It also introduced viewers to one of Springfield’s most notorious residents: Fat Tony.

The head of Springfield’s criminal element, Fat Tony has since been featured in more than 100 Simpsons episodes — sometimes as a major part of the story, sometimes as just part of a quick gag. No matter how minor the screen time, though, Fat Tony has been voiced by Joe Mantegna, best known for Criminal Minds, The Godfather Part III and countless other roles. 

Mantegna has always been vocal about his love for his longest-running character, and as such, he recently jumped on the phone to talk to us about Springfield’s most notorious wise guy.

The Simpsons was still fairly new when you got the part of Fat Tony. Were you familiar with the show at the time?

I knew it existed, but I don’t watch TV much, so The Simpsons was new to me when I got the part of Fat Tony. What’s funny is, I’d gotten a call a year or two earlier from Julie Kavner to do something on The Tracey Ullman Show, but it wasn’t for Fat Tony, it was something else. I wasn’t able to do that, but after I did Godfather III, I got approached for Fat Tony. I decided to watch a couple of episodes, and I thought it was smart and great. I thought it would be fun for an episode, and that’s it. I had no preconception that it was going to be anything more than that. 

Where did Fat Tony’s voice come from?

I didn’t want to sound like my character in Godfather III because that movie was still playing. I didn’t want it to be Joey Zasa as a cartoon, so I made an instantaneous decision to channel my Uncle Willie, who actually talks like that. I figured I’d do that unless they asked for something different. I did my first lines like that and nobody said anything, so I figured they must be okay with it. Plus, I knew Willie would get a kick out of it because he was on the periphery of that world anyway. He was a bricklayer, but he grew up with a lot of those wise-guy types in Chicago back in the day.

How did Uncle Willie feel about Fat Tony?

He loved Fat Tony. I even did Willie’s answering machine as Fat Tony. See, my father died when I was about 21, and Uncle Willie, who was one of my mother’s brothers, became like my adopted father until he passed away.

He lived in Chicago, but he’d often come visit me here in California. One time, he happened to be here when I was going to record an episode of The Simpsons. I brought him with me, and they all knew I was channeling my Uncle Willie, so when he walked in, they all said, “Oh my God!” It was ground zero for Fat Tony. 

I’ve read that you’re really protective of Fat Tony and that you’ll come in for the smallest Fat Tony appearance. Is that true?

That’s absolutely true, though I’m that way about everything. I’ve been in films where they just need my hands for a shot and they tell me I can head to the trailer and have my stand-in do it, but I always say, “No.” Even if nobody else knows it’s not me, I’ll know. So, if I’m available, why wouldn’t I do it?

I think there was one episode where Phil Hartman did Fat Tony, because I was in Europe doing a film or something. But yeah, I’ve been very protective. They were trying to do me a favor, saying, “We didn’t want to bring you in for one line.” But I told them, “I’ll come in for one line.” One line or 100 lines, what’s the difference? This is what I do for a living, and I’m very lucky that this is what I do for a living.

Anybody in the cast you’ve gotten particularly close to?

Pamela Hayden and Tress MacNeille. They’re at all the Simpsons parties, and they’re always very sweet. The Simpsons parties are monumental. Lately, they’ve been doing it at Universal because there’s that Simpsons world up there now. It’s fun for me because I go to the restaurant there, where there’s a Fat Tony dish: the Fat Tony Ziti.

Do you order that?

Oh hell yeah! I’m just so flattered that the character has resonated and still resonates.

Tell me about the first time you played him in “Bart the Murderer.”

“Bart the Murderer” was monumental for me. It established the character, and I also love that I got to play myself in it. At the very end of the episode, the family is on the sofa, watching the TV movie of Bart’s story, and you hear, “And Joe Mantegna as Fat Tony and Neil Patrick Harris as Bart.” So you hear me and Neil Patrick Harris as ourselves playing Bart and Fat Tony. 

I have one of those animation cels, too. In my office I have the cel of me as me, and, of course, I have some Fat Tony cels too.

What did you think about the Season 22 episode “Donnie Fatso,” when Fat Tony dies and is replaced by his slimmer cousin, Fit Tony, who soon gains weight and becomes the new Fat Tony?

When I first read that script, I was devastated. I thought, “Oh fuck, I’m done. Fat Tony’s over.” Then I got to the end, and the narration basically explains that Fat Tony is gone and replaced by his cousin, Fit Tony. Then he gained some weight and they called him Fit-Fat Tony, but now he’s just Fat Tony. So, I wound up doing the same guy all over again.

When I did Fit Tony, I did change my voice a little bit to make him a little younger. By the next episode, though, he was Fat Tony, so I just brought back the original voice. But yeah, Simpsons aficionados know that Fat Tony died and the new guy is his cousin.

Do you have other favorite episodes, lines or moments for Fat Tony?

What often happens is, Simpsons fans come up to me, and they throw lines at me like, “The pretzel money, do that bit!” And I’m like, “I remember that episode — kind of.” I do remember the one where I was engaged to one of Marge’s sisters. That was fun. There have also been times I’ve voiced Fat Tony when he was younger, like 18, so I’ve had to figure out what that voice sounds like. 

How do you think Fat Tony measures up to a few other fictional mob bosses, like Vito Corleone?

They would have been friends. They’d be contemporaries. Fat Tony would be very respectful of the Corleone family. They’d break bread together.

How about Paulie from Goodfellas?

Fat Tony would share his love of food. They would swap those prison pasta recipes.

What about Tony Soprano?

That’s a good question. In that last episode, Tony dies, right? I guess they don’t say, but it’s implied. I’ll just say that hopefully Tony Soprano had some fit young nephew who could step right in and fill in for him.

