A “12 Inch Pianist” Walks Into a Bar

When The New Yorker published a Shouts & Murmurs titled “Guy Walks Into a Bar,” by Simon Rich, back in 2013, Conan O’Brien tweeted a link to the piece, anointing it “the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time.” You see, children, the world was a simpler place back then—X was Twitter, and on that platform, with its chipper little blue-bird logo, people sometimes said nice things about one another. Now the site’s billionaire owner posts . . . You know what? I’m not even going to get into it. Suffice it to say that none of it is remotely funny. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is that “Guy Walks Into a Bar” remains hilarious. The filmmaker Lucas Ansel picked up on this fact, and ran with it, creating a stop-motion-animation adaptation of the classic Shouts, which describes a bit of a monkey’s-paw situation, involving a hard-of-hearing genie in a bathroom, naturally. Please, make like Conan, and enjoy.