Stuart Smalley ‘Disappeared?’
With the announcement of his Senate bid, the call came in from headquarters to go dig up some old clips of Al Franken from his days on Saturday Night Live — including the classic “Franken & Davis” show with Tom Davis and his mincing self-help caricature Stuart Smalley.
But a search of YouTube turned up nothing — not a single clip, including his turn as a drunken railroad porter in Trading Places. Even the notoriously copyright-ambivalent DailyMotion was bare. Of course, there’s plenty of stuff from his more recent career as a pundit like his show on Air America, promotional appearances on book tours, appearances on Comedy Central’s faux news shows and more screeds from Bill O’Reilly, who calls Franken ‘Stuart Smalley’ at every opportunity.
I’m not one to indulge in conspiracy theories except for entertainment value, but is this a reflection of NBC’s efforts keep their content off YouTube, or something more insidious — is there anyone out there wearing a tinfoil hat who knows what kind of pull Franken has with the Illuminati?
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online casino download on March 9th, 2007 at 10:57 am - Permalink
Clips of Stuart Smalley being passed around would only help Al Franken. EVERYONE loved Stuart!!!
DJ on October 16th, 2008 at 7:52 am - Permalink
I was looking for a Stuart Smalley clip to cheer up a friend that is worried about getting laid off and also found nothing. Very disappointing, that SNL skit was awesome and my friend would have thought it hillarious. Oh well .. tough issue on copyright - If NBC wants to be overzealous about protecting their content, I wish they would make some of these small clips available on their own site. Its narrow thinking to go after the sites that host their content and recognize the demand that people want to see the short clips. Reminds me of Napster … if corporate america would have recognized the demand for online digital music and made it broadly available before Napster was big or at least while Napster was getting big, it would have been less of an issue. There was a significant gap between Napster being shut down and the big labels making their music broadly available on pay sites like iTunes.
Brooks Tower on November 20th, 2008 at 9:32 am - Permalink