Friday 28 August 2009

Well, Can You Describe Him?

We're still working on the final part of our mammoth Spotify-comedy update, but while double-checking the name of something related to a choice cut, we're found what is quite possibly the best thing on all of YouTube.



Mel and Griff's One Night Stand live VHS, long-since deleted, now gloriously online in several parts. Not work safe, clearly (though if you work at a company where watching even work-safe YouTube clips is permitted, can we have an application form?), but utterly brilliant viewing. Hopefully, this'll keep you ticking over until the final Cribbinstastic part of our comedy album rundown.
Share:

Tuesday 25 August 2009

A Collection of Measured Dissent

Here's a sobering thought for you. Using a hugely conservative estimate that at least 60% of them are over the age of 18, for every ten people leaving comments on YouTube, six of them can vote in a general election. And their votes counts exactly the same as yours. No matter if you read The Times, The Guardian, The Mirror, The Sun and The Beano each morning to take in all perspectives, peruse Hansard frequently, visit impoverished areas, small businesses, schools and colleges to connect with real people, the vote you make in the next election counts just as much as the person who'll vote for whichever candidate mentions asylum seekers the most, or who seems like 'a nice bloke'. This is why we'd happily lobby for voting slips to contain short current affairs quizzes. Get all five questions correct, and your vote is multiplied by three. Cracking idea, hey?

Part of the reason for our latest dose of despair for the future of society is that we've been unable to get the tune of the marvellous "Paul McCartney's version of Imagine" from Newstopia out of our heads for the last few days.

 

This means we've been dipping back into the above YouTube video occasionally, and while listening to the music (which is crying out to be remixed, we hasten to add), we dipped into the comments for the video. A mistake.

Even though it's a perfectly jolly tune in its own right, and nothing more than an affectionate parody of Macca's melody-over-lyrical-content songwriting style, from many of the comments you could assume it was performed while Micallef danced around a bonfire of Abbey Lane acetates topped with a meat effigy of the late Linda McCartney. Here are a few of them:

 

x10sctmp

Yeah, branding a comedian an “animal” for making a family-friendly remake of a 37-year-old song. That’s a considered opinion, right there. Thanks, “Ponchocv”.

x10sctmp0

“Got a great sense of humor”, have you Mr so-called-“davesharon5747”? We beg to differ there, but note you say you “didn’t appreciate” the choice of song by Mr Micallef. That could be because you’ve changed your mind since your first viewing and have since accepted it wasn’t getting that worked up about, but it could well be some sort of post-vengeance gloat. Maybe you jetted over to Melbourne and rubbed snot onto the windscreen of Shaun Micallef’s car, or flipped him the bird at some traffic lights. Your comment has that sort of air about it. You nutter.

It seems your account has since been suspended. Presumably if you got that worked up over a parody of a song you like, you’ve probably starting making gallingly specific threats to the children of someone you really disagree with, like someone who posits that your favourite sports franchise might not be the greatest ever to grace the conference in which they play.

x10sctmp1

Tell ‘em, Steve-Dave! A quick look at this user’s account reveals they’ve uploaded just two videos. One of them is a camera phone video of them punching a punching bag repeatedly (4 months ago, 71 views). The other one is called ‘freestyle’, and has spent the last four months notching up a total of five views. Five.

x10sctmp2

So, there’s a critic who knows what the public want, right there. We haven’t watched ‘freestyle’, coincidentally. That would sully the efforts of the five people who’d already seen it.

x10sctmp3

Presumably Miss Lizzy hasn’t been listening to the barrage of weak “Paul McCartney and Heather Mills” jokes trotted out by jobbing Mock The Weekers over the last half-dozen years, or she’d have been able to put that song into some kind of perspective. And anyway, it’s Sir Paul now. Show some tossing respect.

x10sctmp4

Yeah, that jhon lennon. Always fcukign poswing around like he pwns the joitn.

