Tag Archives: comedy

tD

The Golden Age of TV: Trailer Park Boys

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I have noticed that critics of our pop culture seem to agree that we are in a second golden age of television in the United States (and elsewhere). It’s a period beginning in the late 1990s, and stretching to the present day, marked by the production of a significant number of critically and internationally acclaimed programs. The original golden age of television spanned the late 1940s and early 50s (e.g., Kraft Television Theater, Four Star Playhouse, The Clock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents).

I’m not much of a TV watcher so my credentials are somewhat dubious. But, I must weigh in to set the record straight on our current golden age. To be precise, it began in Canada on April 22, 2001, and to a fashion, continues to this day.

You see, on April 22, 2001, the CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) aired “Take Your Little Gun and Get Out of My Trailer Park“, the first episode of the first season of Trailer Park Boys.

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I first stumbled across Trailer Park Boys on BBC America while channel surfing in 2004 (I know, 3 years late!). Unfamiliar? Trailer Park Boys (TPB) is a now legendary Canadian mockumentary comedy chronicling the (mis-)adventures of Julian, Ricky and Bubbles, and other colorful residents of fictitious Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Nova Scotia. The show now in its 11th season is a booze and pot-fueled catalog of vulgar, outrageous hare-brained silliness.

I love it. To date I have never laughed so much while watching TV. Luckily for me, and other fans, the show and related movies are now available on Netflix.

So, long may the real golden age of TV continue complete with Bubble’s kitties, Julian and Ricky’s get-rich-quick schemes, Randy’s stomach, Mr.Lahey, Cyrus the nutter, J-Roc, rum-and-coke, Tyrone, Lucy, Officer Green, Trinity, shopping carts and the rest of the madcap bunch.

Image 1: Trailer Park Boys screenshot. Courtesy of Swearnet.

Image 2 courtesy of Google Search.

Idea Soup

Finally A Reason For Twitter

Florida Man (@_FloridaMan) finally brings it all into sharp and hysterical focus. Now, I may have a worthy reason for joining the Twitterscape and actually following someone.

From the NYT:

Dangling into the sea like America’s last-ditch lifeline, the state of Florida beckons. Hustlers and fugitives, million-dollar hucksters and harebrained thieves, Armani-wearing drug traffickers and hapless dope dealers all congregate, scheme and revel in the Sunshine State. It’s easy to get in, get out or get lost.

For decades, this cast of characters provided a diffuse, luckless counternarrative to the salt-and-sun-kissed Florida that tourists spy from their beach towels. But recently there arrived a digital-era prototype, @_FloridaMan, a composite of Florida’s nuttiness unspooled, tweet by tweet, to the world at large. With pithy headlines and links to real news stories, @_FloridaMan offers up the “real-life stories of the world’s worst super hero,” as his Twitter bio proclaims.

His more than 1,600 tweets — equal parts ode and derision — are a favorite for weird-news aficionados. Yet, two years since his 2013 debut, the man behind the Twitter feed remains beguilingly anonymous, a Wizard of LOLZ. (The one false note is his zombielike avatar: The mug shot belongs to an Indiana Man.)

His style is deceptively simple. Nearly every Twitter message begins “Florida Man.” What follows, though, is almost always a pile of trouble. Some examples:

Florida Man Tries to Walk Out of Store With Chainsaw Stuffed Down His Pants.

Florida Man Falls Asleep During Sailboat Burglary With Gift Bag on His Head; Can’t Be Woken by Police.

Florida Man Arrested For Directing Traffic While Also Urinating.

Florida Man Impersonates Police Officer, Accidentally Pulls Over Real Police Officer.

Florida Man Says He Only Survived Ax Attack By Drunk Stripper Because “Her Coordination Was Terrible.”

“Now I think there are people who actually aspire to Florida Man-ness,” said Dave Barry, who celebrates Florida’s brand of madness in his popular columns and best-selling books. “It’s like the big leagues. It’s the Broadway for idiots.”

The number of @_FloridaMan’s followers is 270,000. Homages have proliferated: fan art, copycat Twitter feeds (California Man, Texas Man) and, most recently, a craft beer with Florida Man’s avatar.

