Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray63 [at] hotmail.com (Be patient, I don't check it often.)

Brian Williams on SNL. I actually watched all of Saturday Night Live this weekend. (I've given up watching it at all unless they have a guest who sounds promising.) NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams did a better job than some actors who have appeared. Some people are even saying he was underused. It helped that the show's staff wisely realized that they really couldn't embarrass him. (For the polar opposite, watch the mid-70's episode where presidential press secretary Ron Nessen hosted.)

Here's a clip from the show's last sketch. It started at a meeting where NBC executives are discussing a new open for the news to broaden its appeal. After sitting through some silly pop-type songs from a band, Williams insists that they reconsider his previously rejected idea ...

Labels: comedy

posted by Paul Murray at 12:38 PM | permanent link |

Curb Your Schizophrenia. I found this short New Yorker story interesting on several levels:

In 2004, David Roberts, a second-year clinical-psychology student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a summer job teaching social skills to a group of schizophrenic patients at a state hospital. He had a particularly unresponsive group (“Many patients are flattened by their meds,” he explained recently) and tried in vain to interest them in role-playing everyday social situations, offering the patients rewards of points and tokens in return for not giving in to their urges to wander around, respond to phantom voices, or otherwise become disruptive—a traditional system of behavioral therapy.

During a break one day, Roberts, watching television in the hospital’s lounge, noticed that a change had come over his patients, who generally seemed immune to basic social signals. “They were laughing at the ironic commercials,” he said. “They were laughing at ‘Friends.’ They were laughing at all the places I was laughing.” Many showed a fluency in the kinds of social communication that Roberts had been struggling to teach them in therapy. “We watched a scene from ‘Monk’ where Tony Shalhoub won’t shake hands with anyone for fear of germs, and walks away awkwardly. I asked a man who’d been an inpatient for ten years, and who was generally blank, what had happened, and he shook his head and gave me a wry grin. Unspoken communication is huge for someone like that.”

So Roberts began showing TV clips during therapy sessions. Soon he had narrowed his selections down to one show: television’s purest expression of social dysfunction, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Roberts considers Larry David to be the perfect proxy for a schizophrenic person.... As the patients watched David flub situation after situation, they laughed, and they willingly discussed with Roberts how they might behave in the same circumstances. “That bald man made a mountain out of a molehill!” one woman called out during a session.

Related: A 2004 New Yorker story on Larry David.

Labels: comedy, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, schizophrenia

posted by Paul Murray at 1:32 AM | permanent link |

Don't take my jokes, please. Hmm, two stories about comedians stealing jokes (Radar 2/17/07, LA Times 7/24/07). One more and it will be a trend.

Labels: comedy

posted by Paul Murray at 12:00 AM | permanent link |