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With all due respect, I feel like Chevy’s “no, it’s totally okay for me to use the n-word, I used it once in a sketch with Richard Pryor 37 years ago!” was a pretty lame attempt at backtracking. By every account, he wasn’t making a reference to that sketch when he initially used the word — it’s not like they were talking about crazy word-association games, and he suddenly busted out with the run of words that he said to Richard Pryor. (Which, even then, would be a weird and inappropriate thing to do.) I feel like he used the word, and then — when he saw how badly everyone reacted to it — he reached back for the one and only instance in his life when he’d been given sanction to use it, as if saying the n-word once in a socially-acceptable super-specific context amounted to a lifetime pass to use the n-word whenever he felt like it.
(Having said that, I do think there’s a half a case to be made for Chase that he was using the word to make a point about how crazy-racist his character has become — that he was saying, “the way you’re writing me, next thing you know, you’re going to have me say [the most racist thing imaginable]“, and the n-word filled the blank for “[the most racist thing imaginable]“. Which is different than him straight-out calling someone that word. But even in that context, he — as an adult human being who exists in the world — should’ve known that maybe you can make that point without associating that word with two of your coworkers.)
I’m not sure they’re re-releasing it, so much as they’re releasing it for the first time in the US. At least according to IMDB, it’s been released in pretty much every other country, but never got a theatrical release here.
Better still, they should remake David Cronenberg’s “Crash” with the characters from “Cars”.
The Princess Diarrheas #AnneHathawayPoopMovies
(I am so sorry.)
That poster of playful Oscar interpretations of Best Picture winners is a lot of fun right up until you notice 1993, “Schindler’s List”.
I’m not sure if it’s the line you were thinking of, but the line from “The Office” that made me laugh out loud — and it was more the delivery than the line itself — was Jake Lacy’s aggrieved, “Why does no one stop her?!” in response to Meredith.
I know the photo’s cute, but those things are vicious, and will claw or bite your face off. I just pray that koala got out of there alive.
A tribute to Videogum’s Nose for News(TM): The guy from that GoDaddy.com ad has been featured on Videogum before:
I’m guessing that a more truthful headline would be, “COURTNEY COX FORCES WEEPING PERSONAL ASSISTANT TO PEE ON GRASS”.
Congratulations, “Grease 2″! You are now the second-most-cringe-inducing sequel to “Grease”!
argh. “kind OF a polite-laughter-generating” etc. etc.
(not pictured: the 45 seconds of awkwardness immediately preceding this, as he unbuttoned the shirt and the room reverberated with microphone noise, making the eventual reveal of the t-shirt kind a polite-laughter-generating anticlimax)
Small point, but: “Charmed” wasn’t on basic cable — it was on the WB, back when I believe those letters stood for “Witches and Buffy”.
I dunno — it seems to me like what happened here was, Seinfeld made an offhand, easy joke about the question he was asked, a joke that’s totally in keeping with the material he’s done for decades. (“What’s the most counterintuitive, mildly-hyperbolically-dark place I can take this question? I know: I’ll say I oppose the ban because I *like* the health consequences of drinking too much soda!”) I could see him making the exact same joke about, say, eating fugu — “If someone’s gonna die from eating a poisonous fish, good. That means Darwinism is working.” It was an answer given in character as Seinfeld-the-sarcastic-misanthrope — I don’t think he genuinely is cheered by the prospect of people dying early deaths from overconsumption of soda.
So, he gave his not-very-funny joke answer in Seinfeld-as-comedian mode. And then the interviewer asked him a question about his specific life, and how he’s raising his kids, and he answered it as Seinfeld-the-actual-person, who’s a rich guy with rich kids. And yeah, when you put those two statements together, there’s a juxtaposition between the guy who cares a lot about his kids, and the guy who doesn’t care about society as a whole. But I think that’s more of a function of the interviewer suddenly switching lanes between joking around about an issue, and dealing with the specifics of his life.
That’s not to say that Seinfeld might not be guilty of classist assumptions, or playing into them with his initial joke. But I don’t think that this was anything close to the blithe, sincere Gwyneth Paltrow-esque “why doesn’t everyone give their children mineral water?” sort of thinking. And I think that a lot of comedians do the “saracstic misanthrope who doesn’t care about anyone else” sort of a thing, and the ones who’ve reached a certain level of success — ie., the ones whose names we actually know — are generally pretty well-off. So Seinfeld is hardly the only comedian whose jokes can easily be criticized as, “Oh, look at this rich asshole who has such contempt for the little people”, including plenty of comedians we all like. (“Oh, really, Louis CK? You think people shouldn’t complain so much about air travel? Well, not all of us get to travel FIRST CLASS like you do. And Patton Oswalt, maybe you don’t realize it with all your ‘Ratatouille’ money, but for some people, the KFC bowl is ALL THEY CAN AFFORD.”)
None of this is to say that every sentiment expressed by a comedian — on-stage or off — can be excused with, “It’s just comedy!”. There’s plenty of stuff that’s said under the guise of comedy that’s pretty ugly — Jeff Dunham and Dane Cook both come to mind — and they deserve to be called out on it. It’s a fuzzy line between “acceptable because it’s being said in character, in a hyperbolic fashion” and “unacceptable because it seems to be expressing an underlying philosophy that this actual person actually holds”. And the Seinfeld joke is pretty close to that fuzzy line. But in this particular case, I guess I put him more on the former side of the line than the latter.
“The Uncontrollable Diarrhea, Oh God, Why Did I Eat That Thing Mario Batali Gave Me?”
(sequel to “The Chew”, airs two hours later)
Also: You didn’t mention the far more upsetting news in that story, which is that the studio’s also preparing a sequel to “Midnight Run”, directed by Brett Ratner. I sure hope Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro don’t like rehearsing.
You’d think that, even with only a thousand words left to speak in his time on earth, one of them would be “no”.
A thing I’ve noticed, from the rare occasions I’ve watched “Wheel of Fortune” in the last ten years or so: Watch how Pat Sajak reacts whenever someone wins a lot of money. He’ll usually crack a bunch of weird, chilly, passive-aggressive jokes at the big winner’s expense, in a way that always makes me wonder if the winnings come out of his paycheck.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a terrorist is telling his friends, “I *totally* could’ve prevented ‘Entourage’.”
Whoops. I mean:
[IMG]http://i41.tinypic.com/mw7fx1.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i41.tinypic.com/mwqlja.jpg[/IMG]
Lindsay is, as best I can tell, Sally from “Peanuts” all grown up.
If you haven’t read it yet, George Saunders wrote an unsparing takedown of “Borat” back when it came out, which made me feel awful for laughing at the movie, and which has ruined* SBC for me ever since.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/04/061204sh_shouts?currentPage=all
(* – And by “ruined”, I mean, “made me think about them in a way that made me unable to enjoy them”, not that SBC’s movies are some wonderful thing that George Saunders damaged in some way.)
I feel like the footage of Julie could’ve easily been used on “Big Love” as shocking evidence of the Chloe Sevigny character’s secret rebellious youth.
At the description of the thieves running with chicken, I immediately thought of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu2P3R_wC5A