Tag: Comedy

Friday Fave: Kate McKinnon

I wasn’t originally planning on seeing the new Ghostbusters, but when a friend wanted to get together one afternoon this was the only thing that appealed to both of us–everything else was too political or too heavy, and the films I really wanted to see weren’t out at the time. I was definitely looking forward to seeing something that pissed off Milo Yiannopoulos so badly; that alone made it worth it to me. I had witnessed his campaign of racist and misogynist abuse of Leslie Jones on Twitter (if witnessed is the word? I was online at the time and following some of the threads, but I had decided several months before not to follow Yiannopoulos himself), as well as the general whining about remaking an action film with all female leads, which also made me want to see it. All that said, I have not found previous Melissa McCarthy films especially entertaining, and was not expecting this one to be either, even if it did have Kristin Wiig in it.

Rarely am I so happy to be wrong. Leslie Jones was awesome, as was–somewhat unexpectedly–Chris Hemsworth. I had already settled on him as definitely the most talented of the Hemsworth brothers by miles (possibly the only talented one, at that), going by what I had seen him in previously. The cameos by the original cast members were cleverly and seamlessly worked in. I was also pleased to find that they used the original Ray Parker Jr. recording of the theme tune throughout, in addition to the new and distinctly worse version.

My favourite part of the film, though, was Kate McKinnon. I haven’t liked a performance in a comedy film so much since Emma Stone in Easy A (which I only started watching because I didn’t know what it was–literary snob that I am, I had been studiously avoiding it). Aside from the occasional Stefan sketch or “commercial”, I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since Amy Poehler and Tina Fey left, so I only knew who she was by process of elimination. That scene where Holtzmann starts dancing to “The Rhythm of the Night”, though? I’ve never felt the slightest doubt about my identity as heterosexual woman, but that was hot. Throughout the film, she and Leslie Jones are the funniest things in it. I came home, pre-ordered the blu-ray, and started looking up old clips of SNL.

Turned out I had seen her in a couple of skits, but hadn’t noticed her because the skits as a whole are so funny. (If you didn’t see The Day Beyonce Turned Black when it came out, you can find it here, and it’s hilarious.) She has a well-earned reputation for impressions–her versions of Justin Bieber and CNN’s Kate Bolduan are brilliant. My favourite CNN skits are almost always the ones where the cast themselves can’t keep from cracking up, and she also seems to have a knack for giving her co-stars fits of the giggles, as she does in this skit about alien abductions. She also has a cat named Nino, and talks about him probably as much as I do about my animals, so I’m sold.

And she’s Holtzmann, who is all kinds of awesome. If you haven’t seen Ghostbusters, go check it out, it’s well worth it.

Friday Fave: Allie Brosh and Hyperbole and a Half

I discovered the blog Hyperbole and a Half quite by chance about three years ago when someone I was once in contact with on Facebook at the time happened to post a comment that Allie Brosh had updated her site for the first time in a long time. I was curious, so I clicked on the link.

I think I spent the next two hours laughing until I cried and my stomach hurt.

Brosh’s blog is like many other blogs, mostly about herself and her relatively uneventful, non-celebrity life with her boyfriend and her two dogs, but she has a genius for relating the most trivial–and sometimes the most awful–experiences in a way that is both honest and incredibly funny. (Dooce’s writing has a similar quality, but lacks the fantastic illustrations.) Brosh captures this tone even in explaining and confronting her struggle with depression, which I return to every so often, particularly when I’m having a difficult week myself. The episode I find the funniest, however, is This Is Why I’ll Never Be An Adult.  If you read nothing else on the site, read that episode. Cleaning *all the things* in a single go is an ambition I continue to nurse–I used to be able to manage it when I lived in a flat in Edinburgh, but the house in Atlanta is proving a different beast. (How do closets and cabinets get so dirty? They stay closed 95% of the time. It isn’t fair.)

There’s actually not a great deal I can say that wouldn’t be better captured by just going and reading the blog itself, so have at it. I know some of you reading this will already be familiar with it, but like Black Books, I find it bears many, many repeated viewings. It is safe for work in the sense of no nudity or much swearing, as far as I recall, but laughing may be a problem. She has one book out, containing the best of the blog and some new material; a second book, Solutions and Other Problems, is due out sometime soon, in which we are promised much new material. If the publisher can just settle on a release date.

