Chart Music

[Hot Pepsi]

The four characters in Seinfeld are fucking awful. Jerry seinfeld is not a plausible professional comedian. he's just a cunt with a mullet and white socks. There's obviously clever things going on in the background and it's been very important to comedy writers who came afterwards but seinfeld looks like pong, beside curb your enthusiasm's GTA V

This is madness.

Seinfeld is brilliant.
I never got into Curb your Enthusiasm (I haven't tried hard, mind), because the jokes seemed to be about how Larry is an asshole. That was never really the case with Seinfeld, I thought. Yes they were assholes, but it was a whole world of assholes, and they were assholeish about petty stuff, not big stuff. The jokes were relate-able because we all have those voices of selfishness and laziness in us.

I was never too into Roseanne, but when I did see it, it often had good bits. John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf are just so good.

Cheers had its moments. Lots of them, in fact. Especially one-liners.
But mostly it was just enjoyable to watch a bunch of losers turn themselves into a family. Like the bar on the show, it was just a comfortable place to visit on a Thursday night.
I "got it" a lot more years after it went off the air and I lived in Boston and worked and spent a lot of time in bars.

This was back in the day when we'd all watch TV together, either as a family or with friends or later in the dorms in college. And you had to watch it when it was on. I don't know if Cheers, for example would work as well "binging" or watching bits and pieces onlne.


I never really got into Frazier. The whole Niles-Daphne shit was really tedious.


Wayne's World, like Beavis & Butthead, is also brilliant. It's brilliant because it's dumb and simple. And because the characters are played by 40 year olds. Perhaps you have to have grown up in suburbia listening to shitty classic rock radio to get it. And it was the first thing to really show the comedy potential of Rob Lowe.
I still find myself quoting it a lot. Like when I was in Piccadilly Circus. "What a shitty circus." C'mon, that's gold.

Britons just don't seem to get "dumb humor." I bet you all don't like Animal House or Caddyshack either. And yet, as far as I know, we get most of your humor. So we win. (this might not be true. For example, I've never seen a Carry On film).

But, of course, making that kind of dumb humor work does seem to be a razor's edge, as Mike Myers found out. Each Austin Powers had some good bits, but each was worse than the one before. The jokes about shit and farts were just gross. It's a fine line. And then he made that "Guru" movie that, although I didn't see, is supposed to be awful. Even he says so. And he hasn't had regular work doing comedies since then.

[Hot Pepsi]

Barre chords. It's just a matter of practice, really, but if it helps try rolling your finger outwards so it makes a shallow C shape across the fingerboard. This should give you enough pressure to fret the notes but leave your other digits free for fingering (oo-er).

Either that, or fuck it off and just use power chords. ROCK!

Thanks. I may follow-up with you.
I wish i had more time to practice. I also don't currently own an electric. But I'd like to. Now that I have a house and can be loud, it would be fun.

[Hot Pepsi]

That reason being, of course, that they're fucking brilliant.

Oh dear.
The Ayn Rand shit? C'mon.
It was mostly the tedious mansplaining about how awesome Neil Peart is that I couldn't abide. Yeah, he's skilled, but I don't need to hear about it.

I do like Tom Sawyer. It's a good song to play during breaks in play in a hockey game.

[Gerontophile]

I bet you all don't like Animal House

No such person exists.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Oh dear.
The Ayn Rand shit? C'mon.
It was mostly the tedious mansplaining about how awesome Neil Peart is that I couldn't abide. Yeah, he's skilled, but I don't need to hear about it.

I do like Tom Sawyer. It's a good song to play during breaks in play in a hockey game.

The Ayn Rand shit Peart has - at presumably tedious length - explained as the thought processes of a kid who didn't know any better.

[Hot Pepsi]

That's reassuring, I suppose.

[Hot Pepsi]

No such person exists.

Somebody on here once said they thought it was dumb and not funny. Forget who.

[Gerontophile]

Then they must be shunned.

[Lang Spoon]

Hot Rod and a couple of Lonely Island tracks are stone genius in my book. Trailer Park Boys, Eastbound and Down, Step Brothers, the Rameses Colossus that is The Other Guys. (Parts of) Airplane! Still made me laugh when I saw it last year. I don’t mind good dumb humour at all.

Bill and Ted 2 pisses all over Wayne’s World though. Fuckin mugging Myers man. Like a Canuck Comic Robbie Williams, so full of fairly unjustified and unhidden in every performance self-love. Some of the Beavis and Butthead sketches were good. And if you didn’t have MTV it was the only time you were going to see videos like Whale or some slightly interesting slightly Alternative American stuff on terrestrial after they cancelled Snub TV(?).

