I've been working today from the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica, and for the last 90 minutes a pompous, disheveled gentleman has been doing an interview with some over-earnest reporter, talking about his "career" and his "new film." A little Google image wizardry has revealed this joker to be comedian Doug Benson: You might know him from VH1's Best Week Ever, or perhaps from the popular NBC series Last Comic Standing. I don't know him from Orny Adams.
This guy literally has not uttered one humorous or self-deprecating sentence in nearly two hours. Probably the low point thus far has been his thrilling exegesis of how Friends reruns featuring his cameo appearances have added to his notoriety. Oh, and his theories on the diminished effectiveness of late night television in promoting stand up artists compared to the heyday of Johnny Carson have been stunning in their crushing banality too.
It looks like Benson's gone and made a feature-length documentary called Super High Me -- which features him smoking pot for 30 days straight. I bet it's going to be hilarious. I'm sure it hews closely to his standup routine, which no doubt features priceless illustrations of pure comedy gold like "the munchies" and "forgetfulness" and "meandering thought patterns" and "Keanu Reeves voice."
Oh wow: He just spent five minutes explaining his clever tagline for the movie... It's "4:20 24/7" Get it?! Brilliant.
Thus ends this episode of the Fake Angeleno disgruntled hater hour.
UPDATE: Fake Angeleno commenter Don from Philadelphia rightly points out that I shouldn't judge Benson's talent from an overheard magazine interview. Fair enough. I watched some of Benson's video material and wasn't over-impressed. But then again I'm the kind of guy that watches Charlie Rose's facial ticks for laughs instead of Jay Leno's monologues. Here's a clip of Doug Benson's weekly video content offering "I Love Movies." You can feel free to judge him yourself!
