Musical Comedy

New York comedian Aziz Ansari has a satirical "track by track rundown" of Radiohead singer Thom Yorke's upcoming solo album The Eraser on his blog. He says he has an inside source who got Yorke to e-mail his personal thoughts on each song. I actually believed the first one:

1) "The Eraser" -- I took mushrooms with Alicia Keys and Aphex Twin once. We wrote this song together that weekend.

But I caught on when I got to the second one:

2) "Analyse" -- I once locked my 4 year old nephew Cody in my grandmother's basement for 2 weeks with only some oatmeal and a 12 pack of Hi-C. Somewhere, he found an old drum machine and piano and composed the groundworks for this piece. Bravo, young Cody.

Ansari took part in a recent set of panel discussions on R&B star R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet", a bizarre twelve part "hip-hopera." Ansari and others (David Cross, Andy Richter -- different panels for NYC and LA) did the panels live at the Upright Citizens Brigade's New York and Los Angeles comedy theaters.