The Definitive Guide to Comedy
It isn't as easy as it looks to make mockery of liberal hippies, but that's usually because the jokes are coming from conservatives who are unfunny pricks about it. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein certainly aren't that. They know their targets. They know their target audience. And in their collaboration …
If you're on Twitter and enjoy reading funny things, then odds are strong that you likely already know and follow the quick-hit offerings of Rob Delaney @robdelaney. If you read The Comic's Comic, then the house won't even take your odds, because I've mentioned his ribald brilliance on the Tweets multiple …
At least one review of Pee-wee Herman's Broadway run this winter complained that his show was, in essence, preaching to a choir of lifelong fans. If you loved Pee-wee then, you'd love him now. But any critic who didn't love "The Pee-wee Herman Show" on Broadway simply had no love …
Nicole Shabtai is going to move to Los Angeles and become famous. I'm not a prophet. Shabtai sent out an email saying she was moving. And if you've seen "Citizen Rothstein," her one-woman show — or any of her appearances in videos for LandlineTV — then you could arrive at …
In "Gone Madigan," Kathleen Madigan's first hour-long stand-up set recorded for DVD since 2006, she proves that she remains one of the best women, if not the best, working on the stand-up comedy circuit. She does so simply by using her common-sense philosophy to analyze the madness that surrounds us. …
Ricky Gervais is a beloved comedian here in America and also in the U.K. for knowing just how to tiptoe across the line into offensive humor without being so offensive as to lose our love for him (see: The Office, Extras, his podcasts, his hosting/presenting riffs on awards shows). In …
When you start a comedy show with a silly premise, the only place to go from there may be delirium. In "Getting Quaid," a show currently running at the UCB Theatre in New York City, Geoff Garlock and Emily Strachan play best friends who remain best friends due to their common …
I've been catching up on the first season of Showtime's new dramedy, The Big C, which stars Laura Linney as a middle-aged mother who changes her approach to life upon being diagnosed with stage-four melanoma. It's got a subtle charm to it. But it's no match for "The C Word," …
A lot has changed in Colin Quinn's latest one-man show since I first saw him workshop it under a different name ("The Fall of it All") months ago in the basement lounge of Gotham Comedy Club. Inside the Helen Hayes Theatre, "Long Story Short" now boasts a set design resembling …
If you want to know what bowled over the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August, then you can see and/or listen for yourself as Bo Burnham's Words, Words, Words is out now in separate CD and DVD formats. I was at Burnham's CD recording in June at Carolines on Broadway. Burnham …