Archive for the ‘comedy’ Tag
The art of Amy Poehler
Filed under: culture | Tags: comedy, film, original reporting, television
Leave a comment It was an amusingly good time interviewing one of the great comedians of my generation for the Jan/Feb issue of Arrive magazine. If you don’t have any plans to ride the rails in the northeast over the next few weeks you can read my cover profile of Amy Poehler here. She talked (and joked) with me at length about her current TV show Parks and Recreation, which returns to primetime tonight, as well as about her Saturday Night Live days, parenthood and some action-packed projects she is pondering next. (“I want to be killed in a movie,” she said. “I want to have a really spectacular end.”)
It was interesting to hear Poehler’s take on the humanity beneath the antics of “Parks.” She mastered sketch comedy long ago, and her acting interests have broadened in recent years. I hadn’t watched much of the show until I took this assignment; from what I’ve since seen, it has its moments but can be rather uneven. And yet, it was also quickly apparent to me that Poehler’s charisma and comedic talents could carry the show, at least for a while. The future of “Parks,” now in its third season, appears to be riding on how the ratings tally this spring.
Particularly fun in going back over Poehler’s incandescent career to date was revisiting one of her early breakthrough characters (and one of my favorites), “Stacy,” who brought hilarious combustion to Late Night with Conan O’Brien in the late 1990s. Thanks to YouTube, of course, you can watch her again in glorious action.
The snazzy layout for the print issue of Arrive is also worth checking out via the link above, not least for the gallery of Poehler’s many memorable SNL characters, from Dolly Parton and Dennis Kucinich to Hillary Clinton and Kim Jong-Il.
AP’s complicated Seinfeld episode
Filed under: California, culture, media | Tags: California, comedy, media, technology, television
Leave a comment Recently a MediaBugs user reported that an Associated Press story had misidentified the “Seinfeld” character George Costanza as Jerry’s “neighbor” on the show. Eventually the AP’s west coast entertainment editor, Steve Loeper, responded to an inquiry about the matter, and the AP subsequently decided to publish a correction.
It was a positive outcome, but here’s the rub: Getting to it involved no less than contacting five different people, sending eight emails and making three phone calls — and it took more than three weeks to get a result.
Indeed, one of our early observations with MediaBugs has been that reporting an error to news organizations — even (or is it especially?) large, reputable ones — can be difficult and time-consuming.
When the “Seinfeld” bug appeared on our site on April 28th, I searched online for a specific channel through which to contact the AP regarding errors. I couldn’t find one. (Apparently one does not exist; more on that in a minute.) The AP story had no byline but was datelined Los Angeles, so I looked up the LA bureau and sent an email to the news editor there, Brian Melley. Having been a news editor myself at a busy national media outlet, I knew his inbox was likely to be inundated. I followed up with another email two days later. A couple days after that I tried calling, and emailed again on the heels of that. Then I also tried emailing the LA bureau chief, Anthony Marquez.
Next, I thought to contact an acquaintance who works as a reporter for the AP in Washington, to see if I was even poking in the right place. I learned from her that the news service has a decentralized system for corrections; the AP reporter and/or editor on a specific story apparently is responsible for handling any potential correction. I had been poking in the right place, if to no avail.
Next I tried emailing another person I knew of who used to work in the AP’s LA bureau, to ask if there was anyone else there I might try. He suggested contacting Loeper. After a couple of emails and a voicemail, Loeper responded in timely and good-humored fashion, and we were on our way to a correction. (While the bug ostensibly had been posted by a “Seinfeld” devotee, Loeper subsequently told me via email that the AP “got the definitive word from Rick Ludwin, the NBC executive in charge of the ‘Seinfeld’ series back in the ‘90s, who noted that Kramer and Newman lived in Jerry’s building, but George had his own apartment in another building and also lived with his parents for a time.”)
In the end, AP did right by the error. It wasn’t an earth-shattering one. But rather than getting into whether it’s important for such errors to be corrected (see here and here for why we believe it is), a simple question instead: why does it have to be so hard to get an error fixed?
You can almost hear Jerry working it into one of those nightclub monologues he used to close the show with: “What’s the deal anyway with these newsroom people? You see a simple mistake, so you try to let them know — you email and you call, and you call and you email, and… nothing. Really? What’s the deal with that?” (Cue laugh track.)
[Cross-posted to the MediaBugs blog.]
Cambridge cop accidentally arrests Gates again
Filed under: media, politics | Tags: comedy, law, media, politics
Leave a comment The beer summit, it turns out, was a huge waste of time — it seems Obama had it right about Crowley all along. This just in, from America’s Finest News Source:
WASHINGTON — Upon arriving late to his meeting with President Barack Obama and famed African-American intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Cambridge police officer James Crowley once again detained the distinguished Harvard scholar after failing to recognize the man he had arrested just two weeks earlier, White House sources reported Thursday. “When I entered the Oval Office, I observed an unidentified black male sitting near Mr. Obama, and in the interest of the president’s safety, I attempted to ascertain the individual’s business at the White House,” Crowley said in a sworn statement following the arrest. “The suspect then became uncooperative and verbally abusive. I had no choice but to apprehend him at the scene for disorderly conduct.” Witnesses said that Sgt. Crowley, failing to recognize Gates on their flight to Logan Airport, arrested the tenured professor in midair, once again at the baggage claim, and twice during their shared cab ride back to Cambridge.
