Born in Philadelphia, Brenner started out a documentary filmmaker, but eventually launched a career as a comedian. His big break came on January 8, 1971 when Johnny Carson let him do nine minutes of standup on The Tonight Show. Carson apparently liked Brenner’s observational comedy routine. In years to come, Brenner made a record-setting 157 appearances on Johnny’s show, sometimes as a comedy act, sometimes as a substitute host. Above you can watch the very first of those funny appearances.
Did you know, student of dead white philosophers, that Heidegger was a “boozy beggar”? Wittgenstein a “beery swine” and Descartes a “drunken fart”? What about Plato, who, “they say, could stick it away; Half a crate of whiskey every day”? Neither did I until I saw members of Monty Python sing “The Philosopher’s Song,” above, from their 1982 live show at the Hollywood Bowl. Eric Idle, in what looks like an Australian bush hat strung with teabags, introduces the number, saying it’s “a nice intellectual song for those two or three of you in the audience who understand these things.” Then Idle, joined by Michael Palin and frequent Python collaborator Neil Innes, launches into a paean to drinking that colorfully calls the great philosophers crazed dipsomaniacs. Well, all but John Stuart Mill, who got “particularly ill” from “half a pint of shandy.”
It’s all nonsense, right? Maybe so, but the Pythons were no strangers to philosophy. Having assembled from the august bodies of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, they perpetually revisited academic themes, if only to mock them. And yet some philosophers take the work of Monty Python very seriously. In his Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge, Nudge, Think Think!, Philosophy Professor Gary Hardcastlerefers to an essay called “Tractatus Comedio-Philosophicus,” which “wants us to know that the only difference between Monty Python and academic philosophy is that philosophy isn’t funny.” So there you have it. Skip the years of penury and overwork and go directly to Youtube for your higher education in the classics from the Pythons. Then listen to Professor Hardcastle—in Open Court’s “Popular Culture and Philosophy” podcast above—expound at length on the philosophic virtues of Cleese, Idle, Palin, Gilliam, and Jones. And finally, a bonus: below watch Christopher Hitchens sing “The Philosopher’s Song” from memory in a 2009 interview.
The song grew out of an earlier Python setup known as “The Bruce Sketch” (below). The sketch is pretty dated—some moments certainly come off as more offensive than perhaps deemed at the time. (Our English readers will have to let us know if “pommy bastard” smarts.) Four Australian philosophy professors at the fictitious University of Woolamaloo, all of them named Bruce, welcome a new member, Michael Baldwin (whom they insist on calling “Bruce”). The Bruces seem a nice bunch of chaps until they start in on their rules, revealing a contemptuous obsession with keeping out the “poofters.” It’s perfectly in keeping with this assembly of amiable right-wing nationalists: The Bruces inform their English colleague that he may teach “the great socialist thinkers, provided he makes it clear that they were wrong,” and then they get a visit from a shuffling caricature of an Aboriginal servant (whom one mustn’t mistreat, state the rules, “if there’s anyone watching”). In addition to bigotry, Australia, politics and prayer, the Bruces, their new member learns, seem mostly concerned with drinking rather than philosophy. In my personal experience of some academic quarters, this is at least one part of the sketch that hasn’t aged at all.
Thanks to the efforts of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox and singer Miche Braden, the world now knows how heavy metal rockers, Guns N’ Roses sound with their knees rouged up and their stockings down.
Their New Orleans jazz take on 1987’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” replaces the preening rock god sensitivity of the original with a sort of mature, female swagger harkening all the way back Bessie Smith. (Braden’s stage credits include turns as Billie Holiday, Valaida Snow, and Ma Rainey.)
The backup musicians get in on the fun, too, retooling Slash’s guitar solo as a horn-driven cakewalk. I know which party I’d rather hit!
Over the years, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” has proved a remarkably study workhorse, withstanding attempts to make it over as electronica, a Gregorian Chant and Brazilian prog rock. Or how about this version played on the Guzheng, an ancient Chinese instrument. Postmodern Jukebox’s entry into this stakes is not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one.
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Musical experimentalists Collective Cadenza’s Valentine’s Day Special “A History of Men Moving On” is to wallowing as speed dating is to courtship.
It’s a five minute medley of male romantic pain that takes us all the way from Roy Orbison’s 1960 “Only the Lonely” to CeeLo Green’s pointed “Fuck You.”
Vocalist Forest Van Dyke exhibits considerable dexterity, navigating these stylistic switchbacks. A shame he was directed to deliver so much of this choice material to a framed photo, awkwardly positioned on an upstage music stand. I know that the room was crowded, but I would’ve liked to see his feet, too. A man who can dance is something to see.
Kudos to musical director Michael Thurber for making explicit the similarities between Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” and Usher’s “Papers” (as covered by a goat). As with Hemingway’s couplet, the latter failed to make the round up. Does the heartbreak ever cease?
Not since Gabe Kaplan’s Mr. Kotter has there been such a hip, big-haired, TV teacher to “help make you smart and listen to your feelings, too.”
