The Lonely Island bros—Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg, and Jorma Taccone—have a recipe that sounds good in theory and works even better in practice. They blend hot musical styles (including hard-core rap, electro pop, R&B, and auto-tuned R&B), random celebrities (sometimes hot, sometimes not), trademark SNL humor (boiled geese and a variety of other nonboiled animals make appearances), and enough LOLs to make you forget that what you’re listening to is also kind of great, kind of smart, music. They’ve had a lot of hits and collaborated with a lot of talented people, so it’s hard to pick out a single song or video, but when in doubt, go with Michael Bolton. That’s as true in music as it is in a survival scenario, and that truth is borne out in “Jack Sparrow,” where Bolton arrives in the Lonely Island studios with a “big, sexy hook” for their latest track. Michael Bolton never lies and the track is indeed big and sexy, but it’s also not on topic. The song’s about ballin’ in the club, but Bolton, as it turns out, is a “major cinephile”—and he’s currently obsessed with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Johnny Depp (aka “the jester of Tortuga”) has never been used to greater comic effect.
The year 1989 was auspicious for television sitcoms. Both Seinfeld and The Simpsons had their premieres, and each took a pretty basic idea and used it to influence an entire generation of entertainers, comedians, and TV executives. Seinfeld, for its part, abandoned the normal sitcom formula; instead of providing moral lessons, it allowed the essentially depraved main characters to suffer the hilarious consequences of their very poor behavior. The Simpsons offered its own small tweak: It ended with standard-issue moral lessons, but its characters weren’t people. They were yellow things with four fingers, and they were animated.
That key distinction, which in the early days seemed like little more than a marketing tool (“Don’t have a cow, man!”), eventually turned into something truly revolutionary. Because the real world is great for a lot of things, but it is not so great for joke efficiency. You can’t strangle child actors on prime time television, no matter how funny it may be; and you can only film so many nuclear meltdowns on an actual set before your budget explodes. The Simpsons has no such problems. The animated world can simply do more jokes, and do more kinds of jokes. And as a result The Simpsons has been able to cultivate an almost endless string of top-tier talent, from writers like Conan O’Brien to animators like Brad Bird. The show has been on the air for over 20 years now, but you can still pick an episode at random and find plenty of reasons to laugh out loud. The Simpsons is the place where laughter found a home.
Chappelle’s Show is almost as famous now for the way it ended (when creator and guiding comic light Dave Chappelle suddenly abandoned the project in the midst of its third season) as it is for what it actually accomplished. But for anyone who cares to play a clip from the show, there’s no reason to get caught up in the drama of the conclusion, because the comedy itself has hardly aged a day. Race and other “issues” offer a steady stream of content for the program, and that kind of content generally doesn’t age very well. Usually, as time passes, the commentary becomes less and less pointed, but Chappelle’s underlying goofiness ensures that nothing is ever sacrificed for a laugh. Consequently, the show at large seems impervious to age.
Perhaps the best example of this is the “Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories” sketch, in which Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie Murphy tells the (actually true) story of the occasions when Rick James, in various states of elation, was beaten by one or both of the Murphy brothers, whom he abuses in a variety of incredibly outrageous ways. The sketch gave birth to the phrase “I’m Rick James, Bitch!” which is both utterly insipid and utterly inspired. To watch Charlie Murphy tell his version of events, Rick James mumble his, and Dave Chap-pelle re-enact the sequence, is to gain insight into what it means to be punched in the face by Rick James at the height of his fame. It means little, but it results in a lot of deep, deep laughs.
It’s not easy to write a joke. Anyone who has ever tried, on any level, to make someone laugh out loud via pen on paper must be aware of this fact. (This is especially frustrating when you consider how easy it is to make a LOLcat.) But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Not every deep thought that Jack Handey (real name) wrote was deep, thoughtful, or funny, but over the course of 100 or so pages in his first book, he accomplished a minor miracle. With about as many words as it takes to write a haiku, he composed absolutely hilarious story-jokes. For an example of this ability, search “deep thoughts” on the Internet, because a lawsuit will follow if we include one here. And lawsuits are the opposite of deep thoughts, in almost every respect, but most of all in terms of overall hilarity. So search, read, laugh, and thank me later.
PS: Some say that our names are our destiny. Bearing this in mind, is it any surprise that a man named Jack Handey turned into an absurdist comic genius? Well, if you ask Seymour Butz (aka the wit of West Texas), he’ll tell you the same thing I will: The answer is no.
