BOOYAH

Found this today at Whole Foods.

SWEET SASSY MO-LASSIE! GET OUT THE CHECKBOOK AND PAY GRANDMA FOR THE RUBDOWN.

STU-POT!

Continue? - Batman

After the show begins on a religious note (?!), the guys at Continue move on to more mundane topics like mechanical forks, the Axis Chemicals on I-95 and being cool in the 90's.

They also play Batman.

Conan - Staff Reviews

Conan conducts the annual staff performance reviews.


I don't understand how anyone can question Jordan Schlansky's work. The guy has various tasks and duties!

The Last Late Show: The Video

There's no way to embed it but you can see the last episode of the Late Show in full here.

I'm posting a couple highlight clips but I can't recommend enough watching the full episode. The whole episode is highlights and besides that, it's kind of historic television.


Given that this is the remote chosen for the last show, I guess this is the one they think is the best remote of all-time. That seems strange to me but I can't think of a better one off-hand... "Dave works at Taco Bell"


This is just amazing.  I can't imagine the amount of work that went into it.

The Last Late Show: First Take

The last Late Show with David Letterman just aired and I thought it was fantastic. It's hard to imagine a more perfect hour of television. It was amazing how it could be so funny and yet how it could be such an emotional an experience.

From the time I was made aware that David Letterman existed I wanted to watch every piece of television of his that I could get my hands on. I have so many great memories wrapped up in the show - not just watching (alone, mostly in my bedroom), but sharing it with friends and talking about the jokes. It's impossible to see the old clips of the show without remembering where I was in my life when it first aired and what I was doing. For these reasons, I couldn't help but be swept up in a wave of nostalgia and the bittersweet look at an era that is officially gone. As of tonight, it's gone.

Dave is nothing if not unpredictable and so one of the things I've loved to do through the years is "play the Dave" and try to predict things. One of the things I would have predicted about the end of the last show - that I would have predicted wrongly - is that he would end the show sitting on a stool. Jack Paar signed off for the last time while sitting on a stool, Johnny Carson signed off his last show while sitting on a stool, I thought Dave would make that nod to tradition but it didn't happen.

But there was one thing like that, I think. If you read the reviews of the show tomorrow (and, really, why would you?) it's altogether possible that they will cite the "A Day in the Life of Dave" segment as the only weakness and an "uncharacteristic" one at that. But in his final days Johnny Carson did a segment like that and so Dave's doing it too.

Conan - Letterman Goodbye

As anticipated, Conan's on-air goodbye and "thank you" to David Letterman. Very emotional.

Late Show - Best of Bill Murray

This is amazing. There isn't enough time or detail in any of the clips to really do them justice but the sheer number... the sheer number of amazing clips from over the years is so impressive...



The full Bill Murray interview (this interview) is worth watching but doesn't exist as a separate clip. You can see it within the full episode here.

Late Show - Best of Rupert Jee

On David Letterman's second-to-last show, Rupert Jee makes one last appearance.

Rupert Jee goes right back to the "old days" of the show where part of the fun was putting people on TV who had no business being on TV - and by extension, making celebrities out of people who were simply "normal" people. And Rupert Jee always seemed like a just a really nice guy.


Watching these clips again, I'm amazed at how quickly it feels like it's from an ancient era. Not due to the video quality or technology, the entire zeitgeist is gone forever. Today the "comedy of annoyance" feels mean-spirited, whereas back then it was just the cutting-edge of comedy. Not only that, this is cutting-edge comedy that still feels new and fresh today - and how often does that happen? I was uncomfortable watching it then, I'm uncomfortable watching it now.

"It was my thumb."

Conan - Letterman Tribute

Well... sort of. I'm still waiting for Conan's ON-AIR Letterman tribute. As of the time of this post, Conan still hasn't mentioned on his show. But he recently wrote a tribute in the form of an article for EW.com.

You can read it here.

A notable portion:

"Dave’s show was that rare phenomenon: a big, fat show business hit that seemingly despised show business. Dave didn’t belong, and he had no interest in belonging. He amused himself, skewered clueless celebrity guests, and did strange, ironic comedic bits that no one had seen on television before. Everything about that show was surreal and off-kilter. Where late night television had once provided comfort, this man reveled in awkwardness. Cher called him an asshole. Andy Kaufman ran screaming from the set. Chris Elliot lived under the stairs. Throughout one episode the entire show rotated a complete 360 degrees, for no reason whatsoever. By 1985, when I graduated from college and was ready to try my hand as a comedy writer, Late Night with David Letterman had been the Holy Grail for several miraculous years."

