There is, and always has been, a fundamental disconnect between digital media’s supposedly democratizing effects and the disconnections, delays, and prohibitions that actually characterize the global media environment. For instance, many around the world still feel the “digital distance” that comes with an inability to access films, songs, television programs, games, or other entertainment media experiences that remain out of reach. The DVD region code, developed and implemented in the mid-1990s, was instrumental in maintaining this distance.

Born out of complex, years-long standard-setting debates among film studios, consumer electronics manufacturers, and the computing industry, the region code gave the lie to the idea that digital technologies would necessarily ease global connectivity. By carving up the world into six geographic “regions,” with DVDs from one region unable to play on the DVD players of another, region codes actually attempted to retain global media’s disjunctive flows.

To this end, region codes represented a way for home video industries (and particularly the Hollywood studios) to segment and regionalize their distribution markets. And, of course, they did so in ways that privileged certain territories and markets over others—a logic most obviously apparent in the numerical ranking of the regions. Even a cursory glance at the region code map indicates that territories were grouped through their possible exploitation as markets as much as (or more than) geographic or cultural proximity. Of course, the relative prominence of region-free DVDs and the ease of burning and circulating unauthorized copies meant that region codes worked only partially to maintain these borders of distribution. Region codes could be particularly frustrating to diasporic viewers and cinephiles, who for various, obvious reasons would want access to DVDs from across borders. So, region-free players became quite common.

So, why is the DVD still an important element of media culture–and media studies–in 2014? Well, in spite of pronouncements of the DVD’s death, it’s very much alive. A recent poll showed that DVD and Blu-ray players are still the most commonly owned media devices in American households. Even if, for some, these players are collecting dust, they have not merely disappeared. Furthermore, in many territories around the world, the technology is still key to formal and informal film distribution networks. The fact is, any media technology has a far more complicated lifespan than we might imagine if we simply follow industry logic. As Paul Benzon has recently argued, rather than taking the DVD as obsolete, we might behold its “complex and conflicted timeline of technological change shaped by interdependence among innovation, obsolescence, residuality, reproduction, and reuse.” The suggestion that the DVD will be (or has been) wholly replaced by Blu-ray and streaming video is one that comes with classist and Western-focused assumptions.

But even for those who have already consigned the DVD to the scrap heap, regional lockout is still a common user experience. Streaming music platforms like Spotify and Pandora are only available in some regions. Likewise, VOD platforms like Netflix and the BBC iPlayer are geoblocked, and users take various measures to get past these hurdles. Although other forms of regional incompatibility existed before the DVD (like the PAL/NTSC/SECAM color television standards), the DVD region code represented a pioneering moment in the intentional, conscious installation of regional control mechanisms through DRM. Through geoblocking and IP address detection systems, this logic is present in today’s global media cultures.

For more on the DVD region code’s development, and its implications for global home video distribution and technological standardization, I invite you to read my new International Journal of Cultural Studies piece on the subject, entitled “The DVD Region Code System: Standardizing Home Video’s Disjunctive Global Flows.” To correspond with this post, the journal has agreed to make the article open access for three months.

Mirth

– The centerpiece of any given episode of The Best Show tends to be the phone call between Scharpling and comedy partner Jon Wurster (the drummer for Superchunk, The Mountain Goats, and Bob Mould) in character as one of any number of weirdos that populate fictional Newbridge, NJ. When it comes to world-building, the “Whedonverse,” such as it is, has nothing on Newbridge. If the construction of ambitiously fleshed-out narrative worlds has generally been considered within the realms of science fiction or fantasy, the collected works of Scharpling and Wurster remind us that world-building can pay dividends in comedy. Spending thirteen years building out a story-world deepens jokes, sustains long-simmering storylines, and offers opportunities to subvert well-built expectations.

Music

– More than pretty much anything else, The Best Show finally pushed me past my punk-influenced disavowal of many of the classic rock groups I grew up listening to. On a free-form radio station where you’re likely to hear James Chance instead of James Taylor, or Yoko Ono instead of The Beatles, what could be more subversive than playing a different Led Zeppelin song every week?