x10sctmp5

A collection of measured dissent, there. “Motherfucker”, “scum”, “son of a bitch”. Was there a subliminal flashframe of Micallef taking a dump on The White Album that we missed or something? Oh, and stoberto06 – if you want to elongate the word “shite” in text form, adding multiple letter Es on the end just makes you look, well, a bit shitty.

x10sctmp6

Yes, well spotted.

x10sctmp7

Indeed. Why, Darfur is like getting a spot of jam on your T-shirt compared to this abomination. Interestingly enough, sergeev1989 actually finds The Holocaust deserving of as many as seven frowny brackets, so they’re not doled out lightly(((((((.

x10sctmp8

“It.s a crap or shit”? PICK A SIDE, YOU PUSSY.

x10sctmp9

x10sctmp10

x10sctmp11

x10sctmp12

Really? Really? By the way, we’ve seen the full episode of Newstopia this is from. That actually is the end of the song on that clip up there. There wasn’t, say, an extra bit at the end where Francis Greenslade sneaks onto the set dressed as Mark Chapman and shoots a pistolful of blanks into “Paul McCartney”, no matter how much these comments make it seem like that was the case.

x10sctmp13

Actually, fuck it. As soon as we get around to it, we’re going to get some video cameras together, and do our own parody of ‘Imagine’. We’re going to drive up to Matthew Street in Liverpool, we don’t live that far away. We’ll even pay the toll for the Mersey Tunnel to get there a bit more quickly. We’re going to dress up as John Lennon (circa Sgt Pepper, only the uniform will be emblazoned with embroidered penii), and roll around in dogshit outside The Cavern Pub while singing a version of Imagine where all the lyrics are made up of the words “poo”, “bum” and “willies”. In a Joey Deacon voice*. And then, we’ll go home, and upload it to YouTube, but before clicking “complete”, we’re going to DISABLE COMMENTS FOR THIS VIDEO, so all the self-important prudes will be denied their pissy little way of stamping their little internet feet at the nasty thing the rude men done. What will you do then, PixieDust1996? WHAT THEN?

(* Except we’ll do it really early in the morning, so we don’t get our faces stabbed in.)

Do you know the really funny thing about all these comments? Aside from the fact that the vast majority of people making the comments up there are unlikely to vote in elections because it’s unlikely they’d be able to spell ‘X’? It’s that the song “Imagine”, by John Lennon, is a song about, hey, peace. About putting differences to one side, to admitting that while Person/Country/Religion A might not necessarily get along with Person/Country/Religion B, we should all just chill the fuck out, and try to get along as best we can. Come on, give it a go! It’s easy if you try!

x10sctmp15

Sigh.

Note: We actually do like the Beatles, and Paul McCartney, and John Lennon. And yet, we’re able to display a modicum of tolerance for others. Zany.

 

x10sctmp14

Thank Ringo for the occasional voices of sanity in the comments for that video, that’s all we can say. Cheers, Applemask.

Share:

Sunday 23 August 2009

“Can you help me, Shady Sammy?”

As anyone who has watched Sky Sports News on a weekday afternoon will attest, most daytime television advertising is bland rubbish trying to coax people into taking out loans. Such as:

 

Wholesome looking people striving to improve their lot, basically. Having sat through a lot of daytime television beamed directly from the USA (via TVUPlayer), it seems a decent proportion of their daytime adverts are similarly bland affairs helping people to… get released from jail.

 

As you might expect, many of these commercials try to disguise what they’re selling. For instance, with most of it being a cheery attractive women telling you about their services, aside from the name of the company and quick telltale shots of handcuffs bookending the spot, you’d be forgiven for thinking the advert for Southwest Bail Bonds is actually selling weight-loss pills.

x10sctmp2

Some of the spots even use comedy to make their point. The commercial for Trinity Bail Bonds shows a comic glimpse of what rival bondsmen might be like:

x10sctmp3x10sctmp4x10sctmp5

Before revealing that their bondsmen are all rotund and jolly like.