It’s hard to be likeable when your job requires that you make fools out of people on a weekly basis, but Sacha Baron Cohen somehow managed that trick while filming two seasons of Da Ali G Show in 2003–2004. The characters that he created for the purpose of shaming the world’s elite—these characters being Ali G (a wannabe rapper), Bruno (a flamboyantly gay party animal), and Borat (a simple and intolerant Kazakhstani with a heart of gold)—went on to have film careers of varying quality, but Borat was filmed in a style similar to that of da original Ali G Show, and the guerilla style really pays off. Borat may be simple, but Cohen is brilliant, running a mile with every inch that his interview subjects give him. And when he doesn’t have a good comeback or quip, Borat/Baron Cohen is not at all opposed to either putting on a neon over-the-shoulder groin-cover-up, or wrestling in the nude with a fellow traveler in order to fill the void (no pun intended . . . at all). As a result, there is no dead air in Borat.
Before Ricky Gervais became the British Seth MacFarlane (tailored T-shirt, tailored laugh, very scary outlook), he also created the television series that reinvigorated sitcoms and updated the way the world looks at office life. The innovation of the faux-documentary style provided David Brent (played by Gervais)—the boss of a small paper company—with the necessary outlet to air his hilariously transparent insecurities even as he insists on playing the role of a contented and successful middle-aged businessman. Now that we have the American version of The Office, however, what seems even more impressive is the fact that the original series was able to cram so many jokes into such a short series without ever appearing to resort to exaggeration. This really is a boring office. It seems like a really horrible place to work. And it seems real. And for that very reason, the office has never been more gratifying. Will a boy ever outswim a shark? Is an elf a mythical creature? Can David Brent ever find happiness in this life? These are all real questions that we will all have to come to terms with at some point.
European comedy is usually funny to Americans in the same way that a chipmunk with a bottle cap hat is funny. We laugh at it because it is ridiculous, and we don’t care to figure out how it happened or what it means. As proof of this fact, please ask yourself when you last laughed at a European comedy that wasn’t taking place in the world of your imagination. Okay, that’s settled then. “StSanders” is the internet alias of a young Finnish man who takes videos from famous bands and then composes music and lyrics to match what’s happening on screen. The music and the lyrics are both complete and utter nonsense, but they will make you giggle like you have never giggled before. They will make you giggle like the giggly baby that conquered the YouTube with the power of its baby giggles. They will make you giggle like the carefree teenager you always wished you sometimes used to be. And if they don’t, well, then you clearly don’t know the meaning of “Frustration B.O. void.” Press play on the updated video of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” and prepare to move to the front of the avant-garde. Or go insane. (Whichever comes first.)
Sci-fi is a genre that a lot of people have trouble getting into. (Which makes sense, since people are people and not aliens.) But laughter is a great equalizer, and after Douglas Adams, it almost seems surprising that more sci-fi authors haven’t begun tilling the ripe comic soil of the genre. I mean, after all, anything is possible here, and it doesn’t always have to end in darkness. And even if it does, it doesn’t all have to end in tears. That was Douglas Adams’s key insight, and it’s that fundamental outlook (of irony, absurdity, and fatalistic optimism) that led to such iconic phrases as “So long, and thanks for all the fish” (the message that dolphins leave for humanity upon leaving Earth, just prior to its utter annihilation) and “42” (the answer to the ultimate question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything”).
Our tour guides on this essential tour of the universe are Arthur Dent (an everyman if ever there was one), Ford Prefect (his friend, an alien), Marvin (a robot), Tricia McMillan (the only other ex-Earthling in the current universe), and, of course, the actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—which is exactly as sharp, pithy, and witty as Douglas Adams himself was. Which is to say, very. He’s the human who wrote the book on aliens, and he couldn’t have written a better book if he tried (unless he was a mouse).
“Celebrity Jeopardy!” isn’t officially retired, so we can still reasonably state it has had a pretty long run on SNL, but even so, there have been a few staples. These staples include: Will Ferrell (as the host), potent potables (as a category), and a base level of stupidity that is close enough to what we read about in the (unbelievable) tabloids to be absolutely hilarious. The show generally begins with all of the celebrity guests in the red, and when things get predictable you can always count on the categories (“States that end in ‘Hampshire,’” “Words that end in ‘amburger’”) or a cameo from a real celebrity to liven things up. And when even that fails, well then there’s Sean Connery’s final wager to make up the difference. Sean Connery will be the cock of the walk, and we will be the beneficiaries of his cock-walkery. Each and every time.
Richard Pryor’s performance in Live on the Sunset Strip was his first after free-basing cocaine, setting himself on fire, and spending a significant amount of time in recovery at the hospital and at his home. That is not an easy thing to recover from or address, and although it’s outlandish enough to perhaps contain some element of humor, it’s not usually the burn victim himself who provides the laughs. But in his words, “Fire is inspirational. They should use it in the Olympics, because I ran the 100 in 4.3.”
There’s often an edge to great comedy and often a darkness, too. That was always the case with Pryor, but here there’s also the sense that he has almost stepped beyond that realm of danger and destruction and entered into some place new. The crazy thing is that even here, in the midst of self-reflection and self-discovery, he’s still funnier than just about anybody else has ever been.
