Madonna does a standup comedy routine... and the jokes are all about dating younger men.

One joke is that, needing a date, she asked her son: "Do you have any friends you could introduce me to?" Her son is 14. She's 56.



It's supposed to be funny — not that it needs to be funny (the joke is that she's doing a standup routine at all) — because we're supposed to think good for you when a woman gets a man (or boy) who is younger.

Or maybe the idea was to make the audience boo and hiss, that it was a Neil Hamburger-type routine. Well, no one seems to have gotten it on that level. You have to sell intentionally, painfully bad. It's not easy.

How bad was Joel McHale, the (official) comedian at last night's White House Correspondents Dinner?

At last night's White House Correspondents Dinner, the official comedian — insert typical joke about how they're all comedians — was Joel McHale, whose comic gimmick seemed to be reading bad jokes off cards and then ad-libbing about how that was a poor joke. For example:

I am a big fan of President Obama. I think he’s one of the all-time great presidents, definitely in the top 50. Please explain that to Jessica Simpson. You’re right, that was low.

That came early on and was followed by what might have been his only rough treatment of Obama:

All right, how about the president’s performance tonight, everyone? Sir, it’s amazing that you can still bring it with fresh, hilarious material. My favorite bit of yours was when you said you would close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. That was a classic. That was hilarious, hilarious. Still going.

Detainee Obamedy. Obama laughed and laughed. I think he mouthed something like "I'm still workin' on it."

"Does comedy help people to deal with controversial issues?"

"Sure it helps! That’s like asking a plumber if removing clogged faeces from pipes helps people deal with a fetid stench."

"Is it just me, or is George Bush the worst President in the history of the United States?"

UPDATE: The video went dead. It showed the comedian Neil Hamburger saying that line, listening while the audience cheered and hooted anti-Bushily, and then saying: "Which makes it all the harder to understand why his son, George W. Bush, is in fact the best president we’ve ever had." Ha ha. I love that.

"[Neil] Hamburger’s sets of hackneyed, setup-and-punch line jokes with a side of the bitter are built to bomb..."

"... and rely on pop-culture references that are either too soon for good taste (look for some Michael Jackson jokes on his current tour) or stale going on oblivious. (Who else is still talking about Smash Mouth in 2009?) Yet this rumpled husk of a comic also proclaims his adoration for good old showbiz and laments its decline, especially when he interrupts his shows to scream at audience members who egg on his pitifully out-of-date shtick."

(Clips at that link illustrate the technique well.)

Were you at Neil Hamburger's show at the High Noon Saloon last night? We were. Let this fuzzy iPhone pic prove it:



Or did you make it to "RiffTrax Live: Plan 9 from Outer Space"? We missed that unfortunately, but had a lot of fun laughing at Neil Hamburger and his painfully bad jokes — and JP Inc. and his theme songs for TV shows that don't exist.