The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Before there was the viral video, before the Internet meme, before the Tweet and ReTweet, the Huffington Post and the Colbert Bump, there was The Onion headline. (You remember headlines, right? They’re like Tweets, only way fewer than 140 characters.) The Onion headline, now shorthand for the outrageous (and steeped …
Kenneth Brown, who went by Kd Brown on Facebook and KD, K.D. or Kenny Brown elsewhere, was killed early Monday morning after tacking a shooter wreaking havoc inside the nightclub of the Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. Brown was 40. He’d recently moved to Vegas from Los Angeles. Bally’s …
Monty Hoffman, one of the funny people gathered for a roundtable pep talk about comedy with Adam Sandler’s fictional alter-ego in Judd Apatow’s Funny People, has died. Hoffman was 60. About getting Hoffman at the table with Carol Leifer, George Wallace, Paul Reiser and Mark Schiff for a “Broadway Danny …
“The TBS Just For Laughs Chicago festival wrapped up its fifth annual celebration of comedy in “the second city” over the weekend, but there probably wouldn’t have been reason for such a fest in Chicago without The Second City‘s co-founder, Bernie Sahlins, who died at his home on Sunday. Sahlins …
Rahn Ramey, a stand-up comedian who worked the road and survived the comedy boom of the late 1980s, died on June 9 following a three-year battle with colorectal cancer. He was 58. From St. Louis, Ramey had made his home in New Orleans in recent years. He’d created “The Official …
Jonathan Winters, one of the most inventive and inspired comedians whose career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, has died. He was 87. This is the message on his website today: “Jonathan Winters passed away of natural causes at his Montecito, California home at 6:45 p.m. PDT on …
Scott Kennedy died unexpectedly on Thursday. The stand-up comedian, known for leading dozens of stand-up comedy tours to American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, was in his 40s. Scott Kennedy began his comedy career in his hometown of Lubbock, Texas, in 1989, when a friend entered …
Hal “Chickie” Spear, a stand-up comedian and TV writer who penned jokes for Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall, Howie Mandel, Richard Jeni and others, died from a heart attack Monday in Las Vegas. Spear, born Hal Saperstein and raised in Merrick, NY, was in his late 40s. Spear was working the …
Phyllis Diller, who died in 2012 at the age of 95, helped blaze a trail for generations of funny women not only in stand-up comedy, but also in TV and film. “Just as people say Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backward and in high heels, Phyllis …
After a five-month battle with urethral cancer that he shared with fans and friends through daily Facebook posts and regular YouTube videos, comedian Ron Shock died today. He was 69. Ron Shock began his comedy career relatively late at the age of 40 but did so in Houston where he was …
