March 3, 2006

I just realized that ever since getting my new, big, bright, yummy LCD HD DVR CPR CHF LSMFT monitor, I’ve been messing/screwing/schmucking up the sizes of everything on this site (and all my soon-to-be-revealed new sites – TEASER!). I just fixed a few things, including that Angry Beavers picture which apparently was a bit overwhelming to anyone with an 800X600 or smaller display. Speaking of the Immortal ABs, of whom I remain a die-hard fan (still re-running on Viacom’s Nicktoons Network), the voice of Daggett (the dumb one), Richard Horvitz has gone on to playing the eponymous* character on the even-more-cult-following-esque “Invader Zim” and Billy of “The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy” (I guess he’s one-third eponymous there). And Cartoon Network has just announced a new show created by Everett “Duckman” Peck, titled “Squirrel Boy”, about a boy who’s heavily influenced by a talking squirrel. Richard plays the squirrel. It’s nice to see him getting back into rodents (as it’s nice to see Peck get back into anything).

*It’s always fun to use that word.

Who was it that said “Dying is easy, comedy is hard”? I’ve Googled it, and gotten a variety of mixed attributions: Sir Donald Wolfit, Edmund Kean, George Bernard Shaw, Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth’s brother, so many bad joke possibilities), Edmund Gwenn, Oscar Wilde? To add gravitas, many believe it was whomever’s dying words. It was definately stolen by Peter O’Toole’s character Alan Swain in the 1982 movie “My Favorite Year”. All I know is, having experienced the average person’s number of near-death experiences (three, the next one is probably for real) and having tried to write funny for most of my life, it’s true.

And one of the few things harder than Comedy (besides Math, if you’re a Barbie doll) is serious analysis of Comedy. Like that other old quote I can’t find the source for about submarine duty being “long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror”, most Comedy analysis consists of long texts of mind-numbingly boring intellectual jargon, punctuated by brief examples of side-splitting hilarity.

Which leads to a surprising piece of analysis in the dreaded New York Times* by Virginia Heffernan** which breaks down the content of so many of the current “Brokeback” spoofs, particularly the ones using re-edited parts of other movies***.

The analysis basically boils down to this: it’s easy to make other movies look like “gay love stories” because every time you have a scene in which one male character has a heart-felt conversation with another male character about almost anything, it can easily be taken out of context and made to look like it’s about the two males’ gay love relatonship. (There. Now you don’t have to bother with the Times at all.)

As Spock would say, “totally logical” (after all, there are plenty of Kirk/Spock scenes that have been called “totally gay”).

As for use of the word “Brokeback” in general, let me predict that it will end up on the Lake Superior State University List of Banished Words in record time, but not before a certain show on the Bravo cable channel is re-titled “Brokeback Eye”. Just sayin’.
* As a rule, I no longer rely upon the NYT for any news that’s fit to repeat
**OH MY GOD, I always thought that was a last name that was totally made up for “The King of Queens”

*** A form now being called “Trailer Trashing”, and I can’t find the origin of THAT either.