Funny, how?

Comedy is a tricky business. As the career of Jim Davidson has effectively proved, there's no rhyme or reason to the things that some people will find amusing.

Even so, Evan Emory must be kicking himself for trying to share his own unique take on musical comedy with the world. He's now facing 60 days in jail and 200 hours of community service, plus fines and court costs. Originally charged with manufacturing child pornography, Emory ended up pleading guilty to the lesser charge of “unlawful posting of an Internet message with aggravating circumstances.”

His crime, if you can call it that, was to create a video of himself performing a sexually explicit song to a classroom full of elementary school kids. In fact, the video was carefully spliced together from two separate performances, so the children never actually heard him singing "C’mon, girl…See how long it takes to make your panties mine…I’ll add some foreplay in just to make it fun. I want to stick my index finger in your anus.” If the kids want to listen to that kind of filth, they'll just have to tune into one of the many music video channels.

The video has been taken down, with the judge presiding over the case labeling it 'contraband', so it's hard to judge exactly what Emory's intentions were. Though it's not too hard to imagine that he was poking a satirical finger at the sexual content of modern music and the fact that children have unlimited access to it. It's just a shame that the lawmakers didn't see the funny side. I guess, if you have to explain a joke, it wasn't that great to begin with.

It's also a joke that Friends tried years ago, back when the writers were still getting plenty of mileage out of Phoebe's endearingly awful coffee shop singing. Hoping to score a date with handsome classroom entertainer Chris Isaak, Phoebe brought her idiosyncratic song-writing to a group of kindergarteners. The kids seemed to enjoy the chirpy tunes about dying grandparents and sexual bargaining, but the grown-ups were less than impressed.

And that's exactly what played out with Evan, as the parents of the students at Beechnau Elementary claimed “An innocence was taken, something we as parents try very hard to keep, something we hold sacred and dear was taken from the kids.” But was it really? The entire project was predicated on the seamless merging of two unconnected events, thereby ensuring that the children were never exposed to any unsuitable content. 

Chalk this one up as another victimless crime. In which case, the sentencing seems unnecessarily harsh. With 60 days in the slammer ahead of him, Evan may find himself on the receiving end of more than just an index finger.

The kids are alright

Forget about the 'obesity timebomb' that threatens to turns the world's kids into listless, corpulent slugs. There's another healthcare crisis looming on the horizon - a mass outbreak of peptic ulcers amongst the Daily Mail's constantly agitated readership.

That's right folks, it's time for another flick through the pages of everyone's favourite anger rag to see what's causing Middle England's intestines to spontaneously erode. And this week's bone of contention is with a new craze that's getting kids hooked on a new 'legal high'.

With mephedrone and naphyrone already banned, and MDAI expected to follow, young people are seeking out alternative ways to cut loose and elevate their consciousness. Neither of which are concepts likely to appeal to the Daily Mail or its apoplectic readers.

So it's with a suitably sombre tone that Daniel Bates reports on the i-Dosing craze, in which young people listen to "repetitive drone-like music" in order to "change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics." Forget coke or heroin, if you really want to enter an altered state, all it takes is a couple of Basshunter tracks.

According to Bates, YouTube is awash with tracks that "mimic different sensations you can feel by taking drugs such as Ecstasy or smoking cannabis." The thing is, kids have always been prone to suggestion wherever 'drugs' are involved. Most fourteen-year olds only need half a can of Top Deck shandy to start carrying on like George Best in Wogan's green room.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Daily Mail feature without a bunch of ill-informed speculation and conjecture. So Bates uses the fact that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning about i-Dosing, to confirm the scale of the threat.

Perhaps someone should have pointed out that taking scientific advice from Oklahoma is like asking Peaches Geldof about meritocracies. After all, this is the state that filed a resolution last year to oppose the teaching of evolution.

Nonetheless, Bates forges ahead with his terrifying tale of tracks with "imposing names such as ‘Gates of Hades’ or ‘Hand of God’ which are ten minutes long" and often "resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast." Terrifying stuff indeed.

It doesn't seem to matter that Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Clinician Researcher with the Oregon Health and Science University is on hand to point out that the whole concept of i-Dosing is utter nonsense. Bates would rather side with the unnamed 'researchers' who suggest that the placebo effect is enough if users really want to feel it.

But that's also how stories like this work - it's not about the veracity of the concept, it's about the desire to believe.

When "fudge" is just enough

Here's an interesting moral conundrum - is it appropriate for children to appear in a movie meant for adults only? As long as there have been films with adult themes, there have been key roles portrayed by young actors not old enough to see the finished product in a cinema.

From Jodie Foster as a 12-year old hooker in Taxi Driver and Linda Blair as the demon-hosting schoolgirl in The Exorcist, right up to Natalie Portman as a pint-sized assassin in Léon and Isabelle Fuhrman as a murderous Orphan - Hollywood has never shied away from depicting kids in child-unfriendly scenarios.

