Comedy double

Comedy Double: This Sporting Life

Published on September 14, 2007

This week’s comedy double is all in honour of my elder son, who’s visiting this week and who’s hogging the pc with endless games of Championship Manager. Oh well, better that than crack.

First a classic match: German V Greek philosophers, with Confucius refereeing.

Thierry Henry is such a big sweetie: here he is being totally nonplussed but a good sport on the strange South Korean comedy show Infinite Challenge.

It couldn’t be proper football without injiuries – here’s a selection of the more amusing and innovative football injuries, set to “Bridge On The River Kwai”.

Why? I dunno. Why not?

Oooh, Ryan Giggs quite suits a pinny. Who knew? Here’s one of the classic, in ad terms at least, Johnny Vegas/Monkey ads from back along when ITV digital was challenging Murdoch’s Sky for football coverage supremacy.

Bonus clips

Why some women hate football, from Fox Sports Espanol:

Some men say women hate football because they just can’t play themselves. Nuh-uh.

Of course there are women who hate football but still watch it – for entirely their own reasons. This is defintely NSFW.

Bonus bonus clips

Now you know what some female football-haters are doing while the fans are all off watching the Championship League or something. At least it’s exercise, of a sort.

As always, the best is last: the mean, moody and magnificent Half Man Half Biscuit need no further explanation. Here’s ‘Paintball’s Coming Home”. Enjoy, and wince in self-recognition.

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Published on September 7, 2007

It’s a MySpace special for today’s clips as their embedded playback seems to work better than YouTube’s, though you have to butcher the code a bit to get rid of the extraneous bells and whistles.

There’s no particular theme in these but funny, and all are safe for work for once.

First, the ridiculous security at APEC in Sydney – here .au comedy show “The Chaser’s War On Everything” tests how gullible the general public is when it hears the magic word ‘security’ from a man in uniform.

UPDATE: the same team just breached the rabble-proof fence.

APEC Security

Hilarious, but I thought Aussies had a lot more gumption than that. I was wrong.

Anyway, since we’re discussing imperial stormtroopers (See what I did there? Clever eh?) this just in from our APEC Disco correspondent… I don’t know why, but somehow this short, scrappy video of a gang of war criminals dancing just made me laugh. Get down, Condi!

Republican (Dance) Party – The Politics of Dancing

Heh, the woman’s so stiff she couldn’t get down from a ladder.

Bonus clips

It’s animals again, a] because they’re endlessly amusing and b] because they’re just so fwuffy and kyoot.

Pugs seem to be popping up on video all over the place lately; now they’ve even inspired a new indoor sport – pug bowling.

Pug Bowling

I bet that would work with cats too….

Awww, raccoons – annoying, but funny. Apparently they’re spreading west from Eastern Europe and have already reached the German/Belgian border. Better secure your doormat now.

Raccoon Steals Floor Rug

Here’s proof that we and our relatives have always played with cats, although maybe not all of us with quite as much of a deathwish as to deliberately wind up two young tigers.

monkey with a death wish

Now you know where the expression ‘cheeky monkey’ comes from.

Comedy Double

Published on August 31, 20071 Comment

BBC radio panel shows are where standup comedians go to die…. well, OK, maybe that is a little harsh, but there is a grain of truth in it. Look how many ‘alternative’ comedians of the seventies, eighties and even earlier are now Radio 4 panel game stalwarts. Graeme Garden is one such and has been behind (and in front of) some of the most acclaimed comedy of the past thirty years or so.

Here he is with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and Jeremy Hardy with Humphrey Lyttleton chairing, playing “Finish The George Bush Quote.”

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue is the Rolls-Royce of radio comedy panel games, stacked with experienced comics. Humphrey Lyttleton’s urbane voice and advancing age makes his increasingly louche double entendres even more shocking to gentle suburban listeners: here’s Humph in a rare video clip of the radio recording taken from the South Bank Show, in which he traduces poor invisible lovely Samantha‘s virtue yet again:

Oh all right, those two had barely a few seconds of Graeme Garden in, but any excuse to run an ISIHAC clip. We fans are notoriously obsessive, expecially when it comes to the game called Mornington Crescent. How obsessed are they? Belle & Sebastian even wiote a song about it Some fans even make movies.

But back to Graeme Garden. Here’s A selection of clips from his long career in UK comedy, set to the tune of ‘Stuff that Gibbon’.

Bonus clips:

The Goodies did some groundbreaking things with film and video: here’s a series of clips from The Goodies and The Inbetweenies to demonstrate, set to “Filthy Gorgeous’.

