Awesome D&D Humor

Something Awful has a post about the original D&D supplement from way back when.

Steve: Yo, this is OG D&D style right here. Name randomly jammed in there and ridiculous old lady with no pants riding a horse.

Zack: Somebody, presumably a human, looked at this image and said, "Yes, that's good. Let's put it in the front of our book."

Steve: Maybe that sort of quality control explains why there are multiple pages of naval combat rules and minimal character creation information.

Zack: Poor quality control can't explain why they decided to devote nearly an entire page to egotistical swords.

I laughed a lot. Worth reading.

More Muppets

I posted before about the new Muppet video so I imagine I should as least point out this new one.



I don't know, I'm of mixed mind. I chuckled but I don't know that all that thrilled about Muppets becoming internet commentary meta-memes. I just think that's ultimately limiting. I was hoping this was starting somesort of bigger comeback for the Muppets but I don't think making fun of YouTube will lead to anything bigger.

Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody

This is awesome:



(via everyone. The first link I saw was Chris Hardwick.)

Watching this drives something home to me: the Muppet folks need to bring back the variety show. Here's what I'm saying: sell it direct-to-DVD, stream it on YouTube or Hulu, or do the more esoteric sell subscription podcasts or whatever. Do anything other than attach it to some stupid basic cable channel and I'd sign up. I'm positive you could get a season's worth of various internet folks to guest host the show (just imagine a Muppet Show with Jonathan Coulton for example. That's internet gold right there.). Somebody is going to break this market open eventually, and I seriously think The Muppet Show has the right nostalgia factor to make it happen.

There are these fumbling steps to bring back the Muppets (Waldof and Statler doing movie reviews for example), this video has a link to buy a Queen CD at Best Buy, but I think it's overkill. Just give geeks the show they remember from childhood and and give them some way to pay you for it. (Imagine the Pigs in Space take on The Matrix and tell me you wouldn't pay for that.)

Cute Animation

Cute animation I saw via Rands on Twitter. It's only a couple of minutes long and worth watching.


oktapodi from inkman on Vimeo.

Born Standing Up

Gah. I've been doing more book reading lately and thus the to-be-reviewed piles begins to loom. Let's talk about Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's memoir of his early stand-up career.

I have to admit, I went into this book thinking it was something different than it was. I thought the focus was on comedy, how it works and why it works. There is a discussion about how his stand-up evolved and what Martin was thinking as created his style, but that's not the bulk of the book by any means. Furthermore, that's more of a historical note than a comedy How-To. It's a fascinating topic and his presentation is insightful, but it ends up being a documentary of how Steve Martin reacted to the comedy of that time. If you were going to do comedy today you'd have to react to the comedy of today – meaning you'd have to build off or react to Martin's work. From that perspective knowing his thought process back then isn't really practical information. As I said it's fascinating to read but I had gotten the impression that it there was practical information on creating funny material in the book, and I don't think that's accurate.

I've always enjoyed Steve Martin's stand-up and sketch work, as well as his earlier movies. (I don't think I've seen anything he's done from in the last twenty years or so.) The book does a good job of presenting his start going all the way back to working in Disneyland when he was ten years old. I was only seven when The Jerk came out, so I've always seen his comedy after the fact, usually by many years. I think I was in college before I saw the "Wild And Crazy Guys" skits. Seeing how his comedy evolved and where he started is interesting and he tells it well in the book.

I enjoyed the book. It's a pretty quick and light read. It's not what I thought it was going in but even as a historical note seeing how Martin played with comedy is interesting. I tend to think of that oddly literal and deadpan style Martin has just being fully formed. He does a good job of walking through how that evolved from the standard comedy routines he knew and presenting his style as a journey. If that sounds interesting to you then I think you'd enjoy reading this. It's more of a memoir and less of an analysis of comedy but it's a fine memoir, and chewing on the techniques presented can yield interesting insights. The glimpse of how Martin approached his craft is intriguing and I think worth the time to read.