Movie Time!

Spare seven minutes and some change for today's short feature, in which a pink mountain lion with a flair for drama (ahem) meets a cheap knock-off of The Addams Family.

Cliff's Notes For Dummies, Ya Dummy!

Forgive us for just discovering Better Book Titles, the Tumblr that sums up classic literature by re-titling the books with, well, take a look at the Halloween set and you'll get the idea.

[Hat tip to Hark A Vagrant's Tumblr.]

A Unified Joke Theory?

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner attempts to do what many others have before: dissect jokes and thus explain how humor works. The main theory, provided by McGraw, who is the director of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado, is called the benign-violation theory.

Jokes, once dissected, stop being funny. So without having read the book, it's impossible for us to weigh in with an opinion. Instead, we read Joel Epstein ruminations on the idea in his article for Commentary magazine, "Notes On What's So Damn Funny."

Epstein includes many jokes in his piece, so at the very least, you'll get some laughs. But seriously, read his article. And if you like it, try McGraw and Warner's book.

Thanks, you've been great! G'night!



[Thanks once more to Arts & Letters Daily]

The media watch-dog group One Million Moms, a subset of the fundamentalist Christian organization the American Family Association, has come out swinging against a new live-action show on Adult Swim called Black Jesus.

Aaron McGruder, the creator of the lauded comic strip The Boondocks, is behind Black Jesus, which seems to follow in the same deeply satirical vein as McGruder's comic, which was later turned into a critically acclaimed cartoon on Adult Swim.

Watch the lengthy trailer and form your own thoughtful opinion or whip up some righteous anger:


We were unaware of Black Jesus until One Million Moms got mad enough to make the news outlets pay attention. (It's an historically slow time of year in the news cycle, never mind that we seem to be on the brink of admitting that we're in the midst of global war, or, if you like, World War III.)

As is so often the case, those upset by a piece of art have shouted, and in doing so, prompted many more to take a look than otherwise would have.

Everybody Loves a Doris

Please accept The Typing Monkey's apologies for the long absence. Shit got real over the past few weeks and nobody at the offices felt like lifting the pencil or finding a piece of paper unbesmirched by memory and loss.

Let's get back to publishing with a belated birthday wish of health and happiness to Doris Day, who turned 90 on April 3.

It's easy to dismiss Day as a peroxided, harmless cutie whose sole purpose was to be irritated and flummoxed by Rock Hudson only to come around and fall in love in the third act of the many meringue-light romantic comedies the two made together during the 1960s.

That's fine, but we've always preferred the rom-coms with James Garner as her foil/paramour, as Garner's gravelly nature played better off of Day's sugary charms. Her outing with David Niven ain't bad either.

Better still is to remember that Day is the secret key to the success of Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much. James Stewart does great work in the film, but it's Day's determined, crafty mom who finds a way out of the international intrigue mess they're in. It's a shame she didn't get more roles of this nature, as Day holds her own in a way many probably don't expect.

Her delivery of the song "Que Sera Sera" is not only a great plot device in Too Much, but just straight-up great selling of a song that uses Day's velvety delivery to great effect, given that the lyrics are actually quite clear-headed when put up against many other romantic tunes of the day.

And with that we arrive at Day's other great gift: The woman could sing. She's on par with other lauded Big Band vocalists (Kay Starr, et al.) and her creamy vibrato stands proud alongside Dinah Shore (another singer who rarely gets her due.)

Day could deliver the sad and heartbroken as well as the dreamy lovestruck material. And The Typing Monkey says if you want a real snapshot of what Day could do, look no further than "Everybody Loves a Lover."

It's not a showcase for her vocal abilities the way "Dream a Little Dream" or "When I Fall In Love" are. Instead it's a testament to Day's ability to inhabit the material. Where she's both mother and child -- and all realist -- in "Que Sera Sera" Day plays the wholly self-aware woman who is both confident and stupidly in love in "Everybody Loves a Lover."

It's an almost Bugs Bunny-like performance culminating in Day's round-style duet with herself. She found a guy she loves who loves her back and has no qualms floating by the rest of us, flaunting her luck and (subversively) the hint of the skills she employed to snag her man.


[courtesy of VinylNostalgia]

Look Behind You!

If you followed our headline and actually saw something scary, that's pretty cool. But you probably saw curtains, or the back of the couch ... maybe a coworker. Either way, we've made it to the end of the 2013 Halloween Frenzy. Whew!

We hope it was good for you. Have fun today and be safe tonight. Remember to check under the bed.

Here's a Silly Symphony from 1929 called Hells Bells. Based on slightly foggy memories of a couple biographies we read more than a decade ago, the whole 'toon was likely designed and plotted by Ub Iwerks, the nearly invisible hand that guided Disney's formative years as an animation studio.


[courtesy of Pat Hawkins]

And at no extra charge, have a laugh at Hark! A Vagrant's newest, a Halloween themed set of one-strip gags based on antique postcards. "Bewitching Halloween" is a riot.

It's the No. 1 Drink for Astronaut Draculas the World Over

Thanks Lost Wackys!

