Deconstructing Last Night's 'Family Guy' 9/11 Joke
We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every afternoon The Atlantic Wire highlights the day's video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
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Sunday episode of Family Guy featured an extended in which baby Stewie and drunk dog Brian are given the chance to stop 9/11, choose not to, high-five, then note that what they did "wouldn't look good out of context." The irony is, nobody seems to be taking the bit out of context. If anything, people have been reaching to put it in context by noting that creator Seth Macfarlane was supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11and that the scene was actually part of a much larger Back to the Future Part II parody. All of which seems like an awful lot of work to go through to avoid defend a not very funny joke's right to exist [YouTube]
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Howard Stern still has a remarkable ability to get people who wouldn't otherwise talk about a subject to engage with it in new and surprising ways. Take the interview he did today about the Penn State saga with Al Michaels of NBC Sports. Is there any other forum in the country where somebody like Michaels would feel comfortable remarking: "What the hell is going on there?" [Howard TV]
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Regis Philbin is leaving daytime TV for good (allegedly) at the end of the week, but we wish his final month of farewells could last forever. Why, for instance, are we just now getting a tour of his messy, messy office? This should have been the set after Kathie Lee Gifford left. [Live!]
Meryl Streep may not be a sure thing to win Best Actress for her Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady, but she certainly seems like a sure thing, even if the former Prime Minister's friends don't particularly care for the film. The film's new international trailer only reinforces this notion: how is anyone going to beat Streep when she gets big speeches and tense domestic scenes with Jim Broadbent? [EW]
On Twitter, The Washington Post teased the footage of Russia's successful launch of the Soyuz rocket by asking followers if they had ever seen a rocket launch in the snow. We assume they meant to add, "Outside of The Empire Strikes Back, that is," but realized it wouldn't fit in the 140-character limit [The Washington Post]
