"Stairway to Heaven" is such a dreary slog for its first 4 or 5 minutes that it took me decades to listen past all that and finally get to the good part, which is what I assume everyone thinks is so great about the song.  Because that guitar solo toward the end is an eye-melter!  The piano and drum work that leads up…

It's also understandable when the actor's has a great personality and is likeable in and of himself (this category seems to be specific to male actors).  I'm thinking of Jimmy Stewart and Jack Nicholson as the two best examples.  Sure, they could both act, but by the mid-point of their careers, they and their…

And these movies have to be pirate-proof, right?  I mean, who would actually go to the trouble of stealing this "intellectual property"?

I wonder if the popularity of such self-parody pop culture as Honey-Boo-Boo and that fucking Duck show has made it tougher for these guys to find "material."  On second thought, I guess not; they can always just cut to a random shot of a redneck in a long beard who spouts some Duck-person catch phrase and call it a…

I would make the same argument for the first box, @avclub-0f0d67e214f9fef69b278e3d08114da9:disqus .  My troika of low-brow ways guaranteed to get me to laugh (in no particular order):

I've never seen one of these movies, but I've seen clips of "A Porn Parody" installments, and I have to think that the latter at least have more entertainment value.

I figured this was something like this they were getting at, but it was just dissonant because it involved Joan.  Maybe it was just the closest emergency room, or maybe it was just the only one that Bob could call to mind.  Anyway, I'm sure it was a little glimpse into what's happening on the margins of the city,…

But Pete's visit to the brothel ended up destroying his marriage, so perhaps it was Lane's revenge?

I think I've read through all the comments but didn't see this brought up, so I'll ask: what the fuck was the deal with that nasty-ass hospital Bob took Joan to?  We've seen other hospitals on the show before, and they weren't leaking anything in the waiting room that would be mistaken for urine.  Joan's a partner in…

He's the best guy you love to hate since Erich von Stroheim.

Bob might not even be real.  He might just be the ghost of Lane Pryce, manifesting to certain individuals who need lines that week.

Yes, I took it as less an anti-Irish thing (which would be a very oddly anachronistic prejudice for a person of her generation to still be holding in 1968; then again, she's going senile, so who knows?) and more an anti-huge-masses-of-drunken-idiots thing.  As I said in another post, I'm an Irish-American, and even I…

"Hundreds"?  On St. Patrick's Day in New York?  Hah!

It can also be one of the most emotionally harrowing shows on TV.  I love it, but it makes me just want to hold my family close and not let go for a few days after each episode.

On the flip-side, my grandfather hated butter because in the days before good refrigeration, people used to leave butter out, and if it didn't get eaten fairly quickly, it would go rancid.  He couldn't even stand the smell of butter, and wouldn't allow it in the house.  I guess he would tolerate margarine (though he…

"Catholics can marry whoever they want, so long as the offspring is
raised Catholic - that's all the Church really gives a shit about."

It's actually a Kramer move.  Bob's briefcase is just full of crackers.

I would echo that these Catholic-Jewish marriages might have been rare outside of the New York area in the mid-20th century, but they had to be pretty common in the New York area.  As @disqus_okgItcD0yy:disqus  says, though, I imagine at least one, or both, of the spouses in such marriages were not particularly devout.

I don't think we are given any reason to think that Dick Whitman had some kind of moral problem with the Korean War.  He just saw a stint in the Army as his chance to get away from his horrible family life and never-ending poverty.  Then he took the chance to get out of combat in a dishonorable way — although, even…

When I first started watching Mad Men, I would read the TV without Pity recaps of episodes.  During the first season, the reviewer was convinced that Don Draper was a secret Jew.