Ain't Got No Head

Two very different takes on the Headless Horseman of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

First, Frank Frazetta:

That man could draw horses like few others. For real. You know why Maurice Sendak decided to use monsters in Where the Wild Things Are instead of his original plan for horses? Because he realized how hard it is to draw horses.

Second is Kate Beaton's knee-slapping script-flip of Ichabod on the run:

Read the short strip here.



[A doff of the Jack O'Lantern to Weird Tales for the Frazetta art.]

Nyuk Nyuk

Do a little time travelling with us via the United States Library of Congress.

It's easy to fall down any number of information rabbit-holes there, so allow us to point you in the direction of "The American Variety Stage, 1870 - 1920" collection , then creep a little further into the audio archives and enjoy wax cylinder recordings of some vaudeville routines and songs from the era.

Given these were recorded both for posterity and mass consumption, we can't help but wonder how many blue routines were deemed unfit for preservation. That's our loss.

Switchblades at Dawn

The Typing Monkey has never watched more than a few seconds of the animated Fox sitcom Bob's Burgers. We don't know why, it just never happened. Maybe someday.

Neither have we seen anything beyond a teaser clip for the Nickelodeon cartoon Sanjay and Craig.

Why are we giving an inventory of animated shows we've never seen? Because artist Jay Howell has a hand in both of those shows and we've just discovered his art blog.

One of the most creative and sly things Howell shares via his site, are the "book paintings" in which he paints a sort of illustration on the title page of a paperback. Most of the books are Harlequin romance novels:

When Howell interprets the title literally, as in the example above, it changes what we can assume the book is actually about. Try hard enough, and you can probably imagine what the real book cover looked like. You're probably not far off if you've seen a romance novel or two.

Howell makes them funny, absurd and creepy-cute. His site is full of these, and he even sells them. (We didn't check to see how much he charges.) But just getting to see them online makes his blog worth a look.

Yes, it's the sun covered in naked people. Somehow, Howell has tapped into the 9-year-old boy part of his brain that giggled when Huck Finn shouted "hump yourself" at Jim as the teacher read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud in class.

The Naked Sun joke is so simple and Howell's depiction so elegant and profane that the viewer isn't so much angry that we didn't do it first, but rather overjoyed that somebody made this happen.

Not that Howell's art is all bewbs and knife fights. Go see  for yourself what happened when he took his brushes and pens to the title page of a paperback called Cast a Tender Shadow.


[Yet another enthusiastic nod to Monster Brains for turning us on to Howell's work.]

Solid Advice

We can't stop watching the Fake Adam West videos.



There are just four videos, but it looks like FAW is just getting started. Per Bleeding Cool, where we found this, he had only 38 followers on Twitter when they posted on Jun 2. We're guessing he's got a lot more by now.

Wackys Found

For a certain kind of kid, probably most kinds of kid, the phrase "Wacky Packs" triggers immediate memories of playground conclaves in which the titular cards and stickers were shown off and traded as aggressively as pork bellies at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

For those sadly left out of that Venn diagram, this is a Wacky card:

It's a simple concept. A silly, unexpected or gross-out pun on a popular consumer product is played for laughs. Children, slobbering teens and adults with severe cases of arrested development in the pop culture realm, fell under the sway of Wacky Packs.

Most of the artists responsible for Wacky Packs were of the '60s and '70s comic underground movement. We hope Topps, the baseball-card and petrified gum company that produced Wackys, paid the artists well because kids spent plenty of allowance and paper route earnings on the cards.

Seeing Wackys now gives us a better understanding of how a bunch of Mad magazine types helped shape a generation or two of consumers happy to bite the tail of the commerce beast. We may eat Doritos, but we can laugh along with Don't Eat Those.

There are two astounding archives of Wacky Packages, and probably more, on the web. Lost Wackys catalogs some of the rare specimens, while WackyPackages.org is a buyer's guide run by a fellow named Greg, who will also sell you sets.

Before we release you into the galleries of Lost Wackys, we want to share with you two examples from the '70s era sets that simply wouldn't fly today. "Hostage Cupcakes" is far too grim for modern parenting and "Commie Cleanser" requires both a knowledge of the existence of Comet cleanser and Communism. Discuss?

Notable Illusionists of History [No. 6]

Enjoy this final installment of our award-winning series.


Dell O'Dell aka Nell Odella Newton
(Oct 2, 1897 - Feb 5, 1962)
Birthplace:  Lemonweir, Wisconsin
Profession-changing contribution:  Dell O'Dell was one of the first female stage magicians. She was certainly the first to reach her level of fame. At the height of her career, during the 1940s, she travelled North America in an RV and caravan of various animals, playing as many as 300 shows a year. Her stage show was a crowd-pleasing combination of illusions, animal tricks and comedy.
Fun fact: O'Dell had the first televised magic show, when Los Angeles station KTLA broadcast "The Dell O'Dell Show" in 1951, beating Mark Wilson's TV debut by four years.
Bonus fun fact:  It's alleged that O'Dell could work a nightclub full of horny sailors as easily as she could play to a room full of kids at a children's hospital. Her gift? The woman could swear like a demon, and wasn't afraid to work blue.

