Roger L. Simon: Seinfeld, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times: Scenes from the Culture War

...Speaking of liberal grumps, I was shocked to learn on the same day that they have turned on one of their icons — Jerry Seinfeld — who opined in a Buzzfeed interview:

"Funny is the world I live in. You’re funny, I’m interested. You’re not funny, I’m not interested. I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that. But everyone else is kind of, with their calculating — is this the exact right mix? I think that’s — to me it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC-nonsense."

More HERE

Safety Last! starring Harold Lloyd

Harold Lloyd was one of the great trio of early film comedians, along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Lloyd's movies were filled with incredible slapstick and stunts, with Lloyd doing almost all his own stunt work. Making it all the more amazing was that he was missing the thumb and index finger on his right hand, which was covered up by a special prosthetic glove he used when on camera.

An interesting aside about Lloyd is that following his movie stardom, he became a cheesecake photographer as a hobby, his subjects including Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page.

Safety Last! is probably Lloyd's best known silent movie, and there are some images in it you are sure to recognize. Enjoy and have a happy 2014!

Why the US really cancelled the lunar landing program

In space, no one can hear you fart...

Thai Security Pants prevent rape

Modern Birth Control: Gilbert Gottfried scares your children into permanent sexual abstinence

Funny stuff...

Eddie Murphy returns to Arsenio Hall

In case you didn't catch this from a couple of weeks ago...

The Toronto Star and Daniel Dale's lawsuit against Rob Ford is too implausible to make good fiction

When I used to work in Hollywood for a production company that's films garnered a slew of major Oscar nominations, one of my jobs as a Creative Executive was to decide whether or not to recommend screenplays for production and to write notes on them.

With the news that The Toronto Star's City Hall reporter Daniel Dale is planning, with the enthusiastic support of his employer, to sue Toronto Mayor Rob Ford for libel in a lawsuit of dubious merit, an analogous thought occurred to me, particularly after reading this in The Torontoist:

Dale will continue covering municipal politics, he also explains. “With the full support of the Star, I will stay on the City Hall beat while pursuing this action… I can easily imagine the mayor and his brother attempting to turn the tables on the Star and calling for me to take a leave of absence…I will not let this affect my job. I will not be bullied off of my beat.

I thought of my reaction if I had received a screenplay in which part of the plot involved a City Hall reporter, for a newspaper with the largest circulation in a major city, suing a mayor for libel and continuing to cover the City Hall beat while pursuing the suit.

The ensuing conversation in that imaginary scenario would have gone something like this:

ME: The gags need to be punched up a bit, but on the whole it's a pretty good premise for a comedy. 

WRITER: Comedy? This is a serious political drama. 

ME: I love your sense of humor! It's great, we've got the John Goodman-type regular guy slob, and all the stuck-up elitists are out to get him, like King Ralph, but at City Hall. But seriously, we need some more gags with the reporter and the mayor encountering each other. Oh, and that flaky female reporter that made a name for herself by stalking the mayor, I think her motivation should be that she has this sexual fixation on him, like she's a chubby chaser or something. Here's a scene you might want to consider: maybe she could corner him in private and flash her beaver and demand he eat her out. She could say something like, "You look like you know how to eat a lot of pussy!" And he's squirming to get away and says,"I've got plenty to eat at home!" 

WRITER: You don't understand! I mean it, this is a serious political drama about an oppressed reporter seeking justice from an evil politician! 

ME: Seriously???

WRITER: Yes! My sympathies are completely with the newspaper and its reporters.* 

ME: Okay. You realize that changes everything. Here's why that's not going to work. First off, you've got who are the villains and who is the hero mixed up. You have this guy who was elected, and he's this silly doofus who tells ridiculous lies about his personal life, but when it comes to serving the public, is scrupulously honest. The guy even coaches underprivileged kids and takes them into his own home. And that's your villain. 

On the other side, you have a newspaper run by hypocritical snobs who support a corrupt government that misappropriated billions of dollars in public funds. And they lie about this mayor character, they hate him mainly because he's not part of their "in" crowd, they obsessively stalk and harass him, and support every undemocratic effort they can think of to get him out of office.  And those are supposed to be your heroes?? 

WRITER: But this terrible mayor has made the city a laughingstock!


