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Arts
Monday, October 12, 2015 — 5A

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Have you 
purchased 
the 
Football 
Book 
yet?

Do the 
crossword,
then order 
one.

ACROSS
1 Frozen treat
shown on its
package with
syrup
5 Computer
storage media
10 Sunscreen letters
13 Maxwell House
decaf brand
15 From Taiwan,
say
16 On the __ vive:
alert
17 *Strapless
handbag
19 www address
20 “Whoops!”
21 “Get this away
from me”
23 Former great
26 Carolyn who
created Nancy
Drew
27 “Aha!”
28 Home __: Lowe’s
rival
32 Old Russian
autocrat
33 Neglect, as duty
35 “Ten-hut!”
reversal
37 “Oh yeah? __
who?”
38 *Party favors
holder
41 Physique, briefly
44 __ Field:
Brooklyn
Dodgers’ home
46 Piano practice
piece
48 Sagan’s sci.
50 Wined and dined
53 Frosty flakes
54 Physical therapy,
briefly
56 “Better luck next
time!”
58 Pizza seasoning
61 Like much fall
weather
62 Very angry
63 Warning in a
roller coaster,
and a hint to the
first words of the
answers to
starred clues
68 Org. for shrinks
69 Fur fortune-
maker
70 “Everything all
right?”
71 Introverted
72 Start of a wish
73 Texter’s goof

DOWN
1 PC undo key
2 65-Down’s lass
3 Bearded antelope
4 Bavarian “fest”
month
5 Novelist du
Maurier
6 Ames sch.
7 “What can I help
you with?”
iPhone app
8 __ cow: big
income producer
9 Go furtively
10 *Runner-on-third
play
11 Dog Chow maker
12 Coffeemaker
insert
14 Workout woe
18 Cleared weeds,
say
22 Nero Wolfe and
Sam Spade,
briefly
23 Snake’s sound
24 “Off the Court”
author Arthur
25 *Carpe diem
29 Blue Ribbon
brewer
30 Horseplayer’s
letters
31 Herbal brew
34 CIA Cold War foe

36 Mellow, as wine
39 NFL official
40 Consumed
42 Smell
43 Damp at dawn
45 Blow one’s own
horn
47 “The Waste
Land” poet
48 Kitchen allures
49 High-ranking
angel
51 “Play another
song!”

52 Singer Celine
55 Persian faith that
promotes spiritual
unity
57 Perfume giant
59 Poet Ogden
60 Not fooled by
64 George Bush’s
org.
65 2-Down’s fellow
66 Dance for teens
in socks
67 Fight ender,
briefly

By Ron Toth and C.C. Burnikel
(c)2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/12/15

10/12/15

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Monday, October 12, 2015

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

xwordeditor@aol.com

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TV COLUMN

‘You’re the Worst’ and 
my quarter-life crisis
I 

feel old. I realize that’s 
a ridiculous thing to say 
— objectively, I’m a very 

young person. I’m 21, my skin 
is smooth (and still as oily as a 
teenager’s); 
I know what 
Yik Yak is; 
I can guilt-
lessly indulge 
in late-night 
pizzas with-
out worrying 
about my 
jeans fit-
ting the next 
day. I watch 
young-person 
TV comedies that my dad 
would never really understand, 
like “Broad City” and “You’re 
the Worst.”

But I won’t be 21 for much 

longer. On the morning of Oct. 
12, the day this column will be 
published, the clock will strike 
10:38 and I’ll become a 22-year-
old crone. I’ll officially be older 
than the majority of my friends 
(many of them can’t get into 
bars yet), and I’ll officially be 
older than my father was when 
he got married. Twenty-two 
is a magical age, when many 
people get their first real job 
and move to a real city and 
meet real-adult-friends who 
drink real cocktails instead of 
cheap vodka with vanilla coke. 
I won’t reach any of these mile-
stones in my 22nd year — I’m 
planning on going to graduate 
school, so I’m looking forward 
to another six years in a col-
lege town, waiting to have suf-
ficient degrees for my life to 
actually start.

In the midst of my quarter-

life crisis, I’ve gotten really 
into FXX’s “You’re the Worst.” 
I was a fan when it first aired 
in 2014, but something always 
kept me from connecting emo-
tionally with the show. Objec-
tively, I was not “the worst.” I 
was a 20-year-old Midwestern 
girl who had never done drugs 
or thrown herself into a crazy, 
toxic relationship. None of 
this has changed a year later, 
but “You’re the Worst” has, an 
almost imperceptible bit. The 
show has the same biting wit 
and fearlessness and flawed 
characters that it always has, 
but with every week and every 
new episode, “You’re the 
Worst” pushes its characters 
further out of their immature 
idiot bubbles and into the real, 
grown-up world.