The Friday Fave: The Supersizers

I’ve never been much of a fan of reality TV, with one exception–I try to watch at least one episode of any historical reenactment series I come across. (Some turn out to be dreadful, and I abandon them.) I haven’t seen them all, but I’ve found several over the years. I’ve been interested in history all my life, particularly in how people lived with different social mores and without the medical and technological advances that we enjoy. (I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m a huge fan of costume dramas?)

This is by far the best of the lot, as far as I’m concerned, although I don’t think the term “documentary” really applies, and “The Supersizers Go…”, a reference to Morgan Spurlock’s torturing himself by (allegedly) eating only McDonald’s food for a month, isn’t the best of titles. That said, I really really wish I’d found it sooner.

The show follows Giles Coren, a food critic, and Sue Perkins, a comedian and now co-host of the Great British Baking Show, while they spend a week at a time eating, dressing, and investigating the hobbies, fads, and social constraints of specific time periods. The first series is devoted to different eras in British history; the second includes a few other places in Europe.

I suppose it’s ostensibly a cooking show as much as anything–it goes into cooking methods, serving styles, and eating habits in considerable detail, and employs professional chefs to recreate dishes from each period. Each episode starts and ends with a doctor assessing how the week’s diet has impacted the participants (this is the only similarity to Spurlock’s documentary). In the interim, there is some eating, some dressing up, and Coren and Perkins try out unusual activities such as trying to seduce a (very patient) volunteer with foods thought to be aphrodisiacs in the eighteenth century and applying cosmetics from eras past. There is also a lot of drinking. A lot of drinking. Sometimes at every meal. Because Britain’s reputation as a nation of heavy drinkers is not a new thing–even during the centuries when most of Europe drank beer at every meal because water and milk were unsafe unless boiled, the British were accused of drinking too much.

It is hilariously funny.

 

The Friday Fave: Samantha Bee

I miss Jon Stewart’s incarnation of The Daily Show every day. I knew I would, although I expected to like Trevor Noah a little more than I do, and I thought we’d see more of Jessica Williams and Hasan Minhaj than we have. Trevor Noah is doing a fair job, considering the shoes he had to fill, and is definitely improving–the Lindsay Graham episode was excellent. (If you haven’t seen it, try to catch it on the Comedy Central site before it’s taken down.) Nonetheless, the feel of the show is very different now.

I’ve been watching the show since its first incarnation with Craig Kilborn, and Stewart since he hosted Short Attention Span Theater. When Stewart took over from Kilborn, he shaped it into the platform for satire and biting commentary that it became–under Kilborn there was more pure silliness and every episode ended with a mock game show, if I remember correctly. Not that Jon Stewart’s tenure didn’t include a fair amount of pure silliness as well, but the moments I miss the most were the times when they kept the commentary to a minimum because it was so simple to show up the politicians and pundits just by playing things they’ve said at different times back to back. Speaking solely for myself, I’ve found the Republican primary race–not least Trump’s appalling and repellent performance–a tiny bit harder to endure without him. I missed the blend of acerbity and absurdity that Stewart’s crew perfected, and I worried that it would live on only in John Oliver’s show on HBO. (Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show is awesome, but of a completely different format, far more conversation and debate among guests than mockery and satire.)

I worried a little too much, as usual. Samantha Bee took a large part of what made The Daily Show great when she went over to create Full Frontal for TBS, and it is every bit as good. Unlike TDS and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, she doesn’t organize her program necessarily around the events of the past few days but focuses on specific topics that have been relevant for a matter of weeks, months, or, in many cases, years. She is also every bit as capable of making me–and my Conservative father–laugh hard enough to cry.

samantha_bee_master

She deals with many of the same political topics that TDS, LWT, and other political comedy programs do, but she spends a good bit of the (too little) time she has looking at how the issues or events at hand affect not simply the country as a whole or a political class or income group, but at women in particular, and other minorities. Given the recent onslaught of state bills targeting women’s reproductive rights and the attempts to overturn both the ACA and the Roe v. Wade decision at the federal level–not to mention the attempts to block the LBGT community from marrying, adopting children, working without harassment, and using the bathroom–we desperately need this, and more like it. Jon Stewart and his TDS crew perfected this technique of keeping an audience informed while making them laugh, something essential to us as a society since the news networks have begun to sacrifice truth and actual news for the sake of propaganda, pandering, and feel-good segments.

Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal is on Monday nights at 10:00, and I believe the episodes that have already aired are available on the TBS website and on YouTube. In the meantime, here’s a taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDfpGdk3HgQ