Ellen DeGeneres: Here and Now

With a loose, free-associative flow, Ellen DeGeneres glides through her 2003 HBO special, Here and Now. In just the first 10 minutes she touches on procrastination, new paint colors, television commercials, and mental disorders--topics that fit into the show's subtitle, Modern Life and Other Inconveniences. By the end, she's also spun out sneaky jokes about cell phones, memory loss, elevators, vocal inflections, pickle jars, and social embarrassment. Her genius is that she never seems like a genius; on the contrary, DeGeneres seems like your next door neighbor pointing out the obvious, yet somehow an hour whizzes by in complete enjoyment. It's peerless observational humor--nothing groundbreaking or piercingly satirical, but simply fun. --Bret Fetzer