Reader, we have bad news for you. We are instead here to talk about literal fingers entering you. They are not entering surgically — they are entering orifices, orifices that are normally shielded from the world by underwear. And they aren’t entering because you told them that this is something you’re into. Instead, these unwanted probes come in the form of... 

5 Airport Virginity Tests

In the 1970s, at Heathrow airport in London, women sometimes arrived at the immigration counter saying they were here to marry their British fiancé. This was allowed and entitled them to a three-month stay, after which they would need additional paperwork to stay longer. If they were instead already married and coming to join a husband in the U.K., that was also allowed. But that required prior authorization, which takes time. In theory, someone who wants to join their husband could attempt to jump the queue by claiming to instead be coming for their wedding.

You could probably think of several forms of evidence a bride-to-be could provide to support her story. Airport officials thought of another: They’d take her to a private room and ascertain her virginity, by trying to insert two fingers into her vagina. If two fingers fit, she wasn’t a virgin, so she was likely married and was lying to them. If they didn’t fit, that supported her story and meant she should be admitted into the country. 

Opponents of this practice offered several objections. The first was that it was rape and rape is wrong, but even assuming British officials don’t care about that, the system still didn’t make sense. Perhaps the passenger wasn’t a virgin but still was coming to marry her fiancé as she said. Perhaps she was a virgin but was still lying. And perhaps this test had zero chance of revealing anything because you can’t actually test someone’s virginity. The body doesn’t work like that. 

Britain ended the practice in 1979, after an outcry when one teacher from India went public about her experience. The Home Office offered this teacher £500. A payoff of that size doesn’t really sound like compensatory damages so much as payment for services rendered. 

4 The Trauma Handshake

You find yourself in an accident. Paramedics arrive, and they treat you in accordance with Advanced Trauma Life Support, a protocol that involves assessing your injuries and trying to stabilize you. And then, someone sticks a finger up your butt. This is a bit of a surprise. You’ve heard about men having digital rectal examinations (DREs) for their prostates as part of regular checkups, but no one ever told you about this. 

@doctormyro

Doctors perform these DREs on incoming patients for a few reasons. By seeing if the body reacts to a finger introduced into the anus, they see whether the spinal cord still functions. The exam also aims to check for injuries to the bowel and urethra. These patient doesn’t understand any of these reasons and may find the intrusion unpleasant, and they may even sue for assault. The exam is sometimes called the “trauma handshake,” both because it’s performed on trauma patients and because it’s traumatizing. 

Of course, we have to weigh that psychological trauma against the benefits of doctors quickly diagnosing patients and possibly saving their lives. So, in recent years, doctors conducted a series of studies evaluating the trauma handshake. These found it’s not a very good tool after all. We have a bunch of better ways of assessing patients, and the handshake is largely ineffective at spotting injuries, especially when done on children. The alternative method of just checking for bleeding is more reliable and is also something they’re probably going to do either way.

Plus, once they reach the hospital, a full CT body scan is pretty standard for trauma patients, rendering all firsthand anal checks redundant. Every study that assesses trauma handshakes concludes by saying, “Hey, maybe let’s stop doing this.” 

Some patients don’t want to feel a finger up their butt. Though, that’s not as bad as some things you can experience as a trauma patient. For example, maybe the doctor stick a finger up your butt, and you’ll realize you don’t feel it. 

3 DMV Gynecology

As you can see, we need to distinguish between doctors legitimately examining patients and doctors sticking fingers in us for no reason. While we can conceive of a world where body scans have made all intimate exams obsolete, in which case our descendants will look back and consider all such exams deeply creepy, for now, we shouldn’t be fearmongering about proctologists or gynecologists. If anything, we should be dispelling people’s natural revulsion toward medically necessary probes, for the sake of their own health.

But the key words there are “medically necessary,” and we could add another one as well: “voluntary.” On the other hand, if you’re sentenced to be probed, you might well object, even if the prober is an M.D. Such was the case in the Soviet Union, where women had to get gyno exams in order to receive driver’s licenses. 

In the USSR, getting a car was so difficult that this medical exam hardly seemed worth discussing next to all the other hurdles. You couldn’t simply buy a car. You had to apply for one through your trade union, convince them you were especially worthy and then wait for years for one to become available. The country wasn’t able to manufacture enough for the demand. Then the Soviet Union fell, and things became better for post-Soviet countries, but some of them like Lithuania retained the exam requirement for driving licenses. 

The stated reason was gynecological diseases create sharp spikes of pain, which may impair drivers. The worst of these cause total loss of consciousness. This could lead to some problems on the roads, even in a country with so few cars as the USSR had.

In 2002, following complaints that this requirement counted as sex discrimination, Lithuania launched a study on those stabbing/dizzying gynecological diseases to see if they really did impede driving. The five-month study ended by concluding that no such diseases exist, so the country got rid of the rule. “It should have been revoked a long time ago,” said one government official. “This requirement made our country look more than strange.”

2 The Oil Check

Wrestling is often considered homoerotic. That’s true whether it’s Ancient Greeks wrestling naked before going off to do it Greek-style or modern-day athletes grabbing each other in close holds and merely looking like they’re making love. 

But only occasionally does wrestling get truly penetrative, as in the case of the maneuver known as the oil check. The oil check (also known, in its milder forms, as the butt drag) is when one competitor inserts fingers up an opponent’s butt. This gives the aggressor more grip, as well as an advantage because the shocked opponent loses concentration. The move is banned in some arenas. Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) rules explicitly forbid the oil check. High school wrestling, however, has no such rule. 

