The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Margaret Cho famously has impersonated her mother in her stand-up routines. In this outtake from the new PBS documentary, American Masters: The Women’s List, premiering nationwide 9 p.m. Friday, Cho describes why it has been important to voice her mother accurately, as well as how her Korean father had no …
Enjoy this Throwback Thursday with a look back across a century of laughs and comedian-on-comedian ribbing as PBS premieres a new half-hour documentary on The Friars Club as part of the “Treasures of New York” series. The special debuts at 10 tonight on WLIW21, and 10 p.m. Friday on WNET-THIRTEEN. …
We need another documentary about women in comedy like we need another Holocaust movie. Distressingly, still necessary. So long as there are people who challenge genders, races, religions and varied upbringings, we’ll need to keep presenting evidence to contradict and convince them that anyone is capable of anything. Just because …
The PBS documentary series, Pioneers of Television, had interviewed Robin Williams extensively just recently for its portraits of him and other groundbreaking comedians of the past 60 years. So, when Williams tragically died last month at 63, they went back through the footage with him as well as with other …
“In the beginning of stand-up, it’s the hardest thing in the world, because you are not good,” said Ray Romano. “It takes 30 years to make a good, a great stand-up comic,” Roseanne said. “And it does!” And yet it doesn’t take quite that long to get the attention of …
Bill Murray says you have to remain available. Not just for work, but also for life: “We’re living this life, we’re in this life, and if you’re not available, a sort of ordinary amount of time goes past and you didn’t live it. The day passes and you didn’t live …
More than three decades before Dave Chappelle rocked Comedy Central with his portrayal of “Clayton Bigsby,” and less than a decade after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech that capped off the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, Bill Cosby delivered a devastating …
Carol Burnett received the 16th annual Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor for 2013. Held in Washington, D.C., at The Kennedy Center in October, and broadcast Sunday night on PBS, the all-star cast who paid tribute to Burnett included Julie Andrews, Lucie Arnaz, Tony Bennett, Tim Conway, Tina Fey (herself …
In case you missed it, here it is online. From the PBS American Masters description: “Mel Brooks: Make a Noise journeys through Brooks’ early years in the creative beginnings of live television — with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows — to the film genres he so successfully satirized …
Is the world ready for Mel Brooks to join the Twitter conversation? Ready or not, here comes @MelBrooks later today in an event coordinated for Comedy Central’s first-ever online #ComedyFest — that starts today and continues through May 3, 2013 — with the 2,000(minus 1,914)-year-old comedian in conversation with Carl …
