Airplane!: Convincing Bob that "Surely you can't be serious!" is funny

For Thanksgiving this year, Bob cooked a turkey -- but I couldn't get him out of bed until 9:00, so the turkey went into the oven at 11:00, and we didn't eat until 6:00 pm.  We passed the time by watching "Thanksgiving" movies, such as Airplane! (1980).

A parody of 1970s disaster movies like the Airport series (1970, 1976, 1977, 1979), it holds up surprisingly well -- for me, anyway.  Probably because there is a real plot, with characterization and suspense: when the cockpit crew and many of the passengers are disabled with food poisoning, traumatized pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays), who hasn't been able to fly since the War, is forced to land the plane.

Many of the jokes still made me laugh, although Bob was annoyed by my habit of laughing before the punchline: 

"Surely you can't be serious!"

"I am serious, and don't call me Shirley!"

"The hospital called."

"The hospital!  What is it?"

"It's a big building with patients in it, but that's not important now."

Other jokes were still funny to me, but I had to explain them to Bob, who wasn't born yet in 1980:

The stewardess gives a passenger a second cup of coffee, and his wife muses "He never asks for a second cup of coffee at home": a popular tv commercial.

Robert Stack as Captain Rex Kramer: a parody of his 1970s tough-guy roles.

An elderly white woman can "speak jive" to communicate with black passengers: she was Barbera Billingsley, the button-down conservative Mom on Leave It to Beaver.  Interestingly the team of Abrams, Zucker, and Zuker was also responsible for Kentucky Fried Movie, a sketch-parody movie starring both Wally and the Beaver.

Bob had never hears of any o fhtem.

Other jokes made him glare at me and say "You liked this?"

Racist jokes are everywhere.

1. The two black guys speaking jive, with subtitles translating into English.

2.  A isolated African tribe who "have never seen white people before" are instinctively good at basketball.

3. Striker's life history is so boring that everyone he tells it to tries to kill themselves: a Japanese guy commits seppuku, and an Indian guy tries self-immolation.

4. We could do without Captain Oveur's pedophilia jokes: "Billy, have you ever seen a grown man naked?  Do you like gladiator movies?"

5. Striker sees his future girlfriend Elaine for the first time in a sleazy bar during the War.  He is so oeverwhelmed by her beauty that he thinks he is dreaming, and asks the guy sitting next to him to "pinch me."  The guy glares and moves away. thinking that he is gay.

6.  We were torn about the character of Johnny, who seems to be an assistant ("How about some coffee?"  "No, thank you"), but is listed in the credits as Air Traffic Controller Johnny Henshaw-Jacobs.  Sometimes he evokes gay stereotypes: he criticizes a woman's outfit, respnds to "What do you make of this?" with "Oh, I could make a lovely hat," and calls his Auntie Em during the crisis like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.  

But at other times he comes across as just wacko.  While the plane is landing, he umplugs the lights on the runway, then says "Just kidding" and laughs maniacally.

Compared to the uber-swishy gay characters of other movies of the era, such as Lamar in Revenge of the Nerds (1984), we see a much more nuanced performance.  We wondered if the actor tweaked his performance to cut down on the swish: Stephen Stucker was something of an activist.  He was one of the first performers to publicly announce that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, a  few months before his death in 1986.

Verdict:  Me, A-.  Bob: C.  I guess you had to be there. 

The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy: Nergal and Irwin, gay couple

One of my favorite gay-subtext series of all time was The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (2003-2008) on the Cartoon Network, about the friendship between two kids, the sinister Mandy (voiced by Grey Delisle) and the dopey Billy (Richard Horvitz), and the Grim Reaper, a skeleton with a Jamaican accent (voiced by Greg Eagles, left).

 No tv series aimed at a juvenile audience has ever gone so far in hinting about the existence of gay people.

1. Inclusivity.  Classmate Irwin’s mother turns out to be a decaying, 5,000-year old Egyptian mummy; his father advises that “No one can tell you who to fall in love with.”

In Billy and Mandy Save Christmas, Santa Claus turns out to be married to a female vampire, who has bitten him several times over the years. “You can’t control who you love,” he explains.  Although these relationships both pair male and female creatures, they tacitly validate same-sex bonds, which certainly would be far more conventional.

2. Hints about Same-Sex Practices.  When Billy gets a girlfriend, his father yells to his mother, “Hey, Gladys, Billy is in love -- with a girl!  You owe me five dollars!”, suggesting that there has been some good-natured speculation in the household about the boy’s sexual orientation.

 In a Lord of the Rings parody, a fey elf is overcome with lust as he praises a dwarf’s “thick, sinewy muscles,” and “bulging, compact thighs,” and a scene at the end of the episode shows a cabaret occupied entirely by same-sex elf-dwarf couples listening to Billy sing.

3. References to Gay Culture.  Billy’s parents speculate about his sexual identity in an episode entitled “The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” a well-known euphemism for same-sex love.  “Dad Day Afternoon,” a play on Dog Day Afternoon, has nothing to do with bank robbery, but the plot about Grim hiding his grim-reaper career from his conservative father might be read as a parable for a closeted gay identity, like that of the primary pair in the movie.

