Bill Maher: Bombs Away

I'd rather have my enemies fail than succeed myself. Kind of a retarded position to take, but it's true:

The recipient, architect Frank Gehry, genuinely received the biggest laughs when he related his fear of following Maher (whom he had never met) since the only time he had done something similar, speaking after someone from the comedian's "near-profession", he had found it very difficult to go on immediately after 15 minutes of an hilarious Robin Williams act. He realized his fears were unfounded as "Bill Maher's not that funny."

No, he's not that funny. He simply reinforces liberal beliefs in a snide comedic tone. His clap to laugh ratio is a dangerously high 9:1.

And you know who else isn't funny? Jeneane Garofalo. Here's a telling tale from Fred Wolf, a longtime SNL writer:

I had this one sketch. It was about five idiot guys who were working on oil rigs in North Dakota. And they're drilling a hole deep into the earth and out of that hole pops some sort of a subterranean human-- some crazy alien person. And it's Jeneane Garofalo. And these five idiots see her come out of the hole and she tells them that she lives in an underground kingdom, that they've been watching earth's progress over millions of years and they have all the answers to any question that we might have about life on earth. And that she has five minutes until exposure to the air will kill her. [She offers:] "Ask any question you'd like."

Well, when she first pops out of the hole, Chris Farley screams a really high-pitched scream, so after she gives her speech about how they could ask any question they want, the next thing out of Adam Sandler's mouth is, he turns to Farley and says, "What the hell kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl." And then they proceed to spend one minute of her last remaining time on earth arguing over how he didn't screalm like a woman, he screamed like a man. And back and forth. The point of the sketch was that theese guys were idiots and that they were blowing their chance at, you know, at great knowledge.

Jeneane Garofalo raised hell with three or four people before I got wind of it that I was being "disrespectful to women" in that it is a fault of a guy to scream like a girl, that because Farley screamikng like a girl would bring chastisement, she said that meant that women therefore are deserving to be chastised when they scream. It was one of the most convoluted, strangerst, most ridiculous reasons I've ever heard to dislike a sketch.

I don't know if the sketch ever got on. It sounds sort of familiar, but maybe I'm just imagining it. It sounds kinda funny-- not super-funny, but a good chuckler for that last 12:50 sketch.

It's just amazing to me that some people can be so ludicrously PC that they can't just take a fat paycheck and perform a very skilly sketch.

Credit: Wolf's book taken from Live From New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live, at page... eh, fuck it, go look it fucking up yourself. Somewhere in the four-hundreds.

posted by Ace at 01:29 PM

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