Pretty cool, 2003

Via voicemail, today.

My sister: “I’ve seen ‘Heathers’! I saw ‘Heathers’ way before you ever saw ‘Heathers’! I was way cooler than you were in high school!”

Yes, it’s true.

Amie is pretty cool.

And if you don’t believe me, believe me.

Hat that society loves with jacket that society eschews

(Confidential to my sister: Hey Amie! What’s up? Hey, I’m going to save you a phone call so you don’t have to leave me a message that says, “That thing you wrote. I didn’t get it. Why’d you write that? I didn’t get it.” So, here’s a little note so you’ll get it! You see, the headline of this blog post is a play on words. It is a play on words from a popular movie in the late 1980’s starring Winona Ryder called “Heathers,” which if you were at all a misfit in high school or even flirted with the possibility of joining Amnesty International or Spanish Club, you watched multiple times and were like OMG OMG OMG. Anyway, Amie, there was this so-terrible-it’s-funny scene in it right after Christian Slater’s dastardly J.R. character has killed these two football players. And so the father of one of the two jocks at the funeral is really distraught. Why is he distraught? Well his son has been murdered for one. But mostly, he’s distraught because his jock son has been killed and it was staged as a double suicide resulting from a gay lover’s quarrel, which of course leads to the best line in the entire movie, wait for it, Student in Parking Lot 1: “Did you hear? School’s canceled today because Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed, homosexual suicide pact.” Dialogue! And so you know how fathers of jocks are, right? If they find out their son is gay? Bad, bad news. So earnestly trying to make the best of it jock dad says at the funeral with a very charming conviction which really embodies that famous Hollywood note (“Deliver the moment, deliver the moment”) he says: “I love my dead gay son.” Which is, you know, it’s so terrible it’s funny, kind of like when Kramer was trying to apologize for his racist tirade and then referred to black people as Afro-Americans on Letterman, which, that’s just not good, that’s the wrong term. Which reminds me of an absolutely brilliant line from Chris Rock when he was on Bill Maher’s “Real Time” recently and was asked whether Michael Richards should be considered racist or not. Rock was all: “He yelled n—– in a crowded theater! What do you gotta do to be called a racist these days…shoot Medgar Evers?” My point being that great classic “Heathers” quote for some reason came to mind when I was trying to come up with a headline to put on this blog post that features a clip of me doing stand up at Mo Pitkin’s where I do a few bits about our blind father. So yeah. Thanks for listening, Amie. And definitely rent that movie! You’ll see what I mean. It is totally weird.)

Enjoy, embed, rate, comment and share with the masses!

Thank you, and I love you.

UPDATE: Featured on Comedy Central’s Insider blog! And Metadish! And Daily Motion! And Grouper! And a few more, yeah! Thanks so much, dudes. You rule my everything.

from listening to the pure toxic sadness of this mind-blowing Alec Baldwin voicemail, enjoy the pure joyful hilarity of this Will Ferrell/Adam McKay sketch.

(Via Gawker via Viceland)

Professor Librescu has lit the entire world with hope, reminding us that heroes can still exist even in our dark times,” Evan Goldenthal of Toronto wrote on a Facebook.com page of tributes to Librescu.