"Aw hell, Chewbacca": 10 genuinely funny stand-up routines or monologues about movies (UPDATED)

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Five funniest moments of unsettling, non-Monty Python's The Meaning of Life eating by powerful men (or women) in movies and TV

This list is inspired by a hashtag tweeted by Harold J. Lee on September 2, 2010 ("Deniro and Pesci eating latenight food from Pesci's mom in Goodfellas with the body in the car trunk. #UnsettlingEatingByPowerfulMenInMovies").

By the way, if Lee's name sounds familiar, it's because Harold & Kumar creators Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg named the John Cho character after their friend Lee.

WARNING: NSFW language ahead.

1. De Niro's loud sandwich-chewing in Cop Land



2. Bernie Mac's loud orange-chewing in Bad Santa
Right at the 2:00 mark:



3. Kali Rocha, as a pregnant and surly receptionist for a city councilwoman, attacking a hot dog filled with sauerkraut in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Fights City Hall"

4. Robert Wagner as a "Sloppy Eater" on SNL in 1989 (starts at 06:12)

5. Paul Sorvino's oyster-slurping in Dick Tracy
At the 0:28 mark:

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Pogues, "The Body of an American"

"On its surface The Wire is a cop show, the most stereotype-ridden of TV genres, yet nowhere in The Wire do stereotypes exist. There are no good guys and bad guys, merely men and women who work on opposites sides of the socially acceptable. The Wire treats both as people caught up in the same racial, class, and political tensions that afflict any American, and dramatizes them in manners that feel natural. It's why you're not surprised that African-American detective Lester Freamon knows the words to the Pogues' 'Body of an American' when it's played at a cop wake in an Irish bar."

--Bret McCabe, Baltimore City Paper, January 12, 2005

Song: "The Body of an American" by The Pogues
Released: 1986
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: When Robert F. Colesberry, a co-executive producer of my favorite TV series of all time, The Wire (as well as an occasional actor who appeared on The Wire as homicide detective Ray Cole), died of complications from heart surgery in 2004, series creator David Simon had Colesberry's character die off-screen, and in the "Dead Soldiers" episode, he paid tribute to his mentor and friend through a heartfelt and rousing scene in which a bar full of white and African American Baltimore cops holds an Irish wake for Detective Cole.

"I started listening to a lot of different music for this scene, and The Pogues just naturally came into it, and 'Body of an American,' which seems to tell its own story in its own way about life and about loss, just became this thematically perfect thing," said Simon during his "Dead Soldiers" audio commentary. "The idea that [Baltimore detectives] would lay a guy out on the pool table and do a detective's wake and then sing this song seems entirely reasonable. They don't have this tradition, but they should."



The Shane MacGowan-penned gem, which is about a wake for an Irish boxer-turned-soldier, a real-life prizefighter named Jim Dwyer, "the man of wire," was reprised twice more on The Wire: when the "Corner Boys" episode paid tribute to another deceased Wire cast member, Richard DeAngelis, by giving his cop character Raymond Foerster a sendoff similar to Cole's and when a fake wake was held for Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), a comedic highlight of the series finale "-30-."

The eulogy that Sergeant Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave for Cole was filled with references to past Colesberry projects like Mississippi Burning, After Hours and Simon's HBO miniseries adaptation of his own book The Corner. When Landsman delivered his fake eulogy for McNulty, his lines about McNulty's disregard for rules and authority could double as a comment on what The Wire itself accomplished as a TV series and an exploration of "a dark corner of the American experiment" during its extraordinary five-season run: "He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah... He did what he wanted to do, and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end, he gave me the clearances."



All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
The Heavy, "Short Change Hero"
Death from Above 1979, "Romantic Rights"
Geto Boys, "Still"
The Bar-Kays, "Too Hot to Stop"

This is the final "'Rock Box' Track of the Day" post. The "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Brother Noland, "Coconut Girl"

Song: "Coconut Girl" by Brother Noland
Released: 1982
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in Pineapple Express.
Which moment in Pineapple Express does it appear?: It accompanies the montage of pothead Dale (Seth Rogen) and his dealer Saul (current Best Actor Oscar nominee James Franco, in a performance I thought he should have been nominated for) hanging out with a trio of tough-talking kids they sold weed to. Dale and Saul's interaction with "Chachi" and his friends is reminiscent of the naturalistic scenes between the kids and Paul Schneider's railroad worker character in Pineapple Express director David Gordon Green's earlier film, the much more serious George Washington. Who knew Green would turn out to be such a good comedy director in Pineapple Express and Eastbound & Down? (Green's next film reunites him with Franco and Danny McBride--it's Your Highness, the medieval comedy that's become an Internet sensation because of, mmm, Natalie Portman in a thong).

Yesterday's "Rock Box" track was part of a Sym-Bionic Titan episode that was a source of minor controversy. Today's "Rock Box" track is also tied to some controversy--in England, that is. Pineapple Express was more controversial in England than it was here in America. Because they found the stoner kids sequence offensive, the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification), the English equivalent of the MPAA, gave the film an 18 certificate (their NC-17), which Columbia Pictures didn't want. The studio was shooting for a 15 for their release, so Columbia, Rogen and the Judd Apatow-led producers agreed to delete the stoner kids sequence to get a 15. Yeah, that BBFC uproar really stopped British kids from sneaking in to Pineapple Express like The Green Hornet said he used to do as a kid in order to glimpse racier fare when he noted that "I've been seeing R-rated movies since I was 12 years old and I'm okay!"

