“In fact, the jokes that get some of the wildest, loudest reactions aren’t really even jokes, just statements. Like when one puppet shouts that all Mexicans should learn English, or when Dunham wishes Walter ‘Happy Holidays’ and Walter responds: ‘I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!’ And the crowd doesn’t laugh; it riotously applauds. Dunham describes them as moments of ‘catharsis,’ when the dummy says something ‘everyone wants to laugh about, or that you snicker at with one or two friends, but that you could never say out loud.’” — Jon Mooallem, from his New York Times Magazine profile on the most popular comedian in America, Jeff Dunham
“Obviously, many millions of children have loved Where the Wild Things Are — there are more than 19 million copies in print around the world — but I was struck, while conducting an extremely informal survey of a couple of dozen friends and a few professionals in the field of children’s literature, by how many said Sendak’s work had eluded their younger selves and/or their own offspring.” —
Bruce Handy, a New York Times book review contributor who apparently thinks the opinions of a “couple dozen friends” is more indicative of whether children “actually like” Where the Wild Things Are than the fact that the book has sold 19 million copies over the course of 46 years.
Memo to the media: Being innumerate isn’t the same as thinking outside the box. And while I’m certain the author would defend this article’s thesis with something like a shrug and wink, it’s writing like this — writing that blithely dismisses the overwhelming evidence in favor of a pet idea that’s only supported by blind quotes from three friends and your meaningless personal experience — that supports my belief that the Fourth Estate is mostly made up of people who took Physics for Poets in college.
Tracy Morgan should be on Twitter. Make it happen. -
This is change I can believe in. [H/T: Fimoculous.]
He might not drink Dos Equis, but aside from Richard Jay Potash, Werner Herzog is indisputably the most interesting man on the planet.
From the official website of Werner Herzog’s brand new “anti-film school”:
The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have traveled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock-picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: it is for those who have a sense for poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four-year-old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream.
It’s forward-thinking organizations like the San Francisco Giants that understand one secret advantage of signing a 16-year-old from the Dominican Republic is if he kills someone, he’ll still be in his mid-30s when he gets out from prison.
Of all the inside-Hollywood lingo there is, the phrase I wish I knew most was the word talk-show hosts use with each other to describe the experience of having Robin Williams on their show. Depressi-mortifi-grating?
The Official Tom Waits Flickr Page
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(via goldenfiddle)
“I think [Catch-22] would have been much better received if it hadn’t been for M.A.S.H., which came out about six months before. Which was the kind of film everybody was hoping Catch-22 would be. I auditioned for M.A.S.H. and I got the part of Radar, and I turned it down. Then I was on the set of Catch-22, which I thought was going to be a masterpiece … And so regarding M.A.S.H., I told him I’d tell him after I came back from Mexico, and that alone didn’t make [Robert] Altman happy, because I kept him waiting. Then that actress who was in the scenes with Orson [Welles] and me [in Catch-22], who played the nurse, had just been in the Altman film before that, which was called That Cold Day In The Park. And we were talking about how I was up for M.A.S.H. and she said, “Take it!” I said, “Why? I don’t like the script of M.A.S.H. very much.” She said, “Take that! Altman is incredible.” I said, “I’ve never heard of him!” [Laughs.] And oh boy, do I regret that. And he got so angry when I turned that down that he told me at a party a few years after that, when I was reintroduced to him by a friend — it was a party around one of the openings of his films — he was stoned, of course — he said, “You know, you blew it with me. And I’m the only director in Hollywood who would have understood how to use you. So you really blew it in a big way.” I said, “Does it help to say that there is no professional decision I regret more than that?” He said, “No, it doesn’t.” — Noted character actor Austin Pendleton, yet again confirming that Robert Altman was a notorious pothead