Cobb

Key & Peele: Magic or Tragic?

The format is cool. The style is goofy. The subject is annoying. The context is comedy. The outlook is iffy.

So far, three episodes and it's about over. Key & Peele, the comedy duo who are spelunking their way through the top 100 stereotypes about contemporary male tragic mulattoes are about 75% of the way to the end of the tunnel, in the middle of the mountain of race. That's a tiresome mountain. They seem to have the comic spark to do a lot more, but I think they're milking it. In about two episodes, if they keep up this direction they're going to be squarely in Dat Phan territory. 

So far, their forte has been code switching jokes which they've managed to put into some fairly hilarious contexts - the evil voice of Obama's Anger, the restaurant complaint, and talking out loud at movies. Their take on the Nazi visitation for Inglorius Basterds was inspired. But it's still a code switching joke. That could work very well in a standup routine, but I need more than that from sketch comedy. So far, outside of the Obama references (their greatest joke of all was him pulling up to a street rap contest) K&P have done no current events topics, which their quirky sense should be able to pull off. 

Aside from the difficulty of Comedy Central's insistence on bleeping, which is fking annoying, K&P are not well served here. So we'll see shortly if they can step out of the bucket. The opportunity is stupendous, but they've got to get their characters more deeply situated outside of the jokes. Because, quite frankly, what is the last comic duo you've seen, the Smothers Brothers? Rowan & Martin? Cheech & Chong? It just hasn't been done in decades so the sky's the limit. That is, unless their whole concept of comedy is about breaking through one ceiling. 

Key & Peele and House of Lies

Chapelle? Already?

I live under the rock that is literature and so a great deal of what happens in pop culture just goes whoosh. I have no idea who Cat Deeley is, so when I watched the 'Amsterdam' episode of House of Lies, I didn't get it. But, I was watching House of Lies which says I'm not too far off the planet.

I dig Cheadle. He seems like the kind of dude I could chill with if only he wasn't rich and famous or if I was. So much for that dinner date - still I'm sure we would get each other's jokes. For some reason, I tend to like his latest dimensions of badass. You could click that up to a latent black man thing. The first of the two was his film Traitor, which I think is his best role yet. I didn't like Talk To Me and well, Hotel Rwanda is what it is. The problem of course is that you can't tell me that Cheadle has to do all the shy guy roles when you have Paul Giamatti doing 'Shoot Em Up'. See what I'm saying? So this new dimension of badass is equally over the top. I haven't determined if I totally like it or if it's going to annoy me after four episodes because right now it's a very Hollywood view of my tangential industry, management consulting. It's close enough to be funny as in insider joke funny. It's hyperbolic enough to be funny as in youre so ridiculous Lucy. It's patently sinful of course, after all, it's on Showtime and HBO owns Showtime. You've got to be that kind of Hollywood sick to get those reprobate producers to finance 'entertainment'. What a bunch of vampires. We'll see.

In the meantime there's a new skit duo that are as funny as... Hmm. When's the last time we had a skit duo that wasn't Saturday Nite Live or Penn & Teller? Well, now we have one: Key and Peele already being compared to Dave Chapelle. Their Obama's Anger video has gone as viral as Baracka Flacka Flame, and so it comes as no surprise that the New Yorker Nuyorkican slum village crowd will glom onto it like Eldridge Cleaver's slacks. I get the feeling that they'll be bored too soon, because Key and Peele are probably not going to go there - there being the edgy place that gives comics like Chapelle and Rock a moment to work up a politically tinged sneer. Which means they are going to be short-timers with great talent like Tommy Davidson and David Alan Greir, two other intelligent men who refuse to clown or hoorah on cue. I get the feeling that they write their own stuff too. That means two seasons.

I'm such a cynic. But at least I'll get to laugh. Does Comedy Central still bleep everything? 

One Man Army

I have watched about eight or nine reality TV episodes, ever. Then again, I don't count Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch as reality TV. But there's a new game show in town that's rather interestingly shabby, which is One Man Army. It's so good that it made me do pushups.

The premise is simple. Take four macho dudes from various military, para-military, police and other such agencies and get them to compete in three super rigorous contests. For 10K dollars and the honorific 'One Man Army'. It's shabby because the production values and on screen graphics and sound effects are overdone - to the point of annoyance. The host's voice has got that mix reminescent of cartoon superheroes like Dr. Quest but not so smooth as made to sound artificially deep. I liked the guy from Superweapons much better. 

