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    Robert Klane, Writer of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ Dies at 81

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    He also adapted his best-known novel, “Where’s Poppa?,” into the script for a raw Carl Reiner comedy and directed the disco movie “Thank God It’s Friday.”Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive, died on Aug. 29 at his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 81.His son Jon said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Klane wrote “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than two decades into a career that began with the publication of two humorous novels: “The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel” (1968) and “Where’s Poppa?” (1970). He adapted “Where’s Poppa?” into the screenplay for a twisted comedy about a single lawyer (played by George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).Ted Kotcheff, who directed “Weekend at Bernie’s,” wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film,” that Mr. Klane had been inspired to write it by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island.Mr. Klane with Donna Summer on the set of the 1978 disco film “Thank God It’s Friday,” which he directed. Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves — inmates taking over the asylum,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote.In “Bernie’s,” the young workers (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) discover a $2 million fraud but don’t know that their boss, Bernie (Terry Kiser), is the culprit. Bernie invites them to his beach house, ostensibly as a reward, and asks his mobster partner to kill them. But the mobster tells the hit man to kill Bernie instead for sleeping with his girlfriend.The employees — fearful that they might be next on the hit list — frantically make Bernie seem alive by, among other ruses, putting sunglasses on him, rolling him out to his sun deck and rigging a device that raises his arm so he appears to be waving to people.The film, which grossed a modest $30 million (a little less than $75 million in today’s money), gained fans long after its release through home video and cable-TV viewing. People magazine wrote in 2014 that the movie “has managed to age into something close to respectability.”Mr. Klane believed that the Bernie character was too dead to revive cinematically. But a sequel was made — because Victor Drai, one of the original film’s producers, raised the money from its Italian distributor, Mr. Drai recalled in a phone interview.Mr. Klane was the director as well as the writer of “Weekend at Bernie’s II” (1993), which involves the discovery of Bernie’s offshore bank account, containing the embezzled money, and a voodoo ceremony to try reanimating him.The reviews were roundly negative.“If ever there was a career-ending movie,” the Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez wrote, “‘Weekend at Bernie’s II’ is it.”But for Mr. Klane, it wasn’t. He kept working.Robert Klane was born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Port Jefferson, N.Y., on Long Island, and grew up in nearby Patchogue and Bayport. His father, Edward, was a physician. His mother, Adele (Blum) Klane, was a homemaker.After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Klane returned to New York and found work in advertising.Over the next few years he was a commercial copywriter at two agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO) and McCann Erickson (now McCann). In 1967 he went to work at Filmex, a production house, where he directed commercials.In his spare time he wrote “The Horse Is Dead,” about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The book was labeled “filth and smut simply for the sake of smut” by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it.On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read.Two years later, Mr. Klane published “Where’s Poppa?,” and that same year Carl Reiner directed the film version, with a script by Mr. Klane. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film did not have “much more on its mind than a desperate desire to provoke shock and laughter” — which, he said, it did successfully.Jon Klane recalled going to a theater to see the film with his father, who stayed in the lobby. “I came out to get candy, and he was watching a matronly woman demand a refund,” he said by phone. “I went up to him, and he said, ‘This is exactly the kind of person I want to offend.’”Over the next three decades, Mr. Klane stayed busy in television and film. He wrote six episodes of the sitcom “M*A*S*H”; the 1985 film “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” with John Hughes; “The Man With One Red Shoe,” a 1985 remake of the French comedy “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe,” which starred Tom Hanks; and, in 1997, 11 episodes of Tracey Ullman’s sketch comedy series “Tracey Takes On …,” for which he and several others received an Emmy Award for outstanding variety, music or comedy series.His directing work included “Thank God It’s Friday” (1978), set entirely in a disco, which won the Academy Award for best original song, “Last Dance,” sung by the disco diva Donna Summer, one of its stars; and “The Odd Couple: Together Again,” a 1993 TV movie that reunited Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of that 1970s sitcom.In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Klane is survived by his wife, J.C. Scott; a daughter, Caitlin Klane; another son, David; a brother, Larry; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Tracy Klane, died in 2011. His marriages to Linda Tesh and the actress Anjanette Comer ended in divorce.About 20 years ago, Mr. Klane worked with his son Jon on a script, set in a ski resort, that would have rebooted the “Bernie’s” franchise. It did not sell.“We wore out the carpet coming up with gags,” Jon Klane said. “It was my best memory of him. He would say, ‘It has to be a laugh a page, Jonny.’” More

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      Lying in Comedy Isn’t Always Wrong, but Hasan Minhaj Crossed a Line

