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      in Television

      Dana Carvey Calls His Biden Impression a ‘Delicate Thing’

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      For his portrayal of the former president on “Saturday Night Live,” Carvey admitted that he had to toe a careful line.Dana Carvey, the comedian and actor, said that impersonating former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the just completed 50th season of “Saturday Night Live” was a challenge because he said he believed Biden “was compromised mentally.”Carvey made the comment on a recent episode of his and David Spade’s podcast “Fly on the Wall” while discussing his portrayal of Biden, a Democrat, during his re-election bid in 2024. “It was a delicate thing in the comedy world,” Carvey added. “There were a lot of people that did not want to do anything that would kind of ding him in, like, an awkward way.”Carvey, a former “S.N.L.” cast member known for his many impersonations, including his portrayal of George H.W. Bush in the 1980s and 1990s, said that in order to make his version of Biden funny, it had to be recognizable, which is why Carvey mastered the former president’s squint and chuckle, as well as his lapsing into non sequiturs like insisting on “being serious right now,” even if what he last said was not a joke.In one episode that aired in late September, Carvey as Biden joined Kamala Harris, played by Maya Rudolph, at a rally after she won the Democratic nomination. He slowly walked to the podium and tossed out a number of Biden’s signature phrases (“by the way,” “guess what?”) before being rushed offstage, only to wander back. In another skit from November, after Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, won the election, Carvey’s Biden advises him to watch how he talks as president but stammers over his own words in doing so.It took two years for Carvey to master his impression of Biden, he said, and that the first six months of Biden’s presidency did not provide much material until he heard the president whisper and yell.“Biden eventually was my favorite because he had like 10 hooks,” Carvey said. “I loved it. It was in entering and exiting, but it was a real challenge to make it acceptable.”Biden’s age and mental state became flash points during the 2024 presidential election cycle. Conversations about it reached a fever pitch shortly after the first presidential debate in June, in which Biden meandered and mumbled through his answers. Weeks later and under intense pressure from members of his party, Biden dropped out of the race.Since then, there has been a litany of discussions and even books that examine the former president’s decline while in the White House. In May, Biden was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. More

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      in Television

      Anatomy of a Comedy Cliché

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      <!–>An early example is from the movie “Punchline,” when Tom Hanks chokes up telling a club audience that he disappointed his father, failing out of medical school:–> <!–>In “Obvious Child,” Jenny Slate stops joking in one set to say she was cheated on. Things get dark:–> <!–>After his jokes are met with awkward silence, Kumail […] More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Gailard Sartain, Character Actor and ‘Hee Haw’ Regular, Dies at 81

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      Though best known for comedy, he also played serious roles, including a sinister sheriff in “Mississippi Burning.” The director Alan Rudolph cast him in nine films.Gailard Sartain, a character actor who moved easily between comedy, as a cast member on the variety series “Hee Haw”; music, as the Big Bopper singing “Chantilly Lace” in “The Buddy Holly Story”; and drama, as a racist sheriff in “Mississippi Burning,” died on Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 81.His wife, Mary Jo (Regier) Sartain, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Sartain spent 20 years on “Hee Haw,” the country equivalent of “Laugh-In,” hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, which combined cornpone sketches with music. The characters he played included a bumbling store employee, a chef at a truck stop and Officer Bull Moose. At the same time, he also developed a movie career that began with “Nashville” (1975), Robert Altman’s improvisational drama set against the background of the country music industry.In that film, Mr. Sartain played a man at an airport lunch counter talking to Keenan Wynn. “I just said, ‘Ask Keenan what he’s doing in Nashville,’ and he did,” Alan Rudolph, the assistant director of the film, said in an interview. But Mr. Rudolph saw something special in Mr. Sartain and went on to cast him in nine films he directed over the next two decades, including “Roadie” (1980) and “Endangered Species” (1982).“I only wish I could have fit him into another nine,” he said. “Gailard had a certain silly magic about him. Most of my films are serious and comedic at the same time. In ‘Roadie,’ he was opposite Meat Loaf, as beer truck drivers, and that was about 700 pounds in the front of a beer truck. That should be funny.”One of Mr. Sartain’s most notable roles was in “Mississippi Burning” (1988), Alan Parker’s film about the F.B.I.’s investigation into the murders in 1964 of the civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were buried in an earthen dam. Mr. Sartain played Ray Stuckey, a county sheriff whose deputy was among the Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the men.Mr. Sartain played a racist Southern sheriff in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.” “Nobody likes to be typecast as a barefooted hillbilly,” he said, “so when I had the opportunity to do other roles, I happily did it.”Orion PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      What Does Shane Gillis Want (to Get Away With)?

