the comic's comic

I'll be there for you in 2011: "Parks and Recreation" is like "Friends," only better, as this mashup shows

NBC's Parks and Recreation went from being a so-so spinoff of The Office in its shortened first spring season in 2009, to one of the best sitcoms in all of TV in 2010. For that, NBC is making us wait until 2011 to bring the show back for a third season. How dare they. I'll be there for you when you come back, Parks and Rec. How about everyone else?

Maybe this fan mashup of P&R clips to the theme song for Friends will do the trick, yes? Yes.

Watch the promo for Pete Carroll's "A Better L.A." benefit with Rob Riggle, Aubrey Plaza and more

Hey, sports fans. Pete Carroll may be leaving the University of Southern California and Los Angeles behind to take a job coaching the Seattle Seahawks, but you don't have to go all crazy superfan on him to make him care about L.A. This guy cares.

Just watch Rob Riggle and Aubrey Plaza creep him out for the fun of it, then go and buy tickets to "A Better L.A.," the comedy benefit show Carroll is putting on with the help of Will Ferrell, Tenacious D, Demetri Martin, Tim and Eric, Riggle, Plaza, Nick Swardson and more. It happens Feb. 20 at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.

  

Inside NBC's "Parks and Recreation" with the cast & crew at The Paley Center

One of my first stops on my Hollywood misadventure was to The Paley Center for Media's Beverly Hills branch for a behind-the-scenes discussion with the cast and crew of NBC's Parks and Recreation -- a sitcom that I feel has found a funnier level in its second season following its unusual debut launch in the spring. But we can let the people involved with the show explain that.

Seemed as though many of the audience members in attendance worked for nearby local governments and wanted to let the cast and crew know how "spot-on" they were in nailing life inside Town Hall. Here is a guy who looks like Nick Offerman posing with the actor. I could have told them this as well, having covered various local governments in Idaho and Washington state as a newspaper reporter -- and sakes alive, bubba jive, you have not lived until you've discovered the soap opera mini-dramas of a water and sewer district. Let me tell you. Or not. Let's focus, people! Pawnee, Indiana, you're on the air, fictional city.

Greg Daniels said they had to pick a fictional town. His other NBC sitcom, The Office, may be set in a real place (Scranton, Penn.), but the town is not the driving force of the plot; it's the people in the office. In Parks and Rec, however, the town is the focus. And if they make fun of the mayor being caught up in a scandal, that would be a real person they'd be joking about. So when you go to pawneeindiana.com, you'll be living a second life in another world. But you know that in Internets speak, governments are .gov.

What else did we learn? Well, we saw that this week's episode, "Hunting Trip," takes a dramatic turn when SPOILER ALERTS.

Also...

Parks and Recreation's special Halloween PSA, for the kids

Did you catch last night's episode of Parks and Recreation on NBC? Twas their Halloween-themed show, although, really, it seemed to be just as much about "Cabbage Night" (at least that's what we called the night before Halloween in our sleepy little town in Connecticut), in which kids go out and prank their neighbors with toilet paper and eggs and such. Another nicely understated job by Louis CK as the Pawnee, Ind., policeman who's dating Amy Poehler's parks department character. But what you didn't see on TV was this very special PSA, featuring Poehler, Aziz Ansari and Aubrey Plaza, telling kids to watch out for metaphorical bad apples when they're trick-or-treating! In our town, we had a guy who actually did hand out apples, and not only did he not decorate his house, but he also did, in fact, answer the door in a bathrobe. No. I did not eat the apple. I'm not that crazy! Roll the clip!

Just when ESPN needed something funny, it's the season 3 debut of Mayne Street

ESPN has had a rough week, PR-wise, what with the guy having sex with the young woman who's not his wife, and the other guy making a woefully unfunny joke about a race-car driver based loosely on his ethnic heritage, so they're really due for something to remind us that they're great at delivering us sports information and also quite funny in doing so. Cue Kenny Mayne! Mayne has always been one of my favorite ESPN guys (and the fact that I used to write for the newspaper in Federal Way, Wash., from whence he came, has nothing to do with it). Today marked the debut of season three of Mayne Street, the anchor/reporter's online series. You can watch season one of Mayne Street here; or season two here.

Comedians Alison Becker, Aubrey Plaza and Ben Schwartz have been part of Mayne's crew, though none of them are in the debut, which finds Mayne paying a visit to another guy with sports/media things in common with the blog, Bill Simmons. I've read The Sports Guy's columns for years, but this probably isn't the best time to depict yourself as a faker who has bikini-clad women gratuitously make out and wrestle at your fake mansion, is it? Anyhow. Timing! Who's with me? Roll the clip!