From humble beginnings performing absurd double act routines above a strip club in London’s Soho, a group of young comedians would go on to create one of Britain’s most influential, anarchic comedy shows. The Comic Strip Presents: The Complete Collection, just released on DVD here in the U.S., assembles 39 episodes of the series that aired from 1982-2000 and made stars of its cast in its native England, including Dawn French, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer, Peter Richardson, and Jennifer Saunders.

(The subtitle, “The Complete Collection,” isn’t quite true anymore – the series was originally released in the UK in 2005, so it misses subsequent episodes, one released later in 2005 and one in 2011.)

The title of the show, as well as its cast members, came out of the Comic Strip cabaret club, where the six regulars performed a radical alternative style of rough, young, liberal comedy. Peter Richardson, acting as the group’s ringleader, approached the yet-to-be-launched Channel 4, an independent network developed as an alternative to the more mainstream BBC. The Comic Strip Presents premiered on the first night of Channel 4 in 1982, and the show was brought stateside by MTV in the late 80s.

Right from the beginning, The Comic Strip Presents was like nothing else on television. Each episode of the show was actually a stand-alone film. The six main cast members, alongside frequent regulars like Keith Allen, Alexei Sayle, and Robbie Coltrane, rotated through the episodes, sometimes playing multiple characters, in the style of a repertory company.

With a few exceptions, the show’s style varied strikingly from episode to episode – from film noir to mockumentary to surrealist parody.

The first episode, “Five Go Mad in Dorset,” is a shockingly scathing parody of a popular set of English children’s stories called Famous Five, and cemented this group as a new force in anarchic British comedy. Watching it now, enjoyment of the film is likely to vary based on your knowledge of the source material – the first half in particular is largely a straight satire of Famous Five tropes and the genre in general. In particular, the film is keen to highlight the class snobbery, sexism, and countless other biases of privileged upper-class children in the mid-20^th century, as in this snippet of dialogue.

Julian: I saw, where’s young Toby got to?

Dick: He’s been kidnapped.

Julian: Typical.

George: Serves him right for being nouveau riche.

Anne: Yes, and Jewish!

One of the series’ best and most famous films is “The Strike,” a satire of the Hollywood filmmaking machine. A working class Welshman’s script about the British miner’s strike is warped into a melodramatic Al Pacino vehicle full of Dickensian scoundrels and Meryl Streep peeling oranges.

Other classic episodes include “Bad News Tour,” a mockumentary about an appalling hair metal band that aired a year before “This Is Spinal Tap” was released; “Eddie Monsson – A Life?” about the rise but mostly fall of a despicable South African television host; and “Oxford,” about a famous American comedian visiting a university to film his new feature when things go awry.

More Bad News: Rik Mayall as Colin Grigson, Peter Richardson as Spider Webb, Nigel Planer as Den Dennis, Adrian Edmondson as Vim Fuego

The extras disc on the DVD release include a few talking-head documentaries. “First Laugh on Four” explores the history of the group, with the first part providing a great background for newcomers to the series. “The Comic Strip: A Retrospective” is a 2005 look at the show, but is best saved for after having watched the series first. The other extra, simply called “The Comic Strip,” is a 1981 surrealist documentary by Julien Fellows that was a pre-cursor to the series.

For a devoted lover of British comedy, the series is well-worth exploring. Fans of The Young Ones and French and Saunders will appreciate seeing the early work of such an esteemed group, as well as watching their evolution over nearly 20 years. That said, it’s probably not the right place to introduce this style of comedy to a newbie. Even for an anglophile, the references are on the obscure side for American audiences, and for those used to getting their comedy from web clips and fast-moving sitcoms, the pace can feel slow.

The stand-alone style of the series is both its hallmark and its downside. Even the creators admit that the show, by its very nature, is hit or miss. Writing for the Guardian in 1983, Mary Harron called the individual film style “a brave attack on television market research”, since there was no way to predict how an audience would feel about each episode. In that same article, Peter Richardson told the Guardian that he hoped “people will switch on just because they won’t know what to expect.” It’s an intriguing concept, but one that doesn’t lend itself to marathon DVD viewing.

Considering the unique tone of the series, it’s no surprise that the reaction was mixed. After the second episode aired, Peter Ackroyd of The Times of London described the creators as “a grotesque but inspired group of young comics who would offend anyone who has retained a shred of sensitivity,” and says it lays on “a thick paste of peculiarly English bad taste: ironic, extravagant, self-conscious. The combination is unbeatable, and this series must rank as the funniest on British television.”

