50 Days 50 Films - #48 "Ed Wood" (Tim Burton)

I'm really not a Tim Burton guy.

There was a chunk of years there — between the ages of maybe 11 and 20 — where I really tried. I felt like I should be a Tim Burton guy. His stuff was weird, and I like weird. His stuff was dark (sort of), and I like dark. He was all about the classic horror movies, and I had a poster of Frankenstein's Monster on my wall when I was like eight. On paper, it all should have been there.

But there was always one big problem: the guy just doesn't really know how to tell a story. It's all about the imagery with him, the style, the essential "Tim Burton"-ness of it all. Characters, plot, theme, story logic...he treats all of that like baggage to be jettisoned. I know that I'm not breaking any new ground by saying this, but come on. You know it's true.

So even as a kid I just never could get as into his movies as I wanted to. "Beetlejuice" is fun for awhile, but all the silliness loses me toward the end. "Edward Scissorhands" ... meh. "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" ... nothing. His "Batman" was probably my favorite, but I never quite understood what all the fuss was about. End of the day his stuff just leaves me cold, and always did.

But.

There's always that one exception to prove the rule, right?

"Ed Wood" is, for my money, one of the absolute best films of the 1990s. So what is it that sets this one so far apart from the others?

The black-and-white helps, to be honest. It's a stylistic and some would say obvious choice, but it serves the purpose of reigning in some of Burton's most obnoxious and self-indulgent tendencies. He throws in a lot of his typical flourishes here, but somehow manages to keep it all on the right side of the line. As goofy as it is, the movie keeps its feet on the ground.

The acting is another thing. Johnny Depp is a brilliant actor in so many ways but he's prone to a lot of the same bad instincts, so I always feel like he and Burton are a dangerous combination. But he manages to dig in a little bit here and make Ed something more than his usual bundle of ticks.

Bill Murray is spot-on perfect as Bunny Breckenridge. Jeffrey Jones is fantastic as Criswell. I even like Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Arquette, both of whose characters are frankly nothing to write home about. And George the Animal Fucking STEELE. How perfect is that?

Of course, we can't forget Martin Landau. A large part of what probably made me predisposed to like this movie more than Burton's others is the fact that I've been fascinated by both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff since I was a kid, and Lugosi's story is so epically tragic and yet so banal in its particulars that I've always found it singularly haunting. I feel like Landau got it, and he provides the beating heart that a) makes this movie work and b) is missing from so many other Burton films.

But, at the end of the day, for me it's all about the script. Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski pull off a nifty hat trick here — a biopic of Ed Wood that simultaneously feels like an Ed Wood movie and yet serves as a scathing critique of the whole Ed Wood ethos, while at the same time celebrating his spirit and making us want to go out and watch a bunch of Ed Wood movies. It's a tough balancing act, and they pull it off with real aplomb. As a writer, it's one of those scripts that makes me think "how'd they do that?"

And, oddly, it is in this one movie where Burton's general lack of interest in anything resembling a recognizable human motivation serves him well as a storyteller. The tendency with any of these biopics is to over-pathologize, to try to understand the subject. So we get a lot of dead brothers, absent mothers, angry fathers, humiliating first sexual experiences, whatever.  With Ed, we don't need any of that. He just is who he is, and we go with it. "He likes to dress in women's clothing," the movie seems to be saying, "so fucking what?" Even Lugosi — the more overtly tragic figure here — manages to escape without too much time spent on the analyst's couch.

None of this would have worked but for Alexander's and Karaszewski's deft hand and razor-sharp, almost Coen-like wit. One thing I rarely feel about Tim Burton movies is that they're funny. "Beetlejuice" and "Mars Attacks!" managed to squeeze a few chuckles out of me, but that's pretty much it. The spasmodic nature of his films generally crushes the humor for me the way a speeding truck will crush an injured rabbit. But, for whatever reason, this one has me belly laughing every time I see it.

Like Burton, Alexander and Karaszewski never really hit these heights again. They went on to write "Man in the Moon" and "The People Versus Larry Flynt" — fine enough films but both somehow missing the crazy spark that made this one come to such vivid life. The stars must have just aligned here.

As a writer myself, that's kind of a scary thought. But if I ever manage to write even one script as good as "Ed Wood" in my lifetime, I guess I'll count myself lucky.

