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).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

One of my very favorite Waits tunes. Never realized it was such a yuck-fest.

Anonymous said...

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?

Rob Weinert-Kendt said...

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."

Anonymous said...

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.