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      The stand-up’s penchant for making up stories goes beyond embellishment. When real people and real stakes are involved, a different standard applies.When I first heard that The New Yorker had published an exposé on the veracity of the stand-up comedy of Hasan Minhaj, I rolled my eyes.We’re fact-checking jokes now? Come on. Comedy is an art, not an op-ed. And honesty has always struck me as the most overrated virtue in comedy. But Clare Malone’s reporting in the piece is scrupulous and fair, if a little prosecutorial in its focus. It presents more questions than answers and should inspire some rethinking of the muddy relationship between comedy and truth.Digging into his last two specials, Malone reveals Hasan Minhaj as a comic who leans on fictions to make real-world arguments, putting himself closer to the center of news stories to make him seem more brave or wronged or in danger. To take one example, Minhaj says in “The King’s Jester” (2022) that after the government passed the Patriot Act in the wake of Sept. 11, an undercover F.B.I. informant named Brother Eric had infiltrated his childhood mosque and had dinner at his house. Minhaj recalls how he sniffed him out and, in a prank, asked about getting a pilot’s license, which led to a police officer throwing him against a car.The New Yorker found that there was such a man working in counterterrorism but that Minhaj never met him. Minhaj defended his fabrications as fibs in service to “emotional truth.” For someone in the running to be the next host of “The Daily Show,” that term sounds a little too much like Kellyanne Conway’s euphemism “alternative facts.”Amid plenty of critics online, Whoopi Goldberg was one of the few major figures who spoke up for Minhaj, saying on “The View” that embellishing in the name of a larger truth is what comics do. But here is where some more context would be helpful.Stand-up comedy was never expected to be factually accurate. Rodney Dangerfield, to be clear, got respect. In the setups for early jokes, Richard Pryor lied about having a Puerto Rican mother and living in a Jewish tenement. An old-school observational comic like Jerry Seinfeld has said all his comedy is made up, even his opinions.But in the past few decades, with the rise of “The Daily Show,” which has blurred lines between comedy and the news, as well as the proliferation of confessional solo shows that depend on dramatic revelations that dovetail nicely with jokes, the form has evolved and so have audiences’ assumptions. And they vary wildly depending on the artist.In Sebastian Maniscalco’s last special, “Is It Me?,” he told a story poking fun at a kid in his child’s class who identifies as a lion. Asked by The Daily Beast, he said that this wasn’t true, but that he used it because it puts “a mirror on society” — another kind of emotional truth. Minhaj’s inventions were part of the same tradition, one that deserves new scrutiny.Minhaj in “The King’s Jester.” Comics from Richard Pryor to Jerry Seinfeld to Sebastian Maniscalco have all invented details for their acts.Clifton Prescod/NetflixIt’s also important to point out that many current comics think seriously about their fictions, setting their own code. “I am quite strict about telling the truth,” Daniel Kitson once told me. “I am interested in engaging emotionally and I don’t want to be duplicitous.”In an interview with Taylor Tomlinson this year, she told me she cut a joke about being single after she started dating someone because even that minor white lie made her uncomfortable. Many other comics, like Kate Berlant, build unreliability into their acts. Others lie so overtly that it sets expectations. What’s tricky is that there is no one industry standard.The reality is that some comics have more leeway toying with the truth than others. All artists teach their audience how to view them, by the way they tell jokes, their style, the level of absurdity. What makes Hasan Minhaj such a troubling example is that his style, onstage and often off in interviews, suggested we should believe him.Minhaj is known for using visual aids the way a journalist would. He mixes clips of television news and photos from his life with a general tone of sincerity. The nature of his deceptions were peculiar. He didn’t invent stuff to make himself funnier. He did it to raise the stakes in the easiest, most self-regarding way possible. Lying in comedy isn’t necessarily wrong. But how you lie matters. Minhaj has told a story about his prom date reneging on the day of the dance because her parents didn’t want her seen in photos with a “brown boy.” He now admits to some untruths in this story, but not all, and left her perspective out. (The woman has said she and her family faced online threats for years.) This genre of fiction is a shortcut to sympathy, an unearned tug at the heartstrings. It’s not a capital crime, but it’s an unnecessary and risky one.Lies involving real people should add a new sense of obligation. The problem with only considering the standard of emotional truth is that it can blind you to the impact on the actual world outside your emotions. You could say that the emotional truth behind the Patriot Act was that the terrorism of Sept. 11 required extreme tactics to feel safe, but that doesn’t make the legislation right. The truth is usually more complex than the way you feel about it.Watching “The King’s Jester” now hits differently. In some ways, it’s more interesting than the first time I saw it, when it seemed mawkish. Some jokes, like his desperation for social media clout, seem like clues. And others come across as the work of a guilty conscience, like the moment when Minhaj faces the audience and says: “Everything here is built on trust.”This is the truth. Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience. The one Seinfeld has is different from Minhaj’s, and part of the reason has nothing to do with their intentions. Whether or not critics like me think authenticity is important, it does matter to the audience. So does honesty. And comics understand that. It’s no accident that many of the political comedians working today, especially on television, employ researchers from traditional news sources. Getting facts right matters, especially when the comedy is about grave social issues.That’s not just because a comic’s credibility can take a hit. When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.Minhaj subbing in as a host on “The Daily Show.” Every comic has an unspoken pact with the audience.Matt Wilson/Comedy Central’s The Daily ShowWhen the storyteller Mike Daisey, making an argument about factory conditions in China, said he visited a sweatshop even though he hadn’t, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party used the resulting scandal to try to discredit all reporting by Western media. This kind of argument has only become more common. Look at Russell Brand’s defense against accusations of rape and grooming: He tried to discredit his accusers by saying you can’t trust the mainstream media.One of the most notable aspects of the Minhaj story is the lack of nuance in his response, the complete confidence he projects. It’s striking that he seemingly has no concerns about possibly deceiving some of his audience. His special is about his wife challenging him to take responsibility for how his words can negatively affect his family. One wonders if there will be any more introspection.In the summer, Minhaj interviewed President Barack Obama and began by bringing up his annual best-of lists, skeptically asking if he really consumes all of those books, albums and movies. When Obama said he did, Minhaj pushed back: “No, you didn’t.”Later on his podcast “Working It Out,” Mike Birbiglia asked Minhaj how he could be so bold with the ex-president. Minhaj said his question for Obama was “innocuous.” That seems like naïveté masquerading as savvy.If Obama admitted to lying about even something that inconsequential, it would be a global story. We live in a world where people have long peddled conspiracies about him and would jump on any deception as evidence of some broader scandal. There’s a temptation to respond to the onslaught of lies by thinking that the only way to fight back is to lie some more. But that has it wrong. To quote Minhaj, everything is built on trust.That trust operates differently for politicians and journalists than for artists, but it matters for us all. Treat it carelessly and the price can be steep. More

