I will die before I replace my Beethoven’s Fifth “Nobody’s home! Nobody’s hoooome!” tape on my answering machine. It’s been years since anyone has called the landline that I still have for that very purpose, but if they do, are they in for a hilarious treat.

How did a Frankenstein father

It didn’t get her more Instagram follows, but at least she can fall back on the PornHub videos she makes with her horny stepbro who’s in the same grade.

You’ve seen those videos too? Not my thing, I admit, but if you’ve got a shtick that works, go for it.

The ricochet sauce was one I hadn’t seen until the other day, when it showed up on my YouTube recommendations for some reason. “COME ON STEAKS, YOU WANT SOME?!’

Urkel is one of my favorite bits of random silliness in the show’s history (other candidates: petting the llama and the nanite circus).

A complicated issue. On the one hand, one can certainly understand the adults being upset that the show they had signed up for got re-imagined, thus taking the limelight away from them and fundamentally changing the nature of the creative venture they signed up to do and invested their own time and effort into making,…

—Charles?

What if you’re a Jewish Texan? It could be celebratory gunfire.

I remember watching an interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore (no fan of communism in general and Stalin in particular, so I wasn’t expecting “Good people, but mistakes were made”) a few years ago. From what I recall of the tone and content, the interview could be boiled down to something like, “Here’s Stalin and the…

No, no, no...that mysterious stranger ends the call by saying he isn’t John Swartzwelder. I’m not sure how they got his number, but I hope he enjoyed his steak and is still having a good life, whoever he was.

My favorite bits of Swartzwelderana come from the commentary tracks on Simpsons DVDs, where the other people involved in the process recall his peculiar brand of madness. To wit: an otherwise unexplained bit of animation during a gunfight at a faux old west town the family visits was there because Swartzwelder’s…

Same, same, same. Growing up in a midwest/pretty religiously conservative group, anytime a gay character even showed up in a movie or TV show I would tense up so badly I’d almost pull the arm off the chair, partly out of fear the others would think, “Hey, Lil’ ICN is like that,” and partly because I was bracing for…

Agreed with all you said, and would add (albeit to a much-less important degree than people who can’t be around alcohol without being a danger to themselves), I don’t think I’m alone in that I don’t particularly like a lot of bars because I don’t like being around drunk people. I’m not a teetotaler, but I’ve been…

Duly noted; that’s what I get for basing my timelines on the idea that “things don’t exist until I become aware of them.”

He first did TAL several years ago (I’m guessing 8-10, but I’m bad at timelines); from what I recall it was his sleepwalking at the La Quinta Inn story, which was a perfectly fine story and amusing in its delivery, but for me (I don’t want to come across as “this is my taste, so therefore it is correct and everyone…

In fairness, Birbiglia also managed to stretch five minutes on This American Life that inspired millions to say, “Hey, that was mildly amusing” into a career, so he might be an outlier.*

—So long, Hollywood.

Hey, I loved Mark Russell as a kid--granted, that was mostly because my mom wouldn’t let me watch edgy comics like Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, or Garrison Keilor.

Lawrence’s version, meanwhile, has One Day At A Time star Isabella Gomez hopping from one reboot to the next, playing a supportive teacher operating in the Hesseman role.