The May issue of The Believer has a couple of pieces of special interest to movie fans: a breakdown of the $15,480 budget of the Duplass brothers' The Puffy Chair, a film that you probably have to see to grasp the fact that they still spent too much on it; and a chat about the nature of sketch comedy between Robert Smigel, genius comedy writer (best known for his TV Funhouse cartoons and as the voice of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) and Bob Odenkirk, who has a brief, not altogether happy stint alongside Smigel at Saturday Night Live before heading off to co-create the '90s alternative-comedy revue Mr. Show with David Cross. Apparently Odenkirk's failure to rock Lorne Michaels's world still eats at him, and he's taken the trouble of filming a sketch idea that he originally wrote for Jon Lovitz, with Paul F. Tompkins in the role, and posting it to YouTube, where he encourages Smigel and, by extension, all those reading their discussion, to watch it. We needed no further inducement.

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Just a few weeks ago, I cracked open the New York Times and received a bit of a shock when I saw that Ted Neeley, star of the 1973 film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, is still out there playing the lead in a touring production of the prehistoric rock musical, despite the fact that, at 65, Ted is close to twice the age of Jesus at the time of his death. Which, I'll admit, strikes me as kind of funny. If you kids are curious about what struck some of us as kind of funny back in the mid-'90s, this parody from the Bob Odenkirk-David Cross sketch series Mr. Show may prove instructive. That's Sarah Silverman as the woman in the crowd who gets beaned with a rock; the beaning was unscripted, and her reaction was improvised.

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