Saturday, August 07, 2010

Lifetime achievement award for the Tappett Brothers

I'd like to go on record plumping for Click and Clack, the Tappett brothers, of "Car Talk" fame.  More even than John Stewart, they are probably the most talented entertainers of their generation, and they impart useful information too.  Here's proof:  Natalie, at the tender age of 10, knows nothing about cars, and doesn't want to.  But when the Tappetts are on, she joins Mary and me in shooshing everybody else in the car (AKA Graham) so she can hear them.

There is a growing trend towards "laughology," a belief that laughing is just flat out good for you. There are some guys in India who go out on the beach and just laugh for the sake of laughing.  I'm not going that far.  But the Tappett brothers are both funny and have incredibly infectious laughs. They have it "going on," as the young people say.

And the credits at the end ("our Russian chauffeur is Pickup Andropov") are an incredible exercise in sustained creativity, funny every week, just like the scene at the end of the opening sequence of the Simpsons where the family gathers around the couch. As of May, 2010, Groening and crew had done 464 versions of that, and they're all pretty funny.

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