In
Girl on Guy #30, Aisha Tyler talks to Margaret Cho about polymaths, San Francisco, and being a woman of color in comedy.
posted by psoas
on Feb 4, 2012 -
18 comments
What happens when a Southern paleontologist falls for a creationist? According to Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally, it might go a little something like
this.
posted by yellowbinder
on Jan 25, 2012 -
30 comments
Day at Night was an interview series on the public television station of the City University of New York that aired from 1973-4. CUNY TV is in the process of digitizing and uploading the 130 episodes that were produced, with 46 done so far. The episodes are just under half an hour in length. Among the people interviewed by host James Day are author
Ray Bradbury, actress
Myrna Loy, medical researcher
Jonas Salk, singer
Cab Calloway, writer
Christopher Isherwood, nuclear scientist
Edward Teller, comedian
Victor Borge, tennis player
Billie Jean King, linguist and activist
Noam Chomsky, composer
Aaron Copland, actor
Vincent Price and boxer
Muhammad Ali.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 16, 2012 -
6 comments
Scotch and Wry, Scotland's greatest comedy. As the rest of the world celebrates New year's Eve and bringing in 2012, there's the little matter of Hogmanay. You might think it's just a fancy scottish word for the start of a three day party (which it is), but it's a special time of year. And for those of us who watched the new year come in on TV, it's the point of year where we all miss Rikki Fulton's Scotch and Wry - a TV ritual for over twenty years that has never been equalled.
[more inside]
posted by ewan
on Dec 31, 2011 -
6 comments
"I think Louis has hit on some sort of subterranean undercurrent of emotion that I didn’t realize might be swelling until I listened more closely:
shame." [
via]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Dec 25, 2011 -
53 comments
The Powers That Be was a short-lived, irreverent sitcom about a dim US Senator (John Forsythe, in his last major starring role on television) and his dysfunctional family, that aired on NBC between 1992 and 1993. Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, who would go on to create
Friends, the show co-starred David Hyde Pierce (pre-
Frasier) as the Senator's
suicidal son-in-law.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 25, 2011 -
21 comments
The concept of Used Cars originated with writer-director-producer John Milius, who pitched the idea to scribes Zemeckis and Gale while they were still hard at work on what would become 1941.
... Zemeckis shot Cars
in a breakneck 28 days at a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Mesa, Ariz. ... Despite its low profile, the film received a great deal of critical acclaim, including the notoriously finicky Pauline Kael…who described Cars as “a classic screwball fantasy — a neglected modern comedy that’s like a more restless and visually high-spirited version of the W.C. Fields pictures.”* [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 21, 2011 -
36 comments
Here is "The B.S. of A. with Brain Sack," a show aired on Glenn Beck's TV channel that claims to be a "non-partisan" alternative to the Daily Show. How good is it? Better than the right's previous attempts at making a satire show, but uneven.... Judge for yourself: here's a monologue, in five parts:
1-
2-
3-
4-
5. Here's a few of the better bits:
Kill Panel -
Pilgrim Funnies -
Isle of Skulls MLYT [more inside]
posted by JHarris
on Dec 17, 2011 -
88 comments
"You're going nowhere, son. Just you, me ad the walls. So wipe that bloody grin off before it's shot off, and don't slouch. You toe rag. You bin
. Pay attention when I break you. And break you I will, boy. You're in my manor, now." Buck up! It's Terry Finch's
THE REPRISALIZER! Follow
Bob Shuter, whose mission of reprisal against his brother's killers, their families, associates, progeny and property takes him across the desolate wasteland of 70s Britain, primarily Kent AKA
FINCHLAND. Finch, writer of The Reprisalizer and
DRAW!, the cowboy whose name means death, is soon to be the subject of
a major motion picture from Matthew Holness, creator of
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
posted by Artw
on Dec 13, 2011 -
15 comments
David Malki!, of the "illustrated jocularity"
Wondermark, has released
Wondermark Kinetic. It's a series of ad-libbed, paper-puppeteered videos in an approximation of his usual, surreal style. (If you're unfamiliar with what that style is, he conveniently keeps a list of
his own favorite strips.) I particularly like how a story slowly emerges from the rough start of
this one.
[more inside]
posted by gilrain
on Sep 30, 2011 -
2 comments
What came next was 8 minutes of comic brilliance. On Kevin Pollack's Chat Show guests are invited to do a bad impression of Larry King reveling something embarrassing about himself. Many are very funny, but Gould's amazing comic riff should go down in comedy history. Keep an eye on Kevin as he nearly faints from hilarity.
posted by judson
on Sep 27, 2011 -
50 comments
One of the most radically original TV shows in recent memory is
Louie. It's written, directed, edited, and produced by comedian
Louis C.K., who stars as a (thinly) fictionalized version of himself.
The A.V. Club recently sat down with Louis C.K. to talk through the show's second season, episode by episode. He sheds light on many aspects of the show, including the much-discussed
Dane Cook episode.
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4. (Louis C.K. previously:
1 2 3 4)
posted by naju
on Sep 22, 2011 -
85 comments
