Komedy

Notes from tonight's Colbert Report....

Colbert's bit where he basks in applause while running over to the guest never gets old.....wait, he wants to lick the Liberty Bell and there's no reference at all to How I Met Your Mother? Weak....Michelle Obama is hot!......She ended her chat saying something like "the best candidate is my husband (slight pause) Barack Obama." Was saying Obama's name tehre really necessary? What candidate did she think people would assume she was married to? She obviously isn't Bill Clinton -- he was the first black president, not the first black female president. And she's obviously not married to McCain. Well, unless that "illegitimate black child" that McCain "fathered" years ago that Karl Rove taught us all about grew up and married McCain in some kind of sick Woody Allen-Soon Yi type of situation. That's the kind of thing that could swing an election.

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I'm not crazy about this list of the 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time. As is usually the case in lists like this, it's really a list of 'most famous' sketches rather than purely the funniest --- there is no goddamn way a Coneheads skit is one of the five funniest skits in TV comic history. But even with this fame-centric voting in mind, the inclusion of Monty Python's "The Idiot In Rural Society" sketch at #6 (number six!) baffled me. I had to click the video link just to remember which skit this was, and brother, I've seen every Monty Python show backwards and forwards. I mean, it's a funny bit, but man, would this even crack the top 50 Python skits? Hardly. This made it instead of, say, the Cheese Shop? Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson? The interview with Anne Elk? The 15-minute fairy tale routine with Connie Booth as the princess and Terry Jones as the keyboard-playing idiot king? The game show about Blackmail? Cleese and Chapman as the high-voiced old women? The killer joke? Eric Idle trying to buy a hearing aid from a deaf salesman? This one is so funny it deserves a link.



Other notable omissions: Any SCTV news bit. Eugene Levy as Earl Camembert was just awesome....Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd as the Festrunk Brothers on SNL....A lot more Mr. Show stuff. I need to rent those DVDs, since the most I see of the Mr. Show, the more brilliant it seems....Phil Hartman as the Anal-Retentive Chef on SNL.....that Carol Burnett Mama's Family sketch where Tim Conway ad-libs this ridiculous story about siamese twin elephants and legitimately cracks everyone up.....