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      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe 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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      5 Comedy Specials to Watch: Josh Johnson, Rosebud Baker and More

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      Stand-up shows from Josh Johnson, Rosebud Baker, Craig Ferguson and others investigate Kendrick Lamar’s halftime show, motherhood and the politics of dumplings.Ian Karmel, ‘Comfort Beyond God’s Foresight’(Stream it on YouTube)In his debut special, Ian Karmel, a veteran comic and writer for late night and award shows, turns his worst joke into one of his best by continually refusing to tell it. It’s a neat trick, characteristic of his unpredictably funny style. Explaining his hesitance, he makes a meal out of the idea that it once killed an audience member who died laughing. It’s one of many distinctive riffs.There’s a long act-out of a guy putting a bumper sticker on a car that is somehow very funny. He makes a CPAP machine hilarious. Part of his gift resides in the subtext. He can get a laugh from just saying “I like books” because it’s clear that he doesn’t mean it. There’s a finesse to his delivery. He speaks deliberately, never straining. He veers in unexpected directions, even on a sentence level. “I was on tour with my podcast,” he said, pivoting, “which is a sentence I sometimes think about saying to someone who fought in World War II.”Karmel is committed to skirting free of cliché, but not in an indulgent, hipster way. There’s nothing ironic about his mustache. His interests (sex, politics, figures of speech) are basic. It’s the way he handles them that stands out. For instance, his take on how worried we should be about our current political moment begins with an observation that many of the countries (Poland, Italy) that make the tastiest dumplings have at one point succumbed to fascism. “So, the question we need to ask ourselves as Americans is,” he says, pausing for a dramatic beat. “Does Hot Pockets count?Rosebud Baker, ‘The Mother Lode’(Stream it on Netflix)Many, if not most, stand-up specials are shot over multiple performances, then edited together to make it seem like one integrated whole. Rosebud Baker’s breakout new hour finds meaning in this benign deception, weaving together a performance from when she’s eight months pregnant and another one after she had the baby. Wearing the same color clothes, she cuts between the two even in the middle of a joke. This mixing is never addressed or commented on, but supports a question hovering over the special: Does having a child change you? Baker says it does, but her shots make a different argument.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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      10 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Catchphrases That Readers Love

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      Hundreds of you told us about your favorite “Saturday Night Live” catchphrases. Here are the 10 that came up the most.To mark the 50th season of “Saturday Night Live,” we took a look at 50 memorable catchphrases from the show. We also asked readers to tell us about the ones you use with your friends and loved ones, and why. Hundreds of you responded. Here are the 10 phrases that came up the most, along with stories — some of which have been edited — you shared.‘More cowbell’“As a percussionist I think we ALWAYS need more rhythm in our lives. The skit spurred me to buy my own personal cowbell.”— Sheila Krueger, Phoenix“I teach art. There is often something just not quite right about a painting … it needs something.”— Gerard Brown, Philadelphia“We owned a restaurant. It was the perfect answer to any dilemma or flagging energy.”— Mary Beams, Grand Marais, Minn.“I play in a community band. When something doesn’t sound right someone will shout out ‘more cowbell’!”— Carol McMullen, Bowdoinham, MaineWe 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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      Inside Lorne Michaels’s Archive of ‘S.N.L’ History

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      But nothing tested the show like Sinead O’Connor’s musical appearance on Oct. 3, 1992, when she stunned viewers — and the producers — by tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, declaring, “Fight the real enemy.” Two years earlier, O’Connor had drawn wide criticism for joining the cast member Nora Dunn in pulling […] More

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      The Comedian Looking for Something All of America Can Laugh At

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      Partway through his latest special, “Lonely Flowers,” the comedian Roy Wood Jr. tells the story of the time he accidentally hired a white photographer. Or, as he corrects himself, he hired a photographer who he did not think would be white until he showed up. Whenever he travels to a city for a gig, he explains, artists who live there reach out to him to offer their services. He respects their hustle and sometimes accepts those offers, like the one he got from a guy who wanted to take some pictures of him. “Come on take the pictures,” Wood wrote back. “I’ll see you next week, Deon!”Wood drops Deon’s name casually, letting the audience pick up on the joke before he has to explain it. As they start to lose it, Wood joins them in astonishment. Pitching his body forward, throwing his arms out and bugging his eyes, he yells: “You see what I’m saying? I don’t know no white Deons either! Never met one!”Deon ends up being a bald, unimaginably chiseled military veteran with menacing tattoos consisting of “an animal, a death threat then a Bible verse” decorating his arms, the kind of white man that a Black person might not want to be left alone with. Wood is terrified of him — he makes sure to pay him up front — but he finds him unexpectedly sympathetic. It turns out that after returning from service abroad, Deon feels intensely isolated, and photography gives him a sense of purpose.Onstage, Wood is unhurried, an amiable man who, despite being 46, has the countenance of a churchgoing grandfather who still starches his Sunday suit. He is a master of the leisurely, even comforting, story that plays to his audience’s expectations of what is good, kind and virtuous, only to foil those expectations with a well-timed word or mischievous glance.When I first watched “Lonely Flowers,” I could feel this story about Deon teetering toward the saccharine: Maybe we can all get along, or at least get along better, if we just listen to one another. But then Wood lets us in on a disturbing detail: “I like the camera,” Deon told him, “ ’cause, you know, I get to look down the crosshair and still shoot people.” Wood’s look of earnest sympathy dissolves, and we’re left wondering how to feel about Deon after all.Then the joke rounds yet another corner: Wood turns serious again, recalling how sincerely Deon thanked him in the greenroom, shaking his hand firmly and looking him right in the eye. “I was like, Wooowww,” Wood says, his voice dropping to a stage whisper, seemingly humbled by the interaction. But then we reach the other side of his pause: “He was about to kill some people.” Wood imagines Deon at home, cleaning his rifle right up to the moment Wood contacts him. “We’ll never know how many lives I saved,” Wood says triumphantly, “because I took a chance on a white man!”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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      ‘S.N.L.’ Celebrates 50 Years With Star-Studded Prime-Time Special

