Once again it is demonstrated that comedy can say things that people don’t like hearing.

Although I’m afraid I didn’t do much laughing,

The dead-parrot sketch debuted on episode eight of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which aired in Britain on December 7, 1969. The sketch epitomized everything that was striking about the new show: its impatience with the old formal rules, its ability to take good ideas and compress them into diamonds. The car-salesman sketch had been about the absurdity of bad service, but it had attacked that absurdity in a naturalistic way: it started with a plausible situation, and gradually made it sillier. The parrot sketch inverts that approach. It is absurd from the start, but its absurdity represents a compact, dreamlike way of telling the truth. This time the role of the aggrieved customer is taken by Cleese—who plays him not as a straight man but as a Brylcreemed, raincoated weirdo. In the world of Monty Python, even a guy with a valid beef is a lunatic. As for Palin’s salesman, this time his denials of the undeniable have an existential audacity: he is ready to claim, and keep claiming, that the palpably dead parrot is just resting. Cleese, indignantly brandishing the bird’s corpse, is the victim of the ultimate—the archetypal—rip-off; but he remains an Englishman. Nutty as he is, he declines to vault over the desk and punch Palin’s lights out. Language is the only weapon available to him. So his tamped-down rage becomes a torrent of increasingly baroque synonyms for death, which Cleese and Chapman composed with the aid of a thesaurus.

Monty Python’s signature move was to thrust something very salient into the wrong context.

When that outburst of manic poetry is over, the Pythons don’t bother forcing the parrot sketch toward a well-made conclusion. The quest for punch lines bored them. Instead the sketch collapses into a series of bizarre digressions, and finally Cleese’s character turns to the camera and declares that the situation has become “too silly.” And that’s that: we move on to the next item. I concede that there are people who don’t find the parrot sketch funny at all. I know a couple of them personally. They are unmoved by the sight of John Cleese in his raincoat, wielding that stuffed parrot and saying, “It’s bleeding demised.” I know them, but I can’t help them.

More: The Beatles of Comedy - David Free - the Atlantic

The Politics of Comedy: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred

Politics is a dirty, nasty business. Maybe that is why comedians find it so funny.

Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers have carved out a cultural niche with sharp insight, obtuse comedy and nuanced satire.

If it were easy, anyone could do it.

This past April, Jimmy Fallon—the host of NBC’s Late Night and one of the most dexterous impressionists on TV—took his cameras from New York to Chapel Hill to rendezvous with a top-secret collaborator. The show would be filmed onstage at the University of North Carolina, before a live local audience: a boon for Fallon, who counts college students heavily among his viewership. And the news that week—stories about Metta World Peace, a Minnesota artist trying to sell a nude painting of Mitt Romney, and a Florida hunter who mistook his girlfriend for a feral hog—was as much as a comedian could hope for. The nerve-racking part was the guest. For days, Fallon and his staff had been preparing for a figure so influential he could not be directly identified. “Our code name around the office,” Fallon told me recently, “was Bieber.”

On April 24, “Bieber” went live. Fallon ran his monologue on the UNC stage, folding in a couple of site-specific lines (“Duke sucks!”). The crowd, packed and eager, leaped to every punch line. Then the big moment came. “You might have seen this in the news, but President Obama has asked Congress to stop the interest rates on Stafford student loans from going up this summer,” Fallon said. “I want to slow-jam the news—and I’m not the only one.” The rear curtains of the stage swept open, and President Obama strode out, one hand waving high to greet the college audience.

In “slow-jamming the news,” an occasional feature on Fallon’s show, a guest expounds news items to a sultry R&B beat, and Fallon chimes in with singy interjections. (“Really as Barry White as you can get,” he explains.) As the show’s band, the Roots, struck up a groove, Obama started in: “On July 1 of this year, the interest rates on Stafford student loans, the same loans that many of you use to help pay for college, are set to double. That means some hardworking students will be paying about a thousand dollars extra just to get their education. So I’ve called on Congress to prevent this from happening.”