But. It is by far the most difficult set of tests I've ever seen on any TV show. It's harsh. It's real.

When people complain about the levels of violence on TV, we tend to forget what real violence is like - as if we ever knew. Just one 20 second clip of Joe Theisman's leg going the wrong way or a weightlifting event gone horrible and then we instantly know what's too painful to watch.  We are shocked by our ability to empathize with something that stands out from fiction. We immediatley know it's not drama for its own sake. So One Man Army impressed me with the harshness of its trials.

There are three challenges in each episode. Speed. Strength. Intelligence.

The first episode I watched, only one man finished the first challenge. It was crazy difficult.In this challenge, the contestant was placed in a tank filled with 50 degree water where the only breathing room was a hole about 6 inches in diameter. He has to breathe through that hole, then move back underwater to cut through about four inches of steel to escape the tank. This was the Speed Challenge, and the only man who finished too 45 minutes. 

The strength challenge on the second show had men breaching through five barriers, one of which was a cinderblock wall with rebar. Another had them sprint uphill to fire a pistol at a target 60 feet away. One had them hang upside down and crack four safes. 

I can't wait to see what they think of next, because when these guys fail, they fail hard. I'd have to say this is the unwussiest. 

Social Software Seduction

I had an imaginary fight with some bureaucrat and my killer line had something to do with the ability to write recursive algorithms. But I haven't written one in decades because in the ordinary course of my business, nobody can think of a purpose for their systems that might call for one. 

I write custom code, but around a small universe of systems for which most of the creativity has been squeezed out. It's interesting to do balance sheet forecasting considering the effect of inventory on cash, but only for a short while. 

This got me to thinking about who gets to write interesting code and for what purposes. Like who gets to write interesting books or music, you would be daunted by the mediocrity of the best-sellers. And this is a thing I keep seeing in social software. 

Yesterday, I was actually bored enough to watch ABC news with Diane Sawyer, and there was a segment in which some Silicon Valley dude offered $100,000 for kids with ideas to skip college and go directly into business (with him). All predatory jokes aside, they interviewed a kid who built an electric car. An electric car, well - I never heard that idea before. There's lots of money in the idea of the new, but really. Does anybody actually believe that kid is going to get market share? Market share - especially the mass market, belongs to the big money. Big money grows monoculture. Big money social software expands monoculture.

Now think of all the social software you can. What does it do? It does very little, but it does do it in the same way all software does - by narrowing human focus into the range of interactions the programmers can come up with. In short, it runs you through a maze. 

The interactivity of software is why using it is more mentally stimulating than watching television. I'd take a video game over a tv show any day. oftware does allow to interact but all the right actions are already known, and in some ways it's more restrictive than watching TV. If you are watching I Love Lucy, then you know there is a laugh track. If the joke isn't funny, you don't have to laugh. But with software, you have to interact precisely as the programmer wants you to or you don't get to the next level. Imagine not getting past the commercial break unless you laugh at Lucy's silly foibles.

In this way, even social software is close-ended. It gives you a transaction or two to generation and lets a zillion other folks see 'you' and your transactions. But you must transact to be seen. Social software is never so immersive as any sandbox video game, and never should be (unless you actually prefer There and Second Life to Facebook), but it still directs your attention. It seduces you into believing you are actually being social when you press its buttons, but what is 'social'? Social software processes the means toward shallow ends, like shopping, getting directions, going to a movie, clipping a coupon, getting something to eat. It's marginally more active than being a couch potato, but I say it's creating a new class of morons. Call them mombies. Mobile zombies. 

It's Saturday. You leave the house but not without your e-leash. Heaven forbid you wander into some area where the houses have burglar bars, or even worse no signal bars. You need to occupy yourself and your social software tells you where you can find other mombies who are about your speed. You can follow and friend and like and tweet and yelp and google each other all day long. Mombie verbs, all in sentences with social as the adjective. 

The programmer who sits next to me at work knows better. He spent three weekends putting down new flooring in his house. The programmer who sits across from me knows better. He installed race-quality rollbars in his convertible car. The programmer who sits across the way knows better. He went to catch some 8 foot waves.  I think I know better, I finished two books last week. Call us anti-social. We've always called programmers anti-social. Maybe that's not such a bad thing to be considering what's called social.

