Surviving the sellout

If you allow it, your Tivo will make suggestions based on your recording habits and fill itself up with stuff you might like. I can say that I'm not always comfortable with the picture that it throws back at me.

That said, I'm watching a Bob Saget standup routine that it chose for me ... and laughing at it. I don't think he's going to make my standup top five or anything, but here's a guy who has actually survived the sellout. That loathesome sitcom, the smarmy home video show (most of which are so painfully staged--I mean, yes it's funny that you stepped on the rake and hit yourself in the crotch, but why the hell are you filming it? Don't BS me with fake blows to the groin. Is what I'm saying.

But here he is in 2007--profaner than he needs to be, I think, but aren't we all? He's looking good after all these years, rather funny, and obviously able to put some butts in theater seats while talking about getting rich and famous for doing things he wasn't very proud of. So good for him. Hey, I don't know if he's happy or not, but at least he's doing something he can respect.

And then there's Jim McMahon. I hated this guy back in the early 80s, mainly because I shared much of 1985 with a guy hight--or dare I say yclept--Young Jerome, the boyfriend of my girlfriend's roommate (there ought to be a word for that), and he was a Bears fan ... bad enough in any epoch, but intolerable in 1985. The effing ineffable arrogance of this cocky jerk--McMahon, I mean, not Young Jerome--with his beer and his sunglasses and his 80s hair (which I suppose we must forgive), and his apparently meteoric rise to stardom. That rap song. Ugh. But he played a lot of football even after he crashed and burned with the Bears. Not good football, particularly, but he stuck with it, and that's something, even as a backup. Maybe it was because he burned too many bridges in Chicago to get away with hanging around and snipping ribbons in front of new businesses in that bizarre ritual of symbolic circumcision. Did he survive the sellout? I wouldn't call it an unqualified success, but maybe it could be said that he earned it retroactively.

So ... who else? Surprisingly cool, maneless Peter Frampton maybe? And why are these stories so compelling?