The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Advancing from last night's first semifinal of the 2009 New York's Funniest Stand-Up contest, please congratulate (in alphabetical order): Myq Kaplan, Gerald Kelly, Joe List, Matt McCarthy and Rory Scovel. They move on to the contest finals on Nov. 3 at Carolines, part of the New York Comedy Festival. Eliminated …
That seems like such an odd question. How is your comedy scene celebrating Halloween? I didn't know Halloween was known for comedy, is something that a rational human being who can read and write on the Internets would say (but that wouldn't be a category on The $25,000 Pyramid or …
Ever since I recently made the switch to the iPhone 3GS, I've been even more perceptive of all of the advertising that hits the airwaves both for and against the Apple superphone (thanks, Verizon, for launching the "map" parody spots what seemed like the day after I got my iPhone; …
Remember how Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein were going to dedicate one of their live variety shows to Microsoft's launch of Windows 7? Yes, of course you do. Before you can call up the "a funny thing happened on the way to" phrase on your predictive-text-blogging-platform (which exists only for …
I don't know why Roseanne and Tom Arnold feel the need to yell at each other on the Internets, or in their shows, because we're not laughing. Or is it because you two get roasted about this at every opportunity that you feel you must subject the rest of us …
So. This weekend. Let's talk about it. Cold and rainy. Warm and sunny. Professional baseball players could not field bunts properly. Men with dark secrets got outed in a fictional version of the 1960s, where someone could die of lung cancer and the director says, "Cut to the guy smoking …
The Bentzen Ball opened its inaugural comedy festival in our nation's capital last night, and The Comic's Comic was there for what seemed like a flash (because I was only there for about as many hours as I actually spent on the bus back and forth between NYC and DC …
The 2009 edition of New York's Funniest Stand-Up contest has compiled its field of 30 semifinalists who'll take part in two groups next week. The semis will be held Oct. 27 at Stand-Up NY and Oct. 28 at Gotham Comedy Club, with the five best from each group moving on …
I don't know if or how you remember Soupy Sales, but if you do, likely there was an open doorway and a pie to the face involved. Sales died in a New York hospice on Oct. 22, 2009. He was 83. Sales, born Martin Supman, delivered a subversively simple and silly …
As someone who has experienced 50 hours of continuous stand-up comedy as a patron saint of comedy blogging, I can tell you that it is a dizzying thing (see my Comic Strip Live Marathon coverage for background). There were some unexpected moments there, to be sure. The UCB's Del Close …