Mano Singham
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In this cartoon, we have the somewhat disconcerting idea of the character Pig planning to eat a ham sandwich. I wonder if cartoonist Stephan Pastis made a deliberate choice because the. strip is quirky, or whether a ham sandwich just happened to come to mind because it is such a ubiquitous banal food choice and these are cartoon creatures after all.
In addition to being a master raconteur, the late Irish comedian Dave Allen was a genius at creating visual gags like this one.
Many of the people whom one sees on cable TV ‘news’ shows are not really journalists but people selected for their looks and attitudes. Some old timers may remember the Mary Tyler Moore TV comedy series in which she plays an assistant producer on a local TV new station. Much of the humor in that show comes from their TV news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) who was pompous and ignorant but had the look and the voice of a TV anchor, at least by the standards of that time when they were pretty much all middle-aged white men.
Chris Kaltenbach writes that in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell models his character on Baxter.
Burgundy’s is a character profile that fans of television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” know well. For seven seasons, pompous blowhard Ted Baxter anchored the news on Minneapolis’ WJM-TV, mangling the English language, acting as his own biggest fan, placing more importance on the color of his blazer than on his understanding of the news. He was an insufferable buffoon who rarely did anything right, who believed the world existed for him and him alone.
Fans of the show loved him. Critics loved him. His peers loved him, awarding actor Ted Knight a pair of Emmys for his portrayal. Who knew that Knight and the show’s writers were creating an archetype that would still be going strong three decades later?
…[Show co-creator Allan] Burns, who would go on to win a pair of writing Emmys for the show, says he and Brooks patterned Baxter after a pair of news anchors popular in Los Angeles at the time the show debuted in 1970.
“[Moore’s] aunt was the assistant to the president of the local CBS affiliate here in L.A., and so Jim and I spent a lot of time hanging around that newsroom just to try and get the flavor of it,” he says. “There was an anchorman there, Jerry Dunphy — Jerry was one of those stentorian, firm-jawed, gray-haired guys who looked right on camera, but who was not a newsman, like so many of the anchors are not. They’re really newsreaders more than anything else.
Baxter would constantly mangle the script written for him to read, to the chagrin of the writers. In this clip, Baxter reads the script oblivious that the visuals accompanying it are wrong.
Heather Hendershot makes the case that the fictional Baxter, for all his faults, is better than the current crop of media news pundits.
I suspect many readers of this blog are as wearied as I am from being bombarded with news headlines about the the Windsor family’s internal fights. It seems like it never ends.
This 11-year-old clip from the Australian sketch comedy team The Chasers pokes well-deserved ridicule at the media’s obsession with the most trivial details about that annoying family. And that was long before the current media binge about whatever the hell is the latest topic in this long-running soap opera.
I did not watch the highly popular show Game of Thrones, anticipating that it would be too dark and gory for me, but I enjoyed this clip of one of the characters in the series Jon Snow invited to a dinner party at the home of Seth Myers and trying to learn how to make small talk.
Following up on yesterday’s post on the small arms of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, I remembered an old clip by Eddie Izzard where she talks about dinosaurs.
The radio show This American Life this week had a 15-minute segment that featured comedian Alex Edelman telling the story of how he grew up in a very Orthodox Jewish family and what happened when, for what he says were very Jewish reasons, they happened to celebrate Christmas one year.
It was absolutely hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing.
Politics in the UK seems to have become calmer these days, with just the usual low-level turbulence, such as the former Conservative health minister John Matt Hancock who thought it was a good idea to go on a reality TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. That required him to fly to Australia and do some really disgusting things, leading him to either resign as MP or be forced out by the party, it is not clear which.
During his I’m a Celebrity stint – in which Hancock was repeatedly chosen by viewers to undertake tasks including rummaging for meal tokens underground surrounded by snakes and spiders, and eat food including a cow’s anus and a camel’s penis – officers from the West Suffolk Conservative Association suggested he should step down.
…Hancock, who was first elected as an MP in 2010, served as culture secretary before becoming health secretary under Theresa May, keeping the job with Boris Johnson and throughout the bulk of the Covid pandemic.
He resigned in June last year after footage emerged of him kissing a friend and work colleague, Gina Coladangelo, in his ministerial office, a breach of his own Covid-19 rules.
I find this action inexplicable but maybe Hancock thought that his future as a cabinet minister was over and that he could make more money this way than by being an MP .
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