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      How Shane Gillis Both Plays to and Mocks Red Staters

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      The comic’s savvy approach fits into the evolving meaning of conservatism and has resulted in hugely popular stand-up specials, like “Beautiful Dogs” on Netflix.At the start of his new special “Beautiful Dogs,” Shane Gillis, a bulky comic with the mustache of a Staten Island cop, announces that America is the best country in the world and that all the others suck. His crowd roars. Then he says he’s only been to three other countries and when he boasts about his home abroad, they ask about mass shootings.“There’s really not a good comeback,” he says, shifting from swaggering to struggling, then exclaims, using a profanity: “What, are we going to give up our guns like a bunch of gay guys?” His tone flattens into resignation: “No, we’re just going to have shootings all the time.”This opening bit, which celebrates and satirizes rah-rah American jingoism in the style of “South Park,” encapsulates the Shane Gillis experience. It’s got the amiable idiot swagger, plus the trolling offensive spin. Then there’s the satirical overlay that subverts the perspective. It’s dumb and smart, cocky and self-mocking, homophobic but relentlessly self-aware.Since getting fired from “Saturday Night Live” in 2019 after videos surfaced of him using Asian and gay slurs on a podcast, Gillis has built perhaps one of the fastest growing comedy careers in America. His debut special, released on YouTube in 2021, racked up a staggering 14 million views, and he’s the most popular podcaster on Patreon with more than 71,000 paying listeners. “Beautiful Dogs,” his second special, has been lodged in Netflix’s Top 10 most popular shows since the streamer released it on Sept. 5. He regularly sells out theaters. Don’t be surprised if he becomes an arena act.Getting fired paid off. It made Gillis a martyr to some, and he was savvy enough to embrace those fans without tediously obsessing over cancel culture. He has said he understood the criticism of his comments, offered a halfhearted apology, then doubled down on lumbering through the china shop of cultural sensitivities. A comic who tells the crowd he has no female friends isn’t looking to appeal to everyone.There’s an element of shock jock to his persona. Onstage, his bits are more controlled and agile than they seem, and he’s skilled at winning fans in unexpected places. Speaking in an admiring 2022 New Yorker profile of Gillis, the comic Jerrod Carmichael, who came out as gay in his last special, called him one of the few truly funny comics working today. “His material still feels dangerous,” he said.Gillis, a 35-year-old former football player from central Pennsylvania, often holds the microphone with two hands, more like a singer than a stand-up. His attitude is less telling you the truth about the world than stumbling through the mess of his thought process. His appearance telegraphs rumpled ordinary guy, not polished entertainer. And he speaks to crowds as if he were messing around with friends. Few comics do more with the word “dude.”To fully understand his success, you must use a word taboo in certain comedy circles: conservative. Many comics who rail against cancel culture tend to flinch at that one. Call Joe Rogan one and you will hear umbrage and a list of his liberal policy positions. And look, no one likes to be pigeonholed. But there is a political valence to Gillis’s comedy and the way it fits into the evolving meaning of what it is to be right wing.Being conservative in the age of Trump is not as much about opinions on free markets or foreign policy anymore; now it can mean projecting a certain attitude, alternatively nostalgic and contemptuous, fixated on the supposed oppressiveness of liberal norms and bluntly giddy about transgressing them.That posture sits comfortably in the comedy scene. It’s no accident that two prime-time hosts on Fox (Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld) cut their teeth doing comedy, of sorts. Part of the reason Gillis is such a phenomenon is clearly political. (The title of the special is a Trump quote.)Right-wing media adores him. The Spectator called his success a major turning point in the resurgence of comedy. But unlike comics who are primarily animated by caricaturing and picking apart the left, Gillis lands a broader crowd by focusing on an affectionately mocking insider perspective of the half of the country that voted for Trump (which isn’t to say he did, though there’s no question he finds the politician hilarious).There are MAGA-like identity politics at the center of some of his bits, as when he describes the story of the first baseball game played by Jackie Robinson not as a civil rights landmark but as the moment when white people stopped being cool. “I know what I look like,” he says. “I got the body type of the guy who says, Let’s look at the rest of the body cam footage before jumping to any conclusions.”His last special lovingly poked fun at his “Fox News dad,” who goes to bed angry every night. In “Beautiful Dogs,” he describes himself as a bit of a history buff, which he calls a sign of “early onset Republican.” He levels with his audience: “If you’re a white dude in your 20s and 30s and can’t stop reading about World War II, it’s coming, brother.”The assumptions here are that being a Republican makes you a beleaguered outsider. He compares the pull of it to that of a person turning into a werewolf. “I’m not a Republican, but I can feel it,” he says. “It grows.”Gillis, who lives in New York, regularly works clubs here, and there’s a way that his comedy is pitched as an explanation of a red state sensibility for a blue state audience. Some of this can feel forced and far below his intelligence, tipping over into Larry the Cable Guy territory.He uses a hack sexist line, only to draw attention to how bad it is. His punchlines about porn cover well-trod ground, and his contrarian joke about terrorists is similar to the one that got Bill Maher fired from his ABC show after Sept. 11. Gillis can get stuck in his own bubble, drawing some familiar or easy laughs. His new special has more sex jokes than his last, some about his own grossness (“coughing during sex is funny”) and others about the hopelessness of being competitive with the Navy SEAL who previously dated his girlfriend.His most ambitious bit in the new hour involves a trip to George Washington’s Mount Vernon during the racial upheaval of 2020. He describes the absurdity of the historical re-enactors, but also the gruesome detail of the slave quarters, mapping how he vacillated between hero worship of our first president and denunciation of our country’s original sin.Not unlike his opening bit, Gillis moves back and forth on his feelings about our country through the narrative of Washington, his military exploits, his lore. “I was trying to be cool and liberal and hate him,” he says. “Couldn’t do it.”Interestingly, he includes a joke that is identical to one John Oliver recently told mocking the idea that we are more divided than ever by bringing up the Civil War. Of course, in the 19th century, we couldn’t express our dislike for one another as easily. But what hasn’t changed is that people remain curious about those different from them, even those they dislike or hate. It may be human nature or strategy. (Know thine enemy.)Partly people watch Shane Gillis for the same reason some liberals binge Fox News — to see how the other half thinks. More

