The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Your reviews may vary, but the numbers don’t lie. Adam Sandler’s first two movies in a four-picture exclusive deal with Netflix — The Ridiculous 6 and The Do-Over — rank as the top film releases for the streaming platform. So on the eve of the release of Sandler’s third Netflix …
If you think it’s still tough out there in the comedy trenches for a woman wanting to make it as a stand-up, then just imagine what it must be like for a black women. Heck, don’t imagine it. Go out and talk to some black women in comedy. That’s what …
“We’re the last philosophers. Everybody now that talks is reading from a pre-approved script. Even our alleged smart people are corporately controlled. So there’s only one group of people that can kinda say what they want to say: Stand-ups.” So says Chris Rock, in the opening moments of the new …
The Last Laugh opens with a quote onscreen from the noted non-comedian, German novelist Heinrich Mann, who wrote: “Whoever has cried enough, laughs.” Mann fled Nazi Germany while Hitler’s soldiers burned his books in public. The documentary then cuts to a Nazi-uniformed figure skater, then to present day. Yes, this is …
After Henry Phillips released his semi-autobiographical movie, Punching the Clown, in 2010, Showtime expressed interest in developing a companion series. That series never came to fruition. But the awkwardness of that failure inspired Phillips and Gregori Viens to co-write and direct a sequel. Originally titled And Punching the Clown when …
Baron Vaughn, the comedian and actor you’ve seen on Grace and Frankie and soon will hear on the reboot of MST3K (and heard on Episode #81 of Last Things First), grew up without a father. In the new documentary, Fatherless, Vaughn decided to find out more about his father. And even …
Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs have stepped up from Broad City to the big screen. Aniello directs and co-writes Rough Night with Downs, which sees “five best friends from college (played by Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer, and Zoë Kravitz) reunite 10 years later for a …
Everyone’s talking about how the Oscars ended last night, but everything that came before that Best Picture mixup was very on brand for Jimmy Kimmel, who treated his first time hosting the Academy Awards as if it were an extended edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Kimmel usually, in fact, hosts …
Not since Tropic Thunder have we seen someone tackle the notion of “Oscar Bait” quite as accurately as Seth Meyers did last night on his NBC talker, Late Night with Seth Meyers. Here he was, in as the credits tell us if you didn’t blink and miss ’em, A Shoemaker …
Here’s the lede from my latest Humor In Hindsight column for Decider.com, reflecting on Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, starring Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, and Sandra Bernhard, fast-forwarding the context from 1983 to 2017. Who among us hasn’t suffered from delusions of grandeur from time to time, indulging …
