Let’s crack open a bottle of Gnarly Head Cab and upload a couple of posts!

Have you seen Comedy Shop? It’s hosted by Norm Crosby. It pops up on Sunday nights on TWO stations around here! KGNG (or “King Kong Broadcasting!”) is Channel 47 here in Las Vegas. They spray EIGHT subchannels of quirky television from a transmitter high atop Black Mountain, over in Henderson.

KGNG runs back-to-back half-hour episodes of Comedy Shop on channel 47.4 (RTVNET) and 47.6 (MYFAMILY) every Sunday night from 6 to 7 PM. Our sorry-ass antenna picks them both up.

We don’t have cable. We don’t have time to watch that much television. (Honest! We are usually skeptical of anti-TV types… their excuses for not having/watching a television usually ring hollow or are calculated to somehow get across the message that they are superior and those who wallow in the glow of the “idiot box” are giving into baser instincts. We don’t play that. We’ve considered subscribing to cable or satellite or some other sort of paid television service. For a while, we had Netflix– but we weren’t even able to consume enough of their service to make it worth even that paltry fee! We analogize our decision thusly: It would be like buying ten loaves of bread per month and only eating two or three slices out of each loaf.)

Comedy Shop is variously described, depending on which website you go to, as having started in 1978 or 1979. They all agree that it died in 1981. Just in time for the explosion of comedy! (Perhaps Comedy Shop was some sort of cultural blasting cap.)

We each have our various excuses for missing the show on its first go-round. But we must say that it’s fascinating viewing this time around!

Last night, while preparing to go see Don Rickles at the Orleans Showroom, we ping-ponged back and forth between 47.4 and 47.6 to catch a wild variety of comedians and sample a slice of late-70s, pre-boom comedy.

Slappy White, Lenny Schultz, Shelley Berman, Dave Tyree, Murray Langston, Jimmy Aleck, Ed Bluestone, Bowser… and that was only in the space of about 20 minutes. We note that Buddy Hackett also made an appearance. And, of course, the proceedings were hosted by Crosby.

At times, on certain episodes, it seems as though the show is taped in an empty studio with bizarre, grainy 70s-style audience pan-shots shoehorned in to make it look good. (Lots of flamboyant hair, lots of plaid, some vests, some really horrendous Italian designer-framed glasses.) Some episodes clearly were taped in front of a studio audience– as evidenced by some folks yelling, “Go crazy, Lenny!” to Lenny Schultz during his set.

of all the comedians we watched last night, we would have to say that Ed Bluestone’s set was the funniest and the set that would hold up today, some 31 years later. Slappy White’s set was pretty solid, too. And he lit up a cigarette! Hey, FCC: KGNG just called and said, “Come get me, bitches!” We’re not sure where Bluestone is these days, as there is scant evidence of him online. He seems to have contributed to National Lampoon a lot in their glory days, but past that, he’s not showing up.

We’ve seen Freddy Roman, Wil Shriner and others on previous episodes. It will be appointment television around here for a while. Or we might just check them all out, serially, on Amazon.com! (It’s available on Netflix and on Amazon.com. We assume that our newly-purchased Amazon Prime membership will entitle us to call them up and watch them for free whenever we have the time and inclination. Right now, though, we’re in the middle of watching all eight seasons of Red Dwarf! Amazon Prime, BTW, is a delightful alternative to Netflix. And you get free Amazon shipping for a year!)

Watching Comedy Shop is like cracking open a time capsule. It’s a fascinating look into the American Standup Comedy World just seconds before the BOOM. You can see just who were the go-to comics in the standup cosmosphere in the waning days of the 70s, just before cable and other cultural forces combined to make standup a phenomenon. The old-school guys from the 50s and 50s and 60s appeared alongside some of the up-and-comers who were slugging it out in the newer showcase clubs in NYC and LA at the time. It’s like scanning the Billboard Hot 100 just before the Beatles toured America for the first time.

Seek it out!

Comedian Drew Hastings has decisively won election to mayor of Hillsboro, OH.

With Hillsboro reporting complete, unofficial results, Drew Hastings had 773 votes to 440 for John Levo, a retired banker and former city councilman.
The 57-year-old Hastings moved from Los Angeles to the community 50 miles east of Cincinnati six years ago, buying a cattle farm. He became increasingly involved in the city of 6,600 residents, buying and renovating several downtown buildings.

