That’s not funny
Last week I discussed the comic, Robert Schimmel, who died this past summer in a car accident. I wrote about his debut CD and how funny I thought it was. Thinking about that record made me think about the comedy record as a performance piece. I think of comedy records as intensely personal listening experiences. … Continue reading
Mister Schimmel has passed away
I get the occasional email from my father. Usually they are empty, the subject line of the email is the message he hopes to convey to me. Other times they are notes picked from the obituaries—random grotesque deaths or deaths of people he knew. The other evening he sent me an email simply titled “RIP.” … Continue reading
The unreleasables
It’s tough making a movie. Think about a movie you’ve seen that you hated. No matter how bad it was, I guarantee it was tough to make. A movie is like a machine—there are lots of moving parts and they all need to be oiled and synchronized. I’m always intrigued when, after all the work that goes into it, a movie just never gets released or gets so radically re-worked that the story behind it becomes more interesting than the movie itself. Here’s a look at a few movies with sordid pasts. Some of them you may have seen, most of them, you probably haven’t.
When the laughter stopped
Chappelle’s Show is a strange hybrid. The cinematic clips uproot it from the live experience, but the recorded audience pulls it back down again. The big laughs are all things that a 2004 audience found funny or shocking. And some of them just aren’t that funny or shocking any more.
On top of this, so many of Chappelle’s sketches have become comedy classics that it’s hard to genuinely find them surprising anymore. “I’m Rick James, bitch!” was hilarious. Then your mom’s skeezy brother said it ten times at one holiday party a year after the show aired, and it didn’t feel so funny anymore.
Chappelle’s Show also gets bound up with what we know about Dave Chappelle’s history afterward. Dave famously quit the show because he felt that he was creatively tapped and was increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that jokes he’d intended as racial satire were getting laughed at for their silly, minstrelsy qualities. He even felt that his co-creators were complicit in this—he no longer felt comfortable working with them, so after recording several sketches for a much-anticipated third season, he briefly disappeared. There were rumors about his mental health and the possibility of drug abuse. Nobody could seem to grasp that somebody so successful didn’t like what he was doing anymore.
Laughing again, streaming this time
The decade’s five best, most influential comedies are all on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” online streaming service. What are the odds?
In this short series, I’m going to watch each of them—notice I’m using the future tense, even though I’ve totally gone back and watched all of these—and pick them off and break them down one by one. How have they held up? What do we learn about them (and about us) by rewatching them? I’ll also pull in some additional commentary—some from earlier in the decade, some later—that helps offer some perspective on (re)watching these series. And I’ll definitely be letting you know what I think, offering my take on how we got here.
