GREAT LAUGHS: Trapped in the Closet

R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet (2005-Present)

By: John Semley

Despite my best efforts to stay on top of all the pertinent developments in pop culture, I have a tendency to fall behind on certain things that everyone else seems so damned interested in. This is mostly the result of needing to have a bit of distance from, say, a super popular TV show in order to be sufficiently clinical about it (I made a point to not watch The Sopranos until the series had wrapped, but yeah, it’s awesome). It also has something to do with the fact that I’m not really interested in celebrities, so most of the time I spend on blogs is channeled towards tracking the production Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and not checking Gawker for cell phone video of that Cat Power woman doing karaoke at some bar in New Hampshire or reading Twitters (Tweets?) about who Chris Brown is slapping around. And sometimes I plain miss the boat. I never saw Vampire’s Kiss until just last night, and I make a pretty fine point of being a Nicolas Cage fan.

GREAT LAUGHS: Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage (American actor/carbon-based life form)

By: John Semley

A tender, vulnerable, Moonstruck-era Nic Cage. Handsome for a man.

I think it was probably somewhere around the time I heard that he’d be strapping on the flaming chains to play skeletal vigilante Johnny Blaze in Ghost Rider that I really got into Nicolas Cage. Of course, as a younger man I’d always liked his films. Coming in just as Cage was making his uncomfortable action hero turn in the late 90s, I remember watching The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off with a zeal that had hitherto been reserved for Jurassic Park, Robocop and Terminator 2 (great films all, but crucially lacking the Cage factor). It was enough to get me to tune into Honeymoon in Vegas when it used to air, pretty much constantly, on TBS.

GREAT LAUGHS: Strategic Grill Locations

In our continued effort to diversify our content, Terminal Laughter brings you a new weekly column, Great Laughs. Proceeding from the suggestion that nowadays it’s the stuff of pop culture (and the funny stuff especially) that binds us together, we’ll explore some piece of pop ephemera that packs repeat laughs. It could be a movie, a Simpsons episode, a comedy sketch, a stand-up bit, whatever. So remember: every Thursday (more-or-less), you’ll get a new Great Laughs column. And feel free to suggest your own, as the pickings will inevitably dwindle as weeks pass.

GREAT LAUGHS: Office Space

In our continued effort to diversify our content, Terminal Laughter brings you a new weekly column, Great Laughs. Proceeding from the suggestion that nowadays it’s the stuff of pop culture (and the funny stuff especially) that binds us together, we’ll explore some piece of pop ephemera that packs repeat laughs. It could be a movie, a Simpsons episode, a comedy sketch, a stand-up bit, whatever. So remember: every Thursday (more-or-less), you’ll get a new Great Laughs column. And feel free to suggest your own, as the pickings will inevitably dwindle as weeks pass. That said, let’s wet our beaks with the contemporary benchmark for cult classic comedy and reliable cure for the Mondays…