50 Days 50 Films - #49 "The Road" (John Hillcoat)

I discovered Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat through his many music video collaborations with Nick Cave. The one that really leaped out at me was "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" off The Bad Seeds' "No More Shall We Part" album. In substance it's really just a bunch of Russians dancing around a basement somewhere, but Hillcoat infuses the whole thing with a quiet, sickly menace and then liberally slathers a sticky coating of Eurotrash sleaze all over top of it. You can smell that basement, and what you're smelling ain't good. If there has ever been a more perfect match of music and visuals, I don't know what it would be.

Cave wrote the screenplay and performed the soundtrack (with Warren Ellis) to Hillcoat's gritty-as-fuck Australian western "The Proposition" in 2005. In "The Road," Hillcoat's 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Cave is present only on the soundtrack (the script was written by Joe Penhall). So this is the movie where I was finally able to take off my Bad Seeds fanboy glasses and truly see Hillcoat for the master filmmaker he is.

I really could have picked either "The Proposition" or "The Road" for this entry. I love them both, and certainly they are similarly harrowing experiences. But, to me, "The Road" is the more impressive feat, due in no small part to the quiet but gutwrenching performances by Viggo Mortensen and young Kodi-Smit McPhee as an unnamed father and son making their way across a blasted post-Apocalyptic landscape. Mortensen anchors this movie in a way that Guy Pearce isn't quite able to in "The Proposition," and McPhee gives the best and most nuanced performance by a child actor I can remember seeing in years.

I was also impressed by how deftly Hillcoat manages to work with what, on the page, seemed to me to be pretty unruly source material. The Coens hit paydirt with "No Country For Old Men" just two years earlier, but beyond that the list of successful McCarthy adaptations is pretty thin ("All The Pretty Horses," anyone?). But here we have the perfect mesh of sensibilities. McCarthy and Hillcoat drop us headfirst into a dying world and strip out all traces of the Apocalypse-chic that has wormed its way into pop culture over the last decade. "The Road" is harrowing without being alienating, grueling without being boring or monotonous. The tender moments are quiet but heartfelt. The violence, when it comes, is quick and brutal.

And at the center of it all is the simple love of a father for his son. If you're not torn to shreds by the last 15 minutes of the movie, I don't want to know you because you, sir or ma'am, have no soul.

Hillcoat and Cave teamed up again for "Lawless" in 2012. The film is pretty good, definitely has its moments, but doesn't really rise to the expectations Hillcoat set with his previous two films. But I have faith. He'll be back, and I'll be first in line.

50 Days 50 Films - #50 "Chasing Amy" (Kevin Smith)

Who was it who said "good writers borrow, but great writers steal?" So, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm totally stealing this idea from my friend Jon Curtis, who's currently putting together his own list over at his fantastic New Jonny Transit blog. Click the link to check out what I suspect will be a very different selection of films. 

I've been wanting to reactivate this mostly defunct blog for awhile, and I've been trying to find a way to A)write something new every day and B)write something other than scripts, treatments and Facebook status updates. This seemed like as good a reason to start as any.

This isn't exactly my "50 Favorite Movies" list, although I will tell you in advance that the top 10 pretty much fell out that way. I gave myself a couple limitations -- the big one being only one film per director. If I hadn't done that, at least 20 out of the 50 would have been dominated by Scorsese, the Coens and David Lynch. Also, I decided to pick movies not necessarily based on whether they represent a filmmaker's BEST work, per say, but rather on what each individual movie meant to me when I first saw it. This first entry is a great example of that.

I'm also going to try to keep each entry fairly short.

Anyway. Enough caveats. Here I go.

#50: "Chasing Amy" (Kevin Smith)

I'm generally not a big Kevin Smith fan, but I felt like I had to include him somewhere on this list because of the effect his films had on my decision to ultimately  go back to school and pursue my career as a filmmaker. It's easy to forget in this era of Millenials and Smith's "Cop Out" the seismic effect that Smith had on the indie film landscape back in 1994 with "Clerks". For a minute there, he really was the Kurt Cobain of dick and boob jokes, and his View Askew movies really were the cinematic voice of Generation X.

