Impractical Jokers

I'm always a bit critical whenever popular media (TV shows, movies, etc.) tries to portray the job of a male art model.  The model in the movie Art School Confidential was depicted as nothing more than a creepy exhibitionist.  And as I recall, the TV show Ally McBeal featured a life drawing class in which one model substituted for another in the same pose and during the same drawing.  And the pose was one which a model would never have been able to hold for the length of time depicted in the episode.

Over the last year, I have become a fan of the TruTV show Impractical Jokers.  Four supposedly life-long friends compete in a series of challenges designed to embarrass each other in public.  The loser of each episode has to perform some kind of humiliating task at the end of each episode.  The show is hysterically funny, and there have been times that I have thought that I was going to hurt myself from laughing so hard.

Last night's loser was James Murray or Murr as he's called on the show, and his task was to model, nude, for a drawing class.  Of course, the other three had some surprises up their sleeves, like a rotating platform. The result was, as usual for this show, hilarious. Here's a clip of Murr's "punishment."  TruTV shows a lot of reruns, so I'm sure this episode will be on again...

The Impractical Jokers Facebook page even had some of the sketches done of Murr during his modeling experience...

Cancellation

Summer is always a really slow time for modeling, and this summer has seemed especially slow.  I've modeled twice since April 21st, and one of those was for a brand new drawing group's first attempt at a session.  I was scheduled to model last Tuesday night for a class at my local community arts center, but a few hours before the class was supposed to have started, I got a call saying that it had been cancelled due to a lack of registrations.  I was disappointed, both because I didn't get to model and because the lack of interest in drawing the human figure seems to be increasing in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.  The same instructor will be trying another figure drawing class at that same arts center on September 24th, and I am, once again, the scheduled model.  If the arts center won't promote the class enough to get the minimum number of people to sign up, perhaps I should put a post in the Artists' section on Craig's List or something.