DAN TESSITORE

2/6: Florida Republican state committeewoman Carol Carter resigns over an email she sent to fellow staffers that contained the following joke: How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, DC in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn't get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?

2/23: Scott Renfroe (R-CO) got on the floor and equated homosexuals with murderers.

2/25: A Republican mayor in California, Dean Grose, sent an email containing this picture:


...with the caption, no Easter egg hunt this year, to colleagues, at least one of whom was black.

And the GOP wonders why it has an image problem. I hope someone in that party with some sense encourages the rest to stay away from computers and microphones and just stick to what they're good at, like trolling for gay cock in airport men's rooms. At least that's funny.

Hearing what Nadya Suleman says in this video, it's hard not to conclude that the woman is detached from reality, so much so that I'm going to hazard a prediction: postpartum, bath tub. You heard it here first.

In movie news I care about, Todd Solondz has nearly finished the follow-up/sort-of-sequel to 1998's Happiness, perhaps the darkest dark comedy ever made. I gleefully recommend this film to everyone but my mother (and her mother). Happiness contains very little sex, violence, or even foul language and still manages to induce maximum seat-squirming and butthole-tightening. When you hear the conversation between Dylan Baker and Rufus Read near the end of the film, you will look at the person next to you and say, "Did I just hear what I think I heard?"

Yes, you did.

The new film is called Forgiveness and has a different cast that includes - are you sitting down? - Paul Reubens and Paris Hilton. Somehow Solondz + Reubens seems right. As for Hilton, well, it's bizarre enough that I'm interested in seeing how it works out.

Does anyone really, truly, care about the Oscars anymore? In my lifetime the Academy Awards have been a history of travesty. Scorsese got nothing until The Departed. Titanic won it all. David Lynch has barely been acknowledged. I predict Slumdog Millionaire will sweep this year, not because it's a great movie but because it's about a poor brown person beating the odds, and there's nothing Hollywood likes better than broadcasting its social conscience.

I'm against competitions of any kind when it comes to the arts, but the Oscars are easily the most worthless. At least a Pulitzer can earn a previously obscure but talented writer a larger, well-deserved audience. The Oscars mostly reward films that have already succeeded wildly. Yeah they throw a couple bones to foreign films and shorts and give a few statues to the folks who actually know how to work the cameras, but generally, the awards follow the money.

Hey, congratulations on making a multi-million-dollar-grossing film. Here's a statue or two that will guarantee future millions and a place on the "new release" wall at Blockbuster for 11 months.

I haven't watched the Oscars in years, and I won't be watching this year either. I'll be too busy masturbating in front of a mirror.

...I'll be doing a semi-regular column for Behind the Bricks, Brian Mollica's weekly comedy podcast. Beyond being comedy-related, I'm not sure what focus the column will take, if any, but look for the first installment in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out some or all of the 108 shows Brian has done over the past couple years. The most recent one features an interview with Jeff Schneider, owner of the Pittsburgh Funnybone since 1982 - very enlightening.

Look at the forehead on this whack job.

David Wilcock is one of those New Age conspiracy types who can - and often does - incorporate aliens, stargates, chakras, Planet X, The Philadelphia Experiment, channeling, healing, 2012, and his fervent belief that he is the reincarnated Edgar Cayce all in the same sentence. He's a favorite guest on fringe shows like Coast to Coast AM, Jeff Rense, etc. and is so full of shit he makes Alex Jones look like the editor of The Washington Post.

I don't even know how I came across this muppet. One minute you're watching a National Geographic documentary about the Mayans on YouTube, and the next you're watching a guy who's head looks like a penis interpret crop circles to a sell-out crowd of credulous ass-hats in a Hilton banquet room.

Wilcock takes a handful of viable ideas (intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the entanglement of consciousness and reality, people with more money than ethics fucking up the planet) and spins a "cosmic" theory so mind-numbingly full of shit that it's a wonder M. Knight Shyamalyan didn't think of it first. But don't take my word for it, watch 2012 Enigma for ten minutes and see the delusion for yourself. If Wilcock went on a tour where he just stood there while someone projected his movie onto his forehead, I'd gladly pay to watch the entire thing.

The last time I entered a Subway was out of desperation and limited options. As I watched the pimple-faced teenager carefully laying out those stupid little triangles of cheese that barely add up to a single slice, I wanted to find out which Subway sandwich engineer came up with this shit and mail him anthrax. I can see him now, standing in the test kitchen at HQ, surrounded by the head honchos and demonstrating how one piece of cheese can be made to cover twelve inches of ham. He probably got a small smattering of applause, a promotion, and a nice bonus for figuring out how to rip off the hungry.

That said, Subway has earned minor hero status with me by not dropping Michael Phelps over this marijuana thing. I'm not even a huge fan of the stuff, but it's 2009 and time to acknowledge the fact that it is a PLANT that has never killed anyone and should be - at the very least - decriminalized. It appears that a lot of Americans agree because this story isn't getting a lot of traction, despite the media's best efforts to sensationalize it. Phelps is a gold-medal-winning motherfucker and sure as hell is a lot healthier than Jared. Good for you, Subway. Maybe I'll pop in for a soda.

If I actually found myself in that stupid hypothetical situation where I was forced to spend the rest of my life on a desert island and could only take the collected works of one author, it would be Anthony Trollope. Not because I think he's the best but because he wrote so many books I'd always have a new one. Second on the list, though, would be Kurt Vonnegut. No one wrote so consistently well about human folly with as much insight and humor. And the man truly understood comedy:

Even the simplest jokes are based on tiny twinges of fear, such as the question, "What is the white stuff in bird poop?" The auditor, as though called upon to recite in school, is momentarily afraid of saying something stupid. When the auditor hears the answer, which is, "That's bird poop, too," he or she dispels the automatic fear with laughter. He or she has not been tested after all.

There isn't a book on the subject of comedy that sums it up any better than that. I just finished A Man Without a Country, in which he mentions that his current (now last) novel, If God Were Alive Today, is about "a stand-up comedian at the end of the world." Weren't they all?

Brian McKim and Traci Skene, a.k.a. Shecky Magazine, have a couple of interesting and (I think) insightful posts on the whole Hicks/Letterman thing. I don't know of any other comedy site or blog as useful - or as sane - as this one. They've been in the business a long while, have great sources, and are often the first ones to break comedy news. If you're a comic, browse the archives and contributors links. Great stuff. My only complaint is that there isn't more of it.