Comedy Central - Defamer

announces that it lay off 160 employees from their feature animation unit (Pixar workers are safe) in the next couple of weeks, generously offering newly superfluous employees an opportunity to spend much more time with their families during the holidays. [ ]
orders six episodes of the Amp'd Mobile-originated animated comedy series Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States, a move that will surely send basic cable copycats scrambling to misguidedly snatch up the rights to whatever wallpapers and ringtones they find on their children's cellphones. [ ]
Foreign audiences once again prove they're not interested in seeing any film (not even the one with the rats going down the toilet!

) but Casino Royale, which takes the international crown with $44.7 million, raising its worldwide total to $312.4 million.

[ ]
extends David Letterman's contract through 2010, ensuring that Letterman will remain on the air longer than Jay Leno, who will be replaced on the The Tonight Show by Conan O'Brien in 2009 unless he discovers a way to quietly dispose of his youthful usurper. [ ]
Kevin Spacey finds a leading man for his MIT card-counting pet project 21, relative unknown Jim Sturgess. Spacey will produce, and may opt to play the lead's mentor himself.

Please, no "Spacey mentors up-and-coming actor" jokes. You're far too classy for that. [ ]
, America's most beloved no-show comedian, is set to once again thrill audiences with one of his at the -co-sponsored Comedy Festival this Thursday in Las Vegas:

Dave Chappelle has canceled a performance scheduled for Thursday at the Comedy Festival in Las Vegas, organizers said Monday without providing further explanation. Chappelle's agent and representatives couldn't be reached for comment. [.

..]
People with tickets for Chappelle's show will get refunds.

In keeping with his previous cut-and-run comedy classics, Chappelle will supplement his latest commitment-breaking nonappearance with , where he will explain how the festival's producers' suffocating directives to "just give us 60 to 90 minutes of " forced the panicked performer to hop on the next plane to Tibet for a month of high-altitude soul searching.
What happens when one of the producers of Drawn Together pounds some ipecac before being interviewed by Kennedy? Exactly what you'd expect: prodigious vomiting.

Enjoy.
We're willing to bet being instructed doesn't even rate in the top ten most frustrating things that has asked of screenwriter Jeff Nathanson during their collaborations.
Someone at Mastro's of what and Katie Holmes recently ordered for dinner.

Fascinating stuff, yet we find it odd the spy failed to mention the crucial detail that Holmes' ankle was shackled to a five-hundred-pound weight the entire meal.
The real challenge for the product placement consultants wasn't , it was convincing Russell Crowe not to bludgeon a mouthy PA with it.
of how they broke the news that Rumsfeld was accepting an honorable shitcanning for last night's Republican bloodletting.

All hail basic-cable-based citizen's media!
Like so many struggling actresses seeking parts as "Big Breasted Girl in Elevator" in Adam Sandler comedies, it seems that has finally succumbed to 's floppy-haired charms.

They've signed up his for a third go-around a full two months earlier , giving the comedian another 13 weeks to tie Hollywood to his bedpost and tickle it until it threatens to pee all over his silk, tiger-print sheets. A proud network programming executive

" 'The Showbiz Show' found its voice during the second season and really hit its stride to turn into appointment viewing for our celeb-crazed culture," said Lauren Corrao, Comedy Central executive vp original programming and development. "Our viewers, including celebrities themselves, tune-in to 'Showbiz' each week to get David's incomparable take on the latest Hollywood gossip, scandals and self-obsession.

"

The story also notes that Spade has also been made a "last-minute addition" to the CBS midseason sitcom Rules of Engagement, a project produced by aforementioned BFF Sandler's Happy Madison. We can't wait for the new season's first installment of (which is always a refreshing break from the self-mocking asides that comprise 50 percent of the show), in which the host's popsicle-stick stand-in and his movie star pal discuss how Spade only got the gig by offering to clean Sandler's pool twice a week until the show is eventually cancelled.
It turns out the fishy-smelling-but-just-amusing- enough-to-post-as-fact news item circulating throughout the European press about a month ago, in which Trey Parker and Matt Stone claimed that , was, in a shocking twist that we could never have anticipated from a source as earnest and trustworthy as the two creators of , :

"South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone know how to punk the press. Media outlets all over the world picked up on the mischief-makers' recent claim at a U.

