The Definitive Guide to Comedy
We're only halfway through 2009, but already, methinks we can award the Oscar for Best Misdirection Campaign by a Movie to Funny People, because while everything we've seen about the actual movie suggests that it is a melodrama about what happens when a famous stand-up comedian faces the prospect of …
There's a new trailer out for Steven Soderbergh's upcoming farce, The Informant!, and I include it here, not only because it's funny, but also and more importantly because Soderbergh seems to have carved out some juicy supporting roles for comedians Tom Papa (as someone Matt Damon is trying to snoop …
Two of the more awkward phone interviews I have conducted over the years have been with Al Franken. Just lucky, I guess? But maybe, just maybe, Franken may have been tentative with me all of those years ago because he knew that someday, he'd become a U.S. Senator. That day, …
What's new and making news in the comedy world? Let's take a look-see and find out. Jerry Lewis is going to be making his Broadway directorial debut, a musical version of The Nutty Professor, with Marvin Hamlisch composing. (Variety) Just For Laughs Montreal will hold a "Comedy Conference" for the second …
All of the recent crazy celebrity deaths certainly got everyone talking over the weekend, but the timing of it all overshadowed the death Sunday of comedian and impersonator Fred Travalena. If Rich Little was The Guy in the 1970s and 1980s to get your celebrity impersonations, then Fred Travalena was …
When you see Jon Daly get into character as smooth jazz artist "Barry R," it's quite a bizarre treat in a comedy club. What happens when he busts loose on the beach and makes a commercial for his new box set? Well, that's where Funny or Die comes in. So …
So the directorial debut from Ricky Gervais has a new title — it's no longer "This Side of the Truth," it's now back to original title, "The Invention of Lying" — and a new trailer. The film imagines an alternate reality in which everyone tells the truth all of the …
If you blinked in early 1984, then you may have missed The New Show, which was a primetime comedy oddity that Lorne Michaels produced during his brief stint away from the reins at SNL. And how did this show open its first telecast? With a dance parody of Michael Jackson's …
Jon Lajoie is one of them there musical comedians who came upon the scene in the past couple of years due to the Internets — that fancy thing you're looking at to read this — and he whipped up a very NSFW tune yesterday to respond to all of the hypocrites …
Ellen DeGeneres took questions from the audience at the end of her latest variety special, which taped last week in Chicago at the Just For Laughs fest, and Ellen's Bigger, Longer and Wider Show debuts tonight on TBS. Not all of this footage from the Q&A makes it into the …