The reasoning behind that lack of a rule actually makes some sense: Schools have more leeway when punishing students, so they can crack down on anyone who tries something improper even without this specific rule inked out. That reasoning falls apart, however, when you learn that the move does happen and goes unpunished. “It happens all the time,” say some wrestlers, while others claim, “That never happens, that sounds crazy,” depending on their own experience. Then we finally get one case where a parent presses assault charge, which might not be the best way of dealing with this, especially since the charges get dismissed. 

The oil check also pops up in professional wrestling, despite the UFC rule. Here’s one MMA fighter laughing off being at the receiving end of an oil check at a 2020 UFC event:

Similarly, if you were considering taking part in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Russia, beware. “Show me in the rules where it’s said that this move is illegal,” said one fighter caught trying it. “Now, it’s new school of BJJ!” That last bit might be some kind of attempted pun on the word “BJ,” but we’re not sure.

As for the WWE, Hulk Hogan claims, “Andre used to do that all the time. He’d do it for a rip. If there was somebody he didn’t like, you know?” The Andre there is Andre the Giant, a man known for his huge hands — his pinky was the size of two of Hulk’s thumbs, by Hogan’s estimate. 

Hogan said he received an oil check from Andre once in Montreal, and if this were a tall tale, you’d expect it to end with Hogan explaining how he got his revenge on him by besting Andre in some later fight. But no: He says he didn’t even call the guy out for it. “You don’t say nothing to the boss man,” says Hogan. “He has his way with you, my brother.”

It shouldn’t be controversial to say some parts of the body are off-limits when two people play-fight for public entertainment. In boxing, such a taboo is the origin of the phrase “hitting below the belt.” 

1 Secret Pelvic Demos

Returning to the topic of good medical exams versus bad medical exams, imagine a woman unconscious in the hospital. Someone in the room performs a pelvic exam on her. Only, she didn’t come to the hospital for a pelvic exam. She came for surgery. The examiner (who is a medical student) does the exam on her anyway. Then a second student does an exam, too. Then a third. An entire class of medical students put their hands inside this woman. She didn’t consent to this and is never informed about it, either before or after. 

This isn’t some uniquely terrible incident that happened just once and resulted in everyone going to jail. Instead, this has been standard practice for medical schools, anywhere that it’s not expressly legal. At the start of this year, 21 states had banned unauthorized pelvic exams (UPEs), while the remainder had not.

Hospitals say UPEs offer some benefits. Medical students need to learn how to do exams, and there aren’t enough volunteers. If an entire class must practice at roughly the same time, an anesthetized subject is ideal. Subjects give legal consent by signing general hospital admissions paperwork, even if the paperwork doesn’t say what they’re consenting to. As for why hospitals can’t seek actual informed consent before doing this to patients, well, hospitals have an answer this as well: Most patients wouldn't give consent. So, if students couldn’t do these exams without consent, they wouldn’t be able to do them at all, and this would deprive them of vital practice. 

In the past year, the federal government finally cracked down on this practice, issuing new guidelines saying hospitals can no longer give patients pelvic exams without express consent. It’s still not a crime to do so, but any hospital that does will forfeit Medicare and Medicaid funding, which should be enough to scare them into stopping. So, you can breathe a sigh of relief now, knowing it will never happen to you.

Unless you’re a woman who was unconscious in a hospital any time before April of this year, in which case maybe it already did. 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.

It goes without saying that, in ideal circumstances, the world of children’s entertainment and the underbelly of organized crime don’t have any degree of overlap. In fact, that’s basically the entire premise behind Danny DeVito’s 2002 satirical black comedy Death to Smoochy, and it’s possibly the reason why the movie bombed so bad. Kids and the mafia don’t mix, just ask Kay Adams. As such, when the Australian children’s television series Bananas in Pyjamas went to Moscow for a photo opportunity with the intention of courting a new international audience, the worst-case scenario they could have imagined would have to have been a run-in with the Russian mob. 

Unfortunately, during a recent interview with News.com.au, Kenneth Radley, who played one half of the potassium-filled pair of titular characters in Bananas in Pyjamas, revealed that, not only was the show’s Russian trip derailed by organized criminals, but the mafia even stole the expensive banana suits and attempted to hold them for ransom for $100,000 Australian dollars.

Sadly for the original Bananas and their expensive Pyjamas, instead of paying the outrageous sum, the show’s marketing head simply split.

“Grahame Grassby was the head of marketing and franchising … and Grahame went all over the world with some banana suits to get photo opportunities at places like London Tower and the White House,” explained Radley, who played anthropomorphized banana B1 for over a decade on Bananas in Pyjamas. “He took the suits to Moscow … and the suits were stolen, and there was a ransom note given to Grassby for $100,000 Australian dollars for the return of the suits.” 

Radley alleges that the note came from the Russian mafia, though it’s hard to imagine how exactly he would know the identity of the kidnappers — no one here is suggesting an inside job, just that there seemed to some monkey business going on.

Nevertheless, Grassby set to rescuing the hostages: “Grahame got in touch with ABC Sydney and said, ‘This has happened, they want $100,000, what will we do?’” Radley recalled. “And the head of the ABC said, ‘Well, we’re not gonna give them $100,000. How much do they cost to replace?’ And Graham said, ‘They’re $20,000 to make.’” 

As such, the president of ABC Sydney told Grassby to bring $20,000 to the drop-off and see if he could work it out with the slippery banana kidnappers. “So they wired $20,000 Australian through and then he’s (Grassby) walking with a briefcase to meet the Russian mafia … and he stopped and thought, ‘What am I doing?’” Radley said of his old coworker’s completely understandable reservations about hostage negotiating. 

“He went straight to the airport and got on a plane with the $20,000,” Radley said of Grassby's objectively correct decision. “So the bananas are actually in some gulag in Russia, in some freezing cold jail.”

