The Definitive Guide to Comedy
For two seasons over two different channels (FX and FXX), W. Kamau Bell joined elite company as host of his own late-night TV talk show, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. He’ll return to your cable TV on a regular basis in 2016 as host of United Shades of America …
When there’s smoke, there’s often fire. And when that fire happens in the Piper’s Alley complex in Old Town Chicago that’s home to The Second City, all’s well that ends well with a joke or two on social media. But even as Chicago firefighters arrived on the scene at 1612 …
This summer couldn’t be hotter for Lil Rel. Lil Rel Howery co-stars as one of the Friends of the People, the sketch show currently in its second season on truTV, plays Jerrod Carmichael’s brother (and David Alan Grier’s son) in the new NBC sitcom, The Carmichael Show, that debuts this …
Mike Nichols, the celebrated comedian and director who achieved the rare feat of winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards in his lifetime, has died. Nichols was 83. His death was announced this morning by the president of ABC News. Nichols had been married for the past 26 years to …
“Taking a risk — maybe a tiny one, maybe a giant leap, into the unknown.” Spend the next 14 minutes with Susan Messing, who tells an audience last month at a TedX UChicago event that when she wanted to grow up, she dreamed of being goalie for the New York Rangers, …
I’ve been a fan of Hannibal Buress since he was only known as Chicago’s top up-and-coming stand-up comedian, back when he was selling T-shirts for his kicking pigeons joke and wondering who the next big blind guy would be. The rest of the nation has caught on to how funny …
On Dec. 5, 1962, Lenny Bruce was both comedy icon and outlaw at the age of 37. He had played Carnegie Hall and released the recording as a triple-album, and was just beginning to amass a lengthy arrest record, too. On that night, Bruce was performing at the Gate of …
Stephen Colbert must keep up appearances as blowhard mouthpiece “Stephen Colbert” on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, but at the tail end of Monday night’s episode, “Stephen Colbert” offered that if he, in fact, were a comedian…”as a young, bookish man with glasses looking for a role model, I might …
Writer/director/comedian Harold Ramis died early this morning, four years after first being diagnosed with the health problems that caused his autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. Ramis was 69. Ramis was born in Chicago on Nov. 21, 1944, and moved back to the Windy City in 1996 while still a hugely successful writer …
You’ve seen this photo of late 1980s improv group Comedy Underground with comedians Andy Richter and David Koechner when they were younger and their builds were thin but their hair was not. They performed with Jay Leggett, who died late last year. Koechner was on Conan last night, though, and …
