“The only way to upset the power structure in your communities is to goad them, confuse them, irritate them and, most of all, make them live by their own rules. If you make them live by their own rules, you destroy them. And never forget that ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. Comedy is our friend. Throw the kitchen sink at them!” – from Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radical Comedians.”

Alinsky

I never really had any insight into the pure comic genius of Saul Alinsky until I saw his new age Method followers display their considerable chops on the national stage. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the Master’s ostentatious and envelope-pushing Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner-like proteges, whose hilarious ACORN skits also showed brilliant flashes of the late great Allen Funt. The Mysterious Mister X, the L.A. street comic who “Alinskyed” Faris Alkhateeb’s boredom-fueled Obama Joker art into an urban poster as devilishly humorous as Hannibal Lecter, also made as big a national splash as a 300-pound chub doing a cannonball into a crowded public kiddie pool. (more…)

Tyler Perry is the king of the Hollywood box office for Academy Awards weekend. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) debuted with just 2,032 playdates on Friday and scored a monstrous $14.65M for a Per Theatre Average of over $7,000. The final weekend take could be $41.12M.

The box office king....err....queen of Oscar weekend

Although I am not necessarily a fan of Tyler Perry movies, I am a Tyler Perry fan. He traveled the country for years doing live stage shows in order to fine-tune his act, and he identified an under-served audience – African Americans, and more specifically black, Christian women. Now he makes two movies a year, and he has two television series’ on TBS – House of Payne and Meet the Browns. He built a multi-million dollar studio in an under-served area in Atlanta, taking advantage of tax credits for building in a blighted neighborhood. Now he is building a mini-empire. He produces, writes, directs and stars in his projects, and he even helps to finance them.

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The Drew Barrymore-produced romantic comedy He’s Just Not That Into You has made the jump from catch-phrase to self-help book to movie hit. With an all-star cast this classic ‘chick flick” appears to be winning the weekend after posting a spectacular $10.5M in opening day ticket sales. That should mean a 3-day start of $27.4M or so, easily out-pacing holdover Taken (Fox) and three other new wide releases. With this kind of opening, Not That Into You could reach almost $60M by the end of next weekend (a 4-day Presidents/Valentine’s combo), which would forecast a potential $90M in US ticket sales.

The new movie developed by New Line and now released by Warner Bros is based on the book of the same name co-written by former Sex & the City scribes Greg Behrendt and Liz Tucillo. The line itself has come to be a reassuring fallback for women in the dating scene (and I’m guessing single guys have adopted the mentality as well in the rough-and-tumble world of dating).

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