Just Watch.

Strange Bedfellows

It was a day for us all, as Americans, to come together, and the peculiarities of this directive were perhaps no better evidenced than by Pat Buchanban, reading jeans-cteamingly rapturously from Obama's inaugural adress on MSNBC.

But personally, I felt a much more resonant strain of the "we are one" mentality that pervaded are increasingly partisan instiutoons yesterday. Trolling the MSNBC airwaves for the faint point of light that is Rachel Maddow's perfectly arched eyebrow, I found an unexpected common thread.

Yes possums, amidsts his usual hard-headed blobiating, not to mention the renactment of his multifaceted. Inferiority complex driven psychodrama re: the Kennedys Mr. Chris Matthews revealed himself to be that potent, interesting cocktail of politico dweeb and cinephile.

Within the span of a few hours, Matthews referenced two movies near and dear to the Just Watch bosom: first Advise and Consent (viewer beware: not the flick to watch ifyou're trying to maintain those "aw shucks, ain't America grand?" feelings of yesterday) and second the Paddy Chayevsky--penned, George C. Scott--starring The Hospital.

Wait, I have something on common with a pompous, overondlayed talking head who has somehow deluded himself into thinking he speaks for the Everyman?

Hats off, BHO. Change we can believe in, indeed.

Notes on British Comedy, Part One

Zadie Smith wrote an incredible essay for the latest fiction issue of the New Yorker. Titled Dead Man Laughing, it's basically about the love of comedy she inherited from her father. You can read it here.

Even if I didn't love her writing already, the remarkably sharp second sentence would have lured me in. Remembering her father, Smith writes:

He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning.

This made me laugh out loud. You only have to know about 3 British people to recognize the deep truth of the preceding statement. Of course, this resonance coils me nothing more than a testament to the company I keep, as I happen to be a British comedy nerd born on the wrong shores.

Smith goes on to describe herself and her family as "comedy snobs," highly suspicious of a cheap, easy laugh. The symptoms of the condition that she enumerates strike me as eerily familiar: a deep disdain for Benny Hill; the habit of reciting the Dead Parrot Sketch as if it were catechism; the reverential and often joyless introduction of live albums to the uninitiated.

It's only just occurred to me to wonder whether Smith knows that the comedy snob condition has traveled across the pond. It runs rampant in the children of upwardly mobile, intellectually minded parents who believed that repeated exposure to culture was the best assurance of future success. We members of this ragtag tribe eventually found each other through the cultural signifiers that determine the order of things in college dorms across the land. By their Silly Walks posters and Young Ones DVDs shall ye know them.