The subtly witty program announcer from the free podcasts. And as I mentioned last week, the changing gallery of ridiculous photos and descriptions that appeared on iTunes (or one’s video iPod; I have a Shuffle and it’s sweet, so I’m not ready to upgrade).

Other than that, I actually think they’re trying harder now that the show isn’t free and is getting an even bigger audience. In the newest show, Stephen describes the worst Carnivale vacation ever and actually gets to talk for more than five seconds. He even gets angry! I like that. I had a very happy fantasy recently in which Stephen and I were wed. I could try to reproduce the festive speeches by my friends and the Office types alike, the grudgingly/cheerfully granted slow dance to “Only You” by Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman, and the terrific London real estate preferable even to that represented in Match Point, as well as of course the general good times, but you probably had to be there.

Note: I consume quite a lot of other media besides these podcasts, but since they’ve created a tidal wave of traffic for my wee blog, I feel a special connectedness to them. Stephen’s Carnivale reminiscence made me think once again about Black Orpheus, a favorite film of my mother’s that I saw for the first time at Film Forum last week. It is magnificent.

Speaking of Gervais one more time (not likely), one of the now-famous Knob at Night DJs has just revamped his compulsively listenable—total cliché, but in this case it’s true—mashup of David Brent’s earnestly soulful “Free Love Freeway.” Download it here and you’ll see what I mean.

Well, for one thing, I miss the little iTunes pictures and taglines that went along with the old podcast for those listening/observing on their laptops or video iPods. I have a little collection on Flickr that you might want to check out.

While I was waiting for the latest download, I rented the Office Christmas specials DVD and watched the commentary track. It was like a much longer podcast, minus Karl (though he’s referred to). Lots of fun and I recommend it. I’d seen the specials, of course (“All I needed was the love you gave…”), but had somehow missed those special features. Oh, I know why; I was watching the bootleg advance Kim’s Video version. I’m so edgy.

In other Britpod news, have you heard the Simulacrum interview with Buster Keaton yet? It’s a pip.

In any case, by God, it’s Gladwell’s. Thanks to BookLust for the earliest tip. Do you think the current design and presentation is a little like those sites that are supposed to look like personal blogs, but are really placeholders for a pyramid scheme or something? I’m familiar with one of those because someone with my name (one of many such, alas) has one of them, and it’s all jaunty and confidence-sharing but not a real blog at all. I assume Gladwell is going for a bare-bones, old-skool, casual-diversion feel. I’m no web designer, as you can see [or as you could see; professional designers have since gotten their hands on me, thank goodness], but this is Malcolm Gladwell—as you may know, the man has resources. MG, if you want inspiration, a number of your colleagues and compatriots have the right idea, especially the artistes. To be fair, Gladwell’s original site is totally spiffy. In any case, the blog will be a fun spot to read the letters to the editor the magazine doesn’t print, and to thrill, for those inclined, at the phrase “Adam Gopnik just emailed me.” I’m pleased he’s blogging—let’s hope he has fun with it and gives as much space to his still-forming ideas as he does to making sure he credits everyone who ended up on the cutting-room floor. It’ll be interesting to see what (ideas, books, products, holiday destinations) he endorses, offhandedly or passionately; those words will be gold, so they’re best chosen carefully.

“And Grant is wonderful, Russell a joy, but Bellamy on this umpteenth viewing is a revelation. His slow delivery stands out against all the rapid-fire verbal assaults, and I do believe he steals almost every scene where Grant is ostensibly stealing the rug out from under him. You really do have to be smart and talented to play someone this dumb.”

Nicely put, Noel Vera!

If I have to tell you what movie this is, well, you know what Louis Armstrong said about jazz. Still, there’s a DVD I hadn’t noticed before with (possibly crappy, but I’m obviously buying it) extras. Looky, image-quality comparisons and snazzy stills are here. I will never, never, never grow tired of watching this.

…of New Yorker cover represented this week, in the words of local blogger Teddyvegas :

A few months ago (Dec. 5, 2005), The New Yorker had a cover [by Mark Ulrikson] showing a butch, cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, hamburger-scarfing Dick Cheney reclining in a barcolounger while a wifey-looking, apron-sporting, feather duster-toting George W. Bush stands beside him looking lost and perplexed. While amusing and certainly in alignment with my politics (indeed I enjoy a good Bush bashing as much as the next left-leaning New Yorker reader), the cover struck me as an uncharacteristically cheap slam. Depicting the President (ouch..it still hurts to call him that) and his imperial vice as a dysfunctionally domestic top and bottom seemed a bit more Mad Magazine than Malcolm Gladwell. When I opened my mail box and looked at my new issue of the New Yorker last night, many of the same feelings returned. There on the cover was an image of Dick Cheney and George W. in jeans and cowboy hats engaged in a mock iconic Brokeback embrace. In addition, Cheney was blowing the smoke off his six shooter—an obvious and timely reference to his recent confusion of man and quail. I found the cartoon quite clever and quietly celebrated the flamboyant gesture of administration bashing, but I was struck, once again, by a sense of unease. It seems to me this kind of gratuitously emasculating parody is the last desperate resort of the political critic and it constitutes a flagrant departure from the magazine’s heritage of subtlety and sophistication. I do not turn to the New Yorker for broad burslesque or cheap political hack jobs. I turn to it as the one of the last bastions of intelligently informed, defiantly independent thought. I turn to it to see the hyper-articulate, passionately political Hendrick Hertzberg ripping W a new asshole with his pen. I turn to it to see W’s deceptions debunked and his incompetences exposed. I do not turn to it to see him in a skirt. Somehow, it seems to cheapen the institution. (I’m talking about the New Yorker, not the Presidency). Not to be grandiose, but in some way it brings to mind the most compelling argument against torture: That it hurts the practitioner as much as the victim.

