Michael & Michael

We went out to Providence College on Friday night, which has become, at least in my mind, Providence's premier comedy venue, to catch Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter. As you might expect, the show was a good mix of observational humor, meta-humor, and borderline anti-humor. They even went multimedia and played several clips of a recent interview they did with Fox 2 in Detroit. One of the clips is available online here. As they explained during the performance, they had been up all night prior to this interview and decided to have some fun with it. They also showed clips of them "helping" during the cooking demonstration segment and during the weather report, but I can't find them online.

Infamous Bowls

Some people complain about how the proliferation of huge restaurant chains has destroyed America's regional diversity. What these people fail to realize is that restaurant chains don't destroy regional culture; they demarcate it. Take Bob Evans for example. That middle American dining institution has no franchises in New England and only a handful of them in the other northeastern states (unless you consider Pennsylvania part of the northeast - PA is lousy with Bob Evans franchises).

I had kind of forgotten about Bob Evans until I was back home for Thanksgiving and saw a commercial advertising their answer to KFC's Famous Bowls. It's called the Chicken Fried Deep Dish Dinner, and it takes the KFC Famous Bowl and goes a step further by adding a biscuit into the mix. I've always been fascinated by the Famous Bowl. I'm convinced that the dish was created when someone at KFC headquarters walked into the test kitchen and demanded that the chefs create a new dish that incorporated all existing KFC menu items. I'm not the only one who is fascinated by the Famous Bowl either - comedian Patton Oswalt has carved out a niche for himself in the comedy world with his Famous Bowls routine. With Bob Evans' recent shot across the bow in the Famous Bowls Wars, both of us should have plenty of material to feed our Famous Bowls obsession for the foreseeable future.

College Humor

B.J. Novak (a/k/a Ryan Howard a/k/a "The Temp") was in town on Friday doing stand-up so we went and checked it out. The show was at Providence College so the audience was at least 95% college students. I still can't get over how young college students are these days, but it's nice to know that they enjoy the humor of The Office even if they haven't entered the workaday world yet.

We hit YouTube before the show to look for some examples of Novak's stand-up routine to decide if it was any good. As usual, YouTube delivered. Here's a couple of clips that we watched - both of which were included in his show on Friday.

Novak is pretty funny on stage. His humor is mostly observational and pretty nerdy, so it's right up my alley. He did bits about how pandas are endangered due to their aversion to mating(that's not the whole story, but it certainly doesn't help) and how everyone who appears in porn films is considered a porn "star". While I may never have technically told any jokes based on those ideas, I've certainly thought about it before, so we definitely have similar senses of humor.

After the show, he did a short Q&A session. The Office spoiler alert: Kevin is going to shoot up the office (with sexy results) before turning the gun on himself in the season finale. Just kidding - no juicy Office gossip was revealed. Although, he didn't say anything about Kevin not shooting up the office in the season finale...

George Carlin

I knew this morning when I heard that George Carlin had passed away that I would read many tributes in the blogosphere today. Certain deaths really resonate in blogging world. Generally, they feature men who did great or at least interesting things while living by their own credo and not worrying too much about what the rest of the world thought of them. I suspect that deep down, this is how most of us bloggers would like to see ourselves remembered and therefore, it should come as no surprise that we feel the need to mourn the passing of the great elders of the tribe to which we aspire.

I'm not going to eulogize Carlin because I'm not that familiar with his body of work. I liked the pieces of it that I managed to catch, but I never really sought it out. I will mention that I was just thinking about what he was up to and how old he was after his name came up in a conversation I had with some friends about Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (in which Carlin plays Rufus, of course) on Saturday. I'm not suggesting that the act of me thinking about George Carlin for the first time in a few years led to his passing 24 hours later, but it is strange how things like that happen sometime. Perhaps Carlin once did a bit about this phenomenon.