Lately I’ve only been remembering the lousy things about the ’90s: the atrocious fashion, post-grunge pop music, “Saved by the Bell,” the Macarena, and so on. Tina Fey’s Mutual Savings Bank commercial is a nice example of the decade sucking out loud.

The ’90s also killed Phil Hartman and Chris Farley, two people who worked their asses off to at least make the decade funny. Well, I guess the ’90s didn’t kill them, per se. That ignominy falls on as a shotgun-toting wife and enough drugs to kill a family of manatees, respectively.

Still, this 1994 clip of Farley and Hartman hosting a live call-in show on CNBC is a pleasant reminder of which of our memories are worth keeping from that woebegone decade. There isn’t anything explosive or hilarious in this clip, but it’s cool to see Hartman and Farley talk about “Saturday Night Live” and their comedic influences. Listen for Adam Sandler and David Spade on the phone a couple minutes in. By the way, thanks for that one, God. Hartman gets a trio of shotgun blasts from his drunk and coked-up wife, while Spade has spent the last decade wearing a conga line of Playboy bunnies on his head of wispy hair. That seems fair.

(thanks to Oski for the tip)

There’s all sorts of heavy crap going on in the world. Volcanoes erupting. Earthquakes. Riots in Greece. Yesterday, the Dow dropped 1000 points in 30 minutes, supposedly because some white dude in a suit switched an “m” and a “b” in some financial deal.

In the video below, Jim Cramer of CNBC watches Procter & Gamble stock plummet, and he yells about it being a mistake and how people need to buy, and it instantly goes up again. I don’t know, I think that’s what happens. There are a lot of numbers and graphs and people talking over each other, and the whole thing bored me, so I put Business Dog on the screen. Ha ha, Business Dog makes the stock market fun and furry!

It’s just that way with everything. I didn’t care about the Icelandic volcano until people started Photoshopping cats into the pictures, and I still don’t know anything about the Greek riots except that this dog is at all of them. If my house ever burns down, I’m gonna need a cat in a firefighter costume to break the news to me.

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Drew Magary just wrote a Penthouse column on the “badass ideal” in which he posited that no matter how much we all aspire to being a badass, the real world never allows us to reach such a rarefied status.

Counterpoint: Barack Obama stopped an interview with CNBC because a fly was buzzing around his head, stalked the fly with his eyes, then Miyagi’d it with lightning-fast reflexes.  Now, granted, I’ve swatted plenty of flies with my bare hands, and no one’s ever elected me president.  It’s not like he caught an assassin’s bullet in his teeth.  So I wasn’t all that impressed at first.

Then I realized: Obama’s left-handed.  He swatted that fly with his weak hand.  THAT’S what makes this video awesome to me.  My left hand is a partially formed claw that I use to hit the caps lock key and occasionally assist my right hand when I need to push something heavy.  You’ll see if you ever meet me, I’m the guy with a T-Rex forelimb for a left arm.  I sure as hell can’t swat flies with it.

Okay, steel yourselves, everybody: Jim Cramer’s round of talk-show image-rehabilitation yesterday spurred another response from Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” officially making this Stewart’s response to Cramer’s response to Stewart’s response to Cramer’s compaint about Stewart’s rant. To spare us additional drama, I winnowed the clip down to the little 47-second highlight above.  The full segment clocks in at almost nine minutes, and if you’ve got the patience for that, the full video is below.

Anyway, same thing as the last couple of days: Stewart plays the funnyman and Cramer looks dumb.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  And repeat.  And repeat.

Oh hey, guess who tomorrow night’s guest on “The Daily Show” is?  Yup: Cramer.  Wheeeeeeee!

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Last week, Jon Stewart took CNBC to task for its unfailing failure to cover the economic meltdown with any kind of clarity or mental acuity.  Last night, in response to a complaint from Jim Cramer that one of his clips was taken out of context, Stewart went out for Round 2 (via Gunaxin).  It’s not quite as witheringly brutal as last time, but I’m definitely happy I’m not Jim Cramer this morning.

Now, the last time I wrote about “The Daily Show,” things got pretty contentious in the comments between the political left and right, with President Obama getting blamed for this and that, and threats of eye-rape.  Listen, people: we’re all in this together.  Can’t we unite in hating people who are better off than we are?  I’m not a homeowner and I’m not a banker, but still I lost loads of money that I had squirreled away in Merril Lynch.  Do you understand how devastating that is?  I was saving up for a militia!  Now I’ll have to defend myself from the government with Soviet weapons bought on the cheap.

UPDATE: Cramer went on The Today Show this morning to respond (video below). He’s pretty level-headed about it.

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