October 2013 – Page 52

Canned Laughter Has Passed Its Expiration Date, Ctd

A reader sends the above video:

Someone hates “The Big Bang Theory” so much that they used this clip from Annie Hall and superimposed the image from the show onto the TV monitor.

Another reader:

There is a good point to be made here, but this article seems to use the term “laugh track” like it is solely some artificial thing added in post-production, rather than the fact that the shows mentioned are taped in front of a live, laughing audience. And the shows deemed less “reliant” on laugh tracks, aka single-camera shows, are actually not taped in front of an audience. So, yes, shows taped before an audience include the audio of the audience, and shows without audiences can’t and, therefore, don’t. Whether we need these cues anymore is something to ponder, but this lazy oversight kills any broader point.

Here is a site where you can get tickets to show tapings. Notice all the shows mentioned that add canned laughter in post-production are all taped before live audiences. All the others mentioned that don’t, aren’t taped with an audience.

Another:

I went to a friend’s sitcom taping a few weeks ago, actually next door to “Big Bang”. The audience was awful, and they’re reason sitcoms are as well. They have been conditioned by years of watching sitcoms to laugh at every line. Every single line. No matter what it is. The warmup guy told them in the beginning that it’s critical to laugh outwardly, but they would have done it anyway. Seeing these people truly belly-laugh at almost nothing was one of the weirdest things I’ve seen.

The Best Of The Dish Today

As I’ve watched today’s Republicans take the world to the brink of a serious economic collapse because of the pending apocalypse of a national version of Mitt Romney’s healthcare law, I find myself searching for the kind of sober conservatism I used to respect. So I give you … Winnie the Pooh, as explained by the late and great Henry Fairlie:

There are two sides in every Tory. In all that concerns his society he is unexcited, patient, and not inclined to do much. This is the Pooh in him. Pooh was a Tory … [H]e did not set much store by either plans or brains. In their place, he had wisdom. He knew the Forest was governed, season after season, by laws he did not understand. Left to himself, he would have done nothing. The Forest would be there when he woke up; even more assuring, he knew that it was there while he was asleep.

But he was not left to himself. Most of the other animals in the Forest were anxious and overexcited. Since Pooh was never excited – never – they came to him with their worries; and it was with considerable skepticism, but also with an understanding that they needed to be reassured that he went in search of the Woozle, and even of Eeyore’s tai …. The Tory knows that one should not meddle with society and that if anything goes wrong, it will not go wrong for very long or with much harm done … But surrounding Pooh were lots of agitated conservatives: Rabbit and Kanga, even Piglet, and especially Tigger. They were all afraid of the Forest. They were like liberals who had been mugged. Tigger was the most agitated. When he saw something unfamiliar, it sent him into a whorl of anxiety and a whirl of activity.

No Tory would ever come even close to forcing his own country to default on its debts. Ever. Just saying. And when these maniacs of crisis and brinksmanship tell you they are conservative, just understand that they are abusing that term to an extent that very few other Western conservatives would understand, let alone agree with.

Today, we surveyed the ups and downs of the careening crisis: the Republican revolt this morning; the threat of a one-man default; the economic damage already done; the unbelievably petty and vindictive new GOP demands; and the possibility of a GOP-Tea Party split.

It was such a tense day if you actually care about this country – which Washington doesn’t seem to – that we offered not one, not two, but three Mental Health Breaks; and a beard of such magnificence it almost robbed a British hack of words.

The most popular post of the day was This Is Where We Are, with more than 3,000 Facebook likes. The second was “The Sabotage Is Already Happening.”

See you in the morning.

(Photo: a scene from the Surrey/Sussex countryside where I grew up, at the bottom of my brother’s garden, which is just a short ride away from the original Hundred Acre Wood.)

The House Fails, Again

Boehner doesn’t have the votes. Barro is no longer surprised by the House GOP’s incompetence:

Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a President whose administration gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do? It would be a trainwreck, and “reasonable” Republicans like Nunes would still be on television saying they understand it’s a trainwreck, but by golly, operationally, they had no way to stop it.

There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power. A party that is this bad at tactics can’t be expected to be any good at policy-making.

It’s in the Senate’s hands now. God help us.

Who Supports The Shutdown?

Little jerks like this one:

Dan Amira explains:

One of the ripple effects of the White House shutdown is that Michelle Obama’s White House garden is now rotting away as the staff that typically picks its fruits and vegetables is barred from doing so. … To us humans, this is a depressing metaphor for America’s wasted potential. To the White House squirrels, however, it’s Valhalla.

Eddie Gehman Kohan reports from the scene:

Right now, the many squirrels who live at the White House seem to have gotten even more aggressive with the low level of human intervention. The squirrels are always a problem in the garden, eating the berry crop in the summer months. But they’re now kids in a candy store, gorging themselves.

(Photo by Flickr user Doug88888)

Face Of The Day

A woman protests in support of affirmative action outside the Supreme Court during the hearing of “Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action” on October 15, 2013. The case revolves around affirmative action and whether or not states have the right to ban schools from using race as a consideration in school admissions. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.

The Land Of Legal Weed

Sullum delves into Colorado’s cannabis legalization process:

Customers [of a pot shop] will not be able to buy alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis-free snacks or drinks, and they will not be allowed to consume marijuana on the premises. The latter rule apparently puts the kibosh on dreams of Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes sprouting on the streets of Denver and Fort Collins. But what if you buy marijuana in a pot shop and take it with you to a bar or restaurant? In an effort to forestall such BYOW arrangements, legislators added marijuana to Colorado’s Clean Indoor Air Act, which bans smoking in bars and restaurants. But as amended, the law applies only to “combustible marijuana” and “marijuana smoke,” leaving open the possibility that bars and restaurants could allow patrons to use vaporizers or consume cannabis-infused foods purchased elsewhere.

Mental Health Break III

If the Lonely Island had beards and lived in Brooklyn:

From The Annals Of Chutzpah

“It’s time to put the partisan bickering aside and fund the vital services we all support, maintain our credit rating, and continue the debate about the damage Obamacare is doing to the economy. Sen. Cruz has fully supported individual measures to fund essential government services and to take responsible action to reduce our debt. The President and all members of Congress should send an unmistakable signal that the United States will not default on its debt. We should not put our credit ratings in jeopardy over our political disputes,” – Catherine Frazier, press secretary for Senator Ted Cruz.

Stop Working So Hard

Putting in overtime is a productivity-killer:

If you still need convincing that long hours destroy wealth, look at 2012 OECD figures. The country with the longest hours was Greece, followed by Hungary and Poland – and they ranked 26th, 33rd, and 34th out of 34 countries in terms of productivity. By contrast, the countries working the fewest hours were the Netherlands, Germany and Norway, which rank fifth, seventh and second, respectively, for productivity. Overall, the more hours worked, the poorer the productivity and wealth creation.

Previous Dish on working hours here, here, and here.

Map Of The Day

Rebecca J. Rosen passes along the above map, which resizes countries to reflect their online populations:

The map, created as part of the Information Geographies project at the Oxford Internet Institute, has two layers of information: the absolute size of the online population by country (rendered in geographical space) and the percent of the overall population that represents (rendered by color). Thus, Canada, with a relatively small number of people takes up little space, but is colored dark red, because more than 80 percent of people are online. China, by contrast, is huge, with more than half a billion people online, but relatively lightly shaded, since more than half the population is not online. Lightly colored countries that have large populations, such as China, India, and Indonesia, are where the Internet will grow the most in the years ahead. (The data come from the World Bank’s 2011 report, which defines Internet users as “people with access to the worldwide network.”)