Category: Funny As Fuck

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A Personal Letter From Steve Martin

My ancient obsession with comedy legend Steve Martin continues to manifest itself. From Letters of Note …

Celebrities are faced with a dilemma as their star ascends: the fan mail that used to trickle to the front door now needs its own home, and replying to those messages of support is suddenly a full-time job of its own. A small few battle on valiantly, determined to respond personally to each and every piece of correspondence regardless of the trouble, expense or delay; most, however, take the easy, altogether more sensible route and produce a form letter, to be signed and used as a stock reply for every fan. Impersonal and slightly disappointing, yes, but a response nonetheless.

Trust comedy legend Steve Martin to plump for the latter option but still, thanks to a dab of perfectly pitched humour, come out smelling of roses. Back in the day, he replied to fan mail with “A personal letter from Steve Martin,” a form letter in which just a few words were personalised for each recipient, and which was hilarious precisely for that reason. This particular example was sent to a 17-year-old fan named Jerry Carlson in 1979, the year The Jerk, arguably one of the funniest films he has ever starred in, was released.

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Holiday Traditions

https://youtu.be/xJAxRVeKnTE

For what it’s worth, all of Jim Gaffigan’s albums are on Spotify. Recently, I listened to a couple while I was working. Big mistake. This clip is from 2009’s Beyond the Pale.

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Help! Magazine

Holy shit, more pop culture dots connected. Before I forget, a few full issues of Help! are available online.

Help! is an American satire magazine that was published by James Warren from 1960 to 1965. It was Harvey Kurtzman’s longest-running magazine project after leaving Mad and EC Publications, and during its five years of operation it was chronically underfunded, yet innovative.

In starting Help!, Kurtzman brought along several artists from his Mad collaborations, including Will Elder, Jack Davis, John Severin and Al Jaffee.

Kurtzman’s assistants included Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem; the latter was helpful in gathering the celebrity comedians who appeared on the covers and the fumetti strips the magazine ran along with more traditional comics and text pieces. Among the then little-known performers in the fumetti were John Cleese, Woody Allen and Milt Kamen; better-known performers such as Orson Bean were also known to participate. Some of the fumetti were scripted by Bernard Shir-Cliff.

At Help!, Gilliam met Cleese for the first time, resulting in their collaboration years later on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Cleese appeared in a Gilliam fumetto written by David Crossley, “Christopher’s Punctured Romance”. The tale concerns a man who is shocked to learn that his daughter’s new “Barbee” doll has “titties”; however, he falls in love with the doll and has an affair. Gilliam appeared on two covers of Help! and along with the rest of the creative team, appeared in crowd scenes in several fumetti.

The magazine introduced young talents who went on to influential careers in underground comix as well as the mainstream: among them Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Jay Lynch. Algis Budrys and other science fiction writers were regular contributors of prose and scripts to the magazine.

A total of 26 issues were printed before the magazine folded in 1965. Volume one (Aug. 1960–Sept. 1961) had 12 issues, and 14 issues comprised the second volume (Feb. 1962–Sept. 1965).