One of the best stand-up comedians. I enjoy his stream-of-consciousness, seemingly random association style.
Mano Singham
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One of the best stand-up comedians. I enjoy his stream-of-consciousness, seemingly random association style.
I know this is a bit late, but never mind.
Gervais has a new Netflix special. I will not watch it (or indeed watch anything by him anymore) because I was so disgusted with his earlier one with its rampant transphobia and the smug, preening, overweening sense that he was being ever so edgy and clever. But according to what I read, rather than learn from feedback from that first show, he seems to have doubled down.
Aja Romano writes about all that is wrong with Gervais and others of his ilk like Dave Chappelle who seem to think that making the trans community the target of ridicule is somehow acceptable.
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The origins of languages are buried deep in time and teasing out why they have the features they do is not easy and hence often speculative. For those of us whose language is English, one mystery is the way things are spelled, which is a source of humor for comedians like Eddie Izzard.
Arika Okrent says that English is unusual in the level of weirdness of its spelling
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Some of the most common rules are riddled with exceptions, such as this one.
Eddie Izzard also has a bit on this topic.
I have long been an admirer of Eddie Izzard,. She is one of the few stand up comedians whose shows I can watch in their entirety without it getting a little tedious after some point. I think it is because of the way she goes off on wildly imaginative tangents with a lot of physicality involved. (Izzard has recently said that she prefers she/her pronouns.) In addition to comedy, she is progressive in her politics and raises money for charities by running marathons. But not just a marathon here or there but a series of marathons in a short period of time.
For example. look at this series of runs. (I wrote about that feat back in 2017.)
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Netflix has a lot of specials featuring stand-up comics that usually last an hour or so. Comedies are my favorite form of entertainment but I find that when I watch these specials, I get restless after about 15 minutes or so. It seems like I reach some kind of joke saturation and then need some time to detox. This is true even for comedians that I find really funny, like Eddie Izzard whose riffs can go off in unexpected directions so that you do not quite know what to expect. This is why I usually tend to watch and enjoy short clips of comedians dealing with one particular topic or just a few.
Comedy films and TV shows spread the funny bits out more over time and this works better for me.
I know that these specials are popular and the comedians draw large live audiences as well to their performances, so clearly many people do not get tired they way that I do.
I was just curious if there are many others who are like me in this regard.
This South African ad for fast food turns on its head the tedious and ridiculous narratives of brave European explorers ‘discovering’ countries where people were already living. (Via Rob Beschizza)
Eddie Izzard did a similar riff some time earlier.
The James Bond series has really got to be treated as straight-up comedies. In the Roger Moore era, the campy humor was more explicit with Moore’s wisecracks letting the audience know that it was all utterly ridiculous. In the Daniel Craig era there seemed to be an attempt to revive the original Sean Connery darker vibe of the hero being more ruthless and cold-blooded, willing to use more freely his license to kill. But despite Bond’s somber expression throughout, this film is a real hoot that had me laughing at its unintended humor.
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