The maligned-in-the-U.K. sequence gives some nice exposure to a catchy tune I never heard before. "Coconut Girl," which was a radio hit in Brother Noland's home state of Hawaii, is an example of a sound called "Jawaiian," a genre that mixes Caribbean and Hawaiian elements. According to a 1992 Billboard article, the Jawaiian sound exploded in Hawaii in 1990 before peaking sales-wise in 1991.

From Honolulu magazine's 2010 "100 Years of Hawaiian Music" article:

Jawaiian became the scapegoat of choice for Hawaiian music buffs lamenting the decline of traditional culture. Not that it did anything to quell the reggae takeover. “If you talk to Hawaiian music purists, they revile Jawaiian,” says Amy Stillman. “If you talk to the rank and file, though, they love it. As soon as they’re out of halau, that’s what’s on the radio on the drive home. It’s expressing thoughts and sentiments that are relevant, in a musical language that is relevant.”

Eva Mendes, Cee-Lo Green and Jon Brion believe that "Pimps Don't Cry" in The Other Guys

For the next few months, posts will be even more infrequent here on this blog than they have been over on my microblog because I'm working on bonus material for a book that will be the print edition of my webcomic The Palace (I'm also hoping to give The Palace its own URL).

Whenever I've taken a break from outlining or writing the bonus material, either I've tried to finish reading graphic novels I bought or I've headed to the theater to catch up on summer 2010 movies I've been dying to see. I finally saw The Other Guys--yeah, the buddy cop genre has seen better days on the big screen, but when it's a buddy cop flick made by Adam McKay, the director of two of the most consistently funny and surreal comedy films of the last 10 years, Anchorman and Step Brothers, the flick's a must-see--and this Bernie Madoff-inspired comedy is one of the highlights of what was a mostly underwhelming summer.


Several of The Other Guys' funniest gags involve the Will Ferrell character's "plain" wife (Eva Mendes), a physician whose charming personality and hotness turn the Ben Stiller Mark Wahlberg character into half-putty, half-14-year-old dork. At one point, Mendes soothes an agitated Ferrell by singing to him an a cappella rendition of "Pimps Don't Cry," an original tune co-written by Ferrell, McKay, Orr Ravhon, Erica Weis and Jon Brion, the composer of the scores for Step Brothers and The Other Guys.


During the second half of the film's much-talked-about closing credits sequence, Mendes is joined by break-up song reinventor Cee-Lo for a lovely-sounding retro soul reprise of "Pimps Don't Cry" (this track is now part of A Fistful of Soundtracks' daily "Assorted Fistful" block). The choice of "Pimps Don't Cry" as the partial soundtrack for animated infographics that list examples of average Americans being hustled by the Bernie Madoffs of the world during the current economic crisis was a stroke of genius.


Brion is the last composer/producer I'd expect to craft a silky-smooth R&B jam (despite his work with Kanye West on Late Registration), but he pulls it off well. The composer appears with Cee-Lo and the sultry Mendes in the Funny or Die-produced "Pimps Don't Cry" music video (Brion's the guy on keyboards).



Speaking of Funny or Die, film composer George Shaw, whom I big-upped a while back on this blog, recently scored and edited the amusing FoD video "Yoga for Black People," starring Deborah S. Craig from the original cast of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.

"Aw hell, Chewbacca": 10 genuinely funny stand-up routines about movies

Patton Oswalt, one of the few stand-ups who have publicly sworn off Twitter ("I like having radio silence. I think radio silence is an important part of any public figure's day."), did the unthinkable this past weekend when he succumbed to the Twittersphere and started an account. As one can see from his act and his stint as a guest programmer at L.A.'s New Bev Cinema, movies are a topic the Big Fan star and Hollywood script doctor is passionate about, and they've led to some of my favorite Oswalt routines. Maybe we'll get a taste of some more Oswalt material about movies on his new Twitter page. To mark Oswalt's arrival on Twitter, where he's already on a roll and is demonstrating why stand-ups and comedy writers are the best kind of celebrity to follow on Twitter (unlike most other celebs, their tweets are rarely boring or shallow), here are 10 standout routines from the stand-up world about cinema. Four of these routines are Oswalt's.

10. Richard Pryor rewrites The Exorcist
The horror genre has always fascinated the late Pryor's former writing partner Paul Mooney, who's done brilliant jokes about the Frankenstein monster, white filmgoers' fears of the shark from Jaws and movies that skeevily put women in romantic situations with sci-fi monsters. He must have had a hand in writing Pryor's material about The Exorcist, which he and Pryor actually saw together at its Hollywood premiere. When Pryor guest-hosted SNL and brought along Mooney as a sketch writer, they did an amusing Exorcist sketch in which a pair of black priests (Pryor and Thalmus Rasulala) lose their patience with the possessed kid (Laraine Newman), who taunts Rasulala's priest with the cleaned-up-for-TV "Your mama sews socks that smell."



