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      The Culture Desk: Think ‘The Bear’ Is Overrated? Here’s What to Watch Instead.

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      Margaret Lyons and Elyssa Dudley and The highly anticipated third season of “The Bear” arrives this week. Our television critic Margaret Lyons and television editor Jeremy Egner sat down to talk about their love-hate relationship with the show and dissect their favorite episode. And if you can’t stand to hear even one more “Yes, Chef,” they have recommendations for shows to watch instead.On today’s episodeJeremy Egner, the television editor of The Times.Margaret Lyons, a television critic for The Times.Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThe New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter. More

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      Keith Robinson on Having 2 Strokes and Making a Netflix Special

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      After two strokes, the stand-up has recovered enough to make a new special. If anything, his health crises have sharpened his humor.When the stand-up comic Keith Robinson was 10 years old growing up in Philadelphia, his father was stabbed to death in a bar. Sitting in the restaurant above the Comedy Cellar in New York on a recent weekday afternoon, Robinson explained what happened dispassionately, adding that the killer died soon after.“He got shot accidentally on purpose,” he told me, flashing a mischievous grin and saying nothing more.This is the kind of story that Robinson, 60, likes to tell, one with prickly uncomfortable humor and some tough-guy swagger. But Robinson is currently at the center of a different kind of dramatic narrative, less HBO, more Lifetime channel: He had two strokes in four years, robbing him temporarily of speech and mobility; then, against the odds, he recovered enough to return to the stage.Robinson has been a fixture at the Cellar for three decades, as much a part of the fabled club as the microphone and the hummus. A comedy Zelig, he did stand-up on “Star Search” in the 1980s; was a regular on the Comedy Central show “Tough Crowd,” inspired by the table at the Cellar where Robinson, Colin Quinn and others hung out and bickered; and even wrote on the aborted third season of “Chappelle’s Show.” He has been a mentor to many comics, especially stand-ups from Philadelphia, most famously Kevin Hart who produced Robinson’s last special a decade ago.When Amy Schumer heard Robinson’s difficulty speaking after his second stroke, in 2020, “I thought he was completely done,” she told me by phone. Now she is the executive producer of his new special, “Different Strokes” (Netflix), a jarringly unsentimental take on his health crisis that tells what could be a feel-good story with cranky irreverence.Onstage, Robinson says that facing death taught him this lesson: “If there’s someone you wanted to punch, punch them now.”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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      The Meme-ification of Anthony Bourdain

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      The beloved chef’s admirers have given him a distinctly modern kind of digital afterlife — at the center of fondly parodic jokes.After Anthony Boudain took his own life in June 2018, the internet was flooded with content memorializing him: obituaries, remembrances, bereft tweets by celebrities and regular citizens alike. But one post in particular foretold the chef’s afterlife on social media. Kyrell Grant, who tweeted as @imbobswaget, suggested that Bourdain had the charismatic aura of someone you might expect to be well endowed — except she said that using a pithy new catchphrase that would quickly enter the popular lexicon, garnering its own entry on Dictionary.com.That message on Twitter (now X) may have marked a transition in how people memorialized Bourdain. He was remembered, chiefly, as someone lovable and accessible: straight-talking, salt-of-the-earth, as thoughtful as he was devil-may-care. A real grief surrounded his loss, and he inspired the same types of posthumous adoration so many figures do, complete with words-of-wisdom quotes pasted over nature photos. But it soon became just as common to see posts playing on his drinking habits or salty comebacks; people began to use images of him in the same ways we use images of pop-culture characters like SpongeBob SquarePants or Homer Simpson. Anthony Bourdain became, in short, a meme.Anthony Bourdain in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2016.William MebaneLast month a new Bourdain meme made the rounds. The chef had offered several oft-quoted bits of advice urging people to explore and enjoy the world: “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel,” or, “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” But this new meme paired a pensive portrait of Bourdain with ever more parodic versions of that sentiment. “Go to a [expletive] restaurant. I don’t care what. Go to a [expletive] restaurant and order a [expletive] beer.” A less profane version prodded the reader to take a chance on a Hinge date: “Show her a picture of your cats. Show her two. Give her a tissue while she cries over her ex. Jump over a fence to impress her. Break your ankle. Never hear from her again.” Another tribute hits like whiskey left at a virtual grave: booty shorts emblazoned with the words I MISS ANTHONY BOURDAIN.If you too miss Anthony Bourdain, and you want to engage in serious communion with his oeuvre, there’s a vast trove of media to satiate your craving: 11 books, various essays and graphic novels, hours and hours of television. He participated in countless interviews, appeared on podcasts, played characters based on himself in TV guest appearances. You might dip into the subreddit r/Anthony Bourdain, which, with its 61,000 members, is in the top 2 percent of Reddit communities by size; that forum, far more earnest than X, is often engaged in forlorn discussion.But even in that hallowed space, memes cannot help infiltrating. Yet another variation on fake Bourdain advice recently emerged there, imploring the viewer to eat at Chili’s and get an appetizer combo. Some commenters expected moderators to delete the parody; after all, it didn’t “honor” the group’s subject. Others argued that they shouldn’t. Bourdain was a prodigious Twitter user and a funny one; his afterimage, in most minds, is as someone who could laugh at himself. Surely, people felt, he would have appreciated the lightness of a good Bourdain meme.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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      Conan O’Brien Doesn’t Matter

