Papal Bull#$*@

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard a story having to do with the pope's visit to the U.S. The commentator noted the differences between Pope Now (Benedict XVI) and Pope Before (John Paul II) and said that contrary to conventional wisdom, Pope Now wasn't as "strict" as people thought he might be when he was elected.

He then told a story about how Pope Before was more or less a rock star in this country (as well as others), but how that status didn't necessarily translate into greater devotion and obedience from America's Catholics.

The best line was a comment from a 20-something Catholic girl who, after hearing a papal address by John Paul II, was asked about the contradiction between the pope's preaching against pre-marital sex and her generation's fondness for said sexual activities: "Well, he's entitled to his opinion."

I would pay many, many dollars to see someone tell God's mouthpiece on earth that he's entitled to his opinion. But maybe that's because I'm Jewish.

(Aside: Happy Birthday, Pope! We know you're an avid reader, and we didn't want you to think that we forgot. We got you something really nice on Amazon.com, but it won't arrive for 3-5 business days. Of course, you could speed that up if you really wanted to. Just sayin'...)

Today I'm also linking to people analyzing the funny in very academic ways

While I'm at, Troy Patterson does a good job at Slate discussing what he calls "flabby satire. Then he and his readers delve a little deeper in chat form. It's all very interesting stuff, and makes me wonder about satire as a form and what's funny in general. So much of comedy comes from recognizing what's being said that simply repeating the cliche without any real reflection or depth is frequently the most economical way to "be funny."

[Full disclosure: I've done some lazy stuff of that sort on this blog, but then again I'm currently writing in my ostensibly free time to an audience consisting almost entirely of people who know me primarily as a means to make them come to this page and see my upcoming show times because it beats emailing people--hopefully folks get a chuckle and I get to be a little less diligent about asking folks to come out; I'd like to think I'd be a little more rigorous if this were my job. This is possibly self-deception or a poor excuse, but probably true. There's only one way to find out, folks who might hire me to write comedy professionally!]

In any case, I'm very predisposed to agree with the article because I made largely the same point almost ten years ago about SNL. My words were slightly different: "All parody, no satire." But they mean largely the same thing. It's comedy creation through a series of approximations and exaggerations of those approximations until the original gets lost. (Doonsbury sort-of-mocks-but-sort-of-participates in this by reducing politicians to little avatars rather than drawing caricatures. Bush is an asterisk, Clinton a waffle, Gingrich a bomb with a very short fuse, etc) What happens however is that eventually the comedians in a battle against the comedic law of diminishing returns end up exaggerating their own performances rather than continuing to build in an honest way on real world events (see also Carvey, Dana--George Herbert Walker Bush impression and). The results are often funny (again see Carvey, Dana) but cannot be considered "political satire" in any sense. Because the fiction conforms to our expectation better than the reality ever could, however, we now have a president that will likely be as remembered for something that he never said ("Strategery") as any of the ludicrous things he has said. That's mighty funny as sort of a society-wide art piece on collective memory, but it still isn't political satire.

Ultimately however the problem is that a high percentage of satire isn't funny and, even as one recognizes the inherent problems, the dumbed-down stuff is. It's great to explore the absurdities and ironies of politics on an individual basis, but when people try to do it for the masses it can often be a little cloying and self-important and self-congratulatory, or, alternately, blunt and crude and self-evident. Much like politics itself (which is a trite little self-important and self-evident joke itself). I'm reminded of the old feminist slogan "The personal is political"--there was more honest critique in Will Ferrell's "I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS" guy than in all of his perfectly crafted faux-Bushisms. It feels more genuine to turn the lens on ourselves and expose our own foibles and in so doing critique our values and the power structures--familial, occupational, social--that influence our daily lives (see also Mooney, Paul--Word Association sketch and).

By the way this was not entirely an attempt to own the whole front page of the Four String blog. Not entirely anyway.

Today I'm linking to other funny people rather than making with the funny myself

Nerve.com and IFC compiled what they determined to be the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of all Time. What changes this from the typical list-ism so culturally pervasive right now to an absolutely essential link is that many entries contain video. I can't wait to get home from work and watch a bunch of these--many of them are old favorites of mine but there are also plenty I've never seen. I wouldn't even know how to put together my list, but their top 4 are awfully hard to argue against.

Reuters "Oddly Enough" section: a laugh a minute!

Who doesn't enjoy some weird news? After all the "sub-prime this" and "there were no survivors that" which one normally finds in the news, it's nice to kick back with some goofy stories. Maybe a cat made friends with an alligator. Maybe a three year old can beat Wall Street analysts by circling stocks with an Elmo marker. Maybe a cat made friends with a rhino. Seriously, you never know what you're going to get when you hit the weird news section as far as subject matter, but you do know you're going to get a laugh and a reprieve from the dark clouds of the front page.

Let's see what's up with Reuters while I employ the narrative device of pretending to type my reactions in real time in order to make a greater didactic point!

Berlusconi's sexism chafes as Italian vote looms: Hee hee! He has sex chafes! Try a little KY, Silvio. Wait a minute--sexism? That's not funny. Let's keep looking.

