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I don't understand this synopsis in the least.
Certainly doesn't seem like a sports movie. He is just playing a character with a sports backstory.
As was everyone in This Is Spinal Tap.
Even Paul Shaffer.
And Fred Willard.
So where did he lose it? Stand-up comic, great. Soap, great. SNL, great. When Harry Met Sally, great. He had bit parts in cult classic movies like Spinal Tap and Princess Bride. He hosted those stand-up benefits on TV. I even liked Throw Momma From the Train.
I think it was City Slickers that started the downfall - the success may have been too much. He started doing his own projects - Mr. Saturday Night, Forget Paris. He got caught in Robin Williams' downfall - not just Father's Day, but it seemed like every time you saw Billy Crystal, Williams was right there.
Then he made My Giant.
Which is why they all employ writers.
Seems you're implying those 2 aren't awesome today, and I know that can't be the case.
Carlin remade himself a couple of times over the course of his career, which made a huge difference.
-- MWE
Carlin also replaced Ringo Starr as Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station and had a relatively ordinary (albiet better than most) one and done sitcom on FOX. He was so good in his prime that we are willing to forget his foibles later in life. As it should be..... Espceially considering IMO his standup continued to be stellar. I like(d) Crystal, but he never was in Carlin's league so it is harder for me to forgive his foibles later in life.
And in fact, that's the problem with Crystal. Remember he did that Louis Armstrong imitation where he called himself "Face"- what black bluesy guys call a cute little kid? That's what he still wants to be and can't anymore, because he's too damn old.
I didn't like When Harry Met Sally either. He kind of turned his nads in at the door when he made that. I think that was his downfall. If the movie tanked, he might have retuned his act and recovered. But since it was a financial success, he kept making more that wee sort of out the same mold.
And some guys are funny onstage but not in movies and vice versa.
Carlin may have escaped because he wasn't huge enough, but I don't think he was quite in a class with the greats either. It never happened to Brian Regan either because he didn't get too big.
carlin by a mile.
He has to be considered one of a handful of the most successful stand-up comics.
Carlin may have escaped because he wasn't huge enough
One of those ain't like the others.
Eddie Murphy can still be funny but the problem is that he sold out. He went from edgy comedy to doing fart jokes in drag. Bill Cosby was funny for something like 4 or 5 decades. I think he gets a pass if you don't think he is funny now or in the last decade. Steve Martin basically went the family route and one could argue that his act went stale. Carlin never went the movie and tv route for his act. He basically stayed a stand-up comedian his whole life. As for Billy Crystal, once Tom Hanks got big that pretty much spelled the end for Billy.
clearly just a matter of individual taste, but
a- I never ever got Winters' schtick, and
b- Newhart did some great stuff... The Button-Down Mind, etc.
edit: one swig of Coke to ray james
You just described a problem with most of SNL, not just Crystal.
I don't care who "gets a pass" from me. I'm not passing judgment on these guys*, I'm just pointing out how I think this works for them.
And the pattern I laid out sorta of still applies to those guys. Cosby was very popular, then he did Himself, became huge, and "lost it." Murphy was not popular for very long before the Delirious/Raw stuff, and he was never the same. And I have to say, it's kind of funny to hear that the problem with Murphy was that he sold out and started doing fart jokes. Wasn't that his bread and butter from the start? And if he sold out, what exactly did Cosby do?
Edit: Forgot the *--I did pass some judgment on Carlin.
I'm not sure you fully grasp all that some of these guys did. Cosby losing "it" turned him into the #1 sitcom actor in the country with a hugely popular TV show that ran for about a decade.
Fart jokes were Eddie's bread and butter from the start?
Murphy was not popular for very long before the Delirious/Raw stuff,
He was 22 when he recorded it! He was 19 when he joined the cast of SNL.
Joan Rivers and Don Rickles are still funny.
I'm not sure you realize, but it's possible for people to disagree with you and still know just as much as you do.
And?
This. I thought Crystal was hilarious on Soap -- as was most everyone -- and then, not so much. Never thought his stand-up was particularly good, and to be honest I couldn't stand his SNL stuff.
Not really, no. Listen to Raw, then watch one of those stupid Klumps movies. There are almost no similarities between the two types of humor.
I always thought Winters was hilarious, but my wife can't stand him. I get that he's an acquired taste. IMO he's like early Robin Williams, only he did it first and better. And yeah, last time I saw him he was still hilarious.
As for Newhart, he definitely stayed funny. Even when he played it "safer" as on his last TV show, he still killed me. Nobody does that halting-speech-deadpan-look thing like him.
Gonna have to disagree here. Rivers was never funny, IMO. As for Rickles...last time I heard him, his act sounded so dated to me. He's still doing a lot of the ethnic stuff, which (A) I don't care for and (B) makes it seem like the world has passed him by.
