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      in Movies

      The Comedian Who Anticipated Our Reality-Bent World

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      You’re in a comedy club, and the guy onstage has gone quiet. He looks down at his feet, fidgets with the microphone, smiles a queasy, tight-lipped smile and, after nearly a minute of this, looks as if he might be about to cry.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinHis name is Andy Kaufman, and it’s 1977. Maybe you’re unfamiliar with him, or maybe you’ve heard he’s an up-and-coming comedian with a gift for prankish anti-bits. He has performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Saturday Night Live,” and he killed on those shows. But tonight, taping his part in an HBO “Young Comedians Special,” he has told one stinker after another, and the people who have laughed have laughed in the wrong places: at him, not with him. Other people have started to groan and boo, and Kaufman seems to be breaking down. “I don’t understand one thing,” he finally says. People laugh again, sure it’s a put-on, or hoping it is, because the alternative would be too embarrassing. He goes on: “No, seriously, why everyone is going booo, on, like, when I told some of the jokes, and then when I don’t want you to laugh, you’re laughing? Like right now.”He continues to stammer, and then he’s sobbing outright, scolding the crowd through tears. “You really showed me where I’m at tonight,” he says, emitting a raw, ugly sound, like the honk of a sick goose: Heegh-heegh. “I was just trying to do my best heegh-heegh.” He keeps scolding and honking, but as he does, the honks form a rhythm. With one hand, then both hands, he begins to play bongos in time with the honks, shaping it all into a ridiculous song. The crowd laughs harder at this twist than they’ve laughed all night, and their delight seems mixed with gratitude — for this reassurance that Kaufman wasn’t really upset, for this slippery return to terra firma.In the history of comedy, no one has shown a fuller commitment to cultivating silence, awkwardness, concern, bewilderment and vitriol than Andy Kaufman. Any comedian trades in misdirection on the way to the surprise of a punchline. But Kaufman, as much of a performance artist as he was a stand-up, saw misdirection as the main event. “I’ve never told a joke in my life,” he once said. Laughter was one among many responses he sought to engineer. “He just behaved strangely, in order to get a reaction of any kind,” Jay Leno, who worked the same clubs as Kaufman in the ’70s, has recalled. “Even hostile.”Trading against his air of childlike sweetness, Kaufman scrambled the line between entertainment, tedium, self-indulgence and combativeness. For years, he assumed the persona of a snarling misogynist and wrestled women in clubs and on TV. Some of the women were plants, some were volunteers. Kaufman beat them all. This routine, along with his belligerent lounge-act alter ego, Tony Clifton, proved so unpopular that Kaufman’s manager feared it was ruining his career. But Kaufman, more interested in provocation than adulation, only dug in more.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

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Lionizing Mark Twain, Conan O’Brien Subtly Skewers Trump

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      In accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the comedian mounted a bristling political attack artfully disguised as a tribute.Conan O’Brien faced a thorny question when accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Sunday night.In the headlining speech for the most-high-profile event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since President Trump purged Democrats from its board, cashiered its leaders and made himself chairman, how political should he be? Considering artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Issa Rae have said they are boycotting the Kennedy Center in protest, should he even show up?Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the puppet voiced by Robert Smigel, who was on the original writing staff of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” captured the dilemma of his position when he welcomed the audience in a gravelly voice: “Thank you for coming and shame on you for being here.”The assignment was especially tricky for O’Brien, because unlike past recipients like Jon Stewart or Dave Chappelle, his comedy has always steered clear of ideological fervor. But moving out of his comfort zone, O’Brien delivered what amounted to a bristling attack on the current administration artfully disguised as a tribute to Mark Twain.“Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance,” O’Brien said, steadily, soberly. “Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America, but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote: ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.’”O’Brien’s speech, which along with the rest of the show, will air on Netflix on May 4, followed a murderers’ row of comedians — who put on the best Twain Awards in recent memory. Among those gushing about O’Brien were father figures (David Letterman), peers (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Stephen Colbert) and his comedic children (Nikki Glaser, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney).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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Marty Callner, Director of Comedy Specials and Music Videos, Dies at 78