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      How do you profit from a sudden windfall of attention?That’s what’s confronting the man-children of “Tires,” the Netflix sitcom from the comedian Shane Gillis, at the beginning of its recently released second season. The question digs at them both onscreen and behind the cameras.The show’s first season, which aired last year, felt like a tentative demo — a lo-fi experiment in bawdy, blue-collar yuksmanship. Season 2 is crisper and slicker. The clothes fit better. The lighting is sharper. And the auto repair shop at the show’s center is thriving, or something like it. The spoils of success are trickling in.Gillis, a frisky bear of a man who deftly tangles with the absurdities of contemporary culture and politics, is one of the standout comedic talents of the past few years. His humor is playful and plugged in, and delivered approachably. But he has at times deployed offense, or the appearance of it, in ways that have rendered him still something of an outsider from the mainstream, despite his huge popularity.“Tires,” an episodic sitcom on a major streaming platform, is first and foremost an opportunity to bridge that divide. Can the edgelord comedy that’s defined the nü-bro movement of the past few years come out and play?That remains to be seen. “Tires” is too inert to be offensive — curiously (purposely?) stakesless and edgeless for one of the few performers capable of making comedic hay of the current paroxysms around ideological purity (on all sides). Itchier provocations can be found in one Michael Scott monologue on a random episode of “The Office,” or truer right-leaning red meat on any of Tim Allen’s sitcoms.Gillis, left, stars in “Tires” as a mechanic at a Pennsylvania car repair garage.NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Dr. Demento Announces His Retirement After 55 Years on the Air

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      Barry Hansen, mostly known by his D.J. name, said he’d end his show’s run after 55 years of playing parody songs. His syndicated show was once heard on more than 150 radio stations.“Monster Mash.” “Another One Rides the Bus.” “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”The D.J. most responsible for lodging these earworms in listeners’ heads, Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, said last month that he would retire from the airwaves in October, on the 55th anniversary of his radio debut.Mr. Hansen, 84, started on KPPC-FM, a free form and progressive rock station in Pasadena, Calif., (now KROQ-FM) in 1970 and soon began focusing on what he called “funny music” because of listener requests for songs that made them laugh.After he played “Transfusion,” a song by Nervous Norvus, which had been banned on many radio stations in the 1950s, another D.J. at the station called Mr. Hansen demented.“Transfusion” — featuring the sound effects of vehicle crashes — is about a reckless driver who repeatedly gets seriously injured in car crashes by breaking traffic laws. In the lyrics, the driver gets a blood transfusion after each crash and vows to drive safely, before getting into another one.The novelty song struck a chord with Mr. Hansen, who would spin up similar parodies for his playlists for the next half century. The nickname Dr. Demento, which he adopted shortly afterward, also stuck.He referred to his fans as dementoids and dementites.“I have been doing this show for nearly 55 years, about two-thirds of my life,” Mr. Hansen said on his May 31 show, which broadcasts online. “It’s been a blast, but I have come to the decision that I need to hang up my top hat soon. The show you just heard is the last of my regular shows.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Comedy Samurai,’ the Writer-Director Larry Charles Tells Tales of Working on ‘Borat’ and ‘Curb’

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      Early in Larry Charles’s juicy showbiz memoir “Comedy Samurai,” he describes a formative moment writing for the television sketch show “Fridays.” Andy Kaufman was doing a bit with a masked magician swallowing a sword, only to spit up blood. “These were the laughs, the comedy, that I would try to pursue all my life,” Charles writes. “The deeper codes of comedy.”His book, a must-read for comedy nerds, is an account of nearly half of a century attempting to crack those codes, mostly as a director and writer, working with the most famous funny people in show business (Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld) and some of its most notorious bullies (Scott Rudin, the Weinstein brothers).Charles, 68, describes them all with entertaining candor, while also illuminating the creation of several of the greatest comedies of the modern era, including “Seinfeld” (he wrote for the first five seasons), “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (he directed episodes for two decades) and “Borat,” which he directed.His career, which began by selling a joke to Jay Leno, is a pocket history of modern comedy, anchored by surprisingly melancholy portraits of his two most fertile artistic relationships — with Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. In a recent interview over Zoom, he reflected on the path from Coney Island to Hollywood.Besides Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen, Charles has also worked with Bill Maher, on the film “Religulous,” and Bob Dylan, on “Masked and Anonymous.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesYou grew up in Trump Village, a then new housing complex in Coney Island built by the President’s father, Fred. You meet him?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      Two Fresh Looks at Molière: ‘Imaginary Invalid’ and ‘Prosperous Fools’