Congratulations to Hastings, who starts a four-year term in January.

The comedian, who identifies as a libertarian, has been the subject of many an article in the MSM since he announced his intentions to be mayor. The Republic of Columbus, IN, said, “He at times had to fend off criticism of his adult-oriented humor and questions about his motives, such as whether he was seeking publicity for himself or gathering material for new comedy routines.” A piece of cake for a comedian– we’re always having our motives questioned, are we not?

Fans of Hastings (and democracy) can follow his exploits on HillsboroOhio.net.

So, the editors of a French satire mag called Charlie Hebdo were planning to put out an issue that was “guest-edited by Muhammed.”  And the front cover would have depicted the prophet with a speech balloon that contained the words “100 coups de fouet, si vous n’etes pas morts de rire,” which translated to English means “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.”

We say “were planning” and “would have” because someone– no one knows who– firebombed the publication’s offices and destroyed everything inside.

And for good measure, they hacked into the mag’s website and posted, “You keep abusing Islam’s almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech. Be God’s curse upon you!”

Ha!  Don’t you love that?  ”Freedom of speech” is an “excuse!”

Well, predictably, the outrage has been swift and universal.

Er… except for one dude at some obscure magazine named “TIME.”  (Remember TIME?  It’s still around, still publishing.  Someone must still be reading it.)

Bruce Crumley, TIME’s Paris bureau chief, maintains on his TIME blog that Charlie Hebdo is “no free speech martyr,” then says:

Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile. Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response– however illegitimate– is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.

Charlie Hebdo, the file’s URL informs us, “is a victim of its own obnoxious islamaphobia.”

The paper’s satire is characterized as “antics” which are “futile and childish.” Not only that, but “they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists” that occurred this week.

Can you imagine Crumley and other like-minded individuals being so eager to excuse violent behavior from any other group?

We’re defending Charlie Hebdo’s satire even though we haven’t read it… and we can’t understand French even if we had read it.

And folks like Crumley are condemning it without having read it.  This doesn’t stop him from calling Charlie Hebdo’s parody “idiotic,” “stupid and totally unnecessary” and “offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient.”  (All words which can handily describe Crumley and his commentary!)

The BBC ran an interesting piece on the French satire mag’s lineage and ancestors and sought to place Charlie Hebdo in the context of that country’s history.

Drawing on France’s strong tradition of bandes dessinees [comic strips], cartoons and caricatures are Charlie-Hebdo’s defining feature. Over the years, it has printed examples which make today’s representations of Muhammad look like illustrations from a children’s book.

Police would be shown holding the dripping heads of immigrants; there would be masturbating nuns; popes wearing condoms– anything to make a point.

So today when the paper’s staff say there is nothing unusually provocative about the Charia Hebdo issue– with its front-page cartoon of ‘guest-editor’ Muhammad– they are being perfectly truthful.

The only difference is their choice of target.

And in this case, the target decided to respond using some bottles, a few rags and a liter or two of “petrol.”

And some folks are all right with that.

That would be Big Al himself, on the right. (We assume he’s “Big Al.” We also assume that’s short for “Big Alligator.” Perhaps we assume too much.) Al is in keeping with the mardi gras theme of the Orleans. New Orleans is one of those rare places where one can both eat and be eaten by an alligator. Or so we are constantly reminded.

The marquee is giant. And employs both an electronic screen and elaborate, kinetic neon. Neon is getting rarer and rarer in this town and that’s a pity. The Orleans sign towers perhaps 50 or 60 feet over Tropicana Avenue. It is a marvelous throwback to the pre-Wynn era, before multi-colored neon gave way to computer-controlled LED’s.

We hit the Big Al’s open mike last night because it occurred to us that we hadn’t once set foot on the stage that would be our home for the next four weekends (with the exception of a brief photo shoot a few weeks ago– see below).

