Year: 2013

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I actually think the premise of Amy Schumer’s joke is pretty funny, but it might be funnier if the guy arrives at work Monday and gets called on the carpet for not finishing his work. Of course he didn’t expect to be there, but it turns out this is hardly a new issue of his; he apparently never finishes anything he starts. “You need to develop some stick-to-itiveness, son! You need to follow through to the end!”

Another presumes that Comedy Central killed the joke because it was too skittish about the subject:

There’s no place left for black comedy, I guess, in our timid times. Both MASH and Harold and Maude mined suicide to terrific comedic effect, the latter making suicide both the driver and climax of the movie. Within a year or so of those two movies, Ruth Gordon (Maude) also starred in the hilarious and pitch-black Where’s Poppa? We are poorer for our earnestness.

Below are several more cultural references and links from readers:

Another sterling example of suicide played for laughs is the sequence in Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray, in a fruitless attempt to escape his endlessly repeating day in Punxsutawney, tries over and over to kill himself. In this particular context, suicide is funny indeed. It’s only one of the many elements that makes Groundhog Day a classic film comedy and one of very few movies that succeeds in using suicide in a humorous way (and yet with a poignant touch).

Another:

I’m probably not the first to email the “Bruce’s Cry For Help” skit from Kids In The Hall, but in case you haven’t seen it, it’s a chuckle (2:00 is the one laugh-out-loud moment for me):

Another:

Oh my gosh, you can’t consider suicide humor with Joan Rivers, who began making jokes about her husband Edgar almost immediately after he took his own life. She has continued to so, and it was a theme of her roast.  Not too long ago, she made Terry Gross almost speechless with her comic references to it.

Update from a reader:

How can any discussion of joking about suicide not include “The End?” Burt Reynolds was at the height of his powers, and bearded:

by Brendan James

Dylan Matthews fact-checks the show’s portrayal of the meth game:

One of the most convincing critiques of the show I’ve read came from The New Inquiry’s Malcolm Harris, who argued that the show’s obsession with highly pure method — supposedly Walt’s calling card, and the thing that got Gus interested in buying his wares — doesn’t square with the real world, in which meth is almost always “stepped on,” or diluted. There isn’t a market for pure meth, not because it’s not better, but because of who’s buying meth. “It’s a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand,” Harris writes. “As Stringer Bell told D’Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, ‘When it’s good, they buy. When it’s bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make.’”

Even if that logic holds, there may still be reasons for Walt to make his meth as pure as possible. “When Walt measures the purity in the lab, he’s figuring out how much of the expensive and tightly controlled precursor chemicals became saleable product and how much went to waste,” Lindsay Beyerstein at In These Times has argued. “The purer Walt’s product, the more [distributors] can dilute it.” But that doesn’t explain why Walt’s meth on the street, when found by his DEA agent brother-in-law Hank and analyzed by the agency’s experts, is so much purer than other meth out there. Walt’s product would only make it to the street like that if there really was demand for purer meth.

Update from a reader:

Wasn’t this addressed in last night’s episode, albeit indirectly?

Local scrub dealer Declan is fine with substandard product, as he’s much closer to the end-user, both geographically and in terms of where he falls on the supply chain.  International meth empire mastermind Lydia, on the other hand, needs a purer product.  If you’re moving tons of meth halfway across the globe, you’re going to want the purest product you can have, as it allows for easier transport and lower risk.  I figured that Lydia’s issues with Declan’s substandard product stemmed directly from the fact that the product was meant to be cut upon arrival in Europe, not because Czech junkies are any more discerning than those of Albuquerque.

Previous fact-checking of the show here.

by Jessie Roberts

The Novelist is a video game with an unconventional objective:

[T]he player is tasked with guiding an author named Dan Kaplan and deciding how he will spend his days. There are no bullets or rocket launchers here: the core conflict revolves around Dan’s ability—or inability—to balance his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his son.

You, the player, don’t directly control Dan; instead you are a ghost who inhabits his house. You can watch, observe, and manipulate at your discretion. One day, you might direct Dan to sit and work on his novel, boosting his career at the cost of neglecting his wife and son. Another day you might have help out his wife at an art show, or take his kid to the beach. Every time you go down one branch, the other two could suffer.

The idea, designer Kent Hudson says, is to make us all think about how we approach our own major life decisions. “There’s no winning or losing,” Hudson told me during a lengthy phone chat a few weeks ago. “You play through and get a story that my hope—and this sounds so pretentious—but my hope is that as you’re presented with the same fundamental question in nine different ways over the course of the game, that you start to learn about your own values.”