x10sctmp6

Readers from the midlands might remember all the cheesy local adverts that used to be on Central for Don Amott: King Of Caravans. Well, it seems Don has a cousin based in Colorado. Dennis Blackwell: The King Of Bailbonds. As such, he has a slightly more bombastic commercial:

 
Nice. No earnest “genial bloke being treated outrageously by The Man”, as you get on most of these adverts. Instead we get indistinct shots of someone playing pool (in an empty bar)  and a woman putting on lippy, exciting shots of police cars, topped off with a shot of Dennis Blackwell looking mean.

x10sctmpx10sctmp0x10sctmp1

For why? Because DENNIS BLACKWELL IS SERIOUS ABOUT BAILBONDS, presumably.

Share:

Saturday 22 August 2009

Twitter: The Acid Test



So, you could claim that Twitter has achieved quite a lot for a glorified text messaging service. Facilitating dissent over the re-election of a corrupt government in Iran, giving Fox News a black eye over its unwarranted criticism of the NHS, Stephen Fry getting stuck in a lift, Twitter has helped it all. But, can Twitter achieve real change? In short, can we get #GetNewstopiaOnBBC4 to be a trending topic*?



While the programme itself may have ended about a year ago, which may well be considered something of a problem for a semi-topical news-satire comedy, we reckon the campaign still has legs. Polio-stricken legs with untied shoelaces, admittedly, but legs nonetheless. Surely, if a couple of hundred-thousand followers join us on this, we must surely get our way. It's that simple.



Any readers paying proper attention at this point may like to point out the @brokentv Twitter account is being followed by just 300 people, a largish proportion of which are flangebrained spammers, and that we attract between 50 and 150 visitors per day (most of which have Googled "lesbian vampire killers torrent", which we rank highly in, for some utterly unfathomable reason). With those figures in mind, how could our campaign be expected to register on any sort of scale?



Shut up, that's why. And Barack Obama is technically 'following' us, so if he retweets us, it's in the notional bag. Fingers crossed! Until then, here's a clip of Shaun Micallef, being Paul McCartney, performing a special tribute version of "Imagine". This is why the show belongs on BBC Four*, dammit.



(*Or More4. Heck, even Comedy Central Xtra+1 would do.)
Share:

Wednesday 19 August 2009

How To Be Afraid Of Football Shirts

An entertaining look at Bad Football Kits has been written for our CRIMINALLY IGNORED BY THE PUBLIC AT LARGE sister blog, How To Be Afraid Of Everything. We’ve decided to cross-post a link to it here, to try and get a few pennies into their guitar case, as it were. It includes things like this:

x10sctmp38

We recommend you go over there now to check it out. Promise not to make a mess, and don’t pull faces at their strange habit of referring to themselves in the first person. They’re new here.

x10sctmp39

How To Be Afraid Of Everything

Share:

Friday 14 August 2009

Sound On... ("Sound On!")... Vision On... ("Vision On!")

Hey, ITV. It's coming up to the thirtieth anniversary of what just might be our earliest television memory, and where's the C-list strewn clip show commemorating it? Nowhere, that's not where. Tsk. Weeks and weeks of this:



Followed by, quite excellently, this:



Interesting local colour: all that was going on at a time when the BrokenTV family's front room floor was being repaired. We'd just grown up from the age of "needing those tot-proof gates to prevent us from tumbling down the stairs", and so said gate was instead being used to stop us from toddling into the front room with it's newly-unbuggered-but-still-vulnerable floor. All this means we saw the ITV strike coverage from the strangely cramped kitchen instead.
Share:

The Top 100 Comedy Albums on Spotify: Part Three

Part three: go! To be honest, the whole affair has actually spiralled into “An Indeterminate Number Of Interesting Comedy Albums On Spotify”, because we’re now past the fifty mark, and there are way more than fifty albums worth mentioning. From this point on, think of the title as something akin to how Heinz haven’t actually had just “57 Varieties” since before 1892. We’re still going to get the whole thing wrapped up within four parts though, so we’d better crack on.

x10sctmp4Peter Sellers – Greatest Comedy Cuts (2004)

Kicking off, another nice collection of songs and skits from Southsea-sired Sellers. Super.

