MoMA sent over a press release this morning about an event called Silent but Deadly: An Evening of Comedy Shorts, which looks very cool. Curator Ron Magliozzi and silent film accompanists Steve Massa and Ben Model have put together a program of silent slapstick comedy shorts that “explore social, cultural, and political subjects”; they’ll be screening these, followed by shorts comissioned from contemporary comedians including Nick Kroll and ThunderAnt, AKA Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein.
The press release doesn’t reveal exactly what they’ll be showing in terms of silent films (when I think slapstick silent comedy I think Fatty Arbuckle, but unless the comedy of being fat is a cultural issue, I’m not sure his work qualifies), but I hope the contemporary response pieces fall somewhere along the lines of ThunderAnt’s Boink!, embedded below. It’s a mock, New York Noise-like public access indie rock show, featuring special guest Sadaam Hussein, who strums an acoustic guitar in his “home recording studio in Manhattan” while talking about the life of a dictator in the language of a jaded old punk rocker.
I missed it when it aired over the weekend, but apparently there was a short film on Saturday Night Live this past Saturday starring guest host Paul Rudd, Bill Hader and an out-of-Obama-costume Fred Armisen, directed by none other than Noah Baumbach. Via Whatevs, I’ve embedded it above. It’s a cute bit of bromance–they’re all sleeping with the same girl, because they all really love each other! It’s noMr. Jealousy (ah, Chris Eigeman and Peter Bogdanovich, together at last), but at the very least, it’s considerably more subtle than anything I’ve seen on SNL in awhile.
For all the griping about how critics just don’t get the stuff that fanboys love, a show of the numbers suggests that reviews from Tomatometer and Metacritic ranked critics are more friendly to movies based on comic books than maybe any other single genre. Jim Emerson elaborates on his findings.
Rumsey Taylor on the “brand ambience” of Mad Men: “When Draper is describing each of these products, you’re held rapt by his words, and how they pronounce, with consummate precision, their transcendent significance. It’s all bullshit, of course, but what wonderful, wonderful bullshit.”
Last night at Largo in Los Angeles, “Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen performed a series of light and effortless vignettes co-written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.” According to Vulture’s Nick Confalone, the performance felt “like sneaking a peek at P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love notepad, exploring that movie’s notion that there’s someone for everyone, even though everyone is a little bit weird and fucked up. Whatever the future for this show, last night it made us grin like an idiot and tell our friends, ‘Love is awesome, right?’” Wonderful bullshit indeed.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
For all the 