Does it really matter if comedian, musician, and now web series star Reggie Watts’ Teach is deeply unclear on the science he’s imparting, if the kids in his classroom are learning important life lessons? Why it’s uncool to bully single-celled organisms, for instance. (“You might be multicellular but there’s no need to be cellulist.”)
As we all know, the best teachers awaken their students’ curiosity, send them bounding off in pursuit of knowledge, rather than spoon-feeding them correct answers.
That’s exactly what Mr. Watts did for—or possibly to—me when he talked about ‘tons: protons, contons, decepticons, and tauntauns. Had he said, “That last one refers to a species of imaginary omnivorous reptomammals from the 3rd highest grossing franchise in film history,” I would’ve spelled it “tontons” without a second thought. But because he deliberately left things a little vague, asking, “How many of you have seen The Empire Strikes Back?” I was motivated to do a little research. Star Wars was never my bag…
It boggles the mind how much more I would’ve learned had the Internet existed back when I was in high school. (Teach’s classroom is most definitely a blast from the past—not an iPad in sight and the overhead projector restored to its place of honor. The quickly uptilted flask is, of course, timeless.)
The opening credits suggest that we should look forward to an education in Literature, Music, and History in upcoming episodes.
Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot: they’ve got to rank as one of the twentieth century’s most surprising pair of pen pals. More intriguingly still, they first got in touch — as luminaries seem to do — out of the spirit of mutual admiration. Marx took the praise beyond Eliot’s poetry to his looks: “Why you haven’t been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the basic stupidity of the casting directors.” This he wrote in the letter of June 19, 1961 above, after having received a portrait of the poet, from the poet, in exchange for a portrait of the comedian, from the comedian. This constitutes only part of what The Economistcalls “among the strangest and most delightful epistles ever created.” That same article quotes a darker observation on Eliot from Anthony Julius’ T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form: “Anti-Semitism supplied part of the material out of which he created poetry.”
There we have only one of the reasons to believe that the author of The Waste Land counted as no friend of the Jewish people. Yet at least in correspondence, between 1961 and 1964, he did befriend one particular Jewish person. “Enter Groucho,” the Economist article continues, “whose wit was as uniquely Jewish as it was universally comic. Where Eliot was the famous defender of tradition, order and civilised taste, the crux of Groucho’s humour was flouting tradition, fomenting chaos and outraging taste. ‘I have had a perfectly wonderful evening,’ he once said to a host, ‘but this wasn’t it.’ ” The famous quip could well have come at the end of Marx and Eliot’s first, and last, meeting in person, a dinner at the Eliot house. “There were awkward lulls in the conversation,” according to Anna Knoebel at The Outlet. “Neither man was inclined to discuss his own work, while the other was eager to praise it. They stopped writing shortly thereafter.”
My Friend Friedrich opens on awkward, bespectacled Columbia student Nate having a heart to heart on the phone with his mother. Then, in a philosophy class, he almost succeeds in landing a date by lobbing an illustrated invitation at his love interest, Emma. All goes awry when a taller, more confident, bespectacled Columbia student cuts him off at the knees. So far, so very New York student film, but a conceit arrives to distinguish this story of Ivy League dating woes: the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche appears before Nate to guide him towards self-actualization.
In what “seems to have been a senior project at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts,” according to Critical Theory (a Vimeo upload dates the film as “circa 2003), My Friend Friedrich gives us the typical undergraduate experience of the philosopher’s voice. Nietzsche instructs our young friend to regard the flashing lights, tall buildings, and “horseless carriages” of Times Square as meaningless. “Nihilism cares about nothing” he says and urges his pupil to will himself to power. It’s not too profound a portrayal of Nietzsche—though of course it’s only played for laughs—and seems to come mainly from a surface reading of his Will to Power, an unfinished manuscript published after the philosopher’s death. (His sister fraudulently pitched a mangled edition to the Nazis as Nietzsche’s underwriting of their ideology, cutting out all of her brother’s strong remarks against anti-Semitism.)
One could argue, if it’s worth explaining the humor, that this superficial take on Nietzsche is precisely the point, since it’s the diffident Nate’s slight reading of Will to Power at the outset that produces his hallucination-slash-visitation. Nietzsche helps Nate win an intellectual pissing contest by quoting Beyond Good and Evil chapter and verse, then goads him into some awkward outbursts and eventually overstays his welcome. The screwball conclusion is ripped right out of Wes Anderson.
Here’s a funny little variation on “rickrolling,” a term some of our readers might not be familiar with. So let’s quickly refer you to Wikipedia:
Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch; a person provides a hyperlink which is seemingly relevant to the topic at hand, but actually leads to Astley’s video. The link can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. People led to the music video are said to have been rickrolled. Rickrolling has extended beyond web links to playing the video or song disruptively in other situations, including public places, such as a live appearance of Astley himself in the 2008 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The meme helped to revive Astley’s career.
Now, in another sign that rickrolling has gone beyond the web, we have above a snapshot of a quantum physics written by Sairam Gudiseva, a student at (we believe) White Station High School in Tennessee. As the snapshot shows, Gudiseva managed to run the lyrics of “Never Gonna Give You Up” down the left margin of the page … while still keeping his ideas flowing. Well done, young man. You can see a full page of his essay here.
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