So it was tempting to go with "Clerks" because, whereas Ivan Reitman's "Ghostbusters" (later on this list) was the first film I remember seeing that made me WANT to make movies, "Clerks" was the first film I saw that made me think I COULD make movies. It was lo-fi, rowdy and punk rock in a way that appealed to 16-year-old me in the same way I'm sure The Stooges appealed to Joey and Johnny Ramone back in the early 70s.

But, if I'm to be honest, "Chasing Amy" is really the only movie of Smith's that I still love. It has been roundly knocked for being a puerile male wish-fulfillment fantasy, and I'm sure that when I saw it as a naive and still girlfriendless college freshman, that's probably the level I appreciated it on. But, nearly two decades and more than a few broken relationships later, I can look back on this movie and see that Smith, in his kind of gregariously dumb way, managed to put his finger on some essential truths about me and other young men of my generation.

Rather than just giving us the wish fulfillment myth (man convinces lesbian to stop being lesbian and fall in love with him), Smith rather deftly tears it apart. This isn't a simple story about Holden and Alyssa falling in love. This is about the sudden and confusing fluidity of sexual mores and expectations that arose in the post 80s generation. What did it mean to be a straight man or a gay woman in the 1990s? Nobody really knew. It's something David Fincher got at a couple years later in a much more vicious, male-centric way with "Fight Club," but I think there's a real resonance between Holden and Banky and that film's Tyler and Jack.

And, let's not forget (SPOILER ALERT) that Alyssa and Holden don't ride off into the sunset together. That bummed me out at the time, but in retrospect there was just no way that thing was going to last.

Smith never really got this close to greatness again, and these days I don't have a lot of use for him. But I still throw this one in the DVD player every couple years or so, and I find it's sweetened rather nicely with age.

5 Metal Albums Even Non Metal Heads MIGHT Love

I don't remember the last time I actually posted one of these, but some dipshit writer at Salon named Noah Berlatsky wrote a post called "10 Metal Tracks Even Non Metal Heads Will Love". And I simply have to respond.

I don't know who this Berlatsky guy is or who he thinks he is writing for. But really? You're going to take someone who doesn't like metal and send them to Autopsy's "Hole In The Head" or The Melvins' "Honey Bucket"? And you're actually going to include a track by Drudkh, a legitimately racist black metal band? What planet are you on?

Now, with the exception of the Drudkh track, Berlatsky's choices are all defensible on their own merits as works of some artistry. But I can't imagine your average non-metal fan finding anything in Necro Deathmort's "Origami Werewolf" that will bring him or her into the fold. This is just Berlatsky being a hipster and showing off how weird and outside-the-box his taste in music is.

So, over the last week or so, I've been compiling my list of metal albums (not tracks) that I think A) might have a chance of transcending the genre and appealing to discerning music connoisseurs outside the headbanging world, and B) aren't simply disposable pop wrapped up in chunky guitar swirls (I'm looking at you, Linkin Park). I'm not going to promise that you WILL love these albums. But you might find something here you didn't expect.

Also, I know these albums are all from the 1990s. Shut up. I know. I'm old.

Therapy? - "Infernal Love" (1995)

At the height of the grunge revolution, Belfast art metallers Therapy? basically had two really great albums, this and its more pop-punk influenced predecessor "Troublegum." I remember reading some review at the time that said (I'm paraphrasing) that "Troublegum" is the album by the teenager who can't get the girl, and "Infernal Love" is the album by the grown up who can't figure out how to keep her. Still one of my all time favorites.

Faith No More - "Angel Dust" (1992)

Everyone remembers Faith No More's rap/rock hit "Epic" from their 1989 album "The Real Thing." The always schizophrenic band's 1992 followup "Angel Dust" was much more adventurous, and proved for once and all that lead singer Mike Patton is the greatest metal vocalist since the dearly departed Freddy Mercury. Just listen to the operatic bellows at the end of "Land of Sunshine" and the tortured squeals that spike throughout "Caffeine" and remind yourself that that's the same guy.

KYUSS - "Blues For The Red Sun" (1992)

Josh Homme is now mostly known as the frontman for Queens of the Stone Age, but long before that he came blasting out of Palm Desert, CA with KYUSS, standard bearers of what would become known as "stoner metal." I've never liked that term, but I do love KYUSS. They were simply one of the greatest straight-ahead ball busting and gut bruising rock bands of the 90s. "Blues For The Red Sun" was their masterpiece, although "...And The Circus Leaves Town" has its partisans.

