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Oooh, Matron: Comedy Double, Bumper Sex Ed Edition

Canada, Comedy double, Europe, Funny, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, Parenting, Sexuality, Video
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Today’s comedy double is all about sex education The first group is a collection of public service safe sex and condom ads from all over the world, and because they’re ads they’re pretty much worksafe, depending on how tightassed your boss is – or you are, if you’re working from home. But then if you’re such a tightass, what on earth are you doing here?

The bonus clips are longer and much more graphic, though equally funny. Probably not safe for any workplace though. The cats had to go and hide in the bathroom at one point, poor sensitive loves.

On with the motley then.

I love condom ads; unwritten boundaries of sexual taste and decency vary so widely from country to country, testing the transgressive creativity of ad-makers to the benefit of us viewers. So to soften you up for the condomfest to come here’s a sex-ed ad from Canada and oh god, we’ve all been at this school event or something very like it:

An ad like this next one, also from Canada, might prove more effective in its aim. Works for me.

First the stick, then the carrot, hur hur; from South Africa comes a condom ad that does it with subtlety, style, humour and ooh, eyecandy:

Then there’s the typically idiosyncratic Dutch approach. I’ve never seen them do this on KLM, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they did:
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But some people really do need the message hammered home, if you see what I mean and I think you do.

If you’re male and at all sensitive about the family jewels, I’d suggest you don’t watch this next one, or maybe you could watch it from safely behind your chair. How not to test a condom:

Right, now that we’ve got our condoms and know how to use them, it might be wise to use them responsibly. This one’s from France on the side-effects of easily available contraception:

It’s funny, but I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying there – that contraception makes women bad mothers?

Now for the bonus clips: they’re quite long, so you might want to save them for your lunch break or at home. First, Family Guy on abstinence ed:

Abstinence, schmabstinence. You might as well ask a cat not to lick its itching nads as to ask a teenager to be sexually abstinent. But they tried, and still do: here’s a mashup of American ’50s sex-ed films:

I dunno though, sometimes understanding parents can be worse. Much worse….

That is one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve seen in a very long time.

Far from hymning abstinence or trumpeting fake understanding, this next ad takes humourous acceptance of sexual diversity to whole new levels. I don’t think they’ll be seeing this one in Kansas, do you? What a great ad though:

The last bonus clip is an animated short which I think may be Czech: it’s pretty sexually graphic so definitely not safe for work, but what an excellent safe sex video, funny and touching with great animation.

Now my work here is done, mwahahaha. I’m off to sit in the garden in the sun for a while, at least until disturbed by local cat politics in action.

Comedy Double

Amsterdam, Comedy double, Europe, Funny, Life under Capitalism, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, Video
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Today’s comedy double is all about Holland and the Dutch – it’s about time I did my tiny bit towards cross-cultural understanding confusion ah fuck it muddling along as usual, and as I’m often asked, “what’s life actually like in Holland?”, here it is – life in Holland, via the magic of comedy.

This clip from cable ‘yoof’ channel BNN shows the sorts of things we see in the streets every day:

If you watched that and you’re still going “wtf?”, here, from Amsterdam’s very own US expat comedy theatre Boom Chicago is a quick primer on the difference between European and American senses of humour:

Anyone whose ever been to NL will give a shudder at the mention of Dutch supermarkets. Let’s face it, they’re just weird. The Albert Hein chain of stores, for instance, combines all the glamour of Kwiksave with the aspirations to gentility of Waitrose, but with a complete and utter bonkersness that’s all its own. Recently all the Dutch AH customers went mad for the Wuppie, a little furry doodad given away free with groceries. The key word here is ‘free’ – the Dutch bow to no-one in their ability to grab anything free that’s going, no matter how useless or ugly it might be. “But it’s free! ”

This is how excited the Dutch can get over a cheap supermarket giveaway:

It’s not just me thinks Dutch supermarkets are weird – here’s a vintage clip (you can tell it’s vintage cause he mentions guilders) of British comic John Fearley attempting to explain Albert Hein, in English, to the Dutch:

You see what I have to put up with? As much as I loathe Tesco’s attempts at world domination, every day I cross my fingers and wish for a local, wuppie-free and most of all reliable Tesco. Or even a Somerfield. Whatever, just somewhere where the assistants don’t alternately scowl and snarl at you and the veg don’t rot the minute you get them home and there’s milk and bread after lunchtime… and they open after 6.

But leaving Dutch supermarkets aside, because it makes me depressed, no visit to NL or Amsterdam would be complete without the obligatory nod to history.

We’re surrounded by history and people gawping at history and this time of year it gets particularly difficult. If only we could make historical tourism more user friendly….

So it’s back to Boom Chicago (who have) for the first bonus clip and -Anne Frank is Lonely Girl 1944:

Ooh, that’s mean, and very, very Dutch. Boom Chicago may be expats, but like me they’re being assimilated despite themselves.

Comedy Double

Comedy double, Funny, Music, Video
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Although I can’t stand Gordon Brown I wish Tony ‘legacy’ Blair would either just sod off now or be arrested, preferably the latter.

This first clip, “Go Now!” from the much-loved and lamented Spitting Image, refers to a previous, equally-loathed (discuss) PM, Maggie Thatcher, but it serves equally well for Mr.Tony.

Sums up Blair’s whole premiership, really, doesn’t it?

This next is also from Spitting Image and isn’t political, though you could argue that it puts people off holidays abroad and helps fight climate change….

Naaah. That would be silly.

I included it mainly because I’m evil and I like earworming people. Yup, it’s The Chicken Song… “throw a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose…” See, you’re already singing it and if you’re not, you will.

Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe the force is strong in you. But I have a secet weapon mwahahahah. If the Chicken Song didn’t get you, this will. Here’s Mitch Benn‘s ode to IKEA, from The Now Show, set to an oddly appropriate video of World of Warcraft dwarves. IKEA!!!!

For the bonus clips I’m staying with the WoW theme: here’s a preview of Make Love Not Warcraft, South Park in a WoW stylee:

Parts two and three can be found in this general vicinity.

Once I started looking at WoW comedy videos, I quickly realised just how wide a vein of fanart I’d struck. Here’s Weird Al Yankovich‘s Amish Warcraft Paradise:

WoW people are seriouslly obsessed – that machinima animation must take hours to do. In between that, and playing the game, and talking about the game on IRC or IM or whatever, I don’t suppose there’s a lot of actual time left. Now we know where all those cheeto-eating chiickenhawks went.*

Speaking of chickenhawks – it’s back to Spitting Image again for the final clip. They had as little mercy for US politicians as they did for British: here’s the utterly addled Ronald Reagan’s morning routine. Hmm, an idiot Republican president. I’m sensing a pattern here.

[*Asscovering disclaimer: Yes I am aware of the geographic, political and ethnic diversity of Warcraft players. I also know there’re lots of players. A community that large can accommodate a lot of wingnuts. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing – I for one am thankful for it. Let them fight their wars virtually. It keeps the buggers out of RL politics.]

Comedy Double: Back To The Future

Comedy double, New Labour, Video
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What else could today’s comedy double be? A bit late today, but here’s my magnum opus, a roundup of satirical Tony Blair video clips. Let’s start, as seems only logical, with the early years…

This first is not so much comedy as scandal, but when it’s about Blair getting gay blowjobs, smoking dope and glam-rock it’s good enough for me. From Tony Blair, Rock Star:

What a wanker he was even then. I have to say he seemed like just the sort of posh ‘hippy’ I and my suburban casual friends would’ve wanted to beat up. How he managed not to get laughed out of the Labour party is beyond me but the party was in such internal turmoil then that he just oiled through the ctacks and before you knew it, voila. there he was, party leader. Clause IV was gone and populist socialism was dead.

This next is from 1999; the new Labour party leadership were still seen as well-meaning bumblers rather than the lying, corrupt, greedy authoritarians they were to become. It’s Reeves and Mortimer and the Labour Party Band:

The spiffy Dom Joly lookalike at the beginning of the clip, who appears to have uploaded this and appears also to be quite nifty with brand theory, a videocam and an editing suite, is York councillor and thrusting young New Labour type James Alexander. Who knows, maybe his clever marketing ploy will catch the eye of Gordon, who, as we know, is all about the technology. They never change, these Labour political wannabes, do they? All front. But who knows, maybe Gordon might also notice that young James seems to have put New Labour’s logo on what just might not be its intellectual property to claim. Hmm, didn’t they steal some other online intellectual property before? How very New Labour.

Personally I find it safer to assume that anything found on YouTube has permission – it’s YouTube’s responsiibility, it’s their site. But there are always exceptions and I doubt permissiion to upload means permission to slap the Labour Party logo all over it.

But we’be known for a while how sleazy New Labour and the Blairs were. Here’s eminent QC Cherie Blair done by Dead Ringers:

That minor illegality brings us to the big one – the conspiracy, using the excuse of 9/11, to illegally invade and occupy Iraq. Anti-Bush and Blair satire, or so we thought then, was at it’s zenith. Blair and Bush seemed so close, so sympatico as to be thought lovers . This spawned many an innuendo-laden video mashup, but this is the best. Bush and Blair do Gay Bar:

Blair may have faced many challenges as PM but this may be one of the oddest. Blair faces Paxman, goes blank and gets testy in this Newsnight/ University Challenge hybrid:

Post-2003, and Iraq’s been bombarded with shock, awe and chemical weapons, thousands are dead and the missiom has been declared accomplished. At Westminster relatioins with former BFF Gordon had reached an all time low, according to Armando Iannucci in ‘2004- the Stupid Version‘:

3 years later they’re still bickering like jilted lovers and Iraq is a fucking disaster as a consequence of Blair’s endless lies. Meanwhile the War On Turr rolls on, Blair is still singing an American tune and still a rockstar wannabe, still trying to milk the last drop of applause out of an unwilling audience.

2007, and at this point the nation is so sick of Blair and his crew of mendacious incompetents and war criminals that even such momentous scandals as Cash for Honours and the Downing St memo couldn’t do much more to tarnish them in our eyes. Just go already, we thought. Brown seemed reluctant to put the knife in:

But now, finally, at last, the bugger’s going. But he’s still aping the wannabe rock star, on his last, final, farewell tour ever, playing to ever dwindling audiences.Bremner Bird & Fortune:

And the public still want him hanged. Don’t Watch That, Watch This:

But for Tony it’s all about the legacy, and besides he may not actually be going at all. He is after all a Time Lord, as he tells Nick Robinson on Dead Ringers. A hundred more years, shudder:

Goodbye, Mr Tony Blair, we’ll miss you, in the same way we’d miss suppurating syphilis chancres or steatorrhea.

Hello, Gordon Brown, who isn’t half such good satire-fodder, but boy, does he make a good Dalek:

Mind you, it’s not a done deal yet: Should the unthinkable happen and a general election be called, we might get to start all over again with another posh touch-feely wanker.

More Armando Ianucci, this time from Time Trumpet

Oh, joy.