It's About Time

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. If you don't know, or don't remember, who Jamie Kennedy is, I'm sorry to do this to you. If on the other hand, you do remember Jamie Kennedy, but only from the handful of accidentally good things he did, performances in Scream, Three Kings, Ad Astra, and Bas Lerman's Romeo and Juliet, yeah, it's good, get over yourselves,

yourselves, then I'm really sorry to do this to you. In some sense, Jamie Kennedy is an actor, and in some, even looser sense, he is also a stand-up comedian. You'll see how loose in a second.

The best you can say for Jamie Kennedy is that he's tenacious. He came to Hollywood after graduating high school in 1988, intent on becoming famous, but he found what most people who follow this approximate path do, that he couldn't book a thing, and he ended up working at Red Lobster and doing telemarketing.

But here's where that's Nassidy comes in. Kennedy, correctly, realized that his main impediment was a lack of representation, that he was stuck in the show business doom loop of needing an agent to get work and needing to get work to get an agent.

So he invented an agent, a fictional character called Marty Power, who made phone calls all around town talking up his hot new client, Jamie Kennedy. And it worked. So you've gotta respect the hustle.

Or do you? I don't, I'm pretty much allergic to the hustle, but maybe that's different for you. Perhaps you're getting a sense that I don't care much for Jamie Kennedy, which puts me in the majority of people who know Jamie Kennedy.

If he loses sleep over that, though, he's got no one but himself to blame. Kennedy is one of those people who is largely famous for being irritating, a brand of celebrity we're hopefully producing fewer and fewer of. Most of them are men, most of them are white,

and a concerning proportion of them are redheads. Science doesn't know why, and there should be a prize for solving what I call the Danny Bonaducci conjecture. Aside from the movies he appears in, including those I mentioned above, but also a whole lot more totally unwatchable ones, Kennedy is probably best known for two things.

Welcome to the Jamie Kennedy experiment. For two years in the early aughts, he had a reality prank show on the defunct WB network called the Jamie Kennedy experiment. At the time, prank shows were having a sort of unlikely moment as reality TV began its

slow expanding dominance. MTV had Ashton Kutcher's punked, which was a humongous hit, and apparently someone at Warner Brothers thought Kennedy was a cost-effective generic alternative. But while I would never go to bat for either punked or ashton kutcher, the Jamie Kennedy

experiment was a deeply unpleasant, awkward, and mean-spirited program. I found some clips for you, but after careful consideration have decided to only give you a moment of what is considered one of the good ones, in which Kennedy dresses up as Benjamin Franklin, for reasons too tedious to explain.

June 1776, five men had been tasked with forming a declaration committee. This committee would shape the words that would in turn shape this great country. Who needs those other men? Why I can draw up this great declaration myself.

We are the people. No, that's not it. God. What I've written clearly blows chunks.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Dammit, then. What am I doing? I am such a douchebag.

Ha ha ha ha. Where is my main man, Thomas Jefferson, when I need him? Basically the gag of the Jamie Kennedy experiment

was that Jamie would take on some vague approximation a character whose defining characteristic was annoying and whose secondary defining characteristic was usually perverted. Maybe an annoying and perverted grocery clerk, or an annoying and perverted judge, or an

annoying and perverted Benjamin Franklin impersonator. Whatever annoying and perverted persona would then be loosed upon some unsuspecting person who was trying to go about their life, and the cameras would watch as they got increasingly annoyed and or disgusted until they finally walked away, at which point Jamie Kennedy

Kennedy would tell them, you got ext. Then invariably the person would say something to the effect of, what the fuck are you talking about? And Kennedy would explain that this was all a prank show.

But rather than his victims finding this a relief, or funny, they tend to roll their eyes and look even more annoyed and disgusted than when they thought they were just dealing with reality. This show ran incredibly for three seasons, which tells you more about the median Nielsen

ratings at the WB than it does about Bush administration era America's taste in comedy. Anyway, the other thing Kennedy is best known for today is First Night. Welcome to First Night with me Jamie Kennedy. How's everybody doing? Uh-oh, here comes the stand-up. Gather up your tarps, ladies and germs, because the

first three rows will get wet. I am so glad it is over. I'd like to talk about some stuff in 2012. Talk about some stuff that happened actually.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tied the knot with his longtime girlfriend, Pachilla Chan, earlier this year. And they consummated their marriage with one long, awkward poke.

That's right guys, all night we're gonna be telling jokes like this. Honey Boo Boo and her mom, June became big TV stars this year. You guys like Honey Boo Boo? When asked what it's like to raise an obnoxious

chubby maniac, Honey Boo Boo responded, itch! How about our good friend Lindsay Lohan? You guys follow Lindsay Lohan? She had a big year. She was Elizabeth Taylor in the mini series Liz and Dick. She also crashed into a dump truck, whacked a pedestrian with her Porsche and punched a psychic in the face. Clearly she played both Liz and Dick in that

movie. Had enough yet? No, I'll tell you when you've had enough. Honestly though, I'd still hit. You know you'd hit too, sir. You know you would hit. You would hit. Keep going. Here we go. Keep it going. Katy Perry's recently single. Isn't that exciting? And And I would just like to say, this is a part of me.

OK. A lot has happened this year.