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If you've been watching the Colbert Report you know that comedian Stephen Colbert is headed...somewhere...in..the...middle east...at...some point...to entertain our troops there.

He's not allowed to say where or when, but he recently reported to Fort Jackson in his home state of South Carolina for a day of basic training to prepare for the trip.

Who needs that Steve Martin remake of Sgt. Bilko when you've got this happening in real life?

The Village Voice has one-upped the viral audio clips of Barack Obama reading hilariously out-of-character phrases from his books.

Their entry: Bill O'Reilly reading passages from his creepy, hilariously bad thriller novel Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder.

The Voice writes that the 1998 book is "about an O'Reilly-esque TV journalist who is trained by an Irish Republican Army terrorist to kill the people who deserve it the most: the broadcast news bastards who interfered with the O'Reilly character's career. It's personal on the political level, too -- his victims include a powerful 'bitch' named Hillary and a fat 'slob' named Martin Moore."

Some are shocked that O'Reilly -- a self-styled moral arbiter who has criticized the coarse language, sex and violence in movies, on television and in pop music -- produced a novel full of coarse language, sex, violence and sexual violence.

Those people have got to be kidding, right?

Anyway -- the audio clips are pretty priceless. They include (among many others) O'Reilly voicing a crack dealer who says to his underage girlfriends:

"Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up."

"Off with those pants."

It has been said, and I have to agree, that it will probably be a matter of hours before we're seeing dance remixes of this stuff in the wild.

Best news item I read all weekend: Steve Martin is financing an off-campus production of one of his plays because some parents at the Oregon high school where it was being staged have thrown a nutty about its "adult content."

The play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, is about an imaginary meeting between Einstein and Picasso at a bar in Paris as both men are on the verge of great achievements in art and science.

Martin explained his reasoning in this letter to the La Grande observer.

Choice bits from the letter:

"I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as “people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.” With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle."

I predict that the experience will not be damaging, but meaningful.

Mr. Martin -- you have officially made up for those Pink Panther re-makes.

In celebration, I offer this banjo breakdown with the Muppets.

Fred Gregory of Greensboro asked me to post this photo on Culture Shock, offering it without comment. He says it speaks for itself:

In a way, I'm surprised it took this long for this to go viral.

But, in their own sweet time, out-of-context clips from the audio version of President Obama's book Dreams from My Father have become an Internet phenomenon.

For those who haven't yet heard the (not safe for work) string of clips, which is character dialogue from the book:

And, of course, there are already several dance mixes:

What's most amusing to me about it: our president is, indeed, unleashing a torrent of curses in a hood dialect. But unlike the previous administration, it's not because he's forgotten his mic is hot or because he's lost his temper on the floor of the senate. Does that make it more or less funny?

If Joe Biden intentionally shoots a guy in the face comedy writers are going to go on strike.

The Canadian comedy duo known as "The Masked Avengers" somehow cracked the impenetrable security of the McCain/Palin campaign and got in a prank call to Gov. Sarah Palin.

Pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy, they get Palin to discuss hunting from a helicopter (and promise she'll be a better shot than Dick Cheney), how hot Sarkozy's supermodel wife is in bed and even the infamous Nailin' Paylin porn movie produced by Hustler.

Listen below...

So it IS possible to be amused, to have your heart warmed and to throw up a little in your mouth all at once...

How did I never see this clip of Jerry Seinfeld saying what I've always wanted to say to Larry King?

King seems never to know anything about his guests or what they do -- even the big ones. He hides behind this "Well, I'm just asking questions the viewers may not know" thing, but it's patently obvious that he just does little or no prep for most interviews.

Watching this is glorious.

Saw this post today on one of the many goofball sites I check for the political scuttlebutt and other things worth a chuckle.

A few NSFW images, but this one elicited a chuckle:

and this:

and this:

I'm done. Happy Friday.

Not sure how I missed this, but Bill Maher is calling for a movement to save Levi Johnston, the young man who knocked up Sarah Palin's daughter and immediately became her "fiance."

Web site here.

The Daily Show, taping before Obama's big speech last night, had to settle for this "biographical film."

For those who missed the actual speech:

I did think it was a little strange that after the speech, as the Obama and Biden families were gathering together on the stage, there was this over-the-top country song called "Only in America" playing.

Maybe it was one of those hedging-your-bets things. Like -- all right, we've just seen a black man nominated for president by one of the two major parties for the first time in history. Let's give them a little twang to take the sting out of it for those people who are a little freaked out. When Bruce Springsteen's not patriotic enough you've gotta find somebody in an actual cowboy hat.