“Awwwww, yeah,” Fallon purred into his microphone, making bedroom eyes at the camera. “Things were heatin’ up inside Congress’s chambers, behind all those closed doors. So the president made a few discreet calls across the aisle. He said, ‘Hey. Let’s get together on this one.’ ” The crowd went wild.

In late June, to Fallon’s astonishment, Congress approved the bill to keep Stafford-loan interest rates from rising. “We were shaking at the morning meeting,” Fallon says. “Everyone had their coffees, and we’re like, ‘Dude! Did you see this? It happened! This is crazy—the slow jam worked!’ “

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‘Seinfeld’ Earned $2.7 Billion Since It Went Off the Air in 1998 - NYPOST.com

Forget law school. Send your kids to comedy camp if you want them to support you in your old age.

“Seinfeld” might be the show about nothing, but it’s also made an incredible $2.7 billion — with a “b” — since it went off the air 12 years ago, according to Time Warner, which owns the series.

That makes “Seinfeld” the most profitable 30 minutes in TV history.

It is rare that TV studios reveal the amounts made by their most successful TV series, but at an investors’ conference late last month, execs spilled the beans about just what a moneymaker the show has been over the past 12 years.

Jerry Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David have an undisclosed ownership stake in the show that has paid them in the hundreds of millions for the reruns of the show.

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Ellen DeGeneres received the Mark Twain Prize for humor Monday night at the Kennedy Center, but the all-star tribute was as much about the joyful comedian’s landmark personal revelation as about her comedic talents.

all i can say is - good for her!

Pop singer Jason Mraz put his praise for Ellen in somewhat awkward verse: ‘In the fight for equality, welcome aboard. We appreciate your comedy, you deserve this award.’ Then he sang a song including a word infrequently heard at the Kennedy Center and guaranteed to be bleeped from the PBS broadcast.

For all the talk of equal rights, DeGeneres is just the fourth woman to receive the Twain Prize in its 15 years, following Whoopi Goldberg, Tomlin and Tina Fey.

read more at wapo…

salon.com

Daniel Tosh’s humor, however, is utterly lacking in grace. The star of Comedy Central’s “Tosh.0″ does not possess the transformative power of his betters, so when he tries to be edgy and transgressive, it tends to fall flat. In April, the unapologetic misogynist encouraged his audience to film themselves touching women softly on their stomachs. I am not quite sure how this encroachment on personal space and ignorance of appropriate boundaries constitutes humor, but it takes all kinds. (I’m also a woman — we are, from what I hear, not funny.) Nonetheless, the incident gave me pause, particularly when his ardent fans actually began filming themselves touching women softly on their stomachs and posting the videos to YouTube. Somehow, they thought this behavior was acceptable because the comic they admired told them so. You’d be amazed what people are willing to do when they are given permission, either implicitly or explicitly.

Given Tosh’s brand of humor and his general history of immature, frattish humor, I wasn’t really surprised when I heard he made inappropriate statements about rape at the Laugh Factory last Friday. Rape jokes are part of his shtick. During his Laugh Factory set, a young woman in the audience yelled, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny.” Tosh is said to have maturely responded, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her …”

What if, indeed.

There’s no better follow-up for a rape joke than a gang rape joke. Because if rape is funny, gang rape is funnier.

(Some of the details are in question. The woman’s account can be found here. The club’s owner quarrels with the story here.)

Rape humor is designed to remind women that they are still not quite equal. Just as their bodies and reproductive freedom are open to legislation and public discourse, so are their other issues. When women respond negatively to misogynistic or rape humor they are “sensitive” and branded as feminist a word that has, as of late, become a catch-all term for, “woman who does not tolerate bullshit.”

nytimes.com

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

Nora Ephron, right, with Meryl Streep on the set of “Julie & Julia,” which Ms. Ephron wrote and directed.