I highly doubt the bananas are still frozen in the gulag to this day. At some point, one of those Ruskies must have broken out the chocolate syrup.

When we last saw the workers of Lumon and the world of Severance — spoilers ahead for anyone who is inexplicably waiting until Ben Stiller and Adam Scott start a podcast together to begin watching their critically acclaimed thriller series — Mark S., Dylan G., Helly R. and Irving B. had just pulled off a daring escape into the world outside the secretive Lumon Industries complex and irreversibly punctured the delicate barrier between Innie and Outtie. 

That was on April 8, 2022, and ever since that incredible cliffhanger, Severance has left its audience hanging, waiting for a new thread to pull on, begging AppleTV+ to proceed with a second season that will answer some of our questions and ask many more.

Thankfully, the long wait is almost over, and Severance will return to streaming with new episodes in the new year. But, first, on January 7th, Severance director and producer Stiller and producer/star Scott will launch their Severance companion podcast on Audacy. On the yet-unnamed talk show, Stiller and Scott will discuss and dissect the first season of Severance with celebrity guests before moving on to cover the new episodes as they hit streaming, starting January 17th.

Please try to enjoy each podcast equally, and not show preference for any over the others.

“We have severed ourselves from the world for five years making this show. While we have no memory of what happened during that time, we thought we should do a podcast for all the Innies who will have no recollection of watching, in an attempt to reintegrate them with their memory of the show,” Stiller and Scott explained of the project in a joint statement for Variety, poking fun at their own extended hiatus that no one expected would finally end with a podcast. “We’re happy not to be working with Lumon Industries on this podcast and instead to be bringing it to the world with Audacy Podcasts, who would never send us to the break room.”

On the unnamed companion show, Stiller and Scott plan to host Severance series creator Dan Erickson, executive producer Jackie Cohn, co-stars Zach Cherry, John Turturro and Britt Lower, and even A-list Severance superfans such as Daily Show host Jon Stewart to rewatch, revisit and rediscover each episode of the incredible first season that is almost old enough to start pre-school at this point. 

Presumably, the Severance podcast will follow in the footsteps of other successful companion shows like the Better Call Saul Insider Podcast, which two editors on the lauded AMC legal drama hosted along with their various celebrity coworkers as they discussed each episode during the Better Call Saul’s six-season run. However, unlike the Better Call Saul podcast, Severance doesn’t have the advantage of drawing on a massively successful predecessor series to establish its following, and, seeing as Apple hasn’t even formally announced a third season of Severance, we wonder what the hell Stiller and Scott plan to do with the podcast when they inevitably have to wait another three years just to confirm the greenlight.

Maybe, when Severance Season Two ends on another extended cliffhanger, the podcast can pivot and become a music channel — we’ll never get tired of Defiant Jazz.

A highlight of Season Four’s “Mr. Plow” came when Homer and his family attend the Springfield car show, and encounter a wistful, vaguely embittered Adam West, who bemoans the current state of the Batman franchise before spontaneously breaking into the Batusi.

This memorable cameo only came about because Simpsons writer Jon Vitti decided that he would really like to hang out with Batman. “I wanted to do a winter episode,” Vitti told The Hollywood Reporter, “and then it occurred to me that if Homer bought a snow plow, we could have him go to the car show, and Adam West could be at the car show, and I could meet Adam West.”

The car show bit wasn’t an invention of The Simpsons; following the cancellation of the ‘60s Batman series, West made regular appearances at car shows in character, as Batman. And the part about him being super annoyed at the new Batman movie, well that, too, was true. West actively lobbied to play Batman in the 1980s, but was told that he was “too old.”

It wasn’t just Vitti who wanted to meet West either. Despite the fact that his career was about as hot as Mr. Freeze’s underpants at the time, West’s recording session was a big deal amongst the Simpsons writers and producers. “We were all just in heaven,” Al Jean claimed. Dan Castellaneta, who, as Homer, would instruct Bart and Lisa not to make eye contact with West, recalled that more people showed up for that particular session than any other. “I had never seen so many people come to the stage to see one of our guest stars. All the writers showed up and so forth.”

Co-star Yeardley Smith was similarly shocked: “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Who are all you guys?’” And Castellaneta himself was similarly in awe. “As a big fan of Batman growing up, I was saying to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m recording with Batman!’ That was a big deal with him as a guest.”

While the appearance poked fun at West’s cultural importance in 1992, according to his daughter, The Simpsons became a “career milestone,” paving the way for future work in other animated shows like Family Guy, in which he also played “Adam West.”

This story just goes to show that joining the writing staff of a popular TV series and writing a part for your favorite celebrity is a healthy alternative to stalking. 

A change.org petition in 2022 lobbied to designate Frank Costanza’s Festivus as an official holiday, and frankly, it’s more celebrated than other pseudo occasions like National Bagel Day or Hug a Musician Day. More than 15,000 people signed the plea for Festivus, a celebration based on real-life rituals from the family of Seinfeld writer Dan O’Keefe. 

The Seinfeld crew likely had no idea that people would continue to air grievances and perform feats of strength each year, but maybe they should have seen it coming. After all, Festivus isn’t the only created-for-TV-comedy holiday that’s caught on in the real world. Here are five more holidays that began life as sitcom plots…

4 Best Friends Day

Every day in Bikini Bottom is a celebration of friends, but SpongeBob SquarePants formalized the holiday with Best Friends Day (February 19th if you want to mark your calendar). The concept of the day is simple — give your best pal a gift you think they’ll really enjoy, like a robot servant or a massive wad of gum. 

