Author Topic: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show  (Read 2778199 times)

fletcher munson

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4740 on: August 12, 2010, 09:18:27 PM »
Buzz sounds a little like Nels Cline
veni dixie vici

Steve of Bloomington

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4741 on: August 13, 2010, 11:25:56 AM »

BTW, Auntie Christina, Gawker has a good article about the Pop-Tart Cafe in Times Square...well, not so much an article as a collection of terrible reviews:


I did see that post, and I also found an article from the NYT on the "restaurant" opening that made me weep for journalism. Here are the first two paragraphs, but you can read the whole thing yourself if it moves you:

As a breakfast food, these pastries have neither the nutritional cachet of cereal nor the tuck-in-a-pocket ease of a breakfast bar. As a snack, they’re not quite sweet like a cookie, nor savory like a cracker. In a world on the go, Pop-Tarts can require a toaster. Even the brand name has been hijacked by gossip columnists to mock Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson.

Now the Pop-Tarts brand is demanding some attention for itself, and it is doing so with a store on one of the world’s most attention-grabbing stages, Times Square.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/business/09poptart.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=pop-tart&st=cse

That's sacrelege, talking about Pop tarts like that.

I don't want to live in a world without Pop-Tarts.

(disclosure: author is employed by Sukhie Zavtraki LLC, a subsidiary of the Kellogg's Corporation)

Eric Fishlegs

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4742 on: August 13, 2010, 12:49:34 PM »



[/quote]

I tried to give Shut Up Weirdo a shot a few weeks ago, but I can't get past the skin-crawling-creepiness of a few regular callers. And the last straw was hearing Spike confess that he spends 5 hours a day watching soap operas and porn. Made me long for the broken record complaints about new music, people under 25, and Staten Island.
[/quote]

I thought you were being too hard on SHUT UP, WEIRDO until I listened to last week's "Big Fan" episode. Gah. Spike is actually one of the normal ones on that show. There was one guy whose obsession with Frangry was... I just hope to God it was a schtick because it kinda crossed a line.

fletcher munson

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4743 on: August 13, 2010, 01:28:53 PM »
I know, I hate SUW too.  I hope I can get one of their t-shirts. 
veni dixie vici

daveB from Oakland

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4744 on: August 13, 2010, 02:04:49 PM »
I know, I hate SUW too.  I hope I can get one of their t-shirts.

Just tell them that they "owe" you one, I'm sure they'll be happy to comply.
"He didn't sound like a human when I was talking to him ... he sounded like a shape ... what's that shape of that building ... you know, where the Army lives?" -- Bryce, 11/24/2009

mike_b

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4745 on: August 13, 2010, 04:39:08 PM »
The Amazing Randi saving the Spoon Man from Uri Geller

waltkellysghost

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4746 on: August 13, 2010, 08:38:00 PM »
FWIW, I never got the Bill Hicks worship either, so to hear Tom say "not that good" was minor redemption. I understand why he's important and why he's popular, but to me, it's more like brilliantly phrased political spoken word, and not as much comedy. In fairness, I've heard clips friends have sent me, and I haven't listened to an entire album.  Is there a Bill Hicks album that, for lack of a better term, is the least political?  For the time being, I file him next to Penn Jillette: has amazing moments, always loud, often aggravating.

Worst moment was the South Carolina guy. After a while, it seemed clear he was doing that on a dare from his friends, and he was so boring and bad at it. I was wondering why Tom was getting so upset instead of laughing it off, zinging the guy to oblivion, then POW with the .45 GOMP.

As a teenager in rural Tennessee surrounded by zombified hordes of the willfully ignorant, listening to Bill Hicks for the first time was like a revelation. He was the first ever comedian I ever got into on a personal level. (Bill Cosby I liked too, but he was just accessible to my childhood. Not a real personal connect.) As an angry young man, hearing Hicks talk about how shitty the world was made me think that perhaps the world wasn't really that shitty if someone like Hicks was around to rip into it. I've grown out of most of that bitterness, and Hicks was a big help in that.

The real problem with Bill Hicks (two problems if you count his crappy guitar playing on "Arizona Bay") is that everyone wants to hold him to some super high standard. They want to make a messiah out of him, which leads to crappy comics (as Tom mentioned: Rogan and Carolla) thinking they are his disciples. He was only a comedian, and that was enough. I can't relate to a messiah. I prefer human beings. Overblowing the Hicks mythos also leads to people making unfair comments like saying "Had he lived he would have done comcast commercials". Sorry Tom, but that was an unfair statement to make about a guy who made it a point never to do that. He died holding to that standard. To say he would've done something that he can't possibly do (being that he is dead) is just cheap. I only heard part of South Carolina's call, and from what I could tell he wasn't bringing it.