– As a matter of fact, The Best Show’s use of music has given me cause to think about the personal, individual nature of taste. While academics who study taste tend to follow Bourdieu’s lead and think of it as a social phenomenon informed by our stations in life, there can be dissonance between understanding that on an intellectual level and at the same time emotionally and affectively feeling like something was made just for you—as if it sprung from the cabinet of your brain that stores your feelings about the things you like. “Evan likes ‘60s garage rock, Julie Klausner, Ted Leo, Superchunk, free-flowing conversations about popular culture, Kurt Vile, Patton Oswalt, Aimee Mann, etc etc etc, so here—have this thing that pulls together all of that stuff.” Now, obviously, I know that habitus has much to do with why I like these things. Still, while the tensions between taste as individual experience and social/structural formation have been fundamental to much of the canonical writing on the subject, it can be a strange thing to experience them oneself.

Mayhem

– Focusing only on the Scharpling and Wurster bits threatens to elide that any given episode of The Best Show features at least two additional hours of comedy, conversations, and miscellany. These ingredients make the program fundamentally unpredictable—a capriciousness amplified by the live nature of the program. Now, I’m a sucker for liveness. It’s why I love watching sports, awards shows, and Saturday Night Live regardless of quality, and it’s why I watched NBC’s live Sound of Music last week in spite of that fact that I’m an avowed SoM hater. So, I do listen live whenever possible—and in an era where more and more of my media experiences are delayed, on-demand, or catch-up, I’ll miss the presence of one more live experience in my weekly media diet.

– Most of all, though, I lament the end of The Best Show because it’s truly singular: free-form conversations with callers and guests, occasional musical performances, puppets, sound collages, and other bits of randomness. It is to the call-in radio show what Late Night with David Letterman was to the late-night talk show: proof that well-established formats are still ripe for experimentation and can be opened up and toyed with. If we’re lucky, The Best Show will be just as influential on future generations of comedians.

In a recent Spin magazine feature on the program, Tompkins suggests that The Best Show is “fully exploiting its medium.” It’s true–the affordances of live radio (and the free-form format of WFMU) are well suited to the program’s patient, ambling, and understated approach. Most episodes include a lengthy back-and-forth comedy routine between Scharpling and his comedy partner, Jon Wurster (who doubles as drummer for Superchunk and The Mountain Goats). In fact, The Best Show grew out of a 1997 Scharpling and Wurster routine from Scharpling’s pre-Best Show WFMU program. Playing a rock critic named Ronald Thomas Clontle, Wurster called the program to promote his book Rock, Rot, and Rule, a categorical guide to which popular music acts rock, which ones rot, and which ones rule. A recording of the routine became an underground hit, and The Best Show began as a going concern in 2000. Many of Scharpling and Wurster’s successive bits follow the general format of Rock, Rot, and Rule, with Scharpling as the straight man and Wurster calling the program as one of many hapless characters hailing from fictional Newbridge, New Jersey. In over ten years of these routines (some of which can be found on the duo’s self-released albums), Scharpling and Wurster have created an impressively fleshed-out narrative universe.

Although comedy podcasts and public-radio interview/variety programs represent seemingly obvious points of comparison for The Best Show, Scharpling often distinguishes his program from these genres by mocking the off-the-cuff nature of the former and the slick, genteel sleepiness of the latter. Indeed, Scharpling professes little love for NPR, dismissing Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor as a “hate-monger” and skewering the canned enthusiasm of programs like Car Talk. Alternately, he pokes fun at the amateurish nature of podcasts, albeit in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner. Still, The Best Show’s syndication within that format (as well as Best Show Gems, a podcast collecting many of The Best Show’s “greatest hits”) has expanded its audience over the past few years and helped contribute to the recent popularity of comedy podcasts.

Nevertheless, while the program’s online distribution has boosted its popularity, The Best Show’s status as a live, terrestrial radio program is fundamental to the program’s aesthetic. With its unpredictable callers and comedy routines, the program incorporates a volatile liveness that thrives on the combination of Scharpling’s gift for storytelling, his limited patience with bad callers, his intricately plotted routines with Wurster, and the contributions of a constantly evolving group of “Friends of Tom” or “FOTs” (including comedians, musicians, artists, and even puppets) who participate in the program on one level or another.