Their ‘singing dogs’ clip was made entirely the old-fashioned way, by cutting and splicing actual, physical film together, rather than just doing a bit of jiggery-pokery with software.

Compare and contrast with the modern version – cute, but lacking a certain something.

(Of course the cats had to get on the act too, they always do.)

Bonus bonus clip:

While we’re on the subject of small mammals – make haste! For the badger parade is in but thirty seconds!

I can’t be the only one who went all “Zeinab Badawi!”. last week on seeing Savlon in the news. – long familiar to British viewers but maybe not so much to Americans, here to take you away from whatever it is you’re currently stressing about is the indescribable Harry Hill, with part one of his standup show, ‘Hooves’.

Part two can be found here.

Me, I’m off to have coffee and a pink cream horn with a certain Mrs Trellis of North Wales.

Comedy Double

Published on August 3, 20073 Comments

Ah, the younger generation – I despair (but mostly I laugh). They have way too much spare time, but do they let their imaginations soar? Do they build a new Taj Mahal from Cheetos or find a cure for acne?

Duh. Of course not, they’re doing funny voiceovers to pet videos and old kids cartoons.

This is Otis. Isn’t he cute? He has some self image issues, and also seems to be channeling Dame Edna.

I particularly like the acidhead cat. I may have to worship it as my personal spiritual lord and saviour. Why not? It’s as good as any other.

Next up are Buns and ChouChou, the Beavis and Butthead of rabbits. Sorta.

Here’s another unexpected bunny hobby: it has no voiceover, but it’s crying out for one.

I wouldn’t call this next about animals exactly except in the loosest possible sense. Some men and women, and you know who you are, have a serious thing for the Thundercats. Cheetarah + pubescence, need I say more?

This clip is sheer editing brilliance: the Goodfellas movie trailer, in Thundercat.

Apparently they kept their bloopers:

Dude! Like, what if Thundercats were on MySpace? LOL:

Bonus clip:
This cartoon outlines what Mormons believe and fully deserves its categorisation as comedy.

I know Mitt Romney’s weird even without his religion, but apparently he also believes, like other Mormons, that he’s a superior white being from another planet.

He’s planning to be President of the USA. Now that is funny. Hahaha.

Comedy Double: Tom Lehrer Special

Published on July 27, 20072 Comments

A bit late today, but I’ve been having so much fun with today’s I got carried away. Tom Lehrer, reclusive mathematician/satirist extraordinaire and putative inventor of the jello-shot is perennially popular; I noticed that a contestant on Mastermind had Lehrer as her specialist subject last week, and she couldn’t have been more than about 23, far too young to have been around in Lehrer’s hilarious heyday. Even though he now shuns publicity, I don’t think he’ll be forgotten anytime soon – in fact Lehrer translates very well indeed into YouTube.

Here’s a selection of Lehrer songs with video added, starting with “We’ll All Go Together” with what else (this being YouTube) but added Star Wars.

Next up, an nice little stop-go animation of the braintwisting ‘New Math”. I was among the first age group to be taught that way post-11 after being taught the old maths at primary school and the song perfectly sums up my utter bewilderment by it: my arithmetic was sound (good old rote learning), but new math’s the reason why I never studied maths, physics or natural sciences any further than secondary school. Damn the new maths for producing a half-generation confused by numbers.

No Lehrer compilation would be complete without ‘The Elements Song”. There’s quite a few video accompaniments to it available on YouTube, some good, some exceedingly lame, but to my mind this is the one of the best.

I used to love watching “The Electric Company’ with them when my kids were small and they loved it too so for us and them here’s a real blast from the past, with the Electric Company animation of Lehrer’s “Silent E”.

Lehrer did a lot of songs for the Electric company, here’s his song explaining the ‘sn’.

This next is the song that first made me interested in Lehrer when they played it on the BBC’s Family Favourites at Sunday lunchtime when I was little. The mere mention of Family Favourites gives a clue as to my great antiquity….

Anyway, here’s ‘Poisoning Pigeons In the Park’. There are lots of animations to it, even a Eurovision one (,em>why?)but I liked this one’s cheeky minimalism. Sometimes less is more.

To finish this Lehrerfest here’s the man himself in sparkling form, proof that political snark is for everyone including mathematicians. Here’s “Wernher Von Braun”.*

No bonus clips yet, the wireless is getting a bit flaky for video. I’ll post some later on when I’ve sorted it out.