Me, The Critic...

"...Chuck and Larry" has looked idiotic right from the beginning. From the first second of the first spot I saw for the movie, I thought, "How stupid is that going to be?" Apparently it is. The critics hated the move - fans loved it.

Funny guys don't necessarily make funny movies.

Kevin James - funny.

Adam Sandler - at times funny. At other times, annoying.

A lot of funny people who sprang from the loins of SNL did their best work there, and have yet to do one single thing funny since. I'm still waiting for Will Ferrell to do something funny. He was fall-on-the-floor funny on SNL.

I never thought Chevy Chase was terribly funny. I still don't. Remember his Gerald Ford impression? That was the one where Chevy did fall on the floor. That was it - he'd fall down, we'd laugh, and apparently we never wondered why it was that we did laugh. Funny? About as funny as a fart in spacesuit. I'd sit with friends and watch Chevy fall down, I didn't think it was funny, but in 1977 I laughed anyway.

John Belushi? Yeah, funny, but funny in more of a sight-gag way than anything else. Whether John Belushi could have withstood the test of time, we'll never know. No disrespect intended, somehow I don't think he would have. I believe he knew that. I believe that was a huge component in the tragedy that became his life.

Dan Akroyd has had a successful career, I suppose. When is the last time you saw him anywhere being funny? My guess is that he knew he really wasn't - for want of a better term - sustainably funny, so he moved on to other things.

Chris Farley? Very few people have ever made me laugh harder than Farley. Those few others would be George Carlin and, uh, well, that might be it; Carlin and Farley. Steve Martin once upon a time made me wet my pants. Then Steve Martin became totally overexposed, he was everywhere you looked, the nation began to take him for granted, just my opinion.

Carlin abused himself for years. He's still alive. Farley abused himself for a shorter period of time, only because he died doing it. Here's where I get to play psychiatrist.

It often occurs to me that a lot of these men struggle with the realization that their success is a quirk of place and time. That today they're funny, tomorrow probably not. Do they change? Unlikely. Tastes change. You want an example?

Andrew Dice Clay.

Clay literally flamed-out inside a one year period. I mean he was hot as could be, then cold as could be, within roughly 12 months. Where is he now? I'm betting that you care so little where he is, you don't at all wonder where he is.

How about fall-down funny females? I can think of one, and I'll say you never heard of her. Her name is Maria Bamford. You seldom, maybe more like never, see her. Very, very, funny. Find her, watch her, you'll laugh, laugh hard.

Did Chris Farley suspect that if he lost 50 pounds and grew tired of throwing himself into walls and onto coffee tables that he, too, might be funny today, not funny tomorrow?

Go back, take the time and go back and look at early SNL. A lot of it wasn't funny at all.

It was defiant, certainly irreverent, but not all of it was funny. It was the '70s, we felt defiant. Popular sentiment had brought the war to an end. Defiance. We drove a president from office. More defiance. Defiance was good. SNL was the national symbol of defiance.

We were also starved for a new look at comedy. We were tired of The Lucy Show and Mayberry RFD. The only thing funny about The Lucy Show was Gale Gordon, he was funny. The show was not. So SNL filled a void.

Have you watched SNL lately, like in the last 3-4 years? The audience doesn't laugh. Why are they still on the air? More importantly, why do people go, sit there, and not laugh. Then the next week, different people go, sit there, and not laugh. If people who like the show so much that they made an effort to be there, if people who are sitting 20-30 feet away from the stage can't even offer up some courtesy laughter, isn't it time to fold the tent?

Back in the 70s, it was mandatory that you think SNL people were funny - even if they weren't. It was an act of sedition, a betrayal of your generation, should you be "young" in the 70s and not guffaw at all SNL regulars. If your hair was long(not to mention ugly) and you sported even the skankiest of facial hair, you needed to find SNL funny...and watch it every single week, so you could discuss it, and do your impressions of certain players, during the coming week. Most everyone "did" Belushi. That wasn't funny, either.

Am I funny. Yeah, I am. Funny enough to make a living being funny? No, no I am not. And I'll never pretend that I am.

Oh, I'm a Shemp fan. Shemp Howard was the funniest Stooge of them all.