K. press conference that Saddam Hussein's jailers had told the pair that the dictator had been forced to watch a "South Park" episode depicting him as Satan's gay lover. "It was a joke," Stone told us at a party celebrating the series' 10th season.

Asked if Amnesty International might pursue them, Stone said, "Bring it on! We wish they would."

The embarrassing affair should serve as a lesson to an increasingly scoop-hungry and gullible news media operating under the impression that their efforts have no direct effect on global events: Their irresponsible reports not only misled the public, but also inspired the CIA, always on the lookout for new interrogation methods, to subject suspected terrorist detainess in secret Eastern European prisons to the very real "alternative" torture technique of round-the-clock screenings of Mind of Mencia.

If we were the more cynical sort, we might find ourselves wondering if a publicist locked in a janitorial closet with a handful of eightballs and a rolling yellow bucket filled with Grey Goose, refused to let him out until he'd consumed the entirety of his rampage cocktail, then whispered in his ear that the just told her that she'd always dreamed of having the star of Less than Perfect give her a followed up by a solo watersports display. But as Occam's Celebrity Asshole Razor holds, the simplest explanation for a famous person's egregious public behavior is usually the best one, so Dick's biting and groping can probably be written off to the booze and drugs making him hungry and horny rather than ascribed to more complex PR machinations shaping his behavior.
Anyway, we know you wouldn't sleep tonight without seeing some video of Dick licking Carrie Fisher and Lt.

Uhura during the actual Shatner roast, so enjoy the video (hmmm, wonder how these got online so quickly!) found above and after the jump.
Stop us if you've heard this one before: gets wasted at a public event, runs his tongue along the faces of anyone wandering within licking range, then finds a play-by-play of his antics in Page Six soon after. The Sixies report on the C-list exhibitionist's

Backstage at the after-party, a drunken Dick groped an appalled [NY Post reporter Mandy] Stadtmiller, tried to kiss her, proclaimed his love for her and finally bit her hand. "Baby please," Dick repeated six times.

"Put in something nice," he said after urinating in front of the horrified journalist in his dressing room and offering her cocaine.
"They're so mean," he ranted. "I'm not weird.

Maybe I'm a little weird, they make me out to be a monster, I'm not a monster . . .

I just want to have fun, baby please."

has had of to try to explain why someone might abandon a hit TV show in the middle of production and escape to South Africa, a move that resulted in the likely forfeiture of a $50 million contract and invited the world to openly question his sanity.

Pity head Doug Herzog, who's had no invitations to tell his side of the story to Oprah, James Lipton, or Anderson Cooper. Knowing that his relationship with Chappelle was effectively destroyed by Comedy Central's airing of the "Lost Episodes" of Chappelle's Show, an exasperated Herzog, tired of months of questions about what he did to induce a schizophrenic fugue state in his network's most recognizable talent, finally got to return some fire at the TCAs yesterday.

Chappelle has said the network put him under too much pressure, fostered an uncomfortable working environment and -- last week -- that the network made a "bully move" by airing episodes from the incomplete third season.

Talking to Herzog after the network's "South Park" panel (more on that later), Herzog seemed fed up with Chappelle when asked about the comedian's complaints. "It's all about Dave," he said. "If he's saying that we gave him a lot of money and complete creative control and that made him go off the deep end, then guilty.