The news is that Google stole the executive that Pay Pal wouldn't pay. So now Google is going to create a new market for the masses that makes that very important part of shopping their business. Google will never invent, nor need to invent something as useful as cash. But mombies will use this new fungible as they buy their Starbucks. 

You need to know that there's money involved in all of this. People are figuring out another way to monetize your spare time. The advertizing dollars that once went into television commercials will be distributed to a new set of players in the interactive social software game. Slowly but surely all of the ads that are trapped in your TV will follow you in your mombie quests, so long as there are enough bars.

There will be better and worse social software, just as there are better and worse songs, books and movies. But what I see out there right now is pretty shallow, very seductive, and reflective of the same mass market appeal of television. So far, it ain't literature.

 

Decoded

My new favorite TV show is Brad Meltzer's Decoded, a semi-serious exposure of the mind as the slave to desire. In this case, the desire is to want to know the unknowable or to debunk the mythical, or to substantiate curiosity for the sake of television drama. It's a unique combination of skepticism and wonder that both gets on my nerves and serves up a series of better-than-YouTube quality investigations with a cast of sympathetic characters. 

The characters, Scott, Buddy and Mac, are an attorney, professor and engineer who drive around in a Porsche Cayenne to visit various authorities, researchers, crackpots and experts on the trail of finding the plausible truth of some mystery a little bit weightier than an urban myth. In that, it is very much like Mythbusters but without the edge. In the course of inviting the more dubious witnesses and theorists on camera, the team has to behave politely whereas the Mythbusters could just do everything on their premises without that need. The show has a future if they can get past the first dozen episodes and narrow thngs down to something for the less gullible. It would be a great step forward from the disembodied voices of the standard Discovery-style documentary hackery, ok well Time-Life started this crap way back when. 

They've handled Hopi/Nostrodamus/Mayan end of times myths, theories about the survival of John Wilkes Boothe, mysteries around the Bohemian Club, and secrets of the construction of the Statue of Liberty. All pretty good subjects for inquiry. But very much like Man Vs Wild, a lot of the drama is sustained for the camera. There's an attorney on board and there are very quick was to get to the bottom of whether or not the constructor of the American Stonehenge in Georgia can be identified. There's a record of his purchase of the land that either can or cannot be legally divulged. They've talked to environmentalist wackos, haters of the Masons, as well as scholars at the Smithsonian, National Archives and reputable universities. It's a great mix of semi-authoritative drama, rather like National Treasure for grownups, it makes historical research fun. 

The show is at its best when the trio sit and have some hardball discussions about what they think might be real and what's just crazy, generally over a MacBook and a coffee. That's good TV. I give it four stars out of five. The 2012 episode was just a bit too doofus, whereas the tresspassing on the property of the Bohemian Grove was astounding. 

That There Was Football

Like most people are to politics I am to professional sports. I only pay attention during the playoffs, and I try not to miss The Day, but if I do, no big deal. This year I hosted my first ever Super Bowl party, thanks to the fine folks at Samsung who made such things a pleasure.

What a game. It has to be one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever. I just wanted to say that I know a thing or two about football and now a few more listening to Boy.

1. Doggett. Who knew that people pierced necks? When he got in at Ben R. in the 4th, I thought it was over and the Steelers would not be able to regain the lead, but the Steelers line just stopped him dead. I saw him twice as Ben connected on the final drive, 7 yards out of the play.

2. Safety. Holy smokes what's a safety? I haven't seen a safety in so long that I don't even say it out loud when it looks inevitable.

3. The fieldgoal over. I thought my DVR was broke when some penalty or other called back a field goal and then several downs later there was a field goal.

4. Penalties. Homeboy from the Steelers who put his knee in dude's back and held him on the ground? That was brutal. Was that Harrison? There were probably 3 facemask violations. For all the penalties in this game, they kept it moving. Big up to the officials. They got it right every time. Superb officiating in a close contest.

5. I'm sure I feel about Clarence Clemmons the way some people feel about Michael Steele. I think The Boss needs to get over to Bally's because he's still got nothing on Mick Jagger.

6. Jennifer Hudson just owned the National Anthem. Sorry Whitney, it ain't yours any more. Where can I get the MP3?

7. Best answer to a stoopid question, by head coach Mike Tomlin. Well, basically everything he said because every question was stoopid. Very nicely low key. Righteous.