Bill Burr - Why Do I Do This?

Bill Burr is a stand-up comedian who often uses bawdy and black comedy.  This bit is from one of only two CD’s he’s ever released, “Why Do I Do This?”  In it, he discusses the effects of anonymity on the internet, political correctness on the internet, and sexuality and its relation to politics.  With this piece, he exposes the hypocrisy of many of the people on the internet.  However, he also uses his examples to show how similar we all are despite when we say we are different.  The audience for this piece is anyone who has ever had an argument over the internet and considers themselves intelligent.

 

Why Do I Do This?.  Dir. Michelle Caputo.  Perfs. Bill Burr.  Image Entertainment, 2008.  DVD.  2008.

The Catherine Tate Show: Did You Hear about Our John?

The Catherine Tate Show was a multiple award-winning television sketch comedy program created by and starring Irish Comedian Catherine Tate that ran for three series (seasons) on BBC Two from 2004 to 2007. The program primarily deals with situations in everyday life. Recurring characters in the series include Lauren Cooper, a typical "punk" teenage girl, and Joannie "Nan" Taylor, an Irish grandmother who often swears and criticizes those around her. This particular clip deals with a smaller character, John Reilly, and his mother. John is a teenager in Northern Ireland, who decides that it is finally time for him to "come out of the closet." He comes out to his mother, expecting her to reject him, or worse, throw him out of the house. To his surprise, she accepts him fully, perhaps even a little too enthusiastically. The rest of the skits that deal with the story show how much John's mother tries to accept him. This particular skit deals with two subjects in identity politics, specifically, sexual identity. First of all, it makes fun of the fear that many gays and lesbians may have about coming out in this day and age, while also poking fun at a sort of "sympathetic homophobia" that some people may have (i.e. they attempt to hide their homophobia by attempting to treat those they subconsciously don't accept nicely through stereotypes).

Tate, Catherine, prod. The Catherine Tate Show. BBC Two. 26 Oct. 2006. YouTube. 11 Jan. 2008. 31 Mar. 2009.

Xavier: Renegade Angel

Xavier: Renegade Angel is a 15 min show on Adult Swim. Its first airing was November 2, 2007. Adult Swim is currently airing the second season.

Xavier: Renegade Angel's loose story line is that Xavier, who is a grotesque creature that is the combination of a man, a snake, a bird, and maybe a monkey, is traveling through the desert in search of the meaning of life. The show is very random in nature with odd characters appearing and crazy flashbacks happening consistently. The show's humor comes mainly from altering reality, which it can do easily through its use of computer animation. This "altering of reality" comes from Xavier travels through space and time. He is goes forward and backward in time, seeing things in his own past while also witnessing things like the destruction of Earth. His time travel is sometimes explained, but most of the time is not. These random jumps in time provide humor because the audience is never really sure where Xavier is going to end up and whether what they are seeing is real or not. Xavier also breaks the audiences normal perception of space; leaving our normal sense of reality in favor of abstract worlds that are far removed from any part of human existence. An example of this removal from human existence can be seen in the following clip.

For context, in this episode Xavier is stuck in a circular room with different colored doors, each one transporting him to an abstract place. That clip leads to my next point about how Xavier provides humor. At its core Xavier is a show about philosophy and religion, and that clip, along with many others throughout the series, touch on the belief in God and the search for some purpose in existence. The clip can be taken on the surface to be making fun of belief in God, but more importantly is the way it conveys religion as a viewpoint that is black and white. When asked the question "do you believe in God?" Xavier goes into his own views on existence and a higher power. The bar-code man is there to represent religion(from what I can tell the Judaic God) with the belief of God being either yes or no. Xavier on the other hand takes the role of philosophy, not only questioning the belief in God but going as far as questioning belief itself. I think the humor comes from showing how narrow minded religion can be while also highlighting how abstract philosophy can become. Bringing up philosophical questions is a common theme in Xavier and contributes greatly to its abstract humor. But Xavier: Renegade Angel's humor is not always so abstract in nature. The show also touches on the cultural issues of race, religion, and sexuality. The following clip touches on all these issues. On a side note, this show is made by the same people who did Wonder Showzen on MTV2; the following clip is very reminiscent of Wonder Showzen in its use of race, religion, and sexuality.