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      Red Bull Theater’s smart “The Imaginary Invalid” and Taylor Mac’s dismaying “Prosperous Fools” attempt to engage with the French writer’s comedy.Based on. An adaptation of. After. Inspired by.When these words precede the title of a new production of a classic play or the name of a long-dead writer, chances are good you’ll be in for a ride. Now two shows drawing from Molière — Red Bull Theater’s revival of “The Imaginary Invalid” and the Taylor Mac play “Prosperous Fools,” both running through June 29 — illustrate, with widely diverging degrees of success, how far that ride can go.In “The Imaginary Invalid,” Jeffrey Hatcher compresses the plot of Molière’s three-act comedy, from 1673, into a 90-minute romp, and rewrites the jokes but preserves the essence of the story and characters.The production, now running at New World Stages, reunites Hatcher with the director Jesse Berger, with whom he had cooked up marvelously funny takes on Nikolai Gogol (“The Government Inspector”) and Ben Jonson (“The Alchemist”). Happily, lightning can strike thrice.Aside from nods to “Les Misérables” and Édith Piaf, the play’s structure is intact, and still revolves around the hypochondriac Argan (Mark Linn-Baker). The doctors administering the treatments he constantly requests (all played by Arnie Burton) appear to have graduated from Quack U. “All these things they do to you, it’s like you donated your body to science but they couldn’t wait,” Argan’s no-nonsense maid, Toinette (Sarah Stiles), tells him.He does not listen, of course — though Molière and Hatcher aim their arrows at Argan, they also skewer profit-driven snake-oil peddlers and greedy bad agents.Much of the plot involves efforts to fleece or deceive Argan, and much of the production is shamelessly focused on making the audience laugh. Which it does, thanks to a company of expert farceurs who look to be tremendously enjoying themselves — like “Oh, Mary!,” this show understands that perfect silliness requires perfect execution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      5 Animated Political Satire Series to Stream

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      From Ramy Youssef’s latest to a long-running series from Seth MacFarlane, these shows tackle the hot topics of their time.The state of American politics can feel so exaggerated and far-fetched that one of the best ways to represent it is through a medium made for such absurdity. Animated satirical series can depict our country’s political figures and moments at their most bizarre, sometimes taking aim at a particular party or politician, and sometimes lambasting the general idea of America as a fair, free and democratic nation. What follows is a guide to animated satires of American politics and politicians from the first Bush administration to the Biden administration.#1 Happy Family USA (2025- )This new series, created by the comedian Ramy Youssef and the writer Pam Brady, depicts a Muslim Egyptian American family in New Jersey who must learn to properly code-switch and project the image of a nonthreatening, properly assimilated family in order to carry on in the midst of the prejudice and jingoism of post-9/11 America.Much of the series focuses on the exploits and misadventures of Rumi (voiced by Youssef), who tries to find his place among his middle school peers. But beyond the more standard adolescent story lines, “#1 Happy Family USA” hilariously skewers the likes of Fox News and George W. Bush, and also offers a stringent critique of how American beliefs and values shifted at the expense of many Muslim citizens and people of color after 9/11.Streaming on Amazon Prime.American Dad! (2005- )The series creator Seth MacFarlane (who also created “Family Guy”) has said that “American Dad!” was inspired by his frustration with the 2000 presidential election and the Bush administration. The sitcom stars the Smith family, the patriarch of which, Stan, is a jingoistic far-right Republican who works for the C.I.A. Conservative politics take many of the satire’s hits, but characters like Stan’s hippie daughter and her boyfriend then husband represent leftist targets that get mocked regularly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More