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December 01, 2004

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

Comments

There's something about Janeane...

You know what kills me about her? Not only isn't she funny, but she can't even remember her own stage act!!!

Have you ever see one of her stand up routines? She usually comes out on stage with a legal pad with all her bits written out on them. It's sorta hard to keep the audience interested when you are having to look at your cheat sheet every 30 seconds to see A) what your joke is and B) what the punch line is.

It's sorta a buzz kill. Like when you think you are about to see some hot girl on girl action on "Skinemax" and instead reallize you've accidentally flipped to HBO and a Margaret Cho special comes on.

I hate it when that happens....

Posted by: Senator PhilABuster on December 1, 2004 01:39 PM

Thanks ever so much for that imagery, Senator. I'll be sending you the therapist bill.

As for Janeane: Back in the day, when all she did was act, I thought she was kinda cute. She always got cast as the Dumpy-but-sweet chick, and I always thought she was pretty AND sweet. But the farther out there her politics have become, the more shrill her rhetoric, the more she's let her physical appearance go to shit. So now she's neither pretty nor sweet. It's like the very unattractive female acquaintance I had who was convinced that I was so turned off by her appearance that I was overlooking her personality, and if I just saw past her looks, I'd date her, while I never had the heart to tell her, "No, I can't stand your personality either."

Posted by: Brian B on December 1, 2004 02:00 PM

Ace--

Yeah, that Janeane Garofalo story is great. It's discussed in "Live From New York," the vignette history of Saturday Night Live, as spoken by the cast and crew themselves. Awesome book, if you ever liked SNL at any point.

The best thing about the book is how every single paragraph in there from Garofalo, or about Garofalo, reinforces the perspective that she's Just. Not. Funny. She whines constantly about Lorne never recognizing her massive talent, and how the cast and crew were all so sexist, and how hard it is to be a woman.

Good lord. You're on Saturday Night Live, frickin' enjoy it. She sounds like she'd only be happy at a wake, and even then she'd buzzkill the free coffee.

Oh, one last thing. The only funny thing Garofalo did on SNL? Bathroom Monkey.
http://www.hillison.com/snl/SNL-Bathroom%20Monkey.mpg

It was probably funny because she didn't have to work with any men.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

P.S. Link to the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316781460/102-1897862-9784952?v=glance

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on December 1, 2004 02:04 PM

I'm too much of a moron to find your email on the page, Ace, so I'm posting this instead. You simply must do a post on this item.

Posted by: Deus ex Macrame on December 1, 2004 03:11 PM

Hmmmm, Janeane.

I watched her standup routine on Comedy Central a couple of months ago. When she ahd finished, my roommate turns to me and says "that was not funny at all."

Indeed. Makes her the perfect host for liberal talk radio, doesn't it?

Also, in her monologue she said that being in the SNL cast was like the being an indian that got smallpox from the pilgrims. The ONLY thing she enjoyed about SNL was meeting Alec Balwin when he hosted.

Tells you all you need to know.

Posted by: Bald Eagle on December 2, 2004 02:27 AM

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