The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Brody Stevens was bombing, but all of the comedians were howling. I could’ve been talking about a show last week, or last year, but this was also the case the first time I saw Steven Brody Stevens perform live, onstage at the weekly open mics at Seattle’s Comedy Underground in …
William Stephenson and I once shared 50 straight hours together inside The Comic Strip. Stephenson was hosting. I was live-blogging. We may have been the only folks in the joint to go stir-crazy and still keep a friendly sense of humor about the 50-hour stand-up comedy marathon that set a …
You knew Stewart Robert Einstein by many other names. Officer Judy. Super Dave. Marty Funkhouser. However you knew him, Bob Einstein cemented his comedy legacy as part of a rich, funny family. Einstein died Jan. 2 at the age of 76, from leukemia. Bob didn’t initially want to get into comedy, …
Comedic actress and director Penny Marshall has died. Marshall was 75. She died peacefully Monday night in her Hollywood Hills home, from complications due to diabetes. You might not have guessed the kid sister of Garry Marshall would grow up to be an icon. But just as the lyrics to …
David Shepherd, who co-founded the Compass Players in Chicago with Paul Sills in 1955, thereby giving birth to a revolution in improvisation and comedy which led to The Second City and much of everything we know and love today about sketch comedy in America, has died. Shepherd was 94. Born …
You probably could name at least one famous person who came out of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York City, if not several dozen. But everybody who performed at the UCB could tell you about Chuck Dauble. They’d describe Dauble as affable and irritable, sometimes at the same …
David “Deacon” Gray, the stand-up comedian who also nurtured a generation of Denver-area comedians as the new talent coordinator at Comedy Works since 2004, died over the weekend. He had cancer. Gray grew up in Oklahoma City, graduated high school in 1983 and started comedy on March 5, 1986, according to his …
Neil Simon may not have been the funniest guy in the writers room, but he certainly was the most prolific, if not also the most successful of the all-stars from Your Show of Yours in terms of churning out hit scripts. Simon died Sunday from complications of pneumonia. He was …
Do you suppose Roger Behr is making them laugh in Judgment City right now? Behr, one half of the popular comedy musical duo Roger and Roger in the 1970s and ’80s, and who played a stand-up comedian in the 1991 Albert Brooks film, Defending Your Life, died on Monday. He …
Whether you spelled it marvalous or marvelous, Marva L. Moncrieffe was simply funny. The comedian known as Simply Marvalous died Wednesday in hospice care in Baton Rouge, La. Moncrieffe was 64. She had her own HBO half-hour comedy special in 1994, and followed that up with appearances on Def Comedy …