OK. I’ve probably overstated the case. But I think you get the idea. I think there’s a longer analysis to be made of the way traditionally urbane journalistic institutions like the New York Times and the New Yorker that usually keep their editorializing very deadpan in tone have been seduced by the culture of comedic commentary (notably by the success of The Daily Show) into adopting a broader and more aggressively snarky voice. I think most journalists (like most everyone else) are frustrated comics and they just want to migrate to where the fun is. But in this instance, they do so at the cost of a certain unsettling inconsistency of tone.

Hope you don’t mind my reprinting your whole post, Teddyvegas; I like your style. As for the cover, it’s clever and timely, and I like that; it’s also skilfully done. (Here’s a larger image if you don’t have it right in front of you.) Still, depicting powerful men as women, cross-dressers, or gay-seeming to suggest their weakness or foolishness should really be going out of style by now. “What are you, girls?” my dad’s Army sergeant used to say—it’s an ancient slur. So, of course, is “gay.” But, uh…well, you know. Others would and will make the point that just representing cowboys or presidents or people with guns as gay is radical and paradigm-shifting, if done in the right spirit, and I say, true enough. But not everyone has the Proper Filters. Snobbery or bigotry; it’s a polar world we live in just by looking at stuff!

In more positive news (I like a nice balance), yay, a new Tad Friend piece! In my mind he’s joined the magazine’s modern greats, keepers and builders of the flame in their basic ballsiness (such a good gender-transcending term), patient sensitivity, dedication to form, and pure sparkle, including McGrath, Franklin, Frazier, Gourevitch, Orlean, Konigsberg, Boo, Antrim of course, Hertzberg, Lahr the invincible, and others I’ll remember later on and add to the list. Last year’s Pruzan and Wilsey pieces were a good start, to be followed by more, I should hope. I suspect Frere-Jones’ ultramodern prose will be crucial to the magazine’s future voice, the one we haven’t even heard sing loudly yet. I look forward to the interesting harmonies and aesthetically pleasing dissonance.

I also want to note that in the Gladwell debate with my well-read sister the other day, she said that Gladwell and Jim Surowiecki were the principal reasons some people read the magazine now, and I said that Surowiecki should get to do longer pieces as well as the Financial Page. I know Jim and his longer-form writing, and he’s very good. He’s good there, too, but confined; after he tells the week’s tale and gives his quick take, he gets the vaudeville hook. If Gladwell can go on and on about this and that, by God, so can Jim, and he’ll do it well. (Hey, that’s almost a chiasmus!)

And finally, episode 12. More mashups of “I Could Eat a Knob at Night” come in all the time. I love that my British readership has eclipsed the U.S. and Canada combined; that island has Karl Pilkington fever. As do I. And, again, let’s cheer Stephen Merchant, who gets neglected in this hullaballoo, I fear. I think he’s a great comic mind who always nails the delivery of his small but excellent jokes, and I hope he can talk a bit more in the next series of podcasts. As Karl says, “I suppose you’ve got to have an end for a beginning.”

My pal Gene Seymour writes, as a postscript to his Lady and the Tramp 50th/51st anniversary reissue review:

Also being released this week:

ROBERT BENCHLEY AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ALGONQUIN (Kino Video). A collection of Paramount comedy shorts, most of them from the 1940s, featuring the venerated New Yorker writer and humorist in varying stages of befuddlement.

Later: And Logan Hill writes in New York:

OUR PICK: Modern-day mythmaking about the Algonquin Round Table tends to depict the twenties literary wits—including Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber—as a debauched and vicious circle. But watch The Paramount Comedy Shorts 1928–1941: Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin and you get an altogether sillier vision that’s so sweet it makes you wonder if all the contemporary scandalmongering says more about us than them. This set collects a batch of apt comic shorts by Benchley—a co-founder of the Table, drama critic, and contributor to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker—plus a few by Donald Ogden Stewart and a marvelously snide Alexander Woollcott. The best are comedy sketches that Benchley narrates in the tongue-in-cheek persona of domestic scientist Joe Doakes, poking wry fun at husbands, wives, and sundry household annoyances—including, worst of all, an item that was once the bane of every author: the tangled typewriter ribbon. NR; $29.95.

