It’s not like Santa-themed slapstick is anything particularly new; if you had to count the number of times Tim Allen took a projectile to the nuts in the Santa Clause trilogy, you would probably get bored far before you finished, and then you would have to add at least one…

If you think about it, Santa is kind of like God: He’s omniscient (he knows when you are sleeping), he’s omnipresent (how else does he deliver presents to everyone except for kids in third-world countries all in one night?), not to mention he sits in judgment of sinners and the…

Say what you will about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — better known and often reviled as PETA — but there’s no denying their methods are, ahem, eye-catching. Sex sells, as PETA well knows, and there’s probably never been an activist organization quite as openly willing to use…

As a public service to compulsive drinkers, on Mondays, we usually give you a breakdown of all the obscure holidays you could be celebrating that week. This week, however, there’s no need for that, because this week heralds the coming of the granddaddy of all holidays: Boxing Day, the Canadian…

Aside for obvious problems with suspension of disbelief — how are we going to pretend Chris “The Birdman” Andersen is Santa when we already know he’s The Birdman? — hiring a celebrity to play Kris Kringle can create a slew of dissonance and mildly disturbing associations, particularly if that celebrity…

It’s kind of a ridiculous idea to remake/sequelize Tron, a movie that was, no joke, inspired at least in part by the early video game Pong. Ridiculous, that is, but canny. The original is beloved by nerds everywhere — and not without reason; the plot and special effects are hilariously…

It’s no accident that Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult is prominently referenced in To Die is Hard; though the title is clearly a reference to the Die Hard series, To Die is, like Naked Gun, a send-up of that genre, combining the deadpan puns and the silly fight…

To teach kids how to write, Metro Denver Promotions of Letters is letting adults show off how well they can spell — or letting them drunkenly embarrass themselves trying to slur through “renaissance.” Whatever the case, the MDPL’s monthly Adult Spelling Bee is a pretty genius concept, allowing grownup nerds…

Here’s a fun fact about Yogi Bear: Like many Hanna-Barbera characters, Yogi wore a collar — a corner-cutting trick that allowed animators to only draw the head in repeated frames, reducing the amount of drawings needed for an episode by more than 80 percent. That fact is sort of a…

It’s hard to think of a more politically apt metaphor for immigration than the story of the birth of Christ: Mary and Joseph, away from their homeland, suffer rejection after rejection as they look for a place to give birth to their son, the savior of all humanity. Interestingly, the…

They just don’t make ’em like they used to — and thanks to Scrooged, Bill Murray’s paradigm-defining 1988 reinterpretation of A Christmas Carol, they’re making them better than they otherwise might. You don’t have to look far to see the influence of Scrooged on current, big-budget comedy fare; from the…

Amid the relentless commercial onslaught of the holiday season, it can be hard to find a middle ground between advertiser-approved sentimental treacle and sneering hipster cynicism. And while the Bovine Metropolis Theater holiday production Real Housewives of the North Pole would seem to lean toward the latter, director Eric Farone…

You suck at wrapping presents. It happens every year: You pick out that perfect gift and take it home with every intention of doing it up all nicely with fancy bows and nice crisp edges, but somehow it gets out of control. The tape sticks to your fingers. The paper…

Here’s to you, Wikipedia, settler of barroom bets, supplier of obscure facts, primary source of 80 percent of papers written for freshman comp. You are our favorite way to waste time on our smartphones, the first thing that comes up when we type “coprophagia” into Google; indeed, you’re the very…

If there’s one thing you can count on in life, it’s the potential for ensuing hilarity when you combine dudes with things that go fast — and to that end, it’s hard to think of a better vehicle for it than the snowmobile, a machine built almost solely for the…

It was one of the most egregious and highly publicized miscarriages of justice in American history: the murder of Emmett Louis Till, a sixteen-year-old black boy who was brutally murdered for the alleged crime of flirting with a while woman in rural Mississippi in 1955. Though the obviously guilty perpetrators…

Today, we stand on the very precipice of the granddaddy of all yearly holidays: Next week brings Christmas day, with New Year’s Eve and Day close on its heels — at no other point during the year do we get so much time off for no reason. It’s a special…