Ape Mind Transcripts

A simple concept executed with variety and commitment makes for great humor. Jesse Eisenberg (the actor?) had a fun little dialogue in the New Yorker recently that uses a Marv Albert catchphrase to respond to every bit of anguish coming from a therapist’s couch.

Every comedian took a poke at the subject matter, but Ian Frazier’s reimagining of the death of King Richard III as some medieval dispute over a parking spot was fun.

JUDD APATOW: I felt like a father to everybody, and I felt like everyone’s world was about to collapse. I felt responsible, like I had to fight to have it survive so that their lives would be O.K., so that their careers could get launched. And so to completely fail was devastating to me. And especially for Paul, because this was Paul’s story.

10 years after the show was canceled, the actors and writers look back at their time working on the show in a Vanity Fair oral history.

Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume 1 offers hilarious bits of absurd humor doled out in two-three page bursts. Kupperman is an adept visual mimic, skilled at turning out the heavy-lined styles of old woodblock prints and over-the-top ads that used to promise hidden knowledge in Bronze Age comic books.

His sense of humor is fine too, wry, conceptual and always subverting the authority of the visuals that inspired him. John Hodgman is a good comparison. If you don’t find a quick hidden history of Sex Blimps and Sex Holes to be promising (because of a loophole, it turns out the flesh trade is legal 10 feet above or below the ground), this may not be for you.

The last volume of the four seems to lose a little inspiration; several of the gags seem like retreads of better, earlier offerings. But it’s still good for a lot of laughs.