The Gathering - "Mandylion" (1995)

Before Evanescence set female-fronted symphonic metal back by about a decade, there were Dutch rockers The Gathering. "Mandylion" was a transitional album for them, and they became one of what I would imagine to be among the first metal bands to have as much possible appeal for the Lilith Fair set as they did to sweaty rocker dudes. I remember in college that some of my lady friends who were more into Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan and The Indigo Girls responded pretty positively to The Gathering when I'd insist on playing the album during road trips.

Edge of Sanity - "Crimson" (1996)

This one is probably edging a little toward Berlatsky territory. A 40-minute single-track death metal concept album from Norway is probably not going to appeal to the masses. But Edge of Sanity frontman Dan Swano was always sort of the weirdo genius of European death metal (as his work with Pan Thy Monum proved), and "Crimson" definitely is a huge expansion upon what death metal as a genre could be. It's powerfully proggy in a way that might appeal to Rush, Floyd, or even old-school Genesis fans. Tool fans, in particular, should take note.

Top 10 Films of 2012 - Rust and Bone

I'm going to do something slightly different with my top 10 list this year.  I'm going to post my reviews as separate entries over a few days, in no particular order, rather than as one long blog.  This will give me a chance to say a little bit more about each film than I usually do.  It'll also let me catch up (or, I should say, force me to catch up) with a few of the movies that I haven't had a chance to see.

I'm still going to keep these relatively short.  Without further adieu:

Rust and Bone

Jacques Audiard



If I told you that a movie about a double-amputee killer whale trainer who falls in love with an unemployed bare knuckle boxer is not only the best movie I saw all year, it's also the most sensitive and nuanced, you'd probably think I was nuts.  But I'm not, and it is.

Jacques Audiard made a fairly remarkable (if flawed) French prison movie in 2010 called Un Prophete. One critic said it was "As epic as The Godfather," when in reality it was chilly, gritty, brutal, and relentlessly unsentimental about its subject matter.

When I read the above description of what was to be Audiard's follow-up, I was confused.  This sounded like the type of "quirky" nonsense we expect from someone like Diablo Cody.  I could not connect the filmmaker I knew with what the movie sounded like it would be.

Turns out, he was the exact person to tell this story.  Audiard approaches the romance between Alain (Matthias Schoenerts) and Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) with the same brutalist eye he took to French prison life in Un Prophete.  Rust and Bone is a love story remarkably free of the kind of emotional manipulation we've grown used to in films like this.  Instead, it probes lightly at us with a feather-soft touch, identifies our weaknesses, lulls us into complacency, and then digs its hooks in and rips.  Audiard's matter-of-fact direction is disarming, so when the big moments come he's made us completely unprepared for their effect.

He also delivers a few flashes of sheer visual poetry that literally took my breath away.  A whale swimming up out of the murk, a man desperately punching at an iced-over lake, even a shot of a van door opening and a prosthetic leg emerging — these are images that will stick with me for a long time.

For their parts, Schoenert and Cotillard craft two of the most remarkable, quiet performances I've seen in a long time. Like Audiard, they give us just enough and no more. At first I didn't really like either of them.  By the end, I had fallen in love with both, and I can't identify the moment where that happened.

Top 5 Songs I Love Unironically

My friend Rob just posted this piece about Bruce Springsteen on his Facebook page. It blew my mind. Do kids today really listen to The Boss ironically? Has our post Gen-X pop-cultural dependence on irony really stunted our emotional core to the point where we can't just listen to a song that is beautiful, heartfelt and earnest without sneering at it? Am I really so old now that I don't get this?

The article got me thinking about my own relationship to irony, and I have admit it made me realize that I'm no better than the rest of you. I tend to fall into the same trap. Irony as we currently understand it is , I think, a defense mechanism we all share. It protects us from having to actually feel something real, to be moved by something in a way that might conceivably bring derision. It's safer to stand back and smirk than to open our hearts, let something in and maybe hit a real nerve.

 So, in that spirit, here is my list of my top 5 favorite songs that I absolutely love, and love unironically.  Go ahead.  Mock away.

