hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.
kinda hate the (almost exclusively pejorative) term “organized religion”, as if the only form of religion is some kind of diy spirituality you do by yourself. kind of hyper-individualistic really.
and a big fuck-you to religions where their entire thing is being community-focused.
The amount of people calling Scott Weiner an "AIPAC centrist" when he takes literally zero money from them should tell you exactly what people mean when they talk about AIPAC. It should tell you exactly what Mamdani meant.
Here are 100 reasons to love the comedy writer, director and star who’s celebrating a milestone on Sunday and who’s changed our culture in s
Brooks, best known for directing irreverent films that became comedy classics, including The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein,
The comedy legend and father of satire celebrates his big 100th birthday on June 28.
All hail, Mel Brooks
Groundbreaking writer and director behind 'Blazing Saddles' and 'Young Frankenstein' has joked his gravestone should read: 'I was Mel Brooks
A parody of Adolf Hitler in the landmark 1968 movie "The Producers" was just the beginning for US actor Mel Brooks. The 100-year-old comedia
Howard Jacobson celebrates the 100th birthday of the Jewish film legend
On the Jewish filmmaker and comedian's centenary, a look back at how a kid named Mel Kaminsky wound up conquering the world
Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?
Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.
Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.
Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.
His early recreational experiences prepared him for a career as a tummler, amusing Jewish businesspeople on holiday. Yet even then, Brooks offered a tragicomic twist, prefiguring Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by appearing circa 1940 schlepping two suitcases and leaping fully clothed into a swimming pool as a mock gesture of suicidal despair because business was purportedly bad. The young Brooks was flummoxed by school lessons portraying Jews as simultaneously plutocrats and their anarchistic enemies. His 1991 tragicomedy Life Stinks, echoing the Book of Job in the Bible, is perhaps part of his inner investigation of the place of Jews in American society.
Complicating this understanding was antisemitic propaganda during Brooks’ youth. The German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 to denounce President Franklin Roosevelt as a Jew whose real name was “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” and scorn Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” For Brooks, who worshipped Roosevelt, this ethnic stereotyping was all too credible. At 17, he enlisted in the military, and like Don Rickles, another diminutive Jewish comedian who survived combat during World War II, Brooks emerged with an explosive penchant for humor as violence. The savage ridicule of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers was authenticated by early experience against Nazi adversaries in The Battle of the Bulge.
Rather than try to untangle such complexities, Brooks has tended to sum up life’s wisdom in bits of homespun wisdom attributed to his relatives, like “Never run for a bus; There’ll always be another” on the 2000 Year Old Man comedy album.
As a young comedy writer for Sid Caesar, he worked with the head writer Mel Tolkin (born Shmuel Tolchinsky near Odessa, Ukraine) who advised him to read Russian literature, and this acquaintance with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and even the antisemitic Dostoyevsky, made an indelible impression. Comedy in the latter two writers, born of absurd pain, transfixed Brooks, who would go on to adapt a novel by two Ukrainian Jews, Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Feinsilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev) in the 1970 film The Twelve Chairs.
Although not a box office success, Twelve Chairs gave the English Jewish actor Ron Moody one of his few leading roles on film, after starring as the villainous Jew Fagin in the stage musical Oliver! and its screen adaptation in 1968. About Russian anti-Jewish pogroms, Brooks concurred with his friend Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that the violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”
This comic fury was expressed by Brooks to Jewish friends like Howard Morris, a Bronx-born fellow comedian working with Sid Caesar, who was repeatedly mugged by Brooks, once by tying him up and stealing his wallet on a Greenwich Village street, and again in a Central Park rowboat. These ludicrous, yet intensely realized and enacted pranks were part of his persona over the past century.
And critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he has long referred to as “crickets,” were other targets of aggression, as Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan notes. The apotheosis of feedback deriding opinionated filmgoers is Brooks’ narration as a grumpy old Jew kvetching about avant-garde images in the Oscar-winning 1963 short film The Critic, directed by the American Jewish filmmaker Ernest Pintoff. As animated shapes form and reform, Brooks-as-Jewish-spectator concludes: “I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.” With each Jewish cinemagoer being an amateur Freud, the need for most critics is hilariously eliminated.
