What's the topic for today? How do we end a truly lousy week, notable for unending horrible news? National Fried Chicken Day! Whoopee!
Indeed, National Fried Chicken Day, giving cooks a ready-made excuse to fry or sauté whatever fowl happens to be in the freezer, is this Saturday, July 6.
What got this scribe through the too-many months of COVID related lockdown in 2020-2021 and the unending years of pure awfulness that followed? Standup comedy and our pets (a.k.a. official mascots)! One standup comic we like a lot is Patton Oswalt, who links to National Fried Chicken Day as follows.
When it comes to the topics of fried chicken and fast food in general, can't think of anyone funnier than Jim Gaffigan.
Jim is in frequent rotation here, as is Mr. Oswalt.
Just realized that fried chicken is just about the only food that's NOT in the Saturday Night Live Taco Town sketch, which features Jason Sudeikis, Bill Hader and Andy Samberg.
Shifting from comedy to food, the skilled and frequently very funny chefs at Babish Culinary Universe have tried to replicate the epic Taco Town mega-taco-gordita-crepe-pizza, etc.
Tops in the category of the funniest, most informative and most scientific of cooking show hosts? Hands and measuring devices down, that would be Alton Brown of "Good Eats."
How to we top Alton? Chicken-centric tunes from long, long ago.
The British blues band Chicken Shack didn't play Chicken Strut or ChIcken Scratch as part of their repertoire, but there is a familiar face here - singer/songwriter/keyboardist Christine McVie, a year or so prior to her joining Fleetwood Mac to counter the departure of guitarist Peter Green and a few years before the band's pop juggernaut years in the latter 1970's.
So, the official post for National Fried Chicken Day 2024 ends as many Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog posts do, with cartoons from long long ago.
RE: Sudden Fried Chicken (1946), a Famous Studios cartoon directed by the great Bill Tytla, the animation by such talented Fleischer veterans as Orestes Calpini is invariably quite good and the voice work by Sid Raymond, Jack Mercer, Arnold Stang and others is also terrific.
On one hand, the premise of marital abuse as yuk-yuk comedy falls as flat as a poorly cooked pancake. On the other hand, the cartoon becomes quite funny about 4 minutes in, starting with Herman the Mouse smoking cigarettes.
How storymen Jack Mercer and Carl Meyer missed the opportunity for a hilarious topper gag in which horrific Henrietta Hen, after seeing Henry as an hard drinking ultra-macho tough guy, instantaneously becomes a sex-crazed love machine a la horny hot-to-trot hillbilly Possum Pearl (the star of a very enjoyable Noveltoon cartoon Jack Mercer wrote the story for a decade later), we'll never know. Blame the Hays Office!
Viewing the Noveltoons' Herman & Henry series makes one wonder if someone on the Famous Studios staff in the mid-1940's was stuck in a hideously awful hell on earth marriage. Readers, if you find yourself in a similar situation, GET OUT IMMEDIATELY AND RUN! RUN FAST AND FAR! DON'T TURN BACK!
Closing this National Fried Chicken Day tribute: the Jay Ward Studio's Super Chicken.
2 comments:
The great bassist Charles Mingus recorded a tune called "Eat That Chicken". It was supposedly his tribute to Thomas "Fats" Waller. Great solos by Jimmy Knepper and Rashaan Roland Kirk.
Thanks, Andre P - that tune, IIRC, is on one of Mingus' early 1960's Atlantic Records albums. I saw Mingus and Kirk, as well as groups led by such talented former Mingus bandmates as Don Pullen and George Adams, way back when. They were spectacular musicians and bandleaders, like the graduates of the Universities of Coltrane and Blakey.
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