The videos are both funny and self aware. One shows The Office-stars Ellie Kemper and BJ Novak giving an onscreen countdown till they ask for money while complimenting the viewer as being a good person for continuing to watch. It’s not just comedians standing in a studio however as a few feature the likes of Nick Kroll and Ed Helms travelling around Africa. The clips are funny as well though, as Kroll plays his Bobby Bottleservice character who helpfully explains that mosquitos carry malaria just like his ex-girlfriend carried gonorrhea. Obviously, it’s not all laughs, but there’s a high enough ratio to keep people watching watching more than their typical amount of PSAs.

From a press release:

“While the videos are funny and entertaining, Comedy Fights Malaria shows that the disease is no laughing matter – every 45 seconds, a child in Africa dies from malaria, but humor can keep malaria in the spotlight and in the conversation. Visit the links below for PSA’s featuring Orlando Bloom, John Mayer, Ted Danson, Jeremy Piven, Ellie Kemper, BJ Novak and Ed Helms among others and let me know if you would like further information on the campaign. Please feel free to embed the links on your site or link to us on Facebook.

Fans and supporters are asked to “Like” Malaria No More on Facebook www.Facebook.com/MalariaNoMore and learn about how the world is working to end malaria deaths in Africa by 2015 while also checking out exclusive content from the campaign and seeing how they can be a part of the victory against the disease.”

Comedy for a good cause is nothing new (see: Comic Relief in England and this Thursday’s Night of Too Many Stars on Comedy Central) but that doesn’t make the Comedy Fights Malaria campaign any less fun. Check out some of the videos below:

This morning, HuffPo posted a story claiming that Mayer had made remarks during a recent concert that implied he was back together with his ex, Aniston. In a furious post on his popular Tumblr, Mayer pointed out that these “remarks” were seemingly cobbled together from the lyrics to various songs. The entire rant is a great read, but this paragraph is probably the most insulting:

“The reason I’m calling you out instead of all the other magazines that make stories up out of thin air is that In Touch and Star Magazine aren’t concurrently writing pieces about Pat Tillman or WikiLeaks. Those other rags know who they are, and even if they’re obnoxious, I’d rather have to live with them because they (and the rest of the world) know where they stand, which doesn’t make them one tenth as dangerous as you are. You’re a stripper wearing reading glasses. Or maybe you’re an insolvent law student willing to dance for a few extra dollars. Either way, it’s uncomfortable to watch you try to wrap yourself around a pole when you have that C-Span scar.”

Huffington Post later updated their story with quotes from Mayer’s post. They also pointed out that he never actually denied he was dating Aniston on his Tumblr. Can’t argue with them there. However, our friends at Gossip Cop quote Mayer as saying he’s “completely single” during a different concert.

“After much consideration,” says Mayer “I have decided that I am going to play for Cleveland. So as not to offend my fans in South Beach I’d also like to announce that I’ll be playing for Miami. I’ll also be playing for New York City.” You get the idea. Watch below.

Will the lengthy Rolling Stone profile signal his downfall, or will he survive to see another day. Let’s take a look five recent career-threatening profiles or interviews, and whether the subjects were able to keep their job?

1. Eric Massa vs. Glenn Beck – Career-ending? Yes.

Technically Massa had already quit Congress by the time he sat down with Glenn Beck for a live interview on March 9, but if he was hoping for any career in politics after the tickle-scandal to end all tickle-scandals, he lost it after his bizarre and amazing interview.

There’s a reason this is the only live TV interview on this list – these types of train-wreckingly bad interviews just doesn’t happen. You were able to watch a career implode with each awkward passing moment until Beck finally apologized to his audience for “wasting your time.”

>>> NEXT PAGE: The problem with Albany.

He did a lengthy interview with Playboy in which he discussed his racist penis, having sex with Jessica Simpson, dropped an n-bomb and much much more. Here are some highlights.

So here’s the full Playboy interview. There’s a whole lot there. But here may be the most insane quote to come out of the entire interview:

My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.

John Mayer has a “David Duke cock,” ladies and gentleman.

Now the singer/songwriter/tabloid fodder has not shied away from speaking his mind in interviews before, and it has led to some memorable exchanges. But this may be the height of his ‘he’s so edgy and refreshing’ honesty. While we’re talking about David Duke, here’s Mayer dropping an n-bomb while describing how much black people love him: “And by the way, it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, because if you really had a hood pass, you could call it a nigger pass. Why are you pulling a punch and calling it a hood pass if you really have a hood pass?”

MSNBC contributor Toure has been dressing down Mayer on Twitter this morning (no response yet from the musician). To the above comment he writes, “Whatever you wanna call it, you don’t have it any more.”

