Any Major Dude With Half A Heart

I am so sad that the goldmine that was holygoof.com is no more, apparently zapped by the site’s host. The Holy Goof was a like a supernova: it appeared suddenly, was quite a spectacle, and disappeared as suddenly (that’s what supernovas do, right?). I have not come across a finer audio comedy site, and my life “” and iPod “” is emptier without the fine comedy which the Holy Goof shared. So, for funny Friday, a bit of comedy; some of it samples from stuff I found at the Holy Goof.

Ali G – Ali G Meets Posh Spice And Beckham.mp3
Ali G has been eclipsed by Borat, who was much funnier in small doses than in a feature film. This interview with Victoria Beckham and her little pet monkey is Baron Cohen at the height of his game. He makes Posh repeat what football fans used to allege about her supposed unlocking of the tradesman’s entrance. When he sets up David with a poor joke, it is not the punchline that makes us laugh, but the way David walked into it. And through it all, Victoria handles it with grace, making me almost like her.

Chris Rock – Real People Of Ignorance (Friend of a Rap Star).mp3
Chris Rock – Real People Of Ignorance (Tattoo).mp3
Chris Rock – Tip Your Hat To Whitey (Pineapple).mp3
Chris Rock – Tip Your Hat To Whitey (Jamaica).mp3
Chris Rock – Tip Your Hat To Whitey (Mars).mp3
Five short skits from Chris Rock’s Never Scared album, a collection of stand-up and skits. While I regard Chris Rock as the funniest and most penetrative stand-up comedian of his generation, his skits are a mixed bag. The five on offer here, however, are very good indeed. Rock’s backing vocals on the “Real People Of Ignorance” bits are total genius “” hear his comments on nightvision goggles and the purposelessness of vaginal tattooes (and those in Sanskrit). The Friend of a Rap Star one comes from an earlier post.

Jim Norton – Michael Jackson Is The Artist Of The Millennium
Be warned: Jim Norton smacks you in the face with some entirely inappropriate gags. You may laugh because it is funny, but even then you gasp and think: “He didn’t say that, did he?” Michael Jackson is, of course, an easy target. Britney Spears, another target in this bit, was not yet the pitiable wreck she is now. With Norton, one understands after a while that the offensive lines, often self-deprecating, are merely gratuitous, not representing an agenda or manifesto. By Norton ascribing shocking conduct to himself, he opens his way to be as shocking and scathing about the targets of his jokes. Still, fuckin’ hell, man!

Patton Oswalt – You Are Allowed 20 Birthday Parties.mp3
Patton Oswald is only marginally less ready to offend than Jim Norton. His CV lends him some credibility: voices for various versions of Grand Theft Auto; appearances in several movies and TV shows, and a voice appearance in the Pixar movie Ratatoullie. His routine is laced with pitchblack humour, offset by a certain self-deprecating geek charm (indeed, self-deprecation is a popular technique among contemporary comedians. Ãœbergeek Woody Allen used to it great effect in his stand-up days).

Eddie Izzard – Americans.mp3
Eddie Izzard – The Future.mp3
When I big up Chris Rock as the finest stand-up comedian of his generation, I feel a need to send an apology to that cross-dressing genius Eddie Izzard. I love Izzard’s voice and delivery, but it is his way of weaving a narrative “” not unlike that other giant of British standup, Billy Connolly “” which merits total admiration. So it was quite difficult to cull a couple of tracks out of the context of that narrative. Izzard’s humour is insightful, playing with absurd concepts and the surreal, rather than turning to aggressive sarcasm for laughs.

Paul F Tompkins – Cherry Picking.mp3
A veteran of TV comedy programming, Paul F Tompkins’ debut album Impersonal is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Some bits, like this one, are very amusing; others seem to try too hard in their stretch for surreal humour. But Tompkins’ delivery is likable “” you feel that you are in the company of somebody who will make you laugh at some point; and sooner than later he does. And even the chuckle-free bits hold the listeners interest because Tompkins knows how to tell a story. Sides will remain unsplit, but one is not likely to regret the time spent listening to Tompkins’ brand of observational humour.

Bill Hicks – On The Bright Side.mp3
This is from the Shock & Awe album, recorded in Oxford. While Izzard is an Englishman speaking to an American audience, so is Hicks the Yank trying to explain his country to an English audience, and trying to make sense of Britain. This is not Hicks at the top of his game ““ for one thing, he’s is far less aggro and much more laid back than on other recordings “” but even Hicks not at his best is preferable to many other comedians. Just two years after this show was recorded, Hicks died of pancreatic cancer,

on February 26, 1994. While he never attained great fame, his influence on any number of contemporary comedians, including some featured here, is evident.

Peter Sellers – Party Political Speech.mp3
I have said it before: Peter Sellers is not by any stretch of the imagination a favourite comedian. I find absolutely nothing mirth-inducing about “Birdy Nam Nam”, and the Goon Show leaves me cold, other than to acknowledge the debt owed to it by Monty Python and everything that took influence from that ensemble. But when Sellers was cooking, he really was great. His satire of a political speech which is high on pomposity and empty of content might sound dated in delivery, but remains relevant today. And on the subject of politics: what is the fucking matter with fucking Ohio? Bush in 2004; HRC in ’08?