ME: That's pretty harmless, and again, it's what makes this all more of a comedy.

WRITER: But the real drama comes when this detestable mayor slanders one of the hero reporters by implying he's a pedophile, potentially destroying his life!! 

ME: Yeah. Well, here's your problem with that. The way you describe it, in the first place, the Mayor never said he was a pedophile, he was talking more about his own state of mind when he heard that some guy was peeping in his back yard. In fact, this mayor character explicitly says he doesn't know if the reporter was taking pictures of his kids. He was talking about how a father feels when he hears someone might be invading his privacy and talking pictures of his young kids. That doesn't sound like slander to me and there's no threat to the reporter's reputation because quite reasonably, nobody takes seriously the possibility that the reporter could actually be a pedophile.


WRITER: No! Wait, you're wrong about something! I never had the reporter peeping in the back yard!


ME: Alright, then here's where you've got some more problems with your storyline. After a neighbor calls him, the mayor comes charging out to confront the reporter, who freaks out and runs away.


WRITER: That's right, the Mayor is a bully!


ME: Okay, so let's assume your reporter never peeps in the mayor's back yard. How does the mayor know he's there? Why would a neighbor call the mayor to tell him someone is walking around on public land? The only way your story makes sense is if, even if he wasn't taking pictures of it,  he was at least peeping in the mayor's back yard. I still think you should give some thought to the comedy angle. Maybe have the reporter be a bit like Jim Carrey's character in The Cable Guy...


WRITER: No! It's not a comedy and no, the reporter was never standing on cinder blocks and peeking in the mayor's back yard!!


ME: Well, it's your story.


WRITER: That's right! I think every decent, social justice-seeking person in the audience is going to identify with the crusading newspaper and its heroic journalists!


ME: Interesting. The way I read it, in your story, the only people you've got siding with your newspaper are pompous douchebags and sanctimonious nitwits. But aside from that, we get to the most blatant problem with your story...


WRITER: Which is?


ME: Well, while this reporter is suing the mayor, he still is doing City Hall coverage for the newspaper.


WRITER: Yes, so?


ME: So? So that's completely implausible. There's no way a real newspaper could ever allow that to happen. It would undermine any shred of credibility even as biased a newspaper that you've written about could even pretend to have. I mean, how could there even be a pretense of objectivity and fair journalism when you allow a guy who is suing the mayor to be writing City Hall coverage!? It's like committing seppuku as far as all credibility goes. There's no way an audience would believe that even a third-rate rag of a newspaper would do that.


WRITER: That's the way I've written the story and that's the way I'm keeping it. So when will I hear about whether we go into production?


ME: Don't call us, we'll call you. 

* Actually, this is the point where I would have thought I was dealing with a lunatic and would have edged the meeting to a quick conclusion.

Holy Shit! Charlie Manson has an environmental charity in California!

While checking out some of the links on the groovy blog, Blazing Cat Fur, I came across an item about Charlie Manson being newly engaged to a 25 year old woman. The iconic Manson is a fascinating and instructive case of the weirdness that has permeated popular culture in many ways over the last few decades. People make fun of monstrous characters, but even within the scope of the modern zeitgeist, Manson remains unique.

Like many other demented killers who claim a higher purpose, Manson was an ideologue. He was responsible for the vicious, senseless murders of innocent people and yet he is one of the few such killers that we can simultaneously invoke either or both as a joke and an embodiment of evil. Yes, we can make Hitler jokes, but it's often considered to be of such bad taste that you know someone is going to be seriously offended. Che Guevara was a sociopathic murderer, but unlike Manson, admiring the Cuban totalitarian still has a great deal of cachet among, and is taken seriously by, legions of the pathologically stupid. 

But Manson, for a long time, has almost universally transcended the realm of the taboo into comedy.

One of the funniest things ever done on TV was The Ben Stiller Show's parody of Lassie, replacing the famous, devoted Collie with the infamous, depraved psychopath.

So after reading the article through Blazing Cat Fur and the links associated with it, I decided to investigate (i.e. goof around on the Internet)  a bit further, since it's grim, cold and wet outside, and I'm fueled up on some delicious Bloody Marys (which, to my credit, I make extremely well).

