The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Ask most comedians today who they love and loved watching perform, and Richard Pryor’s name is more likely than not to make the cut as one of the top two influencers for a generation of stand-ups. That’s the sense you’ll get at the start of watching the new documentary about …
If “Long Story Short” told the story of the rise and fall of every empire, including our own, then Colin Quinn’s new one-man show, “Unconstitutional,” zeroes in on what makes the United States of America so unique and yet not quite immune itself to the perils of contemporary culture and …
Growing up in South Africa with an African mother and a Swiss-German father, the nation’s prevailing policy of Apartheid at the time meant that Trevor Noah had been “Born a Crime.” That’s the title Noah adopts for his one-man show, “The Racist,” which over the past year he has performed at the grand …
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 …
Joe Rogan is probably best known for making people who are desperate for money eat animal parts and jump off buildings. You may also recognize Rogan from his younger days on NewsRadio or more recent days providing commentary at UFC fights. For his stand-up and podcast, however, he is known for …
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 …
Who would you include in an exhaustive list of the most iconic stand-up comics and performances? Surely greats like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks would be included. And such a list could not be told without performances like Lenny Bruce’s Carnegie Hall concert. If you are going to …
It is actually quite simple to be offensive. All you have to do is figure out a mainstream value and champion the opposite. People generally like X, therefore you say Y. It is not a complicated process. However, creating an hour’s worth of stand-up that seeks to have every single …
Performing stand-up comedy in front of an audience of two exclusively made up of your parents while cookies bake and pugs run loose sounds like the fever dream of a an eccentric homeless man coming down with influenza. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a homeless person’s thoughts, though, so such a …
