Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I’d never seen anything like it. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren’t in the movie. Quaint, I know.

According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn’t want the outtakes to be included in the movie, “since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers’ failure to win that year’s Academy Award for Best Actor.” I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows.

[via Coudal Partners.]

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player’s hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches.

A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala’s YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here’s one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz:

More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra!

Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

It is a truth not quite universally acknowledged that Ben Stiller is a lazy hack whose schtick ceased being amusing long ago. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan. But he’s had his funny moments in the past. Take the clip below, a compilation of footage from Stiller’s appearance in the penultimate episode of Freaks and Geeks. The clip opens with a minute or so of footage that actually aired, then segues into a seven-minute uncut take from the filming of the scene. I pulled the raw footage off of one of the two extra DVDs included with the special eight-disc F&G fan edition. (The collection sold in stores only has six discs.)

In the episode, Stiller guest-stars as a disgruntled Secret Service agent assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who has traveled to McKinley High for an appearance. Stiller’s character becomes suspicious of the school’s longhaired guidance counselor, Mr. Rosso, and escorts him down the hall to Rosso’s office.

Stiller’s riffing in the raw footage is very funny; it’s interesting to watch him try out different approaches to various lines, and to see him react to the coaching from the episode’s director, Jake Kasdan. There’s also a good George W. Bush reference, made more hilarious by the fact that the scene was filmed in early 2000, when Bush’s blundering numbskullery hadn’t yet affected the world.

I got out of work at 3 on Friday and had no plans for the rest of the afternoon, so I wandered down to Union Square to catch a 4:40 showing of The Aristocrats, which I’d been meaning to see for weeks. It’s hilarious. If you like movies in which famous comedians tell stories about parents fisting their children and entire families wallowing naked in their own bodily fluids, this is the film for you.

Anyway, about 15 or 20 minutes in, there’s a short scene in which five or six Onion writers sit around a conference room and analyze the dirty joke that is the subject of the film. As the scene begins, the camera is focused on a pile of stuff on the conference table. One of the most prominent things on the pile is the front page of an issue of The Onion. As I watched the slow pan up the table, it took me a second or two to realize that the Onion issue onscreen was the very issue whose cover story—“Non-Controversial Christ Painting Under Fire From Art Community”—I posed for several years ago. I’m right there onscreen for a good three or four seconds before the camera pans up from the table. Here’s the picture that accompanied the story; that’s me in front, wearing an ill-fitting jacket that makes me look twice as big—okay, maybe one and a half times as big—as I actually am.

And so I take my rightful place alongside comedy geniuses like Jon Stewart, Eric Idle, Sarah Silverman, and Taylor Negron.

Here is a video file of the South Park version of the Aristocrats joke as it appears in the film. Completely and utterly not safe for work, so take any appropriate precautions.

The latest batch of five-minute shows is up at Channel 101, the L.A.-based “untelevised TV network” founded by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, two goofballs who are best known for having sprung Heat Vision and Jack on an indifferent world (and, more specifically, on indifferent Fox executives). Anyone can submit a five-minute pilot to Channel 101; the least sucky submissions are then shown at the next live monthly screening, where the next “primetime lineup” is determined by audience vote. The primetime shows are placed online, as is the occasional “failed pilot.” Most of the shows are fond parodies of bad TV. Some of them are pretty atriocious—productionwise, actingwise, scriptwise—but many are hilarious, and sometimes it’s the atrociousness that makes them so hilarious. A lot of them are the work of underemployed actor/comedians and pop-culture geeks who like to fuck around with cheap video cameras.

You should check out at least two of Channel 101’s shows this month. First and funniest is the premiere episode of Yacht Rock, a show devoted to exploring a little-understood rock genre that flourished from the mid-’70s to the early ’80s. The show’s debut is a fictionalized retelling of the story behind Michael McDonald’s Doobie Brothers hit “What a Fool Believes,” which, honest to god, for real, was co-written by Kenny Loggins. Who knew that Kenny Loggins co-wrote that song? I did not know this; I had to go to Google to confirm that it’s actually true. Nor did I really want to know this information, because I eventually could have used that part of my brain to store something useful. But Yacht Rock is really funny, complete with a drunk and depressed Jim Messina, a scarily accurate Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and a belligerent John Oates, who hurls the epithet “California vagina sailors” at McDonald and his bandmates. Check it out:

Second, the cheesy, very low budget sci-fi show The Most Extraordinary Space Investigations stars Dan Harmon, House of Cosbys creator Justin Roiland, and Sarah Silverman as stoner space cowboys who do bong hits before strapping themselves into their fighters to go off on their missions. It’s cool that Silverman is game for such sophomoric shenanigans.