I understand why someone wouldn't want to be bogged down with social/political commentary. I like being able to go to the Best Show to escape the world's bitter trappings. Patton Oswalt did plenty of political material during the Bush years. Louis C.K.'s comedy constantly satirizes the social concepts of family and personal ethics. Both of these men have been praised by the Best Show, as they should be. If a political comic annoys you, maybe it's the comic more so than the material. It just seems insane to shut out all comedy that is political/social in nature, or to say that style really isn't comedy. When our own citizens vote away the rights of homosexuals to be legally united, doesn't that piss you off? Don't you want to say something about it? When we trudge along in Middle Eastern wars that only serve to make even more people hate us, doesn't that piss you off? Your opinion may not change the world, but it's the first step to doing anything. Being able to talk about that stuff AND make people laugh is a rare talent.

Now Sam Kinison? That guy sucked. I don't understand the attachment to him at all.

can we hug now?

masterofsparks

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4747 on: August 13, 2010, 09:52:16 PM »
Patton Oswalt did plenty of political material during the Bush years. Louis C.K.'s comedy constantly satirizes the social concepts of family and personal ethics. Both of these men have been praised by the Best Show, as they should be.

Has Louis CK ever been mentioned on the show? I remember wondering at one point what Tom thought about him but I can't remember ever hearing his name mentioned (other than in passing).
I'll probably go into the wee hours.

waltkellysghost

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4748 on: August 13, 2010, 09:58:30 PM »
I heard Tom mention he liked his old show "Lucky Louie", and i seem to have hazy recollections of Tom speaking fairly fondly of him. That may not qualify as "praise", but I haven't heard Tom trash him.

Steve of Bloomington

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4749 on: August 13, 2010, 09:59:18 PM »
Patton Oswalt did plenty of political material during the Bush years. Louis C.K.'s comedy constantly satirizes the social concepts of family and personal ethics. Both of these men have been praised by the Best Show, as they should be.

Has Louis CK ever been mentioned on the show? I remember wondering at one point what Tom thought about him but I can't remember ever hearing his name mentioned (other than in passing).

We can always ask him: http://friendsoftom.com/forum/index.php/topic,7218.0.html

Steve of Bloomington

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4750 on: August 13, 2010, 10:00:54 PM »
Louis CK's show is killing me in both ways. It's funny, and it's pretty dead on about the steepening downward slope toward death as you pass 40.

mackro

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4751 on: August 13, 2010, 10:46:10 PM »
In reply to waltkellysghost:

Thank you. I never did think of the angle you mentioned when discovering Hicks. In retrospect I was very lucky to have grown up in the age of VHS rentals where it was easy to rent out a different stand-up tape a night, and to have a cooler mom who would rent out all the live Richard Pryor shows to watch together when I was younger.  So, I can understand Hicks hitting it just right for folks who are slightly younger than me -- especially away from a big city.

That said, I'm not against political comedy!  I know everyone brings him up, but Lenny Bruce is the master of the template of political comedy to me, to highlight just one great thing about him.  Later in high school, I heard the Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins stand-up/spoken word stuff, a lot of the stuff being funny, a lot of it not so much. And this is the stuff that Hicks reminds me most of.. which isn't a slight against Hicks, but it does currently keep me from being a full-on Hicks fan.


waltkellysghost

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4752 on: August 14, 2010, 12:21:20 AM »
I got a free ticket to see Henry Rollins a couple of years ago. I didn't think I would enjoy it, but it turns out I did.

When I first saw that film "Lenny" I found it very inspiring. My girlfriend at the time bought me a CD recording of Bruce getting arrested at that SF show. The sound quality wasn't great and he was so drugged out you couldn't understand what he was saying. It was like he was getting arrested for saying "ccggggsshhrrrr"

Happy to share perspective.

mackro

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4753 on: August 14, 2010, 01:28:42 AM »
With Lenny, I'd start out with the Carnegie Hall concert from early 1961. Excellent. And, while not as amazing, but far too maligned, the Berkeley Concert from 1965 is good too.

It's difficult for anyone today to get into any stand-up comedian who become famous over 50 years ago. There will be a LOT of cultural references that will have long since died, even with Lenny.  Surprisingly though, there's enough material that resonates to this day. That said, Lenny in 1961 will make more sense to a young kid today than most stand-up comedians from the 80s and early 90s.


JustNicole

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Re: The Best/Worst Moments of last night's show
« Reply #4754 on: August 16, 2010, 10:43:25 AM »
Listening to the podcast on the subway yesterday, I started giggling at "I hope they build 5 mosques down at Ground Zero." I don't know if it makes me look crazy or not just to be sitting there completely calm and then shaking with laughter the next.

It certainly isn't as bad as the very upset man I heard the other morning screaming in Patois at the top of his lungs. If words were graffiti, every house on my street have a 5 ft, bright orange "Bumbaclot" on it.
Doing it Mentos style.