Funny

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

NBC evidently believes laughter is the best medicine: The struggling network will have a strong dose of comedy on four nights in its fall lineup plus the Season 3 return of"The Voice. " Keeping its Thursday sitcom block essentially intact with existing series, NBC will push the low-rated comedies"Community"and"Whitney"to Fridays and open up Tuesdays and Wednesdays for new sitcoms such as "Go On," "Animal Practice" and "Guys With Kids. " Nearly one-quarter of NBC's fall prime-time schedule will consist of sitcoms; last fall, the figure was just 14%. Also on the schedule: the Monday one-hour series "Revolution," the new sci-fi drama from producer J.J. Abrams, and, for Wednesday, "Chicago Fire," from "Law & Order" mastermind Dick Wolf.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

At Home on the Range A Cookbook Margaret Yardley Potter with a forward by her great granddaughter Elizabeth Gilbert McSweeney's Books: 256 pp., $24 You've probably never seen the fine art of bread-making broken down quite like this in a recipe: "Now relax. Sit down, light a cigarette, write a letter or make your own plans for the next fifteen minutes while the dough 'tightens up' as we bakers say. "Is your cigarette finished? Let's go. This is fun. " So writes Margaret Yardley Potter in her cookbook "At Home on the Range.

Eileen Winters, 84, comedian Jonathan Winters' wife of 60 years, died after a long battle with breast cancer Sunday evening at home in Montecito, said their son, Jay. The couple met at the Dayton Art Institute after World War II. In 1949, the year after they were married, Eileen encouraged her funny husband to enter an amateur talent show. "The first time I heard him talk," she later recalled, "my jaw began hanging open. Did he make up all those things by himself?"

Wouldn't it be funny if people stopped reading T.J. Simers' column and quit writing letters to the editor about T.J.? Ron Abrams Los Angeles

Re: Tony Perry column, "Was Juvenile Agent Exposed to Too Much XXX to Testify?" (Aug. 14). The overworked San Diego Police Deparment is making an effort to keep juveniles out of the burgeoning adult book stores as much as possible. The majority of the public appreciates this effort. Unfortunately, Mr. Perry feels it's necessary to write a sneering, comedic column deriding their good work. He even quotes criminal attorney A. Dale Manicom's college-boy humor--real class. Women and children (even toddlers)

I hope the creators of Air America read David Shaw's critical column ("All-Left Radio Is Lacking the Right Stuff for Success," April 18) and try to understand what they are doing wrong before they bore themselves right off the air. Shaw's perception of their "aren't we funny and smarter" attitudes is the most annoying aspect of their programming, especially since they aren't very funny or very original at all. I was looking forward to a left-wing edge...

I know those of us who don't like T.J. Simers are unhip squares, lacking a sense of humor. Simply put, we don't get it. For contrast, I'd like to point out some things that I do find funny: Chris Rock. Al Franken. David Letterman's old NBC show. Woody Allen's early funnier stuff. "The Simpsons." George Carlin's 1970s material. "Lost in America." Wait a minute ... maybe I do have a sense of humor. Could it be that T.J. just isn't funny? Ed Nemiroff Sherman Oaks

Regarding Robin Abcarian's column on Carlos the Jackal ("Carlos Takes Tinseltown? He Could've Been a Terror," Aug. 24): Your article--intended to be witty, I am sure--was in terribly bad taste. Shocking. There can never be anything funny about people bleeding in airports after being machine-gunned or planes being blown up. There must be a thousand ways to poke fun at Hollywood. Terrorism is definitely not one of them. On that day, your pen should have dried up. MAURICE KORNBERG Los Angeles

At times"God Bless America"feels more like an assault weapon than a movie, possibly an AK-47. This funny, sick twist of social satire is certainly locked and loaded, even if its aim is sometimes off. The central character is Frank (Joel Murray), a vigilante of virtue who targets the irritants of modern times - reality TV stars, bratty teens, people who check cellphones in movies and a judge on a talent show who sounds a lot like Simon Cowell. The commentary that runs through Frank's head is accompanied by a ton of blood and guts splattered all over the place because, frankly, writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait has a lot he wants to get off his chest.