Update at 5pm: Mayer is apologizing on Twitter. Here’s some of what he wrote:

And while I’m using today for looking at myself under harsh light, I think it’s time to stop trying to be so raw in interviews…
It started as an attempt to not let the waves of criticism get to me, but it’s gotten out of hand and I’ve created somewhat of a monster.
I wanted to be a blues guitar player. And a singer. And a songwriter. Not a shock jock. I don’t have the stomach for it.
Again, because I don’t want anyone to think I’m equivocating: I should have never said the word and I will never say it again.

Alright more from the Quotable Mr. Mayer -

• Of Jessica Simpson:

That girl, for me, is a drug. And drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me…Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm…Have you ever been with a girl who made you want to quit the rest of your life? Did you ever say, “I want to quit my life and just fuckin’ snort you? If you charged me $10,000 to fuck you, I would start selling all my shit just to keep fucking you.”

That last line is actually from his upcoming single, “Your Body Is A Fuckin’ Wonderland And Shit”.

• Let’s go back to race – and specifically, Kerry Washington:

She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, “Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.” And you’d be like, “What? We weren’t talking about that.”

I’m like “what?” right now, so…

• And now, to Jennifer Aniston:

I wish I could be with her. But I can’t change the fact that I need to be 32…That woman was the most communicative, sweetest, kindest person. When people hear the record, I hope the songs make them think about their lives, not my life. Like, when you listen to Coldplay, do you think about Gwyneth Paltrow? I don’t write songs in order to stick it to my exes. I don’t release underground dis tracks

See, I always thought Chris Martin was like the British John Mayer.

• We’ll just let this entire exchange sink in for you:

PLAYBOY: What does the word womanizer mean to you?

MAYER: Well, wouldn’t a womanizer have dated more than two girls in two years?

PLAYBOY: You and Aniston got back together and broke up again in 2009. How many women did you sleep with in the eight months after the breakup?

MAYER: I’m going to say four or five. No more.

PLAYBOY: That’s a reasonable number.

MAYER: But even if I said 12, that’s a reasonable number. So is 15. Here’s the thing: I get less ass now than I did when I was in a local band. Because now I don’t like jumping through hoops. It’s been so long since I’ve taken a random girl home. I don’t want to have to submit myself for approval. I don’t want to audition. I’d rather come home and edge my shit out for 90 minutes. At this point, before I can have sex I need to know somebody. Unless she’s a 14 out of 10.

John Mayer has standards people, unless she’s really hot.

• And finally, a little about the true love of John Mayer’s life – John Mayer:

What that explains is that I’m more comfortable in my imagination than I am in actual human discovery. The best days of my life are when I’ve dreamed about a sexual encounter with someone I’ve already been with. When that happens, I cannot lay off myself.

The End…to something.

> Update: The interview was conducted by Mediaite contributor Rob Tannenbaum.

> Update at 5pmET: GossipCop points out Mayer has apologized for his use of the n-word.

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That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see Mayer hop onstage at the Slipper Room for the comedy show “Sweet” hosted by Seth Herzog last week — but why I was surprised to see him play the victim in his interview with Sean McCarthy at The Comic’s Comic. Mayer, who got onstage at the last minute and gamely did a set unprepared, nonetheless did a set unprepared, which means a lot of pauses and awkward moments, which he accepted and handled pretty well, and which the crowd was prepared to be patient through. There were a few good jokes (I was one of the few olds who laughed at the Diffr’ent Strokes riff) and a few not so good jokes (eh, we get it, you have sex with hot chicks) but he was a good sport about it, mostly, and it was fine.

It was a little less fine after he finished and the very-popular-in-the-comedy-world-poised-for-breakout Kumail Nanjiani went onstage with stuff he did plan, made a few jokes about whoa, was that just John Mayer? which is pretty de rigeur, and suddenly Mayer jumped back onstage and just like that, they were a very, very, very awkward duo. One was an amateur, one was a pro, and it showed — just as it would have showed had Kumail jumped on stage during a concert and tried to cut into Mayer’s guitar solo. (To be fair, it happened after a little back and forth between them so it wasn’t out of the blue.)

I was there. I saw it. Which is why at this part of McCarthy’s interview I really wanted to smack John Mayer:

“It was combative in the sense that the crowd didn’t really accept the fact that the jock, the guy who gets the girls, was at a place where the guys go who talk about how they don’t get the girls.”

Oh GOD. Really? So everyone in the big bad audience was mean to you because you’re so much cooler and hotter and prettier and famouser than them? Here’s a fact about Sweet: It is one of the friendliest places to do comedy, ever, and plenty of celebs drop by with no complaint (Janeane Garofalo, Paul Rudd, Justin Long to name a few). Seth Herzog is one of the more cuddly comedians on the scene, beloved by his peers and the audience that fills his show week after week for often over 2 hours (and that is a long time for comedy). I’ve seen Seth Herzog be mean only to hecklers, and then only after they’ve way overstayed their welcome. He brings his MOM onstage every week. Like, come on.

