That photo’s not the best shot I’ve ever taken, but it gives you a good idea of what a Louis CK show will be. He doesn’t like the showy things that other comedians do, his stage will have him, a microphone, and not much else. I first learned about Louis CK through his short lived HBO multi-camera sitcom Lucky Louis, a show inspired like all his stand up material by his own life. After that show was cancelled, he returned to the stand up tour circuit.

When Seinfeld did his I’m Telling You for the Last Time tour, the last time he would ever use any of the material he’d developed over the preceding two decades, it was a big deal. The documentary, Comedian, followed Seinfeld as he rebuilt a set from scratch relying on none of his old material. The ultimate test of the stand up comic. Louis CK has done this three times in the last three years.

Every year he tours, building a set, culminating with a recorded special of the material after which he drops it all and starts anew. I went to see Louis CK perform the other night — hence the photo I took above, which might have been better framed had I not been on the mezzanine level; he didn’t seem used to delivering he material to multi-level audiences so most of his attention was cast on the lower level — and I had heard none of the jokes he delivered in his hour-plus set. His material always comes from the same basic world; he’s still a middle-aged divorced comic and he’s still the same essential person, but each year he manages to find a new perspective. Often his jokes are tantalizingly close to old ones, and hearing the set up you’ll find yourself convinced of the punch line only to be redirected into a new avenue of unexpected hilarity.

If you ever get the chance to see Louis CK live, take it. He’s one of the sharpest comics out there right now.

Well, many of you have read, I’m sure by now, that Jerry Seinfeld has signed to advertise Windows Vista for a tidy sum. Hence the lame joke in the post title.

But what this post is really about is stupid language. Over on slashdot, they had a post discussing the acquisition of Jerry Seinfeld by Microsoft and they quoted somebody saying “Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background.”

Nothing is prominently displayed in the background. Now, I don’t consider this an oxymoron, because dictionaries tend to describe oxymora as phrases which are seemingly self-contradicting. There’s nothing seeming about this. It is impossible for something to be prominently displayed in the background. Something can be prominent in the background, but “prominently displayed” implies that it’s the visual target of a given landscape and things in the background are never that.

The real problem here is that the context was ignored. “Prominently displayed” is a common phrase but connecting it to “background” belies its original intention. Context is everything when it comes to language. That’s why the spell checker in Office 2007 is so much better than any previous one: it verifies the words in the sentence in relation to each other to see if the words make sense in that order and in that context. It’s something people should try more often.