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      Recap: Timothée Chalamet Hosts ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      Timothée Chalamet hosted an episode that presented former President Trump as an aggrieved forerunner. The musical guest was boygenius.Come on, you didn’t really think that “Saturday Night Live” would begin this weekend with a parody of the third Republican presidential debate, did you?OK, let’s indulge this little fantasy for a moment and pretend that this broadcast — hosted by Timothée Chalamet and featuring the musical guest boygenius — might actually open on a sketch featuring the candidates who aren’t Donald J. Trump, impersonated by the “S.N.L.” cast including Heidi Gardner as Nikki Haley, John Higgins as Ron DeSantis and Ego Nwodim as Vivek Ramaswamy.Well, not long after Gardner and Nwodim reenacted a testy exchange between Haley and Ramaswamy and Devon Walker (as Tim Scott) began to rhapsodize about his girlfriend, the entire sketch was frozen and the lights were dimmed on the debate stage.Enter James Austin Johnson, in his recurring role as Trump: “How adorable,” he said, mocking the other candidates. “They actually think they’ve got a chance. Sad in some ways, but in other ways, funny. Can you believe it, folks? Ninety-one indictments, four trials. And I’m still the best choice. They’re all stuck behind me and there’s nothing they can do about it. Just like in real life.”Johnson went on to mock the low poll ratings of his Republican rivals: “One percent, very low,” he said, indicating Walker. “Lower than, frankly, milk. Apparently there’s a milk lower than 1 percent. People are calling it skim, we’ve never had it, we don’t drink it.”And he offered a satirical meta-commentary on Higgins, the actor playing DeSantis. “Poor Ron DeSantis,” Johnson said. “Even ‘S.N.L.’ doesn’t think he has a chance. If they did, it’d be like Paul Rudd or something in there, right?”But mostly, he talked about himself: “Isn’t it sad, folks?” Johnson said. “None of them can beat Joe Biden. The worst president since, frankly, me.” Why hasn’t Trump appeared at the debates? As Johnson explained it: “I’m very, very busy. I’m going from trial to trial. I’m basically doing ‘House Hunters’ but with courtrooms.”Johnson complained about the fact that he was being put on trial at all: “They’re saying I committed fraud,” he said. “Not true, OK? Not true. I’ve committed a lot of things. Adultery, treason, a lot of fraud, perhaps.”But on the witness stand, Johnson said he was on his best behavior: “The judge asks, ‘Did you approve these financial reports?’” he explained. “And I very respectfully say, ‘You’re a dumb-ass. This is a sham. When I’m president again, I’ll have you executed.’”Bringing the debate and the sketch to a conclusion, Johnson said, “I’ll pick one of these lucky five to be my VP, or in many ways, I will not at all. Maybe in my third term.”Opening monologue of the weekChalamet, who was hosting “S.N.L.” for the second time, expressed relief that a deal had been reached between the actors of the SAG-AFTRA union and the Hollywood entertainment studios, ending a monthslong strike and allowing him to flog upcoming projects like his film “Wonka.”Picking up a cane, Chalamet began to poke fun at the self-promotional opportunities that he could now indulge, singing a song set to “Pure Imagination” from the original “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Its lyrics ran, in part:“If you want to view a three-and-a-half hour filmGo see ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’Or just wait for Part 2 of ‘Dune’Just make sure before to use the bathroom …”In the latter part of the monologue, Chalamet and Marcello Hernández performed a bawdy tribute to their status as baby-faces — presumably, the material they had prepared in case the strike wasn’t resolved by this weekend.Not-phoned-in performance of the weekA round-table segment paying satirical homage to the 50th anniversary of hip-hop may not be the most revolutionary idea for a comedy sketch, though it provides a great showcase for cast members like James Austin Johnson and Punkie Johnson to show off their impressions of people like Rick Rubin and Mary J. Blige.But what makes this memorable is Chalamet’s delightfully committed performance as a fictional (if frightfully successful) young rapper with the stage name of SmokeCheddaThaAssGetta, who knows nothing about the history of his chosen genre and has no business being on the panel. There’s also the sight of Chalamet being spanked by Kenan Thompson (playing Cornel West), the soon-to-be viral GIF from which the whole sketch, one assumes, was reverse engineered.Impersonation showcase of the weekYes, there was already the sketch about the Republican debate and the hip-hop round table. But for good measure, why not throw in one more segment that lets Chloe Fineman and the “S.N.L.” cast show off their talents for pretending to be other famous people?That is the duty fulfilled by this short film in which the best-selling memoirist Britney Spears (Fineman) reveals that, before choosing Michelle Williams to read the audiobook of “The Woman in Me,” she had tried out other readers as well. Feel free to admire the sheer versatility of Fineman (who also plays Chalamet, Julia Fox and Natasha Lyonne in the sketch); the levels of inside baseball (Sarah Sherman and Michael Longfellow as the “S.N.L.” alums John Mulaney and Bill Hader); or the weirdness of James Austin Johnson as Werner Herzog.Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the Republican debate, the F.B.I. investigation into Mayor Eric Adams of New York and President Biden’s re-election efforts.Jost began:The third Republican debate was held this week, and Vivek Ramaswamy started by saying that the GOP had become “a party of losers.” Weirdly, “a party of losers” was also how NBC advertised the debate. Ramaswamy then criticized Nikki Haley’s daughter for having a TikTok account. He also stressed that it’s not important how he knows her daughter has a TikTok account. Then Nikki Haley responded to the attack by saying, “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” which was pulled directly from the Japanese subtitles of the Will Smith slap.Che continued:Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign got a major boost after Iowa governor Kim Reynolds endorsed him. Also giving DeSantis a lift: his leather hooker boots. The F.B.I. has launched a corruption investigation into New York mayor Eric Adams by seizing two of his cellphones. One named “work phone” and the other named “shorties and shady stuff.”Jost resumed:After new polls showed Donald Trump leading Joe Biden, Democratic strategists are calling Biden’s re-election campaign a five-alarm fire. Which is scary for Biden, because in a fire, you have to use the stairs. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Albert Brooks: Defending My Life’ Review: Revisiting Past Hilarity

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      This actor, comic, writer and director is seen in a cinematic retrospective that celebrates his talent, but not always in a critically discerning way.“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” a documentary about the venerable comedian, filmmaker, actor and writer, directed by his lifelong friend Rob Reiner, has the easy, amiable air of a career retrospective — wistful and hagiographic, it’s the kind of thing that usually accompanies a lifetime achievement award.Now 76, Brooks certainly deserves the recognition: the first four of the films he wrote and directed between 1979 and 2005, “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life,” are among the finest American comedies ever made, and his trailblazing work on the late-night talk show circuit during the 1960s and 1970s had a seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary comedy. (To say nothing of his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Broadcast News,” a near-peerless masterpiece.)But there’s a reason we have comedy roasts, not toasts, as the rhapsodic tone of this film makes clear — breathless flattery just isn’t that interesting, no matter how funny the person receiving it. While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.Brooks and Reiner, lounging in a booth at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles, reminisce chummily about Brooks’s life and work, while an ensemble of comedy A-listers including Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill and Larry David gush over his influence in a series of standard-issue talking head interviews. There are also clips from Brooks’s films and standup routines, which render much of the praise from the interviewees redundant. We don’t need to be told that Brooks is a genius. Even a brief glimpse of his work makes the case.Albert Brooks: Defending My LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Food,’ Geoff Sobelle Explores the Extremes of Eating

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      “I don’t want to tell people what to think,” the performance artist said of his latest show. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity.”It was a little before 6:30 on a recent weeknight, and the kitchen in Geoff Sobelle’s West Village home was in chaos. Two toddlers zoomed around on a ride-on truck and begged him to read from an “Alice in Wonderland” pop-up book. “In a minute,” Sobelle told his son as he stirred artichokes that were simmering on the stove. All the while, he talked to a reporter about his solo show, “Food,” which is running as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival through Nov. 18.“This is like a three-ring circus,” Sobelle, 47, said. He had invited me over for dinner with his family — his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, a longtime “Sleep No More” performer; and his two children, Louise, 4, and Elliott, 2 — or, as he wrote in an email, “my chaotic household as I try to get two toddlers to eat.”“It’s INSANE,” he’d added.Sobelle’s nightly domestic juggling act is akin to the intertwining, overlapping and colliding threads of audience participation, sleight-of-hand and physical comedy in “Food,” a plotless, absurdist “meditation on how and why we eat,” as he described it.During the 90-minute show, which Sobelle created with the magician Steve Cuiffo (“A Simulacrum”) and co-directed with Lee Sunday Evans, he traces the history of food from the days when buffalo roamed to the present. For the first 40 minutes, he embodies a waiter at a fine-dining establishment who takes orders from audience members seated around a massive white-clothed table, making a cherry pie and an apple appear on a silver platter as if by magic.