Play

This marks the second time that Maher has publicly stated that he will be quitting one of his professional activities during a booze-fueled episode of his YouTube show. Back in May, Maher told Jerry Seinfeld that he was planning on retiring from stand-up comedy. Now, again on Club Random, Maher has said that he may walk away from Real Time. And his explanation was both lazy and self-aggrandizing.

Speaking with screen legend Jane Fonda about Donald Trump’s recent electoral win, Maher remarked, “I may quit, because I don’t want to do another — I did Trump.” While the looming dread and exhaustion of another Trump term is certainly something that a lot of people can relate to, Maher wanted us to know that, he, specifically, can’t go through it again, because he’s been making fun of Trump for longer than every other comedian. 

“I did all the Trump stuff before anybody,” Maher claimed. “I called him a con man before anybody. I did ‘he's a mafia boss.’ I was the one who said he wasn’t going to concede the election. I’ve done it.” 

“Well, then, how come he is so hostile to Jimmy Kimmel and not to you?” Fonda returned. 

“He's very hostile to me! He tweets about me every week!” a defensive Maher argued.

Fonda, who isn’t typically regarded as a comedy authority, politely pointed out there is a way forward here: “So find a new thing to do and not, not do Trump, do something else.”

“The show is the politics,” Maher stubbornly retorted. “And he’s going to dominate the news like he always does.”

Suggesting that he’ll bail on his show because he can’t imagine a version of the show in which he doesn’t just re-hash the same hacky Trump jokes he’s been telling for over a decade is pretty on brand for Maher. After all, this is the same guy who once accused The Onion of stealing his joke because he was too lazy to check and see that they published their joke months earlier. 

Obviously Maher isn’t really going to quit. Maher electing to vacate a job that gives him attention and a forum to spout his terrible opinions would be like Garfield giving up lasagna. But this is especially dumb considering that his most recent Real Time editorial was all about how people shouldn’t let Trump’s re-election disrupt their current plans. Maher was specifically talking about spending the holidays with Trump-voting family members, but he actually looked directly into a camera and stressed: “Don’t let Trump live in your brain like RFK’s worm.”

But that was just for the snowflakes who won’t suck it up and spend Jesus’ birthday arguing with their racist uncle. Clearly, the same logic wouldn’t apply to Maher himself.

December is upon us, which means that it’s time for everyone to promote non-denominational, politically correct “holiday season” messaging in their schools and small towns. Around this time of year, right-wing news outlets begin their annual tradition of raging against the War on Christmas, pointing to generic, inoffensive, holiday-branded consumer products from mega-corporations like Starbucks as evidence that there is a conspiracy to obscure the true reason for the season. But, thankfully, a growing number of South Park fans have found a way to fight back against mass-produced idolatry and remind everyone of the real meaning of Christmas: high-fiber diets.

Some crafty South Park fans have discovered that a generic snowman holiday trimming sold in Aldi locations across the world is shaped exactly like a certain secular Christmas mascot, leading to decoration defecation:

The “Turn the Aldi snowman into Mr. Hankey” trend seems to have started in the Facebook group “Aldi Aisle of Shame Community,” when artist and visionary Phill Briggs posted his process photos of a homemade Mr. Hankey early last week with the title, "I Can’t Be the Only One Painting a Christmas Poo on My Kitchen Table on a Monday Night. Hoping to Have Him Done by Thanksgiving.” 

While some nitpicking, no-fiber-eating naysayers criticized Briggs for writing out Mr. Hankey’s catchphrase as “Hidey Ho!” instead of the usual “Howdey Ho!” many hundreds of Mr. Hankey believers took inspiration from Briggs’ paint project and posted their own results within hours of the original post. “My husband and I were going to play Scrabble after Thanksgiving dinner. Plans changed! Now, I am on my way to get an Aldi snowman and paint,” one appreciative fan wrote of Briggs’ now-viral crafts project. 

Another Aldi shopper added a photo of their own results, showing twin Mr. Hankeys, with the comment, “I saw this post first thing this morning. Immediately, I asked my sweet husband if he would go to town and get me a couple of the snowman porch signs. My closest Aldi is 20 minutes away. He asked if I was messing with him. I usually am when he first wakes up. He’s easy prey. No sir. I’m serious this time. He is the absolute best.”

Before long, the entire Aldi Aisle of Shame Community page was overrun with freshly painted Mr. Hankeys as the thrifty shoppers of the South Park community came together with their families to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas. However, and although Briggs’ ingenuity has led to the creation of countless priceless and wholesome moments between crafty Aldi enthusiasts and their loved ones, we must advise caution to anyone looking to paint their own Mr. Hankey — keep him out of your coffee.

Haddish returned to the scene of the crime, according to Page Six, performing at the Comedy Store just as she did before her Thanksgiving arrest last year. In the age-old tradition of turning personal strife into stand-up material, Haddish rehashed the incident for the comedy crowd.

“I’m so happy to see all of y’all. I’m not in jail tonight, and I will not be tomorrow. I promise you!” she said, as seen in a video obtained by TMZ. “But I mean, if you’re gonna go to jail, Beverly Hills is the place to be. There is nothing like the Beverly Hills Police Station. It is niiice, okay?”

It wasn’t so funny last year when police arrested Haddish after she allegedly fell asleep behind the wheel of her car several hours after a Thanksgiving set at the Laugh Factory. That’s virtually a carbon copy of her 2022 DUI arrest in Atlanta, where once again she was snoozing behind the wheel of her car in the wee hours. 

Note to Haddish: If you have to poke fun at your DUI arrests, maybe get some new material? Her Laugh Factory jokes were virtually identical to the ones she told Jimmy Kimmel in June: “I'm gonna tell you right now, if I ever commit a crime ever in life, if I decide to commit one, I'm only doing it in Beverly Hills. I'm sorry, Beverly Hills, I got to tell them! Most beautiful police station I ever been in my life.” 

