Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Shoots Dog Hotels In A Barrel
On last night's (UPDATE: rerun, but whatever) Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog made his Los Angeles debut, going around to expensive LA "dog hotels" and making jokes about what a horrible and ridiculous and insulting and depressing thing that is. What I thought about while watching this, though, was not so much about how rich people will always find increasingly bizarre and disgraceful ways to spend and flaunt their money (revolt!), but about how the Internet will always lose the battle to old media (what an important battle! I am so nervous to see how it all turns out!) as long as the Internet lacks the means to put together the talent and the production value of television. Because this clip, which isn't even the funniest Triumph the Insult Comic Dog clip...it might not even be in the top 5 Triumph the Insult Comic Dog clip, is still funnier than almost anything "intentionally funny" that I've seen on the Internet in a long time* (unintentionally very funny trampoline accidents aside).
Part One:
Part Two:
"Condolences on the loss of your priorities." Incredible.
*Admittedly, everything is kind of hazy right now. Like, I think the Raaaaaaaandy videos were probably as funny or funnier than this, and those were made for the Internet, but those were made for the Internet under the auspices of a movie production, which is still old media. Where do you draw the line? I don't know, ask Fred. I'm pretty sure that Fred is the arbiter of where the line is. And, of course, old media produces as much if not more garbage than new media. Old Media is the mayor of Garbage Town. But you take my point, right? Like, the Internet is cute and we all get bored at work, but the Internet still isn't very good. Maybe one day it will be. Keep going, Internet. I believe in you. Kind of.
Posted by Gabe at 11:30 AM in Late Night
Tags: Conan O'Brien | Dogs | Robert Smigel | The Tonight Show | Triumph The Insult Comic Dog
All I know is this is not the internet that Al Gore envisioned when he invented it.
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Old media produces a lot of garbage, but, just by the nature of the beast, can't produce as much garbage as the internet.
Old media is much more a collaborative effort. Writers, directors, on-screen talent, all working together and putting their own effort into making something funny. Sometimes this is a failure, but, there is often months if not years of effort and money going into its production. Some value can usually be found there, even in ironic enjoyment, or WTF how'd this ever get greenlit and make it through quality control, I'll watch it stoned on a sunday on cable.
Whereas, new media is often spitballed by someone in their basement/apartment/garage in a matter of minutes... sometimes (rarely) hours. Or, it's someone fallng down. Accidental funny. Then uploaded onto the internet without a second thought. The amount of offensive, unwatchable garbage on tv or in your local theater pales in comparison to the nearly insurmountable piles of garbage one has to sift through to find a chuckle-worthy gem on the internet.
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TV and 'old media' have never been better than they are now. But it took forty five years for that to happen--speaking only for TV, it took almost half a century for us to make something that is and was universally regarded as the golden age of television. (1999, as a whole, was a monumental year for both movies and media, regardless of how good a show is in your nostalgia riddled head, it sucks compared to a lot of what's on TV now) And although from this golden age of television we got the 'crap' of reality TV, there's still never been a better time to watch or make television. The internet's still a baby, and generally, people shouldn't beat up on the young. If TV were the same age as the internet, The Donna Reed show would be intorduced next year. So just give it some time. Things move a lot quicker now, but not yet at light speed, yeah?
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By now, Television had figured out how to be profitable (paying for cable wasn't around yet, but sponsorships and ads were). Its still not clear how profitable new media can be. Check out the most recent DGA, WGA, and SAG agreements to see how vague that all still is.
Ads don't work like they used to in Old Media, prices for adspace are dropping across the board with the proliferation of digital recording technology, and cable/sattelite providers with hundreds of viewing options. Ads are not going to be the best way to make money off of new media, and a box office or subscription-like business model are both pretty much out of the question, so while the internet is still a baby, it won't ever have the same business or creative process that old media had. The two are nearly incomparable in terms of maturation and growth, as access to production is not limited in the way it has been since old media's inception.
But those that could help the maturation and growth of new media can't look at it in any other way than their traditional models, so new media continues to suffer a sort of arrested development.