Sample line: “Someone’s nicked the strings on me guitar!” “You’ve got it on back to front.”

x10sctmp5Eddie Murphy – Greatest Comedy Hits (1997)

A collection of well-known Murphy skits (think Ice Cream Man) and clips from his films, alongside some previously unavailable material (such as “Almost Fucked a Midget”, seemingly taken from a bootleg recording). A nice reminder of why he once deserved to be so successful, and why it’s a shame he ended up churning out films like Dr Doolittle 3: Come Back, There Are Some Animals We Haven’t Done Yet.

x10sctmp6

Greg Behrendt - Greg Behrendt is Uncool (2005)

Well known in the US for co-penning the snappily titled book “He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys”, here Behrendt goes back to his day-job of stand-up, and riffs on life as an over-forty still trying be maintain a shred of coolness.

x10sctmp0

Michael Ian Black – I Am A Wonderful Man (2007)

“Terrorists? Terrible PR. They can’t buy a good headline, these guys.”

A splendid CD cover, too. All round niceness from the host of US VH1’s I Love The Eighties. We suspect this means he’s the stateside version of Simon Amstell, except only 80% as good.

“If I had a slave, I wouldn’t make him sleep on the floor. I’d let him have a mattress, or maybe a futon I’d bought off Craigslist.”

x10sctmp8

Charlie Drake – Hello My Darlings! (2004)

If you look up the phrase “cheeky chappie” in Wikipedia, there’s nothing but a photo of Charlie Drake’s winking face. Unless someone’s edited it back to the proper entry, that is.

 

x10sctmp1

Cassius Clay – I Am the Greatest! (1963)

“Do you have anything personal against Sonny Liston?”

“No. He’s a nice old man, but he’s got my job!”

x10sctmp2

Bobcat Goldthwait – I Don’t Mean To Insult You But You Look Like Bobcat Goldthwait (2003)

Y'know, from Police Acadamies 2+, or more enjoyably, the episode of The Larry Sanders Show where Larry wants to get Goldthwait in as host of the chatshow following his ("I don't know, maybe turn it down to six?" "That was a six"). This is a splendid recording, though we'd imagine a lot of people may be put off by his delivery, what with Goldthwait essentially being Animal from the Muppet Show made flesh.

Sample line: “I don’t mind going bald, but you know what I really hate? Grey pubic hairs. That was a sad fuckin’ day!”

x10sctmp3x10sctmp4Steven Wright – I Have A Pony (1985)
Steven Wright – I Still Have A Pony (2007)

Too many classic lines to list, but that doesn’t mean we can’t quote a few. There are from I Have A Pony.

“I’ve just got out of hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a bookmark.”

“One time, I went to a drive-in in a cab. Movie cost me $95.”

“If you were in a vehicle travelling at the speed of light, and you turned the lights on, would they do anything?”

By the time you shift forward twelve years, Wright’s voice seems to have lowered by several octaves (so much so it almost hurt your ears, in fact), but the material is still as good as ever.

"I'm addicted to placebos. I'd give them up, but it wouldn't make any difference."

“One of my Grandfathers died when he was a little boy.”

“One time, at the grocery store, I tried to buy the thing that separates your food from the other guys’”

All assuredly brilliant, but we can’t help but notice a marked difference in the crowd reactions between the two recordings. In the first one, while the audience are undeniably on the side of Wright, they’re relatively restrained when compared to the audience in the 2007 recording. In the more recent recording, while it’s still a great piece of work, the audience have a jarring tendency to whoop and applaud loudly after one-liners that quite frankly aren’t that special. It’s as if there’d been a oneupmanship virus released into the auditorium during the warm-up, resulting in audience members thinking “woo, yeah! I get this joke on a number of different levels from everyone else! Wright is such a genius, I just have to stand up and applaud that last line! Woo! I know what a placebo is!”