Florida Man is considerably more popular (and funny) than competitors like Texas Man (732 followers) or California Man (129). But is the Florida Man who Accidentally Shoots Himself With Stun Gun While Trying to Rob the Radio Shack He Also Works At truly more wacky than, let’s say, an Arkansas Man or New Jersey Man?

Read the entire story here.

Idea Soup

Why Are Most Satirists Liberal?

Stephen_Colbert_2014Oliver Morrison over at The Atlantic has a tremendous article that ponders the comedic divide that spans our political landscape. Why, he asks, do most political satirists identify with left-of-center thought? And, why are the majority of radio talk show hosts right-wing? Why is there no right-wing Stephen Colbert, and why no leftie Rush? These are very interesting questions.

You’ll find some surprising answers, which go beyond the Liberal stereotype of the humorless Republican with no grasp of satire or irony.

From the Atlantic:

Soon after Jon Stewart arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, the world around him began to change. First, George W. Bush moved into the White House. Then came 9/11, and YouTube, and the advent of viral videos. Over the years, Stewart and his cohort mastered the very difficult task of sorting through all the news quickly and turning it around into biting, relevant satire that worked both for television and the Internet.

Now, as Stewart prepares to leave the show, the brand of comedy he helped invent is stronger than ever. Stephen Colbert is getting ready to bring his deadpan smirk to The Late Show. Bill Maher is continuing to provoke pundits and politicians with his blunt punch lines. John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is about to celebrate the end of a wildly popular first year. Stewart has yet to announce his post-Daily Show plans, but even if he retires, the genre seems more than capable of carrying on without him.

Stewart, Colbert, Maher, Oliver and co. belong to a type of late-night satire that’s typically characterized as liberal, skewering Republicans (and, less frequently, Democrats) for absurd statements or pompousness or flagrant hypocrisy. “The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Funny Or Die, and The Onion, while not partisan organs, all clearly have a left-of-center orientation,” wrote Jonathan Chait in The New Republic in 2011.This categorization, though, begs the question of why the form has no equal on the other side of the ideological spectrum. Some self-identified conservative comics argue that the biased liberal media hasn’t given them a chance to thrive. Others point out that Obama is a more difficult target than his Republican predecessor: He was the first African-American president, which meant comedians have had to tip-toe around anything with racial connotations, and his restrained personality has made him difficult to parody.

But six years in, Obama’s party has been thoroughly trounced in the midterms and publicly excoriated by right-wing politicians, yet there’s a dearth of conservative satirists taking aim, even though the niche-targeted structure of cable media today should make it relatively easy for them to find an audience. After all, it would have been difficult for Stewart or Colbert to find an audience during the era when three broadcast stations competed for the entire country and couldn’t afford to alienate too many viewers. But cable TV news programs need only find a niche viewership. Why then, hasn’t a conservative Daily Show found its own place on Fox?

Liberal satirists are certainly having no trouble making light of liberal institutions and societies. Portlandia is about to enter its fifth season skewering the kinds of liberals who don’t understand that eco-terrorismand militant feminism may not be as politically effective as they think. Jon Stewart has had success poking fun at Obama’s policies. And Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, has found that the liberal Clinton was the butt of more jokes on late-night shows of the 1990s than either George W. Bush or Obama would later be.

So if liberals are such vulnerable targets for humor, why do relatively few conservative comedians seem to be taking aim at them?

ne explanation is simply that proportionately fewer people with broadly conservative sensibilities choose to become comedians. Just as liberals dominate academia, journalism, and other writing professions, there are nearly three times as many liberal- as conservative-minded people in the creative arts according to a recent study. Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University, argues that the same personality traits that shape political preferences also guide the choice of professions. These tendencies just get more pronounced in the case of comedy, which usually requires years of irregular income, late hours, and travel, as well as a certain tolerance for crudeness and heckling.

There are, of course, high-profile conservative comedians in America, such as the members of the Blue  Collar Comedy Tour. But these performers, who include Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy, tend carefully to avoid politicized topics, mocking so-called “rednecks” in the same spirit as Borscht Belt acts mocked Jewish culture.