Similarly, Brooks became his own songwriter in hit musicals, despite lacking any memorable melodic gift. So he borrowed from Brahms the tune for the theme song of Twelve Chairs. The song characteristically expresses a generous life philosophy with the lines “You could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst/ hope for the best, expect the worst.” Mentioning the sentimental bestselling American Jewish author Fannie Hurst was part of Brooks’ all-inclusive optic, writing leading roles for African American performers like Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles, a part eventually played by Cleavon Little. And Brooks’ affectionate recognition, albeit mocking, of gay men in The Producers continued in 1983 with his remake of To Be or Not to Be, in which he interpolated a rescue of Sasha, a flamboyant dresser, from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.
Brooks’ equally wide-ranging literary sensibilities are evident in a series of films produced by his Brooksfilms company, a number of them with an Anglophile flavor. Of these, his 1987 production of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, an ode to bibliophilia, offered a plausible Jewish role for his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft.
But ultimately, Brooks’ passion for Russian literature as a Jewish reader best coincides with cinema in a vignette from the 1975 Playboy interview; in an extended Dostoyevskian narration, Brooks recounts how at age ten, he chased after his “Yom Kippur sweater” that had been swept away by an automobile. Arriving in an antisemitic neighborhood, Brooks was obliged to run further until, mentioning a celebrated freeze-frame closeup on a fleeing boy at the end of the French Jewish director François Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows, little Mel arrived at the ocean in Coney Island, his Yom Kippur sweater safely recovered. This happy ending, as is proper in comedy, echoes the long, productive life and career of Mel Brooks, who deserves all our birthday thanks for his comedic gifts to audiences over the decades.
and one day a woman came to lord buddha and said, “sir, i am going thru some insane polycule drama rn, its emotionally destroying me, what should i do?” and the most esteemed shakyamuni replied “go to every polycule in ur discord server and ask for a cup of rice from each of them that has not known insane polycule drama. give this as an offering, and you will be liberated from your grief.” so the woman went to the discord server, but at each turn she was told “no sorry my gf left me for my other gf last year” “i wish i could help but my first partner asked for an open relationship and then ghosted me” “i cant help, my metamour broke up with my gf because i wouldnt break up with her metamour because she was dating her other bf’s sister” until she realised she had nobody left to beg her offering from. and the woman was enlightened
"going out to get milk" is a common turn of phrase used to describe a man abandoning his family.
the "milkman" is a common figure in stories depicting a woman's infidelity and adulterous affair.
this implies that the ability to provide milk would both decrease the likelihood of a man abandoning his wife and children, as it would eliminate the need for leaving to get milk AND would secure that man's marriage, as his wife would have no need to seek milk from an extraneous source.
therefore, all men should produce milk, through various means such as:
- being a cow
- being an almond
- being a woman
- being a coconut
- being in the omegaverse
- being an oat
(list is exemplary and not finite)
in this essay, i will redefine the nuclear family and explain the seductive and inflammatory nature of the 1993 "Got Milk?" commercials.
Every time you go in a public place and something ISN’T disgusting it’s because somebody cleaned it. Every time you feel comfortable using a public bathroom or sitting at a restaurant table or setting something on a gas station counter or playing on a playground it’s because somebody cleaned it.
Thank you to everyone who cleans the world, especially those who are underpaid and under appreciated.
Due to my weird childhood and my weird brain, I have this very unhelpful compulsion to conceal Everything I do from Everyone. I Cannot be observed performing any action, no matter how mundane. My nervous system is convinced I'm gonna, like, Get In Trouble for eating food at dinnertime or sleeping in my bed at bedtime.
I've taken to asking myself, "Okay does this task actually require subterfuge or am I stealing a balloon on Free Balloon Day"
origamiaround
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