Like we say, this doesn’t diminish the quality of Wright’s act, it’s just a teeny bit jarring, like watching the whoops of the Hollywood Bowl crowd when Eric Idle utters the lines about all the kids in Los Angeles being on drugs and all the adults being on roller skates.

x10sctmp5Kenneth Williams – Interesting Facts: The Decca Recordings 1960-1961 (2007)

This disc makes for a nice example of why Kenneth Williams deserves to be remembered for more than just being a troubled diarist, sneaking gay slang onto the wirelesses of 1950s Middle England, perpetual Carry On foil or occasional annoyance for radio Hancock. This disc sees Williams displaying a range of abilities that people may be a little surprised by. A mugger working through a crisis of confidence (“erm, open your hands and give me your money”), nutter in a vet’s waiting room (“I’ve got a viper in this box, y’know. Iss not an asp”), xenophobic holidaymaker (“Do stop putting on that ridiculous regional accent!” “I’m sorry monsieur, but I am French.” “Well, I didn’t come here to listen to your problems”), and many more.

An interesting clip on here is where Williams takes the Peter Cook role in the “One Leg Too Few” sketch. It fares badly when compared to the more familiar Cook/Moore version, after Williams performs the routine in a voice just a bit too outwardly comedic for the thing to work effectively. But hey! It’s Kenneth Williams!

x10sctmp6Tony Hancock – It’s Hancock (1965)

Two classic Half Hours, though sadly this represents all the Tony Hancock there is on Spotify. The two episodes on offer here are The Missing Page and The Reunion Party, meaning that the likes of The Radio Ham, The Lift, The Bedsitter or The Blood Donor are sadly absent. Hopefully they’ll turn up before Kevin Bishop re-records them for a modern audience, retitled as ‘The Internet Ham’ and ‘The Sperm Donor’, respectively. “A pint? That’s very nearly a bollockful!", and so on.

As for these recordings – as excellent as might be expected, but we’d sooner they’d chosen episodes with more Bill Kerr.

x10sctmp7
Jim Gaffigan – King Baby (2009)

“I think you might be addicted to TV when the battery from your remote goes out, and you replace it with the battery from your smoke alarm…”

Before starting this feature, we’d not really been aware of Big Jim Gaffigan’s work outside of a brief appearance in Flight Of The Conchords. After listening to this album in full, alongside 2004’s “Doing My Time”, we’re bloody hooked. This might just be instinctive hyperbole kicking in after listening to the work of someone so enamoured with fast food and procrastination as ourselves, but he exudes an aura of an apolitical Jon Stewart or Bill Hicks for much of this disc. You could possibly argue that he dips into his “appalled audience member reacting to previous punchline” voice too frequently (“the British are our only allies… why would he be so reckless? What if Gordon Brown were sitting in the audience right now?”, after a nice, if inaccurate, gag about vinegar being Britain’s ketchup), but hey. Any comedian able to throw in a five minute routine about the magnificence of bacon – and later toss in about half a dozen back references throughout the rest of the set – is okay with us.

“It’s literally a restriction on entering some religions. ‘Our rules: no killing, no cheating on your wife, no bacon…’ ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa… what was that last one?’ ‘No bacon?’ ‘I’m in the wrong line! Is there a bacon line around here?’”

x10sctmp8x10sctmp9x10sctmp10Spike Milligan – Legends of the 20th Century (1999)
Laurel & Hardy - Legends of the 20th Century (1999)
Peter Sellers - Legends of the 20th Century (1999)

If you’re looking for a pre-millennial triumvirate of comedic powerhouses, you can’t say fairer than these. First up, a series of Milligan all-round splendidness, including more dips into his war memoirs:

“I’m sorry, er… Milligan, your eyesight isn’t up to what we need for pilots, but there are a number of vacancies for rear gunners with really bad eyesight.”

“Er, no, no Sir. I don’t want to be in the back seat. I want to drive.”

“I’m sorry lad, all we can offer you is almost certain death.”

Followed up by another mix of L&H crackly goodness, comprised of songs and arguments.

Ollie : “Where were you born?”

