Feb 27, 2009
Tom Waits for No Man
A truly odd, awkward appearance on Fernwood Tonight, complete with uneasy laugh track (h/t Jimb Fisher).
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A truly odd, awkward appearance on Fernwood Tonight, complete with uneasy laugh track (h/t Jimb Fisher).
4 comments:
One of my very favorite Waits tunes. Never realized it was such a yuck-fest.
Love this clip, but in the spirit of ever-querrelous bloggitry I must question your use of "awkward." The audience ate it up and Martin Mull had Waits on the program, presumably, becuase he knows the guy's a genius (for comedy amongst other musical things). You know that Fernwood was a mock-amateur-local-talkshow, a precursor of cringe comedy?
Oh, I know about Fernwood and Mull's cringe-y aesthetic. What I love about the laugh track on Tom's song is that it sounds like a Muppets audience, and it makes him start to seem like a Muppet--I mean, he does sound a little like Rowlf, doesn't he? What's odd is that the audience laughs at the non-sequiturs but not the final punchline, "not me."
The Mike Douglas interviews from around the same period are even better - and much more real since Douglas wasn't playing at being host...
I think there are also some early Letterman appearances that are pretty interesting to boot.
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