Funny People: In Which Sandler and Apatow Don’t Make It to the Altar and No One Laughs or Cries. Part I.

Dear CF,
Your reaction to the Funny People movie poster was eerily prescient. You have powers. Be my psychic? Also, I’d like to point out that James Thurber wrote his autobiography, “My Life and Hard Times,” at 40. As a joke. Would that Apatow’s self-awareness ran so deep when he decided to mount a Career Retrospective [...]

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Archived Video of the Day: Bill Cosby as Mr. Tooth Decay, or How to Market a Smile

Dear CF,
In light of your Jay Smooth crush (he is indeed braintastic and marvelous) and my newfound obsession with smiling as a shortcut to building a certain kind of empathic resolution that satisfies an audience, I thought it might be interesting to look at Bill Cosby in his youth. He’s the ultimate smiler and the [...]

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Girltalk and Boytalk

I like Roseanne because it gives both genders enough rope to believably hang themselves. The NY Times ran a depressing article yesterday on sexless marriages. Here’s how Roseanne deals with the problems of bad sex and no sex in marriage. Jackie’s Fred “gets in the elevator but won’t go down” post-baby, Roseanne is pregnant and [...]

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Safe Sex

Perhaps the next installment in our “Now We Know” series:

Also, both of their hair reminds me of those pastel decals that are sometimes on strip mall beauty shop windows.  The 80s or early 90s?

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The Maudlin and The Musical

Dear pepperpot,
I hope that, whatever you are doing, you are wrapped in something warm and wearing the diamondhand while doing it. I am thinking of you. I stumbled on these bad examples of maudlin and musical things and thought you could add them to your list of bright shiny distractions of the British variety.
Exhibit A: [...]

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Ultra-Sensitive in Black for Dame Bea

Dear bosom buddy,
This started as a comment on your amazing Bea Arthur clips but it got too long. Hence, a post! The “Bosom Buddies” act nails a kind of friendship much richer than the “frenemy” idea that’s flattened our sense of what girl-girl friendship is. (Much like the “bromance” has flattened the boys’.) And oh, [...]

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And My New Grandma, Bea Arthur

Dear Millicent,
I just heard that Bea Arthur died today.  She was the archetype of “old woman” to me when I was a kid, and Golden Girls seemed to be relentlessly on TV, along with Empty Nest.  And then, in my teens she seemed younger– –a bawdy actress that wore draped clothes and knew how to [...]

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The Brits Explain the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

John Bird and John Fortune: incisive, weak-chinned and devastating:

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Listen to Me, Lovelet!

This reflects my frame of mind after trying to write Part 1 of Flirting. Tomorrow I will make a return to language, and tackle Part 2 with renewed vigor. In the meantime, I leave you with this delicious tidbit, in which thoughts are held, ideals are bibbled, and Hugh Laurie thinks Stephen Fry said “vulva.”
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Peep Show Series 1: Having Fun With the Olives

Dear CF,
You’re so right about the haziness of the impression PS leaves behind. Maybe it’s because it’s so conversational—things aren’t punctuated even as much as they are in the BBC Office, which gives Brent the Talking Head moments to really showcase his one-liners. Here, though, it’s sort of a delicious stream-of-consciousness sequence in which [...]

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