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      Review: Rachel Bloom Shines in ‘Death, Let Me Do My Show’

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      The writer-performer wanted to avoid the pandemic, but couldn’t. Her new solo show dives into birth, death and cosmic confusion.Rachel Bloom came to perform her latest live show in New York, and she really wanted to do it as if it were 2019. That was the year when her musical-comedy series, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” ended its four-season run on the CW, and Bloom was getting ready to hit the road. But in 2020, some things happened.Now that she’s finally able to face a live audience again, the writer-performer wanted to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a parenthesis: She was keen, as she put it at the Lucille Lortel Theater a few days ago, to “go back to my old material unsullied by trauma.”Some things, however, can’t be brushed aside easily, even with the help of gleefully blunt songs, or a few jokes.Fate, life, inspiration, rumination, grief, time, a dark power greater than even the gods of comedy: Whatever you want to call it, something derailed Bloom’s plan, and “Death, Let Me Do My Show” deals with what she was trying to avoid talking about onstage. (Spoiler alert: the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast member David Hull plays one of the aforementioned forces.)Which is that in the spring of 2020, she found herself in a conjunction of events so chaotic, so intense and so scary that had they been part of a Hollywood movie, critics would have accused the screenwriter of being a tad too melodramatic and over-reliant on far-fetched coincidences.In the early days of the pandemic, Bloom gave birth to a daughter. The baby had fluid in her lungs and was placed in intensive care. At the same time and on the opposite coast, Bloom’s close collaborator on the series, the musician Adam Schlesinger, was also in the hospital, with Covid-19.Bloom’s child lived; her friend died.Those harrowing days form the conclusion of Bloom’s memoir, published in November 2020, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” and are the crux of her almost-one-woman show. Bloom bounces from incomprehension to fear to regret to anger to cosmic confusion (she starts questioning her atheism) and back again. All the while, she expertly deploys a jokey, graphic candor that telegraphs honesty and forthrightness — that, after all, is what we expect from a woman who brightly talks about bodily fluids and whose perky song about trees that smell like semen feels like a deep cut from a bizarro “Mary Poppins” cast album. (The music director Jerome Kurtenbach leads a three-piece backing band.)Directed by Seth Barrish, a regular Mike Birbiglia collaborator, “Death, Let Me Do My Show” lands closer to Birbiglia’s classic self-examination than to the recent solos by Kate Berlant and Liz Kingsman, which toyed with the genre’s form and conventions, and reflected on the very nature of narcissism.Bloom is an old-fashioned vaudevillian — because this is the 21st century, she got her start not at a borscht belt resort but by uploading videos on YouTube. (Do look up her 2012 duet with Shaina Taub, “We Don’t Need a Man“; Taub and Kurtenbach are two of Bloom’s several co-songwriters in the new show.) Bloom is also a bona fide theater kid who is fluent in both displaying va-va-voom extroversion and mining her anxieties and struggles for art. The new show toes, often dexterously, the line between confidence and vulnerability, earnest emotion and winking self-dramatization — a number sending up “Dear Evan Hansen” captures the way that hit musical relies on rooting for an unreliable, somewhat unsympathetic lead character.The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail, as when she sings the tender “Lullaby for a Newborn,” then reminds us she had been cradling her bottle of water swathed in a towel. More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.Death, Let Me Do My ShowThrough Sept. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; rachelbloomshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      ‘Outlaw Johnny Black’ Review: A Gravel-Toned Gunslinger