Naked: I Like Guys

After the success of his first collection of essays, Barrel Fever, and his subsequent numerous appearances on Public Radio International's This American Life, David Sedaris released his second collection of essays, Naked, in 1997. This collection contains stories that are a little more personal, and a good number of them on his experiences growing up as a gay teenager in Raleigh, North Carolina. This particular essay focuses on a month-long summer trip to Greece he took after he completed the eighth grade, designed for American kids who have Greek ancestry. He starts off by relating his experiences during not only the eighth grade, but also in previous grades, with homophobia. While he had realized at a young age that he was "different" from the other boys, he also knew that, given the time and place that he grew up in, he had to hide the feelings he had towards other boys. Many teachers in the school even went out of their way to make fun of homosexuality. For example, his Spanish teacher told Sedaris' class once that she wanted to have a boy first, because she felt that if she had a girl first, any boy she had after the girl might "turn out funny." Another one of his teachers used to occasionally prance around the classroom, limp-wristed and all, making fun of homosexuals. Of course, the only way that Sedaris could deal with this was to separate himself from the other boys who were "different" (they could all identify themselves because they all had "speech problems" (i.e. lisps) in elementary school, and had to see a speech therapist to deal with the "problem"), and also being the one to laugh the longest and hardest at any jokes that had to do with sexuality. Anyway, when school lets out, Sedaris and his older sister Lisa fly up to New York with their father to meet up with the rest of the kids who are participating in the trip. Lisa immediately abandons Sedaris, leaving him to fend for himself on a trip that he really didn't want to go on in the first place. While in Greece, however, he realizes that his bunk mate Jason might have similar feelings towards guys. Upon hearing one of the counselors use a derogatory term for gays towards the entirety of the boys on the trip, Sedaris and Jason turned it into a game, calling each other by the same derogatory term. Their friendship starts to turn somewhat physical, and upon realizing what this could mean for them, Sedaris and Jason suddenly turn on each other. Jason finds a girlfriend, and even claims to have found Sedaris' (non-existent) journal, and shares a page from it that says "I Like Guys." Upon his arrival back in the United States, Sedaris goes home, and after another month of summer break, goes back to school, which has been integrated. Most of his former teachers had left, and one of his new teachers, a black man, not only made fun of gays, but also people like Albert Einstein and the host of a popular local television show. Sedaris ends the piece saying, "this [ridicule] is something we each have in common, proof that we're all brothers under the skin."

Sedaris, David. "I Like Guys." 1997. Naked. Paperback ed. New York: Back Bay, 1998. 81-94.

Image pulled from Wikipedia. I claim the same non-free/fair use media rationale as used on Wikipedia.

The Kids in The Hall

The Kids in the Hall (Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson) was a Canadian sketch comedy show that ran for 5 seasons from 1989-1995. Episodes ran twenty minutes (not including commercials) and contained various sketches with themes ranging from gender and sexuality, police, business, family life, religion, and sex to the completely absurd like a man with meat for hands and a killer shark named Skoora that feels remorse.

Some famous recurring characters include: the Head Crusher, a man who sits in public and "crushes" the heads of passers-by with his pointer finger and thumb. Cabbage head, a misogynistic man with, surprise, a head of cabbage for a head, who continually fails on dates due to his rude and womanizing attitude. Buddy Cole, the opinionated owner of a gay bar who goes off on long monologues after closing time with a martini in his hand. Danny Husk, a hopelessly stupid and unlucky businessman. Gavin, a talkative and inquisitive adolescent. Simon and Hecubus, a self-proposed demonic prophet and his man-servant, and many more.

The Kids in the Hall are most known for dressing in drag. All of them straight except for Scott Thompson, they wanted to push the limits and show that it's okay to be yourself and to be a little gay. They frequently performed sketches dealing with homosexuality, gender roles and homophobia, portraying very convincing but very manly women as well as homosexual characters. The Kids in the Hall was the first sketch comedy show to openly and frequently deal with this issue.

This first video clip is a sketch from the season 1 finale, poking fun at the ridiculousness of the bible:



The second video is one example of the Kids dealing with homophobia (in an extreme way):




"The Kids in the Hall" Produced by Lorne Michaels, 1989-1995. Toronto, Canada. Accessed from Youtube February 8, 2009.