In Fox’s world, nothing good is terribly safe. Even the lovable Muppets fall under withering attack.
Last month, Fox Business spent seven minutes (below) unraveling the left wing conspiracy in the latest Muppet movie. Then the Muppets, not taking things lying down, struck back. Appearing at a press conference in London last week, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy rebutted Fox’s charges in one comic minute. It’s a pretty funny clip. But the best part is watching a major news outlet argue with puppets.
What to do about the sanctioned distortion of our political system? It’s hard to be optimistic when fixing the problem would realistically require a constitutional amendment. But that’s what Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor and founder of Creative Commons) is trying to do. Appearing at Google (see below), Lessig describes how special interests corrupt our political system, and what we can do to stop it. But even Lessig will admit that it’s an uphill battle.
That leaves us with the next best solution: turn a joke of an election system into a good joke. Enter Stephen Colbert. The comedian has created his own Super PAC (run by Jon Stewart) that comes complete with its own TV ads. The parody above — an attack ad on attack ads — makes its point pretty effectively. You can watch eight more Colbert PAC commercials here, and make a donation to his PAC here. And, if you’re feeling generous, you can show your support for Open Culture here.
Here we go again. We’re getting meta with readings by the great Christopher Walken. It all starts with the actor appearing on a 1993 broadcast of the British TV series “Saturday Zoo” hosted by Jonathan Ross, and he’s reading and riffing on the beloved fairy tale, The Story of the Three Little Pigs. The potentially terrifying story is uncharacteristically jolly. Walken goes for laughs, not chills. The same can’t be said for the next tale.
We’re not clear on the backstory of this reading. But we do know Walken is reading Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven, and stays true to the original text published in 1845. The Raven made Poe famous then, and it remains influential today — so much so they named a football team after the poem. How many other sports teams can make such a claim?
And then we come full circle again. Almost 16 years after Walken’s reading of The Three Little Pigs, the star returned to another show hosted by Jonathan Ross (BBC’s Friday Night) and served up a second comic reading. This time it’s “Poker Face” by the inescapable Lady Gaga.
Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak? If only, if only .….
In 1968, Terry Gilliam was a young American cartoonist living in London. He was having trouble making a living from magazine work, so his friend John Cleese suggested he get in touch with Humphrey Barclay, who was producing a slightly subversive television show for children called Do Not Adjust Your Set.
Subtitled “The Fairly Pointless Show,” it featured a group of previously unknown actors including Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones, and attracted a cult following among adults. Barclay looked at Gilliam’s portfolio and decided he would fit right in.
For one early assignment, Gilliam was asked to prepare something for a special show to be broadcast on Christmas day, 1968, called Do Not Adjust Your Stocking. Looking for inspiration, he decided to visit the Tate Gallery. In The Pythons Autobiography of the Pythons, Gilliam remembered the project and how it figured into his emerging artistic style:
I went down to the Tate and they’ve got a huge collection of Victorian Christmas cards so I went through the collection and photocopied things and started moving them around. So the style just developed out of that rather than any planning being involved. I never analysed the stuff, I just did it the quickest, easiest way. And I could use images I really loved.
The result (above) is a hilarious free-associational send-up of traditional Christmas card motifs. In addition to being aired on the show, The Christmas Card was incorporated into Gilliam’s short debut film from 1968, Storytime, which is part of our collection of Free Movies Online.
For an update of Gilliam’s twisted take on Christmas–a darker reworking of his Malevolent Santa theme in The Christmas Card–look below for a drawing Gilliam posted a few days ago on his Facebook page. And as the man says, you better watch out!
Another chestnut — fake Werner Herzog reading from ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas. This isn’t the story as you know it. No, this version is dark, packed with bleak social commentary and some witty literary criticism, and shatters all illusions.
Ideally this clip should be watched with faux Werner Herzog reading other children’s classics: Curious George, Madeline, andWhere’s Waldo. And then this: the real Werner Herzog reading Go the F**k to Sleep, the 15 minute hit, at The New York Public Library this past June.
During the 1960s, George Carlin had something of an epiphany. Confronted by the counterculture, the young comedian realized that he wasn’t staying true to himself — that he was trying to be Danny Kaye, a very mainstream star, when he was really an outlaw and a rebel at heart. (Watch him on The Tonight Show in 1966). Eventually, Carlin learned “not to give a shit,” to break with milquetoast conventions that restrained other comedians, and that’s when his comic genius bloomed. Note that some of Carlin’s comments here are … not surprisingly … not safe for work.
Steve Jobs, another child of the counterculture, didn’t learn Carlin’s lesson over time. As Walter Isaacson makes clear in his new biography, Jobs understood from the beginning that excellence is rarely achieved by walking down the path of conformity. In a 1995 interview, Jobs boiled down his basic approach to life. The mastermind behind the legendary Think Different television campaign (watch the version narrated by Jobs himself) said:
When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
You can find more pearls of wisdom from Jobs over at BrainPickings, and we’ll leave you below with more cultural figures meditating on life:
With a fast-moving mixture of comedy and seriousness, an interview on The Colbert Report is something of an improvisational flying trapeze act. “Stephen Colbert is an amazingly good interviewer,” writes physicist Sean Carroll, “managing to mix topical jokes and his usual schtick with some really good questions, and more than a bit of real background knowledge.”
Beneath the humor there is a sense that Colbert understands and respects science. The sad thing, writes Carroll, “is that more people are exposed to real scientists doing cutting-edge research by watching Comedy Central than by watching, shall we say, certain channels you might have thought more appropriate venues for such conversations.” But the exposure is all too brief. An interview on The Colbert Report typically lasts only a few minutes.
So it was interesting when Colbert stepped away from his comedic character for a more in-depth conversation with one of his frequent guests, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. The interview took place last year at Montclair Kimberley Academy in Montclair, New Jersey. Earlier this week Tyson uploaded the video to the website of the Hayden Planetarium, where he is director, but the server was overwhelmed by the resulting surge in traffic. So someone placed the version above on YouTube. It’s an interesting, and witty, one-hour-and-19-minute conversation. For more of Tyson with Colbert, you can watch his appearances on The Colbert Report at the Hayden Planetarium site.
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