Too Many Cooks

Alright, we need to talk about this video...

I was going to comment on it, but then TOO MANY COOKS murdered my FROG FRACTIONS 2 Kickstarter pledge and the baby looked at me.

Is this some sort of endurance test? I got about 2mins into it I guess that's my limit of 80's sitcom intro.

Have you tried 10hours of Taking the Hobbits to Isengard?

Oh boy Jeff...you really haven't seen this then. You should definitely keep watching.

I was actually coming on here to post about it, I felt like I needed to talk about it too.

Especially "Smarf".

I heard the Dave Ryan show talking about it this morning.

Now that I've seen it, I'm speechless. I suppose that's the point of it.

I got bored cause of the idiotic somg and jumped ahead to the sinster bits. The thing is a send up of that kind of TV and would have been funny if it wasn't so overindulgent - the individual bits are funnier than the whole (the best for me was the Falconcrest sequence). Otherwise, it's an old school SNL-type send up that doesn't know when to end.

I made it to wonder woman losing her head. Now I have that damn song in my head.

Adult Swim has wasted enough time in my life that I feel like I need to invoice them. They'll take a concept that at first is quirky, entertaining and unique and then proceed to beat it into the ground to the point that towards the end I'm annoyed and angry.

They still have some funny stuff but more and more they veer into so called "ironic" humor where annoyance and bleakness seem to be the targets.

Even their bumpers irk me most times.

I saw this a few days ago and really liked it. In my books it qualifies as a work of art. It's more that just a silly meme. Its about the history of the family that grew up in front of TV, and it rubs that history against the grain.

It reminds me of how psychotic family gatherings feel when my mom organizes a big reunion only to photograph and document it, and to do so in a compulsive and relentless way so that the poses and smiles are caught over and over again but nobody actually has the chance to interact with each other. Sometimes a conversation might get off the ground but it will be interrupted either by another group photo, or more offers of food, drinks, coffee, sweets. Sometimes I snap out of it and realize twenty of us just spent minutes more more catatonically mesmerized at the bubbles a baby is blowing. Flash! Another group shot. I always leave those events frustrated, disoriented and kinda depressed. Especially when I see the enlarged photos up on the wall next time I visit. All that fantasy world hides a family that struggles with all kinds of illnesses, insecurities, loneliness and bouts of depression.

The kind of artworks that speak most to me are those that have a surface fantasy that hides, manages and aggravates a deeper conflict and problem. Given my avatar I'll cite Tom Waits as an example, who puts blues or gospel or funk in tension with a monstrous atonal and socially tone-deaf sensibility.

The Too Many Cooks short kinda fucked me up though. I don't normally have trouble sleeping, but last night I did (it might have been because I had a late coffee). I was awake in the middle of the night and the "too many cooks" song was on replay in my mind as I was flooded with old memories of highschool (which for me was the late '80s), and imagining how my life would have turned out differently had I made different choices. All the while "too many cooks" spun in my brain.

I feel kinda crazy today, hence this long post.

www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014...e&utm_medium=twitter

First of all, if you bailed a few minutes in I cannot overstate how much of this video you missed. The reason I thought it was so funny was that it surprised me, and it did it over and over again. Whether you find it funny or not is entirely a matter of taste, but I find it remarkable that anyone could find this one-note or repetitive in its entirety, though I totally see those charges in the first five minutes or so.

By the end I had no idea what to expect. I was prepared for just about anything, but it still managed to throw me off. It's like...I thought the joke was one thing, and then it kept revealing that it was something different, and then when I thought I figured it out it shifted once more. At first I thought it was just random crap thrown on the wall, as people have rightly said Adult Swim does all the time. But after a second viewing (and yes, I immediately watched it a second time) it showed a much stronger conceptual unity.

And part of what tickles me so much is how the video made just enough sense, or at least the semblance of it, to make me think that it's saying something. It might be, but it's just as likely taking the piss. Either way I find it really compelling.

I'm with Hatchling, assuming he was being genuine and not sarcastic. (Not that I don't trust him, but it's really hard to tell what's serious and what isn't with anything involving this video.) It made me laugh a lot, but it was deeply unsettling in places as well. It's stuck with me and provoked me to analysis. That might make me the victim of some prank, but I'm fine with that.

clarification: I was being totally sincere, with no sarcastic or ironic overtones intended.

It's soo good. Everyone who already said positive things about it leave me with nothing left to say besides singing "Too Many Cooks!"

C'mon, seriously, that's 22 minutes I want back. Why I watched it again, to see if there was anything I missed, bleh.