The Definitive Guide to Comedy
It was another great night both for Jordan Peele and HBO as the awards season swung through the Writers Guild of America on Sunday night. Peele won for Original Screenplay for his first feature film, Get Out, while HBO played host to the writers for both Best Comedy Series, Veep, …
The third season of HBO’s Emmy-winning Last Week Tonight with John Oliver ended not with a whimper, but with a bang. After a penultimate episode just two days before the election, in which Oliver dug up his own Comedy Central archives to find reasons why he needed to apologize in …
“You get a car! You get a car!! You get a car!!! EVERYBODY GETS A CAR!!!!” I don’t even need to remind you those were Oprah Winfrey’s words when she gifted a brand-new car to every person in her Oprah studio audience on an episode years ago. That was nice. …
You can look back on a calendar year from many different perspectives and points of entry. Your memories flash in front of you. And then a website comes and calculates how other people viewed your year for you. Or one slice of your view. Such is 2015bestnine.com, which takes an …
(Photo of Josh Gondelman by Mindy Tucker, August 2015) What do they say about New York City: There are eight million stories, and sometimes it seems as though eight million of the people telling them think they’re comedians? No, that’s not it. It is a fact, though, that America’s biggest …
Jon Stewart’s talking head might not appear on our TVs four nights a week any longer, but his name and his influence is perhaps even farther reaching now that he’s gone, imprinted into the four most vital late-night TV shows of 2015. Note: Most vital. Not most viral. The Jimmys …
Congratulations to Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer and HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, as they joined seven other TV series honored this morning as recipients of the 74th annual Peabody Awards. The Peabodys were created by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1940 to serve as “the Pulitzer …
With all of the talk in the past week about satire, freedom of speech and comedians abusing or somehow not doing what they can with that privilege, it’s even more remarkable to consider what John Oliver did during that week. Oliver and a camera crew flew to Russia and interviewed …
TV networks may still use Nielsen ratings as their primary measuring stick for how successful their programs in gaining viewers and selling advertisements. But Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is on HBO, where such ratings are even less reliable and relevant than they are for the broadcast networks. So …
Say what you will about the legitimacy of rape jokes, but at least we all can agree that prison rape is hilarious, right ladies? Because it’s not about you. It’s about horrible men convicted of doing horrible things, having something horrible done to them. Cheeky bastards! John Oliver has crafted …