As someone who was IN the audience (front row!) I can tell you two things: First, the audience was excited to have Mayer, and second, we were rooting for him. But he didn’t come up with a tightly-planned set filled with jokes he’d sweated over writing at 4 a.m. He had a few bits that you could tell he’d done before, but there was a lot of “Soooo….what’s up?” time. Nonetheless, the crowd was polite, with just one heckler – the same drunk girl who Seth had shot the death-stare on stage with his mom – and a total willingness to laugh with Mayer, not at him. He made a lot of jokes about women, and how Us Weekly had guaranteed that he wouldn’t get laid again (he referred to the cover to the right, which I now much, much better understand) and mimed having sexual relations with his wineglass, and joked about how a dick didn’t remember all the fine ladies it had met, it only knew that it wanted to meet more (but in less delicate language). Charming, but whatever.

Less ‘whatever’ is the whole “John Mayer Is Racist” thing. Mayer is now getting flack for hassling Kumail (who handled the whole thing beautifully by the way) because he didn’t know his name and jokingly said, “Kabul?” Ha, ha. Kumail retorted: “Is John Mayer busting my balls in a vaguely racist way right now?” Yes, yes he was. He also made a cringey joke about how Kumail had an English accent (according to Mark Graham at Vulture, Kumail quoted him as saying he “looked like a brown guy but sounded like a white guy”). Now he has apparently been dubbed an “Accidental Racist” by Eugene Mirman. As someone who was in the audience, neither Kumail nor the audience nor Herzog (who we were sitting near) nor anyone afterward seemed to pick up this “racist” thread. It was more the “awkward” thread and the “why did he go back up onstage” thread and “wow, that was pretty effing weird” thread. But that was it, and folks, this is a comedy club, envelopes do get pushed a little here and there. Given the context of the evening, it was more that Mayer was guilty of misreading the crowd (NB: I have discussed this with a few people who were there, including a person of color, and that was the consensus).

Incidentally, Graham reports that Mayer “was quick to get in touch with Sean McCarthy” which he was, but to be clear he did so before Nanjiani’s subsequent retelling of the tale — another reason that I was so unimpressed with Mayer. Mayer obviously knew he bombed and was looking to deflect responsibility for that. Dude. You saw the other people on that stage that night, who were pros. When you’re not a pro, you gotta prepare. You didn’t. End of story — and could have been, had your ego not propelled you onstage to tussle with Nanjiani, who you should have realized was the headliner, and the guy meant to go after you to pick up the pieces just in case. Dumbass.

One more thing: Kumail Nanjiani is not some loser who can’t get a date. After Mayer left the stage, most of his bit was about how he just got married. Which means he’s probably getting laid more than John Mayer. Just sayin’.

Anyhow, while I will continue to kick myself for my blackberry’s Twitter freeze-up (all I managed was to opine on Mayer’s large feet before that was it), I did snap some quick photos of the event, which I think actually captures the awkwardness between Mayer and Nanjiani — but also caught them shaking hands after the set. And by the way, afterward Mayer hung out chatting with people, cutting a weirdly tall figure in a black trenchcoat, and then, according to Twitter, headed up to the Comedy Cellar to try again. So. No story came out of that so maybe he learned something.

Update: Here’s the report from that one. Good God, he learned nothing. Sheesh.

Photos of Mayer, Nanjiani, Herzog and his mom below. McCarthy’s interview is here and Graham’s write-up at Vulture is here.

Oh, disclaimer: I know Herzog and was in a show with him on Monday, which is one of the reasons I didn’t get to this earlier – unlike Mayer, as a non-comedy pro I was petrified so I was spending most of my time actually, you know, preparing. Oh, snap.

A few of the highlights:

Ablahad: I don’t think [Obama's Nobel Peace Prize] is a bad thing, but maybe someone else deserved it more.
Mayer: Who? If you don’t know who else should have gotten it instead of Obama, I love you, you’re beautiful, but shut your fucking mouth.

[...]Ablahad: Is there hope behind the heartbreak [in your music]?

Mayer: The melody is the hope. The lyrics are the heartbreak, the melody is the hope. If you have the lyrics being the heartbreak and the music as the heartbreak, your editor made you ask stupid fucking questions!

[...]Ablahad: You don’t always have to rhyme, though.

Mayer: I’m going to forcefully sodomize your editor.

This does not even scratch the surface. Read the full interview here at Vulture.

(h/t Nerve)