Some people in New York have started a similar project called Channel 102; the next Channel 102 screening is on Monday, July 25, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.

This short glossary of scriptwriter slang, from the blog of a longtime TV writer, outlines some behind-the-scenes terminology that scriptwriters use as shorthand for various situations and cliches:

“A Nokamura”: When a large number of jokes are all predicated on a single, earlier joke. This can entail great risk.

Based on a Cheers episode. A day-player was named “Nokamura”. A vast chunk of the second act’s jokes were based on people mispronouncing, repeating, etc. the name “Nokamura.”

But the problem was, on tape night — the first mention of “Nokamura” didn’t get a laugh. This meant the rest of the jokes wouldn’t work. The rest of the show was shanked.

The worst thing about a Nokamura is that when the first joke fails, you as the writing staff know what’s coming. All you can do is watch in horror as your show unravels, the Nokamura too deeply entrenched to require anything but a complete between-tapings rewrite.

(Note: We have recent e-mails suggesting the origin of this term was actually The Bob Newhart Show. We are investigating)

[…]

“a Squiggy” or “the ‘hello’ gag”: From Laverne & Shirley. Can only be defined by example.

Laverne (crossing to door): “What sort of degenerate freak would agree to that?” Squiggy (door opens): “He-looooo.”

This is a variation of but distinct from …

“the Gilligan cut”: When you cut directly from a character declaring there’s no way he’s going to do something, to him doing it, for comedic effect.

Also called “the flip joke”, but I’ve heard this usage, and it’s more interesting nomenclature. Thanks to Jacob at Yankee Fog.

(previously listed as “the red dress”, This name comes from the way it was always described to me: a burly guy saying”There’s no way I’m going to get into a red dress and pretend to be your wife”. SMASH CUT to … you get the idea.)

I just discovered that most of the text of Steve Martin’s out-of-print 1979 book Cruel Shoes is posted on The Compleat Steve, a Steve Martin fansite. I’ve owned a tattered hardcover of this book since the mid-’80s, when, much like these guys, I was an adolescent Steve Martin fanatic.

The book was given to me by a fellow Martin fan named Liz. She apparently had a crush on me, because here is how she inscribed the book:

Hey Andrew!
You sexy guy. You look marvelous. See ya next year. Have fun with Angie in yr.book. Liz

Cruel Shoes is a collection of short absurdist bits with titles like “Women Without Bones,” “How to Fold Soup,” “What to Say When the Dogs Show Up,” and “The Gift of the Magi Indian Giver.” None of the pieces is more than a few hundred words long. A handful of the chapters, including the title piece, originated with Martin’s standup act; others originally appeared in Playboy and other magazines. I think the book has been out of print since the early ’80s. You can find used copies on Amazon.

“She Had the Jugs” is the sort of piece that made me cackle with glee when I was about 14 or 15. Here it is, in its entirety:

SHE HAD THE JUGS

Yes, she was witty; she was intelligent. She was born of high station. She spoke and walked proudly. She was the kind who displayed nobility, who showed style and class. But above all, she had the jugs.

Many people called her by her last name; some closer friends had a confidence with her and shared the intimacy of her first name. But to me, she was always “Lady jugs a-plenty.”

It is true. She was clever and she was charming, but above all, she had the jugs.

The guy who maintains The Compleat Steve also maintains a blog where he posts news articles about Martin.

I hardly know what to say about this, except that it’s bizarre and twisted and hilarious: House of Cosbys, an animated Internet series about a guy who clones Bill Cosby a bunch of times and then lives with the clones in a huge house.

There are two episodes so far (here’s the first and here’s the second). A third is on the way.