Portlandia with Carrie Brownstein - Please Get Funnier

Have you ever been to a party where everybody knows each other really well, but you don't know anybody except the friend who invited you?  

Have you ever spent the night at said party sitting in the corner, nursing your plastic cup of Trader Joe's bargain bin wine, while being regaled with stories full of inside jokes about people you don't know, which everyone in the room laughs at so hard milk practically comes out their nose, while you find yourself scanning the snack table for what's left of the brie?  

Have you seen IFC's new show Portlandia starring Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein and Saturday Night Live's Fred Armisen?

Portlandia should be funny.  A series of sketches poking fun at the somewhat dated and overly precious political correctness of the residents of Portland Oregon, the subject is very much like the neighborhood I live in and if that weren't enough, Steve Buscemi makes a guest appearance. So why am I not laughing?

Despite Armisen's tenure on SNL he seems surprisingly unaware of how sketch-based humor works, and in Portlandia he neither pushes the envelope far enough, nor owns or fleshes out the characters he and Brownstein create.  So even when the pair portray a couple who leave a restaurant to personally visit the local farm where their sustainably raised chicken is being produced before ordering, they come off as merely annoying people in your neighborhood rather than actually funny.  

Brownstein is looking good in her mid-30's, and seems no longer the brilliantly tortured guitar queen of her youth. A shame then that she isn't taking comic aim at the Portland music scene, a topic she'd know well and have a unique humor insight into.  Comedy which cuts close is always the best, and in this case would doubtless would have made Portlandia a whole lot funnier. 

Till one of the stars allows Portlandia to become more personal though, it is going to continue to be like that party, laced with jokes that only insiders get.  Finding the rest of us looking for an early ride home. 

Ozzy capitalizes on unintelligibility for cell ad

In case you aren't watching at the right daypart, here's the newest ad from Ozzy Osbourne.

Is there a moment when as this legendary rocker capitalizes on "I'm just an unintelligible old coot" that he thinks "Maybe this isn't a good idea?"

Upside - his hair looks great.

Flaming Lips love Guitar Hero

Now here's something pleasing. Enjoy Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips describing how they made their promo for NBC (also features the B-52's) and gives us a tour of his souped up double neck guitar - one guitar and one guitar hero.

Aging Madonna still too damn scary for TV

I was so pleased that NBC saw fit to run the full 2-hour video of Madonna’s Confessions Tour on Wednesday night. Even I was surprised that I attended this music spectacle a few months ago when it rolled through Boston and certainly felt I got my money’s worth when among other things Madonna:

1) Arrived on stage inside of a giant
disco ball that dropped from the
ceiling,

2) Did an erotic bump and grind on a saddle suspended in mid-air to "Like a Virgin"
and

3) Made a bunch of political statements with her music that probably aren’t really
quite as deep as she thinks they are. But hey, she’s Madonna, what do you want?

The downside of seeing the show on network TV however, was realizing how American culture has become so lame that even a 48 year-old married mother of two (three?) can be easily judged as far too scandalous for the common viewer. The network apparently were the ones who made the decision to not show Madonna rising from the stage nailed to a giant disco ball cross while singing “Live to Tell” and later in the midst of “I Love New York” also cut out her comment which replaces the lyric “Just go to Texas, isn’t that where they golf?” with “Just go to Texas, and you can suck George Bush's dick”

It’s lame enough that NBC is so afraid of some kind of Christian backlash that they knocked out Madonna’s big fat crucifixion scene (as if any of these people had tuned in to begin with?), but why is a network deciding to chop out Madonna’s comments on Bush? Would Fox be so quick to cut out the political views of any of their ultra-conservative commentators (no matter how profane)? Or is that kind of language only OK in Girls Gone Wild ads? Obviously the lady herself doesn’t much care if anyone knows her politics – she changes this lyric at every show she does. Regardless of NBC's censoring, some markets were still just too plain scared to show the show. In Chattanooga, Knoxville, Reno, Ft. Wayne, Bloomington, and Atlanta TV bigwigs too offended by a number of “questionable scenes and content” opted instead to go for footage of the local aquarium among other sure-fire ratings getters.

At the end of the day I guess we can all thank NBC’s censors to be there to save us from Madonna being... Madonna. Even approaching half a century, there’s still something about her that scares the hell out of people. Well that sounds like something to be admired.