While Scharpling’s on-air persona (inhabiting a state that comedian and FOT John Hodgman refers to as “aggrieved”) may indicate a certain level of misanthropy, a humanist–and, yes, mirthful–current runs through the program. The Best Show often celebrates “the little guy” in the face of political and corporate bullies, and Scharpling has no patience for callers who espouse misogyny, racism, or any of the lowest-common-denominator approaches that draw audiences on other comedy radio programs. Ultimately, it’s not for nothing that writer Jake Fogelnest, in the aforementioned Spin feature, compares The Best Show to DIY indie/post-punk band Fugazi. Like that band, the program is an inspiring testament to the beauty of DIY art, community-supported media (whether that community is bound by geography or common interest), and non-corporate entertainment. And like Fugazi, The Best Show holds pleasures well beyond the particulars of its politics and mode of production—it’s a fantastic listen.

(The Best Show on WFMU runs every Tuesday night from 9pm to midnight, EST. Live-stream links and a nearly complete archive of the program can be found here.)

For example, YouTube promoted its 100^th anniversary, complete with a reprint of their first blog post by guest blogger William Howard Taft and a compilation of the top five “viral pictures” of 1911. These clips parody various entries in the canon of virality: The Annoying Orange, Failblog, The Bed Intruder Song, RickRoll, and Keyboard Cat. Moreover, placing “&vintage=1911” onto the end of any YouTube URL will add a sepia-tone patina and silent-era piano soundtrack to that video. Although this underscores the relative newness of viral video’s online context by contrasting it with an imagined or half-remembered media past, it also demonstrates the link between viral video and early film culture’s cinema of attractions. (1) This particular joke also relies on the differentiation between the early twentieth century’s purportedly genteel social norms and the apparent mass-culture vulgarity of today’s viral fare. “Fail” becomes “flummox,” keyboards turn into flugelhorns, and 80s pop videos become belly-dancing films. Of course, in the case of “Buggy Intruder,” the literal whitewashing of the Antoine Dodson video (with the transformation of “rapist” to “fornicator” and the elimination of the original video’s signifiers of race, class, and sexuality) neatly excises all of the elements that made the original video’s circulation and popularity so dubious to begin with.

With its own April Fools’ gag, Hulu didn’t reach quite as far into the past, but it presented an even more overt demonstration of the problems and possibilities of media history in the digital age. Rather than its usual post-millennial sheen, Hulu displayed a front page that parodies the aesthetic of a website from 1996, complete with awkward interface, low-resolution images, and Times New Roman font. This not only implies that the web is now “old enough” to have its own awkward age at which we can look back and laugh, it also underscores the irony that on-demand streaming video sites like Hulu would not have been possible in 1996—a move which pokes fun at Web 1.0 while congratulating the site for its own advanced technological circumstance.

In addition to this aesthetic design, the page also links to various television episodes and music videos from the mid-1990s, including a faked episode “from the archives” of Hulu’s daily entertainment recap program, The Morning After, in which the two anchors reference Alanis Morissette songs in their recaps of last night’s episodes of Cybill, Lois and Clark, and Sister Sister. Hulu’s prank places cultural items such as The X-Files, Saturday Night Live’s “Bill Brasky” skit, and the music video for Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me” within an uncharacteristically well-defined historical context. Put another way, by linking such texts with the contemporaneous aesthetics of dot-com-bubble-era web design, Hulu roots them in a period-specific milieu. Thus, not only does its April Fools’ joke goof on the history of web design, it plays with the site’s usual historicization of television, which Lynn Spigel describes as such: “On Hulu, the user is not situated in any particular time or place, and the historical resonance of any one program or film is less a concern than its availability and circulation—at instant speeds to mobile audiences—in the present.” (2) In contrast, “Hulu 1996” diverges from this ahistorical, on-demand mode of presentation and reaffixes this heretofore missing “resonance” by quite literally framing these television episodes and music videos within the functions and designs of Web 1.0.

Playing with issues of taste and canonization more directly, The Criterion Collection posted a site advertising a fake, out-of-print edition of Douglas Cheek’s 1984 horror film C.H.U.D, complete with audio commentary by filmmaker Pedro Costa and a “visual essay” by Tag Gallagher. The site also contains a faux-pretentious reading by critic Kent Jones, who underscores the absurdity of C.H.U.D.’s faked canonization by comparing it to Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, and Anthony Mann’s He Walked by Night. The joke here is fairly obvious, contrasting C.H.U.D. with Criterion’s usual art-house fare. Of course, while these gags all work at the expense of Cheeks’ film (albeit with relative affection), it’s possible that this could also be a joke about the oft-raised question of why Michael Bay’s similarly schlocky Armageddon has been adorned with the most prestigious of all home-video accoutrements: a Criterion spine number.