Tonight Show - Jimmy's Dave Tribute

Jimmy Fallon isn't much of a speechwriter, of course, but it's from the heart. Dave's last show is tomorrow night.

Late Show - Norm MacDonald

Norm MacDonald performed stand-up comedy one last time on the Late Show with David Letterman. If you want to see the entire performance, you can see it here. But an interesting thing happened on his last joke...

[Original Link Broken]

Link to the Moment.

Late Show - Last Show Approaching

David Letterman's career on late night is quickly coming to an end; his last show is May 20th. In an interesting interview, Dave talks about what it all means, his heart surgery, the scandal and reveals that he's been taking anti-depressants.

This was the part that I found most interesting:

As the end nears, Late Show has dug into its vaults to replay a sampling of vintage comedy bits, some almost Dada-esque in their absurdity. (On a recent show, a 1993 clip found Dave cruising Manhattan making mischief with his car phone, as when he alerted a news-radio station that traffic was backed up on Amsterdam Avenue, then corrected himself: 'Oh, I think it was just a red light.')
Those old clips make him nostalgic for the Lettermanesque-ness he may have since outgrown.

'I realize what the old show was, and we haven't being doing the old show in years,' he says.  

'And that's all because of me.'

I have to agree. Not that I've been saying that it's "all because of him" but that my reason for losing interest in the show is because it had changed. It wasn't that Dave was old or that his competitors were so much better or that he couldn't produce "the viral videos", it was that they simply stopped doing The Late Show.

I imagine there'll be many such clip montages in the episodes leading up to the final show, so I look forward to that.

Continue? - The Shadow

In the 80s, when the family sitcom reigned supreme, there would invariably be that one episode where there was a power outage (or a hurricane or an emergency) and the characters would be forced to remember old episodes in the form of a clip show.

Well, the tradition continues...

Tonight Show - Extreme Jack Black

Whatever surprise this bit might have had is ruined by the title of the youtube video. Well anyways...



For comparison:



If anyone asks your favorite Extreme or Beethoven song (and, honestly, at some point probably EVERYONE will be asked that question) I suggest you consider this lesser known track.

TV - Other Space

A foreign intelligence has invaded the ship and suddenly every crew member is experiencing their wildest dreams as very real hallucinations. Zalian Fletcher suddenly finds a tuna fish sandwich on the ground and begins to eat it. Later, crew members discuss this occurrence:

"So your #1 fantasy is to find a tuna fish sandwich on the ground?"
"It... doesn't have to be on the ground."

"Other Space" is a science-fiction comedy (more comedy than science fiction) whose first season is available on "Yahoo! Screen". Like the classic "Red Dwarf", each episode finds them encountering some outer space phenomenon with hilarious consequences.

I was first attracted to the show because the cast features none other than Joel Hodgson, of MST3K fame. But a second big surprise is that he's also joined in space by a robot pal played by Trace Beaulieu who played Crow, his space robot pal in that show as well. A third big surprise is that one of the female leads, Tina Shukshin, is played by Milana Vayntrub (of Let's Talk About Something More Interesting though more people will recognize her as "the AT&T girl"). Actually seeing these three people interacting in the same show makes me scared that the producers have actually tapped into my dreams somehow and are putting it on screen. What am I, the Lathe of Heaven? [Obscure PBS referencessss. No one ever gets them.] In the second season, watch them to be flying in the A-Team van and add a Philadelphia Eagles sub-plot.

I found "Other Space" to be pretty funny and would recommend giving it a watch. The show's creator is Paul Feig who was one of the minds behind "Freaks and Geeks". The sci-fi is well done and there's lots of solid comedy despite the somewhat cheap budget. The main strength of the show is the character acting - there are some great, offbeat deliveries and one suspects there's some improv going on. The pace/editing of the show is very quick, which I find troubling, but that may just mean that it rewards repeated viewings and would be great for quoting with friends.

MST3K Trivia Tidbits:

 - Joel's sporting long hair which is something that he did in the very, very early days of MST3K. His character, as well as some aspects of the show (and therefore the hair), were originally inspired by Bruce Dern's 60s hippie spaceman character in the movie "Silent Running".

- Trace Beaulieu's robot character is named "A.R.T." In the early days of MST3K they would read fan letters. One day, a child sent in a drawing of the show's characters with each of them neatly labeled. The picture of Crow was labeled as "Art" for reasons that no one of the show could understand. For the rest of the series, Crow would periodically be called Art as an inside joke.

Tonight Show - Bottom of the Charts

This is a great example of comedy that's so stupid that it's funny.



That's a deep cut, referencing the Crash Test Dummies. Who remembers the Crash Test Dummies? That, plus Pee Wee's timing is off.