When it comes to actual political satire, one of the most well-known figures nationally is Dennis Miller, a former Saturday Night Live cast member who now has a weekly segment on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor. On a recent show, O’Reilly brought up the Democrats’ election losses, and Miller took the bait. “I think liberalism is like a nude beach,” Miller said. “It’s better off in your mind than actually going there.” His jokes are sometimes amusing, but they tend to be grounded in vague ideologies, not the attentive criticism to the news of the day that has given liberal satires plenty of fodder five days a week. The real problem, Frank Rich wrote about Miller, “is that his tone has become preachy. He too often seems a pundit first and a comic second.”

The Flipside, a more recent attempt at conservative satire, was launched this year by Kfir Alfia, who got his start in political performance a decade ago when he joined the Protest Warriors, a conservative group that counter-demonstrated at anti-war protests. The Flipside started airing this fall in more than 200 stations across the country, but its growth is hampered by its small budget, according to The Flipside’s producer, Rodney Lee Connover, who said he has to work 10 times as hard because his show has 10 times fewer resources than the liberal shows supported by cable networks.

Connover was a writer along with Miller on The 1/2 Hour News Hour, the first major attempt to create a conservative counterpart to The Daily Showin 2007. It was cancelled after just 13 episodes and has remained the worst-rated show of all time on Metacritic. It was widely panned by critics who complained that it was trying to be political first and funny second, so the jokes were unsurprising and flat.

The host of The Flipside, Michael Loftus, says he’s doing the same thing as Jon Stewart, just with some conservative window-dressing. Wearing jeans, Loftus stands and delivers his jokes on a set that looks like the set of Tool Time, the fictional home-improvement show Tim Allen hosts on the sitcom Home Improvement: The walls are decorated with a dartboard, a “Men at Work” sign, and various other items the producers might expect to find in a typical American garage. In a recent episode, after Republicans won the Senate, Loftus sang the song, “Looks like we made it …” to celebrate the victory.

But rather than talking about the news, as Colbert and Stewart do, or deconstructing a big political issue, as Oliver does, Loftus frequently makes dated references without offering new context to freshen them up. “What’s the deal with Harry Reid?” he asked in a recent episode. “You either hate him or you hate him, am I right? The man is in the business of telling people how greedy they are, and how they don’t pay their fair share, and he lives in the Ritz Carlton … This guy is literally Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.” Much of his material seems designed to resonate with only the most ardent Fox News viewers. Loftus obviously can’t yet attract the kinds of celebrity guests his network competitors can. But instead of playing games with the guests he can get, he asks softball questions that simply allow them to spout off.

Greg Gutfeld, the host of Fox’s Red Eye, can also be funny, but his willing-to-be-controversial style often comes across as more hackneyed than insightful. “You know you’re getting close to the truth when someone is calling you a racist,” he once said. Gutfeld has also railed against “greenie” leftists who shop at Whole Foods, tolerance, and football players who are openly gay. Gutfeld’s shtick works okay during its 3 a.m. timeslot, but a recent controversy over sexist jokes about a female fighter pilot highlighted just how far his humor is from working in prime time.

So if conservatives have yet to produce their own Jon Stewart, it could be the relatively small number of working conservative comedians, or their lack of power in the entertainment industry. Or it could be that shows like The Flipside are failing at least, in part, because they’re just not that funny. But what is it about political satire that makes it so hard for conservatives to get it right?

Read the entire article here.

Image: Stephen Colbert at the 2014 MontClair Film Festival. Courtesy of the 2014 MontClair Film Festival.

Idea Soup

Need Some Exercise? Laugh

Duck_SoupYour sense of humor and wit will keep your brain active and nimble. It will endear you to friends (often), family (usually) and bosses (sometimes). In addition, there is growing evidence that being an amateur (or professional) comedian or a just a connoisseur of good jokes will help you physically as well.

From WSJ:

“I just shot an elephant in my pajamas,” goes the old Groucho Marx joke. “How he got in my pajamas I don’t know.”

You’ve probably heard that one before, or something similar. For example, while viewing polling data for the 2008 presidential election on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert deadpanned, “If I’m reading this graph correctly…I’d be very surprised.”

