Tag: comedy

The Beautiful Sad Sick Genius of Blue Jam

BLUE JAM/CHRIS MORRIS

I listened to almost every single episode of Chris Morris’ genius-like radio show Blue Jam when I was on holiday.

It can put you in a very strange place. But it is absolutely amazing. Some of the writing is incredible. Yes it’s undoubtedly in odd taste (I’m sure some people would say incredibly bad taste), but it stands alone in my mind as a kind of fucked-up mutoid love-child of Derek and Clive, Monty Python, the set from an early 90s chill out room, and a warped psycho-therapist.

Here’s a kind of montage of a bunch of bits from YouTube. The video isn’t supposed to move, it’s a radio show :-)

From a DJing perspective the musical selection is fantastic too. That’s the thing you don’t pick up from these isolated clips, you don’t get a sense of the sonic journey.

These YouTubed snippets don’t really do it justice. You need to get transported into the whole 60 minute experience for it to really seep into your brain like is needs to.

If you think you might be a fan there’s an excellent comedy forum with a strong Chris Morris bent over at Cook’d and Bomb’d.

In fact there’s a complete episode guide as well as download links to the whole first series – yay!: http://chilled.cream.org/boards/index.php?page=bluejam#series_1

The only thing that I think you can legitimately get hold of is the Blue Jam CD that they put out on Warp. Which is good. But marginally less good than the stuff that was on Radio 1 IMHO.

Oh and you can still get hold of the DVD of the Show JAM which was the telly version of the show. But again this isn’t as good as the radio stuff IMHO. The pictures reveal a bit too much and some of the oddness is knocked off. Plus I loved the interplay between the music and the words that a 1hr radio show gave them the space to play with.

There’s lots of snippets from Jam around on YouTube if you want to check it out. And in spite of having just said that it’s not as good as the radio there are undoubtedly moments of genius…

And it still does have that strange sense of melancholy that I love so dearly…

The sense that you’re not quite sure whether to laugh, cry or peel off your skin with a rusty penknife.

And don’t get me started on The Day Today, Brass Eye or Nathan Barley or we’ll be here forever…

I Heart Flight of the Conchords A Lot

Flight of the Conchords

I know lots of people know about The Flight of the Conchords, and I know that it’s not new. But there are a few people who’ve either not heard of it, or for some reason resisted. This post is for you.

I’m loving it so much I feel the need to evangelise…

For me FOC takes the slow, dark, slightly depressing humour of The Office, and manages to fuse it with the surreal nutsness of The Mighty Boosh in a spectacularly funny way. And the characters all possess those fundamental human flaws and quirks that we can all relate to, but it’s done a bit more subtly and less painfully than something like Peep Show.

And the songs. I’m not normally a funny song kind of person. But I love the way these guys burst into song with a totally unexpected genre and mutate it into something that’s laugh out loud funny.

Hip hop gets lampooned quite a lot, but this is so superior to most efforts. Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros:

And Inner City Pressure bears more than a passing resemblance to someone…

And the songs / sketches make perfect YouTube fodder. Their clips have millions and millions of views which can’t hurt in terms of creating buzz and awareness.

And their websites are funny too.

Copy like this is just good:

The Conchords will be playing there. Here for details. Performance times TBA (that stands for ‘to be arranged’ but it just saves time to write ‘TBA’).