During that inquiry, imagine my surprise to learn that Charlie Manson has become an environmentalist guru!

Manson`s acolytes, in his name and in tribute to him, have an environmental non-profit set up in California called ATWA (Air-Trees-Water-Animals).

While a bit startled at that thought, still, the physical idea of Manson as an environmentalist had a strangely familiar look.

One of these guys is a narcissistic cult leader
and the other is Charlie Manson

I guess after a while, all these environmental guru/cult leaders start to look alike.

According to the ATWA website, "Charlie noticed that each time he got out of jail, the natural part of the world would be more and more degraded to make room for so-called human progress..."

Like David Suzuki, Manson has been outspoken about the perils of Global Warming. I suppose one way to make sure those awful humans don't infringe on the environment too much is to have your followers slaughter them.

Manson evidently still has a lot of groupies, some of whom maintain his facebook fan page, which has over 11,000 followers. (Update - That Manson facebook fan page has since been removed, but he has a closed group of admirers who number over 1600.)

Weirder still, it turns out contributions to Charlie Manson`s legal trust are tax deductible.

If you donate $25 ($35 outside of the USA), they'll even send you a print of a drawing by Manson called Dragon.

DRAGON by the noted contemporary artist and murdering mental-case, Charlie Manson

Speaking of idiotic use of taxes, it's actually a lot better than most of the stuff that has received Canada Council grants for far more than 100 times that amount. I'd be tempted to get one, except for the problem that even as a joke, knowing I've helped out Charlie Manson would be a bit more than even I can stomach.

Septuagenarians to reunite for comedy tour

The five surviving members of Monty Python are getting back together!

And if you don't like it, you can complain to the man in the video below:




h/t Marvin W.

"They're all going to laugh at you!" Toronto's loony left goes full-on Carrie's mom

Five Feet of Fury's Kathy Shaidle has been saying for weeks now that the pathetic, insecure loony left in Toronto has been acting like Carrie's Mom. These of course are people who are pathologically obsessed with how other people think about them, and they believe their worst fear, that they are being laughed at, has come true.

The belief that Rob Ford's troubles reflect directly on them is something that would only go on within diseased minds.

Yesterday, at a sparsely attended anti-Ford rally at Toronto's City Hall, in which the media almost outnumbered the protesters, Kathy's Carrie's Mom comment was fully realized.

A protester named Linda Keigher furiously, bitterly seethed into a bullhorn in front of the two and a half dozen or so assembled malcontents that:

"The world is talking about us, they're laughing at us, and they're finding it to be very funny!"

Oh, the horror!

Actually, I'm finding it pretty funny too. It's something I can share a laugh about with friends who aren't from Toronto. When they ask, "so why is his popularity going up?" it's an easy answer. "Because of the other morons we'd have to choose from if we get rid of Ford."

A couple of weeks before things blew up with the latest Ford brouhaha, the Mayor went on an excursion to Austin, Texas to find ways of emulating their success as a live-music hub. Ford has accomplished something better now, making Toronto a global center of live comedy, and all his stupid opponents do is gripe!

Take a look at the idiotic, petulant, juvenile behavior of the rest of his Toronto City Council opponents when Ford spoke a couple of days ago. Like spoiled 8 year-olds, as a group, they decided to turn their back on him.

This is more disgraceful than any behavior I've seen from Ford in his role as a public official and it's completely typical of the half-wits we have sitting as Ward representatives in Toronto. Why would no other media show this picture that reveals the real face of Toronto's hateful, insecure, self-obsessed, would-be ruling class? Because if they did, they know they'd be laughed at even more.

For them, nothing could be worse than that.

Remembering PJ Torokvei: Comedy Genius Behind 'WKRP' Was Transgender Trailblazer

Torokvei in
the made-in-Canada 1977 TV spy series,
"The New Avengers"

Producer Stan Brooks recalls how the screenwriter, who died July 3 at age 62, revealed his plans to become a woman: “I was hoping for Christie Brinkley; I fear I'm heading toward Bea Arthur.”

