I’ve been hooked on Carol Burnett ever since the first time I heard that yell. She will always do whatever it takes to get the laugh, whether that means playing Scarlet O’Hara in a dress made out of a curtain with a rod running through the back or wearing a pair of sagging, pendulous breasts in a sketch with Charo. She is always willing not only to be the butt of the joke, but also to look like the butt of the joke.

One day I tuned in to see her talk about her life and career on Inside The Actors Studio. She and the host, James Lipton, were talking about the themes she liked to explore in her comedy. Her favorite, she said, was the natural conflict between funny and sexy. Then she asked a question that I wasn’t ready for, a question far more profound than the material she is best known for – “Is funny the opposite of sexy?”

That may sound like an innocent question to you, but it has haunted me for nearly fifteen years. The implication of that question is shockingly bleak for someone like me who loves to make people laugh. And what does it say about us as people? Laughter is one of the most basic expressions of our humanity. How could we have gotten our wires so crossed that we would be turned off by an expression of our own humanity?

Perhaps a clue lies in Burnett’s famous Tarzan yell. Imagine a caveman, dirty and hairy with a protruding brow and a sturdy loincloth. If you were a cavewoman (or a caveman for that matter), you might think he looked sexy in his loincloth. But, if he wore one of the over-the-shoulder versions made famous by Borat, you probably wouldn’t notice that he was sexy at all. You would just point, laugh and move on to find another caveman with a more sophisticated sense of cave-style.

We now know that it’s not polite to point, but as anyone who grew up even slightly awkward knows, the instinct to point remains intact. Maybe the other instinct, the one that urges us to reject the objects of our ridicule, also remains intact and it forces us to overlook funny people as potential mates.

On the other hand, the conflict between funny and sexy may be more deeply rooted in our minds. Perhaps there’s some undiscovered part of our brains that functions as some kind of mental valve, preventing us from simultaneously finding people both funny and sexy.

Either way, there must be a way to train ourselves out of this behavior. After all, Carol Burnett and other funny ladies like Goldie Hawn, Tina Fey and Melissa McCarthy are happily married. Perhaps they have found some evolutionary loophole or developed some kind of advanced comedic therapy to help their partners see them as both funny and sexy.

Until we learn their secret, perhaps we can find a way to make this conflict work to our advantage. Remember that crush from high school that you couldn’t get over? The one who thought you were funny, but wasn’t attracted to you. Imagine your crush in a loin cloth. Now, imagine your crush in an over-the-shoulder loin cloth. Feel better?

You’re welcome.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

As your 5th grade teacher no doubt taught you and you promptly forgot, it’s grammatically incorrect to say they when referring to a single person. For example, “someone should throw away their Crocs immediately,” is perhaps the best advice you’ll ever get, but it’s grammatically incorrect. Someone refers to a single person while their obviously refers to more than one person. You could fix this nugget of wisdom by replacing their with his/her, but then you just end up with tons of slashes. And who wants that? Slashes are the switch blades of grammar. Do you really want to go around pulling them on him, her and your reader? No.

It turns out that people have been writing about this for over 150 years. Dennis Barron pulled together an amazing post chronicling this effort. There are some truly amazing gems in the post including the following:

• In 1886 a writer in the New York Evening Post offers his-her as “an hermaphrodite pronoun,” adding, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, “When one has become accustomed to the use of him-her, his-her, etc., one can drop the hyphen at his-her pleasure.”
• “The need of a personal pronoun of the singular number and the common gender is so desperate, urgent, imperative, that according to the established theories it should have grown on our speech as the tails grew off of the monkeys.”

Eventually there were also calls for a “bi-personal pronoun” with several recommendations including hesher, hiser and himer as the compound forms of the nominative, possessive and objective forms of him/her.

Makes sense right? But we can do better. WAY better. I’m thinking a nice genderless pronoun could be something like, tuck. I mean, it works for drag queens right? What do you think? Let’s come up with some fantastic ideas. We can do this people. Fetch didn’t happen, but the “hermaphrodite pronoun” can with a little help from the Interwebs.

(from clientsfromhell)

Honestly this blog has been a lot of fun. I try to keep posting, but I’ve been super busy this month.

If you have any tips, thoughts, stories, etc., please comment below or contact me directly with the handy dandy contact form on the About page.

Tired of the rancor between the political left and right I’ve formed the Chamomile Tea Party, a calming force in American political discourse. When party politics, character assassination, and rhetoric take precedence over the good of the country it’s time to say enough is enough.

These are the first of our posters calling for change in our country. They are based on old propaganda posters from World War II, appropriated for the present political climate. Feel free to download the larger copies and pass them around.

Check out the entire set on Flickr.

Anyway, here’s a brilliant Twitter-themed parody of the upcoming Social Network movie.

• Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches.
• I swear, but since I am the owner of this company, that is my privilege.
• Anyone who lets their hair grow below their ears to where I can’t see their ears means they don’t wash.
• In case anyone does not know who owns Tiger Oil, it is me… do not let anyone think they are the owner but me.
• Executive personnel who are in my office and have to be excused to go to the bathroom may use the one outside my office so no time is wasted going all the way down the hall.
• Effective now, all employees will be docked for the time they are off sick, unless I authorize you to pay them.
• Idle conversation or gossip in this office among employees will result in immediate termination.

Check out the full memos here.

The woman who actually pushed her grabby boss to the floor:

I knocked down my first boss. On my first day at a small art publisher in the mid-70s, I saw that he was openly pawing all the young female employees. He looked like a disgusting Rowlandson caricature, and he had one hanging in the office. I went down to the public phone, called Unemployment to find out how many weeks I needed to work to collect, and ducked him for that period. It was like running a football field. On the day I could get Unemployment, I allowed him to touch me for the first time, pushed him hard so he fell over backwards, was fired, and finished my BA on the Unemployment money. To all young women I say, “Be Tactical.”

Check out the rest of the stories at NY Mag.

(from clientsfromhell.net)

A Three Page Site

Client: “Can you quote me for a three page site?”

Me: “Sure. What are the three pages?”

Client: “Home, Contact, and Login.”