She also returned to the Laugh Factory last November immediately after the arrest to crack wise. “I prayed to God to send me a man with a job, preferably in a uniform,” she joked. “God answered my prayers.”

She recycled that joke as well, telling Jimmy Fallon last January that she had been “praying to God to send me a new man. A good man. And God went ahead and sent me four — in uniform.” Cue Fallon bursting into hysterics.

Say what you will about DUI jokes — and the commenters on Page Six had plenty to say — Haddish claims to have cleaned up her act. Her newfound sobriety has made her meaner, she said last April. “When I drank, there was a filter, okay?” she said. “Because I would think really mean things, and want to say really mean things, but I just told myself not to say them. Now I say the shit.”

And more often than not, she says that shit twice. 

An inextricable part of the Extras and The Office creator’s legacy in the entertainment business is his brief foray into pop music, starting his career as one half of the short-lived new wave group Seona Dancing in the early 1980s. Like his most famous character David Brent, Gervais thought of himself as a musician first, everything else second. But the world of Brit Pop apparently told him that he has a face for comedy, not Glastonbury. Still, even when he became the U.K.’s most internationally celebrated TV comedy creator, Gervais continued to take inspiration from his earliest musical influences, including from his personal hero, David Bowie.

Aladdin Sane appeared as himself in a 2006 episode of Extras, and he serenaded Gervais’ character Andy Millman with a bespoke, Hunky Dory-style diss track about a “little fat man who sold his soul.” During a recent appearance on the Stick to Football podcast, Gervais revealed that, while Bowie’s song on Extras may have been brutally insulting towards Gervais and his physique, in real life, Gervais was actually elated because his hero was singing his lyrics.

During the talk, Gervais called the Extras shooting day when Bowie sat down at a piano and sang a song about how Gervais is talentless, fat and deserving of death “one of the best days of my life.” Gervais said of his relationship with Bowie and his work, “He was a hero of mine. He’s properly my hero, I’d say.”

As Gervais explained, when Bowie agreed to do the sitcom, Gervais sent him the lyrics to the song, including lines like, “He’s so depressed at being hated, fatso takes his own life,” and “He’s banal and facile, he’s a fat waste of space.” Using Gervais’ self-slams in verse, Bowie wrote the music for the Extras all-time best original song – with some entirely unwarranted direction from the “fatso” himself. 

“I remember I sent him the lyrics, and I called him up and said, ‘Did you get the lyrics?’ And he went, ‘Yeah, yeah,’” Gervais recalled. “And I said, ‘Give me something sort of retro, like “Life On Mars.’” And he went, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll knock off a quick fucking “Life On Mars” for you.’”

“And I realized that was so insulting! He’s doing my little sitcom, and (I’m telling him), ‘Do your opus,’” Gervais admitted. 

Thankfully, Bowie didn’t take the slight too personally, and he brought his best to Extras. Said Gervais, “He came, and it was just really funny. He’s really charming. He’s really smart. And he was really funny.”

He’d better be — he’s the best selling show.

“We have made a pact, Ryan and I, to go to our grave with that line, but I will say that it was replaced with an equally dirty line of dialogue about Pinocchio shoving his face up Deadpool’s ass and starting to lie like crazy,” Levy said. “I was like, ‘Ryan, that’s your replacement line in response to, ‘Can we clean it up?’ That’s Ryan Reynolds for you, audacious to the very edge.”

The calendar just turned to December and so much for going to the grave. The secret’s already out, with no dead bodies to show for it. Dirty secrets being revealed is not so surprising. But here’s a jaw-dropper for you: The Dirtiest Joke of ‘Em All is posted in the screenplay on Disney’s ‘For Your Consideration’ website. 

What’s the joke that had to be changed? The not-so-clean version that made it into the movie went something like this:

DEADPOOL: Fuck! What, we can’t even afford one more X-Man? Disney is so cheap. I got Pinocchio jammed in my ass, and he’s lying like crazy.

In the original version, the script landed on a different punchline:

DEADPOOL: Fuck! What, we can’t even afford one more X-Man? Disney is so cheap. I can barely breathe with all this Mickey Mouse cock in my throat.

And that whirring sound you hear is Walt Disney spinning in his grave.

In September, according to Deadline, Reynolds also teased the cut at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. “There was only one line in the entire film that they asked me to take out.” He refused to give in to an audience who longed to hear the nastiness. “No. No. No! And they were right!”

Reynolds recounted the phone call he received about the original script. “Ryan, Bob Iger here. Would love it if you’d take that one line out. It’s really going to make our life hard over here.”

Reynolds admitted that Disney saying “You can’t” triggered something in his comedy brain that said, “Must keep line! Precious!” But after that initial rush of defiance, the Deadpool actor simply penned alternate obscenities. “As soon as the fog of war lifts and you have a second thought, it’s like, ‘Of course I can take that out. Can I say something about Pinocchio instead?’ And the answer is yes!”

Somehow, Deadpool & Wolverine still managed to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time without referencing Mickey’s animated extremities. Bring on the Oscar nominations.

Cleese seems like an odd choice to write a Superman story, considering that his only previous superhero experience was the “Bicycle Repair Man” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Nonetheless, Cleese and Python scholar Kim “Howard” Johnson penned an “Elseworlds” comic, 2004’s Superman: True Brit, which imagined what would have happened had the Man of Steel’s ship crash landed in Britain, rather than America. It was pretty strange.