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      This misguided Western parody, starring and directed by Michael Jai White, struggles to establish a comedic rhythm.A gravel-toned gunslinger rolls into town. He’s got a bullet with his nemesis’s name on it and vengeance on his mind. It’s a familiar image that “Outlaw Johnny Black,” directed by Michael Jai White, intends to spoof, but the punchlines don’t quite land properly in this misguided Western parody.This is the second movie that White has written with Byron Minns; the first was “Black Dynamite,” the 2009 Blaxploitation spoof that White also starred in. But whereas the latter understood the specific visual language and tricky tone of its genre satire, “Outlaw Johnny Black” struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.Much of the flaws come from its bagginess and lack of expositional focus (plus several needlessly cringe-worthy scenes involving Native American characters). The first third of the film — which concerns the relationship between the titular Johnny Black (White) and Brett Clayton (Chris Browning), the man who killed his father — becomes practically irrelevant after Johnny winds up in a small town impersonating a preacher and enmeshed in political schemes over oil-rich land.There are some funny moments in this stretch, particularly when the actors are allowed to run with some of the purely inane gags. But the laughs are lost within an overly long, meandering plot and scenes that miss visual polish or comedic concision. The gunslinger can land a punch, but the film doesn’t pack any.Outlaw Johnny BlackRated PG-13 for violence, strong language and some sexual material. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad Tackle Another Book (Not Mormon)