The Bullshitters: Keith Allen as Bonehead; Peter Richardson as Foyle

But a week later in the Guardian, Julian Barnes called the show “a sporadically very funny but largely ghoulish half hour based on the uncertain premise that the worse the taste of a joke, the less trouble you need to take over getting it right.”

It’s safe to say that very few people will love every minute of The Comic Strip Presents, but there are gems. The best-played episodes are exciting, moving, and of course, absurdly funny. And it’s certainly different from anything else likely to pop up on TV. As Richardson told the Guardian when the show was starting, “I don’t like jokes to have no purpose, throwing something in because you need to raise a laugh. I like comedy that’s about attitudes.”

One of the most popular new SNL characters in years has been Stefon, Bill Hader‘s absurdist club kid who, for inexplicable reasons, Weekend Update host Seth Meyers insists on asking for recommendations for places to take the family. The result is always hilarious, and not unlike the sort of chaos that would reign if Hunter S. Thompson took you out for a day of live ammo mini-golf. As if Stefon – who Hader brings to life with the help of SNL writer and notable stand-up comic in his own right John Mulaney – wasn’t already a piece of day-glo performance art, the folks at Splitsider took his inherent creativity one step further, by asking a variety of illustrators to turn Stefon’s nightlife suggestions into actual works of art. It’s totally worth your time to check out – if only to let you know that New York’s hottest club is [unintelligible noise here].

(Drawing: Ounce/Danielle MacIndoe)

Along the way, they also provided great insight into a comedian’s mental process.

When I hear discussions like this, I’m often reminded of Bush-era press secretary Ari Fleischer’s misguided statement after 9/11 about how in times of crisis, Americans need to watch what they say – a statement made, ironically, in reaction to comments made by a comedian, Bill Maher – and the reaction of many including myself that protecting freedom of speech is never more important than in just such times, when the institutional reaction is often to pull the other way.

These days, of course, taking offense at what other people say has become something of a national pastime, furthered along by growing political correctness – the notion that language is so powerful that it can do harm, and must therefore be curtailed or regulated – and the way that the Internet and the proliferation of portable video recording devices has, as Belzer mentions in the video, turned every private statement into a potentially public one. (i.e. Would Michael Richards have been nearly as vilified for his “N” word tirade if he’d done it twenty years ago, when it would have been seen and heard by only several hundred people instead of many thousands?)

After a long and varied career that has seen him caught in the worst cast in SNL history, and later beloved as the voice of a talking bird, Gilbert Gottfried has developed a reputation over the past decade as a comic flame-thrower who’ll make solid, well-crafted jokes about the more serious and tragic events in our world, often at the obvious risk of offending millions. 9/11? Fair game. Japanese tsunami? Fair game. A joke about an incestuous family? Many told it – they did make an entire film about it, after all – but Gottfried took it further, using it at a more precarious time, and therefore making it funnier by virtue of both his own creativity and the joke’s cathartic context.

But before we get to that: the more recent comic “misdeed” by the bellowing comedian came on the heels of last year’s Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which took the lives of over 15,000 people.

Gottfried made a series of jokes on Twitter about the tragedies, including the following:

“I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, “They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.”

“I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said, “is there a school in this area?” She said, “not now, but just wait.”

For these offenses, Gottfried was relieved of his lucrative gig as the voice of the AFLAC duck, a move driven by that company’s reportedly significant business interests in Japan.

Talking to Belzer, Gottfried makes a case for the senselessness of much of the public’s – and certainly of AFLAC’s – reaction.

What I loved about the whole thing is that the biggest, the most painful and hateful thing, is how I hurt the Japanese people. And I’m thinking, if enormous waves are crushing your village, and your family is being swept out to sea, are you really gonna be running to your computer going, ‘let’s see, how do you spell Gottfried?’ If the worst thing on your mind is my jokes, don’t you need to get your priorities in order? ‘My family’s dead, but look at joke #7! That one pisses me off.’

Belzer then makes the point that many people, especially in the media, reflexively laugh at jokes of this sort before intellectualizing them, and only take public offense later, after seeing the reaction of others.

(Aaron Sorkin had a great take on this sort of hypocrisy in a Season 2 episode of “The West Wing” called “The Drop-In.” White House press secretary C.J. Cregg, played by Allison Janney, has to get a comedian played by Rocky Carroll to turn down a job hosting an event the president will be attending, due to a joke he told about police shooting black men at another event attended by the president. The catch? They both know that at the time, the president laughed at the joke.)

