“Eileen, pace yourself. It’s only Scrumspan. We’ve got three lightmodes to go before good-binge.”
Tag: humor
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Paul Ford gifts us a new modern lexicon for time
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What Keeps Al Jaffee, the Genius Behind Mad Magazine’s Fold-Ins, Going After 52 Years
If it ever gets too bleak, just remember that Al Jaffee is still making the world a better place through his incredible (and bitingly funny) illustrations for Mad at age 96 (!!!).
I was making fun of the fold-outs you’d see in Playboy or National Geographic or Life Magazine. They had these big, fancy, full-color fold-outs. Well, at Mad we didn’t have that kind of budget. So I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do the exact opposite? We’d do a cheap black-and-white fold in.
I love that the Fold-In started as another subversive bit of meta-humor about how “cheap” Mad magazine is.
On a side note, Columbia University acquired Jaffee’s paper archives a couple of years ago — I’d be amazing to look through that trove of 50+ years of sketches.
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Charles Addams Mother Goose
Maria Popova posts a wonderful selection of cartoons from Charles Addam’s lesser-known book of Mother Goose rhymes from 1967. Such good stuff, and fun to imagine the crossovers between the classic grim nursery rhymes and his own macabre sense of humor, juxtaposed with his mid-century New York City skylines and deadpan-faced characters.
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Shaw and Lee: the Beau Brummels
Some comedy for your Saturday: Shaw and Lee, AKA The Beau Brummels. We saw this Vitaphone short on TCM last week, and were mesmerized by the duo’s Andy Kaufman-esque deadpan delivery of bad jokes and Vaudeville songs (stick with it for at least a couple of minutes!). Strangely modern, or in any case I gather from digging around that this was considered a bizarre, unique act at the time.
Always eat when you are hungry.
Always drink when you are dry.
Go to bed when you’re sleepy.
But don’t forget to breathe or else you’ll die. -
Fake Unicode Consortium
I’m getting far too many chuckles out of this page for the Fake Unicode Consortium, which pairs up obscure Unicode glyphs with better names. Depicted here:
Unicode character U+2231: ‘NOW FLIP SNAKE TO COOK OTHER SIDE’
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2231/index.htm(Via O’Reilly Radar)
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Total Recall Commentary Track
I’ve been telling people for years that the Total Recall DVD commentary track is one of the most entertaining bits of meta-entertainment out there, with Paul Verhoeven waxing nostalgic about his directorial artistry while Arnold chuckles through literal recaps of his favorite violent scenes. Now you can enjoy Arnold’s rambling half of the conversation, condensed into a tidy YouTube package!
See also: Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Milius on Conan The Barbarian, a similar collection edited down from that movie’s commentary track, another true gem.
(Via Kottke)
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Zippy Meets Family Circus
Life is a circus, Zippy! It can be a circus of pain or a circus of delight!
As the Bil Keane RIP notices started flooding across the net yesterday, my friend Julien reminded me of the bizarre phenomenon of Zippy the Pinhead making a crossover appearance in Family Circus back in 1994 (go look at it, it’s weird!). It wasn’t a single-panel affair: that out-of-context Family Circus strip was a followup to a week in which Bil Keane literally drew his characters into the surreal world of Zippy as a sort of exchange project. From a speech by Zippy artist Bill Griffith:
Here’s an example of something that kind of blew my mind, and a number of readers. I did a number of comic strips in 1994 in which the idea was that Zippy and Griffy were going to, at least Zippy, enter, literally, the world of The Family Circus, a single panel comic. Into the strip a few days I thought, “What the hell, I’ll call Bill Keene. I’ll get his phone number, and I’ll see if he wants to literally jam this strip with me.” I figured the chances were zero, but why not? I called him up; he was incredibly friendly. He lives in Phoenix, where Zippy is published in the local paper. Loves the strip; reads it every day. Y’know, at the end of the phone call I thought, “He’s my blood brother. We’re like the two surreal comic strip artists.”
Behind the sticky-sweet facade of everyone’s favorite round newspaper comic, it’s good to know there was an artist of subversive humor and warmth for his fellow cartoonists, appreciative of both parody and collaboration.
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B-I-Bicky-Bi
Thanks to the Alamo Drafthouse’s always-amazing preshow entertainment reels, Marsha and I have had this Three Stooges earworm stuck in our head for the past week. Maybe now you’ll be stuck with it too.
(PS for cartoon fans: this song is the origin of a classic Dale Gribble-ism)
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Logically boring
From Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, which aimed to make logic understandable via quirky syllogisms and illustrated tables:
- No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste;
- No modern poetry is free from affectation;
- All your poems are on the subject of soap-bubbles;
- No affected poetry is popular among people of real taste;
- No ancient poem is on the subject of soap-bubbles.
Conclusion: all your poems are uninteresting.
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Wario Monetization Robot
I wanted something nice to have at the office that tell us every time someone make a purchase on our game. Every time we make a buck Wario rings the bell and flash his greedy green eyes. If we made a lot then Wario shoot smoke from his ears!
Wario would approve.