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      Twelve years after opening “The Book of Mormon,” the two actors — and good friends — return with “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Josh Gad still remembers the first time he and Andrew Rannells met, in June 2010 in a Los Angeles audition suite. No matter what Gad did during their scenes together, Rannells didn’t laugh. Not once.Rannells was auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical from the creators of “South Park.” Gad, then a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” had long been attached. The producers wanted a celebrity opposite him, and they’d invited several to these tryouts. Rannells, a replacement actor in “Hairspray” and “Jersey Boys,” was not remotely famous. Confronted with Gad’s cyclone energy, he chose stillness.“I was so intimidated. And it really upset me,” Gad said, over dinner at Chez Josephine, a theater district mainstay where Rannells, in younger days, used to work the coat check. Gad turned to Rannells. “I had that Tony locked until you walked in the door. And I still had a grudge because you beat me out for ‘Jersey Boys.’” (It was unclear if Gad was joking. Then again, Gad is almost always joking.)“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser. Both men were nominated for a Tony Award and both men lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for “Catch Me If You Can.” Somewhere along the way, they became close friends, which was apparent over dinner, a symphony of bits, riffs and callbacks between bites of tuna tartare and duck breast. They had ordered identical meals and identical Diet Cokes.Rannells, 45, has spent his post “Mormon” years in other Broadway shows and on television (“Girls,” “Black Monday,” “Girls5Eva”). Gad, 42, has since become a voice-over luminary (“Frozen,” Frozen 2,” “Central Park”). Now they are reuniting, one block south and one block east of their “Mormon” haunts, in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” which begins previews at the James Earl Jones Theater on Sept. 15.“Gutenberg!” directed by Alex Timbers and written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, is a farcical, largehearted duet about a pair of nursing home workers, Bud and Doug, bitten grievously by the Broadway bug. Using an inheritance and the proceeds from the sale of a home, they rent a Broadway theater for one night, hoping to find a producer for their deeply misguided and tragically under-researched original musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and the publisher of the Gutenberg Bible.“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTwo old friends finding a vehicle for a Broadway return has the whiff of a vanity project. But this deliriously silly show, in which the two actors play dozens of characters and wear a combined 107 baseball caps, demands that vanity be left at the stage door.Over dinner, Gad joked (probably!) that when Timbers had sent him a photo of those 107 hats, each inscribed with the name of one of the show’s characters, he’d tried to back out.“It was too late,” Rannells said.“I know,” Gad said. “I read my contract last night.”The day after dinner, at a rehearsal space at the Alvin Ailey Extension, Gad and Rannells were stumbling through (with an emphasis, perhaps, on stumbling) the second act of “Gutenberg!” In a scene at the top of the act, as Bud and Doug introduced themselves to the audience, Rannells hit Gad in the face, perhaps accidentally.“That’s assault,” Gad said.“You walked into it,” Rannells replied. Moments later they were standing cheek to cheek, singing spooky oo-oo-oos.Rannells was wearing a shirt and shorts in complementary greens, his wavy hair reliably perfect. Gad was all in black. He was also drinking an iced coffee. Given his typical energy levels, this seemed like a bad idea. He had burst into the rehearsal room after the lunch break singing “Unchained Melody” with heavy vibrato. He also riffed on a line from “Sunset Boulevard”: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”“No,” Rannells said. He hugged Gad. Or maybe he gave him a mild version of the Heimlich maneuver. This is more or less their way, with Gad as an avatar of chaos and Rannells in smirking control.Casey Nicholaw, the director of “The Book of Mormon,” had noted this contrast. “Josh’s comedy basically just says, ‘Watch me. Love me.’ Josh is just out there,” he said. “And Andrew’s is sneaky. Andrew knows how to just hold himself with grace and dignity and then just go for it.”Each has a different process, a different style, a different affect. Collaborators I spoke with compared them to famous comic duos — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Gad cited “The Odd Couple.”“I definitely am more anxious than he is,” Gad said over dinner. “I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to learning dances. I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to getting lines right.” Gad said that he is also a hypochondriac and that sometimes, offstage during “The Book of Mormon,” Rannells would suggest possible diseases for him.“He’s got a mean streak,” Gad said. “I can say that now.” Rannells, sipping his Diet Coke, didn’t deny it.Despite that mean streak, a friendship endures. Nikki M. James, their “Mormon” co-star, recalled watching it begin. “Onstage, they played very different people who end up becoming each other’s best friends,” she said in a recent interview. “That camaraderie and friendship and love and sense of family, it was very clear offstage as well.”That show left them inextricably linked. “When I die, if I get an obituary in The New York Times, Josh’s name will also be in it,” Rannells said, somewhat darkly.And after they departed “The Book of Mormon,” each for a quickly canceled sitcom (“1600 Penn” for Gad, “The New Normal” for Rannells), they would often talk about how they might work together again. A revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” was mooted. So was a revival of “The Producers.” About four years ago Timbers (“Moulin Rouge,” “Beetlejuice”) had another idea.Brown and King (“Beetlejuice”) had first conceived “Gutenberg!” more than 20 years ago. Back then, King was a musical theater intern at Manhattan Theater Club. Tasked with sifting through the slush pile, he found himself listening to home-recorded tapes and CDs of new musicals, most of them sung through by the author or authors, most of them hopeless. King thought that he and Brown could write something just as bad. Worse even.“We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King said.But what began as a way to prank King’s boss evolved into something just a little more sincere. As King put it, “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff.”In 2003, Brown and King performed a 45-minute version of the show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. It ran for about two years. With encouragement from a producer, they wrote a second act and took it to London. The show that emerged was never about the real Gutenberg — Bud and Doug have only the vaguest ideas of how movable type and medieval history work. Instead it was a loving lampoon of Broadway wishes and tropes.Gad and Rannells’s characters in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” hope to find a producer for their musical about the inventor of movable type.Adam Powell for The New York TimesBut for the Off Broadway premiere in 2006, directed by Timbers, the creators stepped out in favor of actual actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos, which made it feel more like a real show and less like a goofball routine written by two starving artist roommates.There had been conversations about moving the show to Broadway. Those conversations had never been especially earnest. Then Timbers slipped Gad the script, hoping that he would share it in turn with Rannells. Which is exactly what happened.With Brown and King and Timbers, the actors met for a reading in workshop in Los Angeles in March 2020, an inauspicious moment for Broadway-bound musicals. The reading went well. To succeed, the friendship between Bud and Doug has to feel ardent, unbreakable. Gad and Rannells had that.So after a delay of about three years, conversations began again. A two-person show felt overwhelming, especially one in which the actors also had to serve as their own crew, moving each prop and set piece. Gad described it as “more intimate, and yet much more insane than even ‘Mormon.’” Still, he and Rannells agreed.In rehearsal, that insanity was in evidence. The two men were playing not only Bud (Gad), the composer, and Doug (Rannells), the book writer, but also every other baseball-capped character. And they had to play them with all the naïveté and enthusiasm that newbie writers would bring, but also with the necessary skills of a practiced musical theater performer, because bad acting and bad singing aren’t funny for long.“You have to commit to doing fully lived-in characters by performers who otherwise would not be on Broadway,” Gad said.“It’s literally a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat,” Rannells sighed.Hats aside, they seemed to be having a pretty good time, particularly during one sequence where Rannells reenacted an eagle attacking a sea gull, while Gad, playing a pubescent girl, did a sexy, scary skeleton dance.It wasn’t all skeletons and sea gulls. Opening a Broadway show is stressful. “I think our actual human sweat will give us away,” Rannells said. “I’m going to be a real mess 10 minutes into the show.” Opening a Broadway show with a best friend in accidental smacking distance is stressful in a different way. But it’s also pretty nice. “Gutenberg!” is about two characters supporting each other, through thick and thin and third reprise. And as Gad and Rannells tell it, that tracks for the actors, too.“There are times where I want to fall down and just cry at how tiring the show is,” Gad said. “Then I look at Rannells and I’m like, ‘OK, he’s going to keep me upright.’”He turned to Rannells, adding, “I’m so happy you got ‘Jersey Boys’ now. Now I actually think they made the right choice.” More