For me – and, I imagine, many others my age – the absurdity of these “controversies” is magnified by our own childhood experiences. Growing up in pre-Giuliani New York City, one of the pleasures of the elementary/junior high school years was the telling of dead-baby jokes, a popular meme at the time in my blue collar Brooklyn neighborhood (and, I assume, many other places as well). Dead-baby jokes – and their related cousin, baby-in-a-blender jokes – were rites of passage, just a normal part of growing up, as were the often incredibly brutal jokes about whatever tragedy was in the news at the time. In fact, whenever something horrible happened on a nationwide scale, there would invariably be articles in the paper about the nature of using crude jokes and humor to get through these tragedies. But these articles, as I remember them, were not about why this humor was wrong, or how people were protesting in horror, but rather analyses of why crude humor was so often employed in times of mass grief, and how it served as a release for the sadness, anxiety, and other potentially unbearable emotions of the time, since grief could be made less overwhelming through humor. Now, it seems, when similar articles pop up in times of trouble, they’re generally ignited by those who take offense, rather than by those who possess a calm, rational curiosity about human reactions to tragedy. And not being a parent myself, I can only imagine what would happen if a kid today was caught telling a dead-baby joke in school. Mandatory counseling? A school-wide seminar on sensitivity?

(A totally tangential but, I think, fascinating aside. Jokes of the sort I discuss above were brought full-bore mainstream in the early 80s by the publication of a series of books called “Truly Tasteless Jokes,” which dominated the New York Times bestseller lists and, filled as they were with jokes about dead babies and various races and such, were eventually met with some outrage. The author of the books was only known at the time by the pseudonym Blanche Knott, but it was eventually revealed that Knott was actually Ashton Applewhite, a young editor at the book’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press. Applewhite’s father, it turns out, was a man named Edgar Applewhite – a longtime collaborator of Buckminster Fuller’s, and also a veteran CIA operative who was reportedly involved in a massive CIA operation called Mockingbird, the purpose of which was to influence, manipulate, and, when necessary, silence the media. In a book called “The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA,” Applewhite is quoted as follows about how he manipulated a left-wing magazine called “Ramparts”:

“I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running ‘Ramparts’ were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off.”

No word on how Applewhite felt about his daughter’s scandalous efforts.)

After discussing the tsunami fracas, Belzer and Gottfried go in-depth about Gottfried’s controversial 9/11 jokes at the Hugh Hefner roast that took place just weeks after the tragedy, and the ensuing conversation is revealing not just about Gottfried’s intent that night – he sought to shake up the still-reticent and traumatized crowd when he told a joke about how he couldn’t get a direct flight because his plane had to make a stop at the Empire State Building – but also about a comedian’s mental process in general.

After telling that joke, which was met by crickets and much shuffling in seats, Gottfried made the split-second decision to segue into his outrageously filthy, XXX-rated, incestuous “Aristocrats” material, which brought the crowd roaring with laughter back to his side – and in the process, he says, was also a brilliant illustration of the inconsistency and ludicrousness of allowing yourself to be offended by comedy. (And yes, lest we forget, being offended is, absolutely, a choice.)

The terrorist attack was tasteless, and inexcusable. But if you wanna do a joke about a family fucking and sucking each other, and blowing their dog, well that’s OK. Go with what you know.

Several years later, Frank Rich of the New York Times, who was at the roast, further illustrated the greatness of what Gottfried accomplished – and why it’s so often absurd for the initial reaction to a politically incorrect joke to be the taking of offense.

We knew we had seen something remarkable, not because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and jolted us back into the land of the living again.

While all of this is true, what’s also important is what the telling of, and the reaction to, jokes like these says about us as a nation. Aside from the initial effect of killing lots of people, the goal of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, when committing terrorist acts like 9/11, is to destroy any illusion of security in everyday life, and to thrust the intended victims into a perpetual bubble of fear – a goal that, given the ease with which we have allowed certain overbearing security and surveillance operations into our lives, I often cannot help thinking that bin Ladin accomplished.

The best way to defy terrorists – aside from killing them, of course – is to refuse to allow their actions to restrict our freedoms. And that, someone should have told Mr. Fleischer, means ALL freedoms, including the freedom to speak freely, the freedom to tell whatever jokes we like, and the freedom to live and laugh just as we had before the tragedy.

As Gottfried concludes about what that evening accomplished:

It was like that moment of, hey, it’s OK. You can come out, climb out from under your beds. Everything’s fine. I always thought that moment of me, on stage, telling the first 9/11 joke, should be sent to Al Qaeda, and say, ‘hey, you killed 3,000 of us, and you know what we’re doing now? We’re laughing about it.’

 

Well, then you clearly don’t live in Nebraska. North Platte, Nebraska, that is.

