Humor

A three-day teleplay done at CalArts takes a sordid behind-the-scenes look at an art school professor’s life.

A video in two parts (Starstruck and MGM: Movie Goddess Machine), focusing on celebrity culture, identity, and the body. “What is Liz Taylor doing in my bed, in the bed of my friend Leland, as he dies of AIDS?” These and related questions are enacted in a series of encounters between the artist/ performer/ spectator and a host of famous people from la Liz to Anita Hill. In Joan Sees Stars, Braderman addresses the subversive potential of masquerade in a parade of video-assisted star sightings.

Colorful lines follow the gestures of a conductor leading the orchestra until he disappears just at the point of crescendo. As the music slows, he starts to reappear. A sketch as a tribute to Walt Disney. 

This title is also available on Ximena Cuevas: El Mundo del Silencio (The Silent World) and Half-Lies: The Videoworks of Ximena Cuevas.

In this short but provocative tape, recorded August 4th, 1971, Carol Vontobel “interviews” Nancy Cain who is speaking about her “coke addiction problem” under the pseudonym Nancy X.  Nancy’s addiction, the viewer soon learns, is not to cocaine but coca-cola. As such, the segment unfolds as a spoof, both playfully calling attention to the proliferation of depictions of, and conversations about, the pervasive use of drugs in the U.S. in the early 1970s.

Tension between a man and his handsome young rival (a Ken doll) erupts into violence. Their interaction devolves from a series of tussles to a spanking.

This title is also available on Joe Gibbons Videoworks: Volume 1.

With various trips to the seashore, this summer travelette becomes an inner journey through mythical realms populated by rubberized horrors. The viewer is transported into a caregiver’s nightmare where mother and son share the fruits and bones of undigested demands. These figments of fermented atrocities pile up in a barrage of bestial assaults inflamed into hellish reality by reading material of unwholesome content. Fantasy lumbers into reality with an unrelenting menu of severed ties and familial knots that tighten around the neck of he who dabbles with dementia.

The artist Bruce Conner is featured in this videotape which bounces east and west, depicting the fragility of holistic hooligans in a world of hit-and-run encounters, Prozac, and pizzas. A meditation on faulty plumbing and paradise lost... but not forgotten!

A trip across the bay to Concord yields a harvest of non-fruit-like beings who celebrate a housewarming that simmers with macho machinations and family discord. The mood is upbeat while the company is lowbrow, and coming out of the bushes rather than the woodwork.

In a world of Internet and high technology, there still remains something so arcane, so simple and extraordinary, so absolutely incredible as a circus of educated fleas. Marvel at Maria Fernanda Cardoso's work as the powerful Brutus (The Strongest Flea on Earth) pulls a locomotive that weighs 160,000 times his own weight. See the flea ballerinas dressed in micro-tutus, dance to the rhythms of Tango! Hold your breath as the highwire artists defy gravity on the tightrope and swing precariously on a miniature trapeze.

The unstable earth becomes the epicenter of this videotape document which explores—in a fractured way—the relationships between the people, places, and furniture that sit atop the San Andreas Fault.

A film about haircuts, clothes, and image/sound relationships.

"This four-minute film explores our response to stereotypes—aural, visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see and hear."

—Gary Davis

An island. A mountain. A City of Angels who scoop up the pellets dropped by other winged creatures.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.

Smith’s gentle, recusant comedy is a critique of masculine domination, focusing on the myth of manifest destiny. Believing the moral of the Old West that “Everything is there for the taking”, mild-mannered Mike is inspired to “Go for it!" and conquer wide-open spaces in the modern way: as a real estate developer of suburban sub-divisions. Dressed as a cowboy and mime-riding a horse in front of images of mobile homes, Smith updates the notion of “rugged individualism” to include personal theme music and a chorus.

Male escorts and crytozoologists battle behemoths and bulemics in this student-teacher collaboration about undying evil and those that escape it via the LOVE CANAL.

In this spoof program produced for Lanesville TV, the premise is that a “Sheik” has come to buy all the land in Lanesville. Videofreex member Carol Vontobel reports that the sheik (Bart Friedman), escorted by his real estate agent (Parry Teasdale) is approaching people in the community and asking to buy their homes. An unknown Lanesville local chauffeurs them around, and the Videofreex interview Mr. Benjamin, Mr. And Mrs. Kelly, Mr. Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. Ginsburg, and others from the Tavern.

In Reel 1, newly re-mastered in 2005, a series of vignettes and jokes to camera take place, some starring Wegman’s droll and obliging canine partner Man Ray. Both the human body and props are employed to amusing effect: lamps talk, a microphone is dragged around, stomachs sing. At one point, Wegman dribbles milk on to the floor, to be lapped up by a thirsty dog.

Contents:

Microphone, 0:47

Pocketbook Man, 1:19

Anet and Abtu, 0:47

The Ring, 1:11

Randy’s Sick, 0:16

Milk/Floor, 1:02

Animals debate the sticky subject of body dysmorphia and the merits of reconstructive surgery in this short animation.  

"Jessie Mott wrote the script for this, recorded the voices and made the drawings.  I constructed the soundtrack and animated her drawings."
--Steve Reinke

The unusual combination of a sound like a singing saw accompanies sweet images of frolicking lambs in the meadow, galloping horses, and a strange boy, is eerily beautiful and pure.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.

First there is a stop at Salt Lake City and a massive dose of theological imagery that prepares the viewer for the hellish landscape to come—a land of igneous outcroppings and noxious emissions peopled by mammals of exquisite bulk. A countryside plundered of its potatoes by behemoths who head for the hills with their bounty of starch and iron. Follow them to the heights of Yellowstone National Park and the depths of Pocatello, Idaho. Follow them if you dare!

"You are invited to Jim’s party! Snake optional."

--Cinematexas Festival (Austin, 2001)

"Three more sing-alongs, this time with swans, a snake, and the Red Army Chorus."

--L.A. Freewaves Festival

This title is also available on Jim Finn Videoworks: Volume 1.

Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Behind the skyscraping walls of a neon lit asylum, the frustrated inhabitants therein erupt and engage in a psychological waltz that couple fact with fantasy in ways that open windows of the madhouse to the sanity of daylight.

This title comprises Grip of the Gorgon (2001), Midnight Mass (2006) and Celestial Murmurs (2006) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Is everything larger in Texas? Everyone knows that Texans like to show off "big-ly" and they like to perpetuate the myth in a big way, too. The World's Largest features larger-than-life-size monuments built primarily in small Texas towns, the monuments in commemoration of a local resource.

Encompassing both Thanksgiving, Christmas and the exploding New Year's Eve celebrations, this holiday video is chock full of chicken and chatter befitting the season. There's a turkey in there too and a hungry clan of consumer ready to eat you out of house and home (with a house made specifically for that purpose). Come join the merry mayhem as young and old devour what's left of the old year to burp up the new one!

Taped in Normal, Illinois, during the height of autumn, a snapshot of a young girl triggers a meditation on dying innocence and sizzling sausages as a low, winter sun ignites the smoke of greasy longings and meat-eating hunger.

This title is also available on The World of George Kuchar.