In the second episode of the 

season, “Crevasses,” Gretchen 
decides she’s sick of picking 
her outfits out of a black plastic 
garbage bag in Jimmy’s apart-
ment; she would like a drawer 
in Jimmy’s dresser and for him 
to acknowledge the fact that 
they are actually living togeth-
er and sharing that space. She 
boldly states that she’s going to 
“Towels & Things” to buy some 
stuff that she didn’t steal or 
scam her way into possessing. 
She is going to be a real human 
who buys towels at a store, god-
damn it.

Except she can’t do it. When 

Gretchen arrives at the store, 
she freezes a few feet from 
the door. She makes several 
attempts to walk inside, but 
immediately reroutes to the 
same spot she stood in a few 
minutes ago — it’s like she’s on 

the high dive at the town swim-
ming pool, and she suddenly 
remembered that some kid 
named Andrew did a belly flop 
off the high dive once, and he 
said it really hurt. Gretchen’s 
eyes show the familiar terror of 
a little kid who is realizing that 
this thing that is supposedly 
fun is actually scary as hell. 
She has to decide whether it’s 
worth it to just jump off and get 
it over with or to descend the 
ladder, rung by awkward rung.

I’ve never had trouble buying 

things at a home goods store, 
but this scene was painfully 
relatable to me. Every time I 
open up the website for a mas-
ter’s program application or the 
Word document for my thesis 
proposal, I snap my computer 
shut and leave it in my room 
for a few hours. Maybe if I 
ignore the problem and just 
leave things undone, I’ll never 
have to step up and actually do 
them. Being an adult is scary, 
because you have to make that 
conscious effort to start, and 
then somehow find the motiva-
tion and fearlessness to com-
plete the task. Gretchen wasn’t 
ready yet, and I’m not quite 
there either.

In another episode, Gretch-

en decides to throw a house 
party at Jimmy’s, and invites 
the crew of girlfriends she 
knows are always down for 
a crazy night. But when they 
arrive at the parties with 
babies and AA chips in tow, 
she realizes how much has 
changed in the three years 
since she’d last hung out with 
them. They’re real adults with 
responsibilities and real lives 
to go home to; their days of 
wild nights and cocaine are 
behind them. Meanwhile, 
Gretchen is stuck in the twi-
light zone of her early 20s. 
While she desperately search-
es for an age peer who still has 
the same priorities she does, 
she realizes that Jimmy, her 
live-in boyfriend, might be the 
only one who’s still there with 
her. And that’s fucking ter-
rifying.

The past few installments 

of “You’re the Worst” have 
ended with Gretchen sneaking 
out of Jimmy’s house in the 
middle of night, carrying only 
her jacket and a burner phone. 
I can’t guess what Gretchen is 
up to, but I know her behavior 
has something to do with the 
way she feels trapped by where 
she is in life.

Sometimes, I want to do 

the same. My friends who are 
already 22 have jobs and plans; 
I feel like there’s some thresh-
old to adulthood that people 
cross on their 22nd birthday, 
and as I get closer and closer 
to it, I realize there’s no way 
I’ll make it over in time. I 
don’t write my own checks. I 
never learned how to drive. 
I still haven’t learned any 
marketable skills aside from 
being good at turning essays 
in on time. But when I watch 
“You’re the Worst,” I feel a lit-
tle better about my situation, 
because I can see that other 
people are right here with me. 
There’s something valuable 
about having company in your 

misery, even if that company is 
fictional.

My dad, a fellow TV fanatic, 

has been recommending “Mar-
ried” and “Togetherness” to 
me for the better part of a year. 
For him, these are comedies 
imbued with pathos and a real 
sense of truth, a humor born 
out of middle-aged malaise 
that hits him in just the right 
place. They are also “the fun-
niest shows on TV,” according 
to someone who has never seen 
“Broad City.”

I tried watching 

“Togetherness” because I trust 
my dad’s good taste, but I just 
couldn’t relate in the same 
way. It was funny, but it relied 
on an emotional connection I 
just couldn’t make, because I 
haven’t been 40 years old yet. 
I haven’t felt the same kind 
of nostalgic ache for youth 
or mourned the decades I’ve 
already spent, and I’ve never 
suffered a nagging spouse. 
And that’s OK. One of the best 
things about living in this 
time of “peak TV” and having 
hundreds of quality shows to 
pick from is that there’s always 
somebody on a parallel track 
to you, someone you can follow 
and laugh at and think about 
after the show ends. There’s a 
point of connection for nearly 
everybody; TV offers points 
of view from a broader variety 
of races, cultures, sexualities 
and socioeconomic statuses all 
over the spectrum.

The show I’m connecting 

with at the moment is 
called “You’re the Worst.” 
Should I be concerned about 
what this says about my 
personality? Probably. But a 
Hulu subscription is cheaper 
than therapy, and I’m really 
enjoying this season. This 
show is made for lazy old 
babies like me, so shut up and 
let me have this.