PJ Torokvei, a Canadian-born comedy writer and producer who decided at age 50 to become a woman, died as a result of complications from liver failure on July 3 at the age of 62. Torokvei, whose name was originally Peter, was an alum of Second City and SCTV, and went on to serve as a producer and the head writer ofWKRP in Cincinnati (1979-1982), for which she and her colleagues received two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series. She also co-wrote the films Real Genius (1985), Back to School(1986), Caddyshack II (1988) and Guarding Tess (1994). She is survived by an ex-wife, a son, a daughter and grandchildren.

More at The Hollywood Reporter 

Rob Ford helps raise Toronto's international profile

The self-obsessed left will be driven into histrionic fits over this segment on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

But even as a Ford supporter, I find this pretty funny (and as they say in Showbiz, "there's no such thing as bad publicity") :

Fun with Internet trolls

Obviously, I should find better things to do, but I decided to waste time again on twitter today.  As some wit once said about the Internet - if you were talking about it in the past, you might say 'someday, we will have something that will let you communicate with anyone in the world instantly and access the sum total of human knowledge, and we'll use it to look at funny pictures of cats and pick fights with strangers.' Well, I was involved in some of that this afternoon.

I retweeted a comment by Ezra Levant about the apparent hypocrisy of the Toronto Star's outrage over the, ahem, ...alleged crack cocaine use by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford:

Then for reasons unknown, someone named Werner Patels decided to include me in his reply to Ezra.

The name sounded vaguely familiar. Werner, as a quick google search revealed, is a sometime contributor to The Huffington Post. In his self-written twitter profile, he describes himself in effusive terms as a "thinker" and "improver of all things"

Now if someone with such a pompous, self-inflated public opinion of themselves wants to play trash talk with me,  I'm usually game, so I played back with:

Implying Werner is pompous evidently really pissed him off:

Scumbag?!?  Scumbag!?! Them's fightin' words!  Well, take this, Werner!:

Werner was none too pleased with that and shot back:

Ah! It appeared that Werner hadn't clued in that he had replied to me when he replied to Ezra's tweet. So being the friendly, helpful fellow I am, I thought I'd politely let him know where he made his error:

That really set off poor Werner!

He either was too lazy to bother to check his own correspondence or simply doesn't understand how the medium he was using works. But in either case, I think I actually saw some of the forehead veins in his litter twitter image throbbing and him sucking even harder on his lips when he blasted out these two tweets:

Clearly, the obviously humorless Werner still hadn't figured out that he initiated contact with me. It was therefore incumbent on me to set him straight (because I was bored killing time before I needed to join a conference call  ...ok,  that doesn't really make it incumbent, but I was having fun):

And that was the last I have heard from Werner Patels.

Bottom line: I really need to find more productive things to do between calls!

50 Shades of Grey the way it was meant to be read

Christopher Walken vs Honey Boo Boo

For those of you who haven't seen this.. the great Christopher Walken vs Honey Boo Boo feud orchestrated by Screen Junkies:

Blackadder: Back and Forth

The Swan Song of the wonderful Blackadder series with Rowan Atkinson and the rest of the cast reunited 10 years after the series had ended.

Let the puns begin! Bacon-flavored condoms are now available!

This should make some people squeal with delight..

All the better to pork you with, my dear..

Only in America!   

For more wacky J&D's bacon-related products, check out their page.

Blame Canada: The Palestinian Version

A musical message from the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage:





And as a bonus treat... the original:



h/t Blazing Cat Fur

When Harry Met Sally 2 with Billy Crystal and Helen Mirren

"Thank goodness the United States exist to give proper Canadian comedians an opportunity not to suck"

It’s not very good at all. It’s certainly not politically correct.  But I have to agree with some of the commenters cited in a follow-up CBC article noting the fevered online reaction to the original piece: The skit sounds like nothing so much as a terrible CBC comedy program. Maybe funnier.  

CBC-approved comedian Shaun Majumder disagrees. “When you are in the workplace — and especially if it is the military — it’s like you’ve got to have some kind of sensitivity to the current world that we live in,” he told the network.   

Right, right. In the workplace. Your local bank branch, for example, or florist or fishmonger, or … military base full of people relatively near the front lines of a war against, broadly speaking, Osama bin Laden and his followers. It’s totally the same thing!

Chris Selley in the National Post sums up why the CBC and it's lame-ass alleged comedians like Shaun Majumder should stop pretending they produce competent news or comedy programming.