All in all, these April Fools’ jokes take as their butt the contemporary problems of canonizing and historicizing entertainment media’s texts and technologies. More specifically, they involve laughter around the remediation of genres, texts, and aesthetics somehow perceived as antiquated, embarrassing, or downright bad. Even Gmail Motion cracks wise about the differences between e-mail and the more obviously tactile and embodied communicative methods of yore. It’s easy enough to see this as derisive laughter at the embarrassing ghosts of media past (as I have argued earlier about laughing at found footage), and it is that, at least in part. But when we laugh at this past, there is often a great deal of affection commingled with scorn. Indeed, it can be impossible to parse the lines that separate derisive mockery, laughter of recognition, and genuine nostalgia for mediated experience that can never be completely recovered. This affective melange is certainly not exclusive to these April Fools’ jokes, and it helps explain the pleasures found in sites like the oft-circulated “Geocitiesizer,” which promises to “make any webpage look like it was made by a 13 year-old In 1996,” and the website for the movie Space Jam (alerted recently to my attention by an esteemed colleague), still intact in all of its late-twentieth-century glory. These websites, along with “Hulu 1996,” are amusing in their antiquity (whether “real” or parodic), but they also allow us to re-enter the sandbox of the mid-nineties web—an experience that can be surprisingly poignant.

(1) David Gurney, “‘It’s Just Like a Mini-Mall’: Textuality and Participatory Culture on YouTube,” in Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence, ed. Michael Kackman et al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 31

(2) Lynn Spigel, “Housing Television: Architectures of the Archive,” The Communication Review 13 (2010): 64.

Recorded at the now-defunct Boarding House in San Francisco, Let’s Get Small comprises a meandering collection of gags, one-liners, non-sequiturs and noises that coalesce into a generally endearing portrait of a performer experimenting with his craft. The recording is alternately manic and laid back, moving quickly and capriciously among impressions, physical humor, and nonsense—all punctuated by Martin’s trademark banjo. For the most part, the album is harmless, silly fun, and when Martin lists the extravagances he recently bought himself (an electric dog polisher, a fur sink, and a gasoline-powered turtleneck sweater), part of the joy comes in listening to the comic combine words with such surrealist illogic.

When his act approaches offensive or blue material, it usually doubles back onto an indictment of such comedic crutches. On the fifteen-minute title track, for example, Martin tells the crowd that he does not want to offend anyone in the audience by doing “any of those ‘fag’ jokes.” Then, after discovering that there are only a couple of “fags” in the audience, Martin yells, “These two fruits are walkin’ down the street…!” with an affected and exaggerated sneer. This gag plays with the traditional form of the joke (here, the setup is the punch line, and indeed Martin never finishes the joke) and, more importantly, treads the line between a homophobic joke and a joke about homophobic jokes. This is a tricky move, and as with any such gag, the joke’s butt likely relies on individual interpretation. Still, it exemplifies Martin’s interrogation of comic form and highlights the assumptions audiences and performers make regarding appropriate targets of ridicule. As in the titular gag about using drugs to “get small,” Martin filters zeitgeisty comedy through an absurdist lens, which depending on one’s view either offers an original take on such material or saps it of its urgency and importance.

Having also never heard Martin’s follow-up album, 1978’s A Wild and Crazy Guy, I was surprised by its abrupt midpoint shift. The front half of the album continues the easygoing nightclub act of Let’s Get Small, but the back half presents an explicit record of Martin’s transition from shambling goofball to comedy superstar. Specifically, the title track segues from performances at The Boarding House to a performance at Red Rocks Amphitheater in front of a massive crowd full of Beatlemania-level energy. While the Red Rocks half is not devoid of funny material, the presence of the stadium-sized audience is somewhat alienating. For example, there is something distinctly creepy about listening to a massive crowd of women screaming in faux-orgiastic delight as Martin, playing his SNL character Yortuk Festrunk, compares his lovemaking capabilities to animals going to the bathroom. Entertaining and confident as it often is, A Wild and Crazy Guy is a deeply ambivalent document. While its split between well-known-Martin and celebrity-Martin is conceptually daring, much of the second half feels like those middling Dana Carvey specials where he performs out-of-context SNL bits. Nevertheless, the two albums highlight Martin’s adeptness at accessing comic forms from the past and pointing the way toward further play with the syntax of humor.

