What does Hedley Lamarr want for Christmas?

"Take this down: I want rustlers, cut-throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nit-wits, half-wits, dim-wits, vipers, snipers, con-men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bush-whackers, horn-swagglers, horse-thieves, bull-dykes, train-robbers, bank-robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers, and Methodists!"

Since George W. Bush is a Methodist, I'll skip getting Hedley one of those.

So long old friend

When I was a little boy I loved Saturday nights because I got to stay up late and at 10 o'clock I got to watch The Carol Burnett Show with my mom. I liked that show because it I got most of the jokes even though I was only a shade under ten years of age. But mainly I liked Carol Burnett because when my mom watched she laughed like crazy and I loved seeing her laugh. Our life in Detroit was pretty bleak at times, especially so for her what with a husband who was in and out mental hospitals and 5 kids to take care of virtually on her own and the only money we had coming in was the monthly welfare check. So Carol Burnett was an oasis of laughter in our lives and we loved watching it.

I'd watch it each Saturday and I'd wait for Harvey Korman and Tim Conway to crack either up. To me that was the epitome of comedy, making another comic actor beak up while doing the sketch, and later when I did improv and the show was tanking my friend Todd would always grab me and say, "Fuck making the audience laugh, you and I need to concentrate on making each other laugh," and when we did the show invariably picked up.

As I grew up the kind of comedy Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman lost it's appeal to me and I became too hip for their bad jokes and reliance on sight gags. I shunned watching them and I drifted towards Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. I thought I was too cool for their old time Borscht Belt bullshit. However I did continue to enjoy Harvey Korman in most Mel Brooks movies. I loved him Blazing Saddles, quoting his line, "That's Hedley!" after someone uses the word 'heady' is always funny to me and I'll never stop doing it. The tracking shot where the camera goes through the window and into the staff dinner table in High Anxiety still makes me laugh every time I see it, and it was so funny the first time I saw it I had to rewind the film and watch it four or five times, Harvey's shocked expression is too damn funny for words. His French aristocrat in History of the World Part One is a scream as well. Some of his later performances in Mel Brooks films were a bit stale to me but his good stuff more than made up for his mediocre stuff. No one did movie comedy like Mr. Korman.

Harvey passed away late yesterday at the age of 81. I'll miss him and I'll always be grateful for the laughs he gave me and my late mom. So long Harvey, I hope you reincarnated real soon.

And now Jane Lynch would like to sing you a song

So please put down your rusty trombone and adjust your Cincinnati bow tie and give her your full attention.

Thanks. You may now return to whatever it is you were doing.

Look Around You

After my last two posts about the Chicken Hawk in Chief and the video from The Hermit and after reading this post by my blog bud FranIam, I thought my head was going to explode in a sea of Bush induced negativity. So I stopped reading blogs and news websites for a bit and I headed over to You Tube to look for things that would make me laugh.


After looking at bits of clips from The Young Ones (I'm not sure why because I have the series on DVD) I decided to see if they had any clips from one of my favorite BBC comedies of all time, Look Around You and wouldn't you know it, they did!
If you're not familiar with this little gem of a comedy then please allow me to fill you in. It's a parody of those futurism type of shows they used to run in the late 70's/early 80's where they'd speculate about what life was going to be like in the year 2000 and beyond. Of course those old shows were painfully off the mark but at the time I remember watching them and thinking, "Wow, cool!" The humor in this show is dry as Death Valley in the middle of summer and it's as deadpan as any Christopher Guest mockumentary ever was. It stars Peter Serafinowicz (he's the guy on the left), who also co-wrote the show, Olivia Coleman (she's the woman on the far left), Josie D'Arby (she's the black gal), and Robert Popper (the guy on the far right), who also co-wrote the show with Serafinowicz. The show also had guest stars such as Paul Putner, Harry Enfield, Sarah Alexander, David Walliams, and others you'll recognize if you watch as many BBC comedies as I do. The costumes, the music, and the acting are all spot on.

I've never seen the first series they did of this show but maybe one day BBC America will run it again and I'll get to see it too. I have to admit though when I saw the first episode of this the second series I thought, "Man this show is stupid." But then it hit me that it's supposed to be stupid and it's a feckin' parody and then I saw what a genius creation it was. I watched all the episodes they ran on BBC America and it looks like between that and watching clips on You Tube will have to do me because the DVD is not available in this country.

Here's a ten minute clip from the first episode of the second series that makes me howl with laughter, I love Josie D'Arby's hair and hat, Harry Enfield as the ghost of Tchaikovsky, and of course all three of the musical performances:



Some other great clips feature the insanely funny clip about the food of the future which is casseroles, Psilence, this three parter about computers (part 1, part 2, part 3), and since you got to have something to do with those computers, here's a clip about computer games! The line about waggling your joystick to create more foam kills me!

There's more clips on You Tube (for now anyway) so go check them out if you like. Maybe the boy and girls at the Beeb will release both series of Look Around You here in North America. Until they do I recommend that you LOOK AROUND YOU!