(Hat tip: Page-Turner)

by Matt Sitman

Michael Lemonick profiles the work of archaeology professor James Adovasio, whose excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in western Pennsylvania helped upend our ideas about the peopling of North America:

A young archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh, he intended to use Meadowcroft to train students. But what he found here helped demolish his colleagues’ long-held ideas about the timing of humans’ first steps in the New World. Since the nineteen-thirties, the conventional wisdom had held that humans crossed over into North America from Siberia around thirteen thousand years ago, then spread over the next five hundred years through North and South America—wiping out mammoths, mastodons, and other large mammals as they went. This hypothesis became known as the “blitzkrieg model” of species extinction.

But Adovasio, now a professor at Mercyhurst University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, discovered evidence that humans had camped at Meadowcroft, under a protective rock overhang, sixteen thousand years ago—a few thousand years before the Siberian crossing.

Adovasio at least partly blames old-fashioned prejudices for the persistence of the theory he rejects:

In part, he attributes the longstanding acceptance of this implausible story to the fact that, until relatively recently, most archaeologists were men. “I mean, who but a male would think that the ancestors of modern Native Americans sprinted to South America and killed everything in their path?”

If the first immigrants did arrive much earlier, the ice-free corridor through the glaciers wouldn’t have been available. But there’s an alternate route: they could have travelled down the coast in boats. “The colonization of Australia occurred even earlier,” Adovasio said. “It’s, in my opinion, simple racism that we never recognized before that the earliest populations in the Americas were capable of building boats.”

Here’s a great little essay in defense of beards. I’ve made its core argument before, of course. But it’s worth making again:

The mystery of beards altogether is that it’s the growers of them who are questioned as to their motives. Given that a beard will happen of its own accord, shouldn’t it be those who interfere in the process that we ought to be interrogating? Not why do you grow, but why do you shave? I grow because I can’t bear the fag of shaving. Now you explain yourself. We will very quickly, I suspect, find vanity at the root of clean-shavenness, or if not vanity neurosis. All that work for what? To look like David Beckham who reputedly shaves every other inch of his person as well? And having shaved himself to resemble a muscular baby, gets someone else to draw on him with a needle. Tell me that’s not sick.

Esau, you will remember, was a hairy man. You will also remember that it was his brother Jacob, a smooth man, who soft-talked his way into Esau’s inheritance. The smooth do that. For all their hard-scraped air of transparent affability, it is they, not the bearded, who have something to hide.

Amen. Don Draper anyone? Richard Nixon – who fought against debilitating five o’clock shadow much of his life? You betcha. But Howard Jacobson also offers an affirmative beards-are-good argument as well:

It was said of me by my enemies when I first taught at a university that I grew a beard because D H Lawrence had one. Nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t like Lawrence’s beard. It was too sexuo-spiritual for my taste. There was too much intent and pedantry about it, and finished too far from his chin. You can always tell an erotic disciple-seeker’s beard: it doesn’t know when to stop. Had I wanted to model my beard on any novelist’s it would have been Joseph Conrad’s  – a melancholy, well-traveled, utterly unillusioned seaman’s beard. Or the one Henry James sported for a while –  the beard of a man who thought he hadn’t lived enough but was prepared to die trying. A beard should be accepting of human limitations, skeptical but sympathetic, and a little sad.

The beard is … Oakeshottian!

And scene.

(Photo: US actor George Clooney smiles as he arrives for the German Media Award in Baden-Baden, southern Germany, on February 26, 2013. Clooney is awarded for his humanitarian commitment. By Thomas KienzleAFP/Getty Images.)

Mark Oppenheimer complicates the discussion, arguing that being religious dampens creativity only if it “makes you less fun or irreverent”:

[T]he strictures of religion can paradoxically make you fruitful, but not if they are so strict or rigorous—so orthodox—that you become a pill. Not if you can’t take a joke, about your religion or about anything else. Not if you become so uptight that you can’t abide profanity, heresy, or apostasy.

If your religion prohibits you from using profane words, it might make you more creative, because you have to find fresher and better ways to say what you are trying to say, rather than falling back on hackneyed profanities. But if your religion has so straitjacketed your thought that you can’t even think profane thoughts, then of course it has made you less creative. One might almost say that a huge part of creativity involves lusting in your heart, then finding ways to make art of that lust; but if some brand of orthodox religiosity has worked you over too well, and you can’t even admit your heart-lust to yourself, then as an artist you are probably screwed.