Yes, I was admittedly being a little melodramatic there although the people you mention weren’t necessarily the ones I resonated with the most. For me, some of the other greats were Richard Pryor (obviously messed up, but more self-destructive than a creep), Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (the 2000 Year Old Man–not just the skit, but the whole 3 record set with that name), and Nichols and May (under-appreciated I think). I like to think these people are reasonably OK. Oh, and as for the obviously greatest comedy troupe of all-Monty Python–my world would shatter if they weren’t as thoroughly sane and likable in person as their comic personae would suggest.
Selling space to Russians for rubles? No filters over who is buying time on FB?
This is not a 1st Amendment issue.
If I wrote to a major metro daily and said, for ex, that Hillary was buying arms for ISIS, the editor would either ignore it or call me for my evidence.
FB published just such an allegation without batting an eyelash. FB hides behind “neutrality” . Bullshit.
Zuk, you had better show some civic responsibility.
Likewise! Any number of them, though Bill Cosby is a Very Funny Fellow…Right is the one I remember best. I would have loved to see him in the 60s when he was at his peak. I’m jealous.
I loved their work in writing, producing, and directing movies and TV, and Mel is a scream as an actor, but they were not my cuppa on stage, and the 2000 YOM fell completely flat for me.
I halfway agree. I was not a big N&M fan as a kid, and I despised The Graduate and vowed to avoid anything else he might direct. Elaine May, OTOH, had a whiff of genius about her. People like Jack Paar got the benefit of that, and therefore I did.
It occurs to me that what I don’t like about intellectuals’ darlings like Nichols-May is that they tend to resemble improv to me. I have never seen improv that wasn’t strained and sometimes embarrassing. Spontaneous humor (as in conversation or even out of the blue) can be sublime, but improv just ain’t. It’s too kinetic. There’s no room for a Benny Kubelsky pause, cock of head, stroke of chin…, and nothing like the images Newhart created with nothing but reaction—to the half of a conversation we cannot hear.
I don’t know or see much about most of them, but John Cleese certainly seems urbane, witty, and on the right side of things.
I played my parents’ "Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart, and Tom Lehrer’s first album (on his own label!) until the groves were smooth in middle school.
In grammar school, it was “Song’s that Tickle Your Funny Bone.”
I think I got it for my birthday in first grade. I heard “On Top of Spaghetti” for the first time and was rolling on the floor, laughing so hard I couldn’t talk. I was rendered completely helpless by humor. I still remember my parents standing in the next room watching me, howling, and asking me, “What’s so funny Dave? Is something wrong?” I’ve still never laughed that hard.
If this Probe were a football game–Trump vs Mueller-- the Facebook search warrant by Mueller would be a touch-back like 2 points, still in the second period, added to a 67-0! Go, Mueller! Go, Mueller! Give no mercy!
The money laundering and financial abuses are only one strand of this story about the Trump crime family. Another, equally valid, strand has to do with the use of off-the-shelf bots to influence social media. First seen in 2014 in the Hungarian elections, then in the Brexit vote, a couple Spanish researchers had bot analysis up on the web within a couple weeks after the US election. During this period, Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian came out with a remarkable series of articles, including this one, sort of outlining how hijacking hearts and minds works. Just before the US election, on November 4, F-Secure’s cyberchief Mikko Hyppönen said that botified manipulation, because it was cheap, effective and deniable, was destined to be part of all major elections in the future. He found the outcome of the US election unremarkable.
We live in an age of manufactured consensus, and really, despite all the hand-wringing on TV about a nation or congress divided, there is no big debate out there. We go through the day with little outrages from time to time, but largely accept the larger trends.
I think the commenting software used to resize it itself, and now it doesn’t anymore. Also, I noticed at the same time it started breaking, it started putting in the image code twice when you paste in an image.