Stan: “Well… I don’t know.”

Ollie, scoffing: “Fancy not knowing where you were born!”

Stan: “Well, I was too young to remember.”

Rounded off with a further third of the Goon crew. One track on the latter entry sees Sellers team up with Milligan to take on a splendidly deranged version of ‘Unchained Melody’, in the guises of Eccles and Bluebottle.

“a long lonely time / and time goes by so slowly / and time can do so much / are you still mine? / I need your love / I need your love / Godspeed your love to me / a ying tong, ying tong yiddle-I-po / I play my ukulele as *WORDS UNINTELLIGIBLE TO OUR EAR*”

And so on. You need to listen to it to get the full effect, obviously. Instantly preferable to the Robson and Jermone version, and we don’t even care that making disparaging remarks about the musical abilities of Robson and Jerome was declared illegal by the European Court of Human Rights in 1999 when we say that.

x10sctmp11W.C. Fields – Lies, Lies and More Lies (2007)

Another collection of (possibly out-of-copyright) audio scrapings from the vaults, this time from legendary sourpuss W.C. “Because Fish Fuck In It” Fields. Don’t let the “designer bought a Photoshop manual, but only bothered reading two pages from the chapter Getting Started With Filters” cover fool you, this is a nice series of recordings.

x10sctmp12 x10sctmp13 x10sctmp14 
x10sctmp15x10sctmp16 x10sctmp17 x10sctmp18 x10sctmp19x10sctmp20 x10sctmp21

Monty Python
‘s Previous Record
Live at Drury Lane
Matching Tie and Handkerchief 
The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of […] and The Holy Grail: Executive Version
The Ultimate Rip Off 
Contractual Obligation Album 
The Meaning Of Life 
The Final Rip-Off
Sings 
Life of Brian 
(1972-2006)

Now we’ve stopped caring about cramming everything into a hundred places, here are all the Python albums we’ve not mentioned yet (1970’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus itself isn’t yet on Spotify, if you were wondering). Now, we could try to sum up each album, but we’d be better served by linking to SOTCAA’s remarkable webpages on the subject. We will however implore you all not to make the same mistake that we did by putting off listening to the Life Of Brian, Meaning of Life and Holy Grail albums for years. We’d stupidly (and yet, almost reasonably) assumed they’d simply be a recording of the best moments from the films, what with them dating from the pre-home video age (well, aside from Meaning Of Life, granted). Technically, they do, but they also offer so much more. Listen to them, and see why. Erm, hear why.

 

x10sctmp22

Tom Rhodes – Live in Paris (2007)

Possibly the smallest crowd of any live recording on the entire list. Not quite at the level of the five slightly amused people pretending to be the crowd in the woeful "’3 Mobile’ sponsor bits on Channel Four, but not too far away. The most popular track on this album (going by the Spotify stat-o-bar) is the track called “Muslim Girlfriend”. To the potential annoyance of of a certain proportion of the speculative audience, that part of Rhodes routine looks at the overall idiocy of organised religion. Yeah, take that, religion. As for the remainder of it, well, not spectacular, but hey, it’s free. Erm, if you’re not paying for Spotify, like we are.

Sample line: “England makes the best potato chips in the world. You ever had these Walkers Sensations? Oh my god, they’re like fuckin’ orgasms in chip form. Roasted chicken with thyme… roasted lamb with mint… Thai chilli prawn… but other than that, English food is not that nice in general. What makes an English breakfast? They pour baked beans all over your eggs. What an inconsiderate way to start your day. With a bunch of ass-fuel. The Germans should have dropped cookbooks on you motherfuckers!”

x10sctmp23

Denis Leary – Lock ‘N Load (2007)