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      After hosting talk shows for nearly three decades, Conan O’Brien has come to believe that longevity is overrated. The first time he made this point to me was in April at a restaurant in New York, when he proposed that all statues and monuments should be made with durable soap that dissolves in seven years. One month later, in his office in Los Angeles, down the hall from his podcast studio, he went further, declaring himself anti-graveyard.Asked if this means he wants to be cremated, O’Brien responded: “I want to be left in a ditch and found by a jogger.” Taking up space in a cemetery seems selfish to him. “I say this in a positive way,” he added, leaning forward and shifting to a less jokey tone. “We don’t matter.”Since leaving late-night television in 2021, Conan O’Brien, 61, has become more reflective about life (and death), given to philosophical flights of fancy that he compulsively alternates with comic tangents. O’Brien famously champions the intersection between smart and stupid, but in conversation, what stands out is how quickly he moves between light and heavy. In one of several interviews, I asked him if he was happier now than when he was on television and his response was to question happiness itself. “At best it’s a fleeting moment after a rainstorm when the sun’s coming out,” he said. “Being contented comes in little moments, here and there.”The only thing trickier than being a late-night talk show host is being a former one. Some relapse (Jon Stewart). A few vanish (Johnny Carson, Craig Kilborn). Most enter a more modest era (David Letterman, Jay Leno). Since he started writing for “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s, Conan O’Brien has built one of the most consequential careers in comedy. And while his late-night tenure is beloved by comedy nerds, helping define a sensibility for a generation of comedians like Bill Hader, Eric André and Nikki Glaser, his postshow work may turn out to be more impressive.It helps that his brand of joyfully goofy absurdity ages well. Stewart may have repeatedly beaten him out for Emmys during the George W. Bush years, but jokes about the Iraq War have a shorter shelf life than the masturbating bear, a recurring character on O’Brien’s late-night show that is exactly what it sounds like. His reputation has grown as new generations have discovered his work online.The other reason O’Brien has done well since leaving “Conan,” his final late-night show (after “Late Night” and “The Tonight Show”), is that he’s always been excited by and open to experimentation. “I enjoyed playing with that form,” he said of the talk show. “The stuff I’m really interested in, there’s so many opportunities to do it now. ‘Hot Ones’ is proof.”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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      Murray Hill’s Showbiz Dream

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      The almost famous drag king comedian Murray Hill struts through Melvyn’s Restaurant & Lounge, an old school steakhouse in Palm Springs, Calif.Melvyn’s is Mr. Hill’s kind of place. It has steak Diane on the menu, black-and-white head shots of celebrities on the walls and the aroma of crêpes suzette flambéing in the air. And Palm Springs is Mr. Hill’s kind of town — faded midcentury Hollywood glamour, with a modern dash of queer culture.Moving past diners wearing pastel polo shirts and golf shorts, Mr. Hill cuts a distinctive figure in his three-piece baby blue seersucker suit and white loafers. His pencil-thin mustache, tinted glasses and shiny rings complete a look that brings to mind a 1970s Las Vegas lounge singer crossed with a 1950s Borscht Belt comedian.He is a somebody, clearly. But who?He sits down, studies the menu. His glance falls on the section for steak toppings, which are listed under the heading “Enhancements.”“‘Enhancements’?” he cries, loudly enough for almost everyone in the place to hear. “I already got them. They’re back at the house. They’re on the drying rack!”Mr. Hill, 52, speaks with the hint of a Brooklyn wiseguy accent and punctuates anything remotely to do with the entertainment industry — the rungs of which he has been tirelessly climbing for some 30 years — with a cry of “Showbiz!”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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      The Gay Comedians Who Showed the Way Even if They Weren’t Exactly Out

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      Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly and Rip Taylor get a cursory mention in a new documentary about queer stand-up, but they were groundbreaking.In 1987, David Letterman was taping his late-night show in Las Vegas before rowdy audiences of mostly young men in preppy pullovers and muscle shirts — prototypical bros raised on “Porky’s.”On one episode, Letterman introduces a “very funny and strange, peculiar man who first played Las Vegas way back in 1963.” The sea of seemingly straight guys parts, and to a cartoonishly accelerated rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the comedian Rip Taylor speed-walks through, ferociously hurling heaps of confetti, his signature entrance shtick.I’ve had this clip on repeat since watching “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,” a new Netflix documentary about the history of queer stand-up comedy. Not because Taylor plays a big role in the film, but because he and two other groundbreaking gay comics — Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly — do not.“Outstanding” does briefly single out the three men as renowned comedy elders, even though they weren’t primarily known for stand-up. The documentary also does right by underappreciated comedians like Robin Tyler and Bob Smith and household names like Rosie O’Donnell and Margaret Cho.But why just the cursory mention of Lynde, Reilly and Taylor? It’s as if we couldn’t possibly glean anything meaningful from old-school comedians who were apolitical and effeminate, steppingstones for contemporary comedians, like Hannah Gadsby and Jerrod Carmichael, who are willing to wait for a room to quiet down so they can talk about difficult childhoods.Lynde, Reilly and Taylor didn’t sit in their trauma. They kept it light and never talked about their biography in a serious way, because doing so would have led to questions they weren’t prepared to engage with. Maybe that’s why the documentary made me race to YouTube to see these Stonewall-generation funnymen with dippy but dark-edged sensibilities that were shaped by decades of self-hatred and fear the likes of which a 20-year-old today cannot fathom.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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      ‘Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution’ Review: Beyond the Punchline