We’re excited about “Mr. and Mrs. Comedy!”  (And that label is a choice that we made.  It’s not pretentious in the least.  It’s… ironic!   Kinda.  Old-school, maybe.  Vegas-y, perhaps.  No other comedy couple has laid claim to the title.  And no other comedy couple has written a book about comedy.  Or written about standup in a high-profile way for more than a decade.  Besides, if you stand in the Orleans parking lot long enough, the slide touting our engagement is replaced by one that displays Don Rickles, who is known as “Mr. Warmth.”  Folks get sarcasm and irony around here.  Or they don’t.  That’s the beauty of Vegas.  Either folks enjoy the entertainment in a literal way or, if they choose, in an ironic way.  We suppose it depends on where you’re coming from– literally and figuratively!  Oddly, the folks who most often seem to fail to grasp that are in the entertainment media.)

Big Al seems to be conducting a hold-up using a microphone as a fake gun. The Female Half seems genuinely startled.  ”Don’t tase me, Bro!”

Entertainment Weekly, whose website has the unfortunate name of EW.com, published a bit of fluff in the guise of a blog post called “Poll: Who’s your favorite stand-up comic of all time?” by Aly Semigran.

As any entertainer will attest, making someone laugh is always harder than making someone cry. It takes an entirely different skill set and taps into an entirely different, and arguably, more complicated psyche….

Then again, having to choose your favorite stand-up comic of all-time might be just as difficult a task.

Some choices are then laid out (tough choices, it says!) and a few clips are offered to get the brain thinking of standup comedy. Then the readers are invited to submit their fave. It’s an attempt to get some of that interactivity going between EW and its readers.

It’s always good to see comics getting their due. Not a harsh word in the entire piece. And the various modes of comedy are actually presented as (possibly) equivalent! And that comedy might be subjective!

It got us to thinking about our “Comic of the Millennium” poll from late 1999 (the first year for SHECKYmagazine.com) We, too, wanted to create some of that sweet interactivity and we got some interesting commentary from our readers. The winners of the poll in order:

• 1. Richard Pryor
• 2. George Carlin
• 3. Lenny Bruce
• 4. Bill Cosby
• 5. Henny Youngman
• 6. Jerry Seinfeld
• 7. Milton Berle
• 8. Steven Wright
• 9. George Burns
• 10. Shecky Greene

Fascinating.

We also ran some reader comments in which folks nominated such comics as Sam Kinison, Woody Allen, Chris Rock and Lord Buckley. We even received a lengthy argument for Mark Twain as COTM, from none other than A. Whitney Brown (who also nominated Shakespeare and Herodotus)!

We got to thinking about who would make the list if we were to conduct a similar poll in 2011, 12 years later. And we theorize that at least half of 1999′s top ten wouldn’t make it onto the 2011 list. We can’t imagine that our present-day readers– far greater in number than we had back then– would vote in such a way as to place Berle, Youngman, Burns or, sadly, Shecky Greene in the top ten. Indeed, they might even leave out Wright or Seinfeld.

This isn’t so much indicative of a change in the size of our readership or demographics as much as it is indicative of a vast change in the standup landscape over the past decade-plus. In a relatively short time, the standup business has matured and mushroomed and given birth to a couple dozen comedy “stars” that seem to have captured the fancy of a significant numbers of fans and comedians.

Or we could be completely wrong.

There’s an article behind the NYT paywall that details the mild conflict between folks who want to name a hunk of a street in Morningside Heights after George Carlin and the folks who think it would be a bad thing.

“‘Carlin St.’ Resisted by His Old Church.  Was It Something He Said?” is the headline.  And the answer, of course, is, “Yes.”

We’re not sure why anyone is surprised that the Corpus Christi School (Carlin’s grade school on 121st St.) would oppose such an honor.  And we’re not sure why anyone would see this opposition not as vindictive but as entirely logical and consistent.

Carlin’s 1972 album “Class Clown,” as the parish pastor Rev. Raymond Rafferty says, “made mockery of Corpus Christi parish and its priests.”

So why would Carlin and his admirers expect the nearby church to roll over and except such an honor in their backyard, even four decades later?  Indeed, in light of Carlin’s much later (and much more vitriolic) outright condemnation of the Catholic Church (and of religion in general), why would they expect the church to suddenly look fondly on Carlin?  It might be argued that his initial musings on his youth and his Catholic education were “just jokes,” but much of his later speaking and writing on the subject of religion quite often fell afoul of that definition.

