The Unit has bad taste sometimes. For the five good laughs I get out of half an hour of comedy, I've been wading through a hodload of horse hockey for some snuggle time on the midnight couch of bored insomnia. I'm talking about First Amendment, the new series of standup from our Hollywood geniuses and Martin Lawrence.
It has long been my contention that there's a difference between pornography and porno, porno being good. It is a natural consequence of my appreciation for the size of this nation, and my disgust at the arrogance of social control. The nation was built for tanks, it's nice to roll our Lexi on the same tracks, but don't pretend you're important. Similarly the nation was built for Wordsworth, it's nice to have Bruce Bruce share the airwaves but...damn!
In truth, Bruce Bruce is the Lexus of the bunch. A man with true breath control, he can take his diction to a rabid pace or immediately bring the crowd to a hush. The rest the pack of rats are a level of fuck jokes I never even heard in summer camp. I keep wondering when I'm going to get through a standup routine in which the male comic does NOT do the smack that ass giddyup pantomime. That was tired in 1988, and yet it remains a staple. Where IS Paul Mooney when you need him?
On the other hand, there is a small star on the horizon - Russell Peters, from the great white north, has enough material to fill a one hour show and a good sized venue with his observations of the differences between race and culture. He has an uncanny ability with Chinglish and Englian, which would be the stereotypical accents we recognize when Chinese or Indians mangle the King's English. And so he has some refreshing hilarity on those, the two largest countries on the planet, neither of which can field a decent soccer team. He chides Jews, Deaf, Arabs, Portugese, Blacks, Whites, Latinos roughly in proportion to their representative population in the world-bourgios. It's a good show which I recommend.
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The good thing about racial humor is that it is predictable. Peters' experience says that it translates fairly well across the West. There is that possibility that getting between Chinese and Indian will be an interesting spot for humor, if and when we get to hear it. It's a rivalry I expect we'll hear more about. So who IS the cheapest?
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