And your point is meaningless. Murphy wasn't popular before Delirious? So what?
Murphy was popular for something like 10 to 15 years. Bill Cosby was popular for something like 40 years. Steve Martin had something like 20 years. George Carlin had something like 50 years.
You state that that success is your own downfall and your examples contradict that view.
I'm not sure you realize, but it's possible for people to disagree with you and still know just as much as you do.
And sometimes they don't.
Jonathan Winters is an odd person in popular culture to me. I consume a lot of classic movies and old TV and even old comedy albums and I have never run across anything featuring Jonathan Winters except "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". He doesn't seem to have had any catchphrases or any all-time classic bits or any particular shtick. I have no idea why he was famous or what he did except being overweight, but all my life I've been hearing references to him. Never has anyone mentioned anything specific that he did except generally being famous for showing up on talk shows. Also, I'm shocked that he's still alive. Only six months older than Don Rickles!
I agree they're very different. But listen to Raw: plenty of fart jokes.
Also, the first Klumps movie came out in the mid-1990s, a decade after Raw. It wasn't that Murphy's problem was that he sold out and did the Klumps movies. He had already lost it by then--the Klumps was an attempt to get it back.
Well, you seemed to be trying to make a point about Murphy being different from Cosby because Cosby had been successful for longer than he was. I was only pointing out that that didn't contradict my point, which was that, whether it happened early in their careers or late, they lost it after making it huge.
I don't disagree that they were popular. But as you noted above with your mention the Klumps, being popular doesn't mean it's good. I think all of those people lost something after making it big (except Carlin, who though I thought was fine, wouldn't have put him in that class of success).
Well he may never have been the biggest star on the scene but he's one of the handful of guys in the conversation for best standup ever. The 'not in a class with the greats' thing is wide of the mark.
You're right--the rest of Delirious was very highbrow stuff.
I've heard this a lot and agree myself.
He's still a funny/interesting guy - he recorded a worth listening to WTF (comedy podcast) a few months back.
Carlin definitely is an inner circle HOFer.
Here's Comedy Central's top 100 comedian list ... I'm not keen on it, but it's a starting point.
I like Louis CK's show more than his standup*, but - man - his show is good.
* his standup is also good, of course.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that Murphy was highbrow, but anyone who doesn't see a tremendous difference between Murphy's humor in Delirious and Norbit is simply not paying attention.
This is just historically inaccurate as to Steve Martin. He quit standup at his peak (and never returned) because he recognized the "watercooler effect" was approaching. He finished that tour, and walked away before the act could get stale. Of course, if you don't like the arc his movies have taken, this may make no difference to you. But even there he didn't do "the same thing [he's] always done": From The Jerk to Pennies From Heaven to Roxanne to Parenthood to LA Story, three of which he co-wrote. He also wrote a successful play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, and played banjo on a Grammy winning album.
I don't like everything he's done by any means. But if at any point you decided "ehh, I'm sick of Steve Martin," you would literally have no idea what you might miss a few years later.
Louis CK may be one of the funniest guys on tv right now. The guy is on a Jose Bautista like run.
In terms of stand-up, Paul F. Tompkins and Patton Oswalt are probably the best working comics today.
Definitely the name that immediately popped into my head when thinking about current comedians. I'm about to watch Chewed Up which is the only standup of his I haven't seen. I also think Neil Hamburger is extremely funny.
You're right, George Carlin was never that funny. Most wildly overrated comedian - possibly the most wildly overrated entertainer of any kind - that I can think of.
Both WTF (maybe the one with Christopher Titus?) and the Jerry Seinfeld documentary (in the scene with Chris Rock) talk about their astonishment at Bill Cosby still killing with new material, at 163 years old.
I've heard Patton Oswalt on the BS Report. According to him, Louis CK is the best stand-up working today. And guys like Chris Rock (I am not a big fan of his) and Dave Chappelle are right up there too.
I love this thread. Lots of opinions, and I can see the reasoning for all of them. I think one thing that is not being mentioned is the idea that people change over time. Most people become more tame with age. I think that is the reason Cosby was able to stay so popular for so long. His comedy was funny, but not vulgar or really offensive (if I am wrong, I apologize, other than "Himself" I have not listened to much Cosby stand-up).
In my opinion, Eddie Murphy was already losing it by the time he did Raw. I thought Comedian and Delirious were his best two efforts. Of course those were the first two I heard, long before Raw came out, so I am naturally biased. But Murphy toned it down when he got older. I think he wanted to do movies that he wouldn't mind his kids seeing him in. It's understandable, and even admirable. His three stand-up albums were directed more towards late teens and twenty-somethings. His movies starting in the mid 90s were aimed more for the entire family.