We’re also puzzled as to why anyone would think that Carlin would like the idea.  It’s the second article that the Times has done on the alleged controversy. There seems to be weak sentiments on both sides. The quotes in the article and the comments that follow it aren’t particularly passionate. And the petition itself has garnered only 2,800 signatures as of early last month. Perhaps the comment from “Mark Ryan” of Long Island put it right when he said, “No, Carlin wouldn’t like the idea of a street being named for him, but it’s not for him, it’s for us.”

There is every chance that that, had it been re-named while Carlin was still alive, he might consider it the highlight of his life. But perhaps not. We’re not going to engage in what Hitchens might call “ghoulish ventriloquism” either way.

But we do wonder why someone who engaged in such controversial (and often purposefully contentious) rhetoric would expect his targets to forgive and forget. Wouldn’t such a capitulation signal that Carlin was wrong? Or perhaps ineffective? And were the church to embrace Carlin– and were Carlin to accept their forgiveness– wouldn’t that mean that both parties were mistaken? Why would “one of the most prolific minds of a lifetime” wish to be controversial in life, but not controversial in death?

When we first start doing standup, we do impolite things, we talk about sex and death and we insult the powerful and the powerless. We do so because… we don’t care about the vast majority of social conventions. The minute we say “fuck” onstage, we pretty much kiss a career in politics goodbye. We relegate ourselves to a substrata of society that really can’t (and often shouldn’t) be taken seriously. At least that’s the way it was in the past. We were outlaws, outcasts, folks who, with rare exceptions (Al Franken?), don’t aspire to power or pine for conventional accolades, nor do we care about such niceties as having streets named after us.

Recently, though, we notice a passive-aggressive attitude on behalf of comics who wish to be taken seriously and who wish to simultaneously take a dump on society and be accepted, even venerated, by that same society. They want to have their cake and eat it too. It’s curious and just a little tiny bit embarrassing.

Sure, we want respect. But we don’t want anyone naming a charter school after us.

There are comedians who do. Bill Cosby would probably welcome such an honor. But Cosby has made a living staying on the sweet, straight and narrow side of the street. And, for the most part, his public life has been exemplary.

But it seems incongruous that any edgy/controversial comics would want or need such validation.

And it’s asking too much of the targets of said comics to sit on their hands while their fellow citizens heap praise upon them and advocate for permanent tributes to them.

We’re not particularly interested in defending the church here, but we do concede that they do have a point. And perhaps, as was said above, “it’s for us.” Some of “us” being the folks who would like to honor Carlin and others who merely wish to stick a thumb in the eye of Corpus Christi Church.

We’re guessing that a compromise will be reached. A statue? (Probably not, too costly.) A plaque on the building where Carlin was raised? A historical marker? That sounds more likely.

H/T to FOS Terry Reilly!

Video contests are in the air. We got two emails soliciting emails for contests. And there’s cash prizes if your video is chosen. And contest organizers thought our readers were logical places to go for contestants.

The first one is from the folks who promote recycling through America Recycles Day. “So help us show that “recycling is no joke” by participating in the first-ever America Recycles Day (ARD) video contest, open to contestants of all ages. You’ll be eligible to win $1,000 if you make the judges (and the public) laugh.” The details:

The video contest runs through the extended deadline of October 28, 2011. Submissions can be anything ranging from a one-liner, to a comic strip or skit about recycling, but the video must show recycling in a positive, humorous manner. The video needs to be uploaded to the ARD YouTube page by October. 28, 2011, as a response to a short video that explains the competition. The ARD Video Committee will vote on the top 10 winners and upload them to a YouTube playlist on our ARD page by November. 8, 2011. During the following week, the public will pick the winning videos by clicking the “like” button associated with their favorite video. Voting ends on America Recycles Day. Full rules found here.

Extended deadline? You know what that means (probably)– not that many folks entered… and you know what that means– a better chance of winning!

The other contest involves “a group of leading national advertisers whose goal is to provide consumers with entertainment options the entire family can watch.” They’re called Alliance for Family Entertainment and they’re looking for a family-friendly script.

I’m reaching out to you on behalf of the ANA Alliance for Family Entertainment (AFE) to let you know about a new national writing contest to find the next great story featuring the modern family. From October 5th – 28th, aspiring writers can submit an original half-hour comedy format script into the Search for America’s Newest Comedy Writer Contest for the opportunity to win $5,000.00 and receive creative guidance and direct input from American film and television producer, John Wells, best known for his role as executive producer of the television series ER, Third Watch and The West Wing among others.

