Cynical Cinema

When I was younger, and single, I had a poster of an Olsen twins movie up on the wall of my apartment.  The movie was called The Challenge, and I had the DVD as well.  In fact, I had several Olsen twins DVDs, and an Olsen twins puzzle, that were laying around in strategic locations that ensured that everyone who walked into my apartment would instantly notice the paraphenalia and assume I had some kind of fetish for the Olsen twins.  And I would play that up, saying some very filthy things about what I did with those posters and movies.  And some people were incredibly uncomfortable, and others laughed extremely hard.  Those who laughed became my friends for life.  At the time, the Olsen twins were 16, and the wait-until-they’re-18 countdown was on.

Now, the Olsen twins are in their 20s.  And there is no longer anything creepy (and, by extension, funny) about Olsen twins fantasies.  So I have taken down the posters and given away the DVDs to friends who were genuinely creepy enough to enjoy them for real.  There’s just no humour in the Olsen twins any more, now that they are legal.  If only someone could have told the roasters at the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget!  If only someone could have sat them all down and said “Olsen twins jokes are irritating and tired.  Stop it.”  Especially when the extent of the “clever” when it comes to these jokes is along the lines of “Mary-Kate Olsen is super skinny because she has an eating disorder because Bob Saget touched her on the set of Full House.”  That’s not funny.  Or even shocking.  It’s stupid.

But then, most of the comedians didn’t make me laugh much at all, as they got up on stage to roast Saget, who really ought to be one of the easiest targets in showbiz.  Not only that, but he’s a “comedian” himself, so he can take the really mean stuff.  And there is a lot of mean stuff.  But a lot of the roasters seem to think they are supposed to riff on the rest of the roasters, and eventually get around to Saget.  So we get “Cloris Leachman is old and gross” jokes, and “Susie Essman is terribly ugly” jokes (by the way - really?  I think she’s quite attractive.  Maybe this is comedy I don’t understand.  Or, perhaps, it’s just comedy that sucks.)

This is the way with Jim Norton, Greg Giraldo, Jeffrey Ross, Jon Lovitz and Jeff Garlin, who does a strange but not very good bit where he pretends to be the creator of Full House.  John Stamos is the host, the “roast-master” if you will, and he is no comedian.  Then again, he is better than some of the people who “are” comedians.  Susie Essman is decent, and so is Brian Posehn, but the truly great acts are few and far between.  Gilbert Gottfried’s bit is pretty good.  Cloris Leachman’s is a bit better, but part of that is the novelty that still exists with old women making jokes about dried-up body parts and using the f- word.  There are some funny sent-in-by-tape segments from Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman and Don Rickles. 

Speaking of Rickles, he clearly seems to have the oldest routine on the tape (because he is 100), and it almost feels like one of the Sammy Davis style roasts of old for a moment.  Until we get to Norm McDonald.  His bit was absolutely, terribly unfunny.  And I laughed very, very hard.  His jokes seemed to come from an era hundreds of years before Rickles ever picked up a mic for a zinger.  They were the kind three-year-olds make these days, and he had them written down on cue cards.  There is no way to convey how funny it was to watch McDonald saying “Bob Saget has a face that is beautiful like a flower…a CAULI-flower!” 

The audience had no idea what was going on.  Every other comedian got up there and dropped f-bombs and made child-molesting jokes, and now here’e Norm McDonald with “Susie Essman may be a vegetarian, but she’s still full of bologna in my book”.  Some of the comedians really get it, but even then a few of them look totally stunned and lost.  This is the best bit on the entire DVD, which comes out December 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and hopefully you can find it on youtube or something.  And skip the rest of the DVD.  The Olsen twins were no longer a source of comedic gold when they turned 18.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing Season Two of one of my favourite TV shows on October 14th. The Sarah Silverman Program is not just one of my favourite TV shows in the world, it stars one of my favourite people in the world. Sarah Silverman is reasonably attractive. In fact, she’s pretty. But that’s not why I love her. She is hilarious, but again, that’s not her best quality. The reason I have told my girlfriend I would leave her for Sarah Silverman is that she has absolutely no boundaries. At all. Think of the most offensive joke you can, and how that joke could be made even more offensive, with the addition of racial humour, or toilet humour, or an extra bit of dialogue about AIDS. Sarah Silverman has already thought of it all, and is a few steps ahead of you. She has crossed the line you’ve imagined, taken it three steps further, and added something else that YOU would never in a million years have thought of saying.

And the best thing about this humour - it all works! The Sarah Silverman Program is one of the smartest, funniest, most offensive shows in the history of television. In Season Two, she joins a radical anti-abortion group without understanding what they’re all about, then quits because she really loves having abortions. She wears blackface for an entire episode, in a bizarre bet with a black friend as to who has it tougher - blacks or jews. Oh, and her mother has her corpse defiled by grave robbers, and she licks her own dog’s anus.

It’s easy to find humour this offensive on the internet and even elsewhere on TV. But nowhere else is it done with such a whimsical sense of fun, or such a brilliantly subversive stroke of genius. Check out this TV series. Do it today. This is what humour is supposed to be.