Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Funny
The news has been so depressing I've tried to find things to divert — funny things.
Two commercials that make me laugh are the Snickers commercial where a guy in a suit, with a guitar, sings a plaintive ditty to a guy at a desk eating a Snickers bar, with hilarious relish; this guy, who has been drafted as a one-man audience, looks at the guitar player incredulously, and then begins singing along. It is inexplicably laugh out loud funny.
The other is the Da-iry commercials for milk. They are so well directed, the readings dead on. Fully visualized — more benignly amusing than hilarious.
Blessedly, we just received from our Netflix queue the DVD's of all of last season's Larry David. Season 5 was just released on August 1. The shows are clearly getting better. We are into the third episode and although David is still channeling some of Seinfeld, he is shuffling things enough to make it feel original. The Seinfeld shows were so well structured that David's own show, pre-structured, but fully improvised in its dialog, has an all over the place feel — as it develops the story threads do reveal however. The problem is that the actors are being thrown on their improvisational skills to provide interaction, resulting in repetitive dialog and characters that don't evolve. Actors are performers, not writers. The Netflix sleeve describes David as a “tactless but self-deprecating comedian'. They nailed it. Of all the Seinfeld crew, David is the only one who has been able to find his way to a successful, funny show. It makes you realize how large a contribution he must have made to the success of Seinfeld.