I know a lot of talented comics read your site and you probably know of a few folks who may be sitting on a winning screenplay. If so, we’d appreciate any help you can provide in getting the word out about the opportunity, through your site, Facebook page or Twitter handle – submissions are currently being accepted at www.comedywritercontest.com

Make us proud, readers.

This is fun! We’ve gotten a grand total of four customer reviews on the Amazon.com site. The first two were lovely, five-star assessments of the book. We didn’t talk about those publicly. That’s not our style. We brag only on rare occasions. We let the upward thumbs speak for themselves.

The fun part comes when the negative reviews come in!

We know– we said we were probably not going to trash every bad review we got… but we left ourselves an out! (“We aren’t going to fisk every review of the book…”) And this one is so delicious that we couldn’t pass it up! Herewith, agnew.peter’s review of “The Comedy Bible: The Complete Resource for Aspiring Comedians” in its entirety:

Anybody could write a book like this and, contrary to the title – it will not help the aspiring comedian in the slightest. Please – if you are considering a career in comedy – spend your money on Judy Carter’s bible – a robust and legitimate piece of work. ….unless of course you need to read drivel like: “Punch Line: Position this at the end of your joke.”

This is probably the worst book I have ever purchased. The (cruel) joke is on me! and anyone else foolish enough to purchase this so-called book.

“Anybody could write a book like this?” Yipe! We’ll listen to legitimate criticism, but that’s just childish.

And we don’t think it’s catty to say that agnew.peter– were he commissioned to write a book like this– would have a rough time of it. After all, he refers to our book as “this so-called book.” Uh… the last time we checked, it had pages, words and a cover. No one would dispute that it’s a book. (And anyone who uses this tired rhetorical gesture has some cajones writing such a harsh review.)

Agnew.peter says our book, “will not help the aspiring comedian in the slightest,” and his main complaint seems to be that we offer “drivel”– or information that is so basic as to be useless. We suspect that agnew.peter hasn’t hung around an open mike lately. Or conducted a comedy seminar for aspiring comedians. These are things that we’ve been doing for 25 years.

Folks who aspire to do standup– or who aspire to give their nascent career a kick in the pants– quite often have gaping holes in their knowledge of standup. We are often aghast at some of the questions that up-and-coming comedians ask us. (Of course, we quickly suppress our horror and patiently attempt to answer any and all questions, for we recall all too vividly that time when we knew NOTHING about standup.)

Agnew.peter makes the very basic mistake of not remembering. It’s like not failing to recall that time when you possessed absolutely none of the skills necessary to drive a car. The first time behind the wheel is intimidating. The prospect of piloting 2,000 lbs. of steel and glass seems near impossible. Fast-forward a few months and you’re cruising down the street, steering with one index finger and trying to tune in your favorite station. After a decade or three, you can only recall those initial, sweaty driving attempts with great effort.

But we remember. That’s why we offer advice like “Put the punchline at the end of the joke,” we’re speaking to someone who hasn’t the faintest notion of how to approach the art of joke-telling. There are probably novices who have been performing at open mikes for months or years who haven’t figured out that the reason they aren’t getting a laugh (or the laugh that they might) is because they’ve consistently failed to put the punchline at the end of the joke. It is for them that we’ve included such “drivel.”

As for agnew.peter’s advice to purchase a book by a rival author instead of ours, we say, “Buy them both!” You’ll get free shipping and you’ll be out a total of $26.51! In spite of the claims made by their respective titles (“Ultimate” and “Complete”), neither book is comprehensive, so buying and reading both would probably make for a better-informed (and not that much broker) student of comedy.

We’re surprised by the emotion contained in the title of the review– “Utter garbage– How to write a scam book”– but we understand how passionate people can get about comedy. And we understand just how excited people get when they’re granted the “privilege” of reviewing someone else’s work.

As for calling our book a “scam,” we would say that calling our book a “dishonest scheme” or a “fraud” (both basic definitions of the word “scam”) overstates things and strains credulity. (Ask anyone who’s been ripped off by Bernie Madoff if buying our book– for the grand total of $15.63– is anywhere close to being a scam.)