I’m good at telling jokes. Which would be great, except there are only two jokes I remember. Both have been my staple for donkey’s years. This means that once I’ve told them, I’m sold out of jokes. So my stand-up routine is rather limited, and to entertain I need to rely on recordings of my favourite stand-up comedians. Some of these, and some other stuff that makes me laugh, follows below. First, however, let me share with you my two staple jokes. You will have to forgive the absence of my physical “comedy” (machines rattling, basically) and fake German accents (as opposed to my natural German accent). The first joke requires us to move back in time, to the early ’90s.

Hitler in the Amazon
The time is the early ’90s. Germany has just been reunified, but things are going poorly. In short, Germany is in terrible political and economic trouble, and the politicians can see no way of solving the problems, until some bright spark ascertains that the only man who can help Germany now is in fact still alive, living in a little hut in Paraguay. And so a delegation is dispatched to South America to persuade Adolf Hitler to return and save Germany from ruin.

And so the delegation is cutting its way through the jungle, until the group happens upon that little hut. They look at the door bell. Sure enough, it says “A. Hitler”. They ring the bell, the door opens, and there stands Adolf Hitler. The figure is a little bent now, the greasy hair with the side-parting has over the years turned white, and so has the Chaplin moustache. Nonetheless, it is unmistakably the Führer.

“Ja, vot do you vont?” Hitler barks.

“Führer,” the head of the Federal Republic’s delegation says, “we have come to ask you for your help. You see, things are very bad in the Vaterland now. We’ve had this unification, and that has created all sorts of problem. Only one man can help our Deutschland now, mein Führer, and that man is you. We have come to ask you to become the Führer of Deutschland once again.”

“Nein,” shouts Hitler. “Zis is out of ze kvetchon. Ze last time you peeple didn’t apprechihate me, and I vill never go back to Deutschland agaen.”

“But, Führer, please reconsider, for the welfare of the Volk and of our beloved Vaterland.”

“Nein, nein, nein,” Hitler replies with the kind of agitation which made him such a favourite with cartoon movie producers. “I am out of ze Füher buzinezz!”

But the delegation continues to persuade Adolf until he caves in.

“Ja gut, I vill be your Führer agaen,” says Hitler. “But only under vun condition!”

“Yes, Führer?”

“Zis time …. No more Mr Nice Guy.”

Take a look at ‘The Top 10 Rap Songs White People Love’. Not because it hits the nail on the head (it doesn’t), not because it’s amusing (it mostly isn’t), not because we can learn anything from it (we can’t). I’m flagging it because the idea is at once interesting and ridiculous. Is the dude saying that white people are lame for supposedly liking these tracks, or is he saying that the tracks are lame for white people supposedly liking these songs? Either way, is he advocating some kind of a Taste Apartheid?

Of course, it seems evident that cap-in-yo-ass-bustin’ charlies such as 50 Cent, The Game or Fabolous, and even Snoop Dogg, are now marketed primarily at an audience in the ‘burbs, not that in the ‘hood. It would be fair to say that “Whitey” digs Fiddy probably more than Whitey’s African-American counterparts do. But by establishing a racial link between music and perceived audience, one risks engaging in the same silly stereotype which assumes that black people cannot possibly like rock or pop music due to some cultural or genetic proscription. Which, of course, is not true (and here is a blog about non-hip hop music black people like ).

Some rap acts will lack credibility, for a variety of reasons. Some had cred, and lost it when they sold their image to be used in kids’ cartoons (MC Hammer); some entered with no credibility in first place (any number of cash-in copycat herberts); and some are accused of not having any credibility when that is just uninformed nonsense, sometimes based on race (Beastie Boys, by people who know nothing; I’ve heard that even Vanilla Ice had credibility on the rap circuit before he sold out to MTV). Surely credibility cannot be based on whether a melanin-disadvantaged character dances poorly to Eazy E. Because — ha ha ha — Whitey ain’t got no rhythm. Flip that stereotype for a laugh.

A poster on my favourite message board suggested the following juxtaposition: “Transpose the post as ‘Top 10 country songs that black people love’ written by some redneck and see what responses it would garner.” Nail. MC Hammer. Bang.

Incidentally, the latest poll suggests that most readers here don’t give much of a damn about hip hop. I asked: What is the state of hip hop today?

Better than ever…………………..1%
Doing OK………………………………4%
Dying on its arse…………………26%
Who gives a 50 Cent…………..67% (that would be the Sir Mix-A-Lot fanbase, presumably)

Count me in the ‘dying on its arse’ constituency. But, frankly, hip hop has become so corporate that I’ve stopped giving much of a 50 Cent. Can rap be saved? We’ll have our old CDs and the memories should all these gimps invariably featuring Akon on their albums succeed in killing rap.

In the spirit of rap songs being liked by white people, a few random tracks which this (non-nasal) “whitey” likes:
Scarface – On My Block.mp3
Common – Real People.mp3
Jay-Z – Izzo (H.O.V.A.).mp3 (live unplugged)
Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five – The Message.mp3
De La Soul – Me, Myself And I.mp3
Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.mp3 (proto rap track)

And for the fun of it:
Chris Rock – Rap Standup.mp3 (“love rap, tired of defending it”)
Chris Rock – Real People Of Ignorance.mp3 (a few laugh-out-loud moments!)
Ben Folds – Bitches Ain’t Shit.mp3 (live on 3FM)
Richard Cheese – Hey Ya.mp3