Jon Rowe's Sense of Humor

Jon Rowe has a post about his odd sense of humor as a test for his readers. If the test was whether we found the same thing funny that he did, the answer is yes. I laughed out loud reading the melodramatic and overly pedantic memo from Robert Reed concerning the proper way to write the Brady Bunch. He compares it to Shakespearean character development. Howlingly funny. It reminds me of the kind of people who apply literary criticism to the songs of Madonna and actually present papers comparing the archetypal construction of the virgin or some such rot, or who write hysterically overblown and usually nonsensical reviews of modern art. Coincidentally, Sandefur also just posted a delightful quote from Robert Hughes, one of my favorite writers and an art critic, on the state of modern art. Hughes loves to puncture this kind of pomposity. I recall him particularly skewering a review of a modern art exhibit that waxed eloquent about the fact that the exhibit "had a certain deceptive sincerity about it." This is the sort of thing that debases a language and a culture.

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Stcynic...is this the StCynic I knew on IRC (Dalnet), and who posts in the www.talkorigins? I don´t know if you remember me, I am ^^Maldoror^^. We used to hang on in #christiandebate, do you remember? Wondering where have you been all this time...Anyways, good to know about you. BTW, nice blog.I am going to add to my list of favorite blogs.

By Sergio Méndez (not verified) on 16 Nov 2004 #permalink

Reading the Reed memo I got a sudden, and very vivid flashback to second-year Theatre school. I can hear my acting teachers voice ringing in my head: "This is Beckett, not Arthur Miller! If you have a hard-on it's three fucking feet long and your balls ache like you haven't fucked in a decade!"

Mal! It is indeed the same StCynic you remember from Dalnet, and of course I remember you. You were the one who always called me Santos Cynicos. Nice to know you're still around, I hope things are going well for you down there.

I would have loved to have been in the room when Schwartz got that memo. Reed and Schwartz hated one another.

The way Schwartz tells it, he actually made a lot of accomodations to Reeds demands but couldn't with this one b/c he got that memo on the day of the shoot. So he decided to write Reed out of the script for that episode (the orange hair episode). So Reed shows up to the shoot and watches from the sidelines with a big scowl on his face (and didn't get $ either for that show).

This was also the last episode of the show ever made. Schwartz was seriously considering killing off Mr. Brady for the next season (then Bobby, Peter, and Greg would have had both biological parents dead). Or they could have just replaced him like they did with Dick York on Bewitched.

Weird... I used to hang around #cd from time to time, but didn't make the connection between Ed and "StCynic." But then, it's been a while since I've chatted... mostly because it's, oh, a complete waste of time? Unlike blogging [cough] of course.

Jim, you think Chatting is a waste of time? (cough, sputter, gasp!)