Also, the reason it works and is so funny onstage is because of a final sight gag: after we've just seen almost genuinely touching deaths for our two main characters… they reappear as plant zombies, singing cheerfully. It subverts the pathos of the past scenes in a way that seeing giant plants go Godzilla and destroy…

The only good part of Birdie is the role of Mrs. Peterson, which (whether or not you give her the optional song "A Mother Doesn't Matter Anymore") turns slowly from a stereotypical Jewish mother with views "of her time" into a genuinely disgusting racist. If you do it well, she's hilarious… and then she stops being…

It's not about smart enough to get the jokes, it's about the rhythms with which a script is written. This one stuck pretty close to the stage show as opposed to either screenplay, which meant the setup-punchline-beat for response rhythm is baked into it. Single-cam and multicam sitcoms have very different writing…

Can't confirm, but the buzz is he was in talks to do one of those two male roles (I believe Link), but couldn't do the rehearsals and the Criss/Hall run of "Hedwig" in California. So he asked if he could host instead, since he still wanted to be involved.

The use of the sacred and the profane together in traditional Latin mass format was called a "parody mass," and not all of them were quodlibets. Parody masses weren't spoofs- they were just using secular or popular tunes and refitting them into hymns or mass chants. None of them have survived in popular culture; the…

I remember watching dubbed Dragon Ball as a kid, and many of the characters had food names. I never associated General Tao with General Tso until now… the dubbers/translators must have been Canadian.

Congrats, sir or madam! You have the Right Stuff to start a rewarding career writing cutaways on Family Guy!

DARQUEGK VERSUS CHRISTMAS:

Self actualization is the hardest fucking thing in the world, especially in the face of career issues. My thoughts go out to you.

Fundamentalists want to bring back the Old Covenant and its tribe-versus-tribe warfare, anyway, and have no real use for Jesus except as a bargaining chip. It's like Krampus battling Santa in "The Yule Lord."

Do they have to use the phrase hashtag, or is any clearly catch-phrase, linguistically reductive exclamation enough?

That's why they cancelled "Ernest Goes to Hell."

"Make Your Own Kind of Music" will forever be tied to that scene for me.

Deep cut.

"You're a little bit racist!"
"Well, you're a little bit too!"

I'm entirely pro diversity, but you can be diverse and even have an agenda without pandering. It's the difference between being Westworld, and being the Burger King Kids Club mascots.

A friend of mine went to the Italian villa of Dolemite to music direct a production of RENT; I told him he should get permission to stage "Dolemite" in Dolemite.

The soundtrack to this movie is just the 5-second "immigrants: we get the job done" line from "Hamilton," looped YTMND style, playing forever and ever and getting louder over time like Black Mirror.

I used to think, "did they not realize that Force Awakens is VERY SPECIFIC in painting First Order as Neo-Nazi?" Now I realize, yes, yes they did.

It's only available in Gomez Addams's library vault.