ancient Sumeria - the least-hack comedy topic ever
I shall now introduce you to someone I think might amuse you.
Chris White of DCStandup.com has issued a challenge: You challenge him to perform four minutes of standup on a topic of your selection. He gets two weeks to prepare. Then, he videotapes the performances and puts them here.
Challenges in 2006 included: Cars, Body Hair, Sumeria, Carpentry, Camping, The Zoo, Body Piercing, Eating Babies, Boy Scouts. Sumeria! For real.
I have challenged Chris to do four minutes of standup about the quadratic equation, and he has accepted. "The quadratic equation" is in the queue right after "pet names." Check the site in about three weeks.
Chris White of DCStandup.com has issued a challenge: You challenge him to perform four minutes of standup on a topic of your selection. He gets two weeks to prepare. Then, he videotapes the performances and puts them here.
Challenges in 2006 included: Cars, Body Hair, Sumeria, Carpentry, Camping, The Zoo, Body Piercing, Eating Babies, Boy Scouts. Sumeria! For real.I have challenged Chris to do four minutes of standup about the quadratic equation, and he has accepted. "The quadratic equation" is in the queue right after "pet names." Check the site in about three weeks.
posted by JenIsFamous at 2/13/2007 10:44:00 PM
8 Comments:
NEIL GAIMAN'S NOTE:
Like a pie in the face, or small yappy dogs, the quadratic equation has, of course, provided seemingly endless fodder for a great deal of British humour. It may interest some readers to know that it was also the inspiration for this (I hope) humourous entry in the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest when I was at university; it having occurred to me at the time that as second-order polynomial equations, quadratic ones are, so like unravelling the mysteries of a young girl's heart I then supposed, guaranteed always to yield two possible outcomes simultaneously. I was struck by the dichotomy between the "real" and the "complex"--what can I say other than that I was so much older then, but I'm younger than that now--and I thought to set my hand to writing a story in which I would anthropomorphise each.
As it turned out, my story did not win the Bulwer-Lytton award, but years later after I had reworked the story and it was published as a chapbook in an anthology edited by Peter Straub, it did take a Locus Award of which I remain to this day immensely proud.
This story is dedicated to my friend Susanna Clarke. . .
In all ways, he was the very model of a modern major general. He knew, for instance, information vegetable, animal, and mineral; the kings of England too. He could quote the fights historical from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical, and was very well acquainted with matters mathematical, understanding equations both simple and quadratic. (Of binomial theorem he was teeming with lots o’ news including many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.)
And yet, despite having added Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World to his formidable list of appellations and achievements--and that at the tender age of only twenty-one--his was nothing if not a deeply troubled soul. The man-child shadowboxed across the terrazzo floor of his Grand Ballroom, as ever mindful to complete the Knight’s Tour of the sixty-four alternating black and white tiles in as few steps as possible, and resisted for now the urge to toss the confounding puzzle through an open window, if not pulverize it completely in his meaty paw.
Dr. Erno Rubik’s cube was, and quite simply, driving Mr. Tyson batshit. . .
Gilgamesh and Hammurabi are playing golf when. . .
Yeah, I imagine that'll be quite a challenge!
As a big fan of Neil Gaiman I thought that author's note is one of the most dead-on parodies I've ever read. LOL
Thank you very much, Ben. I appreciate your kind words.
Best,
Matt
Footnote the First:
Susanna Clarke (born 1959) is a British author best known for her Hugo Award-winning first novel "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell"*, which Neil Gaiman, who's been logrolling blurbs with Susanna Clarke ever since she first wrote a short story based on his novel "Stardust", characterizes on the book jacket as "unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years". (Crap!)
* Despite having been characterized by some as "Harry Potter for adults" and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004, "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell", riddled as it is with excessive footnotes that would make Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace* blush, is in fact an 800-page sleep aid that New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called "dull as the river Thames".
** David Foster Wallace (born 1962) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer badly in need of a shower and a shave. He is best known for destroying entire rainforests in order to create tedious sprawling novels in which countless footnotes and endnotes, and other digressions, are sprinkled liberally. Interspersed throughout the text of his works are numerous obscure words, Wallace's love of the OED being so well-documented that it was he who was asked to write the review of Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman"*** in the New York Times Sunday Book Review section.
*** "The Professor and the Madman" (first published in the U.K. in 1989 with the title "The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Love of Words") tells the story of the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary; specifically of the contributions to it of Dr. W.C. Minor, a retired United States army surgeon and civil war veteran who was at the time imprisoned in London's infamous Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. . .
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! I agree with Ben that the parody of Neil Gaiman is first rate, especially name-dropping Susanna Clarke and mentioning that a story Gaiman wrote won a Locus Award. Gaiman wins the Locus Award every year, and it's not such an accomplishment considering that he's published in every other edition of Locus magazine. It's kind of like Joyce Carol Oates and T.C. Boyle's being nominated for an O. Henry Award every year when one or the other is published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, or Playboy every month. But unlike those authors, Gaiman never seems to tire of resting on his laurels.)
Good job, Matt Penn!
Thank you very much, Julie. I appreciate your kind words and thought that you especially might appreciate something poking fun at Neil Gaiman. Having tried my best to slog through both "Infinite Jest" and "Jonathan Strange"--note the first: I couldn't finish either, and admit that I haven't actually read "Gravity's Rainbow" either; relying on the Cliff Notes when I was in college--your footnotes gave me a good laugh.
Happy Valentine's Day,
Matt
Thanks very much, Matt, but I didn't write those footnotes. I just cut and pasted some of what I saw on the internet that was a parody of different writers overwrought writing style and edited it a bit. I figured you would find it funny.
(BTW, I emailed you the link. Did you get it? I. Like. The parody. Of Hemingway. LOL)
FUN FACT:
The demon who inhabits the body of thirteen year-old Regan McNeil (Linda Blair) in William Friedkin's 1973 film "The Exorcist" is Pazuzu. Pazuzu is a relatively obscure Sumerian god of pestilence, specifically the god of the hot south-east wind that carried disease with it. In William Peter Blatty's novel, Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow in the film) encounters a statue of Pazuzu while accompanying an archaeological dig in Iraq; at the same time, back in Washington, DC, Regan molds a figurine of Pazuzu out of orange Play-Doh after playing with a Ouija board.
Although Pazuzu had uncredited roles in each of two sequels to "The Exorcist", his career in pictures was relatively short-lived. After appearing in a memorable episode of "Fantasy Island" and numerous Marilyn Manson videos, he moved to Florida. In 2003, he appeared with Harold Gould in a short-lived revival of "The Sunshine Boys" that played at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater.
Long active in Republican politics, Pazuzu most recently ran for his party's nomination for the senate seat occupied by former astronaut Bill Nelson; losing to Bill McCollum in the primaries. Paz lives in Jupiter with his wife, and enjoys golf and snorkeling.
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