Season 3 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffeekicks off with Jerry Seinfeld and his pal Louis CK piling into a very small 1959 Fiat Jolly and taking a leisurely (death) ride through New York City. Eventually, they escape the city and wind up at an unexpected place — aboard CK’s yacht. There, they share a cappuccino, navigate various nautical dangers, crack their signature jokes, and kibitz the day away. Not a bad way to pass some time. If you’d like to see Jerry and Louis together in another context, see our previous post: Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of Comedy (NSFW).
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A true fact about the thesis stage of an advanced degree: Whatever the academic field, whether writing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s thesis or 250 plus page doctoral dissertation, at some point, you will need to winnow your argument down to an abstract summary of a couple succinct paragraphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when riding elevators with colleagues and mentors, talking to relatives over holiday dinners, justifying one’s existence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to somehow reduce to one intelligible sentence or two. It’s all anyone has the patience for, honestly, and it saves you the trouble of trying to reconstruct complex arguments for people who won’t understand or care about them and who generally only asked out of politeness anyway.
But how, how, to cram years of research, agony, turmoil, crushing failure and soaring epiphany into bite-sized conversational nuggets without gross oversimplification to the point of tautological absurdity? Can it even be done?! The blog “lol my thesis,” started last year by a Harvard senior studying Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, suggests that it can, but not without hilarious results. Part of an exploding genre of academic parody (and procrastination) sites, lol my thesis proudly ventures forth in its mission of “summing up years of work in one sentence” with open submissions from current students. Many of the submissions are from the sciences, and many from undergraduate theses, but a fair number also come from humanities and post-graduate studies. Take, for example, the following submission from an MFA Creative Nonfiction student at Emerson College, which directly addresses the intended audience:
“A collection of nonfiction essays, which means they’re written about real people and events, mom. Remember all those times you accused me of not listening to the things you said?”
A passive aggressive example that most of us who’ve been through the process can relate to at some level. Another one that hits home is this, from a Vassar Political Science major, who discovers too late that the argument doesn’t work: “Oops: Turns out self-published poetry didn’t actually affect Indian politics but I’m 60 pages in, so.”
The submissions from the sciences do not disappoint. For example, from a University of Maryland student of Biological Sciences: “We spent thousands of government dollars to create a mouse model for a disease only 32 people in the world have.” And a Science Writing student at M.I.T. gives us this particularly impressive example of brevity: “Wolves + humans, the ultimate frenemies.” Not to be outdone, a Stem Cell Biology student at Harvard offers a grimly terse confessional: “I have killed so many fish.”
The submissions are anonymous, but some good sports have chosen to include links to their theses, endearingly hoping that someone besides their advisor will actually want to read them. Most of the submissions, however, simply combine two qualities every advanced student knows all too well: a well-earned feeling of futility and the mordant wit required to keep going anyway.
Her question? What do English cows sound like when they moo.
The knighted star does not skimp on his answer, even if, as he repeatedly suggests, one cannot do the subject justice in less than an entire afternoon. The dialects of British cows, like those of their human counterparts, underscore that theirs is a society “dominated by class, social status and location.”
The moo of a cow from West Oxfordshire, home to Prime Minister David Cameron, is quite conservative compared to the lusty bellow of a specimen from West Yorkshire, where Stewart grew up. (The latter is so astonishing, he immediately offers to produce it twice.)
Cockney cows, a breed whose ranks have thinned considerably since Shakespeare’s day, sound like sheep.
As an extra treat, Stewart generously agrees to the host’s request for an American cow, impersonating a Nevada-dweller, a geographic homage to the original questioner as well as his bride, jazz singer Sunny Ozell.
Is there anything this man can’t — or won’t — do?
In October, 1973, David Bowie made his last live appearance as Ziggy Stardust. (Watch it here.) Pretty soon, Bowie would morph into a new persona Aladdin Sane and later The Thin White Duke. But, for a moment there, he almost went with another unlikely character, “Cobbler Bob.” Or so that’s the playful scenario that English comedian and actor Adam Buxton imagines in this short lego video. Enjoy.
