The Definitive Guide to Comedy
About five years ago, Nina Conti faced a crisis of self-confidence regarding her career as a ventriloquist — despite winning the BBC New Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 2002 and the Barry Award six years later at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (which she shared in Australia with Kristen Schaal). …
Living only about a mile away from a comedy club in Bloomington, University of Indiana professor Susan Seizer loved seeing live stand-up comedy shows but wondered why the performers she enjoyed so much weren’t enjoying so much attention on the national stage. So she made a movie about them. Directed …
It’s Opening Day for Major League Baseball, and also the 75th anniversary of Abbott and Costello’s classic baseball comedy sketch, “Who’s On First?” ESPN’s Chris Connelly looked back at “Who’s On First” with help from Jimmy Fallon and Steve Higgins — who crafted an update to the sketch over the …
If you saw InAPPropriate Comedy on the big screen over the weekend, then perhaps you were the person I saw and heard laughing, well, inappropriately in the cinema. The sketch comedy film grossed $156,414 in its opening weekend at the box office at 275 theaters nationwide, for an average of …
Not all Kickstarters are created equal. While “The Veronica Mars Movie Project” by the TV show’s creator, Rob Thomas, and Hollywood studio Warner Bros. roped in its $2 million goal from eager private citizens within a day — and more than $3.7 million in its first week on Kickstarter from …
What’s a decade for comedy nerds to wait for their beloved British characters? Over the weekend, we saw the rebirth of not only Steve Coogan’s “Alan Partridge,” but also Ricky Gervais’ “David Brent.” Coogan’s fictional radio and TV talk-show host has popped up in various projects over the past two …
File under April Fool’s Day real news: The Friars Club Comedy Film Festival is springing forward to springtime for its fifth annual celebration of comedy on film, opening in 2013 with Michael Urie’s film, He’s Way More Famous Than You. In Urie’s first feature as a director, written by Halley Feiffer …
Phyllis Diller, who died in 2012 at the age of 95, helped blaze a trail for generations of funny women not only in stand-up comedy, but also in TV and film. “Just as people say Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backward and in high heels, Phyllis …
Stephen Tobolowsky visited New York City this weekend to tell amazing stories from his life, sign copies of his book, The Dangerous Animals Club, and introduce a screening at the 92YTribeca of the 1993 film favorite, Groundhog Day. Tobolowsky spoke with The Comic’s Comic about all that and much more …
Are women funny? Are you funny? That’s a fairer, more legitimate question. In a new documentary by stand-up comedian Bonnie McFarlane, shot with her husband, comedian Rich Vos, Women Aren’t Funny wisely takes a humorous approach to the topic. “It seems so obvious to me that women are funny, that to …
