Once upon a time there was a band called Catatonia made up of bored and isolated young folks in Wales. They wrote clever and catchy songs. They sang in Welsh and English. Their singer’s voice was supple and ferocious; it could seduce and it could head-butt you as an opening salvo in a pub brawl. She was a sonic and cultural Boudicca. At a fevered peak in the 1990’s, Catatonia left Wales to try to make it bigger and became a commodity product adjacent to the “Britpop” narrative (viz. Blur and Oasis) as part of the “Cool Cymru” sound. That Catatonia never quite got their due, and that Catatonia’s final album is a complete piece that shows their versatility, capability, and uniqueness.

Let’s un-forget Catatonia’s Equally Cursed and Blessed.

In around 1992, I heard Frente!’s (hereafter, Frente), cover of New Order’s masterpiece, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” Stripped down to singer Angie Hart’s vocals and guitarist Simon Austin’s light guitar arrangement, it dangled like a bauble amid the rest of the 120 Minutes slate driven, in no small part, by the incredibly photogenic Hart playing to the camera.

The cover was part of their name-making Marvin the Album that was used to spread Frente from being an Australian band to being a folky, fun band with international reach. In Summer 1996, after my first year at college where I’d been introduced to the Sundays, Frente returned with their second album: Shape which kept Hart’s angelic voice, but layered it into an ambitiously energetic, complex, Brian Wilson-esque psychedelia that, sadly, never got its due.

Let’ un-forget Frente’s Shape.

In the early 2000s, I often bounced between San Jose and Austin. Oftentimes, I’d spend the night in a hotel on Sunday night before catching the early morning flight back to the West Coast (R.I.P. “Nerd Bird”). As part of the Sunday-night return ritual, I would catch the airing of Fox’s “Malcolm In the Middle.” One episode has stuck with me across all these years because it said something revolutionary about class in America, gender relations, and features a blistering monologue about nascent incel-culture delivered fantastically.

In the exposition of episode 207, “Robbery (2000),” the working-class-to-working-poor mother of the series, Lois, portrayed by Jane Kaczmarek, is working the evening shift at her retail pharmacy store job.^{1 2}

In my late teen years, I started watching SNL (or, actually, on VHS delay so that I could get my beauty rest). One of my favorite sketches in the late-90’s, Mike Myers / Dana Carvey / Adam Sandler era featured a Japanese punditry show that emulated the arguing talking heads format of “The McLaughlin Group”, “The Arakawa Group.”

Leveraging Mike Meyers’ sense of random, absurdist humor (stolen whole cloth for pretty much every 15^th second of “The Family Guy”) and supported by the comedic delivery of Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, and Rob Schneider, the panel discussion follows a pugilistic talking-political heads format and then breaks à la Meyers’ “Sprockets” with a random non-sequitur (“Now we dance”) as Meyers-san bellows: “SHOW ME THE MONKEY.” Thus is shown a monkey salaryman in a suit falling over (it seems). Arakawa-san et al. are then shown wiping tears of mirth away as the cut ends and they utter in Engrish: “He sray me” etc.

At the time of airing, I found random jump and meta-meta spoof (more on that later) he-high-larious, but, looking back, it’s a cringe-o-rama of dated stereotypes, racism, and laaaaaazy writing that dodges the charge of unfunnyness by appealing to cheap racial stereotype.

It’s. Just. So. Bad.

And while I don’t believe we should go back and shame/re-evaluate the humor of yesteryear in light of current mores or “cancel” people over it (we all make mistakes that are bonded to the cultural moment in which the mistakes surface), that this ever got out the door and got Carvey / Hartman to stake their well-established bona fides on it is surprising.