We may sound defensive, but we’re not. We’re slightly befuddled that someone could read a 45,000-word book and fixate on one, short tidbit in order to condemn the entire work. There’s a lot of handy, interesting information in the book and it’s fairly wide-ranging. And, like we’ve already said, we didn’t choose the title… or the sub-title.

And, just as it might behoove a 40-year driver to take a refresher course in driving, it might be a good idea for a professional comic to browse through a book like ours to recall long-dormant fears, read a new take on hecklers or maybe pick up some new knowledge that puts our profession in an historical context.

When turned in the final chapter, we said privately that folks are either going to either love it or hate it. Force of habit, we suppose– folks have either loved SHECKYmagazine.com or hated it and folks have either loved our standup or hated it. And that’s pretty much how it’s breaking down with the book. Five-stars followed by one-star.

We suppose that it’s not such a bad thing that one’s work should evoke such extremes. Perhaps it’s an indication that we’re doing something right.

Being on the road isn’t the ordeal it used to be. With email, internet access, smart phones, Kinko’s, fax machines (Remember them? We’ve actually been required to fax something in the past year!), digital cameras and Flip cams, the miles between where you are and where you live don’t matter as much as they once did. Once in a while, however, even with all the technology, a jam occurs.

We were staying at the Nassau Inn in Wildwood Crest, NJ, last week, laying low between engagements here on the east coast, when we got an email from Vegas saying that the pics we had provided to the folks at the Orleans (for use in “collateral material” to promote our upcoming monthlong gig there) were unusable.  Something about having an inadequately high resolution.  What to do?  The deadline for the pics was near, so there was no way we could be home to dig up proper pics, so…

We figured we had three options, with a deadline approaching in hours: 1) Use the pics, no matter how lo-res they might be, 2) Go to a Walmart Portrait center and have “formal portraits” taken, 2a) find a local photographer and studio or 3) Use our Fuji FinePix S2950 “bridge” camera to shoot some sort of provisional headshots, using the built-in flash and/or existing light. The pics would be used for everything from table tents to signs over the slot machines and billboards, so we were panicked

We opted for number three.

Wildwood in the off-season is… abandoned.  So much so that it seems eerie.  In fact, for the first four days of our stay at the Nassau, we were the only occupants.  Friday saw an influx of visitors, but the town was still pretty much empty.  So we had our pick of any one of dozens of walls to use as backdrops, many of them painted in muted, mid-century groovy colors and some having offbeat textures.  After a hurried survey of websites offering portrait-taking tips (“shoot in open shade,” “clouds make a good softbox,” “shoot with the sun at your back… unless the sun’s behind a cloud,” etc.), we set out to find the perfect backdrop.

We shot TFHOTS against an aqua wall, but the exiting storm front kicked up winds that made like an eggbeater on her carefully arranged hair.  When a light rain started to fall, we retreated back to the Nassau to wait for the sun to reappear.

When the clouds moved on, TFHOTS suggested we use the front door of our unit as a backdrop (see below). She also suggested we both wear black-and-white clothing, so that, together with the backdrop, the pics would be a matching set.

Since we had only recently purchased the Fuji, we were not as familiar with the equipment as we would have liked. We downloaded the owner’s manual from the Fuji site, skimmed the important parts, and, after we gave the Fuji tech support line a call and got the answers to a couple of pertinent questions, we were ready to shoot.

Brian: f-stop: 4.2, 1/50 sec., ISO-200 and no flash. Traci: f-stop: 5, 1/30 sec, ISO-200 and no flash. We FTP’ed the files to up to the folks in Vegas and eventually got word that the images would be included in all the necessary materials.

Are we 100 per cent happy with the results? No. But it was crucial that we provide some sort of workable image. And, considering that we did so with little notice and a looming deadline, we think that the final result was pretty good. Had it been 1999, we would have been totally screwed.

The folks on Huffington Post are huffing and puffing about an article that appeared on the Fox News website. They’re mainly upset because the author(ess) supposedly compared Janeane Garofalo to Chris Farley.

Of course the author(ess) did nothing of the kind.

But the folks at HuffPo never let the facts get in the way of a good huff. It’s in the title of the website, after all.