1 . Bruce Springsteen - "Youngstown"

Since it was an article on Springsteen that started this, I'll go ahead and start with my favorite Springsteen song.  It has become a bit of a joke that Bruce sees himself as the self-appointed voice of disenfranchised America.  But this song from his 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad shows why we shouldn't laugh that idea off so easily.  Springsteen -- a real master of narrative -- uses Youngstown, Ohio, to tell the a haunting and elegiac story of the rustbelt and, by extension, the story of the rise and fall of the American working class.  His portrait of a city in crisis -- whose Heartland denizens want nothing more than to work hard and provide for their families but who have been abused and neglected by a nation that has used them and thrown them away -- would be ripe for parody if it wasn't so damn true.  The images Springsteen creates are indelible -- "Them smokestacks reachin' like the arms of God/into a beautiful sky of soot and clay" may be my single favorite lyric ever.  And when he sings "we sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam/Now we're wondering what they were dying for," it still cuts deep.  How many sons and daughters of Youngstown fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wonder?

2. Jim Croce - "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"

The plaintive guitar, the swelling strings, the heart-tugging jilted boyfriend sentiment...all these make this one of those songs that seems destined for a snarky, tongue-in-cheek Karaoke rendition at a hipster party somewhere in Silverlake.  But stop and think about it for a minute...how many times have you (yeah, YOU) been compelled to reach out to an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/etc. just so you could prove to them how OK you were, now that the dust has settled and your broken heart has been crudely stitched back together?  How well did that go for you?  Croce so perfectly captures that ache of trying to let go of something that you know you have to and failing.

3. Louis Armstrong - "What A Wonderful World"

This one is almost impossible to separate from all our ironic associations with it.  It's just so hopeful and naive, most people can't help but snicker.  I'm guilty of this, too: when I was a college radio DJ, I remember playing this over audio of the zombies eating all the Army guys in the bunker at the end of Day of the Dead.

But there is something genuinely touching about its hopefulness and naivete.  It's a call for us to see the world as we might want it to be, rather than as it is.  When I need to remind myself what this really song is, I just think back to what it meant to Bruce Willis's character in 12 Monkeys (yeah, I referenced 12 Monkeys, shut up).

4. Styx - "Come Sail Away"

I don't really know that I can mount a truly articulate defense for this one other than to say, beyond all its goofball charm, I just this find this song to be the sound of pure, unfettered joy. When angels fly, I think this is what the beat of their wings against the clouds sounds like.  And no, I'm not being ironic.

5. Johnny Cash - "Hurt"

This one gets all sort of hipster cred, probably, because its a mashup of Johnny Cash and Nine Inch Nails.  Or maybe that just provokes a backlash.  I don't know.  I don't really get what hipsters like.  Regardless, put all the iconographic meta stuff ("it's JOHNNY CASH...singing NINE INCH NAILS!") out of your head and really listen to it.  Has any song ever more fully captured the sting of grief, regret, and encroaching mortality than this one?  Cash was nearing the end of his life here and was busy taking stock of a lot of things.  The soul his broken voice infuses into this song elevates it way past the frankly sad-eyed Gothboy nonsense it was and turns it into something bare, raw, and utterly truthful.

For another late-era Cash song that makes me want to cry, check out this one.

Top 10 Favorite Standup Comedians

Strangely, around the time I seriously got into horror fiction (when I was about 13 or so) I also became a bit of a standup comedy geek.

Standup has always seemed to be so far beyond anything I could ever imagine myself doing, but in some fundamental way I think the neurosis that drives a standup is very similar to that which drives a horror writer. At best it's a transgressive artform, dangerous, full of anger and cynicism, and it allows us to poke around in our own id in a relatively safe way. Good horror shows us the things we aren't supposed to see, and good standup says the things we aren't supposed to say.

So I just started brainstorming a horror-inspired TV pilot set in the world of standup comedy, and it got me thinking about my favorite standups and what I love about them. I'm not saying these are necessarily the BEST standups. They're just the ones I have the most affection for. Here's my list:

10. Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney Dangerfield's approach feels pretty outdated now, I suppose, but I've had a bit of a soft spot for him ever since I first saw him performing on Johnny Carson back in the 80s. Maybe it's because he was so unrelentingly Jew-ey, which helped make me feel a little less self conscious about being one of the only Jews I knew in Los Alamos. Maybe it was just the googley eyes, which would never fail to crack me up when I was eight or nine.

