About a year after her participation in the groundbreaking Comedy Central documentary series the
Comedians of Comedy,
Maria Bamford was on stage at the Friars Club in LA when a heckler began shouting at her. What happened after that isn’t entirely clear, other than Bamford had a breakdown, walked off stage, and disappeared. She was found three months later selling clock radios on the sidewalks of Detroit. A fellow homeless person, who was also a Comedy Central fan, recognized Bamford and eventually her parents were contacted. They brought her back home to Deluth, Minnesota and began to get her help. Maria decided to document her recovery in a series of short videos called
The Maria Bamford Show, which were first posted to the TBS networks' now abandoned
Super Deluxe Web site.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Jan 26, 2013 -
100 comments
"There are plenty of reasons to recover from addiction, anxiety, depression, and trauma....But comedians are perverse people who often don't care about any of those things. So maybe this will convince them, and maybe this will convince me: get better — so you can get funny."
In a frank, personal, and revealing article, essayist Jaime Lutz interviews comedians
Marc Maron,
Eddie Pepitone,
Paul Gilmartin, and
Anthony Atamanuik about the uneasy relationship between mental illness and comedy.
posted by scarylarry
on Dec 14, 2012 -
9 comments
Between Peter Jackson’s penchant for cartoonish unserious gore and Bob McCarron’s off-screen makeup effects manipulations, Braindead
achieves something that approaches inspired genius in the heretofore unknown artform of human carnage. The film is filled with moments of joyous slapstick tableaux... And then there is that moment where Braindead
finally breaks through to achieve a transcendentally surreal glory of excess where Tim Balme wades into battle against the zombies armed with a lawnmower, drenching an entire room in showers of blood. (Braindead
holds the record for the greatest amount of artificial blood ever used in a film). The film is a work of perverse genius. -
Richard Scheib
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 8, 2012 -
41 comments
It may be the most notorious Thanksgiving promotion of all time. It is the 40th best television episode of all time. It's available in (semi-)entirety on
HULU. And the classic TV blog
offers an oral history. Happy thanksgiving, and, as God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
posted by Bunny Ultramod
on Nov 21, 2012 -
102 comments
The Onion's great for a witty skewering of current events. But its historical editions, as collected in the book
Our Dumb Century, are a gem all their own, full of razor-sharp satire, trenchant social commentary, period-accurate advertisements, running gags, historical irony, photoshoppery, and even some editorial cartoons for every year of the twentieth century. Luckily for history (and humor) buffs, nearly the whole run of the series is available piecemeal on their website. Click inside for an organized timeline of links to all the front pages from this brilliant work (plus a bonus!).
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Oct 25, 2012 -
52 comments