I am guessing this is what happened to Steve Martin too. I am only 35, so I missed him when he was at his peak.
As for Carlin, I think of his as the kind of guy whose longevity will be his calling card. He was never really the #1 stand-up at any time (maybe early 70s? Not sure), but he could always be considered in the Top 5 at any given time. He did occasional cameos in movies, and I seem to remember that Fox show... wasn't he a cab driver or something? Bartender? Carlin did change his material as he felt it necessary. He did the goofy and drug-oriented stuff. Then he switched to more funny observational (not as far as Seinfeld took it though) and mainstream material, and then he turned highly political in a time when presidents were easy to make fun of. Many of his last albums weren't as funny as his older stuff. If you listen to the crowds, they aren't laughing, they are cheering in agreement.
Then he did the "Life is Worth Losing" show, and that was just dark as ####. It showed that he understood his own mortality. I think Carlin still goes down as one of the top 3 stand-up comedians of all time. Carlin, Bruce, Pryor, and Foxx. They were all pioneers. Most of the guys working today seem to just be adding new material to the routines of those four.
None of these guys were terrific for more than a few years, though. By the time Cosby started his sitcom he hadn't been funny for well over a decade.
Standup's a tough, tough form to stay relevant in, and to bring anything new to after you've done it for a few years, in part because if it's not deeply observational (probably why Carlin was good for so long), it's an extremely limiting form. In some sense it's easier to keep your mojo as a great poet over many decades, or as a great novelist, because what there is to mine is unlimited and the forms themselves are so flexible. A great pop artist for that long, though (because of the material and format)? A great comedian (mostly because of the format)? Those are tough, tough gigs.
He had his won show back in the 70's. It was mostly him improv-ing with characters he developed over the years like Maudy Frickett the Granny and Chester Honeyhugger.
Here's Winters on The Dean Martin Show. The show was great because it was so blatantly sexist, and in an era when feminism had reached it's high water mark. It seemed so anacronistic but the average Joe loved it:
Dean and Jonathan
I saw Louis CK do a Q and A when his last concert film as released and he went over his process for creating a show's worth of material. The guy works hard and I think what happens to comics as they get successful is they stop working so hard. Also, how many uber successful comics want to go to some crappy comedy club and work out new material, much of which will bomb while you work out the kinks?
Still ROFL hours later!
Naw, those are just a series of strokes and heart attacks.
I nominate Robert Klein's baseball routines from the 1970s -- somehow his comedy never gets mentioned in the same breath as Carlin's.
Then there's the comedy that approaches literature: Carlin, Steven Wright, Mitch Hedberg: people you can quote forever, sometimes laughing quite a bit, sometimes also with an appreciation of how aphoristically right (or completely absurd) the material is. It's in the tradition of Mark Twain, who can still kill an audience today from well beyond the grave.
I don't know if Louis CK is going to join that latter group – he's certainly edgy-funny, but there's the sense I also get with people like Ricky Gervais and Sarah Silverman, that they're testing how much un-PC stuff they can say while feeling confident that they'll be accepted as being actually PC because they couldn't possibly be serious. Some of Carlin's earlier material is dated for that very reason; e.g. Carlin had a homophobic streak that he grew out of, but he wasn't always on the side of the angels.
And his New Yorker writings. Which are very good, for what they are.
Carlin was a great stand-up--probably the epitome and ideal of all stand-up. He got a Mark Twain award--he wasn't Mark Twain, though, and fans who seem to revere him as this great daring thinker kind of harsh my mellow.
Speaking of re-invention of oneself, there's Woody Allen. For good and bad, he's sui generis. But, he did it all. No TV sit-com, but that's only because he wanted to do movies and probably thought regular TV beneath him--which at the time of his greatest "funnyman" popularity, is undeniably true. But, writer for TV and movies, then stand-up, plays, then acting and writing movies like Take the Money and Run and Bananas, humor pieces for the NY-er. Hey, among the moderns, that's hard to beat.
I'll always remember the line from the Jonathan Winters show (and still use it) "If the shoe fits you, Fitzhugh..." Although, now that I think of it, it may have been his costar Louis Nye who said that.
King: "Don Rickles, paying tribute to his good friend Joan Rivers. Thanks for calling, Don."
Rickles: "You know what? You can go to hell, Larry." [...click...]
The man's still got some zip on his fastball.
Tough crowd.
