I'm quickly coming to the realization that Michael Cera is a very talented guy, beyond his work on Arrested Development. The video after the jump is one of the funniest things I've ever seen on YouTube.

I'm not exactly sure what the parody is (who the heck is Aleksay Vayner?), but it's hysterical nonetheless. It's a faux-interview with Cera, where he talks about what it takes to be successful: in career, in relationships, in fitness, and in life in general. Like a teenaged, Hollywood star/Anthony Robbins. There are a ton of lines you'll be quoting to friends tomorrow, but my favorite might be about proving to his parents he could play guitar:

"Cut to nine years later, I play guitar every chance I get, when I'm not signing an autograph or reading a script or having copies of keys made. And whenever I see my mother calling on the phone, I'll pick up the guitar and play a song. They'll hear it and say, 'hi, I was wrong, how are you? I haven't spoken to you in a while.' "

[via Gawker]

Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer is one of my favorite Christmas specials, along with It's A Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town, but a few things about it have always bothered me. Like the way Santa treats a lot of his workers, from the flying reindeer to his elves, he just seems a little harsh and mopey.

This video after the jump explains it further. It's like a little investigative compilation of scenes from the special to show how much of a jerk Santa is. Is this fair? Or did the person who put it together have it out for Santa and only pick the worst parts? I would say it's fair, because there's a lot of proof, from almost every scene in the special.

This is one of the more ridiculous videos I've seen in a long, long time. It's footage of a local weatherman freaking out on camera because a bug was crawling on his leg.

Let me repeat that: he completely freaked out because a bug was crawling on his leg.

No joke. This isn't just an "oh my God!" exclamation, this is an all-out Jerry Springer-guest-meets-Little Richard explosion. And he does it twice. Video after the jump...

[via Gawker]

This is how the web works.

Last night I thought of an old song that I like ("old" as in 1986 or so) by Stan Ridgway, former lead singer of Wall of Voodoo, of "Mexican Radio" fame. So I downloaded the song ("The Big Heat") from iTunes, then went to YouTube to see if they had the video. Of course, they did! Odd video. Film noir, but with lots of artsy sci-fi touches too.

Anyway, I'm looking around at the other Ridgway videos they have, and came across this. He's interviewed on Canada's MuchMusic channel, probably right around 1986-88, about his new album and the music business. The interviewer looked familiar to me, even if he was sporting a MacGyver-like hairdo and hip New Wave shirt. Can you guess who it is?

A hint: he's a former CBS anchor/correspondent, now on CNN. Don't cheat by reading the description or comments!

I would watch Amy Sedaris do anything. If she was in a music video featuring Kevin Federline and Nancy Grace, I would watch MTV all day long until the video came on. If she wanted to just go on TV and sit in a chair and eat a bowl of cereal, I would set my TiVo season pass for it. In short, I've had a crush on Amy Sedaris since...well, forever.

So that's why I really enjoyed this, her appearance on Sesame Street last week. She played Snow White, looking for Sesame Street. I have to admit though, Elmo's voice gets really annoying really quickly. Part 2 of the show is on the menu to the left, along with Sedaris' appearances on The Colbert Report, The Late Show With David Letterman, and other shows.

Does Sesame Street always have jokes about burping and cheese in shoes?

Does a day go by on The View where they don't talk about something controversial? Where an argument doesn't occur? Where somebody doesn't freak out?

YouTube has the latest meltdown, from today, when Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets into an argument with Joy Behar about the 72 hour pill and pregnancy and rape and the sanctity of life. Then Barbara Walters gets into it, and displays that phony "voice of reason" tone that she so often has.

It honestly looks like Hasselbeck is going to walk off the set, or at the very least start crying or pouting. Guest host Lisa Loeb just looks really, really uncomfortable and is probably thinking, "I should have gone to Regis and Kelly."

Video after the jump...

[via Gawker]

I don't really get this New York Observer article. Writer Tom Scocca talks about YouTube's influence on pop culture. How some things that we thought were good (or bad) years ago can be seen in a new light now. How incidents like the famous World Cup head butt can be uploaded a minute after it happens and viewed over and over and over again, something that would have been unheard of 10 or 20 years ago. All that's well and good, but he claims that YouTube also shows that Dennis Miller wasn't funny in 1992.

Um, yeah, actually, he was.

Now, I'm not going to defend Miller's recent work. I thought his declaration that he wasn't going to joke about Bush on his talk show disturbing, plus there was that whole Monday Night Football fiasco (though I liked him on that, but I'm not a football fan, I'm the audience they were trying to woo with that move). But the NYO uses as "evidence" this clip of Miller interviewing the Pixies after a performance on his show. You're going to judge whether a comedian is funny by what he says in the 30 seconds after a band plays? Then Carson, Letterman, and Conan aren't funny either.

I submit as evidence that Miller was funny his standup work, his Weekend Update spots on SNL, and his guest appearances on other talk shows. He's had many lines over the years that I still quote to friends.