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      in Television

      5 Stand-Up Comedy Specials to Stream for the Labor Day Weekend

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      Todd Barry, Tracy Morgan, Sasheer Zamata, Chris Fleming and Jason Fried riff on weird characters, middle age, lost histories and more.Todd Barry, ‘Domestic Shorthair’Stream it on YouTubeTodd Barry speaks fluent sarcasm. After decades of refinement, honing his low-key deadpan into something flexible and distinctive, he can turn a sentence inside-out with the mildest shift in intonation, instantly divorcing what he says from what he means. The pivots in his jokes are subtle but crisp. Ever since David Letterman retired from late night, sarcasm has no better champion. Barry starts waving its flag as soon as the applause settles down on his very funny new special. “That is the type of forced fraudulent crowd response that will propel this whole show,” he says, enough of a hint of a smile to soften the blow.Barry is a taut joke teller more than a yarn-spinner. But his punchlines emerge from anecdotes filled with details about curious characters he’s met, tales that have the quirkiness and surprise of what you find in a sensitively observed short story. There’s the Uber drive who apologizes for not talking during the ride, the waiter who warns against the Italian dressing in a whisper and the cabinet salesman who says he loves his job because it allows him to eat with his customers. He filters the slightest interactions with them through his arch responses, mocking but not mean. His real adversaries are not people but hyperbole, nonsense or any pointless excess of emotion. And some of his most unexpected laughs are in his own mixing up of mountains and molehills. “My printer broke recently,” he said, gently shifting gears to a parody of concern. “Sorry to bum you out.”Tracy Morgan, ‘Takin’ It Too Far’Stream it on MaxIt’s been a rough couple of years for Tracy Morgan, the veteran comic, “30 Rock” scene stealer and all-time great talk-show guest. He almost died after being hit by a Walmart truck, then during the pandemic, his marriage fell apart. In his baggy new special, he says his wife “took that social distancing too far.”If you were looking for a bracing and introspective hour on his troubles, you came to the wrong place. Morgan just brings up his problems to crack wise about them. There is little attempt at timeliness (the expiration date on jokes about the slap at the Oscars has passed) or ambitious set pieces with tight jokes snapping into place. This is a comic coasting on charisma, which he can do as well as anyone. His main subject is middle age. He’s out to prove you don’t need to be mature in your 50s. Instead, he doubles down on sex and fart jokes, yanking his shirt up, rubbing his belly, finishing with a dozen or so minutes on what it’s like to sleep with older women. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the fact that aging changes you. Morgan confesses he pushed a lap dance away at a strip club, shouting: ‘You know my sciatica flared up!”Sasheer Zamata, ‘The First Woman’Stream it on YouTubeWhy does everyone know Amelia Earhart but not Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the world? According to the comic Sasheer Zamata, whose second stand-up special is full of hidden histories, it boils down to marketing. Mock kept to herself, saying, “The kind of person who enjoys being alone in a plane is not the kind who enjoys being continuously around other people.” Zamata says she doesn’t “like going places or doing things,” so perhaps she can relate. Earhart married her publicist, and Zamata calls her the “original Kim Kardashian.”Her digression, filled with punchlines, is just one example of how this special unpacks lost or taboo stories. The political centerpiece of the set is about how we should talk more about female sexuality, especially for girls. She relates a story about masturbating for the first time with a lint roller, then opens the topic to the audience, resulting in some colorful crowd work. Zamata, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, turns jokes into carefully crafted vignettes, often hinging on a twist that leads her to widen her eyes for a long pause. She’s a poised performer, effortlessly moving from crowd work to dating tales to political gibes. Her description of being hit by a car becomes a peg for how people (including doctors) ignore Black women when describing pain but pay attention to them on the question of what is cool. Her solution? Black women should champion illness (“Sickle cell is sick as hell!”), and disease will be “gentrified out of our bodies.”Chris Fleming, ‘Hell’Stream it on PeacockWhenever a new Chris Fleming video appears on my feed, I stop and pay attention. In a scroll of sameness, he’s thrillingly unexpected, a shaggy-haired Los Angeles absurdist who often begins with an offhand and narrow idea (sitting in his car, considering the appeal of Adam Driver, say), then riffs on it with a gusto and flamboyance that accumulates its own comic momentum. His is a pointedly niche sensibility but responsible for some of the biggest laughs I have had on social media. His debut, a scattershot affair that mixes a performance at a theater with sketches, has some very funny oddball ideas, like his celebration of the Nissan Cube as the “one true asexual icon in American culture.”His precise dissection of basic families who think they’re really eccentric is a characteristic hobby horse. But these bursts of lunacy don’t build on one another. In the translation to long form, the pacing gets a little slack. Part of the problem might be editing (you must kill your darlings, especially when they involve sketches that go on too long) and an undercooked overall conceit. Fleming can’t seem to entirely decide if his aesthetic is going to be polished or ragged, his material revealing or purely absurd. He’s smart enough to commit to the personal and the weird, but absurdity requires its own rigor.Jared Fried, ‘37 & Single’Stream it on NetflixIn the crowded field of dating jokes, Jared Fried, an amusingly hyperventilating self-deprecator exploring red flags, online profiles and tensions between millennials and Generation Z, distinguishes himself in a couple of ways. In his very strong act-outs, he does an inspired impression of fake laughing that projects real discomfort. It gooses a familiar bit about married people talking to singles about the perils of matrimony into something spiky and layered. Secondarily, not since Leslie Jones has a comic done more with bulging eyes. While dead eyes can kill an act, expressive ones can illuminate it. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Amsterdam: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Find your perfect street food
      Between the Lindengracht Markt and the neighboring Noordermarkt, a pricier, organic market that also has antiques, handmade jewelry, artisanal pickles, soaps and honey to browse, there are plenty of street-food stalls to choose from. (Walking while eating is frowned upon in Dutch culture, so grab a picnic table). On the Lindengracht side, try a sabich (€7.50), a stuffed vegetarian pita at Abu Salie, or for a classic Dutch lunch, go for the speciaal beenham and braadworst (a sandwich piled high with sausage, ham and sauerkraut, €6) at Fluks & Sons. Stalls throughout the markets also sell raw herring, sometimes covered in onions. Join locals at the Noordermarkt for fresh oysters (from €3.50 each; find them beside the entrance, next to the church tower). Dutch sweets also abound, including the ever-popular poffertjes (mini pancakes in powdered sugar or syrup) or warm and gooey stroopwafels. More

