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Page 6 THE GRIFFIN Friday, April 26,1996 kaleidoscope • kaleidoscope • kaleidoscope Previews of summer releases by E ric R. Neffke Griffin Feature Editor Summer is just around the bend. As all music fans know, the summer is a difficult time to keep up with new releases, especially considering that many new bands choose to releeise their debut records during the summer. This can create a sort of confu sion, and without me to help sort the music scene out for you, it can get downright dreadful. Just kidding. Actually, even I have a hard time keeping up with summer releases. That's why I’ve chosen this week's column to give previews of a few of the interesting releases coming out this summer. Firstly, May 14 marks the release date of Elvis Costello and the A ttractions’ new CD, All This Useless Beauty. This is his first CD of new material since 1994’s absolutely stellar Brutal Youth. This . being the case, it is provoking a firestorm of antici pation among hardcore Costello fans. The album is made up of songs that Costello composed for other artists. Some of them were actually recorded by those artists, including “You Bowed Down,” which was performed by former Byrds guitarist Roger McGuinn on his 1991 solo release, but many of the songs were never recorded by the artists Costello intended them for. So, Costello decided to reclaim these songs for himself and set about recording the tracks with the reunited Attractions. Advance word on this record is that it is very “folky” and laced with ballads, which may be a good thing, since Costello’s last “folk\ record, 1986’s King of America, was by far one of his best. Word also has it that he is already in th% process of recording his next album, another collaboration with the B rodsky Quartet, the string quartet with whom he wrote and recorded 1993’s critically acclaimed song cycle The Juliet Letters. The Brodsky Quartet also reportedly makes an appearance on All This Useless Beauty, playing on the track “I Want to Vanish.\ Rumor also has it that Costello and Attractions’ keyboardist Steve Nieve will be playing a show at the Opera House in Toronto near the end of May, so keep your ears peeled for that news if you are a Costello fanatic like myself. Also coming soon is the new solo album from former Sugar frontman Bob Mould. The album, also entitled Bob Mould (how clever!) allows Mould to fulfill a self-professed “lifetime ambition,\ which is to record an album on which he writes every song and plays every instrument. Well, he does it here. No wonder the album is eponymously titled. Mould even goes so far as to dedicate the album to himself in the liner notes. The songs on the record are traditional Mould songs, short F>oppy compositions with great melodies and borderline punk accompa niment, although the omnipresent electronic drum machine becomes very annoying at times. Person ally, I’d like to see Mould reunite Sugar, but since that most likely won’t happen, I would at least like to hear him with a real drummer. This album comes off as being just a tad self-indulgent. Finally, news is that quirky singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has signed a new deal with Warner Brothers Records and is planning to release his first record since 1993’s underrated Respect this summer. I’ve heard quite a few rumors about different titles for the album, all of which sound very Hitchcockian. I’m not harboring any illusions that this album will be a million seller, but Fegmaniacs everywhere will be pleased at the return of Hitchcock, even if he did break up his longtime band. The Egyptians. In news about bands that people other than myself have heard of, it looks like both RE.M. and U2 are finishing up work on their respective new albums, which should be released in late summer or early fall. Well, that’s all the news I have this week. Until we meet again, I ask you to keep your ears open and be willing to listen to new sounds. Who knows, you might hear something that will change the way you listen to music. What is in the Tuna Noodle Surprise? Little Theatre presents ‘Announcements ’ by Eric R Neffke Griffin Feature Editor The posters link the 700 words of hope, cannibalism, monkeys and Tuna Noodle Surprise. Interested in finding out how these disparate elements link together? Interested in finding out how Pat Boone fits into all of this as well? Never fear, all your questions will be answered tonight and tomorrow night in the Marie Maday Theater as Little Theatre puts on a completely student run production of a student written play, Michael D. Bowen’s Morning Announcements. Not only was this play written by a Canisius student, but it is also being directed by a Canisius grad student. Jason M. Trost makes his directorial debut with this production. The play is set in the fictional Charles J. Downin High School, an hour before an assembly in which Dr. Gavin Moxie is to give a presentation dealing with monkeys. Hence the title. Morning Announcements, since much of the play takes place at the time when announcements are read over the school’s P.A. system. The play then follows the characters through the assmebly itself. Monkeys and Pat Boone combined sounds like the recipe for a comedy. Bowen admitted, “The play will make you laugh.” The ensemble cast oiMorning An nouncements include Mark Beers as the school’s principal Lewis Anewbis, Maria Wichlac as Maggie Pokel and David Hoffmann as the off-kilter Elliot Alice Palaver (Gretchen Grottenthaler, left) and Elliot Fey (Dave Hoffmann) take a moment to prepare themselves for the monkeys. Photo by christin tank