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      Stage and audience alike at Studio 8H were packed with cast, alumni and other celebrities in a night that was in turns sweet and self-satirizing.After a half-century of comedy and music (and what at times felt like an equal amount of buildup and hype), how do you at last kick off a prime-time 50th anniversary special for “Saturday Night Live”? Calmly and serenely, it turns out.The long-awaited “SNL50: The Anniversary Special” opened on Sunday with the musicians Paul Simon (an “S.N.L.” stalwart through the decades) and Sabrina Carpenter (who was its musical guest in May 2024) sharing the stage at the show’s familiar home base at Studio 8H at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.They exchanged a simple joke, setting a theme that would recur for the rest of the night: Time passes, whether you like it or not. Simon said they were about to play a song that he had performed on the show with George Harrison in 1976. “I was not born then,” Carpenter said, “and neither were my parents.”“I’m glad they’ll get the chance to hear it tonight,” Simon replied. And together he and Carpenter performed Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound,” the first musical number in a night that also included performances by Paul McCartney, Miley Cyrus with Brittany Howard and Lil Wayne with the Roots.And who else could perform the opening monologue on this occasion but Steve Martin, a 16-time host whose own rising star in the 1970s imparted some needed credibility and momentum to “S.N.L.” when it was just starting out.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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      Lorne Michaels Reflects on His ‘S.N.L.’ Legacy Ahead of the 50th Anniversary

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      Is it possible that Lorne Michaels is Lorne-ed out?Even for a man who enjoys being famous, all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live,” all the extra attention it has brought him, has been a bit much.“I say this not with any sense of modesty — I was famous enough,” Michaels said recently at Orso, one of his favorite New York haunts. Someone who knew him once sardonically suggested Michaels would like to have “LEGENDARY” stitched into his underwear. And he is, after all, known in some circles by one name, like Beyoncé, Cher, Ichiro. But Michaels demurs.“Everybody who had to know me, knew me,” he said. “I wasn’t in the public eye. But now, walking over here, a young comedian came up and said, ‘How would I audition?’”I said I would have loved to have seen that encounter.“You would not love that,” he said in his bone-dry voice and signature cadence.Since the 50th season premiered last fall, the anniversary of “S.N.L.,” one of a fragmented America’s few remaining communal cultural events, has inspired a steady stream of tributes to the show and its creator. There was a Jason Reitman origin-story movie called “Saturday Night,” as well as hundreds of feature stories and listicles in the press. Last month there was a four-part docuseries on the show and another documentary on just the music. Friday night brings an “S.N.L” concert at Radio City Music Hall, livestreaming on Peacock. A 600-plus page biography of Michaels titled “Lorne,” by Susan Morrison, an editor at The New Yorker, comes out next week.It all culminates on Sunday with a live three-hour prime-time special looking back on “S.N.L.” and its singular legacy. Like a Veterans Day parade with troops from different wars marching by, “S.N.L.” stars from different decades, among many other celebrities young and old — guests include Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro, Steve Martin, Sabrina Carpenter, Tom Hanks, Kim Kardashian and Dave Chappelle — are swirling around New York, ready to help Michaels celebrate the golden anniversary.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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      Wallace and Gromit Creator Discusses the Characters, Technology and the Queen

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      Nick Park’s latest film in the stop-motion series is up for multiple awards at the BAFTAs and the Oscars.Wallace and Gromit is something of an institution in the entertainment world. Since its introduction more than 35 years ago, the stop-motion series has won three Oscars and five BAFTAs. The two protagonists — Wallace, the cheese-eating inventor, and Gromit, the long-suffering dog — have even appeared on Royal Mail stamps.The animation series’ latest iteration — “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” — is now back in the awards race with nominations at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs, and the Oscars in March.“Vengeance Most Fowl” was directed by Wallace and Gromit’s creator, Nick Park, and by Merlin Crossingham, who said the film was shot over 15 months in a studio that was larger than a soccer field, with 260 people on set — including 35 animators and 50 puppet makers. The handcrafted clay cast has been expanded to include a robotic garden gnome called Norbot.“As a crew, if we got a minute and a half in the week, we’d have a megaweek,” Crossingham said. He described animation as a “magic trick,” because “you’re breathing life into something that doesn’t have any.”Park was born and raised in Preston, a city in northwestern England. His father was a photographer and his mother was a tailor and seamstress who made garments for all five of her children.Nick Park, left and Merlin Crossingham at the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards this month, where “Vengeance Most Fowl” won the best animated feature prize.Scott A. Garfitt/Invision, via Associated PressWe 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