Friday, August 20, 2010

THAT SHOW, THE AMAZING RACE. IS THAT ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE? Continuing my milking of the GQ Comedy issue for a third post, there's also a conversation between Zach Galifianakis, Tracy Morgan and Paul Rudd on the nature of comedy, and what things (and people) are always funny.

GQ: What guys out there now do you pay attention to?

PAUL: Zach was one of my favorite stand-ups. Patton Oswalt is hilarious. Louis C.K. is one of my absolute favorites. One of the funniest jokes, and it's so politically incorrect, was this one he told right after September 11. The joke was about how you could gauge how good a person you were by how long you waited before you felt comfortable masturbating. He said, "It took me a while. For me it was after the first tower fell but before the second one."...

TRACY: All I watch is the Dean Martin roasts. And last night I found out The Honeymooners is back on TV. Jackie Gleason. Never went to rehearsal. Made the cameraman stay loose and stay wide. That's it: Stay loose and stay wide.

PAUL: You know who's old-school funny and, in my opinion, never wavered as the funniest? Don Rickles. That guy is just funny.

TRACY: I saw him at the Emmys. He just tore it apart.

ZACH: There's a clip of Don Rickles. Still unbelievable. It's in the '70s, I imagine. He's filling for Johnny Carson. And he's in the audience, doing crowd work, and there was this attractive black woman. He stands her up and asks her a few questions. He's not done talking to her, but she just decides to sit back down on her own. And he turns to the audience and he says, "Ever since Roots, they do what they want." And of course the audience starts laughing. If that had happened now, it would have been such a crazy knee-jerk reaction.

A decade from now, I can see Rudd still working, albeit a lead on television. What are the other two doing?

1 comment:

  1. J. Bowman10:09 AM

    Morgan is two years in to a twenty-year stretch of increasingly family-friendly comedies, most of which make us say, "Remember when Tracy Morgan was funny?"
    Galafianakis is second lead on 2020's version of a USA Network Procedural, does voice work in animated films, and shows up in two or three movies a year. There's rumor that he's going to leave Fuzzy Logic (the aforementioned procedural) to do a "Chelsea Lately"-style show on the Oprah Network.

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