comedy Archives - Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

American Bystander #3 is available

By Michael Gerber|2016-10-07T20:35:17-07:00October 7, 2016|comedy|

If George were alive, he'd totally dig this magazine. I try to keep my non-Beatles activities separate from this blog, for obvious reasons. And being from the Midwest, I have a positive horror of self-promotion. (This has been exactly as helpful to my career as you might expect.) But several readers have asked me to tell everybody about my dayjob, on the chance that it is something y'all would like and want to support. I run The American Bystander, a print humor quarterly with an amazing roster of writers and cartoonists. Every issue is chock-full of people from The Simpsons, [...]

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Beatle humor in your daily life

By Michael Gerber|2016-05-01T12:35:47-07:00May 1, 2016|comedy|

"Pencil, Mal -- " I was recently in the hospital with my first kidney stone (not recommended). I left the experience knowing two new things about myself. One, I can survive the most intense pain the male body can dish out. And two, no matter how bad it gets, I still keep a sense of humor. After eight hours of agony, the nurse decided to "get on top of this pain" by giving me a bunch of morphine. My wife Kate was standing next to me as he put a port into my right hand, loaded the ampule, and pressed [...]

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The American Bystander #2

By Michael Gerber|2016-04-08T12:26:47-07:00April 8, 2016|comedy|

I look high, I look low... Where is Mike?" I'm sure many of you are not asking. But others may be concerned. "Where am I supposed to get my daily quota of digs at the White Album? Who can I turn to for frank, unashamed love for the Fabs' psychedelic period? Not to mention egregious and off-topic references to Peter Cook and Peter Sellers? Some bad person is trying to make me listen to Let It Be, and I need reasons not to! Help!" It's like this, Beatle peedles: After a near-decade of under- and straight up un-employment, my life [...]

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Dirk Voetberg

By Michael Gerber|2016-01-30T11:50:02-08:00January 30, 2016|comedy|

Great-looking, but when it rains, they're SH*T (image links to a neat merch site) From my very funny friend Dirk Voetberg, on Facebook: "With the almost-death of printed media and the ubiquity of Uber, is it any wonder that newspaper taxis are now practically nonexistent?" Go friend him. He will make you laugh.

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“These Paper Bullets!”: The Fabs Meet the Bard

By Nancy Carr|2016-01-18T21:58:42-08:00January 18, 2016|AHDN, alternate history, Beatle-inspired, Beatlemania, Beatles fiction, comedy|

For everyone who's wondered what might have happened if Shakespeare had met the Beatles, These Paper Bullets! delivers "a modish rip-off of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with a serious backbeat." I saw one of the last scheduled performances of the play, by New York's Atlantic Theater Company, and it was a delight. Despite a few wobbly bits, it stands on its own as a story—but it's also salted with plenty of in-jokes and references for Beatles fans. And the original songs, by Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, are outstanding. The play originated with the Yale Repertory Theatre, and its book was written by Rolin [...]

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Comments and the spam filter

By Nancy Carr|2015-12-01T15:05:33-08:00December 1, 2015|comedy, Housekeeping|

Fished around in the spam filter today and retrieved two actual comments, one by ChelseaQW and one by Virginia Abreau de Paula –they’re now showing up in the appropriate threads. Everyone, if you submit a comment and it’s not posted within a few hours, please resend it. (Like George in "Blue Jay Way," we may be asleep—but there's also a chance the filter sucked in your comment. Either way, no harm in resending.) I made it to page 21 of 910 spam comment pages, folks. It’s no wonder the poor, hardworking thing shorts out occasionally and captures a real person’s remark—the inundation [...]

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And now a word from our sponsor…

By Michael Gerber|2015-10-19T14:49:06-07:00October 19, 2015|comedy|

The big, beautiful beast that is the rest of my life. Hey Dullblog wouldn't be what it is today without my dayjob, The American Bystander. For the past several years, I've been working with a team to create the next great print humor magazine. Issue #1, a big and beautiful softcover book, is finally done -- or it would be, if you guys would stop distracting me! ("Were John and Paul Lovers?" I still have no idea, but I predict the comments will hit 250.) Both John and George were involved with projects like this; John hung around National Lampoon [...]

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The Beatles and National Lampoon: “Magical Misery Tour” (1971)

By Michael Gerber|2015-09-22T22:57:43-07:00September 22, 2015|comedy|

Yeah, the covers kicked ass, too Last week, as I was cleaning up my office, I came upon this wonderful piece from the American humor magazine National Lampoon. In print and on vinyl, the Lampoon talked about the Beatles a lot, quite irreverently -- and it was (so I've heard) the magazine's irreverence towards Yoko that soured their relationship with John Lennon. (He hung out at Lampoon's offices for a while right after making the move from Tittenhurst Park to the Big Apple.) I don't know specifically what caused the rift, but I think we can all agree that it [...]

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Starrtime: Defining Moments from Ringo’s non-Beatle movies (2)

By Devin McKinney|2022-03-01T14:45:29-08:00April 13, 2015|1969, comedy, Monty Python, Movies, Ringo, Ringo movies, Ringo Starr|

If you thought Candy sucked rubber, point your innocent eyeballs in the direction of The Magic Christian, a film with similar components—Terry Southern novel, Ringo Starr one face among many in a ridiculously eclectic, overqualified cast—and find yourself trapped in the Fourth Dimension of Suck. All that I remember of the novel from a high-school reading is that Ringo’s character, a homeless bum and adopted son of a billionaire, isn’t in it. That the role was created for the film and left to languish as an afterthought manifests in the marginality of Ringo’s presence, though he is top-billed among the eminent or [...]

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Mick Jagger on The Rutles

By Michael Gerber|2015-01-17T12:58:11-08:00January 17, 2015|comedy, Eric Idle, Rutles|

Cash is all you need… If you haven't seen All You Need is Cash, the 1978 Python/SNL jam that created the Rutles, you're in for a treat. We've covered the Rutles before on Dullblog -- here -- here -- and here -- but I just ran across a transcript of the interview with Mick Jagger from the movie. "QUESTION: Were they trying to sell you songs at that stage? MICK: A bit later on they did, yeh. The one for that was Dirk really. He was a real hustler for the songs. Any old slag he'd sell a song to. [...]

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