How strange? Well, at one point a young Kal-El, or “Colin” as he’s known in True Brit, accidentally impales a fellow student with a cricket bat. The resulting bloody carnage makes Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s Black Knight scene seem downright understated by comparison. 

Then there’s the scene in which Superman saves The Rutles, thus confirming that Eric Idle’s 1970s Beatles mockumentary takes place in the DC universe.

How much of the book Cleese actually wrote is unclear, but it does seem pretty out-of-character for him to throw in an homage to one of Idle’s projects. Much of the True Brit storyline finds this alternate Superman using his powers to perform British acts of heroism, such as pulling a commuter train to ensure that it arrives on time, and using his heat vision to warm up a cup of tea for his adoptive parents. 

And in this version of events, “Colin” gets a job working, not for The Daily Planet, but for a British tabloid: The Daily Smear. This means that Superman’s best pal, Jimmy Olsen, is a paparazzi creep who scales a building just to try and snap a photo of a naked celebrity.

Incidentally, the comic was illustrated by renowned Superman artist John Byrne. So the whole thing looks exactly like a Superman comic should, but the storyline is incredibly bizarre, mostly because it’s seemingly trying to be both funny and satirical (mostly poking fun at the British press) but it ends up just being confusing and peculiar.

To be honest, it would have been preferable to just get a comic in which Superman runs a chaotic seaside hotel with his exasperated wife, using his superpowers to impress German guests and make inconvenient corpses disappear.

Still, it’s far from the worst thing that John Cleese has attached his name to in recent years. 

It’s all the more impressive considering that, until about 200 years ago, they were considered real shitheads. The earliest writings about elves in Anglo-Saxon England describe them as a cause of illness in people and livestock. Specifically, any sharp pain could be blamed on an “elf-shot,” which really puts Leglolas’ whole deal in perspective. Later, it was believed that elves had a tendency to seduce or rape humans and kidnap human babies. Mostly, elves loved to trick people. As if the rape and kidnapping weren’t bad enough, the Rumplestiltskin-ass jerkwads had to rub it in.

So just how did those bastards become Santa’s little helpers? Their image rehabilitation was carried out largely by the Brothers Grimm, who published “The Elves and the Shoemaker” in 1812. It tells the story of three elves (technically “little men,” but the Grimms probably didn’t mean humans with dwarfism) who show up each night to pick up the slack for an overworked cobbler who wakes up flabbergasted to find his work already done. It’s not altogether out-of-character for the trickster gods. It’s just an altruistic prank instead of — we really do have to keep checking our notes here — rape and kidnapping.

From there, it was easy to slot these creatures now known for their diligent work ethic into another story that needed them: the developing Santa myth. That’s a whole thing in and of itself, but most of what we think about Santa came from “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” released only 11 years later, which incidentally describes Santa as a “jolly old elf” even though he’s almost definitely a separate species from his factory employees.

Still, Santa didn’t actually get the help he needed until 1857, when Harper’s Weekly published a poem called “The Wonders of Santa Claus,” which described elves “all working with all their might / To make a million of pretty things / Cakes, sugar-plums and toys / To fill the stockings, hung up you know / By the little girls and boys.” That was the point of no return, when elves became a permanent fixture at the North Pole. It was an easy answer to the question, “How does Santa get everything done?” even though that line of inquiry is always going to end at, “It’s magic, now eat your peas,” anyway.

But don’t think that just because they’ve rebranded means they’re repentant; a century of advertising has taught us better than that. Keep as close an eye on that shelf jockey as he’s keeping on you. He’s capable of unspeakable things.

Danson wasn’t expecting that reveal, apologizing to his stepchildren for that intimate look inside their bedroom. “Nice,” he replied. “I wasn’t setting that one up, but that’s great. Sorry, kids.”

But Steenburgen had a good reason to believe Danson had something in common with the preening Malone. The two met when the actress was being considered for a part in the movie Pontiac Moon. She showed up to meet director Peter Madak and Danson, where she was shocked by his long, flowing locks (courtesy of extensions he was wearing for the comedy Getting Even With Dad).

“You’re walking ahead of me, and you’re tossing your fake hair as you walk through the restaurant," Steenburgen remembered. “You were so attached and so proud of it. And I just remember that my first thought of you, besides adoring you on Cheers, was, ‘Well, this is the most ridiculous creature I’ve ever met.’”

“And from that moment on, folks, I had her,” Danson joked.

Eventually, Danson changed Steenburgen’s mind. “You’d come to work, and you had paint all over your clothes because you were doing these little paintings,” she explained. “And I just kept thinking, Wow, he’s not who I pictured.”  

The big moment in their courtship, said Danson, was a four-mile canoe ride. “We came back not just friends,” he swooned. “I think we pulled over and kissed and then got back into the canoe. And I was smitten. I was a goner at that point.”

Things were going so well that Steenburgen eventually had to tell her ex-husband of 10 years, actor Malcolm McDowell. That wasn’t necessarily going to be easy. “He hadn’t exactly loved people I’d gone out with after our divorce,” she confessed. “And he could be kind of obvious about it.”

But once things started to take off with Danson, she wanted to tell McDowell “quite early on so he wouldn't hear it from somebody else. And I said, ‘I know you haven’t liked people I’ve gone out with, but the person I’m seeing now is someone I know you like.’”

McDowell wanted to know who it was this time. “And I said, ‘It’s Ted Danson.’” Her ex, as it turns out, was a fellow Cheers fan. “And he goes, ‘Oh, shit.’ Because he didn’t really know you, but he admired you so much as an actor.”

Now it sounds like one big happy family. “He has been nothing but loving and kind,” Danson said. “I adore him. I really do. We’re very lucky.” 

Gosharooney!