A combination of comedy songs and live clippings from the bête noir of the late William Melvin "Bill" Hicks. As is par for the Leary course, it makes for a mixture of relative highs (“I can’t bring up my kids based on a belief system based purely on the size of fuckin’ hats, okay? That’s apparently how the Catholic Church is run”) and box-ticking “fuck you” lows (“When I’m President, things are gonna change. My foreign policy? Fuuuuck you!”) We can’t help but wonder how Leary’s core US audience would react if they saw his slightly surprising (and, to be fair, entertaining) appearance on Fantasy Football League. “What the fuck? He likes soccer? The fuckin’ fag!”

x10sctmp24

Cheech & Chong – Los Cochinos (1973)

“Ha ha! Drugs! Drugs is funny! The fact I’m able to telegraph the fact I understand the references made in this record help to make up for the lack of my actual personality! Yay! I’m edgy! Take that, The Man! And I saw someone doing a cocaine once, too.”

Us being holier-than-you-bastards annoying twats aside, this album includes the majestic track Basketball Jones. Not only is that a brilliant song in its own right, but it reminds us of the ace scene with Chauncey Gardiner in the limo near the beginning of Being There. Reason enough for inclusion, if you’re asking.

x10sctmp25

Lewis Black – Luther Burbank Performing Arts Center Blues (2005)

Another offering from NY funnyman Lewis Black. If Leslie Halliwell had decided to concentrate wholly on the art of comedy as opposed to cinema, and if he’d decided to stay alive until at least 2005, his guide to comedy would surely have included a reference to this album. And in this comedy guide, the snapshot review of this album would only have required a wordcount of two: piss funny. And that’s all you really need to know.

Sample line, on the subject of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe misfunction’ at the Superbowl Half-Time Show: “It’s more disturbing for a child to hear adults talking about seeing a tit as being disturbing, and disgusting, and indecent, and shocking than it is for a child to see one. There is no child that, when a breast is exposed to them accidentally that has suffered a mild epileptic seizure. When I was nine, my entire life was devoted to… seeing a tit. I was Captain Ahab. Sad, but fuckin’ true.”

x10sctmp26Mort Sahl – Mort Sahl Live (2006)

Though going by the badly scanned LP artwork, routine about a then-ongoing Watergate scandal at the beginning, and fact the tracks are called “LP Side A” and “LP Side B”, this was recorded some time before 2006. 1973, in fact.

Sample quote: “Eugene McCarthy once said that Nixon was a man who, if he saw you drowning thirty feet from shore, would then throw you a twenty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on television and say that ‘the President has met you more than half-way’.”

x10sctmp27Mike Birbiglia – My Secret Public Journal Live (2007)

“I didn’t realise how good I was with computers until I met my parents. My parents are like what would happen if you gave a monkey a computer.

x10sctmp28

Marc Maron – Not Sold Out (2006)

Marc Maron’s 2006 offering sees us falling squarely into an old comedy trap. Listen to a dozen comedy albums from American stand-ups, and you’ll encounter at least three of them spending five minutes going on about how New York is simultaneously great and shit. We think this might be something written into the constitution.

Sample line: “Hey, remember before 9/11, when Rudy Giuliani used to be a fuckin’ asshole?”

x10sctmp29Kyle Cease – One Dimple (2006)

Aw, kinda looks like Ant from PJ & Duncan, doesn't he?

Sample line: “How much did it suck to be Player Two in Super Mario Bros? Holy ass-fuck, you’d have to wait like four days for your fuckin’ turn.”

x10sctmp30

Russell Peters – Outsourced (2006)

That's the US Russell Peters, not the British one who constantly appears on Mock The Week. We can't help but speculate that should Russell Peters (the British one) make it big in the USA, he'll have to rebrand himself in much the same way that bands like Suede and The Charlatans did over there. "Hello, Anaheim Performing Arts Center, my name is The Bristol Russell Peters."

No, wait. It’s Russell Howard we’re thinking of. Damn.

So, with another 36 albums down (which partly explains why it took so long to get to part three), we’re nearing the end of the list. Part four is coming soon, where we’ll probably wrap things up. Or not, if we uncover another rich seam of Spotify comedy. The forthcoming days will tell.

Share:

BTemplates.com

Blog Archive

Popular Posts

Labels

Blog Archive