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      A new Netflix documentary showcases comedy as a source of queer liberation, featuring Margaret Cho, Tig Notaro, Joel Kim Booster and more.The director Page Hurwitz examines comedy’s place in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement in the new Netflix documentary “Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution,” creating a rich, century-long timeline full of archival footage, behind-the-scenes glimpses and candid interviews with comedians. A standout subject is the 82-year-old trailblazer Robin Tyler, the first out lesbian on national TV.Throughout the film, Hurwitz showcases comedy as more than just a source of laughter, but of healing, catharsis and as an agent for queer liberation, particularly during the Stonewall riots in 1969 and, later, the AIDS epidemic.L.G.B.T.Q. comedians were already on hand for “Outstanding” — in 2022, many of them, including Lily Tomlin, Wanda Sykes and Billy Eichner, performed on the same stage during “Stand Out: An LGBTQ+ Celebration,” a Netflix standup special hosted by Eichner. The backstage footage from that special captured something that feels revolutionary, echoing Margaret Cho’s assertion that “queer comedy was really a solace” when she achieved fame in the 1990s.Many of the best moments in “Outstanding” occur when it draws connections between idols and admirers. A simple moment between Joel Kim Booster and Cho is made powerful through thoughtful editing: Cho, in a voice-over, describes the joy that queer comedy can evoke as we see Booster experiencing it among his peers.The film also addresses transphobic jokes by comedians like Dave Chappelle and Bill Maher, and ends with an acknowledgment of the anti-transgender bills being passed nationwide.“There’s no such thing as just kidding,” Tyler, the pioneering comedian, says. “So if anybody does homophobic jokes, they mean it.” The fight is still no laughing matter.Outstanding: A Comedy RevolutionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Interview’: The Darker Side of Julia Louis-Dreyfus

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      At some point in almost every performance she gives, Julia Louis-Dreyfus has this look. If you’ve watched “Seinfeld,” “The New Adventures of Old Christine” or “Veep,” you know it — the perfect mix of irritation and defiance. As if she were saying, Try me.Louis-Dreyfus’s performances in those shows — from the eccentrically self-actualized Elaine Benes in “Seinfeld” to the completely un-self-aware Selina Meyer in “Veep” — were comedic master classes. But in recent years, she has been moving toward more introspective and serious work. Still, that “try me” vibe remains. She hosts a wonderful hit podcast called “Wiser Than Me,” in which she interviews older, famous, often (necessarily) sharp-elbowed women — Billie Jean King, Sally Field, Carol Burnett and Debbie Allen, to name a few — about their lives and careers and the crap they’ve all navigated. Last year she starred as a frustrated novelist and wife in the writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s movie “You Hurt My Feelings,” the second collaboration between the two women about the struggles of middle age. In her newest movie, “Tuesday,” which opens nationwide on June 14, Louis-Dreyfus plays a mother whose teenage daughter has a terminal illness. It’s a surreal, dark fairy tale that she was nervous about taking on. (She’s also got a recurring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: She was shooting “Thunderbolts” when we talked.)Listen to the Conversation With Julia Louis-DreyfusThe actress is taking on serious roles, trying to overcome self-doubt and sharing more about her personal life — but she’s not done being funny.At 63, Louis-Dreyfus says she’s still trying to prove herself (“always”), and that “Tuesday” is part of that process. “I’m certain nobody would have considered me for that role 20 years ago, and that’s probably because they just thought of me only as a ‘ha-ha’ funny person.” She’s still interested in TV comedy, she told me, but she’s loving this stage of her career, and getting to do more. “I just want to try it all,” she says. “It’s good for my brain.”You’re in a new Marvel film at the moment. It must be a very different kind of set to be on. What’s it like? It’s very well organized. Very methodical. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. Particularly on this film, they’re very much focused on, frankly, the human story, believe it or not. They’re trying to sort of go back to their roots, as it were. And so there’s a lot of focus on that. They’re trying to stay away from as much C.G.I. or whatever as possible, so that the stunts are, like, everywhere. And in fact, I had to do a couple.What stunts have you done? Well, I’m making this out to sound like I’m flying through the air like Captain America or whatever, but I’m not. It’s just a very, very, very, very brief stunt. More