Comedy | Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

August 16, 2010

Literary slap fight & Juggalo rampage

I wanted to direct your attention to this enjoyable AV Club rumination on the alarming news that a bunch of overzealous Insane Clown Posse fans attacked inexplicably famous person Tila Tequila at the Gathering of the Juggaloes. The rampant uncouthness of these fans was eerily predicted by this Scharpling & Wurster bit (about an hour to 90 minutes in).

And I’m also using this opportunity to sneak in a few links that I couldn’t quite turn into the considered, thoughtful post I wanted to post.

I wrote about a thousand words trying to make some kind of meaningful response to this list of 15 overrated contemporary writers, written by Anis Shivani, an all-but-unknown writer, in The Huffington Post. And I also wanted to approvingly link to Anna North, at Jezebel, who responded elegantly here.

The problem I had was in taking this guy’s idiosyncratic opinions, which he’d like to elevate above the state of mere opinion by using lots of jargon and trashing these writers (mostly women, as Anna North points out (although the baffling thing, to me, was the high number of poets singled out for punishment; how many readers are these poets reaching, and thus how much damage could they be causing? Maybe lay off a bit, playboy.)), and discussing something more than the article, the specific whining, and the specific writers.

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July 31, 2010

Deeper into slavering fandom

Relishing, savoring, basking in this audio interview with Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster (while I’m supposed to be doing work).

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July 27, 2010

The great Teddy Wayne

has cracked The New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmurs” section. Why great? The man is a beast. See here for the exhaustive list, but do especially peep “Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years” (dear to my heart), “Your Best Friend in a Romantic Comedy Is Always There for You,” and my most favorite of all, “Ashton Kutcher Fan Fiction: ‘The Middle School Dance’ by Melissa Bell, Age 13” (also in video form here, though I think seeing someone perform it makes it less funny; this girl is not quite who I pictured in my head).

Wayne’s debut novel, Kapitoil, recently came out. I have not yet read it, though every time I remember it exists, I ask myself, “Why haven’t I read it yet?” My friend and noble roommate, Salvatore Pane, reviewed the book for BOMB and had nothing but good things to say about it.

Also, as an aside, the fact that Teddy Wayne produced all this screamingly funny stuff for McSweeney’s website and now has this (still funny but decidedly) tamer piece in The New Yorker reminds me of this article in The Onion, the upshot of which is that pitcher Mike Mussina has no problem getting his satirical pieces into “Shouts & Murmurs” but finds McSweeney’s a tough nut to crack.

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July 26, 2010

Everyone talks about the weather, but almost no one attempts ball jokes about it

. . . Until now.

In Philadelphia this weekend, it was literally as hot as balls.

Thank you. Thank you.

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July 23, 2010

Recordings where people laugh

I’m listening to an episode of The Best Show on WFMU (which I slavered over here) from a couple of weeks ago. Jon Wurster is in the studio as Rick Spangler, “a record producer with a diverse resume.” Although usually unflappable, Wurster here cracks himself up repeatedly, playing it off as an effect of pollen and breath mints, and glossing over the covered-microphone silences as his having fallen out of his chair.

And I am loving it. It’s reminding me of this Elliott Smith cover, “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down),” a Hank Williams, Jr., song, which is on the CD that comes with Autumn de Wilde’s Elliott Smith photo book. I think the CD is called “Live at Largo,” if a CD in the back of a book can have a proper title, but in any case that’s what the music is: recordings from a show at Largo in Los Angeles (which, just to make this post splinter off in as many directions as possible, here is a New Yorker piece describing the scene at Largo (though you have to have digital access to get at more than the abstract, so maybe save yourself the click if you don’t want your interest piqued and then rudely stifled)).

But anyway the reason I love the song is that Smith laughs repeatedly during the song and sounds, generally, happy. He totally blanks on part of the lyrics, which I’ve now discovered to be “corn bread and iced tea took the place / Of pills and ninety proof.”

Also, here’s Hank Williams, Jr. playing the original. Not surprisingly, I prefer the Elliott Smith version. Last weekend I picked up a cassette of Hank Williams, Jr.’s greatest hits at Salvation Army (minus any kind of cover or case, which made it all that much more thrilling) and by Tuesday I was pretty well done with it. Country music remains, like the films of Jerry Lewis, way better in theory than in my actual experience of them. It is a great song, though.

And another plus is that I now get the self-referential line Williams, Jr. throws into the Monday Night Football theme at the end, when he goes, “All my rowdy friends are here on Monday night.”

