Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Carrie Brownstein is best known as one-third of late, lamented rock'n'roll band Sleater-Kinney (and, more recently, a blogger for NPR). Fred Armisen is best known as the dude who's been impersonating Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live. But together, they create hilariously deadpan viral videos (shot by Lance Bangs, the husband of Brownstein's former S-K bandmate Corin Tucker) as the comedy duo ThunderAnt.

Thanks to the diligent cliphounds at Videogum, I was alerted to ThunderAnt's latest offering. It's a po-faced sequel to a piece the two posted earlier this year, which followed the exploits of the excruciatingly earnest proprietors of a feminist bookstore. In the new video, Armisen and Brownstein pore over a stack of new CD releases, debating whether any of the albums are... er, appropriate enough to be stocked on the shelves of Women and Women First.

Take a gander. As a frazzled matron with a surprisingly salacious past, the scraggly-wigged Armisen reminds me of some of Mark McKinney's dowager kooks on Kids In The Hall. And while Brownstein's portrayal is more understated, I think her quietly nutty New Ager is an even sharper character -- I get the sense her overly-PC anxiety and sporadic fits of crazy talk ("If the chard in my garden were singing, that is the song that my chard would sing to me") are drawn from her experience playing to sanctimonious flakes at womyn's music festivals.

--Sarah Liss