There are dozens of Simpsons episodes ranging from the Golden Age to the modern era that could be loosely summarized as, “Marge gets upset with everyone else in Springfield tolerating and embracing something distasteful and spends the entire runtime nagging her family about it.” In fact, most of the best Simpsons episodes ever have at least a little bit of Marge moralizing in them. “Marge vs. The Monorail,” “Bart After Dark” and “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” all jump to mind as classics that wouldn’t be complete without one of Marge’s famous lectures.

However, if Marge wasn’t there to push back against indecency and bad taste, the entire Simpsons family would devolve into awfulness — which is exactly why Julie Kavner put her foot down in 1993 when it came time to record her lines for “Krusty Gets Kancelled.” According to The Simpsons Season Four DVD commentary, Kavner refused to participate in the episode due to its overindulgence in needless celebrity cameos — and, judging by the Elon Musk episode, the Lady Gaga appearance and the groan-worthy Billie Eilish short that would eventually follow, the rest of The Simpsons crew should have listened.

In “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” a rising komedy star known as Gabbo the puppet competes directly with The Krusty the Clown Show in its own time slot, eventually beating out Springfield’s most colorful entertainer in the ratings and leading to the cancellation of Krusty’s show — even Itchy & Scratchy end up jumping ship to Gabbo. In order to save Krusty’s kareer, Bart and Lisa inspire the clown to stage a comeback show featuring his many celebrity friends, a group that included Johnny Carson, Hugh Hefner, Bette Midler, Luke Perry, Elizabeth Taylor, Barry White and every one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing themselves.

The Simpsons writers and producers deliberately hired as many A-listers as they could book for “Krusty Gets Kancelled” to follow up the success of the episode “Homer at the Bat,” in which many baseball superstars played themselves as ringers for Mr. Burns’ company softball team. Given the conflicting schedules of so many in-demand celebrities, many of the planned guest stars had to drop out of the episode at the last second, and The Simpsons almost had to scrap the entire comeback special sequence due to the no-shows.

Meanwhile, the committed, day-in, day-out, hard-working series regulars of The Simpsons took issue with their bosses making a mockery of the voice-acting profession by shamelessly snatching up as many big names as they could for brief performances. Both Kavner and Harry Shearer vocalized their displeasure with the stunt casting, and Kavner even opted to boycott the episode entirely, leaving Marge in the background of many shots in “Krusty Gets Kancelled” but completely and atypically silent for the first time in Simpsons history.

Now, 30 years later, it’s clear that Kavner had a point about The Simpsons selling its soul for celebrity cameos at the expense of the art itself. Maybe Springfield is better off without a house of burlesque, too.

Debuting on SNL on December 3, 1994, “The Chanukah Song” has changed a bit over the last three decades — with the names of new Jewish celebrities being swapped in and out — but it’s never stopped being a banger (Chanukah or otherwise). Sandler wrote the original with SNL writers Ian Maxtone-Graham and Lew Morton, the latter of whom recently spoke to me about coming up with the biggest Chanukah hit since “I Have a Little Dreidel.”

When did you join Saturday Night Live as a writer?

In the fall of 1993. Sandler had been there for a while already, but I’d only worked with him a little bit before “The Chanukah Song.” He would do these holiday songs that were always fun to work on. He did Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, and this was just one of those. We had no idea it would be the winner it turned out to be.

How did the idea for a song about Chanukah start?

Sandler deserves all the credit for the song. Ian Maxtone-Graham and I sat in a room with him with a book called The Book of Jewish Lists, which was a book in every Jewish person’s bathroom at this time, and we helped him with some rhymes. It was a fun time with Adam and his guitar, posing unlikely rhymes with names of Jewish guys. 

Do you have a particular favorite celebrity that you got to include in the song?

I really loved that we had Rod Carew in there. There was some performance somewhere where he showed up to give his line: “I converted!”

What do you remember about the initial audience reaction to the song?

It destroyed so hard during the show that Adam kind of had to stop after every line. I remember worrying, “I hope this plays well at home because it’s killing so hard here that he can barely do it.”

You guys did craft a true holiday classic.

I’m Jewish, and when you live your life as a Jewish kid around Christmas time, you’d always hear the choir sing five or six really great Christmas carols written by the greatest composers in the Western canon. Then you’d get, “I had a little dreidel, I made it out of clay” — it really couldn’t have felt more token. Everyone knows damn well it’s the crummiest song of all of them.

So, it’s sort of amazing to have been part of something that’s become a part of the holiday canon.

Those movies are going to be the absolute pinnacle of any composer’s career. Before that, they’ll be doing even sillier stuff, and that goes equally for the most famous composers of all.

“So I watched Edge of Tomorrow yesterday for the first time,” Redditor TheAlmightyTapir told r/Movies, “and it was a good action/sci-fi movie. I liked it. And the ending was nice right up until the credits kicked in with, ‘IIIIIIIIII NEED TO KNOOOOOOW NOW!’ It was incredibly jarring, and it got me thinking if there are any other movies out with an incredibly poor/random choice of music in the end credits.” 

They then asked for more “movies with the most inappropriate music in the end credits?” and their fellow Redditors couldn’t have been more inappropriate in their responses. 

20 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

19 Brightburn

18 Dragnet

17 Ben-Hur

16 Eragon

15 Con Air

14 An American Werewolf in London

13 The Emperor’s New Groove

12 Finding Dory

11 Sunshine

10 Event Horizon

9 Tenet

8 The Prestige

7 Twilight

6 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

5 Battleship

4 Spider-Man

3 Addams Family Values

2 Gangs of New York

1 The Haunted Mansion

Here are a few times celebrities had to clarify that they weren’t flattened at the bottom of a remote canyon…