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i agree that actually turning a profit is a totally new thing to the internet as opposed to running ads like on TV. the point I wanted to get across has very little to do with monetary values. I don't think the processes, either creative or profit making are incomparable, some of the best minds on TV have made the leap into 'new media' with great succcess. I'm mostly thinking in terms of comedy, because drama isn't the best suited for short formats, but things like wainy days, horrible people, childrens' hospital...these are relatively new, and while they rip off the old media's format, some of them run self conciously as an internet show, and tha'ts only part of it. The internet is interactive beyond anything we've encountered, and print collides with a/v content in ways that create things faster than we can consume them, giving way to new models and new ideas-- new ways to create and distribute. To say that people only have these past models to look at isn't exactly true. Things are being built on the barely laid fonudations of their contempoaries. As twitter informs people's writing styles and vocabularies, we're seeing a different type of blogging and storytelling style, which in turn is prompting videographers and filmmakers to adapt the way they form narrative arcs-- the TV had only a few channels, you're right, cable wasn't around for a while, but the internet is so much more expanisve and steps forwards are less pronounced than they were in the past. Since monetary gain isn't figured out yet, we're not competing for it, we're working together subconciously to build and figure out this thing.
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Agreed -- we, the masses, are the ones that will have to push new media forward. Twitter, youtube, blogs, for the most part, with the exceptions that you've provided above, are run by those that would typically be the audience. Its an essentially interactive media. And there is clearly more to be said about entertainment value in the internet than in profitting from the entertainment that is being produced for it.
My point was that the those who provided the funding and production in old media are suddenly in the minority when it comes to new media, nd they try to follow old business models which is the wrong way to go about it. They still have the production values, and creativity to make something as brilliant as Wainy Days, but that's the minority of internet content. You have to fish through many more hours of banal blogs, videos, etc., (like your Freds for instance) that have little to no value to find a videogum, a Between the Shrubs or Wainy Days. SInce there are so many avenues for uploading content, and so many creators, its an inevitability.
In the origins of old media, there were 3 stations, with 3-4 hours of primetime programming to fill. Sure it wasn't as sophisticated or specialized as what we have today, but there wasn't as much content to sift through to find something that you enjoyed.
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now that i more fully understand your point, I will say 'agreed,' and 'point well made,' but because I was born stubborn and without the knowledge of when to stop I'd like to tack this on to your final statement: there wasn't as much to enjoy, either.
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Because I don't know when to stop either....
Agreed on your addition to my last point.
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poop
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farts
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do I have a future dvr? why did I already see this last week? was last night's conan a rerun? I need a nap.
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Actually, it was.
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oh thank god. I was starting to think the "future me" (the one that discovers time travel) was unraveling the space-time continuum. all is right with the world.
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That little miserable looking dog in that very big room?
Fuck it, eat the rich.
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I have nothing against dog hotels, but this one is poorly designed! Why are the rooms seemingly set up for PEOPLE and not dogs?
What's with the candles in the last room???
There should be hella dog toys there, no? And a computer monitor with a pointer that moves AROUND AND AROUND infinitely. Now THAT would be a dog hotel.
Have these people even MET a dog before?
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It might be all the vicodine that I took today for my bad back, but i laughed very hard at this. Looks like somebody has been studying at the American Patriots school of emphasis.
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If future you discovered time travel, why is he watching Conan and not killing Hitler???
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One day we'll discover that Hitler was actually someone's future me who went back in time to kill the Hitler of their parallel universe. And that will be the day the stock of Chunks of Minds Stuck to Walls shoots through the roof, and I'll finally be rich, rich as Nazis.
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Conan and Robert Smigel are going to be sued by the owners of all those dogs for putting "their babies" on camera and mocking them.
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I thought the same thing. All of the distress those monsters caused their poor babies, THEY'LL NEVER BE THE SAME.
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Fuck you, homeless people! Yeah!
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It wasn't a rerun! It was new! I've seen conan ever since he began in june and I've never seen it. I did see when Triump went to bonaroo. dumbass.
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Where else would we learn the Gwenyth Roast Chicken recipe ? I Kiss my internets daily.
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