Echoing Frank Harrell‘s impassioned letter to Steve Martin asking him to make movies that don’t suck so much, my favorite Salon critic and party conversationalist, Stephanie Zacharek, considers Why Good Comedians Go Bad. As the subhed yearns to know, “Remember when Steve Martin, Albert Brooks and Woody Allen were funny? What on earth happened to our favorite funnymen?” Stephanie writes:

In Shawn Levy’s gaspingly unfunny “The Pink Panther” — not a remake of the Blake Edwards original, but a version of some vague idea of the original — Steve Martin may play Inspector Clouseau. But at least he’s smart enough to know that he can’t play Peter Sellers. In the movie’s production notes, Martin says, “I bent it a little bit because I am a different person. When I looked at those movies, I understood that Peter Sellers could ad-lib all day within the context of the character.” Martin knew he had to reinvent the role, which he did mostly by devising an identifiably Martinesque faux-French accent that sounds like a speech impediment.

Martin’s Clouseau is a performance draped precariously on a thumbtack of a gimmick. “The Pink Panther” is lousy for many reasons: For one thing, its rhythms wobble and weave drunkenly, and even the potentially funny jokes hang in the stratosphere, twinkling dimly with far too much space around them, before crashing to earth. But because “The Pink Panther” is a star vehicle, Martin has to bear most of the blame. Like another recent disappointment from a comedian many of us long ago came to love, Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” “The Pink Panther” cements the idea that, no matter how much faith we place in our favorite comedians, their presence alone is never enough to guarantee laughs. Brooks’ and Martin’s recent failures carry a particularly potent sting: How can comedians we’ve come to trust so much let us down so hard? Cont’d.

In Slate, Dana Stevens writes:

Let us now ponder the mystery of Steve Martin’s career. In the past decade or so, it’s diverged into two discrete and contradictory channels: There’s Steve Martin the auteur (of three novels, a collection of plays, and “serious” film scripts like Shopgirl or the upcoming Picasso at the Lapin Agile, both based on his own work); and Steve Martin the lowbrow, the shameless purveyor of crap like Cheaper by the Dozen, Parts 1 and 2, Father of the Bride, Parts 1 and 2, or Bringing Down the House, the Martin/Queen Latifah race comedy, which has mercifully stopped at Part 1 (so far.) Cont’d.

Ever the optimist, I’d like to end this by saying I didn’t know they were making Picasso at the Lapin Agile into a film! I saw the play and liked it a lot. I’m looking forward to that. In the meantime, Steve, if you must remake silly ’50s comedies, how about The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48 and ’47, but you know what I mean)? Or a new His Girl Friday with, say, Geena Davis? There are so many others. We could make you a list.

Delightedly filming the blank monitor with his handheld camera, so it’s showing what he’s filming, which is the monitor itself, and on and on: “If I shoot the monitor, I should be able to recreate the Hindu Wheel of Life.”

Two left to go, or, as Gervais and co. have been hinting, quite a few more left to go, which is good news. There are ads on this one (for comedy on Channel Four), but Karl Pilkington does them, so who’s complaining? There’s also a marriage proposal. Pilkington’s farcically uneventful diary, which Stephen Merchant read aloud this week, is reminiscent of Jim’s Journal, Onion founder Scott Dikkers’ diary-like anti-cartoon, which I reviewed many moons ago in Salon. ‘Course, that’s the link above.

Meanwhile, the trio asks high-profile DJs to work on “I Could Eat a Knob at Night.” If they do, and they will, they can add their remixes to the versions of the insanely popular mashup that I’ve been compiling. And it occurs to me, this podcast, that as convinced as Ricky says he is that Karl is not a man but a shaved monkey, it’s Ricky who emanates the ape-like screeches that punctuate the show. In fact, it was the sly, good-natured, and undermentioned Merchant who prompted one of the piercingest shrieks this time around. Who’s the monkey? Perhaps it’s not the inspired Karl, who, invented persona or not, has a sang-froid most of us would surely do well to borrow.

Gervais’ fans are, clearly, insane for comedy that’s part Beckett, part bollocks, all improv chemistry, and quintessentially British. This is why, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be sad when Gervais takes a break, but I couldn’t live without the Comedy 365 podcasts to which I’ve become irreversibly addicted. Big Squeeze, starring the profane and sparkly Georgina Sowerby and Brian Luff, Chris Skinner’s “celebrity interviews” on Simulacrum (Paris Hilton! Prince William! King Henry VIII! Dr. Dre!), and John Dredge’s Killer Comedy (if you think Pilkington is dry…) are rocking my world nearly every day these days, and I hope more people discover this gold mine of hilarious, more or less X-rated inanities. Also, Skinner is always ready to talk about honey badgers, which I now agree are the meanest, most symbiotic, best animals ever.

Categories: Gervais, Pilkington, Comedy 365, podcasts