But I think it's mostly because, as kind of a fat sadsack dork myself, I responded to how he made that very thing work for him.

I also have always loved his personal story : a failed standup who gave it up for years to be a paint salesman, and who then reinvented himself in his late 40s, took on a new stage name, and almost by chance became a huge star because of a single performance on the Ed Sullivan Show.

As I grew older and my tastes shifted toward more overtly edgy material, I began to see past Dangerfield's sometimes hokey one-liners to the seething rage that seemed to boil beneath them. His vicious turn in the otherwise overwrought Natural Born Killers -- where his shtick was stripped down to its raw, ugly core -- cemented his place in my personal pantheon.

9. Steve Martin

In a lot of ways the antithesis of Rodney Dangerfield, Steve Martin is probably the first standup other than Bill Cosby I really recognized. I distinctly remember being six or seven and listening to my parents vinyl copy of A Wild and Crazy Guy over and over and over again. I couldn't get enough.

What's amazing is, almost three decades later, how well the album holds up for me. Martin embraced outright silliness in a way that almost no other comic has, and he took a scientific approach to it that somehow elevated the material beyond the goofy one liners and the shtick with the banjo and the arrow-in-the-head gag. I still find it to be imminently re-listenable in the way a lot of comedy albums just aren't.

And speaking of Bill Cosby...

8. Bill Cosby

It's a total cliche to say that Bill Cosby was everybody's dad in the 1980s, but it's also pretty much true. Like your dad, he wasn't not terribly cool. But I'd guess that for most of us who grew up during that time period, he was this constantly soothing presence that, if we're willing to admit it, we're still fond of.

Most people associate him with The Cosby Show, but the first thing I think of when I think of him is actually going to the dentist. It was Dr. Lorio's practice up in Los Alamos. He used to have these little radio headsets that he'd give to patients whenever they were getting their teeth cleaned or their cavities filled. It had about five or six stations, mostly light rock or smooth jazz, but the last station was always a running loop of Bill Cosby. I didn't even really know who he was at the time, but I'd lay back while the pretty and buxomy dental hygienist picked at my teeth with her little instruments, close my eyes and just let his low rumbling voice take me away.

It got to the point where I actually looked forward to going to the dentist. Even now when I go and they don't have those headsets I find myself absurdly disappointed.

The amazing thing about Cosby, I realize now, is that he never really tells an actual joke. It's just these precisely crafted long-form stories about his friends or his family that are as touching as they are hilarious. I don't get a lot of belly laughs from his stuff anymore, but when the mood strikes me I can still slip into Bill Cosby, Himself like an old pair of pajama pants.

7. Bill Hicks

Bill Hicks inhabits the exact opposite end of the comic spectrum from Cosby. There's nothing comfortable about what he did. He didn't tell stories. He didn't want you to like him. He wasn't trying to make you comfortable, or even necessarily to make you laugh. He was rage personified, and he wanted to piss you off.

When I was in high school I was a huge Denis Leary fan, but then I got to college and a buddy of mine introduced me to Hicks. I realized that he pretty much did the exact same thing Leary did, but earlier, funnier, smarter, and much much better (something countless other people have noticed, by the way). When I dug deeper into Hicks's stuff, I realized that only maybe two thirds of it is actually funny. The rest is just too blistering and bitter to really get a laugh. Hicks was kind of out of control. But funny or not, it's all genius.

6. Marc Maron

Like most people, I discovered Marc Maron pretty recently through his incredibly popular WTF podcast. I'd seen him before on Conan and Comedy Central, and I even caught a couple of his live shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in LA without really knowing who he was. He was just one of those "that guy" comics that you sort of recognize.

But the podcast, if you haven't listened to it, is brilliant. It's a pretty straightforward interview show, where he sits down with a fellow comic and talks about life and career. But through his own matter-of-fact vulnerability he manages to get these comics to open up about their own pain and personal demons in some extraordinary ways (check out the Todd Hanson and Mike DeStefano episodes to see what I mean). He got Louis CK to cry. He also, over the course of two interviews, famously gave supreme douchebag Carlos Mencia enough wick to completely detonate himself.

After watching more of his actual standup, I realized that that queer mixture of anger, honesty, and raw vulnerability is sort of his thing. He could be insufferable -- a Bill Hicks who wants to talk about himself -- but his generally laid-back delivery makes it all go down easily. He's the sort of guy you think you want to hang out with, but sort of fear you'll either get into a fist fight or it'll turn into a big sensitive man cry-fest before the night's done.

