“I Love Lunch! The Musical” is the latest mission by Improv Everywhere, where they staged a spontaneous musical during lunch in The Atrium at Trump Tower in NYC.

The mission was filmed as part of a segment for The Today Show, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at how it was was planned.

If you look closely, you’ll see that Improv Everywhere founder Charlie Todd is wearing a Laughing Squid t-shirt during the rehearsals.

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In the comments on mikl-em’s post about comics first appearances on The Tonight Show, Doctor Popular tips us off to a 1968 episode of The Dating Game featuring Steve Martin as one of the competing bachelors.

Of course there’s the infamous 1978 episode where Andy Kaufman was a contestant playing a character similar to his Latka Gravas role from the TV show Taxi.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was a bachelor asking the questions on 1973 episode.

In 1972 a 14 year-old Michael Jackson was the guest on a special teenage episode.

Over the years many other celebrities made appearances as well.

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Here’s the original Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) 1969 pitch film (in 3 parts) produced by Joan Ganz Cooney to help sell what would eventually become the hit children’s public television show Sesame Street. It features early versions of Jim Henson muppets Kermit the Frog and Rowlf the Dog.

via The Retro Blog

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guest post by mikl-em

Jerry Seinfeld made his 1981 debut on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, so young he looks like he’s could have just come from his Bar Mitzvah. You can see where he’s headed, but he’s definitely not there yet.

YouTube has an even earlier clip of Seinfeled on something called “Celebrity Cabaret” in 1977. Definitely in that awkward phase.

Here is a compilation of other comedians making their first stand-up appearance on the Tonight Show. Including David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Eddie Murphy. I think that is Johnny Carson himself that you can hear kinda mumbling along appreciatively (also awkwardly) while he re-watches the video.

It’s fun to see the current comedy old guard in their early days. For one thing it’s a mad fashion slalom course to see what stand-up’s were wearing in the 70’s and 80’s. Leno shows tremendous commitment to a single color there.

And, yes, that’s right, someone hosted The Tonight Show prior to Leno. In fact there was someone before Carson, too.

Lastly, here’s Steven Wright’s first time on the Tonight Show or TV at all. It’s worth seeing the interview with him at the end–it turns out that a scout for Carson just called him out of the blue to invite him on the show.

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On a recent episode of The Jay Leno Show, Rainn Wilson shows us how to pull off Halloween Super-Pranks. The home’s occupant wasn’t too pleased.

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guest post by Chuck Cirino

Before the quintessential quick-cutting and fast-paced techniques overused in television today Shadoe Steven’s Fred Rated television commercials broke this new stylistic ground back in the mid-1980s.  Smashing prices, and expensive audio and video gear was Shadoe’s trademark technique for driving media-crazy customers into the many Federated Group home entertainment stores scattered around Southern California at the time.

It was a race for pace by jam packing three minutes of mundane ad information into edgy, entertaining and explosive thirty second commercial spots.  My pleasure and honor was to have collaborated with Shadoe on these commercials as his director and editor.  Over a three-year period we made over 1000 television commercials together.

Cut to:  PRESENT DAY

A few weeks ago Shadoe approached me about a new advertising collaboration.  Shadoe’s task 25 years later was to sell a wheelchair.  What?  A wheelchair?

Oh, but this isn’t just a wheelchair, the Standing Powerchair is an affordable way to bring dignity to those of us who don’t have the full use of our bodies… and Shadoe’s good friend Mark Shedlin, a victim of MS is one such person.  Mark purchased this Powerchair only to discover it was not well-known by doctors and most insurance companies.  Marks mission soon became to get the word out so more people could benefit, and he enlisted Shadoe to help him.

This time for Shadoe the commercial was personal, and once he introduced me to Mark it became personal for me too.  So of course leave it to Shadoe to wildly entertain while getting his message across.  Once again he smashes the traditional and we created this ad…

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Marge Simpson is featured on the cover of the November issue of Playboy Magazine, along with a pictorial spread “The Devil in Marge Simpson.

The special version of Playboy with Marge on the cover is only available as a single-copy purchase or download.

via Fimoculous

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Nick Douglas recently made an appearance on The Martha Stewart Show to talk about his new book “Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less”.

