogue like that anymore.
TGIF: “My Gay Son”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifUQq5p5i2g
Catherine Tate and her gay son
Sure, Toronto looks like the country’s just undergone a military coup d’etat, but soon the jackbooted security, the concrete barriers and the general misery of the good people of Toronto will be wisked aside as Gay Pride gets seriously underway. Do you think our prime minister and his po-faced cohort might stick around for that? It’d no doubt do them some good to appreciate that there are men in this country who can dress up like cowboys too but without any intention of getting on a horse.