New Poem: BILL MAHER AND THE MARK TWAIN PRIZE

 please please please

 please please please

 gotta have the Comedian Respected Award

 goddamn it give it to me I deserve it

 please please please

 Donald I’m sorry I made you sue me

 look at me grovel across the floor

 from the doorway to the bottom of your desk

 please please please please bless me me me

The Louis C.K. Poem

    but heeees my freeeeeennndddd say the female comics

    it is hard out there if you want to be funny

    bomb away on the open mics

    eventually get paid a little bit

    others get jealous

    say you’re not all that good

   the resentment you suck up 

    gets spit out in your standup set

    those pain in the ass kids and women

    who want you to pull focus from career career career

    eventually you’re around long enough  

    people think you’re commenting on bile 

    when you’re just regurgitating it

    here, female colleague, watch me wank

    look at this as comedy fraternity hazing

    damn this #MeToo stuff

    made you shelve your movie

    costs one million dollars in lost TV

    you’ll do new act attacking correctness

    drop in unannounced

    keep the press from spoiling the set

    wait long enough, someone will write

    you’re aware of what you’ve done to be diminished 

    when you still think you’ve been screwed 

    by pious people who don’t understand 

    comedy is letting your demons wank

    onto the audience in the same way

    you once wanked on people who,

    if they stood up to you,

    would see their careers go into the tank

    but heeeees my frieeeennnnnddd

    says the male comic who used some of his

    standup special time to middle-finger your accusers

    

    comedy, as practiced by some,  is not pretty

    it’s the fastball whizzing past your head

    it’s the punch smashing your testicles

    it’s the emcee saying you’re going to get fucked with

    it’s the joke that, too many times, leaves a stain

    that can never come out, no matter how much you scrub

    

    

30 years after THE BREAKFAST CLUB--re-evaluating the John Hughes humor/angst canon.

Last week, Universal reissued John Hughes' high school detention/encounter group film THE BREAKFAST CLUB on Blu-ray/DVD (on its own and bundled with SIXTEEN CANDLES and WEIRD SCIENCE).

Nowadays, the Paramount Pictures period of Hughes' career seems to yield more repeat-viewing experiences than much of his Universal output (WEIRD SCIENCE and THE GREAT OUTDOORS are hard-to-sit-through nadirs).  PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES and (up to a point) SHE'S HAVING A BABY are good adult films; SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL is Hughes' best, least self-sorrowing teen film (and, consequently, the most forgotten today).

THE BREAKFAST CLUB must still be considered seminal by admirers due to its outcasts-marginalized-by-authority-and-peer-pressure dynamic.  Ally Sheedy's socially-averse proto-Goth, Judd Nelson's blustering (sort of an ancestor to T.J. Miller's character Erlich on Mike Judge's SILICON VALLEY) and Anthony Michael Hall's repressed A-student still resonate with me, as does Paul Gleason's sharp-tongued, you-don't-matter-to-me principal.

But, as adolescent films are concerned, it doesn't come close in quality to genuine classics of the genre such as Nicholas Ray's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and John Frankenheimer's THE YOUNG STRANGER.