Gilke is on her third cheap 

vodka with vanilla coke. 

To encourage her, e-mail 

chloeliz@umich.edu.

CHLOE

GILKE

FILM REVIEW
New doc explores the 
history of Lampoon

By BRIAN BURLAGE

Daily Arts Writer

“So we all know why we came 

here,” John Belushi starts to 
say at the first meeting of The 
Lemmings 
in the 1970s, 
“A million of 
us. We came 
here 
to 
off 

ourselves.”

One of the 

first 
hugely 

popular 
— 

and 
majorly 

controversial 
— 
National 

Lampoon-
sponsored 
gags 
was 
a 

show 
called 

“The Lemmings.” John Belushi 
stood in front of a live audience 
and essentially talked about all 
the reasons why it makes sense 
for certain people in certain 
situations to kill themselves. 
The character was “manically 
agreeable,” noted one of the 
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead 
interviewees, 
and 
in 
many 

ways he’s right: As we all sit 
and watch this absurd, slightly 
overweight, comic numbskull 
make fun of our collective 
tendency to overreact to things, 
we can’t help but laugh a little 
bit.

“The 
Lemmings” 
show 

featured 
many 
Lampoon 

writers and other guest stars, 
one of which was Chevy Chase. 
In part of his interview for the 
documentary, Chase recalls a 
bit between him and Belushi 
where they pretended to be 
two teenage friends standing 
at a urinal talking. Chase 
remembers 
some 
confusion 

he had about the audience’s 
incessant laughter at Belushi, 
and about a week into the 
routine, he realized what they 
were laughing at. As Chase 
pretended to hold his junk with 
his thumb and index finger, 
Belushi was using his whole 
hand.

This scene, among others, 

captures the National Lampoon 

magazine in its essence: It 
was the Internet before the 
Internet. Irreverent penis jokes 
were somehow thrown into a 
mix of self-deprecation, social 
commentary, 
theatricality, 

and it all seemed wonderfully 
strange and familiar, funny 
and appalling. Think about any 
YouTube 
comment 
section, 

4chan forum or Reddit thread 
— what do you see? A bunch 
of twisted goofball weirdos 
making 
overly 
insightful 

remarks about things of no 
consequence. 
The 
people 

behind National Lampoon did 
it first.

In fact, they did a lot of things 

first, and they did a lot of things 
really, really well. In the mid-
1970s, some of the early Lampoon 
writers like Belushi, Chase and 
Bill Murray entered conversations 
with a young man named Lorne 
Michaels about creating a live 
TV show that would offer new 
sketches every Saturday. That 
show was “Saturday Night Live.”

That same group of writers 

decided also to make a movie about 
the silliness and awkwardness of 
teenage romance and sex, a germ 
of an idea that ballooned into 
one of the most beloved comedy 
films of all time: “Animal House.” 
 

They also turned out a series of 
“Vacation” movies that still run 
constantly during the holidays.

Other writers like Al Jean 

and Mike Reiss knew they 
had screenwriting talent and 
wanted to try scripting for 
television. They found a job 
working for a quirky cartoonist 
named Matt Groening, who’d 
been running his cartoon about 
a dysfunctional family on the 
“Tracy Ullman Show” for several 
months. Reiss and Jean would 
become members of the original 
writing team that created “The 
Simpsons.”

Director Douglas Tirola does 

a good job of making these 
enormously important National 
Lampoon spin-offs subservient 
to the magazine that bore them. 
Tirola takes us in front of such 
varied talent as Kevin Bacon, 
Billy Bob Thornton and Meat 
Loaf to give us a sense of how 
National 
Lampoon’s 
humor 

infiltrated nearly every part 
of the entertainment industry. 
Comedy 
heavyweight 
and 

so-called genius Judd Apatow 
said it best: the people behind 
National Lampoon magazine 
became all of modern comedy.

Is “Drunk Stoned Brilliant 

Dead” a well-done, articulate 
and 
endearing 
documentary 

about 
one 
of 
the 
greatest 

magazines ever? Yes it is. Can 
a documentary ever do such a 
magazine and its people justice? 
Of course not. But it’s enough 
for this film to exist and satisfy 
viewers. Go and be entertained. 

4TH ROW FILMS

5 minutes before start time of the Republican Presidential debate.

B+

Drunk 
Stoned 
Brilliant 
Dead

4th Row Films

State Theater

DO YOU WANT TO GO TO
SHONDA RHIMES-THEMED

PREGAMES?

JOIN DAILY ARTS.

For information on applying, e-mail

ADEPOLLO@UMICH.EDU
CHLOELIZ@UMICH.EDU

TV has a point 
of connection 

for nearly 
everybody.

Gretchen is 
stuck in the 
twilight zone.