[Lang Spoon]

Niles and Daphne worked when she didn’t know, or was pretending not to know. But that got stretched thin after the first five or six seasons. Fucking ruined when they got together. Those Fuckin Accents man. Her Manc accent is piss enough, then you bring in an Aussie playing cockney as her brother? And the piss annoying Ma. All kinds of shark jumping. Far better when Niles was being attacked by a cockatoo while preening to some Committee of Nobs.

[Hot Pepsi]

Hot Rod and a couple of Lonely Island tracks are stone genius in my book. Trailer Park Boys, Eastbound and Down, Step Brothers, the Rameses Colossus that is The Other Guys. (Parts of) Airplane! Still made me laugh when I saw it last year. I don’t mind good dumb humour at all.

Bill and Ted 2 pisses all over Wayne’s World though. Fuckin mugging Myers man. Like a Canuck Comic Robbie Williams, so full of fairly unjustified and unhidden in every performance self-love. Some of the Beavis and Butthead sketches were good. And if you didn’t have MTV it was the only time you were going to see videos like Whale or some slightly interesting slightly Alternative American stuff on terrestrial after they cancelled Snub TV(?).

Bill & Ted's (both) are underrated and better than Wayne's World, that's true.

[Lang Spoon]

Bill and Ted 2 was really good because it was stupid as fuck but didn’t treat the viewer like an idiot (I’m not that keen on the first but). So you’d have a tonne of movie pastiches that are still funny even if 80+ percent of the audience don’t get the reference. The Seventh Seal death playing chess/Battleships/Twister scene is a perfect example. I was just the kind of 16 year old cunt to get the reference, but of course had never sat through the whole film. So I could elevate Bill n Ted into some proto-Meta experience, rather than admitting I’d gone to the pictures for cheap laffs.

Shit, that throwing around Big Serious authors, stealing Bergman’s cinematographer, creepy fuck Woody Allen’s whole schtick is High School dilettante, two terms at NYU literally Sophomoric shit. A prop for the chicks and the narcissistic solipsism.

There’s more intellectual purity (and more laffs) fuckin Bob’s Burgers than Woody. A long long sleazebaggy time since Bananas.

[Lang Spoon]

I mean, Shadows and Fog. FFS. And Madonna was in that, to compound the Shitnami.

[Hot Pepsi]

The first B&T has this classic
https://g.co/kgs/ETtZTs

There’s going to be a third, supposedly

[Lang Spoon]

Oh good god. New actor reboot or middle aged adventures?

[Lang Spoon]

Leave us alone before we drown in trash nostalgia.

[Hot Pepsi]

Middle-aged, I think

[Gawpus]

For example, I've never seen a Carry On film.

Don't. They're shit.

[Gerontophile]

Don't. They're shit.

I liked Screaming and Khyber. Aside from that, you may well be correct.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Don't. They're shit.

Oh, behave.

[Gawpus]

Oh, behave.

Genuinely the first Carry On-related laugh I've had. [smiley sure why not]

[Wouter D]

Beavis and Butthead is brilliant.

[Jon]

Have only heard the first bit with Melody Maker reminiscences aplenty. I've often thought I'd backed the wrong horse, reading the NME as I did from about 1987 - 1996. I think I read both for a while in 1987 and then decided to choose a side and the NME won out. I stuck doggedly with the NME for the best part of a decade and only got to read and hear about Melody Maker journalists when I joined OTF. (Although I do remember reading the collection of essays by Melody Maker journalists, Unknown Pleasures, in the mid 90s and being really struck with how good it was.)

However, I might be vindicated somewhat as the gist I got from the podcast was that the NME was pretty decent in the mid 80s and the Maker didn't hit its stride until a bit later and by that time I was a creature of habit and not to be swayed from my weekly NME fix. Sorry Pricey et al.

[G-Man]

When I came to London in 1984, my choice was Melody Maker. Their humour was better. When In left Britain three years later, I couldn't get Melody Maker and switched to NME, which was OK. But that meant that I missed out on the era during which OTF's future MM alumni society were active, which is a pity.

[ad hoc]

I was NME (in the mid eighties probably around 83-87), and I don't regret that at all. I looked at MM a few times, but back then I have no doubt that NME was the better paper. The writers were much better (Charles Shaar Murray, Paul du Noyer, Stephen Wells, Barney Hoskyns, etc.) and the editorial direction was more up my street. I would have loved to have read the MM in that period when people like wingco, Taylor, and SP were writing for it, but by then I'd left the country, and I didn't have access to music papers anyway.