Zingers like these aren’t just good lines. They reveal something unusual about how the mind operates—and they show us how humor works. Simply put, the brain likes to jump the gun. We are always guessing where things are going, and we often get it wrong. But this isn’t necessarily bad. It’s why we laugh.

Humor is a form of exercise—a way of keeping the brain engaged. Mr. Colbert’s line is a fine example of this kind of mental calisthenics. If he had simply observed that polling data are hard to interpret, you would have heard crickets chirping. Instead, he misdirected his listeners, leading them to expect ponderous analysis and then bolting in the other direction to declare his own ignorance. He got a laugh as his audience’s minds caught up with him and enjoyed the experience of being fooled.

We benefit from taxing our brains with the mental exercise of humor, much as we benefit from the physical exercise of a long run or a tough tennis match. Comedy extends our mental stamina and improves our mental flexibility. A 1976 study by Avner Ziv of Tel Aviv University found that those who listened to a comedy album before taking a creativity test performed 20% better than those who weren’t exposed to the routine beforehand. In 1987, researchers at the University of Maryland found that watching comedy more than doubles our ability to solve brain teasers, like the so-called Duncker candle problem, which challenges people to attach a candle to a wall using only a book of matches and a box of thumbtacks. Research published in 1998 by psychologist Heather Belanger of the College of William and Mary even suggests that humor improves our ability to mentally rotate imaginary objects in our heads—a key test of spatial thinking ability.

The benefits of humor don’t stop with increased intelligence and creativity. Consider the “cold pressor test,” in which scientists ask subjects to submerge their hands in water cooled to just above the freezing mark.

This isn’t dangerous, but it does allow researchers to measure pain tolerance—which varies, it turns out, depending on what we’ve been doing before dunking our hands. How long could you hold your hand in 35-degree water after watching 10 minutes of Bill Cosby telling jokes? The answer depends on your own pain tolerance, but I can promise that it is longer than it would be if you had instead watched a nature documentary.

Like exercise, humor helps to prepare the mind for stressful events. A study done in 2000 by Arnold Cann, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, had subjects watch 16 minutes of stand-up comedy before viewing “Faces of Death”—the notorious 1978 shock film depicting scene after scene of gruesome deaths. Those who watched the comedy routine before the grisly film reported significantly less psychological distress than those who watched a travel show instead. The degree to which humor can inoculate us from stress is quite amazing (though perhaps not as amazing as the fact that Dr. Cann got his experiment approved by his university’s ethical review board).

This doesn’t mean that every sort of humor is helpful. Taking a dark, sardonic attitude toward life can be unhealthy, especially when it relies on constant self-punishment. (Rodney Dangerfield: “My wife and I were happy for 20 years. Then we met.”) According to Nicholas Kuiper of the University of Western Ontario, people who resort to this kind of humor experience higher rates of depression than their peers, along with higher anxiety and lower self-esteem. Enjoying a good laugh is healthy, so long as you yourself aren’t always the target.

Having an active sense of humor helps us to get more from life, both cognitively and emotionally. It allows us to exercise our brains regularly, looking for unexpected and pleasing connections even in the face of difficulties or hardship. The physicist Richard Feynman called this “the kick of the discovery,” claiming that the greatest joy of his life wasn’t winning the Nobel Prize—it was the pleasure of discovering new things.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Duck Soup, promotional movie poster (1933). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

 

Arts and Letters

Reheated Spam — The Circus Flies Again

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Of late it seems that the wave of musical reunions has threatened to submerge us all under a tsunami of nostalgia — Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Madness, Kid Creole (and the Coconuts), The Eagles to name but a few. Some, we would rather not have — can anyone say Spice Girls? Hollywood certainly has had a hand in this wave of nostalgia, with a firm eye on box office cash — War of the Worlds, Dracula, Ocean’s Eleven, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And, of course, we have witnessed no end of updated remakes of, or soon to be rebooted, once classic TV shows from the last fifty years — Roots, Tales from the Darkside, Fame, Charlie’s Angels, Hawaii Five-O, Rockford Files and even Dukes of Hazzard.

However, none can possibly compare with the imminent reunion of the most revered act in British comedy — Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Brits the world over are having heart palpitations at the prospect of the five remaining pythons reforming on stage in the summer of 2014. Hold the spam, though. Shows are only currently scheduled for London.

