Palaver

He reminds me more of Will Bailey from West Wing. Young guy with raw talent that needs molding. At least that was the first thing I thought of.

boogieman03

Yup, I liked last night's episode as well.

My only complaint,w as too little of that chick from Calico Gals.

megashock5

Loved it. Actually, I've loved every episode. I hate the fact that this show isn't doing well and probably won't make it. Especially considering the stuff that stays on for years.

Red Dog

When you say middle-age, what do you mean? I'm talking 50-ish. I can buy a 30-something white J6P male possibly not hearing of A&C nor the routine.

DRG

I hated the stuff with Cordry's family. It's like Sorkin was attempting to represent an older conservative couple but it's such an alien concept to him that he bases it on exaggerated cliches. I do give him credit for not making them the 'bad guys' in the scenes, though.

That said, this was IMO one of the better episodes. The rest of the character moments worked for me. For the first time I actually liked DL Hughley's character. I thought the material between him and Matt was golden. The scenes with the old guy were a bit overdone but also helped set the 'tradition' of the place (as did Cordry's guided tour). I'd like to think the three dumb girls were a comical exaggeration, but I can't help but to believe they were based on very real people Sorkin has met.

Tracer Bullet

I don't think you're scaling your timeframe. My dad was born in 1956 and he doesn't know what "Who's on First?" is; I just asked him.

Red Dog

Had he ever heard of Abbott & Costello? What demographic is your dad?

I remember seeing A&C black and white stuff on television all the time on weekends as a kid in the 70s, and I presume that the same stuff aired in the 60s. Any white middle-class J6P born in the 50s must have lived in a hole to not know who those 2 were.

Tracer Bullet

Yes, he knows who Abbott & Costello are. I know their TV show was rerun in the '60s and '70s.

My dad was a kid in the '60s and a teenager in the early-to-mid '70s. Of course, his family wasn't what I would call middle-class, so maybe that's it.

Red Dog

Well there you go.

das Monkey

I dunno. Mid-40s? I wasn't conducting a census.

I wonder how DL feels about his role on this show. First his character is embarrassed about being linked to reusing jokes when DL's own stand-up is far from original; and now his character is embarrassed by a "white people dance like this; black people like crime and big asses" bit when that's a lot of what his own material is.

das

BabiG

This is the type of episode I thought I was going to see when I first saw this was an Aaron Sorkin show. This is the first episode that I actually gave a damn about, and felt the drama and acting actually matched the situations and felt substansive.

I might be too "aware" of Aaron Sorkin to truly enjoy the show they way it should be. I too thought the midwestern parents tour was a little much, I had a real "who the hell talks like that?" moment when he's reciting all the tour guide information from memory (by the way, Rob left the Daily Show to go to Afganistan? Bum deal...), but I liked the Simon storyline a lot.

Jeremy517

It seems to me that the only reason that they hired the comic was essentially because he "speaks so well". He completely bombs on stage with bad material (although a different kind of bad than Willie Wilz) and they hire him anyways?

DRG

But I think the material was supposed to be funny, but that we were to believe that he bombed because either 1) the audience was too dumb to 'get it' and/or 2) the presentation sucked... i.e. he sucked as a stand-up, but Matt actually liked the content/writing of the material.

Again, here is the problem with the comedy they display. They almost have to tell us each time what is "funny" and what is not in the context of Sorkin's world just so we can follow the story and plot points they are trying to establish, because what is considered funny in that world does not necessarily match what is funny in the real world. Maybe there should be a name for this, like 'Sorkomedy".

It's almost like watching a movie about some fictional sport/game where we don't know any of the rules... yet we are still supposed to follow the game dramatically.

das Monkey

Except neither Matt nor Simon laughed at the routine. It wasn't about him being funny on stage or not. They thought he had potential, that his perspective was different from the typical dime-a-dozen comic and might be valuable as part of the writing staff under the mentorship of professionals. They were pretty clear about how much they thought his stand-up sucked.

das

lotsofdvds

"CSI: Miami" grabbed the night's biggest audience at 10 p.m. with an 11.4/18. Its rating beat the combined total of NBC's "Studio 60," 5.1/8, and ABC's "What About Brian," 4.4/7.

DRG

Again, you could blame the delivery and not the material. If you think back, when does Matt ever laugh out loud at material in the rough stages? There have been several scenes where he reads something and stone-faced will respond along the likes of "That's really funny. Put it in the show." I can't recall him ever busting a gut over something in the written form, only occasionally he does laugh at the 'final product'.

Jeremy517

The slavery joke yeah maybe, but the drug-dealing barber joke was pretty much a Willie Wilz joke with a dfferent delivery style.

Jadzia

Well at least Studio 60 is now beating that awful Brian show now.

das Monkey

He rarely even goes that far. If I recall, of the plagiarized routine he said, "It's not bad." But I think the point of that scene was clear.
The Willie Wilz jokes were about not paying bills, skipping out on rent instead of going on "vacation", making babies and slapping the big badonkadonks of "bitches". The slavery joke was creative and showed a unique perspective and drug-dealing barber joke wasn't standard "white people do this; black people do this". While it may have been rooted in the black experience, it wasn't based around blacks being women-disrespecting, baby-making thugs like the countless Willie Wilz comics in every club. That's why they hired him.

das

JasonF

Willie Wilz: Yo, check this out: black guys drive a car like this.
[Leans back, as though his elbow were on the windowsill]
Do, do, ch. Do-be-do, do-be-do-be-do.
Yeah, but white guys, see, they drive a car like this.
[Hunches forward, talks nasally]
Dee-da-dee, a-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-dee.
[Audience howls with laughter]
Homer: Ah ha ha, it's true, it's true! We're so lame!

devilshalo

I liked this episode. A bigger improvement over last week and really gave me something to look forward to.

Jobronie

Best ep so far (tho the continuous genuflecting to the History of TV could wear thin and be too preachy for the general public).

The exchange that really hit home for me was Mom referring to the 'skits', and calmly being told the difference between sketches and skits (people calling anything and everything a 'skit' is a pet peeve of mine, except I always use the example that skits are those semi-humorous little exchanges that Cub Scouts perform at Pack Meetings).

And it's incomprehensible to me too how neither half of a 50 something couple from the midwest had ever heard of Who's on First. If anything, Mom struck me as the type who would want her children to embrace comedy like that, lest they start listening to that nasty Richard Prior or George Carlin or, heavens forbid, the Cheech and the Chong (or whatever a 27 y/o would have listened to).

Going way OT here, but was anyone else surprised by how big and flabby (OK, lacking in tone) Sara Paulson's upper arms are; that really jumped out at me in that one scene. Or have I just never noticed that before......

Jeremy517

Maybe not, but it still fits one of the negative stereotypes that too many people believe.

das Monkey

Duude, weed is a universal theme.

das

Jeremy517

I meant the dealer, not the user.