Comedy … Where’s the Line???

I thought that this was an interesting discussion because frankly, don’t think that there should necessarily be “a line” … as Jimmy says, as long as comedy is the intent. Comparing the Michael Richards incident from a few years back is really a great example because although he was on stage, it really didn’t seem like he was trying to be funny at that point – he was just being a jerk. There have been plenty of examples of comedians heckling back at their hecklers and it being hilarious, but that just wasn’t it and the world was right to call him on it.

On the other hand, I actually did think that the Quvenzhané Wallis tweet from The Onion was pretty funny because she’s nine years old and apparently currently just about the nicest kid in Hollywood. That’s the joke – calling someone a horrendous name that she’s most definitely not. But I guess you get a lot more airtime if you denounce the joke as obscene and horrendous and raise you and your audience up on a pedestal above it because that’s what nearly every media outlet did in reaction.

But the thing is, humor is subjective and what I may find funny you might not find as much. Hell, over time don’t find the same things funny that I did a decade or more ago, and that’s completely ok. I have fond memories of the summer of 1997 when one night I abruptly smashed my new Firebird that I’d only purchased a couple of months prior. And yet the memories are still “fond” because the way I coped with the tragedy later that night with my friends who’d been through the accident with me was by staying up half the night reading dead baby jokes to each other out of a book that we’d picked up at the mall earlier that day.

Sure, they were tasteless.

Hell, I think the name of the book was Truly Tasteless Jokes, but in that moment, they were hilarious and we all had a ball seeing how far the next one would push the envelope, and they helped us to forget about otherwise being in a really dangerous situation that could’ve gotten somebody killed earlier that evening.

Now of course, I’ve gotten complaints about that page on Just Laugh – many several pages long from people who’ve lost babies or whatnot themselves … and yet I’ve also gotten emails asking for more and it’s still one of the most popular pages on the site, so you be the judge. At the end of the day, most jokes make light of somebody or something, and if you were to eliminate anything that could possibly be offensive to anyone, we wouldn’t have much left to laugh about at all. And typically that’s not how most people get offended, anyways – it’s not really fair to get all up in arms about something that offends you if you then turn around and enjoy the things that offend other people … a la a Christian who’s offended by Christian jokes, but doesn’t have a problem with jokes at the expense of Muslims.

What’s funny to me is that through it all, I’ve yet to see anyone specifically interviewing Quvenzhané Wallis herself to show that she was offended by a satirical publication calling her a dirty word … just lots of people with microphones eager to be offended on her behalf.

onion-quvenzhane-tweet-roc4life[1]

Again, it’s funny because she’s actually not a cunt at all!  🙄

Dream Journal : The Graduation Heist

Fair warning – this one is really odd and fragmented, but I thought some of the scenes were strangely interesting, so here we are…

I had traveled from Florida up to Michigan … by bicycle.

The trip back later in the dream was much more vivid, but I assumed that I must’ve traveled via two wheels getting there as well because everything that I brought with me fit in a backpack.

Then again, at one point I also had Cleo with me, but I vaguely recall that she was getting home some other way.  😕

Anyways, earlier in the dream featured a lot of home scenes, although home wasn’t how I remembered it. My parents were in the middle of their divorce, and my Mom was living in a much smaller house/trailer that was very cramped, particularly in the kitchen.

(time was all out of whack in this dream – very few events were actually “in order”…)

One of the scenes that took place at home was some sort of Christmas celebration, although this time it was about half unwrapping presents and half helping Mom to clean out junk that she no longer had room for. My sister was going through a pile of her old drawings to throw out, and there was one pertaining to Christmas that I absolutely had to keep, though no clue how I was going to transport it back home! There was also a Christmas scene that involved a party of some kind in which there was a shortage of Mom’s Christmas cookies, or at least frosted ones anyways. Somebody asked me if there were anymore because the plate was empty, and upon inspection in the pantry I found another plate of unfrosted ones, but only one in the middle had frosting.

Needless to say, I snarfed down the frosted one in the pantry and then told him that there weren’t any frosted ones left.

The cookie itself was in the shape of a mitten.

