The Sopranos' Lost Ending

Courtesy of my boy 'Ziz...Cold ass shit, this. Also, One Tree Hill, where have you been all my life?

Which Two Are Those?

I think Aziz Ansari is a golden God. I am on record. But I am still on the fence about Aziz's post-racial comedy routines, at least in one respect: none of his characters have recognizably Indian or Arabic names, which Muslims from any region do and would have -- shit, none of his characters even have Christian names popular in the Subcontinent. But so much stand-up comedy has been weighted down by the worst, by the most facile of ethnic self-stereotype that when I watch Aziz -- a young South Asian Muslim man -- make jokes about getting his drink on and getting his fuck on and getting his cd-burning on, well, I can't help but swell with continental and coreligionist pride.

The Post Where I Tell You What's Up and What's Funny

I want to write a sweeping post about the death--okay, the evolution of--comedy, a result, obviously, of the Internet's fracturing of our popular culture and its promotion of quirk. But that would mean some bullshit bandying about of academese that no one -- I especially -- wants to endure (well, maybe Thumbu excepted). So, let me check my "discursives" and my "normatives" at the door, and say this only by way of opening query: Remember when only things that made you laugh out loud were truly funny? I have vivid memories of the scene in Naked Gun (or one of its sequels) where Frank Drebin uses the bathroom without detaching his microphone and everyone is made to listen to his bodily functions; that Barry and Levon $240 worth of pudding skit from MTV's The State; that Moleculo the molecular man skit that Conan O'Brien did when he was on Saturday Night Live. And I remember laughing hard at each of them and knowing that, that right there, that's funny. The first of these skits/scenes was universally funny, if the universe was peopled by awkward 10-year-old boys. The second of these ventured into some welcome absurdism, which my high school self had some appreciation for. The last of these I caught at a friend's house one Saturday night before a night out with a large group of people, none of whom got or cared for the joke. I remember standing in this friend's living room, doubled over, as ten people looked at each other, totally perplexed.

I have since watched all three scenes/skits and find them notably less funny than when I first watched them, but I don't think this diminishes their value at all. The thing to note is that all three at one time in my life made me laugh out loud, really hard. Why is it then that these days so much of what passes for humour in our popular culture evokes maybe a half-crooked smile? Robert Downey, Jr.'s minstrel show in Tropic Thunder? Virtually every moment of The Office ever? These -- the performance and the show -- have been haled as virtuosic examples of comedy by many people I respect, but neither have encouraged the slightest snicker from my person. It occurs to me that quirk, that certain boldness of performance, perhaps what Derrida would call differance (French pronunciation; also, just fucking with you...), these are the measures of good comedy, but where is all the stuff that makes you keel over because you're convulsing with laughter? Look, I like Zach Galifianakis plenty, but is clever and discomfiting the same as funny? Seriously, is it? I like Keyboard Cat (see above) too, but does he even qualify as amusing, or is he just the latest example of the mainstreaming of quirk brought on by the internet?

Don't get me wrong. I am happy that laugh tracks are going the way of GM and the newspaper industry. I like that we, collectively as a society, have put up some resistance to cookie-cutter comedy (e.g., America's Funniest Home Videos) -- and yes, I know there is plenty of evidence suggesting we haven't -- but is it too much to ask that things that purport to be funny make us laugh out loud?

That's my piece, and let me end it this way. There are two people on the Internet who make me laugh almost without fail. Aziz Ansari and Gabe Delahaye. They are also both my secret boyfriends, and I not so secretly hope that one day they make a baby together. Recently they both posted throwaway items in their blogs that made me laugh, and as anyone who has ever read the vile trash that is The New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs section knows, it's not easy to elicit that kind of reaction through the written word alone.

Here's Gabe on the upcoming season of Entourage, and here's Aziz on IM'ing with his brother.

Must Desi TV

Hey, everybody. There is a hot new blog on the scene. Thoughtful vivisection of television done by brianiac grad students, Tubatv is the half brainchild of devoted reader Thumbu Sammy, who this past week makes the rather astute observation that all four of the shows comprising NBC's comedy lineup last Thursday, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock featured South Asian people. Yay for pop cultural presence! Boo for the fact that the South Asian people in question (pictured above)-- Aziz Ansari, Maulik Pancholy, and Mindy Kaling -- played characters named Tom, Jonathan, and Kelly respectively, just like that lady from Texas wants.

Aziz Ansari, who has been a personal favorite of mine since occasional reader Sweet Daddy Purns introduced me to him in the summer of 2005 at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater (right before his killer "Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall" show), has always eschewed the rather limiting ethno-centric style of lesser comedians, but Tom Haverford? Desi, please...Still, I hesitate to condemn after one episode; he struck gold with his "I'm what you call a redneck" line in the otherwise mediocre pilot of Parks and Rec, but gets several demerits for the following statement, which while funny and self-undermining, does nothing to explain really why the fuck he can't be of Muslim heritage on TV: The cold hard fact is that dark-skinned people with funny-sounding Muslim names just don’t make it very far in politics...Yes, OK, fine, Barack Obama, Why does everyone always bring up Barack Obama?