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Why is the Internet so great? Because it tears down barriers to information and communication enabling the dream of creating truly free and democratic societies? OK, yes, there’s that, but the Internet also shows naked celebrities and often makes you laugh…

I saw Brandon Hardesty on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, tried to find this video online, couldn’t, tracked Brandon down through the Tubes and he quickly got back to me with the link below. Are the Internets awesome or what?

As you’ll see in this video Brandon is a grocery store clerk from Baltimore who re-creates scenes from movies in his parents’ basement. He does everything, the shooting, lighting, editing and acting. As in all the acting, every part.

Brandon is currently tackling Oscar-nominated films for Jimmy Kimmel and this is the first of the series, Brandon’s take on There Will Be Blood.

If loving this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Hilarious.

Yippee-ki-yay. Happy Friday. (Spotted over at Kung Fu Monkey.)

Katrna VandenHeuvel, editor of The Nation magazine did a great job on The Colbert Report the other night, but I still walk away from this clip marvelling at the performance of Stephen Colbert.

(Ever wonder what he’s gonna do when/if this character-based gig of his ever ends?)

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.)

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.

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I discovered Tenacious D’s Fuck Her Gently with my buddies back in the early 00’s and clambered eagerly aboard the Jack Black train of intensity. I’m still kicking myself for not roadtripping it down to Burlington to see them live when they played live at Higher Ground.

The D’s first movie, several years in the works, is coming out on Friday and I can’t think of a modern band that embodies satire more than these guys. I especially love how they take the piss out of the whole devil & rock ‘n roll connection.

The D recently sat down for an interview with the Onion’s A.V. club who asked them, among other things, “Do you think Satan is a necessary component of rock ‘n’ roll?”

Jack Black responds:

No. There are some great bands that never incorporated Satan. But it’s a bygone era where Satan really participated. And there was a while there where you knew that you were a big band if there was a priest out front telling you not to go in. That is the measure of success.

Common priests. Where’s all the love/hate these days?

Wish I remember where I’d read this before, but trust John Amato over at the excellent Crooks and Liars to pick up the ball.

Variety reports that:

Joel Surnow, co-creator of “24,” is shooting two half-hour pilots [that] he described as ” ‘The Daily Show’ for conservatives”…

Oh man, can’t wait. Nothing screams hilarity like right-wing comics and shows that promote torture. (At least Dennis Miller should be available. Since his CNBC show has been cancelled, there doesn’t seem to be much going on in his life…)

Today’s featured article at Wikipeeds is a minute dissection of Stephen Colbert’s talk at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner back in April.

Colbert is, of course, one of the English world’s greatest living satirists, consistently speaking “truthiness” to power. His talk at the Correspondents’ Dinner was hilarious, historical satire.

Initially, major news organizations failed to do any reporting on the event while the talk blew up huge online, causing a virtual YouTube meltdown and leaving news organisations scrambling to explain why they had suddenly gone silent. (A popular excuse seemed to be that the talk “just wasn’t funny” — a strange barometer for newsworthiness, but there you go.)

As the Widipedia article says, Time magazine TV critic James Poniewozik thought that Colbert’s critics missed the point:

Colbert wasn’t playing to the room, I suspect, but to the wide audience of people who would later watch on the Internet. If anything, he was playing against the room.

Keep on keepin’ on S.C. You’re #1 in my books.

(Don’t you love alliteration headlines that end with question marks? …? ??!!)

Laying aside the fact that “succumbs” is the most impressively gayful word in the English language, everyone knows Dan Savage of the sex advice column Savage Love, yes? (…? ??!!)

If not, you can find an excellent Savage Love backgrounder at Wikipedia and then open your own voyeristic window on kinky North America from one of the many sites that syndicate it. (My bookmark points to Savage Love’s home on The Onion.)

Dan Savage has never shied away from slipping big issues into his colon column (a true GGG if there ever was one) and so back in 2003 when Rick Santorum defended laws banning gay sex on the grounds that legalizing homosexuality would open the door to bigamy, polygamy and incest, Dan decided to fight back.

Going with a written suggestion from one of his readers, Dan ran a poll in his column to determine which unlabeled-’til-then naughty thing should be named after Santorum.

Lo and behold, we now have:

san-TOR-um n. A frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex. (See also: Sen. Rick Santorum (R - PA).)

The movement to re-brand Santorum picked up steam online and off, tracked every step of the way from the Spreading Santorum site which became the #1 result when you Google “Santorum” (with Rick’s official site playing a bottom at #2).

Now that the midterm elections are over, nobody is saying that the santorum movement was single-handedly responsible for bringing down the Republican’s No. 3 man, but it certainly didn’t help.

I’ll leave the closing words to Dan Savage himself who said:

There’s a reason why monarchs and despots used to lock up political cartoonists and satirists. Being made ridiculous, being turned into the butt of a joke—that’s politically disempowering fairy dust. It’s hard to rule when you aren’t taken seriously, and it’s hard to be taken seriously after your name has been reduced to a dirty joke. Indeed, the power of satire should never be underestimated.

Last night I debuted the first of what I hope will evolve into a series of funny lectures about the future.

Broadly called “Future Tense”, the premise is that I’m a normal dude who has traveled to the not-too-distant future and back. Now I show up at comedy clubs to tell everyone about the strange things they will encounter 10-20 years in the future.

I’m pretty jazzed about the idea. Think it has a great potential for hilarious satire.

In this segment of “Future Tense” I talk about how in the future a group of tree planters stumble into a Sasquatch and the profound impact that has on the entire human race. Humanity’s capacity to love is only matched by our capacity to hate. In this age of political correctness, all the nations and religions of the world will never be able to come together until we can find a common enemy to hate the shit out of.

Click on this link to download an mp3 recording of the first performance of The Sasquatch Solution. (Host, Dave Ackerflug mistakenly calls it The Sasquatch Adventure.)

(UPDATE: The audio is broken and I don’t know why…)

Like Christophe said last night, you need to use the open mic nights to work out your comedy, not just to flex in front of the mirror. I’d never done any of this material before, so I was happy that people laughed during the test run.

Now that the inagural set is done, I’m going to work on the dynamism of the whole thing. Get much higher energy with it. Have a stronger comic point of view, etc. Looking forward to fine tuning it. Thanks to Jeanne who found the perfect music for the series.

I would love to hear your feedback.

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My buddy Dan recently moved to NYC to start writing for The Onion full-time. Before that he was a long-time Onion headline writer, working out of Montreal. You know how that gig works? You send in like 30 headlines per week and then the main Onion staff writers sit around in a big pow-wow and vote on the headlines they want to work on. If they want your headline, you get $20 for it. They used to call Dan “The Machine” ’cause he’d crank out shitloads of good copy every week.
Anyhow, in classic Onion style, Dan is posing this week as a random dude, in this case, Aaron Henschler: Voices In Man’s Head Make Great Point About Time Management

Dudes. This is equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking. Everything satire should be right? This is what’s known as reality satire, check it out…

If You’re Nervous and Hungover, Do Not Go on Live TV

Great comics, like great musicians, were raised on the audio knee of the masters who came before them. Invariably when you hear a great modern comic talking about his/her childhood, they’ll mention the albums they listened to as kids. It was as true for Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks as it is for guys like Stephen Colbert.
It goes without saying that a good way to get into the head of your favourite comic, is to hunt down the movies, albums and books that they list as influential. If you haven’t already, check out Colbert’s great interview that was up on The Onion last week.

People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?