It wasn't until Andy Samberg came along that I realized that most of my life, I wasn't really getting comedy. Thanks to a generation of comics steeped in observational humor, like most of the public, I came to believe that something was funny because a comedian told us it was.
"Look at this- isn't it outrageously funny?", Dude With a Hatred for His Ex-Wife intones into his microphone, throwing some air quotes up in the air. Not that this can't be fun in a smart aleck way (see Conan, Dave), but it's not really funny. You laugh because you're in on the joke, not because you're happy.
The alternative is the gross-out, frat boy humor of say, Adam Sandler. What Samberg does it combines the two. He's a smart dude that makes you think a little, but he's not uppity about it-- he just wants to make you laugh.
So thank YHWH for Andy. He did it again this week with "Iran So Far Away" and R&B love song to Iran's prime minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's not exactly Chaplin's The Great Dictator, but it's in the same territory. Check it out:
The soft touch is what makes it brilliant and potent. It's light-hearted irreverence is just the sort of thing Ahmadinjad brutally keeps his people from engaging in.
Samberg won an Emmy this month for "Dick in a Box", his duet with Justin Timberlake and of course, he's also the dude that gave America "Lazy Sunday", which looking back on it, basically introduced the hipster ethos to mainstream America. And then he also turned Natalie Portman into Easy-E by giving her a full out gangsta rap. Basically, the dude's been funnier in two years than Adam Sandler's managed to be during his entire career.