The latest tabloid-troubling teen is Chloe Moretz, who plays the 11-year-old Hit Girl in Matthew Vaughn's graphic novel adaptation Kick Ass. Decked out in a skin-tight costume and a fetching purple wig, the young actress is portrayed shooting people in the head and using the C-word.

Outraged moral guardians have been predictably quick to condemn what they've decided (without seeing it, of course) is an "offensive and inappropriate" film.

As for Chloe herself, she seems pretty well-adjusted about the whole thing, telling The Sun: "Obviously a little girl can't beat up and kill huge, heavy men. It is a controversial role, but it was a role I wanted to do. If I said a sixteenth of the words I say in that movie at home, I would be grounded for the rest of my life for sure." That's because Chloe, like Jodie, Natalie and Linda before her, has parents who make sure she understands the difference between what she's portraying on film, and what's acceptable in real life.

With that in mind, it's interesting that another 'innapropriate roles for kids' controversy has erupted in the last couple of days over a viral film that's currently doing the rounds.

Posted by a woman called cindymomof6, the youtube clip is of Cindy's son Jaydon's performance in a surprising school play. Rather than a traditional nativity with tea-towels and Tiny Tears, Jaydon's school apparently decided to re-enact Brian DePalma's classic drugs 'n' guns epic Scarface.

Some might say that it's a little strange that they picked a modern-day gangster classic, especially one with 226 uses of the f-word. In fact, Scarface's famously foul mouth isnpired a series of Swear-A-Long screenings - like Sing-Along-A-Sound of Music, if Julie Andrews called each of the Von Trapp kids a motherfucker.

Don't worry, the kids' version has been carefully rewritten to replace every f-bomb with the word 'fudge'. The bowl of cocaine is a dish of popcorn, and none of the guns fire live ammo.

Nonetheless, people are still up in arms about the school's choice of performance material, with comments posted along the lines of "Jaydon's school and teacher should be sued. This is just toooo wrong. What have we become. Shamefull" and "Its just wrong,the school needs help and so do the American people,to teach this at any age,no wonder they shoot each other in the street."



What's most worrying about this whole debacle is that fact that anyone thinks for a second that this video is the real thing. Everything, from the careful crafting of the script to the surprisingly adept camerawork, suggests that this is a joke. That and the fact that it's clearly supposed to be funny. Anyone who's ever sat through, or appeared in, a school play knows they're about as entertaining as an omnibus edition of Cash In The Attic.

It doesn't take a genius to discover the story on TMZ confirming that it's the work of an LA-based production company that's made videos for Lady Gaga, Bowling For Soup and Adam Lambert. What's not yet known is the purpose of the film itself, other than to give the easily disgusted a bit of a work-out.

And that's the problem - when exactly did we become so hungry for outrage that any sense of credulity went out the window? Does our sense of moral indignation mean more to us than any semblance of curiosity or rational thought?

Oh, and one more thing. For all of the outrage over kids re-enacting mobster movies and shooting each other with toy guns, it's worth remembering that Alan Parker did this 34 years ago in Bugsy Malone. And the only troubling thing to emerge from that was the career of Scott Baio.

Lady goes Gaga over fans

When you finally achieve your dreams, it's very tough to stay grounded. For some people, all it takes is one whiff of success and they start throwing their weight around like a pre-menstrual Mariah Carey. So we should all be grateful for Lady Gaga who manages to be both grateful and gracious to her fans for putting her where she is today - even if that happens to be her own little world.

A few months ago, when she released the follow-up to her best-selling debut album, she treated the fans queuing outside the record signing to a thousand dollars worth of pizza as a way of saying thank you. Some might carp that she didn't bother to check whether anyone was gluten intolerant or trying to lay off the carbs, but in this instance, it's definitely the thought that counts.

The strange thing is, as pretentious as her stage persona might seem to some, she's actually very grounded. She's said repeatedly that she's driven by a need to please and delight her fans, and make outsiders feel welcome and accepted. All very commendable.

Yesterday, she went another step closer to proving this point when she added a link on her official Twitter page, along with the comment 'holy shit'. The video (posted below) was made by a group of friends who received Flip cameras for Christmas and decided to remake Gaga's award-winning video for Bad Romance.



Although they were working from a significantly more rstrictive budget, and the choreography is somewhat lacklustre, they can't be faulted for their commitment or attention to detail. You'll never look at a laundry basket the same way again after this.

Whereas some celebrities might get their record company to pressure YouTube to take down the video for breaking the rules over music usage rights, Lady Gaga decided to share the video with her 2+ million-strong group of Twitter followers. For all the fans who keep posting messages in the hope their favourite star migth notice them, this should be considered a major breakthrough.

Already, the video has received over a quarter of a million hits. But, ironically, this has caused something of an unforeseen problem for the young videographers.

A new note on their YouTube channel reads: "We're flattered some of you guys friend requested us on Facebook, but we wanna try to keep our personal lives seperate. So add our fanpage instead :D!" Isn't it funny how quickly people forget the fans who put them where they are today?