Because viewers there got to see this mysterious half-a-spot of Ferrell walking slowly through a wheat field while majestic music plays him on, and an off-camera figure tosses him a can of delicious Old Milwaukee beer before he says those magic words, “Old Milwau…” and then the commercial is cut off. (BTW – note how the can of beer he’s tossed is actually a football that TURNS INTO a can of beer. Pretty cool.)

Apparently, the locally-aired spot is just the latest in a series that Ferrell has done for Old Milwaukee, the others – which you can watch below – were filmed, and presumably only aired in, Davenport , IA and Terre Haute, IN. The first ad shows Ferrell trying to equate every letter in the word Davenport with the drinkability and deliciousness of Old Milwaukee, a task that disintegrates into a typical Ferrell breakdown.  The second shows Ferrell sitting on a log, fishing, and talking about Davenport and Old Milwaukee. The third may be our favorite – also Ferrell just talking, but this time with an absurdist, Anchorman-reminiscent flair (our fave quote – “we are a nation of backyards, and there’s a lot of rickity trampolines out there”).

No word on why the ads – which an owner of Pabst told Ad Week were initiated by Ferrell – are only being shown locally. If it’s an attempt to go viral – well, who better than Funny or Die’s Ferrell to get that ball rolling. Still, here’s the hoping Ferrell takes his absurdist perspective to more ads, but this time on a nationwide basis. Super Bowl 2013? Let’s hope.

(via Hollywood Reporter, Deadspin)

Nick McKaig is a singer in Florida with a multi-track studio set up in his closet, who for some time as been recreating various TV theme songs, along with green screen videos, for YouTube. Now, after renditions of songs such as The Office theme, he’s released his personal “Stairway to Heaven” – a 30+ track version of The Simpsons theme which is pretty damn near perfect, including reproducing all the instrument sounds. Check it out – we think Lisa Simpson and Bleeding Gums Murphy would both be proud.

(via Gizmodo)

I suppose it was inevitable. Given the moss-like growth of “Shit ____ Says” videos, and since being a comedian certainly places you in a singular, often insulated world, this video was the clear logical step. One question though – “I’m just doing this to get famous” seems more an L.A. sentiment than an NYC one. So – will NYC comics need to do “Shit New York Comedians” say in response? On second thought – this one is probably enough. “I didn’t see the light.” Indeed.

Photo: FX

Louis CK not only breaks new ground in comedy, but he teaches as well. After the announcement this week of Louis’ CBS pilot sale – of a script he wrote with Spike Feresten 13 years ago –  the website Third Beat found a long post that Louis wrote on Usenet back in 2006, when he was still working on his HBO show “Lucky Louie.” It lays out, in great detail, the process of selling a show to a network from pitch to pilot, and after reading it, it couldn’t be clearer why he insisted on going the “just give me money and leave me the hell alone” route with FX. Because the way Louis portrays it, every step of the process is an absolute fucking nightmare.

Not only does Louis give us an up close and personal view of his creative mental process, such as here…

 …take as long as you need to churn out a first draft. I think this took me a couple of months. Only about three days were spent actually writing. The other fifty seven were spent driving myself nuts while ruminating about what the show is and how to do it. That’s me.

…but he makes clear the anguish involved in every step, as with…

So you do another rewrite and pass it in. Now it’s time to break out in hives and hit your children for no reason, because you have to wait….The network presidents take a bunch of pilots home to read over the hollidays, while you spend the hollidays not knowing your future. It’s torture. And the Holiidays, in Hollywood are a LONG FUCKING TIME. These people go away from about Haloween to New Year. So now you hate all of life and it’s about the second week in January.

What I find amazing about this is knowing that while Louis makes this seem like a real piece of hell, many aspiring Louis C.K.’s will take this as inspiration – memorizing every step and looking forward to every indignity, while also trying to figure out how they can possibly do the same, but while somehow skirting the aggravation. And to them I say, best of luck. You’re gonna need it.

(Third Beat, via Slate)

Photo: Fox

“The Simpsons” are planning big things for their upcoming 500th episode, which airs February 19, and EW is reporting that one of the special guests for the episode is Julian Assange, who recorded the guest spot from a secret location (seriously – he did). According to EW, Assange, who will not be the only special guest that night, was tracked down by one of the Simpsons casting people, and Simpsons executive producer Al Jean directed him by phone from L.A. (Jean didn’t know Assange’s location, saying he was only given a phone number). No word on whether Assange will be sharing any state secrets with Simpsons viewers. Maybe we’ll finally learn how Marge keeps her hair so high?