Dave Eggers, Peter Orner and more
Filed under: California, culture | Tags: art, books, California, comedy, film, media, San Francisco, writing
Leave a comment I’m at work on a couple of freelance projects that will soon take me back to the great northwest. More bits here in a couple of days; in the meantime, I must recommend a visit to The Rumpus, a great online culture mag launched a few months back in San Francisco.
It’s got entertaining and informative and sexy stuff of all sorts. (Disclosure: A few of my posts have also been published there.) Editor Stephen Elliott recently interviewed Dave Eggers, who has a forthcoming nonfiction book, “Zeitoun,” about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as seen through the eyes of a Muslim-American family in New Orleans. I was struck by Eggers’ comments about his collaborative (and exhaustive) approach to the project:
With a book like this, I think you get the most accuracy when you involve your subjects as much as possible. I think I sent the manuscript to the Zeitouns for six or seven reads. They caught little inaccuracies each time. They have to live with the book, of course, as much as I do, so I needed their approval. With What Is the What and with this book, I consider the book as much theirs as mine. So they were intimately involved in every step, as were their extended families. We had many months to get everyone’s approval over everything, to make sure it was accurate.
Eggers recommends an edition of the Quran to read, discusses why he’s optimistic about print in the digital age (“Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper”) and describes some intriguing plans for McSweeney’s to put out a newspaper.
Absolutely also check out Peter Orner’s new column, “The Lonely Voice.” His appreciative ruminations on the art of the short story are as engaging and illuminating as any literary writing you’ll find online. (Or in print, for that matter.) Not to be missed.
Guardian’s Twitter move, GM’s bailout madness
Filed under: culture, media | Tags: California, comedy, media, recession, technology
Comments (3) It’s adding up to a strange day in the news, my friends, but then again these are no ordinary times.
The venerable 188-year-old Guardian, apparently seeing the ugly writing on the wall for the media business, has taken perhaps the boldest step yet to embrace digital technology. Will such an all-in bet on rapid-fire reporting pay off?
Meanwhile, in the heart of Silicon Valley, a hotshot entrepreneur has moved to capitalize on social networking technology in a different cutting-edge way. If the producers of “The Bachelor” take notice, look out for a full convergence of reality TV and the Internets even sooner than already anticipated.
And in what can only really be considered a desperate move, General Motors apparently is grasping for a solution to its epic troubles by way of two well-known, if irritating, car experts.
More odd stuff going on across the pond.
Ricky Gervais goes toe to toe with Elmo
So what happens when a friendly little red monster sits down with a top British comedian for an interview? Mayhem, of course.
Outtakes from Ricky Gervais’ visit to “Sesame Street,” an appearance to be aired during the show’s 40th anniversary this fall, have been floating around recently on the Web. It’s potent stuff, and probably works well as an antidote to, say, lingering rage about AIG, or worries about the invasive drug war, or the grim economic headlines, or personal pain from the recession, or etc.
A little over a year ago I had the pleasure of spending a day watching Gervais work and interviewing him at length for a magazine profile. He was thoughtful and engaging, and at turns quite zany. But really I had no idea.
“Elmo is so glad Mr. Ricky Gervais is here,” the little guy chirps at the outset, and it’s quickly downhill from there. Soon Elmo admonishes a producer off camera. “Where did you lose this interview?” he demands. “Where? Where?”
“You call yourself professional,” Gervais retorts. “You can’t even control a muppet and a fat guy. Just calm down.”
Both are in top form — Elmo with his radiant third-person observations of self, Gervais with his ever tasteful subversiveness. Elmo points out that the dust-up “wasn’t Elmo’s fault,” and things ratchet back down a notch. But Gervais can’t let it rest. “Listen,” he says, “these are the no-go areas: Drugs. Child Abuse. The Holocaust. OK? Let’s stay off those three things.”
His riff about necrophilia probably won’t make final cut, either. Enjoy.
Precisely the poet we needed
Filed under: California, culture | Tags: books, California, comedy, language, media, poetry, San Francisco, writing
Comments (2) Kay Ryan was in town for a reading on Friday night at the San Francisco Center for the Book. It was packed. It occurred to me it was absolutely right she’d become our U.S. Poet Laureate in a time of so much turmoil near and far. The universe has a way of balancing itself, even when it seems barely to be standing on one foot. Some comic concision to cut through all the gloomy cacophony—just the thing.
I’ve been an admirer for years of Ryan’s pithy assessments. They seem even more necessary right now, and not just for their luminous resuscitation of dead language and reanimation of cliché. As she put it on Friday, one of her interests has been considering extremity and trying to “cool things down” a bit. Claims found in “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” became the source for her latest collection The Jam Jar Lifeboat & Other Novelties Exposed. The poem “Murder at Midnight” departs from Ripley’s assertion that “If everyone who was told about it told two other people within 12 minutes, everybody on earth would know about it before morning.” Determines Ryan:
But people would begin getting it
a little bit wrong. Long before daylight,
the ‘murder at midnight’ would be
‘sugar stolen outright.’ The fate
of the dead man would not extend
beyond his gate. Only those
right now missing his little habits,
his footfall, his sleeping noises,
will know, and they can’t really tell;
news doesn’t really travel very well.
Whether Ripley’s math quite holds up under scrutiny I can’t say, but no matter. This morning a friend from a group of old high school buddies emailed to suggest that we all start using the trendy messaging service Twitter to banter and keep in touch on a more frequent basis. With three email accounts, IM, Facebook and a blog already running me apace on the digital information wheel, I’m thinking I’ll gently decline for now, and refer him to Sasha Cagen’s fine essay posted yesterday, This Is Your Brain on Twitter.
Mark Follman 
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