9. Scott Thompson sinks Titanic during an interview on Late Night with Conan O'Brien
"I don't think that to be a leading man, you have to be Harrison Ford, but I do think that you should be able to do at least one push-up. When little Leo finally kisses big Kate, I thought it was a lesbian scene."



8. Robert Klein reenacts every single Our Gang short you've seen
I actually like this routine from the 1973 album Child of the 50's more than "I Can't Stop My Leg." Klein's recreation of the Our Gang score music ("Hal Roach had four tunes that he played over and over again") is priceless.

7. Oswalt wonders what Star Wars would have been like if Nick Nolte won the role he actually auditioned for: Han Solo
"Fuckin' droids, beep, beep..."



6. Oswalt recalls one of the reasons why he left his hometown of Sterling, Virginia
The Blast of Silence-loving film geek gets worked up over the aggravating opinions of an NBC affiliate's out-of-touch film critic ("Yeah, so there's this new movie from Australia... called The Road Warrior. Now let me get this straight. It's the future, there's no gasoline, but everyone's driving around in cars. I don't get it. No stars!"). It's an oddly affecting routine that anyone who's aching to leave the hometown they despise--including right now, yours truly--can identify with.

5. Steve Byrne imagines how Bruce Lee had sex
This is a hilarious little routine that must be watched, not listened to. Why Byrne included it as a track on his 2005 CD Little by Little boggles the mind because 90 percent of it relies on visual gags. Without the visuals, it's like listening to a Marcel Marceau record album.



4. Mario Cantone does an impression of that annoying classroom song from The Birds
I'm disappointed that no one has posted Cantone's Birds routine on YouTube. If you watched a lot of Comedy Central during the late '90s like I did, you might have fond memories of the routine. The channel frequently reran it, yet it never got old. I always dug how instead of the Psycho shower scene or the North by Northwest crop-duster attack, Cantone chose a lesser-known Hitchcock movie moment to mock (and add some profane new lyrics to). And yes, when you watch The Birds, that song really does work your last nerve and make you want to go peck a defenseless hobo's eyes out like he's Suzanne Pleshette.

3. Oswalt wishes he could go back in time and kill George Lucas with a shovel
A lapsed Star Wars fan, Oswalt delivers a terrific argument against prequels. Yet that didn't stop Oswalt from joining the cast of one of them--Caprica.



2. Paul Mooney rips apart white Hollywood
During the long-out-of-print 1993 album Race, Mooney makes you never look at Disney's Beauty and the Beast the same way again ("Don't take your kids to see that shit. Four or five years from now, your kid'll be in the kitchen fucking the dog, singing 'Beauty and the Beast!'") and disses sci-fi and horror filmmakers for both their misogyny and weird fetishes for "exotic" interspecies romances (I wonder what Mooney has to say about Twilight and True Blood). But the best part of Mooney's amazing rant is when he explains why he detests Driving Miss Daisy ("I don't like that coonin' happy slave bullshit"). The movies that Mooney jokes about on the 1993 CD may be old now, but unfortunately, the stereotypes they reinforced still remain. Now if only there were an Asian American stand-up who isn't so subservient to the Man and will go onstage and rant about the Asian American version of all this.



1. Oswalt channels movie producer Robert Evans
I love how Oswalt often picks the most obscure pop culture-related topics for his act (Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is a recent example). An audience favorite at past Oswalt performances was his parody of the little-remembered ESPN radio ads that the Godfather and Rosemary's Baby producer recorded to promote the channel's programming. We see why Oswalt is frequently employed as a punch-up scriptwriter when he lets his imagination run wild with colorful, almost poetic-sounding descriptions of wild escapades with '70s celebrities ("Tom Wopat loved the three F's: food, fun and fisting. We took Gil Gerard out on my cigarette boat Memorial Day Weekend 1978, and I swear to you, over those sweet, savage 72 hours, he turned that poor man into his personal finger puppet.").

"You happy now, bitch?": 100 great quotes from The Wire

This sweet 10-minute montage of classic and uncensored (and therefore, NSFW) lines from all five seasons of my favorite TV series of all time is strictly for Wire fans only. Everyone else should skip this montage because it makes no sense without prior viewing of the episodes the clips were culled from, and it contains spoilers.

I wish the montage included a clip from Bunny's speech to the troops during "All Due Respect" ("There's never been a paper bag for drugs. Until now."), but it does include one of my favorite exchanges in the entire series--Omar pwns the Barksdale crew's slimy lawyer while being cross-examined by him in court. The scene boils down the series' primary theme of broken institutions so well in that terse manner that was such a trademark of The Wire:

Levy: You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You're stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off...

Omar: Just like you, mang.

Levy: ... the culture of drugs... Excuse me? What?

Omar: I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?

Reason to Dig Aziz Ansari #2: Earlier this year, he amusingly pretended to tweet to (or retweet) characters from The Wire as if they were on Twitter.

[Via Entertainment Weekly]