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      At HBO in the late 1970s, he established the template for presenting stand-up on the small screen. He then became a mainstay of MTV in its early days.Marty Callner, a pioneering director of comedy specials who set the template for the genre at HBO in the 1970s before going on to make music videos infused with humor during the early heyday of MTV, died on March 17 at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 78.His son Jazz Callner said the cause was not yet known.Over a half-century, Mr. Callner worked with some of the biggest names in popular culture, including Jerry Seinfeld, Madonna, Robin Williams, George Carlin, the Rolling Stones and Chris Rock.Mr. Callner, who preferred to stay in the background but was far from shy, “might be the most successful director you have never heard of,” Jason Zinoman of The New York Times wrote in 2022.One day in the early 1980s, Mr. Callner had an epiphany. While watching television at his home in Beverly Hills, he found himself enraptured by a music video. It was Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” — and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.“I said, ‘This is unbelievable,’” he recalled on the “HawkeTalk” podcast in 2021. He called it “the most artistic and entertaining thing I’ve ever seen” and recalled thinking, “I’ve got to go do this.”Marty Callner in his home office in 2022 with a Sports Emmy Award that he won for the football reality series “Hard Knocks.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesWe 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

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Lenny Schultz, Comedian Who Made a Lot of Noise, Dies at 91

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      A highly physical performer, he said he couldn’t tell jokes. But he became well known for a wild act that fellow comedians didn’t want to follow.Lenny Schultz, a wild-eyed comedian who became known in the 1970s and ’80s for high-energy performances that he delivered with a mouthful of sound effects and a table full of silly props, died on Sunday at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 91.His son and only immediate survivor, Mark, confirmed the death.“I can’t tell a joke,” Mr. Schultz told The Orlando Sentinel in 1972, but that didn’t matter. “The guys I like and the guys I identify with,” he added, “are Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Guy Marks — the zanies. I like the zanies. I am a zany!”With his expressive face, his physicality and the rapid pace of his act, Mr. Schultz exuded a loony intensity. He began his comedy career in the late 1960s while keeping his day job as a high school gym teacher.Onstage, he described the start of life on Earth, punctuating his narrative with explosions and other noises; bowed a banana as if it were a violin (while taking bites out of it); played the Lone Ranger, wearing a mask and a tiny cowboy hat while riding a small toy horse on a stick and flinging Froot Loops from a box; rendered a cockfight between game fowl of different ethnicities; and admonished the baby doll in his backpack to stop crying because William Morris agents were in the audience.Mr. Schultz in 1977 on the first episode of the rebooted “Laugh-In.” The original show had revolutionized TV comedy, but the new version was canceled after six episodes.NBCUniversal Photo Bank, via Getty Images“Lenny has a special place in the hearts and memories of everybody in his peer group,” David Letterman, who met Mr. Schultz when they were performing in Los Angeles, said in a phone interview. “He is talked about more often, randomly, than any single person we spent time with at the Comedy Store in the 1970s.”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

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age

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      Black American novelists, filmmakers and other writers are using comedy to reveal — and combat — our era’s disturbing political realities.LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of “Appropriate” (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who’s a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. “You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?” Bo says. “Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody!” The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped.“They were clapping in earnest,” says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were “someone who’s genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, ‘Found his letters and read each one out loud!’” Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: “Are you serious right now?” For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. “Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we’re encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.” At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to “risk learning something we didn’t anticipate” about one another.Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it’s vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire’s indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term “woke,” for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of “equity” — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity.I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama “Purpose” is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it’s also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: ‘Are you serious right now?’” The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities.From left: the writer-director-actor Jordan Peele, the novelist Paul Beatty and the playwright Lynn Nottage.From left: Vivien Killilea/Getty for Imdb; Alex Welsh for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa for The New York TimesWe 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 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Tony Hinchcliffe, the Trump Rally Comedian, Lands a Netflix Deal