5. Sarah Silverman

I feel bad that there aren't more women on this list. Putting it together really showed me how behind I am in really paying attention to female comics. There are a number -- Tig Notaro, Lisa Lampanelli, Amy Barnes, Paula Poundstone, etc. -- who I know, but when it comes right down to it I'm just not familiar enough with their work to say much about them (Maria Bamford almost made my list, but I couldn't quite justify knocking off Rodney Dangerfield). Bad Scotty. I obviously have homework to do.

So now I'm going to make it worse by saying I have a huge crush on Sarah Silverman (I know, me and all the other hipsters out there). I always kind of melt in the face of really beautiful women saying really awful and offensive things. But fanboy lust aside, I think Silverman is one of the most technically perfect comics around. Her sense of timing is pretty much unmatched, and she's able to layer a single joke with about seven more layers of cringe-inducing hilarity than any male shock comic out there. She's smart, she's no bullshit, and she's fucking fearless.

4. Brian Posehn

I feel like Brian Posehn's kind of guilty pleasure (just check out the dick farting bit in the video above to see what I mean). But, I don't know, the guy's just really fucking funny to me. He's the quintessential big fat metal dork, and so he reminds me of myself and a lot of friends I've had over the years. If I could do standup, I'd like to think I'd be all smart and stuff like Marc Maron, Steven Wright or Louis CK, but I actually think I'd probably be a lot like Brian Posehn.

3. Louis CK

Louis CK's probably the best living standup comic out there right now. He combines the best of everything -- absurdity, observational, surreal, social commentary, smart, stupid, etc. -- into a stream of hilarity that just doesn't let up. I probably laugh more times per minute during a Louis CK bit than I do any other comic. And he somehow makes it all look really easy.

What's weird is how he's sort of become this dad figure like Bill Cosby, but for a younger and more cynical generation. His relentless lack of sentimentality about his kids can make me uncomfortable at times, but it has lead to some of the funniest routines in the history of standup.

2. David Cross

I know I just said Louis CK is the best living standup, but my affection for David Cross goes way back to the early 90s and his legendary Mr. Show with Bob and David (clip NSFW), in my opinion the greatest sketch show ever (it's also where I first saw Silverman and Posehn). This gives him the edge.

As a standup, Cross is as polished as CK and as fearless as Silverman. And he just doesn't seem to give a fuck. He's relentlessly intelligent, calls out bullshit when he sees it, and is not afraid to pick a fight. He also, famously, ad libs a lot of his act on the spot. That blows my mind. Most people know him these days as an actor from either Arrested Development or Modern Family, but if you haven't checked out his standup do yourself a favor.

1. Richard Pryor

Of course. Who else?

Nobody could tell a horrifying and heart-breaking personal story and make you laugh as hard and as consistently as Richard Pryor. Whether he was talking about his abusive father, growing up in a brothel, or lighting himself on fire while freebasing, Pryor had a unique ability to mine into himself in a way that most comics only dream of. There has never been a comic more willing to expose himself on stage, to flaunt all of his personal demons and invite you to laugh at them. And no one was funnier. It's a tragedy that he was struck down with MS so relatively young, just when it seemed he had gotten his shit together. He could still be going.

All that said, this is my first memory of him, and as terrible as it is I still kind of love it.

Honorable mentions:

Maria Bamford
Mitch Hedberg
George Carlin
Lenny Bruce
Richard Belzer
Paul F. Tompkins
Steven Wright
Richard Lewis
Kristen Schaal
Wendy Liebman
Chris Rock
Robin Williams
Rita Rudner
David Brenner
Albert Brooks
Kevin Pollack
Tig Notaro
Patton Oswalt
Greg Giraldo
Patrice O'Neal
Paula Poundstone
Christopher Titus
Stewart Lee
Dave Chappelle
Jim Gaffigan
Erin Foley
Greg Fitzsimmons
Zach Galifianakis
Bill Burr
Laura Kightlinger
Dave Attell
Jim Norton
Mike Birbiglia
Bob Saget
Maz Jobrani
Jessi Klein
Mike DeStefano
Carl LaBove
Donald Glover