Bob Barker Controls You

This is the world famous Showcase Showdown wheel. I was watching The Price is Right at work today (I also watched 2 episodes of 24. Envy me.), and realized a subtle difference between Bob Barker and Drew Carey. Back when Bob hosted, as the wheel was slowing down, Bob would know exactly where it was going to land a full 4 spots before it finished. Drew, on the other hand, has no fucking clue where the wheel will land until it comes to a complete stop. A quarter of a second before the wheel completely runs out of momentum, Drew will still be undecided on whether the arrow will make it to the dollar, or if it'll bounce off the peg and stay on 5 cents.

When you think about it, this makes logical sense. Drew has only hosted the show for 2 and a half years. Although 30 months is a reasonably long time to hold a job, it's practically a probationary period compared to the 35 consecutive years that Bob has held the job. Each episode of The Price is Right has six contestants spin the wheel. When you subtract the contestants that only spin once and add the bonus spins, the average probably comes out to two per contestant. That's 12 spins per show, and with 5 shows a week, he's witnessed 60 spins a week, and roughly 3,000 spins a year. The Showcase Showdown began in 1975, so over 32 years, Bob Barker came close to watching 100,000 spins.

So as you can see, it makes logical sense that he'd be so familiar with the wheel and how much farther it will spin based on the rate that it's slowing down that he can tell you where it'll end up with incredible accuracy. He knows the wheel better than his own family. He's more familiar with the intricacies of the wheel than he is with the intricacies of the wording of sexual harassment suits.

So this got me thinking: Bob Barker developed an impressive understanding of the physics of the wheel just from casually observing it 12 times a day and 5 days a week. Imagine how well he'd understand it if he spent a majority of those 32 years closely observing the wheel, studying, and taking notes, and if we increased the daily number of spins from 12 to 500. I'll bet he'd be able to tell you where the wheel will land the moment it is spun. I'll take it a step further and say he'd eventually reach the point where you wouldn't even need to spin the wheel. He'd be able to look at the contestant, assess his or her bodily dimensions, note the physical strength indicated by bicep and pectoral size, read the subtle bodily cues to determine the contestant's mood and therefore how much of their total physical potential they'd put into spinning the wheel, and use all of those factors to determine where the wheel will land before you fucking spin it.

Think about it. The three contestants will line up. He knows that the pink-shirted douchebag will try to show off all of his strength and successfully turn the wheel 2.64 times and land on 60 cents. Being horribly cocky, he knows he'll spin again and luck out by landing on 35 cents for a total of 95. Bob will then take it a step further and assess how this score will affect the strategy and spinning strength of the woman who comes up next. He will announce a winner before the wheel is even touched. The contestants won't take the predictions seriously at first and spin anyway, only to find that he was absolutely right. As the days wear on, contestants will try to escape the predetermined fate that Bob has laid out for them, only to fail. In a matter of months, they will succumb to inevitability and accept what is laid out for them.

In short time, all Price is Right contestants reach a state of extreme despair as they realize that everything they have ever done and ever will do is already laid out by the way they were born in relation to their environment, free will does not exist, the laws of physics are their true masters, and any choice they thought they made and any change in the world they believed to have been made by a conscious decision on their part was a complete and total illusion.

One day, a college philosophy student will bravely stand up to the deterministic hell that Bob Barker has forced him to face and decide that there is only one way to break free and prove that free will does in fact exist. He will tell the TV cameras that he'll end this cycle by his own decision once and for all, for he is truly in control of his own life. Then he'll pull out a gun, point it at his head, and pull the trigger.

The gun will fail to fire. Bob tells the boy that he knew he'd try to kill himself, so he took the liberty of bending the firing pin. He says that the process of of bending a firing pin is surprisingly similar to neutering a cat. Bob tells the boy that he can never escape the existential carnival of terror that he built with his own gnarled hands. The strings that carry this boy-puppet through the world cannot be cut until Puppetmaster Barker cuts them himself. The boy would scream upon realizing that cold, inevitable death that he can't even enact on his own terms is all that awaits him, but thanks to Bob Barker, he now knows that screaming, like all actions, achieves nothing.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part Three)

The joke about the Agro Crag reminds me of one time I was home for Christmas break from college. A couple friends and I watched a rerun of Nickelodeon Guts on one of Nick's satellite channels that only airs game shows, and my friend Craig tried to sing along with the theme song, and completely fucked up the lyrics. This is tragic, because the Guts theme song is nothing but instrumentals periodically punctuated with a few male voices shouting, "Guts!" Whenever I think of that show, I will always think of Craig shouting, "Guts!" only to have the guys on TV shout it three seconds later, followed by laughter and Craig burying his head in shame.

As for the Banana Magnets tag, we have a giant bowl of fake plastic fruit at home. There;s a banana, a lime, a lemon, an orange, grapes, a plum, an apple, and I'm not at home so I can't confirm this, but there might also be a nectarine. I have no idea why we own a giant bowl of fake plastic fruit, but I also can't think of a particularly good reason why we shouldn't have one, so I'll allow it.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part Two)

For the love of god, if anybody has any advice on how I can get a handle on my car again, please e-mail me and clue me in, because I'm going to shoot myself in the face with an assault rifle if I have to go another month or so without being able to open my car door. It's very annoying, not to mention that the extra 10 seconds it takes to get into my car will make the difference between surviving and getting fucking eaten when all nerd wet dreams come true and the zombie apocalypse finally happens.

