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Brian Eno: The next guest on Zach Galifianakis’ ‘Between Two Ferns’?

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Brian Eno is known for many things -- production brilliance with U2 and Talking Heads; lush and cerebral ambient music; crazy getups in his glam rock days -- but humor isn’t really one of them. Perhaps inspired by the well-documented comedy exploits of his onetime collaborator Paul Simon, Eno has made a video of himself getting interviewed by the distinguished journalist Dick Flash of Pork magazine in suport of his new album that Flash incorrectly calls ‘Milk Crate on a Small Sea,’ out this week.

Sound fishy? Well, it is. Dick Flash appears to be none other than Eno himself, donning an unflattering mousy-brown wig, glasses and other accoutrements of the music journalist. At the start of the interview, Flash barely lets Eno get in a word edgewise. When Eno finally gets a say, he reveals himself to be embarrassingly inarticulate and a fount of cliches in comparison with Flash’s intellectual blowhardisms, botched album title aside. However, there is one topic that finds Eno scarily lucid: copyright law.

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The humor is pretty nerdy, and the video runs a little long, but it’s delivered with goofball charm. Some favorite moments: Eno says, ‘Painting, I think it’s like jazz,’ like he’s the first dude to ever think of such a thing and stopping just shy of making an obligatory Mobius strip reference. Also, crediting ‘the medium is the message’ to ‘the bloke who started the Sex Pistols’ instead of Marshall McLuhan.There are many other fine gags -- including Eno talking about how they punished a 13-year-old who pirated his music -- but we won’t give them all away.

-- Margaret Wappler

P.S. Here’s hoping that the book that Flash references, Kurt von Pork’s ‘Vestiges of the Religious Experience in the Artistic Spectrum,’ gets the Roger Sterling treatment sometime soon. I bet the faux-but-real Museum of Jurassic Technology would love to sell that in its bookstore.

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