4. Gay Marriage.  In “One Crazy Summoner” (August 5, 2005), Billy and Mandy attend summer school in a sorcery academy modeled on Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.  A misdirected potion makes Dean Toadblatt (John Vernon) fall in love with one of the male teachers, a human-sized squid (Weird Al Yankovic), who eagerly returns his interest.  In the next scene, they graphically kiss, then ride away on a broom decorated with tin cans and a “Just Married” banner, while the students cheer.

5. A Gay Romance.  In “Most Greatest Love Story Ever Told” (April 9, 2007), Billy's cousin Nergal, Jr. rejects a girl’s offer to walk him home from school, suggesting a lack of interest in preteen heterosexual practice; but he eagerly accepts Irwin’s offer to “hang out.”

Later Nergal agrees to Cyrano-de-Bergerac for Irwin, asking Mandy if she will go to the school dance with him. But Mandy thinks that Irwin is asking for himself, and agrees, whereupon Irwin angrily breaks off the friendship. 

Nergal is heartbroken, and he never “liked Mandy that way” in the first place, but he can’t call off the date and disappoint his unaccountably enthusiastic father (perhaps Nergal’s parents have been speculating about his sexual orientation, like Billy’s parents, but with less nonchalance).

At the dance, Nergal and Irwin fight, and Mandy rejects them both.  They look at each other.

Nergal says “So this is what love is?”  Irwin nods.

They begin to slow dance, holding each other closely as the camera pans out.  Nergal was never interested in Mandy, or in any girl, so his statement makes no sense unless he is referring to Irwin.  Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the last regular episode of the series.

Unfortunately, the last season hasn't been released on DVD.

Maxwell Atoms, the show's creator (center), complains on his blog that his grandmother thinks that he is gay.

See also: Jake Thomas: Lizzie McGuire bratty brother plays Harry Potter, competes with Cory, kisses Finn.  With Jake's junk and Cory's c*ock.

"Bad Ideas with Adam Devine": When you need to f*k the Sadness in a hurry. With bonus buddy bulges and butts

 

Link to the buddy butts and bulges

Sometimes you need to f*k the Sadness in a hurry, and your best bet is Adam Devine.  Not (just) because of his hotness, because his stuff is always upbeat, with no hatred, no tragedy, no angst, not a lot of heteronormative mishegas, just whimsical problems, humorous braggadoccio, and homoerotic bonds. 

But you don't have time for a whole movie, or an episode of  Workaholicsor   The Righteous Gemstones. What do you do?

The reality series Bad Ideas with Adam Devine, streaming on Roku, is a perfect solution. In each episode, Adam. "the world's greatest movie star, the world's greatest lover, the guy who clearly writes his own intros," teams up with one of his comedian buddies to do something dangerous:

1. Compete in the World's Hottest Pepper Eating Contest, in the Bahamas. With Thomas Middleditch of Solar Opposites

2. Compete in a demolition derby, the Night of Destruction, at Perris Auto Speedway, near Riverside, California. With Blake Anderson from Workaholics

3. Become stunt performers in a Western movie (after seven minutes of training). With Rebel Wilson from Pitch Perfect

4. Drive an ice cream truck up highway P3 in Peru, called "the Death Road" for its hairpin turns and 1000 foot drops. With Anders Holm from Workaholics

More after the break

Jamie McGuire: The Smiley Creature from "From," with Halifax hunks and a nude Dylan Sprouse

Link to the nude photos

From, on MGM+, is set in the ruins of a small town, with a diner, a police station, a hotel, a farm, and some houses, where stranded travelers from various parts of the U.S. get stuck.  Every night humanoid creatures appear, dressed in 1950s costumes -- mechanic, nurse, librarian, tv cowboy.  They try to lure you outside, or trick you into letting them in, whereupon they turn into monsters and kill you.  

The Creatures are the main threat, and one of the biggest mysteries, in From. They are impervious to most weapons, but they don't have paranormal powers.  Their physiology is human, but dessicated, as if they've been mummified.  They were once regular humans: a Creature named Jasmine says "I didn't ask to be this way."  My theory is that some sort of dark magic went wrong during the 1950s, zapping the town into a pocket universe and transforming some of the townsfolk into Creatures.

Jamie McGuire's Smiley Creature has become a fan favorite, due to his especially huge, creepy grin and his quirky personality: he  seems delighted to be part of the world again.  He feels furniture, picks up objects.  He climbs aboard a stalled bus and plays at driving it.   

He was killed in Season 2, but Creatures never really die, so chances are he'll be back in Season 3.

Without the creepy grin, Jamie is quite handsome, so I wanted to know more about him.  

He's been interviewed a dozen times, but mostly about the Smiley Creature -- and he doesn't know any more than we do.  He just puts on a creepy grin and follows the director's instructions.

Researching Jamie McGuire turns out to be extremely difficult.  A Google search yields 3,000 entries about a romance novelist named Jamie McGuire, mostly reviewing two of her books that have been made into movies, Beautiful Disaster and Beautiful Wedding.    Dylan Sprouse, top photo, stars as an inked bad boy boxer. 

More Jamie after the break