I remember seeing this the night that it happened, in 1973: Uri Geller trying to perform some psychic "feats" on The Tonight Show, and host Johnny Carson (a magician himself and someone with a low tolerance for hucksters and hoaxes) making sure he can't fool anyone with a trick by changing the items on the table. This is a slightly edited version, but it's very telling. Geller actually gets a little irritated at Carson, at one point even mentioning that Carson was supposed to ask him the questions they agreed on before the show. Doc Severinsen sits there waiting for Geller to do something amazing, but it never comes.

That's magician and professional debunker James Randi narrating the clip. I think this is part of a larger documentary that was show on television several years ago.

[via Boing Boing]

But try telling that to CNBC. The other day, while giving a report on the weekend box office, anchor Joe Kernan said that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest beat the previous record set by Aquaman, which had beaten a previous record held by Spiderman.

Um, does anyone at CNBC know that this Aquaman movie is a fake movie from Entourage? As Jossip says, Kernan was only reading a teleprompter, but the person who wrote the copy should have known (and where exactly did they get this "info" that Pirates had beaten Aquaman?) Video after the jump.

Update: Keith Olbermann talked about this just now on Countdown, and played the whole clip. Seems that Kernan actually did talk about Entourage just before this and made a joke. So the web has been corrected. Thanks to everyone in the comments who pointed this out too.

I remember the first night of Connie Chung's highly touted CNN show a few years ago. The one that lasted about 3 minutes, like most of Chung's shows do. She had Jon Stewart on as a guest, and she said to him - in all seriousness and with a straight face - that he should consider being a network news anchor. The look on Stewart's face was priceless. Was she serious? In fact, if I remember correctly, Stewart couldn't even hide his shock, asking, "are you serious?" She was clueless, ill at ease, and embarrassing.

That came to mind after watching Chung's performance on the last episode of her dreadful MSNBC show with husband/sleazemonger Maury Povich. Now she's telling everyone (including Keith Olbermann last night) that it was a joke! She was just kidding!

Um, Connie? No shit it was a joke. No one in their right mind has thought otherwise. Everyone thinks it was just weird.

I've been writing for years that Connie Chung is a terrible newsperson. So I'm hoping that this caberet act will finally make producers and other news execs finally slap their heads and say, "don't hire this woman for the news." Maybe she can join hubby Maury on his show. Maybe she can sing during commercial breaks, or run paternity results back and forth to the lab for Povich.

I know, I know, it seems like this is Columbo week here at TV Squad, but you've got to watch this. It's a video made for the 50th Anniversary of ABC a couple of years ago. I didn't watch the show, but I'm glad someone put it up on YouTube. Columbo has been called in to help Sydney, Jack, Vaughn and the rest of the team.

Who asked him to help out, and what is he supposed to help with? Well, you'll just have to watch it to see. You don't usually see a crossover episode involving two of your favorite shows, so this was a great find. Very funny stuff.

That's what Sean Captain over at Slate says. We completely agree. I mean, what would we write about? OK, a lot, but we'd have to change our name.

Why does Captain say that the web will never replace television? Oh, it's complicated. It has to do with data packets and pixels and network congestion and routing equipment and bandwidth and megabits and ... gah. Just go on over and read it for yourself and let us know if you agree or not.

Pesonally, I think that the web will never replace TV for the simple fact that people like to have different things to do different things in their home, no matter how "cool" it is to see a video on YouTube.

Paul Boutin over at Slate tries to explain the YouTube and MySpace phenomenas. (Side note: according to Webster, that's the correct plural. Go figure.) Basically, it comes down to ease of use, cool factor, and the fact that they don't tell you what to do. (Personally, I think it's because "you get to see cool videos on the web for free," but maybe that's just me.)

But Boutin does get into something I've been wondering about lately: why is MySpace so popular? It's basically a place where you can put up a web site, but those kinds of sites have been around for years (Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, etc). What makes MySpace so popular (besides the whole "friends" thing)? I'm amazed that so many celebs have a site on there, because the designs are pretty crappy, if you ask me. The sites look like the web, circa 1996, from what I've seen. Though I guess like any other site you have to design them well.

Robert Smigel says that he meant nothing nasty by lampooning Disney and the Disney Vault on last week's Saturday Night Live. (YouTube has it, for now.)

"I didn't really look at it as mean-spirited...I know that some of these things that I talk about in that cartoon aren't true. I don't really know that anything in there is true."

And why the dig at Mickey Mouse?

"I never found Mickey Mouse funny...I have to admit that."

I can't wait for The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse, on NBC, April 29, at 11:30.

[via TV Tattle]

Bopping around online I came across two very interesting interviews with comedian Demetri Martin.

In the first one at The Believer, he talks juggling, Conan O'Brien, doing standup for old guys in London, and how riding a unicycle with never get you laid. In the second interview, at Brian Palmer's site, he describes going from law school to comedy, skateboarding, and how he ended up on The Daily Show.

And why'll we're at it, check out some of his standup and Daily Show bits at YouTube.