Because a little Steve goes a long way…

Especially on a Monday.

Check out this interview with Stuart Galbraith IV over at DVD Savant.

I’ll fake it to ya.

Matt Zoller Seitz is a gifted and engaging critic of popular culture. Today, he starts writing about TV for New York magazine. Here’s a piece he wrote in 2010 about The Larry Sanders Show, a Bronx Banter favorite if there ever was one:

If one were to make a list of the most influential TV series that almost nobody watched, HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show would be at the top. During its 1992-1998 run, it never got the industry accolades fans felt it deserved, and although it routinely ended up on critics’ year-end Top 10 lists, it got a meager handful of Emmy nominations and just three awards, a paltry number for a series that was often called the best thing on TV. And it rarely drew more than a couple million viewers per episode, a decent number for a premium channel in the pre-Sopranos era, but puny by broadcast network standards.

History, on the other hand, has rendered a glowing verdict. Created by actor-writer Garry Shandling and Dennis Klein, The Larry Sanders Show changed the look and feel of TV comedy. Its influence was felt almost immediately, and its impact continues to resonate. Although it wasn’t the first half-hour series to strip-mine the comedy of embarrassment, affect a laid-back, naturalistic style, or do without a score or a laugh track (except in the talk show sequences), the program’s combination of these elements was so distinctive that they amounted to a new template—one that subsequent programs borrowed and customized. From actor-writer-producer Ken Finkleman’s seriocomic Canadian series The Newsroom through the British and American versions of The Office and NBC’s current hit 30 Rock, which often feels like Larry Sanders played at double-speed, the series evokes that apocryphal line about Velvet Underground: Three thousand people bought their first album, and every one of them started a band.

I’ve still got to see this show.

[Photo Credit: Frank W. Ockenfels 3/FX]

I have not watched “Portlandia” and am not familiar with the music of Sleater-Kinney but I thought this profile of Carrie Brownstein by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker was excellent:

Brownstein doesn’t see the contradictions in her work that other people do. Her sexy, roiling presence onstage is one side of her, her wry social portraits on “Portlandia” represent another side, and neither has much in common with her modest, cerebral, nonperforming self. Brownstein said that when playing rock music she’s always conscious that she’s performing; she remains fully in control, no matter how chaotic it looks. “Onstage, I can stop on a dime,” she said. Lately, the “Portlandia” characters had “been seeming more akin to who I really am,” she added. “Or maybe it’s just a safer place for me to go. With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I’m able to go with ‘Portlandia’ has a wider range, but also a brighter range.” Ideally, she’d like to keep her music side and her comedy side separate; she doesn’t really want people to be thinking about her onscreen goofiness when she’s tearing it up with Wild Flag.

Touring with the band kept her away from Portland for most of October and November. But she went home for Thanksgiving, to see her dogs, to take long walks in the mossy, gray-green woods, and to see [Fred] Armisen, who flew in from New York, where he’d been filming “Saturday Night Live.” I e-mailed Brownstein to ask how her holiday had gone. She recalled stopping at a dog park with Armisen. Because it was the real Portland, “the weather was horrible—rainy, windy, cold.” She wrote, “I told Fred he could stay in the car. But he insisted on joining me out on the wet, muddy grass, tolerating not only the elements but a typical dog-park lady who overshared about her pair of jacket-clad whippets. When I saw Fred bundled up in his parka, wearing his brand-new R.E.I. hiking boots, I felt so happy and lucky; there are very few people for whom Fred—a classic New Yorker, not a nature guy at all—would brave the outdoors.

“The dinner itself was spent with the Goldfarbs, a family I’ve sort of adopted as my own; I spend all my holidays at their house. In the decade that I’ve known them, even when I’ve been dating someone, I never bring anyone over. I prefer to keep things separate; perhaps I’m bad at sharing the scant amount of family that I do have, or fearful of giving someone a glimpse of the few people who really know me. But Fred is someone whom I deeply trust, he’s already an extension of what I’d call family.