When you’re done having a laugh and ready for something more serious, we’d encourage you to see these related posts:
There are myriad New Year’s Eve customs worldwide. In Japan, toshikoshi soba noodles are eaten to bring in the coming year. In North America, finding someone to share a New Year’s Eve kiss with as the clock winds down has become a boon to the romantically-challenged. In Germany, however, a different tradition has taken form: every year on December 31st, TV networks broadcast an 18-minute-long black and white two-hander comedy skit.
In 1963, Germany’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk television station recorded a sketch entitled Dinner For One, performed by the British comics Freddie Frinton and May Warden. The duo depicted an aging butler serving his aristocratic mistress, Miss Sophie, dinner on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
Although four additional spots have been set at the table, the nonagenarian’s friends have long since passed away, and the butler is forced to take their places in drinking copious amounts of alcohol while toasting Miss Sophie’s health. Hilarity, as it is wont to do in such cases, ensues.
Since its initial recording, the clip has become a New Year’s Eve staple in Germany. Although Dinner For One has never been broadcast in the U. S. or Canada, the clip has spread throughout Europe to Norway, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond the continent’s shores, to South Africa and Australia. In Sweden, a bowdlerized 11-minute version of the clip has been produced, where, for decency’s sake, much of the butler’s boozing was excised alongside its attendant comedic effect. In Denmark, after the national television network failed to broadcast the sketch in 1985, an avalanche of viewer complaints has guaranteed its subsequent yearly appearance. Although the category is now defunct, the clip held the Guinness World Record for Most Frequently Repeated TV Program. As for why the video’s garnered so much attention? No one’s really sure. The Wall Street Journal’s Todd Buell posits that the sketch’s easy to understand English combined with a German longing for security and simplicity may have led to its iconic status. To me, however, it seems that the finely tuned physical comedy translates readily beyond any linguistic boundaries, and simply hit the right note at the right time.
Above, you can view the original 18-minute comedic opus and celebrate New Year’s day in the same way that much of Europe brought in 2014 (don’t mind the German introduction — the video is in English). In future years, you can always find Dinner for One in our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
From all of us at Open Culture to you, have a happy new year!
Woody Allen once said that “sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go it’s pretty damn good.” Most readers would be compelled to think that Allen’s slight frame, trademark horn-rimmed glasses, and stuttering delivery would preclude his characters from achieving much of anything in the sexual realm. After all, how could the consummate nebbishes that Allen portrays in most of his films possibly impress a member of the fairer sex? Somehow, however, in spite of their whinging neuroticism, Allen’s geek incarnates transform into gallants of prodigious proportions in almost every role. Those wanting concrete evidence may take a look at Take the Money and Run(1969), Annie Hall (1977), or Manhattan (1979), among myriad others, and note that Allen’s characters repeatedly end up with women who seemed to make a gross error in sexual selection.
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Every year, around this time, I give thanks that I no longer work retail. Sore feet and rude customers go with the territory, but December (nay, November) brings with it a terrifying onslaught of Little Drummer Boys. I know folks who can’t abide Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer, or the Singing Dogs’ Jingle Bells, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing hastens a psychotic break faster than a few dozen pa rum pa pum pum pum rum pa pum pum pum rum pa pum pum pums.
It seems horror legend Christopher Lee, familiar to younger fans as Star Wars’ Count Dooku, feels my pain..and relishes it. It’s a cliche for an aging actor to release an album of seasonal chestnuts, but the 91-year-old Lee’s A Heavy Metal Christmas is a thing apart. His take on The Little Drummer Boy is the sonic equivalent of Rosemary’s Baby.
I can’t say that I prefer Lee’s to any other version — they’re all tortuous in my book- but I’m at peace with admiring it in the abstract. A stunt? Maybe, but he seems wholly sincere in his video greeting below, wishing us all a very happy Christmas and “for the sake of the world and those people in it” a safe New Year.
Yakov Smirnoff has the distinction of being the most famous Russian comic in America. He’s also the only Russian comic in America (ba-dum-dum). But seriously: In his mid-80s heyday, he had the market cornered on Soviet humor in the U.S. Whatever demand there was, Smirnoff supplied it, singlehandedly, as a fixture in ads, TV show and film appearances, comedy specials, late-night talk shows…. His was the only face of Russian humor anyone knew in the 80s (unless we’re counting Ivan Drago). Smirnoff even warranted a Family Guy reference, which pretty much cements his reputation as endlessly recyclable pop culture syndication fodder.
