The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Conan O’Brien graduated from Brookline High School in 1981. As a junior, the teenager who was not yet a beloved TV writer and late-night host apparently wasn’t feeling much love for the game. Until he got a hold of some E.B. White. White, a longtime contributor to The New Yorker …
If you haven’t yet treated yourself to the first season of Cobra Kai on YouTube, better get to it before season two drops next week. The series wonderfully spins the whole saga of The Karate Kid around and around, making you question who really is the hero and who is …
One of the odder aspects of this year’s Election Day madness, and there were many odd things to choose from, was seeing so many old comedy characters come out of the woodwork for late-night TV sketches and bits. Borat canvassed in Los Angeles for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Dr. Evil announced …
You want to get your TBTs on in a very comedy way? Starting this week, your ear holes can deliver the history of comedy into your brain parts, thanks to the brand-new podcast, The History of Standup. Over the course of six weekly episodes, teacher Wayne Federman (who is a …
Scott Rudin needed to persuade both star Jack Black and director Richard Linklater that Linklater was the right choice to direct 2003’s film, School of Rock. As these new interviews for an American Masters documentary on Linklater prove 14 years later. “At first we were like, that doesn’t make sense …
Late-night TV talk show hosts love digging up old clips from a celebrity guest’s early career, but this clip Jimmy Kimmel Live found of Billy Crystal is extra special. As ABC prepares to reboot Battle of the Network Stars, Kimmel showed Crystal a clip from the classic years in the …
“It was 2007, and at this point, the Internet was basically just a place for perverts to talk dirty to each other,” says writer/director Adam McKay. “It was rubble,” added comedy star Will Ferrell. “It was just a vast field of rubble.” Enter Saturday Night Live alums McKay and Ferrell, …
While the FBI and Congress are still trying to figure out what happened in our presidential election of 2016 and who helped the Russians and how much the Russians meddled with us, Samantha Bee already knew. Bee told us all about it months ago, before Election Day. As she reminded …
For years now, we’ve been sharing notes, transcripts and more recently full audio recordings of Andy Kindler’s annual State of the Industry Address that he delivers at Montreal’s Just For Laughs Comedy Festival. It has become one of the must-see, must-listen moments each July at comedy’s largest confab. What will …
Before IFC’s Portlandia, and before NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Fred Armisen showed up on your TV screens in unusual ways and sometimes even without credit. Armisen performed a number of short videos for HBO in the late 1990s, for instance, that ran as interstitials between movies. He’d take one of …