“We drove home late and I dropped him off at his hotel. Sometimes I get confused and think, Are we supposed to kiss goodnight? But, the truth is, I don’t want us to kiss, I want us to teach each other how good it can be to stick around.”

[Photo Credit:  Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times ]

Sippin’ egg nog and…

Best bit in the movie…

Friday Morning Smile.

[Drawing by Drew Friedman]

Mr. Idle talks turkey.

A very funny fellow.

The Great Sid Caesar:

From “The Age of Movies,” here’s P. Kael on History of the World, Part I:

When I saw History, there were hisses and walkouts during this number, and the film has been attacked as a disgrace by reviewers in the press and on TV. I bet nobody hissed or walked out on Candide. When Prince and Bernstein do it, it’s culture; when Brooks does it, there’s a chorus of voices saying, “He has gone too far this time.” Earlier in the film, the dancer Gregory Hines, who makes a breezy film debut as Comicus’ Ethiopian pal, Josephus, tries to convince the slavers who are sending him to the circus to be eaten by lions that he’s not a Christian but a Jew. With his loose-limbed body–his legs seem to be on hinges–he does a mock-Jewish dance, and then a shim-sham, and the racial humor didn’t appear to bother the audience. But during the Inquisition, when nuns toss off their habits, and a giant torture wheel to which pious Jews are attached is spun in a game of chance, there were mutterings of disapproval. Yet it’s Brooks’s audacity–his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke, and doing it in a low-comedy context–that gives History the kick that was missing from his last few films. The Inquisition is presented as a paranoid fantasy, with Jews as the only victims, and when Torquemada whacks the knees of gray-bearded old men imprisoned in stocks–using them as a xylophone–you may gasp. But either you get stuck thinking about the “bad taste” or you let yourself laugh at the obscenity in the humor, as you do at Bunuel’s perverse dirty jokes. The offensive material is a springboard to a less sentimental kind of comedy.

If Mel Brooks doesn’t go “too far,” he’s nowhere–he’s mild and mushy. It’s his maniacal, exuberant compulsion to flaunt show-biz Jewishness that makes him an uncontrollable original. At his best, he is to being Jewish what Richard Pryor is to being black: wildly in love with the joke of it, obsessed and inspired by the joke of it. What History needs is more musical numbers with the show-biz surreal satire of the Inquistion section; it’s the kind of satire that makes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup a classic farce. Brooks goes wrong when he pulls back to innocuous loveability–when he has Gregory Hines say to him, “You’re the first white man I even considered liking.” (Now, if that had been “the first Jews…”) Hines’ dancing–the movie could have used more of it–deserves better than a suck-up line.

When Brooks has a hot streak on a TV talk show, you can see his mental process at work, and amazing things just pop out of his mouth. He can’t get that rhythm going on the screen with prepared gags. Some movie directors can give their material that surprise. Altman has often done it, and in Hi, Mom! DePalma did it, with a highly inflammatory race-relations subject. But Brooks isn’t a great director–far from it. He’s a great personality though, and he moves wonderfully; his dancing in his Torquemada robes is right up there with Groucho’s lope. Wearing a little mustache and with his lips puckered, Brooks as Louis XVI bears a startling resemblance to Chaplin in his Monsieur Verdoux period. I kept waiting for him to do something with this resemblance, but he didn’t. Was he unaware of it? Lecherous Louis did, however, make me understand why women at the French court wore those panniers that puffed out the sides of their skirts; we see those ballooning bottoms through his eyes. (Brooks may be wasting his talent by not appearing in other directors’ movies while he’s preparing his own.) As a director-star, he has the chance to go on pushing out the boundaries of screen comedy, because, despite the disapproving voices in the press and on TV, he can probably get away with it. Like Pryor, he’s a cutie.

Too bad for us, Mel’s movies never got better, but he sure did score a hit with the play version of The Producers.

Dig this amazingness from Kottke, a most dope site.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

And then, there’s this:

Class is in session.

Another classic routine from the one and only Lenny Bruce. Man, this is one of my favorites.

Tex Avery is the bomb.

One of the great routines ever put on vinyl:

Dig.