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Last week on The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien interviewed Ajay Bhatt, co-inventor of the USB port, who was recently portrayed by an actor in an Intel Nerd Rock Stars commercial. Later Conan recreated the commercial with the real Ajay.

via Engadget

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guest post by mikl-em

Please note, several real sneezes were filmed during the making of this video!

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage (@donttrythis), the guys from Mythbusters, shot the above public service announcement as part of a larger campaign to inform about H1N1 flu virus (of which swine flu is a subset) which stars in the current flu pandemic that is sweeping the globe.

The Discovery Channel campaign includes a Mythbusters website that explains five myths about the virus.

Adam tweeted that it was directed by our good friend Carl, who made that Trader Joes film. There are 2 versions of his fake TJ commercial actually; go ahead and watch the long one cuz it’s great!

You can see those videos and more on Carl’s website or his YouTube channel. He also directed the MB guys in the Intel commercial below.

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guest post by mikl-em

Dylan Moran levels a characteristically petulant critique of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wherein the Irish comedian demonstrates his personal aversion for “lifting up heavy things”.

You might recognize Moran from the film Shaun Of The Dead. He also starred in a great, lesser-known (in the US) sitcom on Britain’s Channel 4 called Black Books which he co-created with Graham Linehan (who later created the show The IT Crowd).

Black Books ran from 2000 to 2004 and co-starred Tamsin Greig and Bill Bailey. It’s a great show, worth seeking out if you’re looking for a Brit comedy fix (NetFlix has it). You can see clips on YouTube, and if you are in Britain you can watch episodes online (no access from the US).

Bill Bailey has a very different style, he’s a trained musician who incorporates more than a dozen instruments into his routines and parodies the likes of Jean Michel Jarre and Phillip Glass; he’s also a confirmed nerd who jokes about Doctor Who, LOTR, Star Trek, and hosted a Stonehenge documentary; he’s also fond of making surreal erudite rants with references to literature, science, and philosophy.

Here’s Bailey in action, with a very close reading of the “Acts of God” clause in a car rental agreement…

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Sesame Street does a spoof of the popular TV show Mad Men, including teaching kids the meaning of the word sycophant.

via ANIMAL

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photo by Scott Beale

Last Wednesday Chris Hardwick invited me to a taping of his show Web Soup at the G4 studios located at the Comcast Entertainment Group building in LA’s Miracle Mile. On show Chris shares ridiculous videos they find on the web or submitted by viewers, along with the occasional field report. It’s a really fun show and Chris is a great host.

I shot a few behind the scenes photos while at the taping of the show which airs tonight and each Tuesday night at 8pm ET on G4 after Attack of the Show.

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guest post by Violet Blue

photo by Scott Beale

In a completely non-ironic and potentially exciting move, KQED and the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism have snatched $5 million in kindling to start the Bay Area News Project. The money is being fronted by the Hellman Family Foundation to create online (and sideline print) media outlets as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan publicly supported news organization.” The first post on their fledgling Twitter account (@bayareanewsproject) announces that they’ve joined forces with the New York Times and the rumor is that it’ll be basically a New York Times West. The veritable Grey Lady herself said — one day after the NYT’s involvement was announced — opines that it’ll be “the largest and most ambitious of dozens of similar local news operations that have cropped up around the country.”

The venture is set to launch next year, which is really just around the corner in old media time, and to get a good sense of what the various people involved have to say about the scope and intention of the next possible Chron/Gate/Examiner killer, there’s a lot to be gleaned in KQED’s roundtable audio interview from Friday. Forum’s recent episode with host Dave Iverson The Future of News? is worth a listen. The topic of local news coverage here in the heart of technology (and the Hollywood of tech) is nothing if not a morbid topic, and there have been many contenders for the title they’re going to be more than a few rounds in the ring for. They’re hiring for freelancers right now (email: jobs at bayareanewsproject dot org). Although on Iverson’s show, when directly asked by a caller self-identified as a journalist, they said there would be compensation but were not transparent about any pay scale. I guess we’ll have to wait until they choose a name for more details (BANP is a temporary title). But they do tell us that distribution will be through a website, mobile applications, KQED will funnel them through radio and television dissemination, and they’re “exploring” print options with the NYT.