Fast forward to the good stuff, it eventually became apparent that the reason I had traveled home was that my friend and I were planning some sort of heist for school graduation. It was never actually revealed what our heist actually was, but there was a list with lots of checkpoints and a fair amount of scheming took place … at one point we were trying to convince an older teacher (no idea who – he kind of looked like Mr. Belding from Saved by the Bell) to help us with something, and he kept telling us that it was illegal, yet he didn’t turn us in or discipline us or anything … presumably because we had something on him and were trying to blackmail him???

At one point some of the scheming took place in a ridiculously designed swimming pool … well, it was actually a series of pools and hot tubs spread out over about half a dozen levels that cascaded into one another via waterfalls. I had a strange flashback as we entered one of the hot tub back to my own pool in real life because it’s ridiculously cold right now, whereas these must’ve all been heated because they were pretty great!

After the exotic pool scene, we were waiting on stage to perform a rock show. It was sort of like a competition, though I never saw any other bands that we were competing with, and the audience was situated around a large swimming pool … but not one of the ones from the previous scene. When it came time for us to play, someone handed me and my friend each a guitar … almost as if we were being forced to play … and after adjusting the strap on the ugly, orange Les Paul that I had been handed, we went out and blew the audience away with an original song that we’d written, whereas everyone else in the competition had only been playing covers.

Somewhere between all of this randomness, there was another home scene – this time at my Mom’s actual house, although she had a doggy door in the back … which was important because at one point there was something bad in the backyard and we had to hurry all of the dogs in real quick and strangely enough, there were a lot of them! My dog and I think Lori’s dogs were present, but then there were also just a bunch of other smaller random dogs – maybe they belonged to the neighbors? Mom insisted that it wasn’t safe outside and they all had to come in, too, and then we saw the miniature horses running around the backyard, and though Mom wanted to protect those, too, she wasn’t sure how they’d fit in the house. Granted, they were really miniature – as in small enough to fit through the doggy door, but their hooves still pack quite the wallop, I guess?

As we were trying to do something with the horses – maybe get them into the garage or something – we finally saw the real threat … there were also hippos in the backyard that were scaring all of the other animals.

I can only assume that they were probably very, very hungry.

But back to the heist – I never did quite figure out what it actually was, and after all of this I found myself bicycling back to Florida again. The last scene I recall was stopping at a fast food place for something to eat, and feeling claustrophobic in one of the booths because it was kind of closed in and way too small for me. As I packed up and decided to go eat outside instead, I noticed that someone was watching me … like a biker gang or something … and as I walked out to my bike, I kept checking back expecting to see them coming out the door after me.

I was only in Kentucky, so I still had a long ways left to ride, and now I was being chased by bikers on motorcycles.

Maybe they were pissed for never actually finding out what the heist was all about, either!  😯

Saturday Science Shows!

I stumbled across this one today and I think I kind of like it … I’ve always been a fan of narrated white board illustrations! 🙂

Good stuff, although the first one doesn’t really surprise me – I haven’t had what anyone would consider a “normal” sleep schedule in the better part of a decade…

a firearm I could ACTUALLY get behind…

Or even in front of, for that matter!

I’m not sure what amazes me more – that this gun is able to shoot an Oreo cookie through a cardboard boxor that this dude is able to foster an entire YouTube channel about slingshots that has 29 million views!  😯

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood…

Second video now from MentalFloss – this channel is definitely shaping up into one that you want to be subscribing to … makes me real curious to see what John talks about in the weeks to come!

Also, was Mr. Rogers not pretty much the nicest guy who ever lived?! If you need more proof, check out the videos below – the speech in front of Congress was mentioned in the video and the acceptance of his Lifetime Achievement Award, well, I was just about ready to tear up watching the people in the audience just about ready to tear up! Just so friendly and kind – it does make me chuckle just a bit to think that he got into broadcasting because “he hated that all TV showed was people throwing pies at each other,” so I guess that means Mr. Rogers wasn’t a fan of The Three Stooges?!  😕

I suppose we can give everybody’s favorite neighbor a pass, though… 😉

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q

Shark Tank

I’m not entirely sure how I stumbled upon it, but lately I’ve kind of found myself sort of obsessed with the TV show Shark Tank. It’s one of the few almost not a reality shows that I can stand, meaning that the overly dramatic pauses and general arrogance from the judges is usually set to a minimum, at least in the episodes that I’ve been watching (seasons 1 & 4, I think?). But it’s neat to see all of the different “companies” present themselves asking for money, and also somewhat funny to see how overly dramatic they are when they insist that their business will be ruined forever if they can’t get investment money from the sharks.