From the Telegraph:

The five remaining members of Monty Python and I are sitting in a silver Mercedes. We’re driving away from the press conference where they have just announced their reunion. Opposite me are Eric Idle and the two Terrys, Gilliam and Jones. I’m squashed up next to Michael Palin and John Cleese.

It’s been “an awful long time”, says Gilliam, since they’ve been together in the same vehicle. Do they feel like rock stars on tour? “We don’t know what that would be like,” says Cleese. “I do,” Palin says. “It’s just having people wanting to tear your clothes off, John.” Cleese is having none of it: “This is very tame in comparison…”

Idle suggests the five men could almost pass as “the geriatric version” of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s

Night, “where we’re not being pursued by anybody. We’re very old and we just long to go to bed and have a sleep.” But they’re clearly having a good time. “Better than being home alone,” as Gilliam puts it.

The Pythons’ announcement, that next summer they will perform together on stage for the first time in 24 years, was filmed by 27 camera crews and transmitted live around the world, generating a wave of both excitement and nostalgia. Gilliam’s wife of 40 years, Maggie, was watching the press conference from the departure lounge of an airport in France, in tears. She was moved, jokes Gilliam, by the sight of “five old farts… about to step into the abyss”. Idle’s wife, Tania, tuned in from their home in Los Angeles. “She was enjoying it,” he says. “She thought we looked good.” Gilliam smiles, “You’ve got a better wife than I do, then.”

“How many of us are married to Catholics?” asks Cleese. Only he is, as it turns out. “Your latest one’s a Catholic?” asks Idle. “The last few years I’ve had a lot of Catholic girlfriends,” Cleese replies. “About four in a row.” He married Jennifer Wade, his fourth wife, last year in the West Indies. “By an umpire,” jokes Idle. “I declare this marriage LBW,” Palin joins in. “Leg Before Wife,” says Gilliam.

When I ask whether they ever have political discussions, the laughter stops briefly. “We’re so disillusioned now that we have nothing to disagree about,” says Cleese. Gilliam launches into a monologue about politics giving way to corporate power. “Gilliam, shut up!” says Cleese. “Not much of a discussion,” Palin observes. “It was a rant, Terry,” says Idle. “The discussion follows the rant,” replies Gilliam.

It’s 44 years since the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was shown on BBC One late one evening, changing comedy history for ever. It’s 24 years since the sixth member of the gang, Graham Chapman, died of cancer. Today, the surviving five boast a combined age of 358, yet they still make each other laugh. “The worst thing,” says Gilliam, who is now 73 years old, “is on the bus or Tube when a girl in her twenties offers you her seat. It’s so depressing.” “I thought that was called twerking,” says Idle instantly. “And you thought I was dead!”

In the days before the reunion, as anticipation grew, one national newspaper characterised the group as the “poisonous Pythons”, portraying Cleese and Idle as being at the centre of the acrimony. Before our car journey, when I have some time alone with each of the Pythons, Cleese bats away that paper’s suggestion that the five of them are in a permanent state of war, insisting that he needed no persuasion to sign up for the comeback. “It’s not very time-consuming and we’ve always enjoyed each other’s company,” he says, “which doesn’t mean we don’t argue and disagree about things. We do all the time.”

Cleese left the Flying Circus after the third series ended in 1973; the others carried on for a fourth half series the following year. What made him leave before the end? “I felt that Python had taken my life over and I wanted to be able to do other things,” he says. “I wanted to be part of the group, I didn’t want to be married to them – because that’s what it felt like. I began to lose any kind of control over my life and I was not forceful enough in saying no.”

What’s more, he says, “the Pythons didn’t really hear my objection when I said I was not happy about one or two aspects of the show. It was like, ‘Cleese is on some strange trip of his own’ and they never listened. We never really communicated. And I also had the burden of working with Chapman during his alcoholic phase when no one else would work with him. So my writing consisted of sitting with someone who couldn’t remember in the afternoon what we had written in the morning.” Cleese did return for the Monty Python films, however, including Life of Brian in 1979, but they involved far less of a time commitment.