Fey. Matthew Slazak plays the afore mentioned Dr. Moxie with senior Gretchen Grottenthaler playing Alice Palaver. Other cast members include Sara Ausberger, Alicia DeCarlo Hoffman, Candice Shiree and Steve Liderbach. Why did Little Theatre choose to accept the task of doing this play them selves? “There are many reasons,” explained Kathy Odojewski, Little Theatre’s club president. “We wanted to provide a showcase for Michael’s writing talent and we also wanted to give the director [Trost] a chance to learn on the job as well.” “We also saw it as a chance to get a lot of new people involved,” she added. “This type of production could attract people who had never auditioned for a mainstage production before.” Little Theatre also saw this as a great opportunity to do a second pro duction this semester. “We’re looking to expand in the future towards doing two productions per sem ester,” Odojewski said. “We saw this as a great start.\ Morning Announcements runs to night and tomorrow night in the Marie Maday Theater. The curtain for both performances rises at 8 p.m., so don’t be late. You don’t know what you might miss if you are. Thoughts on writing comedy articles How to attempt humor and fail miserably by Eric R Neffke Griffin Feature Editor Asking me to be funny on a regular basis is like asking a pig to act the lead role in an Oscar-nominated motion picture. Oh, wait, that happened, so maybe there is hope for me yet. One of the major problems with being consistently funny is trying to adapt one’s unique style of humor to a variety of situations. Even more important is knowing when not to attempt being humorous. For example, a funeral may not be the best time to debut your impression of the recently deceased. There is a thing called taste, regardless of what Jim Carrey might lead you to believe. Then there arises the problem of those who think they are funnier than Aey actually are. Wait a minute, why are you looking a t me like that? Basi cally, the point of this paragraph is that no matter how many times you say “I know you are, but what eun I?” in re sponse to name calling, it will indeed never be a snappy comeback. Just some words for thought. Plus, another problem appears when one tries to take a one line joke and stretch it out. Once you get past the initial chuckle of a line like “Haggis: real food for real people,\ there’s nowhere you can really go with it without making a lot of people very sick. Trying to come up with a topic out of thin air to wax comically about is probably one of the hardest things of all. You have to be able to gauge what people think is humor ous and then be consistently funny while talking about this subject. This immediately rules out a column about sta plers, considering that there’s only about 1-2 paragraphs that you can get out of that without either repeating yourselforjust sounding stupid, much like I’m doing right Some good topics for extended pieces of humor include fast food, desktop publishing, Julia Roberts movies and painful accidents because we all know how funny they can be. Throw in a line about the Presidential campaign and you’ve got a sure bet. Which brings me to my next point, which is that you can’t lose with political humor. Well, you can lose if you tell a joke about the shape of President Clinton’s nose to a staunch Democrat, but as long as you’re careful, you can always get a laugh out of somebody with a joke about politics, even if it isn’t very funny. Which leads into another point — that, seemingly, political humor doesn’t even have to be funny to be effective. I suppose just saying the words “Bob Dole” can be enough to elicit a chuckle or two out of the right people. And, on the other side of the fence, “A1 CJore” can be a quite funny image when used correctly in a sentence. In other words, saying “My car broke down yesterday, so I fixed it with my A1 Gore” isn't very funny, unless you find that sort of thing humorous, then I suppose youll get a good laugh. But this type of obvious humor can become grating very quickly. To put it bluntly, if you can, try to avoid picking on Hootie and the Blowffsh. It can be hard not to some times, but those who have come before you have, for the most part, told all the good Hootie jokes. Unless you want to unwittingly copy those jokes, just stay away from Hootie humor altogether. It also might be a good idea to not tell any Stone Temple Pilots jokes, for very similar reasons. Of course, one has to take into consideration that some people just have better delivery than others. Has the following ever happened to you? One person tells you a joke and you find it quite funny, then a short time later, someone else tells you the exact same joke and you do not laugh at all. This can be attributed to the fact that the first person has much better comic delivery than the second. Or it can just be that a joke is never quite as humorous the second time you hear it. Your choice. Then we get to the phenomenon of those who are funny without even trying to be. The best thing that can be said is that this requires a natural gift and you should not even attempt this. You cannot try to be funny without trying to be, since that is a contradiction in terms much along the same lines as “old news” or, more importantly, “smart bombs.\ The point of this entire column is simple — The harder you try to be funny sometimes, the less funny you actually are. Just look at this column, count how many times you laughed and realize that I was trying very hard to be funny, and you just might get the point. If not, just watch any episode of “Step by Step\ and you should understand very quickly.
