Welcome to Season 2.5. The theme music this week is “Rock and Roll Dixie,” from the soundtrack to the video game The Neverhood. We also have a special guest host, Nathan Gilmour’s brother Ryan.
General Introduction
– Welcome to Season 2.5
– David Grubbs, our reporter from the field
– We get the dirt on Nathan
– What’s on the blog?
– Listener feedback
Ryan’s Story
– Mr. Gallops, Talking Horse Comedian
– Second City
– Birds on Life
– The life of a working comedian
– Dog hotel
– Our first bleep
Medieval Comedy
– Where have all the jesters gone?
– The handicapped, the short, and the studied
– Insulting the powerful
– Reading Shakespeare into the Middle Ages
– How universal are jesters?
Vaudeville and Minstrelsy
– American literary humor
– Medicine shows
– The complicated politics of blackface
– Racism and Disney cartoons
– A New Kind of Comedy
– Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor
– Taking comedy personally
– The Second City
– Saturday Night Live
Radio, Television, and the Internet
– Censorship
– Increased sophistication and multiplying clichés
– Why Second City is funnier than Saturday Night Live
– How the Internet changed it all
– We talk about joke stealing for ten minutes
– Faking it
– Effusive praise for Dave Chappelle
Mean and Amoral Comedy
– How prudish is Nathan?
– Why the absurd requires the congruous
– The difference between mean and amoral
– Easy targets
– Please excuse our technical issues
– The Celebrity Roast
What we need to know about comedy
– Mean, mean Grandma Gilmour
– The future of the entertainment industry
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.
Harrison, Jim. The Farmer’s Daughter. New York: Grove, 2009.
Montgomery, Marion. With Walker Percy at the Tupperware Party: In Company with Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, and Others. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2009.
Otto, Beatrice K. Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.
Ruhl, Sarah. Dead Man’s Cell Phone. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Norton, 1998.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1996.
I think that Dennis Leary did rip off Bill Hicks. If you look on youtube you can see some videos that compare the two and it seems to be more than coincidence.
Ryan’s allegation was that Leary stole Hicks’ persona rather than his actual act; this video certainly supports that allegation. Leary’s jokes are of the same brand as Hicks’, but other than the phrase “whining maggots” and the reference to Barry Manilow, I don’t see any direct theft–just the same sorts of jokes about the same sorts of subjects. Still lame.
On the other hand, the video also supports the quote from Hicks at the beginning of the clip, that his act was funnier than Leary’s. Put them side by side and Leary seems like a poseur. His sections are incredibly annoying.