Which Charlie among Charlies am I charlieing about, you might ask. And rightly so. Unless you know me, in which case you wonder wrongly and inattentively because the Charlie is surely obvious. Might it be Charlie Chaplin? A fine guess. One of our greatest comedic Charlies. I wrote a paper or two on said Charlie in grad school after all (two papers, at two grad schools, to be precise). But what about another screenwriting and directing Charlie, one Charlie-boy Kaufman (as close friends call him), director of Being John Malkovich and many more? WRONG, you goddamn idiot!

Well it’s Charlie Sheen, by Jehovah’s witness. Winning! Etc! But no. Not he. Good comedy is liberal and not the stuff of cocaine-addled, wife-shooting and wife-punching celebrities like Sheen. Well howzibout the liberal hilarity of the mid-century US political project of making enough room in the crotch of your slacks to carpet-bomb and napalm hundreds of thousands of peasants in southeast Asia, like genocidal death? Ah shucks, not that funniness either, alas.

What an indulgent way to plug a friend’s comedy special. Call it compensation for being such a fanboy. The Charlie in question, once interviewed here on the site, is of course Vancouver’s Charles Demers, champion of CBC’s The Debaters, essayist and novelist, and favorite guest on the greatest of Canadian comedy podcasts Stop Podcasting Yourself (take the wayback machine to episode 74 in 2009 for Charlie’s now famous Gene Simmons little person joke). Our pal Demers has a new-media-fresh online comedy special hot off the superhighway for our downloading pleasure. And at the reasonable price of 5 of our Harper earth dollars. Recorded live at the Waldorf Hotel in East Van, just down from my old apartment on Commercial Drive, it’s worth every worthless penny my friends. Get it HERE.

Did I mention Charlie returned this week, on episode 222, for his umpteenth Stop Podcasting Yourself appearance? We all know I didn’t, but now we do know. Oh “we.”