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junk teevee laughs
Sunday, April 20 2003
Today Gretchen and Sally went with Ray and Nancy for a hike up Slide Mountain, the highest peak in the Catskills. Meanwhile Ray and Nancy's dog Suzy stayed with me back at the house. She's skinned the pad of her left front foot and was limping too badly for such an ambitious hike.
The weather was pleasant and I had the laboratory window open wide as I played my guitar at considerable amplification (though the amplifier is rated at only 30 watts). I'd play for a bit and then kick the button on the digital effects processor to try some other sound. I looked up at one point and there's this lady standing down at the bottom of my window, and, though she was dressed for Easter Sunday, I knew she wasn't there to ask if I'd accepted Christ Jesus as my personal savior. She was from the house immediately across the street up a hill. The leaves haven't come out yet and there's no real barrier between my window and her house. She said that, much as she regretted meeting me in this way, the music was awfully loud and could I please turn it down? She went way out of her way in terms of politeness, saying, "It's not that we don't like the music..." I was most apologetic and made the excuse that I hadn't known my window was open (which was a lie). Indeed, on a subconscious level I'd actually been performing a test to see how much noise the neighborhood would tolerate.
In the evening, all of us sat around watching hours and hours of quality Sunday night programming. It all began with a fragment of that wooden Passover perennial, The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston. Then came the Simpsons, a new one wherein Homer and family win a lawsuit against the church and actually take it over. There's a hilarious scene where Homer is in his underwear listening to classic rock and grabs a cross for something more substantial than an air guitar. Of course, the Simpsons is always reliable entertainment unless there is something desperately wrong with your Meyers-Briggs profile. It's when other shows get me laughing that hard that I have something interesting to write about. Enter Oliver Beene. It's like the Simpsons in that it seems a whole roomful of comics conspired to put together every episode - there's not enough humor in one person's head to make something so continuously funny.
Maybe it was all the matzos we'd been eating, but after Six Feet Under, Gretchen and I were laughing nearly as hard at episodes of the show Blind Date, particularly the goofy 2D graphics added to the live action in post-production. Of course, it's never been a secret - Gretchen and I love deliciously-flawed junk television.
The grand finalé for tonight's laugh marathon came at 11pm when we watched something Ray suggested, the Ali G Show on HBO. Most of the show was comprised of interviews conducted with unsuspecting American personalities, some as famous as Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich. Ali G's schtick is to act stupid and use a kind of made-up nonstandard street slang to disarm his interviewees, which gives him the ability to extract all kinds of nonsense while performing wickedly-clever culture-jams. In interviewing some New York hot-shot fashion designer, he managed to get the victim to contradict himself by arguing his designs were, for example, both "very heavy" and "very light." The kicker was an interview with a DEA agent, who came prepared with the cliché spread of contraband (just like you remember from anti-drug lectures in high school). After the agent listed the effects of pot, Ali G asked, "Okay, but what be da bad things it do to you?" Later, Ali G gave a huge list of synonyms for marijuana and then stopped and asked, "But what be some of the other terms?"
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