Hair salon scalps customers: Umm, this article is about forcing people to stay in a salon for hours against their consent in attempt to extort them for more money after a bait-and-switch on the price of a haircut. But the title is a pun! "Scalp" is a hair word! That's got to count for something, right? On second thought I'm going to move on.

Duck gets "order of protection" after attack: Now this is more like it! A duck in the court system. "Here I have thousands of letters, all addressed to Donald." Miracle on Thirty-Fowl Street! Except reading a little further I see that the duck was a pet and that a neighbor was abusing it and shooting it with a pellet gun. I think I'm going to cry. Ducks are cute.

Witchdoctor killings condemned: I think I know how this will turn out, but I'll at least look at the lede. I've come this far.

Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete has condemned witchdoctors who kill albinos and harvest their body parts in the hope it will bring prosperity.

I think I'll go back to reading about the sub-prime crisis.

The game will most likely be won by the team that can put the ball in the basket more often (adjusting for the relative values of different baskets)

Tyler Hansbrough called last night's loss to Kansas "frustrating." Some people might have called it "heartbreaking" but not Tyler Hansbrough. Tyler Hansbrough's heart does not break. I have never seen Tyler Hansbrough's heart take a play off. Tyler Hansbrough's heart works as hard or harder than any other player's heart in the country. I've seen Michael Jordan's heart, I've seen Mateen Cleaves' heart, I've seen Steve Wojciechowski's heart, and none of their hearts hearted any harder than Tyler Hansbrough's heart, night in and night out.

CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Most people don't know that the shows that Four String Samurai does on stage are actually the shows within the shows, or the "mise en abyme" as the incredibly nerdy might call it. You know, it's the same as the technique used by Shakespeare in Hamlet ("The play's the thing") and Gary Shandling in The Larry Sanders Show and a bunch of other stuff. So the meta show is us hanging around and doing stuff and preparing for the show within the show that we put on stage roughly once a month. We also drive around in a van and solve mysteries.

What you didn't know when you started reading the previous 102 words was that all of that was prologue for this, the release of the 4SS season 5 spoilers!

• A new member joins the group who knows more about '60s R&B, soul, and proto-punk than Paul! Is this the start of a beautiful friendship, or is there only room in Four String for one person with obscure taste in old music?
  
• Ben places Chris on an exacting calisthenics regimen. Has he gone too far, or is this just what the doctor ordered?
  
• The guys learn an important lesson about fire safety from Purple Feather recording artists The Donnas.
  
• It just so happens that Bret is a corpse that only moves when music plays like Bernie does that one weekend. What happens when Eric and his piano go out of town for a few weeks?
  
• Ryan learns to astrally project himself thousands of miles. Will he use this new-found power for good... or evil?
  
• The group has their toughest mystery yet. They can only solve it with the help of this week's guests, the Harlem Globetrotters!

Global media domination

According to sitemeter, our traffic is twice what it was a month ago. Based on this "doubling every month" trend, our traffic will rival that of Facebook in about a year. I've included a graph to illustrate future projections.

So thank you for reading. And if you want to invest, the offer stands.

The secret of my success

Oh hi. I didn't hear you come in. My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv. After seeing a particularly choice graffito of mine, young graffitoists will come up to me and say, "Hey Christopher" and I'll say, "My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv." Then they will inevitably say, "Hey Pup Luv, can you tell me some secrets? I want to make a graffito as good as yours." Then I will say, "I have no idea what you're talking about." Then they will convince me that they are not a cop, and I will tell them my secrets.

These folks focus on the smooth bubbles of my letters and the straightness of the lines that I intend to be straight, and the perfect spacing of it all. It is then I share my secret:


That's right, the rolling ruler. This classy measurement device is a protractor, a compass, a ruler, and a rolling ruler all in one. When you're in a men's room stall and find it's time to unsheathe your sharpie and stick it to a harpy, it's rolling ruler time. The rolling ruler is perfect for marking your small scale trail.

"But Christopher," you might say, and I would reply, "My name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv." "Pup Luv," you say, "I saw a graffito of yours just today, and it covered an entire wall, and a large one at that, and it was rolling ruler perfect." "Aha!" I would say.

I would say "Aha!" because of this:


These images are not to scale. The second one is of my giant client, the jumbo rolling ruler. It is twelve feet long. The holes are big enough to accommodate a spray can nozzle. It is the real deal, Banana Peel.

But what about the quieter times? When I feel the need for an evening auto-erotic graffito experience, I reach for this:


That is the one-inch-long-with-the-inch-divided-into-twelfths rolling ruler. When I want to tag my bag but also need to measure than angle of my dangle to get it right, Dwight, I know I can trust my one-inch-long-with-the-inch-divided-into-twelfths rolling ruler because of its precision protractor.

Since you let yourself in (remember I didn't hear you come in) please feel to show yourself out. Just remember next time you're out at a fine store to seek out your new rolling ruler, preferably in all three sizes. You could tell them Christopher sent you because my name is Christopher, but you can call me by my graffitoist name, Pup Luv. They'll know me be the latter.

mimicking the master

this dog learned to pray, and yet we still can't get bret to post to this blog.

Stop the madness...

The word bracket has become like tiny grains of sand in my ass crack.