Is it possible to humanize a presidential candidate by proxy? That seems to be the aim of Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, who is pursuing the hearts of voters by carefully parceling out seemingly intimate details of her own life. On Thursday, fresh off her turn in the "mommy wars" spotlight, Romney sat down with "Entertainment Tonight" and revealed that her multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed in 1998, had flared up last month as a result of the rigors of the campaign trail. "E.T.

Armando Iannucci's droll, fleet "Veep," which premieres Sunday on HBO and stars Julia Louis-Dreyfusas Selina Meyer, vice president of the United States, has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, who once came close to occupying that post and bears a minor resemblance to the star. It is, rather, an Americanization of Iannucci's fitfully ongoing 2005 BBC series "The Thick of It" and its spun-off 2009 film "In the Loop," whose protagonists are minor ministers in the U.K. government, and which make comedy from the place where power and powerlessness, ambition and limitation overlap.

Despite its rather tiresome and typographically unwieldy title,ABC's "Don't Trust the B - in Apartment 23" is among the least raunchy of this year's super-sized batch of female-centric comedies. It is also one of the funniest, which should make a point about the tantalizing though too often abusive relationship between shock and humor, and also the comedic value of the word "vagina," which will never be as high as the various slang terms for the word "penis. " (It may just be a syllable thing.)

Chomp: A Novel Carl Hiaasen Alfred A. Knopf: 304 pp., $16.99, ages 10 and up South Florida is known for many things: Alligators, orange groves and the writer who spins the area's most sensational attributes into even more sensational story lines, Carl Hiaasen. In his many bestsellers for adults and kids, Hiaasen has demonstrated a unique gift for wrapping real environmental issues into apocryphal, bust-a-gut books that parody pop culture - a talent he furthers in his most recent middle-school novel, "Chomp.

Rueful, funny and wise, "The Salt of Life" is a comedy not of errors but of the tiniest of missteps. A warm yet melancholy film of quiet yet inescapable charm, it has a feeling for character and personality that couldn't be more delicious. That a film as delicate, personal and small-scaled as "Salt of Life," directed and co-written by Italy's Gianni Di Gregorio, exists at all is a function of fate and chance. Di Gregorio, who also stars, acted as a young man before beginning what became an accomplished screenwriting career.

What a low blow. Not only are we insulted by comics who accuse us of having fallen off the salami truck, but now our own Valley columnist, Al Martinez, (Feb. 23) says we are a hotel in which nothing funny has ever happened. What does he have in mind? Should we short-sheet his bed next time he stays here? How about peanut butter in the soap dish? Incidentally, the Improv at the Valley Hilton is not a franchise, and our recent survey indicates that Sherman Oaks has many more professional people than air-conditioning repairmen.

Patrick Goldstein makes some interesting points in his piece about the recent big-screen travails of the "Saturday Night Live" graduating class ("Are These Guys Still Funny?," Nov. 17). He points out the ample evidence that Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin and Billy Crystal have flopped mightily of late on the big screen. But in his rush to judgment, Goldstein seems intent on proving his premise that the actors have lost touch with hip young audiences primarily because they've gotten old. This despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

The problem with Eddie Murphy? It is not a problem of talent or fearlessness. He has plenty of both. But in "A Thousand Words," shot in 2008 and now available for your viewing displeasure, he's a first-rate talent stuck in yet another third-rate piece of bleccch, written by Steve Koren, who shoveled us the Adam Sandler leavings "Click" and "Jack and Jill," and directed by frequent Murphy collaborator Brian Robbins, whose résumé includes "Norbit" and...

If it's a Funny or Die movie, where's the "die" button? Because watching "Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," which arrives under the production banner of the popular comedy video website, makes you want to exercise the freedom to click that reject (eject?) button and consign the movie forever to the Funny or Die crypt, right next to "Pandas Teach You How to Dougie" and "Whoopi Farts on 'The View.'" Cult comedy team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim take the mechanics of the Funny or Die website and stretch it past the breaking point with their movie, which revolves around an astronomically budgeted flick, a love story starring Johnny Depp (or would have, if the Hollywood producers Heidecker and Wareheim play had bothered to contact him)