Freaky Pictures & Whacky Stuff !!

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is not, one thinks, in the funny videos aisle. But it is considered black comedy, as is one of the best in funny videos for 2005. Especially, the subscript or subtext for the baby, Sunny Baudelaire, is some of the wryest “dialogue” this decade. Sunny’s grunts, representative utterances, or one-word invectives translate logically at times, with her “Hewenkewer [Helen Keller]” denoting she wants to see, but more laughable, her gibberish speaking for all: She tosses out a baby sound at Count Olaf, and the subtitle reads, “What a schmuck!” When the baby with the signature biting fixation is told to bite the head off a bobble-head doll in the car, she utters a gurgled syllable and the baby subtext reads, “Love to!” Sunny, baby-talking in between bites of Count Olaf is translated as “Back off, parrot-face!” and “I’ll bite higher!” And my favorites are her baby burbles translated to “Look it up, bookworm,” and—in response to a loony toons Aunt Josephine about to take in the displaced siblings, who are confronted with her paranoia, obsessive and neurotic fictional tales: Sunny goos and gas and is translated as saying first, in a pejorative uh-oh way, “Someone’s been to crazy town,” and—when continues—“She’s the mayor of crazy town!”
Chris Farley, in The Best of Chris Farley. Though if you watch it knowing it hurt him to play the token fat characters, his hysterical Chippendale wannabe, his Earl “in a van by the river,” and his fat high school girl stuffing her face sets will break your heart at the same time as they have you rewinding to ace with laughs all over again.
If you can get one skit on video, it’s the Goat Boy, created by Jim Breuer on SNL. I was lucky enough to video tape it one night, and no matter who I play it for, we laugh over and over and over. Uncanny.
If you can get them on video or DVD, the stand-up performances of Ellen Degeneres, Paula Poundstone, and Margaret Smith will have you assigning signature bits to your own life, as will the video performances of Louie Anderson. Unforgettable.
As sick as it might be to assert, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is also a flick that will have you laughing inappropriately and often.
SNL—Saturday Night Live. The original cast (aka the original SNL players) leaves us humor that is immeasurably unparalleled.
One character skit set on Mad TV: Stuart. Absolutely the best in funny impressions—of a kid and a Midwestern mom. Michael McDonald and Mo Collins should have been on SNL.
Any Seinfeld episode, every Seinfeld episode. All are at the top of the funniest videos of all time. Period.
Almost every Woody Allen, save Interiors, will have the intellectuals popping stuffed shirt buttons with laughter they can’t help but bust into.
George Carlin, Bill Cosby, and Bill Murray. Their stand-up, their comedies, their funny videos, their TV series. Find them. Get them. Watch them again and again. There will be no more war if we all do this.
Some of us are just now growing into Cary Grant’s funny videos, unable to get over the flip, tongue-in-cheek, sardonic lines, delivered in deadpan tones unequalled by anything except his beauty, lines such as “Come in; I don’t bite, you know…unless it’s called for;” or, after Hildy says another man treats her like a woman: “What did I treat you like? A water buffalo?”
Others of us are still hooked on The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplain, still others of us are re-playing the contemporary and brilliant gut-busters—The School of Rock and Shallow Hal; American Pie (the first one only), There’s Something about Mary [only the uncensored version—useless with the censoring], Meet the Fokkers, Fargo (dark), Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (with Wilder)
But regardless of subjective tastes, all of the above are clear contenders for the top 100 funniest, drollest, wryest, sickest works of all time.

