The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Sam Richardson is best known for playing Richard Splett, the only optimistic voice in Selina Meyer’s administration on HBO’s Veep. Richardson spent summers in his childhood across the globe in Ghana with his mother’s side of the family. But he’s also a Detroit native through and through, getting his comedy …
When Viola Davis accepted her Emmy Award last night for Outstanding Lead Actress in a TV drama series, she said: “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You can’t win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.” Powerful, moving words. Even more …
Anne Meara, an actress and renowned comedian nominated for Emmys, Golden Globes and Tonys who started performing comedy with The Second City’s parent troupe, The Compass Players, and enjoyed a six-decade run as comedy and life partner with Jerry Stiller as Stiller and Meara, has died. Meara was 85. Meara …
Before Parks and Recreation, before SNL, before the Upright Citizens Brigade set up shop in New York City, Amy Poehler was a fresh-faced college grad studying with the rogue improv mastermind Del Close and performing with The Second City. In 1995, Poehler and Close starred together in a pilot called …
In Amy Poehler’s inspirational new book that’s part memoir of her life in comedy — up, up and still rising from iO to UCB to SNL to Parks and Rec — and into advising young comedians and other “Smart Girls at the Party” as an executive producer, Yes Please really …
Sometimes it takes 15 years to rediscover the origins of something you loved. Over the weekend, we all finally enjoyed the opportunity to turn back the hands of time and jump into the YouTube machine to 1999, when fresh-faced young sketch/improv comedians Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey were about to …
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 …
If you caught David Letterman’s sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey last weekend, then you might have noticed ads promoting a special “sneak peek” at a series called My Life is a Joke. Well, it’s not a series just yet. But it is something special — a televised look at five …
With star players such as Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg departing Saturday Night Live this spring, plus the departure of Abby Elliott over the summer and the potential swan song of Jason Sudeikis coming after Election Day, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Lorne Michaels would look to bring in …
