He gets knocked down, but he gets up again – I’ve featured Australian comic Jim Jeffries before: he’s incredibly hilarious but incredibly crude and apparently in Manchester recently he hit on some nutter’s hotbutton issue. Said nutter promptly got up on stage and attacked him. Nevertheless our doughty hero carried on:
Jim Jeffries is funny and so had the audience behind him, but I’m amazed the whole fucking audience didn’t attack this very unfunny American comic. No idea who he is but perhaps it’s best he should remain nameless if this performance is any guide. The lamest wingnut comedian I’ve ever seen. Two women take him on re his racist comments and make him look very silly indeed. “Fuck you!” “Not likely”:
How not to get the audience behind you: take the straight and simple Oklahoma approach to hecklers and nip it in the bud with a whack over the head with a guitar.
None of the above is SFW, due to offensive language, but the next clip is. “I not a girl, I a woman!” 2 year old Sadie deals with a pest:
But best and most stylish heckler response of all comes from Noel Fielding of the Mighty Boosh. It’s shaky cameraphone footage but the sound is OK and he handles the heckler with just his wit and his unique style.
Now that’s the way to do it. And you lot can shut up at the back.
A roundabout journey this morning, from an impious Scotswoman to a gang of genius scallies, taking in everyone’s favourite daft Brummie uncle and a cute wiggly machine on the way. All but the cute wiggly machine and possibly Jasper Carrott are NSFW really, unless have your boss well-trained, you are the boss, or you just don’t give a shit.
Anything labelled “CAUTION This clip may offend as it contains strong language and religious references.” has got my interest straight away. This is Glaswegian comedian, journalist and occasional blogger Janey Godley on how hard the whole ‘body of Christ’ thing is for a small child to swallow:
Without Sunday school there wouldn’t be half so many bolshy atheists like me about. Thanks, C of E!
Speaking of past times; remember when the advent of Thatcher and Reagan seemed unlikely and all there was to be scared of was complete and utter mutual nuclear annihilation? Ah, halcyon days. Here’s Jasper Carrott‘s 1979 standup show at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Part 1. (Parts 2 and 3). How strangely innocent and sweet it seems now.
Today’s first bonus clip has no real connection to anything at all really, it just tickles me. Here’s Keepon the dancing robot dancing to the Thizzle dance. No idea what the Thizzle dance is but it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it. Oi’ll give it foive.
Last but most definitely not least, and short but hardly sweet, are the wonderful Half Man Half Biscuit (Motto: “Satisfying The Bloodlust Of The Masses in Peacetime”), mocking those saddos from Slipknot in a clip titled “A Broadside against the Vatican.” More HMHB here.
It’s fascinating the way the cat lays its head on the keys to hear the sounds it’s making – and if you’re in any doubt that the cat’s deliberately hitting specific keys to make specific sounds watch the duet section or just turn the sound off and watch what it does. That can’t be anything but deliberate, atonal as the noise it’s making is. But then cats are atonal, so what else would you expect?
Cute as it is, though, it does get decidely irritating after a while. I’m very glad we don’t have a piano, a 3 cat concert recital at 4am is not really what we need.
For a Saudi woman to expose the hollow arguments of the Saudi patriarchy head-to-head on pan-Arab television is a very brave thing to do, not just morally but physically. Saudi women have been imprisoned, tortured and executed for much less.
Braver still is to use the oppressor’s own ammunition against him – and win. Saudi newscaster Buthayner Nasser is seen here in a televised debate about women’s role in public life and on tv, very publicly demolishing a male Saudi cleric’s arguments, and doing it in such a Koranically-based, logical and respectful yet totally kickass way that he can make no coherent response.
Both those who see the mass of Saudi women as mere mobile, silent draperies with no voices or opinions and those who think that any feminist Moslem woman must ipso facto be automatically pro-western and pro-secular will be much enlightened and informed. Maybe it will also enlighten those self-righteous western feminists who think that they and they alone are the holy keepers of the precious feminist flame and that Moslem women are an ignorant amorphous mass just hanging around waiting to be liberated by the eventual triumph of western cultural values. There are many more ways to freedom than through the East Coast intelligentsia.
The original clip can be found here and was translated and subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which appears so far s I can tell to be a thoroughly worthy organisation in need of support.
(MEMRI) explores the Middle East through the region’s media. MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends in the Middle East.
They also have a great back catalogue of subtitled clips from Middle Eastern current affairs and news programmes here, well worth looking at.
UPDATE
Good job I qualified that last statement with a “so far as I know” wasn’t it? From comments:
steve Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Um. MEMRI are the guys whose “translation” was responsible for the whole Apple/Mecca storm in a teacup last year: for a neutral organisation, it’s quite surprising how often their translations make Arabs look bad and Israelis good….
Martin Wisse Says:
April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Actually, they have long been accused off being a crypto-zionist organisation and there have been times when their translations were …less than faithful to the original, shall we say?
One of the few times Only Fools and Horses ever made me laugh. (The other ones are the one with the chandelier and the one where Del Boy falls down sideways.) Courtesy of Backword, rapidly becoming a favourite.