On the show, guests (and members of BANP) include Carl Hall, former representative of the SF Chronicle’s newsroom and commercial departments; Jeff Clarke, president and CEO of KQED; Neil Henry, professor and dean of the UC Berkeley’s J-school and author of 2007’s “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media”; Noelle Leca, chair of the board of directors of KQED; and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In all it looks to be a very exciting venture, and we’ve been waiting for that local news wake-up call for decades — after all, we really should be leading the world in a revolution for combining democratized reportage and cutting edge technology. But instead most of us just gnash our teeth, watch the lag, read SFist, SF Appeal and SFBG while going elsewhere for… everything else.

Bay Area News Project is nothing if not ambitious. Will they really be the shock troops for journalism’s revolution as they hope? I’m reminded of when GETV was invited as citizen journalists to the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival in a groundbreaking step to incorporate indie media with mainstream media. Only to discover in our on-the-spot interview with Graham Leggat that while courting us — no: in fact, bloggers and web TV reporters like us were not going to be granted equal access. Bait and switch, or perhaps yet another case of misunderstanding the medium. In the KQED Forum show, they tell us that BANP wants to “engage, listen, communicate with one another… with professional heart for news gathering and dissemination.” While also bantering that unlike citizen journalism, “truth” is at the heart of professional journalism, hence their preference for pro over citizen reportage — a sentiment many of us might find dismaying, at odds with our experience, and simply old fashioned.

Well, we can take heart that KQED’s Noelle Leca can be quoted as saying (at 37:35, in case we need it later) that Bay Area News Project “is a risk taking venture.” We certainly hope so. And Lillian Hellman was a very interesting and cool woman. BANP, whatever it will be called, could be just the kick in the [body part] that is needed, not just locally but nationally or even internationally. And that would be something to finally be proud of, indeed.

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photos by Scott Beale

Last week while visting Boulder, we stopped by the Victorian house (1619 Pine Street) that was used for the exterior shots of Mork and Mindy’s house in the Mork & Mindy television series which ran from 1978 through 1982.

A bunch of other Boulder scenes appear in the show’s opening sequence, including Mindy driving her Jeep down Boulder Canyon Drive, Pearl Street where Mindy’s father Fred had his music store and Mork and Mindy at Boulder Falls.

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The Footnotes of Mad Men is an wonderful blog that is must read for fans of the brilliant AMC television series Mad Men. The blog is written by Natasha Vargas-Cooper who digs deep into the historic events and cultural themes featured on the show. They’ve just announced that Harper Collins will be adapting the blog into a book. Congratulations guys!

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guest post by mikl-em

A classic song from The Electric Company in the 1970s Morgan Freeman & Rita Moreno perform The Menu Song by Tom Lehrer. The song was arranged by Joe Raposo (a classmate of Lehrer’s at Harvard, who himself wrote the classics Bein’ Green and C is for Cookie).

While several of Lehrer’s children songs on the show have become classics, he is otherwise known for his often dark and always funny compositions that often appeared on the Dr. Demento radio show such as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, The Old Dope Peddler, and The Masochism Tango…

Like few other performers, Lehrer had to make the difficult choice between being a full-time recording artist and teaching math. Until 2001, when he retired, he was on the faculty at UC-Santa Cruz.

Below Lehrer in action more recently (1997), as he revisits some of his more advanced math songs, Calculus specifically, written in the 1940’s. This and other videos are available on archive.org.

See also these lyrics for various Tom Lehrer songs including Silent E and L-Y from The Electric Company.

via Sherilyn Connelly

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photos by Scott Beale

My 4 pack of Tru Blood O Positive arrived last week, it’s a based on the synthetic blood substitute that vampires drink in the HBO series True Blood, which just finished Season 2. It’s a tart, lightly sweetened blood orange carbonated drink created by our friends at Omni Consumer Products, the same people who produce Brawndo – The Thirst Mutilator and Sex Panther Cologne.

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Mad Men Explained in 60 Seconds by Landline TV

via Rachel Mercer

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DataSage reviews the “Home Improvement” video game for Super Nintendo (SNES).

via Nick Douglas

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