And yet, post-Soviet Russia, it’s hard to imagine there’s a place for Yakov Smirnoff, since corny jokes at the expense of end-stage Russian communism were not only his bread and butter, but his whole comedic menu, such that Marc Maron introduces Smirnoff as a guest on his WTF Podcast above with: “that guy, with his hook, that certainly isn’t relevant anymore. How does a guy like that survive?” Ouch. But what a hook it was, says Maron: a wonderstruck immigrant exclaiming “What a country!” as he took in each new capitalist marvel. He was like a real-life version of one of Andy Kaufman’s characters, or a pre-Borat Eastern European innocent abroad. The act carried him beyond his mid-eighties 15 minutes of fame and through a 20-year career entertaining middle-class Americans in Branson, Missouri.
But was there much demand for Smirnoff’s brand of humor even at his peak? If you didn’t have the great fortune of living through the 80s, you might be surprised at just how popular his sort of thing could be—“a Russian comic talking about how great America was.” But it wasn’t only Smirnoff’s persona that flattered our sense of economic, political, and moral superiority. A whole genre of Soviet jokes had a prominent place in the discourse, with knee-slappers about KGB surveillance and bread lines and other privations commonly tossed around at dinner parties. Even Ronald Reagan tried his hand at it, as you can see here. Reagan’s delivery was never my cup of tea, but you can also see Smirnoff do his impression of Reagan telling the same joke in the video at the top of the post.
And while revisiting Smirnoff’s not exactly meteoric rise to fame in the U.S. is fun for its own sake, what’s even more interesting are Smirnoff’s serious reminiscences of his time growing up and working as a comic in Russia. The serious Smirnoff is full of psychological insights (he has a masters degree in the subject from Penn) and sociological anecdotes about life under a repressive communist regime—though he never misses a chance for some of the old Smirnoff material, complete with his honking, donkey-like laughter.
For example, about twenty minutes into his WTF interview, Smirnoff discuss the serious subject of joke approval in the Soviet Union. That’s right, in all seriousness, he tells us, comics were required to submit their material to a Department of Jokes. Smirnoff also once spoke expansively on the subject in a 1985 Chicago Tribune piece on him at his peak.
Yep. There’s a Department of Jokes. Actually, the Ministry of Culture has a very big department of humor. I’m serious now. Once a year they censor your material, and then you have to stay with what they have approved. You can‘t improvise or do anything like that. You write out your material and mail it to them, and they send it back to you with corrections. After that, you stay with it for a year.
It is perhaps for this reason that comics in Soviet Russia borrowed liberally from each other, rarely did original material, and never, ever improvised. Says Smirnoff: “I would do some original material, but that would be unusual. Also, it was OK for comedians to borrow—if one of the big comedians went on television and did a monolog, next day 10 or 20 other comedians would do the same thing in clubs. That wasn’t considered stealing.”
It also turns out that serious Yakov Smirnoff explains the comic stylings of his persona, the cornball character:
It was old jokes, more vaudeville type of humor. More like English-style comedy. Or like Henny Youngman. One-liners or stories that have been told over and over again but they’re still funny. No improvisation comedy. You don’t improvise. You don’t tell stories about yourself the way American comics do.
So it turns out that a lot of those bad jokes about Russia at the tail end of the Cold War actually descended from the source. Take this one from Smirnoff:
A funeral procession is going by, and they’re walking a goat behind the coffin. A guy comes over and says, “Why are you walking a goat behind the coffin?” The other guys says, “That goat killed my mother-in-law.” The first guy says, “Can I borrow this goat for a week?” The second guy says, “You see all these people in the procession? They’re all waiting. Get in line.”
See? It’s a joke about standing in line! Also, about mothers-in-law, which must be a truly universal subject. Find more of Smirnoff’s insights into Soviet humor and joke censorship at the full Chicago Tribune interview piece and on Maron’s WTF podcast.
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