Historical accounts of American comedy often posit stand-up and sketch from the 1960s and 1970s as anti-establishment (whether the “establishment” in question represents earlier Borscht Belt/Friars Club comedians or the broader social/political milieu). However, Martin’s albums are at once entirely unique and part of a loose collection of comedic practices that resist such characterizations. Often using Saturday Night Live as a home base, comics such as Martin, Andy Kaufman, and Michael O’Donoghue proposed alternative methods of comedic performance that often eschewed direct political satire or traditional gags for absurdist play, experimental performance, and confrontational aggression, respectively. Martin’s act was not as politically urgent or important as those of Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, but it raises the question of where such silliness fits among the often-weighty linchpins of media histories.

With its mundane and amateurish visual/aural design, monologic address, and fourth-wall demolition, stand-up comedy seems to exist at odds with many of the traditional criteria of entertainment media. However, considering the commercial success of Jeff Dunham, Dane Cook, and Chris Rock as well as the critical acclaim of Louis C.K., Hannibal Buress, Eddie Izzard, and Margaret Cho, stand-up remains a significant yet underexplored dimension of media culture. Spreadable, transmedial, and often political, stand-up has much to contribute to our current conversations about media, and it may well point toward future discussions. While I began this brief project curious about Martin’s work and followed it through with considerable enjoyment, I am left with more difficult questions regarding how these recordings and others like them fit into historical narratives and contemporary discussions of media genres, practices, formats, and modes of address.

On a basic level, much of the material is damn funny. The pleasures that await include dating service videos; Kathie Lee Gifford rapping; and Club Mario, a particularly egregious offender in the wasteland of canned 1990s “extreme” youth culture. The cult fascination of these texts carries affinities with paracinematic appreciation, and it also follows familiar lines of camp, kitsch, and/or irony. But there is also an element of earnest nostalgic pleasure. As Lucas Hilderbrand writes about workout videos, revisiting these tapes might bring about “a double-edge affect of shame and affection.” And just like the workout tapes, many of these found videos carry the battle-scars of worn-out videotape and overuse. For the Found Footage Festival and Everything is Terrible!, the various signifiers of “imperfect” older technology figure as another part of the joke.

Makin’ Tracks to Branson! from Everything Is Terrible! on Vimeo.

On the other hand, my laughter tends to catch when I consider its dimensions of mockery. This is made explicit, of course, in the Found Footage Festival’s description of its exhibits as miserable failures. Moreover, the Found Footage Festival is hosted by two droll hipsters and, well, the title of Everything is Terrible! says it all. But like any good student of cultural studies, I worry when the Found Footage Festival and Everything is Terrible! focus their mockery on people, genres, and practices existent at the bottom of any number of cultural hierarchies. Moreover, the ridicule of videotape as a technological form suggests a masculinist, Western logic that privileges advanced technology and the mastery of that technology in the production of knowledge.

It follows that these videos become purportedly funnier as our contemporary media technology gets “better.” From there, it’s not hard to extend the idea of “clarity” beyond aesthetic and technological descriptions of high-definition visual media into a metaphorical judgment of contemporary cultural practices counterposed against those of the embarrassing 80s and 90s. We can see more clearly now; just look at the sharper images on our screens as proof! Charles Acland has recently raised some provocative questions about the increased academic focus on new media forms, suggesting that an intensified attention to new media technologies follows the capitalist logic of consumer electronics industries. I wonder if the deployment of analog technologies for comic purposes carries a similar logic. Tellingly, I watch these videos through my laptop screen, which provides safe historical, technological, and ontological distance from the “bad” object.

Ultimately, the Found Footage Festival and Everything is Terrible! afford me an opportunity to interrogate both my own responses to “unintentional” humor and the logic that newer technologies equate to a necessarily “better” engagement with visual media. Of course, this negotiation may also just be a way for me to have my cake and eat it too. I can take issue with the presumption that analog technology and its various users are deserving of scorn, but that does not mean that I am going to stop laughing at Danny Bonaduce’s Mortal Kombat.