Editor's note:  O'Dell's story really is incredible -- one of those "does it all" tales of early 20th century entertainment. The website that bears her name has a two-page, exhaustive (and kind of exhausting, design-wise, but that's a trifle) history of O'Dell's inspiring career. And if you make it to the end of her story, halfway down page two is a great gallery of other women of magic.

Q: You know how I know you're gay?

A: You posted a poem on your blog.


Poem
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

[From Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara. City Lights Books. All rights reserved. Re-posted from Frank O'Hara.org.]

***

If you'd like to hear Mr. O'Hara himself reading this poem to an audience, and we highly recommend it, click here.

"can't hold one stick ..."

Buddy Rich played drums. That's an understatement, but also true. Like us, some of our readers may have learned who he was by his appearance on The Muppet Show.

Surely Rich had many great stories to tell about his glorious career redefining how musicians could play the trap kit. But it's just as likely many who met and worked with him have their own stories to tell about Mr. Rich.

One of those is the equally legendary music promoter Bill Graham, who, in his autobiography, My Life Inside Rock and Out, shares a real doozy about convincing Rich to bring his jazz band to San Francisco to play for a bunch of kids raised on rock & roll.

It's a wondefully foul-mouthed tale of bridging the generation gap via grudge-drumming. Read it here.

Rim shot to Cover Me for the link.

arROOO!

Slobbering press materials say Game of Werewolves [Lobos de Arga] will do for werewolves "what Shaun of the Dead did for zombies."

We respectfully reserve our hyperbole until we've seen the goods. Regardless, the trailer indiates that writer/director Joan Martinez Moreno's horror-comedy is at least a stupid good time. You can't ask for more of a horror-comedy.

Sure it would be nice if they were all smart, funny and genuinely scary. (E.g. An American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead) But keeping expectations in check is just good thinking. That said, we're fully on board with the Lon Chaney Jr./Oliver Reed-style lycanthropes.

Here's a trailer for Game of Werewolves. If you require subtitles, the movie's Website launches a subtitled version of the trailer immediately.


[courtesy of TodoElTerrorDelMundo]

Cartoons Can Be Funny

In March 2012, Cartoon Network debuted it's programming block called DC Nation. It's various animated series based on characters from the DC universe, to varying degrees of engagement for grown-ups who are willing to spend time watching this sort of thing. (Or, you know, want to.)

The real joy of tuning in to DC Nation's programming is that each Saturday they debut two new short 'toons from a group of creators who forgo any heroic posturing for the characters and instead aim for comedy. And they're all pretty funny.

The two stand-outs are Lauren Faust's Super Best Friends Forever, starring Wonder Girl, Batgirl and Supergirl doing things that we'd all do if we were them.



And Aardman Studios gives Superman, Batman, Catwoman and The Joker the Creature Comforts treatment by having them voiced by little kids saying things wholly unrelated to the business of crime fighting. DC World's Funniest is delightful.



Tune in for some of the other shorts, but do scour the Web for more of the DC World's Funniest shorts and, you lucky dog, io9 has all of Faust's Super BFF work up for your entertainment.

Time for Comics

Let us break up the long sad string of obituaries we've been documenting and mourning here and move on to something much lighter: free comic books.

The Digital Comics Museum is a great place to spend time getting lost in the public domain world of vintage comic books.

You don't have to love superhero tales, as the world of mainstream comics prior to the 1960s hosted any number of topics having little or nothing to do with boy scouts from other planets or deranged millionaires deciding to rid their cities of crime.

There are plenty of hero titles, but some are war stories or Old West glories. Horror and suspense/mystery titles abound, as well as quite a few jungle-adventure serials.

Other titles embrace the "comics" aspect in the traditional Sunday comics sense, where the punchline and the sight gag rule.

The romance titles from publishers such as Charlton, Prize and Ace can be quite fun too. Some dare to document genuine romantic problems facing women and men, others go scandalous and some, as in issue 70 of "Young Romance" from Prize go the romance novel route.

And the previously mentioned Charlton Comics hosted a number of now legendary artists and writers at a time when they were just trying to get started in the industry. The cover of Charlton's "The Thing!"  (issue 14) was done by Steve Ditko before he was Steve Ditko. [What? -- ed.]

Either way, you get an army of grotesque bat-men attacking terrified humans as a group of ancient Egyptians give chase. Neat!

Dig in and have fun. It's free.

"The Other Girls"

[Click on image to embiggen]

Please do yourself a huge favor and spend some time reading and laughing at Nicholas Gurewitch's comic strip The Perry Bible Fellowship.

The above strip, "The Other Girls", is particularly seasonal, but Gurewitch's humor is always black and deeply funny.

And for a double-whammy of PBF goodness, check out his spot-on tribute to Edward Gorey.

We'll be right back after these messages ...

The last week of March pummelled us into a coarse paste reconstituted only by carefully measured doses of Hennessey and prosecco. Original content, reviews, and all the other ramblings nobody reads will appear here eventually. Until then, whip out your lighter and shout with us: "Freberg!"

[courtesy of liviuarh]

The animation is by Paul Glickman, the voices by Stan Freberg. Happy April. Sooner or later it's going to stop raining.