July 19, 2010

Jack Pendarvis & John Brandon Podcast

One of my most favoritest of contemporary writers, Jack Pendarvis, reads here at an Oxford, MS bookstore with the writer John Brandon (who seems poised for big success with his second novel, Citrus County, from McSweeney’s). I liked, but did not love, Brandon’s first novel, Arkansas, also from McSweeney’s. (A compendium of info on that book is here. They published a couple excerpts, but I’m unable to locate those on the website.) However, I loved, not liked, Brandon’s prose, so I may well check out Citrus County.

Jack Pendarvis cracks me up, whether I’m reading his “blog” or one of his story collections (Your Body Is Changing and The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure), or his novel, Awesome. (One of my great accomplishments during graduate school was, while fiction editor of the grad-student lit mag, Hot Metal Bridge, to solicit a selection from Awesome. Mr. Pendarvis was gracious enough to give us an excellent section of the book, and was a pretty darn nice guy to correspond with.) He is pretty funny here, reading from a column he writes for The Believer. It kind of bummed me out to hear him slated as the opening act, but I guess what with John Brandon’s being something of a rising star, that status may now be appropriate.

The Brandon reading is pretty excellent, too. After hearing what Citrus County is about—it seems to involve a terrible crime, and potentially a love triangle—I am all the more intrigued after listening to this excerpt, which features a middle-school teacher running his students through genealogy presentations and reluctantly planning for his tenure as coach of the school’s girls’ basketball team. If you’re like me, you love it when random stuff comes together.

One sour note about the podcast, as I experienced it: the player really, really sucks. And by that I mean it won’t let you pause or fast-forward (which would be a convenience if you tried to pause the broadcast, realized pushing Play took you all the way back to the beginning, and thought you’d like to skip over the ten minutes you’d already heard).

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June 24, 2010

The Best Show on WFMU

Nine or ten months ago, a friend turned me on to a radio program broadcast each week out of New Jersey, on the independent station WFMU. The friend told me I seemed “like someone who could really use the Best Show in his life.” While I took slight umbrage at that assessment, time has proved him right. The Best Show, a mongrel of a show featuring open call-ins, in-studio guests, and glorious semi-improvised call-in bits, is true to its name in being about the best thing going. The web archives have been invaluable to me as I’ve slogged through some slow days at the office. (I’ve also gotten deeply into the recordings of Scharpling and Wurster, which are the best bits from the Best Show compiled onto a series of hallucinatory and hilarious discs. Jon Wurster, an accomplished rock drummer, does a wide range of voices, from Hippy Johnny, the less-than-benevolent benefactor of a hippie commune, to Philly Boy Roy, an overly proud Philadelphian (complete with fantastic stuffed-up-nose accent), to Timmy von Trimble, the two-inch racist.)

As is only right, as I have fallen deeper into love with the Best Show I have sought to pay off my debt by spreading the word of this terrific show. So far as I can tell, others have not fallen for the show as I have, but that won’t stop me from trying. Today I put together a brief introduction for a friend who, fingers crossed, I think is a prime candidate to fall hard for the show. And I thought to myself, “I’ve got a blog now. Eventually, someone may read it. Why not post this primer there, too?” And in reply I thought, “Yes. That is actually a pretty good idea.”

And so here is a quick, somewhat arbitrary introduction to the Best Show on WFMU:

There are two archives: of complete (3- and sometimes 6-hour) shows, and of “gems,” which are (mostly) the parts described above, wherein Jon Wurster calls in doing various voices.

The gems are where I started. If you like those, and have the patience and luxury to listen to a 3-hour radio show, I’d move on to the full shows. They’re funny, Tom has good guests, and there’s usually one Wurster call-in per show.

The Gems archive here.

Within the Gems, a few good starting places:

-Bill Cheetah, a caller who’s surprisingly well-prepared to back up his trash talk.

-The manager of Club Pizzazz, presenting his ill-advised slate of upcoming events.

-Tom takes a call from Mike Sajak. Enough said.

For the advanced Best Show listener, the full-program archives are here.

Places to get started:

-Tom Scharpling and Paul F. Tompkins talk about the Gathering of the Juggalos. This one made me cry laughing.

-The following week, Jon Wurster calls in as a disgruntled Juggalo.

-Guest Patton Oswalt talks about Gallagher.

The full shows usually start with like 20 minutes of music, which made me almost not listen to them—the music’s often pretty good, but as I initially got sold on the comedy stuff I was impatient, plus I don’t like much of the psychedelic / British invasion-type stuff that Tom often plays—but if you hang in there or skip over it turns to more of a comedy show.

Enjoy! (And if you do enjoy, pass it on to someone else.)

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Category: Comedy