Let's face it: some of these Comedy Central Roasts suck.

Anybody remember the one for Flavor Flav? Yeah, me either.

But the roast of Bob Saget this weekend was damned good.

And the surprise MVP? The 82-year-old Cloris Leachman.

Check out her extremely-not-safe-for-work bit:

Leachman was also a great sport while providing plenty of "she's so old" fodder for the other guest roasters...

Leachman is an Oscar winner and has won more Emmies than any other actor. And there's talk this roast could bring her another.

I say she's earned it.

Cracked.com has a hilarious (and surprisingly educational) list of The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High.

The list includes Coca-Cola, Psychoanalysis, the discovery of the DNA and (wait for it...) The Ten Commandments.

It also includes the following caveat: "To make the cut, an accomplishment has to be considered great by people who could pass a field sobriety test. So no Grateful Dead music."

Hear it here.

I'm going to miss that guy.

The Kids in the Hall are doing a 30-city, two-month tour (don't call it a comeback - they've been here for years, rockin their peers and puttin' suckas in fear).

The Onion's A.V. Club has an interview with them.

They're apparently looking to do a new show and movie. To which I will immediately become addicted.

Holy Chocolate Salty Balls!

South Park Studios is now live -- a South Park internet hub from which you can legally stream every episode from all 12 seasons of the show, right up to last Sunday's installment, all for free.

The site also has clips, games, news, an episode guide (when DID Kenny come back, and when DID we find out who Cartman's father was?) -- as well as this really weird avatar maker.

I've been meaning to get hold of Steve Martin's memoir Born Standing Up for a few weeks now.

A recent excerpt in Smithsonian magazine has made me resolve to go get it this weekend. From the excerpt, in which Martin begins to craft his own style of comedy by abandoning convention:

"What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: this is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. I would move through my act without pausing for the laugh, as though everything were an aside. Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all and that this act was going on with or without them."

In this week's posts you can:

* Read my musings on Britney Spears looking like a drag queen (and the possibility that she'll spend the rest of her life performing for them).

* Find out whether Disney Channel's High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens (and new star of inadvertent teen amateur Internet pornography) is into the Brazilian wax!

* Check out pictures of Maggie Gyllenhaal in the new Agent Provocateur lingerie ad campaign!

* Consider "The N Word" with comedians Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle -- all of whom used it to greater effect than Eddie Griffin, who was bounced from a Black Enterprise event for dropping it this weekend.

* Tell me whether you got screwed when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone just two months after its release (and whether the $100 store credit they're giving customers makes up for it).

* Check out clips from shows coming out on DVD -- including 30 Rock, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and, of course, Flight of the Conchords.

If you missed any of it, it's all archived. Enjoy.

Also -- talk back, you lurking bastards!

So, apparently Eddie Griffin's set at a Black Enterprise event was ended when he used profanity and (gasp!) "The N Word."

Hey -- it's their event and they can do what they like. But you might want to fire your entertainment director if he hired Eddie Griffin and thought he wasn't going to say nig...um.."the N-Word."

Had none of these folks ever seen Eddie Griffin's standup? Or any of his movies? He's sort of a third-rate Chris Rock (another comic who would, in all likelihood, have used the N-word without apology to anyone) and his comedy is usually racy and racial.
(Clip from Griffin's stand up below, strong language)

I don't like the N Word. I don't use it. But in comedy and satire -- particularly comedy and satire with a racial component, which is often Griffin's thing -- you have to make some allowance for its use.

Lenny Bruce famously (and brilliantly) advocated the use of the word (and other racial slurs) as a means of taking power from the word. If the president went on TV and used the word a hundred times, he said, it would lose its power completely. Consequently, no redneck could ever make a little black girl in Alabama cry by using the word.

Chris Rock famously (and controversially) tackled the N-word in his bit, "N---ers vs. Black People" (Clip below from "Roll With the New" -- some strong language).

Richard Pryor, after a trip to Africa, famously swore off use of the N-Word.
(Clip below from "Live on the Sunset Strip" -- includes strong language)

One of Pryor's most famous disciples, Dave Chapelle, uses the word almost plenty -- often with a biting satirical edge.
(Clip below from The Dave Chapelle show, includes strong language)

It is, of course, all a matter of context.

But the ridiculousness of pretending censoring the words does away with the racism aside -- there are any number of "safe" comics you can hire for this type of event. Why go with Eddie Griffin and then embarrass and persecute him for doing the kind of comedy on which he's made his reputation? Why not just go with Wayne Brady?

All right...maybe that's a bad example...
(Clip below from The Dave Chapelle Show, contains...oh, you know...)