Austan Goolsbee was known at Chicago for the hilarious semi-impromptu monologues he would deliver at the annual business school follies. Now he's bringing those talents to DC:
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Lemme guess; he's a friend of yours? 'Cause that sure as shit ain't funny he's doing up there.
My, my, you're so negative.
Who pee-peed in your cornflakes this morning?
You know how we hold hot girls to a lower standard for humor, i.e. "hot girl funny"? There is clearly such a thing as "Washington D.C. Funny".
P.S. Remember when people claimed Bob Dole was funny? Same deal.
It's great to know that our leaders have a wonderful sense of humor! To bad there wasn't a real (non-MSM, non-Atlantic) journalist around to heckle him about this.
Gaah! Too painful to watch.
Oh Meg,
I am sure he is a hoot at cocktail parties and in front of students, but that was either not his greatest performance or you hold him to a relatively low standard.
I'm just saying...
Megan must mean hilarious in the "this guy is so socially inept he thinks we're laughing with him" sense.
In the modern world, you can't just be college follies funny to be funny. It's pretty much just as easy for me to click the link here as it is to get some Louis C.K. clip from YouTube.
If only Patton Oswalt had a doctorate in economics.
Hah! Started really slow, but I enjoyed it. :-)
... enjoyed it until the gratuitous piling on Sarah Palin.
Hey, I never got to that part. Will check it out.
Still not funny.
That'd make a great speech for the Friday night reception at a fairly low-key political convention. Serious, but lighthearted and amusing. But standing in front of an "Improv Comedy" banner? It's not as advertised. He seems like a cool guy and all, but this is hardly standup at its finest.
I heard a couple clips of this on NPR, and all I could think of was Mickey Kaus's "Law of Curated Humor"...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/archive/2009/09/18/pelosi-has-a-point-about-violence.aspx
So this is what it looks like to be constipated clear up to the throat.
The negative commenters, that is. Goolsbee may not be everyone's favorite style but you've got to hand it to an econ prof who can keep a schtick going like that.
To be fair, I did enjoy it, though I wish he had a way of telling a joke in there that didn't involve verbal parentheses. However, that's because I liked it because I like what it is, even though it wasn't what it was ostensibly trying to be.
Can this be considered irrefutable proof that aMouseforallSeasons is really Megan?
For a stand up set, he starts way too slow. You've got to have something that gets the audience onside right out of the gate.
Seeing as he's there because he's a friend and adviser of the President, I'd have opened with a the funny-name-in-common bit. It needs to be sharpened up a lot, but it would show him as self-deprecating, which people always like, and, let's face it, Austan Goolsbee is a funny name. (To my mind, Barack Obama is really more of an uncommon name, at least in an American context, but "Goolsbee"? That's comedy gold.)
Also, he'd be better off without the subliminal talking. there are a lot of comics, Kevin Nealon being one, who do it much better.
I thought he was funny. Like others have said, he wasn't funny enough to rival any professional comedian. I wish he were; I'd really like him to give up his day job.
That's an amazing microphone. His voice never changed regardless of where his mouth was in relation to it.