Humor is subjective, and we know it when we try to pull off a crass joke at a formal dinner party or we tell a highbrow quip at a baseball game. We know it when we flop. We know it when we land a funny, kill, hit the funny bone, too, but how is it that we were funny? How did our funny jokes go over so well?
We don’t have to take the substance out of funny jokes to consider what makes funny jokes funny, really. We just have to have the thick skin and miserable childhoods and caustic, bantering mentality that compose a comic sense of humor…and give a few nods to the elements of a good joke.
The Element of Surprise
When the unexpected—the absolutely bizarre or unpredicted—suddenly appears, the shock elicits [inappropriate] laughter.
You have likely seen (in an old movie, in a melodramatic TV show) a woman slap a man for kissing her. Consider the show, Third Rock from the Sun. Dick Solomon (played by the genius of quasi-slapstick, John Lithgow) is an alien commander sent by The Big Head to study earth humans. Everything is new or daunting or perplexing to him. In the first episode, he is at a gathering with Mary (played by the brilliantly witty Jane Curtain). They end up in the restroom together and he inappropriately kisses her. She slaps him. He looks wounded. Then he slaps her back. He thinks it is part of the earthling ritual. Hysterical, that unexpected out of the norm behavior.
Exaggeration
Slippery slopes make for the funniest of simple jokes. On Tool Time, for example, Tim Allen is fretting about his oldest son Brad (and again, I paraphrase). He says to his wife that if Brad doesn’t go to college, he’ll never get a degree, and if he doesn’t get a degree, he’ll have to move back in, and if he moves back in, Tim and his wife will have to baby-sit the whole new family of Brad, Brad’s wife, their kids, etc., when they are in walkers….
The Truth
Funny jokes are based in truth—somebody’s truth. This is unfortunately how racist jokes have survived, too, as they are based in a common understanding of what is a truth (which is in fact an ignorant mythological, collective truth). But since we can get away with humor about an ethnicity if we are of that ethnicity (and known for our people’s sense of humor, ahem), let’s pull off a mild one here:
What’s a Jewish dilemma?Free ham.
Self- and Other-Effacing Funny Jokes
Telling the truth about oneself is safe. And the more ridiculous the better. David Sedaris is superb at pointing out his own inanities and idiosyncrasies: he writes of having the booze-drinking, cigarette-smoking, aproned housewife mother who has a coffee clatch neighbor over for a visit one morning, and how he, with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), is still compelled to carry out his necessary rituals, no matter how bizarre, no matter that an outsider will witness them. So he walks to the doorway of the kitchen where his mother and their neighbor are chatting, and he steps to the wall near the door, to the light switch. He begins his imperative licking of the light switch. The neighbor is stunned and staring. The mother just rolls her eyes and says something casual, like, “David, stop licking the light switch and come say hello to Suzie Q.” [note: paraphrased from memory]
The Funny Jokes without the Fanfare
Some of the funniest stuff is that which is not prefaced by any warning that it will be funny. The funniest people to me are those who are deadpan—as if they are SERIOUS—and we are the nervous gigglers who can’t quite wrap our brains around whether they are for real or not.
Cary Grant pulled this off in the best of ways, tossing off flip remarks every other line or so of dialogue.
Jake Johansen (sic) tells a wide-eyed, innocent tale that is so funny you pee a little.
No laugh, giggle, grin, or even smirk that indicates it is a joke.
Then again, there are hysterical jokesters who are so funny they can’t contain their usually straight-faced selves, and they laugh, too. This is funny, also. Louie Anderson, Jerry Seinfeld, and Ellen Degeneres come to mind. You can catch them breaking, and that makes their humor all the funnier.
And Timing Matters
This is the trickiest part of telling funny jokes, waiting for the beat, knowing the pause. But if you know your audience, know your joke (are comfortable with it) and don’t TRY too hard, it’ll come for you. Or it won’t, and they’ll kick you out of their homes, and you’ll be so ashamed you’ll move to a secluded hick town where no one laughs, an you’ll sink deeper and deeper into forgetting and depression and drinking Jack Daniels, about which, Robin Williams says, if alcohol is a crutch, then Jack Daniels is a wheelchair!

The best of the best movie lines are compiled often and by many. So though I am by no means a movie aficionado (though I watch more than the average person), I present the 2006 best of the best movie lines as I deem them. Here they are, in no particular order, though I have numbered them for the purposes of listing:
1. "If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day."
Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff says this to Catherine in Wuthering Heights.
2. “I am not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love. That is all. But I love strongly, exclusively and steadfastly.”
Judy Davis’s character, writer George Sand says this to Hugh Grant’s Chopin in one of the best movies ever made, Impromptu.
3. “Uh. Oh. V-E-R-N! V-E-R-N!” “Course, ten minutes to Wapner.” “Course, Dad lets me drive on the driveway….” Course, I get my underwear at K-Mart.” “She’s [the casino prostitute’s] very sparkly.” In response to his first kiss and being asked how it was: “Wet.”
All of the above delivered by the master, Dustin Hoffmann, as the greatest character of all time, Rainman—Raymond Babbit.
4. “I'm no friggin' monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”
Said by the genius Nic Cage, playing wooden-handed Johnny Cammareri in Moonstruck.
5. [After Johnny (who has just made love to his brother’s fiancé) says “I love you” to her, she slaps his face] “Snap out of it!”
The wonderful Cher, as Loretta Castorini in Moonstruck.
6. [As Lynnard Skynnard’s “Sweet Home Alabama” plays while cons take over plane]: “Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.”
Spoken by Steve Buscemi’s character, Garland Greene, in Con Air.
7. “Y'know, I could eat a peach for hours.”
Cage’s smarmy Castor Troy says this in Face/Off.
8. [To girlfriend, Lula, played by Laura Dern] “The way your head works is God's own private mystery.”
Cage’s Sailor Ripley, in Wild at Heart.
9. And from the second greatest movie of all time (in my lofty opinion), Mad Max: Road Warrior, come two best of the best movie lines (or snippets of dialogue):
“I got it!” [The Gyro Captain, jumping to catch a deadly incoming boomerang, a murder weapon used by the grunty little Feral Kid]
“My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called "Max". To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max. The warrior Max. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything. And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again....” [Narrator of Mad Max: Road Warrior]


My nods of course go to AFI (American Film Institute), as they have their own list of best of the best movie lines; and I acknowledge the critics and true film experts and professionals who also have their lists of the best of the best movie lines, the top ten movie lines, or the top 100 movie quotes.
But these organizations have already established that on the lists-- living forever, in perpetuity--are such lines as Clark Gable/Rhett Butler’s “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” or Mae West’s “It’s not the life in my men, it’s the men in my life,” or Robert Deniro/Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?” soliloquy.
So I thought it fun to give a heads up to the marginalized lines that have just as much power, make just as great an impact on us movie fanatics.