There will be those who say that the reason Cleese and the others are regrouping now can be summarised in one word: money. Certainly Jones did little to dispel that idea when he declared before the press conference, “I hope it makes us a lot of money. I hope to be able to pay off my mortgage.” But when I ask him now, he offers a different explanation: the Pythons enjoy working together. Idle also identifies “fun” as the main motivation behind the reunion. “I couldn’t really believe it. We sort of agreed in August,” he says, though he worried that the others might change their minds. “But no, everybody’s getting more and more into it.”

Idle, Palin and Jones appeared together in public at the start of this year to give evidence in court after Mark Forstater, the producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, sued for a share of profits from the spin-off stage musical Spamalot. Forstater won the case and Idle says the group have also had to pay lawyers $1million over the past year and a half. “We’ve had to deal with all this… Somebody said, ‘Oh God let’s do something funny.’”

Read the entire article here.

Video: Spam. Courtesy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus / BBC.

Arts and Letters, BigBang

There’s the Big Bang theory and then there’s The Big Bang Theory

Now in it’s fifth season on U.S. television, The Big Bang Theory has made serious geekiness fun and science cool. In fact, the show is rising in popularity to such an extent that a Google search for “big bang theory” ranks the show first and above all other more learned scientific entires.

Brad Hooker from Symmetry Breaking asks some deep questions of David Saltzberg, science advisor to The Big Bang Theory.

[div class=attrib]From Symmetry Breaking:[end-div]

For those who live, breathe and laugh physics, one show entangles them all: The Big Bang Theory. Now in its fifth season on CBS, the show follows a group of geeks, including a NASA engineer, an astrophysicist and two particle physicists.

Every episode has at least one particle physics joke. On faster-than-light neutrinos: “Is this observation another Swiss export full of more holes than their cheese?” On Saul Perlmutter clutching the Nobel Prize: “What’s the matter, Saul? You afraid somebody’s going to steal it, like you stole Einstein’s cosmological constant?”

To make these jokes timely and accurate, while sprinkling the sets with authentic scientific plots and posters, the show’s writers depend on one physicist, David Saltzberg. Since the first episode, Saltzberg’s dose of realism has made science chic again, and has even been credited with increasing admissions to physics programs. Symmetry writer Brad Hooker asked the LHC physicist, former Tevatron researcher and University of California, Los Angeles professor to explain how he walks the tightrope between science and sitcom.

Brad: How many of your suggestions are put into the show?

David: In general, when they ask for something, they use it. But it’s never anything that’s funny or moves the story along. It’s the part that you don’t need to understand. They explained to me in the beginning that you can watch an I Love Lucy rerun and not understand Spanish, but understand that Ricky Ricardo is angry. That’s all the level of science understanding needed for the show.

B: These references are current. Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was mentioned on the show just weeks after winning the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe.

D: Right. And you may wonder why they chose Saul Perlmutter, as opposed to the other two winners. It just comes down to that they liked the sound of his name better. Things like that matter. The writers think of the script in terms of music and the rhythm of the lines. I usually give them multiple choices because I don’t know if they want something short or long or something with odd sounds in it. They really think about that kind of thing.

B: Do the writers ever ask you to explain the science and it goes completely over their heads?

D: We respond by email so I don’t really know. But I don’t think it goes over their heads because you can Wikipedia anything.

One thing was a little difficult for me: they asked for a spoof of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which is harder than it sounds. But for the most part it’s just a matter of narrowing it down to a few choices. There are so many ways to go through it and I deliberately chose things that are current.

First of all, these guys live in our universe—they’re talking about the things we physicists are talking about. And also, there isn’t a whole lot of science journalism out there. It’s been cut back a lot. In getting the words out there, whether it’s “dark matter” or “topological insulators,” hopefully some fraction of the audience will Google it.

B: Are you working with any other science advisors? I know one character is a neurobiologist.

D: Luckily the actress who portrays her, Mayim Bialik, is also a neuroscientist. She has a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA. So that worked out really well because I don’t know all of physics, let alone all of science. What I’m able to do with the physics is say, “Well, we don’t really talk like that even though it’s technically correct.” And I can’t do that for biology, but she can.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of The Big Bang Theory, Warner Bros.[end-div]