The article, by someone (or something– we’re not sure it’s actually written by a human being, as it seems to be written by some sort of program that has been fed lots of cliched information, hinky data and ludicrous aphorisms and designed to spit out fluffy and seemingly thoughtful pop culture articles) named “Holly McKay” (a likely name) proposes that funny females (alliteration is a big part of the program!) are “hot” now! Citing Anna Faris, Mila Kunis and Olivia Munn, they conclude that gals who are in the laff biz “all combine funny bones with bangin’ bodies.”

Eye candy is supplied by a photo of Carrie Keagan (who?), pictured in her boyfriend’s oxford shirt, lounging (still in heels!) next to… BREAKFAST! I think you know what we mean!

(Keagan turns out to be the main source of quotes for the story, so we figure the piece was engineered by her handlers at VH-1– where she’s a host of “ultra-edgy morning entertainment show ‘Big Morning Buzz,.”)

Regardless of the genesis of this sorry story, it seeks to hang its hook on this notion (that’s being echoed elsewhere) that all of a sudden, funny females can be sexy and– why stop there– funny females MUST be sexy.

The argument is bolstered by numerous examples of comedic actresses and “presenters,” but none (or nearly none) are standup comics. Which is curious.

And the trend is not new! No! it comes from way back. Let’s listen:

But Keagan et al didn’t come out of nowhere. Some of our favorite “old-skool” sitcom stars like Jennifer Aniston, Jane Krakowski and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have transformed themselves in recent years from somewhat awkward to stylish sex symbols.

Wow! How far back will they go to prove their point? As far back as Jennifer Aniston!

This article is silly on several levels.

There have has always been a handful of funny women with smokin’ hot bods studding our pop culture landscape.

Conversation overheard on the internet, in a bar, in a magazine, in church: “Who would you rather bang? Ginger or MaryAnn?”

Has Holly McKay ever seen any footage of Lucille Ball in her early movie career?

What about Carol Wayne? What about Loni Anderson? What about Judy Holliday? What about Mae West, ferchrissakes?

One has to ignore an awful lot of cinema and television history to concoct a ridiculous story like this one.

And what about this charge that Garofalo was compared to Chris Farley? Well, it’s goofy. They quoted from “entertainment expert Patrick Wanis,” who said that “funny women who aren’t all that sexy may struggle in the new comedy landscape,” and that:

Rosie O’Donnell and Janeane Garofalo will be relegated to playing the female versions of Chris Farley.

Which is just the good doctor’s way of saying that Garofalo and O’Donnell will be playing the funny, unattractive, non-threatening roles in future funny pics.

But… waitaminute… what about Melissa McCarthy? She’s the co-lead on Mike & Molly and the most talked about cast member of “Bridesmaids?” Wasn’t that the picture that grossed nearly $300 million dollars? (And will probably make twice that in DVD sales?) She hardly has a “bangin’ body!”

The other huge gaffe in this article is the uncomfortable fact that the only women they cite as “unattractive” are mainly standup comics, known primarily for their prowess onstage and not really notable for their box office drawing power. It’s kind of incongruous (and more than a little tawdry… catty, maybe!) to drag them into this discussion. Really: they bring them in just to make some sort of awful, tenuous point.

How about, instead of writing some sort of fragile, slapped-together article about attractive, funny women are starring in film or TV (a “new” phenomenon since… sound was introduced… maybe earlier), why not write an article about how there is a crop of funny, hot, sexy standup comedians?

There have been attractive women in standup for quite some time now. But they always played down their “assets.” But these days there is no shortage of funny women who are hot and not the least bit apologetic.

Rhonda Shear was alone for a while. She was eventually joined by others. To the point where we are awash in competent, wickedly funny, attractive standup comics who are sexy in obvious and not-so-obvious ways.

This myth that a hot gal couldn’t elicit laughs has long been demolished in the theater, in the movies and on the telly. But the meme has always has persisted that a pretty woman couldn’t excel at standup. Even that one’s been shattered. And largely ignored.

Should any of us consider a woman’s looks when deciding on whether or not to laugh at her standup? Certainly not. But there are folks out there who can’t get over it– Audience members, people in charge and others. But they will get over it. And, after a while, a hot babe soliciting laughs won’t seem odd any more.

But hot-looking women in film and television a new trend? Don’t make us laugh.

Isn’t the chick on VH-1– by herself– enough of a story? It’s embarrassing when they try to make larger points by dragging in such icons as Jennifer Aniston and PhD Patrick Wanis but only end up looking foolish.