I'm trying to think of more to say about this segment, but I'm finding more and more that the comedy is really self-explanatory, and maybe there just isn't that much of interest to say about it. Actually, after listening to a few DVD commentaries, I've more or less determined that people talking about why something is funny or what inspired a particular joke is the driest, most boring fucking thing a person could possibly be subjected to. You get stunning insights like, "This character's catchphrase comes from something my science teacher said in high school," and in worst case scenarios you'll hear somebody discuss the literary merit and hidden meanings of their comedy, which is every bit as terrible as it sounds.

I don't know if you own any Simpsons DVDs. It's kind of fucking pointless since everyone has already seen every good episode of The Simpsons 12 times, and on any given day you can catch 8 different airings on local TV, but I guess there's something to be said for collectors or fans who have a really strong urge to load up one particular episode. Anyway, I tried listening to the commentary for the Frank Grimes episode, and it was fucking painful. Hearing the showrunner analyze, overanalyze, then overanalyze his analysis on how the episode so powerfully speaks to the relationship between the fiction of the show and reality is like verbal waterboarding. Even Hank Azaria, who plays the character, seems to be in disbelief by the end of the 22-minute session.

So I'll try to can the painfully overlong commentary and say that I busted on The New Radicals because they were awful, the Where's Waldo bit is funny because he's dead, and playing the preacher was fun because I got to stand in my kitchen and scream for extended periods of time.

Moldy Bagels: Episode Six (Part One)

Here's the first part of the season finale. I just finished logging the length of every sketch in the six episode first season, and I'll be throwing together a Frankenstein clip show to serve as a type of pilot that I'll try to get represented and parlay into some sort of comedy writing job. I can't believe I started doing this show all the hell back in October. It legitimately blows my mind how fucking long it takes to to write and produce 22 minutes of comedy, especially since every episode has at least a few minutes of old material repackaged for the show.

It's funny that I wrote a sketch where I pretend to be friends with a horribly Photoshopped black guy, the joke being that I've never seen a black person before, when the black guys I used to work with at the restaurant have asked me a few times if they could do something for the show. I'm sure I'll include them eventually, but this is a good example of life doing the exact opposite of imitating art.

As for the cartoon, I think it's funny, but damn if it isn't incredibly easy to come up with those jokes. While running teleprompter for the morning news at work, I wrote down jokes for the cartoons during commercial breaks, and by the end of the show I had a list that was about 30 items long. I had to drastically cut them back just because I could pretty easily fill an entire half hour with that shit.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part Three)

Fun facts:

1. My celebrity impersonations are notoriously terrible, but I still enjoy the bit with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michael Caine.

2. I said "Fist Punches" when I clearly meant to say "Face Punches." Much like the Chris Henry debacle from an earlier episode, I am way too lazy to actually correct my mistakes with reshoots. Fuck that shit, this is public access. Let Martin Scorsese do reshoots when necessary. When I'm paid zero dollars, the show airs exclusively in one Northern Kentucky county, and the Youtube uploads all register well under 20 views, all you're getting is some white text, and that's final.

3. This episode still sucks.

4. I was home alone when I shot the mailbag segments, so I didn't have anyone to punch me in the face. I taped a glove around the end of an umbrella and shoved the umbrella into my own face with my off-camera arm. There was a soft glove at the end of the umbrella, but the tip was still metal. It required a lot of takes to get right, and my jaw hurt like hell for a few days afterwards.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part Two)

And this is where the show gets worthless and depressing. I really have no idea what I was going for with the news sketch. Maybe it's supposed to be funny because it's so silly, or maybe it's supposed to be some sort of satire about news organizations overexaggerating news stories and jumping straight to the air to report when they don't even have the whole story, or maybe it's radical anti-comedy. All I know is it doesn't work and the fact that I return to this sketch TWO MORE TIMES over the course of the show defies all explanation.

The cartoon is pretty funny though. Well, it was funnier when I made it over a year ago, but it's worth a revisit.

Moldy Bagels: Episode 5 (Part One)

I don't know what to say, except that this episode is a complete disaster. As you'll soon see, it takes two bits, the news stories and me reading E-mails, and stretches both of them out to unforgivably interminable length. I spend literally 7 minutes total reading and responding to message. That's a third of the episode. That's awful.

The sitcom at the beginning with the stuffed animals was a sketch that I wrote a really long time ago. I never made it because I just couldn't ever get excited enough about the humor to actually go through the trouble of making it, but I went for it this time because I thought the stuffed animal angle would give it the right tone and approach to make it funny. I'm not sure it if turned out to be particularly successful, but I had more fun making that sketch than I have in a while. As a fun side note, on the final shot where I'm beating the shit out of the stuffed animal, I had a whole inch of plumber's crack visible, and I had to crop and zoom in the shot while editing significantly in order to get my exposed ass out of the shot.