JWhiting.com

Are The Simpsons making a last-minute comedy comeback?

Check out this intro segment to a recent show. Feels like a return to older, gooder times…

Have you heard of Channel 101? 101 started out as a 5-minute film festival that challenged people to abandon perfectionism to make short little pieces for, essentially, themselves and their friends.

But something unexpected happened when the group started to mix time-pressure, talent, a wicked sense of humour and this new-fangled thing called the Internet: Heat Vision and Jack, the Lonely Island and, uh, fame.

Now, from the fertile mind of Channel 101 comes Acceptable.tv a weekly sort of uber sketch show airing on VH1.

Acceptable.tv lets the audience judge what lives and what dies on the show. Each week shows are voted off, shows are voted on.

You can see the current batch of shows here. Although I like “Homeless James Bond” and “The Teensies”, my hat goes off to the perfect satire of TV’s current round of shitty gameshows: “Who Farted?”

Jeanne and I are currently producing a demo radio show for the CBC and one of our influences for what we’re doing is WBEZ Chicago’s awesomest-amazing, This American Life with Ira Glass.

Now TAL is going to become a TV show and you can view a sample of what it’s going to look like here.

(And if you’re already a fan of This American Life you’ll love the spot-on parody that you can listen to

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I have my first Just For Laughs standup show in about 18 hours and all I can think about is that my whatever my future with JFL and comedy is, it’s going to be pretty impossible to top last summer when Jeanne and I were hired to work with John Cleese.

The whole experience deserves a proper long post, but it’s late and I gotta get to bed.

Here’s how it all went down on July 22, 2006…

My long-lost buddy Dan Guterman is a staff writer at The Onion.

Awhile back Dan brewed up this article that was loosely inspired by my own experience with cellphones.

(For the record, that’s not a picture of me and although I’m not really passionately anti-cellphone, the only time I’ve ever owned one was when I was given a company phone while I was working for Airborne Entertainment.)

On Thursday, the Montreal Gazette printed an op-ed piece by Barry Cooper, called “Is Recycling Really Worth It?” (I put screenshots of the article above, ’cause I think you have to be a subscriber to view the Gazette online).

Although I definitely have a beef with guys like Barry Cooper, my bigger concern is with the Gazette perpetuating the spin cycle.

Barry Cooper has written before on why he thinks recycling is bullshit using, for the most part, economic models that don’t put a dollar value on animal habitat, air quality, or greenhouse gas emissions. That’s fine. You want to stick your head in the (oil) sand, go right ahead. But if you think everybody else should be facedown with you, you’d better present some damn good science to demonstrate how your ideas are good for humanity and the planet in the long run.

Unfortunately, Barry Cooper’s policy ideas don’t pass the smell test. And that’s probably because they’re downwind of the refineries…

Here’s the letter that I sent to the Gazette:

I’m not surprised that Barry Cooper thinks recycling is a waste of time (”Is Recycling Really Worth It?” Montreal Gazette, March 15, 2007). After all, as stated on Dr. Cooper’s University of Calgary homepage, he’s affiliated with the “Friends of Science”.

“Friends of Science” is made up a group of people who, according to their website, “believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable.” The group should more properly be called the “Friends of Spin” because their activities are heavy on PR and light on actual peer-reviewed science. Little wonder that the group’s coming-out-party in Ottawa was sponsored by Imperial Oil, as detailed in Fifth Estate’s recent program “The Denial Machine” (viewable online).

So, like I said, I’m not surprised when Barry Cooper’s thoroughly unscientific opinion piece says things like “future generations can never exhaust natural resources” or that Cooper refers to “so-called greenhouse-gas emissions” after 2000 scientists in over 100 countries recently linked global warming to human activity. When you run up against the Barry Coopers of the world you sometimes have to throw up your hands in despair — you can’t reason someone out of a position that they weren’t reasoned into.

What surprises me is that the Gazette would choose to publish such laughable garbage.

And while we’re on the topic of the Gazette, why are they so behind the times in enabling their readers to leave comments on their articles online? They cynical part of me thinks that they prefer the old media system of picking and editing one sentence reader responses. That way it looks like you’re giving your readers a voice without all the messy complications of, you know, long well-reasoned arguments and, uh, facts.

(I did find this good short letter though at the Calgary Herald…)

I originally blogged about rumours of a FOX News supported “comedy” satire back here and have been remiss in reporting on it after it lauched.

Well guess what?

The show blows.

Hard.

It blows so hard, I can’t even make it through the “highlight” clips where the only laughter comes out of a can. You can find samples here and other places.

Here’s Keith Olberman’s video response.

Metacritic gives the show a score of 12/100 and users 2.8/10. (Metacritic coverage is here.)

Is anyone surprised? The thing that I love about comedy is that the root of all humour is truth. No truth, no yuks. No mystery why there’s not much funny to be found over at FOX News.

Why is there a picture of your dad on my blog? Because I surfed over to monoface and found him there, that’s why.

You can build your own real-life Mr./Ms./Msrss? yourself by clicking here.

This new movie out of New Zealand looks “Shawn of the Dead” style hilarious.

On a vast New Zealand sheep station, a reckless genetic engineering experiment goes horribly wrong, turning sheep into bloodthirsty killers! Trailer here.

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