I may have seemed to do this in the post before :) But I was actually thinking of something different, the sense of paradox that one gets from Carlin (the butter-warmer in the fridge in the house) and Wright (I have a collection of billions of seashells, I keep them on all the beaches of the world) and Twain (the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco). It's in Oscar Wilde, and Woody Allen too: it tends to have neither topical pointedness nor philosophical depth, but it wonderfully exploits the resources of language. These guys could do topical stuff too, but like most topical things it dates quickly. Probably for this reason I like Police Squad and Fawlty Towers best among sitcoms.
I guess there's quite a bit of overlap as several people mentioned in the thread already worked on SNL.
There seems to be a separate tradition of sketch comedy, with Python, Kids in the Hall, Fry and Laurie (among many others). I guess it's normally a collabrative thing, in a way that stand-up usually isn't.
I think these guys would agree.
Although on a more serious note, I think anyone who claims comedy can't be objectively explained or desribed did not attent this lecture series.
What impresses me is how well his stuff has aged. Newhart too.
Those are funny.
71:
Don't be a wish pig.
Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia have peaks? I will assume you are from the future. Anything Cook or Menica have ever said that was funny they probably stole from someone else.
I miss Sam Kinison.
Shhh, then. If you are really quiet and it's a windless night, you can still hear him...
Wasn't Tom Hanks only big for a few weeks? Then he went back to junior high.
Damn.
How out of touch are you? Ethnic humor is huge - George Lopez, Margaret Cho, Kat Williams, Chris Rock - it's what the kids are in to these days.
You can say whatever you want about Don Rickles here, but I know if he ever walks up to you and asks which hand you shuffle cards with, you'll shut the hell up.
The difference is these days you have to be ethnic to make the ethnic jokes. I don't think that's a bad thing, really. HBO shows lesser known comic from the 80's a lot, for some reason, and I cringe about how easily racist and homophobic a lot of them were. Not even funny most of it, but mean spirited.
BTW: I always thought Don Rickles had a lifetime pass for whatever kind of joke he wants to tell. He's the last of the heavyweights.
Ethnic humor is passe, or so I hear.
Jack Benny's work has aged extremely well in my estimation. Jimmy Durante's onstage patter still makes me laugh no matter how many times I've heard it. That's the magic of excellent comedic timing, which was always Joan Rivers' greatest strength as a performer.
Who isn't ethnic? Other than Mitt Romney of course.
Unfunny jokes are the crime. The ethnic components of those jokes aren't.
I dunno, I heard plenty of ethnic jokes about white people, I think they're pretty assimilated into the mainstream.
I don't see any oppression. But a joke is a joke. If it's a funny joke, it deserves to be told. If it's a stupid unfunny joke with punchlines about watermelons and Chinese diction it will meet the fate it deserves.
Well that's a matter of record.
Also, the fact that he writes, shoots, and edits every episode personally is really apparent and gives the show a really great, personal, "auteur"-y kind of vibe. And the girl who plays his five-year-old daughter is one of the best, funniest, cutest child actresses I've ever seen. I don't know where he got that girl but almost everything she says is pure gold.
Shooty, RR just comedy pwned you. Read it again like they all suck. Unless he really likes them, in that case, I feel a little sick.
I sure hope I was pwned.
This place skews a little young for Pryor. He was slightly before my time, and very much an artist of his time, but I did see Live on the Sunset Strip as a teen a few years after it came out and it remains awesome.
Not stand-up and certainly not current, but my dad is way, way into The Marx Brothers and WC Fields, introduced me to them when I was young, and their best bits in their movies still make me laugh out loud. Bill James once wrote, "The Marx Brothers are funny. WC Fields is funny. Charlie Chaplin is an acquired taste."
I am a Dave Chappelle fan. Don't know how the BTF pop sees him.
I think he's pretty great. His adventures with his white buddy Chip crack me up. Louis CK and Chappelle are probably my favorite stand ups right now. Chappelle seems semi-retired, though.
I wrote this exact same thing in one of the Maris threads. Both of those guys pulled off the physical resemblance well (Pepper in particular) and both are pretty good actors.
I remember that comment, because it seems to fly in the face of the first rule of humor: there's nothing that's universally and objectively funny. The Marx Brothers (even Harpo!) and WC Fields did mostly verbal humor; Chaplin did silent acrobatics. (It was Fields who said of Chaplin, "He's a ####### little ballet dancer.") But even if you like Chaplin (I think his best stuff is in the early shorts, which are fabulously timed), you might not like Keaton or Lloyd. I have a weakness for the Three Stooges, but I have never much liked Laurel & Hardy. Who knows why.
1. I actually liked that show though I get why it wasn't popular. (There is one scene where one of Louis' friends says to Louis' wife in an argument, "Yeah, suck my dick!" and she gives him the coldest stare and says "I swear to god, if you pull it out right this second and it's hard, I will suck it." I think it must be the filthiest sitcom of all time.
2. It's much different than his stand up.
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