Some time last year, you may have had the unfortunate pleasure of being asked to watch that video on YouTube where the lady who looks like one of your mom’s friends stands on a stage in a big auditorium and sings the “William Tell Overture” with all these funny lyrics about being a mom.  If you were like me, you instantly got the feeling this lady was a Christian and that she was onstage at some kind of convention of Christian women.  The jokes were tired and cliched, but the audience loved it.  I didn’t.  But then, I was not the intended audience. 

The William Tell Mom, as she is sometimes identified on YouTube, is named Anita Renfroe. She is 45 and lives in suburban Atlanta with her husband, John, a Southern Baptist minister […] Last Mother’s Day, at the urging of her kids, she posted on YouTube the film clip of her performance at the Dozier Center for the Performing Arts in Kennesaw, Ga., and promptly forgot about it.

By October, 8 million people had seen it.  She’s been on Good Morning, America.  She’s been featured on iTunes.  “After that, Renfroe was fending off offers like a Hollywood starlet.”  And in case you think this lady is something small, she’s big enough for the New York Times Magazine to do a feature on her.  That’s a big deal for a “Christian comedienne,” although it testifies as much to her popularity as to the Times’ wonderment that this is news. 

Christian comedians are in the same category as Christian novelists or Christian painters, which is to say, artists aiming themselves at a very small demographic with a very specific purpose.  This puts limits on the craft, but can mean large chunks of market share.  The article says that her success and the atmosphere of her appearances (at Christian women’s conferences) owes “as much to Oprah as to Joel Osteen.”  I’m not sure either comparison is a compliment, but the lady is a hit.

To remind you, Stuart Smalley is running for the U.S. Senate.  I mean Al Franken.

(more…)

Regarding the writers’ strike, Slate thinks The Daily Show is a terrific case study in just how bad the strike is going to be and to get: “While a Grey’s Anatomy rerun is a bummer only if you’ve already seen that episode, a Daily Show rerun is the television equivalent of a day-old newspaper. It’s birdcage liner.” 

But fear not!  “A five-year-old episode of The Daily Show, on the other hand, is pure gold […]”  I used think all comedy was liable to spoil, like milk, after a while (why classical Greek comedy is no longer very funny, for example), but this article has me thinking otherwise.  Thank you, internet.

You can’t say bomb on a plane, and you can’t make fun of minorities on television.  Well, one of those taboos is being broken just about every night.     

(more…)

I think conservatives like Stephen Colbert because, well, for the same reason conservatives like Ignatius Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces.  While both Colbert and Reilly seem to be lampooning conservatism with their satire of it, they’re actually revealing what’s good about it, and what’s bad about the other.  When Colbert, on his show, offers a “tribute to the ladies” by inviting Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem on the show to bake apple pies, he’s not just saying something about sexism.  He’s saying something about the paradox of feminism, too. 

But what’s Colbert really like? 

(more…)

According to many, the novel and the short story are relatively dead, for many, many reasons.  For one, novels are long and boring and don’t have as many explosions.  And those are the bad novels about attorneys and spies.  For another, short stories are short, but even more boring.  But my general claim is that fiction is in the dumps because fiction isn’t fun like it used to be.  Somewhere after Cervantes, novelists forgot that it was okay to be funny. 

(more…)

People laugh at shows like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm because Larry David knows something about people and morality.  Comedy is the most moral of literary forms, after all.  And Larry David knows that there’s a Right Way to Behave and a Wrong Way to Behave, and comedy happens when people choose the latter on accident and on purpose.  We laugh because we’re all depraved, and we all do it, and it’s nice to laugh.  It turns out that the benefits of watching Larry David’s comedy go beyond just laughter, though.  Schizophrenic patients, it turns out, identify quite well with Mr. David.  A psychology student, David Roberts, found this out by accident.

(more…)