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      Hinchcliffe’s set at Madison Square Garden in October drew sharp criticism after he described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”The stand-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe has landed a deal at Netflix months after angering people with his insults about Latinos and other minority groups at a New York rally when Donald J. Trump was running for president.The deal for three comedy specials under Hinchcliffe’s “Kill Tony” brand is part of an attempt by streaming services to appeal to Trump voters. Amazon Prime Video announced on Monday that several seasons of “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality show that bolstered Trump’s public profile in the early 2000s, would soon be available on the streaming service.Hinchcliffe’s specials will feature a mix of established comedians and surprise celebrity guests, Netflix said in a news release on Tuesday. The first special will be filmed at Comedy Mothership in Austin, Texas, and will arrive on the platform on April 7. Hinchcliffe will also receive his own stand-up special in the deal.Hinchcliffe is known for his “roast” style of comedy and his “Kill Tony” podcast, which is recorded live each week from Austin. He said in a statement that he was excited to share his show, which started with 12 audience members in 2013, with the world.“To think that I can pull a name out of a bucket and that person will be performing standup and an improvised interview on the largest streaming service in the world is both exciting and frightening,” Hinchcliffe said. “It’s the most spontaneous and improvised show that is out there and the creative freedom given to us by Netflix to keep the show in its pure form is a comedian’s dream.”Hinchcliffe was among the comedians who roasted the retired N.F.L. quarterback Tom Brady in a Netflix special last year that was viewed 13.8 million times in its first week on the streaming platform. His segment included homophobic remarks and comments about slavery.The comedian’s public profile grew even more in October after taking the stage at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, where he made insults and vulgar statements that leaned on offensive stereotypes about Jews, Latinos and African Americans. He received intense backlash after calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” drawing condemnation from celebrities like Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Lin-Manuel Miranda. More

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      in Theater

      A Critic Whose Beat Is, on Occasion, a Laughing Matter

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      Jason Zinoman started writing about comedy for The New York Times in 2011, when the world of stand-up and improv looked a little different.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Jason Zinoman, who has been the comedy columnist for The New York Times since 2011, stumbled into his role by accident.“It was just dumb luck,” said Zinoman, then a freelance theater critic for The Times who had just published a book on his longtime passion, the modern horror film. “But in retrospect, it makes sense to me: There are a lot of theatrical elements to comedy. And there’s a really fine line between horror and comedy.”Now, nearly 15 years after being approached with the offer to become a comedy critic for the paper, his beat has broadened: He joined The Times’s Culture desk full time in 2022 as a critic at large, covering movies, books, theater and of course, all things comedy. He has since written about naked stand-up comedy, Jewish artists wrestling with antisemitism and even the political power of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s laugh.“When I can find a theme that can tie together all these different cultural threads, that’s really satisfying,” said Zinoman, who has also written books about the comedians Dave Chappelle and David Letterman, whom he grew up watching on NBC.In a recent interview, Zinoman reflected on the evolution of comedy over the last decade. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.You are The Times’s comedy columnist, but you’ve also written about theater, film, politics and even sports. How would you describe your role as a critic at large?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

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      George Lowe, Kvetchy Voice of Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost, Dies at 67

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      He was the secret weapon behind a modern cult-classic series that reimagined the 1960s intergalactic superhero as temperamental talk show host.George Lowe, the actor who voiced the superhero-turned-talk-show-host Space Ghost on “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” on the Cartoon Network for nearly two decades, died on Sunday in Lakeland, Fla. He was 67.His agent, Christy Clark, confirmed the death. His family said in a statement that Mr. Lowe had a challenging recovery after undergoing elective heart surgery in November.“Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” was the first fully original program for Cartoon Network and the spark that led to the creation of Adult Swim, the network’s late-night programming block. The show, which ran for 11 seasons from 1994 until 2012, reimagined Space Ghost, the title character from a 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoon, as a temperamental talk show host, in a new format that mixed animation and live action.Produced on a minimal budget, “Space Ghost: Coast to Coast” featured off-the-wall interviews with celebrity guests.Cartoon NetworkThanks to an enviable lineup of guests — Weird Al Yankovic, Beck and Sarah Jessica Parker were among the celebrities who made appearances — and decidedly off-the-wall interview questions (“Are you getting enough oxygen?” Space Ghost once asked Hulk Hogan), the show became a cult favorite among teenagers and young adults, helping launch Adult Swim into the stratosphere.At the heart of it all was Mr. Lowe. Dave Willis, a writer and producer on the show, said Mr. Lowe had a “big, booming movie-trailer voice” and approached the role like the morning drive-time D.J. he had been before he got into voice work. His relatable and highly entertaining kvetching, Mr. Willis said, helped shape Space Ghost’s new persona.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