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      in Theater

      Meet Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s Breakout Clown

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      Around 2 a.m. one recent Saturday, Julia Masli laughed as she glided up to an audience member in a sweaty basement room at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel comedy club.Wearing a ghostly outfit with dolls’ legs sticking from a black hat, she pointed a microphone at the panicked-looking man and asked a simple question: “Problem?”After a confused “Er,” he blurted out a genuine issue for most people in the basement. “I’m quite warm,” he said.Masli, looking concerned, led the man onstage and made him sit on a stool. Then she pulled a huge electric fan from a nearby cupboard and duct-taped him to it.As the audience laughed, the clown was already moving on. “Problem?” she said, pointing the microphone at another audience member.Masli, right, had planned for “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” to run only two weeks.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesMasli’s show “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” (running through Aug. 27) has become the surprise hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Britain’s largest arts and comedy festival. She considered it a work in progress and had planned for only two weeks of performances, but word-of-mouth enthusiasm and rave newspaper reviews quickly sold out the run, forcing Masli to extend it in the only available time slot: 1:30 a.m.On Wednesday, the show was nominated for the fringe’s main comedy award, and Masli announced a three-week London run next year.Viggo Venn, another clown and Masli’s partner, said the show had gripped audiences because “it feels so risky and exciting,” with little possibility of planning. “She just has to trust the comedy gods that something magical will happen,” Venn said. “And it does. Every day.”In one recent show, Venn recalled, a man said he had a strained relationship with his mother, so Masli called her at 2 a.m., leading to an emotional chat onstage. That wasn’t something you get from many comedy acts, Venn said.During a recent interview in an Edinburgh pub, Masli, 27, said she developed shows by coming up with games to play, “and then from those I find where the meat is.” Last year, she started a routine where she’d walk up to audience members and say “Ha” in increasingly silly ways, seeing how they responded. If they echoed her, she tinkled a bell. If they misplaced the phrasing, she screamed.Saying “Problem?”, Masli found, quickly made audience members share startling tales.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOne night, she decided instead to say “Problem?” and see what happened. She found that audience members quickly shared startling tales. Working with Kim Noble, a performance artist, she said they realized: “This is it. The ‘Problem?’ is the show.”Performing “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” has changed Masli’s own perspective on the world, she said. At an early show, a man said he was overweight, so she began running around the venue with him to help him burn calories. “It was wild,” she recalled.But when another man said he too felt fat, she said, she concluded the problem lay not with the men, but with how society saw them. She asked other audience members if they felt the man looked overweight, then kicked out anyone who agreed.“Clown is really about connection,” Masli said in the interview when asked why she thought the show was a success. “Maybe right now everyone just wants to be connected.”The daughter of two lawyers, Masli grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until age 12 when her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in England. Masli has said she spoke so little English at the time that she would mime to be understood.As a teenager, her heart was set on becoming an actor and performing the great tragedies on London stages. She auditioned for British drama schools, she said, “but got nowhere because I had this really strong accent.” So she moved to Étampes, France, to study under Philippe Gaulier, a clowning instructor whose past students include Sacha Baron Cohen.Masli uses a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg as a reminder of her first Fringe show.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesFor nine weeks of a 10-week module, Masli said, she failed to make anyone laugh. In the final week, Gaulier told her to perform as a plumber. She came onstage, looked at the pipes and said, “Oh, God.” When everyone fell about, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it happen again.Venn, Masli’s partner, said there was something in Masli’s eyes — “this innocent but cheeky look” — that could make anyone laugh with a glance.After returning to London, Masli struggled to make it as a clown. At one point, she stopped performing for 18 months and became so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Things only changed in 2019, she said, when she took her first show, “Legs,” to the Fringe. Made with the Duncan Brothers, two other clowns, it featured skits such as Masli shaking hands with audience members using her feet.Only two people saw the first performance, Masli recalled, but the show won a prize for comic innovation. Masli now tries to highlight the appendage in all her shows. “‘Legs’ saved me,” she said. “It was the biggest ‘Keep going.’” Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with “Choosh!” a solo show about a migrant struggling to make it in the United States, for which The Daily Telegraph named her the Fringe’s “best sad clown.”Masli onstage. On Wednesday, her show was named as one of eight nominees for the Fringe’s main comedy award.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesBoth those shows featured some audience interaction, but nothing compared to what happens in “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” During the recent Saturday performance, the problems ranged from the trivial (someone’s glasses were broken) to the seemingly insurmountable (a man said he was a hypochondriac). Masli tried to solve them all.She only seemed stumped once, when an audience member said that she was devastated after splitting up with her girlfriend. Masli empathized, but that didn’t seem to help. She solicited relationship advice from other audience members. That didn’t work, either. So Masli suggested something a little more left field: that the person crowd surf.Approaching 2:30 in the morning, the audience member leaped into the crowd, who then carried her from the front of the room to the back. Her heartbreak was far from solved, but for a minute, at least, she seemed to forget all about it. More