In a way it kind of surprises me how many people go on the show without a solid business plan or actual sales to back their products up, but at the same time I have to remind myself that these folks are being cherry-picked by the producers so that they’ll have some great ones and some terrible ones alike. I guess it probably wouldn’t be a very good show if we had to watch all of the abysmal ones in the same way that American Idol couldn’t make an entire season just out of terrible auditions from people who have no business being in the vicinity of a microphone.

Ok, Idol may be a bad example … is that show even on anymore?!

Anyways, fortunately this seems to be another show that has a whole bunch of full episodes up on YouTube … I started out just watching clips, but then through some not so creative searching also managed to find full episodes from the latest season, so I’ve been listening to those in the background while I’m working this week. Plus, I enjoy any of the episodes with Mark Cuban because I used to follow his blog pretty regularly and I just think he seems like a really laid back, down to earth, extraordinarily successful guy.

Besides, he gave $25,000 to this guy to sit around drawing cats for people all day! Clearly yours truly picked the wrong creative career path… 😯

pretty colors over Beast’s Castle!

So I don’t want to spoil it too much because I plan on writing up a bunch of stuff later on this week, but over the weekend the wife and I made a much-needed escape over to Disney World for a couple of days. One of the highlights was eating dinner at the Magic Kingdom’s newest restaurant, Be Our Guest … which I’ll talk about later … but what I wanted to share here was a couple of unexpected photos of the fireworks that we caught outside just after our extraordinarily late dinner reservation.

These were taken on the bridge just before Beast’s Castle in New Fantasyland, and while I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone watching Wishes here for their first time instead of from Main Street USA as the show is best enjoyed, it does add for an interesting perspective over an alternate castle, and as an added bonus, I had a lot more pictures turn out better from this show because I was able to rest against the rocks for a steadier hand… 😉

20130317_fireworks1

20130317_fireworks2

20130317_fireworks3

Stripped: The Comics Documentary

I SOOOOO can’t wait for this film to finally be done!

It’s kind of hard to believe that I first contributed to that Kickstarter over a year and a half ago, but for what it’s worth, all of the previews and teasers that Dave & Co. have trickled out as they feverishly worked on this project make no indication that the final product is going to be anything less than pure gold. The interview clips that we’ve already seen have been outstanding, and I really hope that they figure out some way to share the unedited, full-length interviews at some point because I have a feeling that when it’s all said and done, this is one of those things that I’m going to want more of because much like the Webcomics Weekly podcasts that the gang used to do, even not being involved with webcomics anymore I still feel like I get a ton out of their work simply as an independent creator and the podcasts have always been great to listen to in the background while I work or when I need a bit of an inspirational pick-me-up.

Anyways, just thought I’d share because they’re actually doing a supplementary Kickstarter right now in an attempt to raise a little last-minute cash for crazy licensing fees and final touches to make the film even better, so you should definitely think about donating if you haven’t already because it’s an easy way to pre-order the movie like I did and the neat thing is instead of just being profit if you buy after the fact, your donations can go towards cramming even more greatness into what looks like is going to be an already incredible presentation!

Seriously, if anybody, these guys truly deserve it and I can’t wait to see the final product. I’m going to take my salesman hat off now, but I leave you with a couple of great shorts from the film that they shared recently. I’m not sure which one I love more – the webcomics one, both for its 16-bit style and inspirational vibes in my own present situation, or the newspaper one, simply because it’s crazy to think that there was a time not that long ago where there was a lot of money to be made from newspaper syndication.

I used to envy Dave Barry for having his humor column in the Miami Herald … I guess I still do, but I’m not exactly considering it as a viable option for my own career in this day and age…

Thanks a lot, Internet! 😛