"

There you have it, straight from a TV executive who knows he's never getting his biggest star back: They drove Chappelle crazy with piles of money and total freedom. Please spend the next two minutes distributing your sympathy between the rich guy who threw away an eight-figure paycheck or the other rich guy who signed that paycheck.
Peabody Award-winning animated series (we're still trying to wrap our minds around that one) faces an interesting artistic dilemma: Namely, for a show whose main raison d'etre is to poke massive, battering ram-sized holes into society's last remaining taboos, where do you go after a tour-de-force, ? Well, if your network refuses to allow you to incite an anti-US jihad by broadcasting cartoon images of Mohammed, you simply do the next best thing: Turn the disagreement into an episode, and throw in for good measure.

In Wednesday's episode, the character Kyle is shown trying to persuade a Fox network executive to air an uncensored "Family Guy" even though it had an image of Muhammad.

"Either it's all OK, or none of it is," Kyle said. "Do the right thing."
The executive decides to strike a blow for free speech and agrees to show it.

But at the point where Muhammad is to be seen, the screen is filled with the message: " has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network."
It would be underestimating Matt Stone and Trey Parker's considerable social mores-mincing abilities to assume that this was the end of the line for their parade of wrongness. We look forward to a future South Park in which the First Family tries to sell a jaded vaudeville booker on their novelty act, an endless series of scatalogical and sexual combinations between the President, Laura, the twins, and deceased family dog , which they proudly call "The Autocrats.

"
It would have been tough for to the -bashing of "Trapped in the Closet," the episode that started the whole fracas in the first place. They may have succeeded, however, with their much anticipated season premiere, titled "The Return of Chef!

" As has been reported just about everywhere, Isaac Hayes, the voice of Chef and a longtime Scientologist, released a damning statement just weeks ago, announcing that he was . A FoxNews.com report then suggested that Hayes has been recovering from a stroke and that this "decision" was .

The plot (spoilers if you haven't seen it yet) accounts for either circumstance: It follows a thoroughly brainwashed Chef returning from an extended absence during which he traveled the world with the Super Adventure Club--a group of monocled and mustachioed Col. Mustard types who just happen, it turns out, to enjoy raping the local children they encounter on safari. Chef speaks in mostly crudely patched-together dialogue, expressing in various ways his desire to "get in kids' butts.

" If that's not enough of a dishonorable sendoff for the beloved character, then there's the protracted death sequence that culminates in a Grizzly Man-inspired scenario. In the end, however, is this :

"A lot of us don't agree with the choices the Chef has made in the last few days," one of the children eulogizes him at a funeral. "Some of us feel hurt and confused that he seemed to turn his back on us.

But we can't let the events of the past few weeks take away the memories of how Chef made us smile. "We shouldn't be mad at Chef for leaving us," the eulogy concludes. "We should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains.

"

While likening Scientology to a "fruity little club" may be funny in a bratty sort of way, we're wondering if perhaps it's giving them too easy a retaliatory target. They are, after all, a club that helped many a conflicted little fruit kick their dangerous anti-psychotic medication habits, resolve their past-life issues, and maximize their life potential.
The Battle for Our Souls currently being waged between the forces of good and evil ( and , in no particular order) rages on: The show can impressively churn out a brand new, ripped-from-the-headlines adventure for Stan, Cartman and the gang in about a week, which gives them ample time to address from the series in .

Details of the new episode were vague..

.But a network synopsis said the fictional town of South Park, Colorado, is "jolted out of a case of the doldrums when Chef suddenly reappears," leading to new antics by the group of foul-mouthed fourth graders who are the show's stars. "While Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman are thrilled to have their old friend back, they notice that something about Chef seems different.

When Chef's strange behavior starts getting him in trouble, the boys pull out all the stops to save him."

A network spokesman told Reuters that someone "besides Hayes" will be providing his character's voice for the episode, which looks to be a handsome, Scientology-bashing bookend companion to their classic of the genre, " ." Sadly, while the fictional, animated South Park kids might be able to save Chef in time, their real life counterparts will probably have trouble scaling the 14-foot electrified fences and evading the sniper fire to save Hayes for real.