“Food” is a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, among many, many things, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch.”Iain MastertonBut the show quickly devolves into a satire of human greed, with Sobelle consuming, at one previous performance — brace yourself — six apples, a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a bowl of lettuce, what one critic called “a concerning quantity of ranch,” a half-dozen asparagus stalks, five carrots, a raw onion, three bowls of rice, a 22-ounce rib-eye, a baked potato, a bowl of egg yolks, a bottle of wine, a fish, a cherry pie, another bottle of wine, a lit candle, a pack of cigarettes (gulped, not just smoked), four napkins, part of a phone and a few dollar bills.That’s about 9,000 calories in 15 minutes. And he does it twice on Saturdays.“Matinees are seriously rough,” said Sobelle, who performed the show at Arizona State University last month and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. “I’m definitely still getting used to it.”How can he eat that much? Does he have to train like Joey Chestnut?“It’s like freestyle Olympic eating,” he said, as his wife burst into laughter. “You just have to do it.”That seems to be the theme of Sobelle’s life, whether it’s helping his son realize his dream of dressing up as both a fire truck and a car for Halloween or creating shows that push the boundary between absurd satire and purposeful meaninglessness.“The power of the shows is provoking something in the audience,” he said, “not tying a bow around the subject of food.”“Food” is the third in Sobelle’s series of participatory theater shows exploring the uncommonness of common themes. The first, “The Object Lesson” (2013), examined our relationship to everyday objects, and in the second, “Home” (2017), he raised a house onstage for a meditation on what makes a home; all three premiered at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.Though “we’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” Sobelle said, he consumes beef in his show. “The character’s not vegetarian.”Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“I knew I wanted to play with the ritual of gathering around a table,” he said about “Food.” “And that lent itself to thinking about fine dining and the spaces where it happens. Especially places like BAM and the Edinburgh International Festival, because they’re kind of fancy.”He enlisted Cuiffo, a friend of more than 20 years whom he has collaborated with on a half-dozen shows, to help him create the magic tricks and physical comedy.“Geoff is really great at going deep on an idea, whether it’s an intellectual idea or a physical theater trick,” Cuiffo said in a recent phone conversation. “He’ll keep going at it until he finds these really funny or magical or poignant moments.”Like all his shows, “Food” is heavy on audience participation. Sobelle asks people to share memories evoked by the wine he serves, or to describe the last recipe they made. He lives for the unpredictability of each performance.“Sometimes it works like a charm, and sometimes I just work hard to make it look like it’s working like a charm, or sometimes it just doesn’t work,” he said. “But that’s the adventure.”Dinner was now ready (“Time to eat!” he called to the kids), and he and Bortolussi spooned roasted carrots, cauliflower and butternut squash into wooden serving bowls, which he ferried over to a table in front of giant mirror.“We’ve been vegetarian on and off for years,” he said. “It’s about sustainability.”But what about the steak that I watched him wolf down during a video recording of the show’s premiere last year?Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“If I’m working, I don’t have to be a vegetarian,” he said. “The character’s not vegetarian.”When he was 16 and living in Los Angeles, he said, he visited a school on a marginal farm in Vershire, Vt., where he harvested food that other students had planted. “That was pretty profound to understand where it was coming from, and that you were part of the process, instead of just going to the supermarket and getting something shrink-wrapped,” he said.But to be clear, he said, his show has no moral message.“I don’t want to tell people what to think,” he said. “I just hope it tickles them and their curiosity, and that it provokes something that they then want to go talk about at the bar or wherever their next destination is.”For the last part of the performance, Sobelle invites the audience to do just that sort of reflection, violently pulling away the tablecloth to reveal a field of dirt, on which he enacts a continuous scene with minimal dialogue that serves as a CliffsNotes of human cultivation and consumption.Absurd physical comedy has become a hallmark of shows created by Sobelle, who abandoned his childhood dream of becoming a doctor and a priest after seeing a production of “Cats” when he was 7 (“I wanted to be Rum Tum Tugger,” he said), to study English at Stanford, where he mounted what he called “experimental, D.I.Y. theater shows.”Sobelle and his wife, Sophie Bortolussi, prepared a meal of vegetables, including artichokes and aioli.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times“Even my first experiences in high school with plays, I was more excited by the stuff beyond the script,” he said. “The things that were translated outside of the words, or in addition to the words.”After his freshman year, he spent a year abroad at the famed Jacques Lecoq school in Paris — Geoffrey Rush and Julie Taymor are alums — where he studied physical theater.“That was a real turning point,” said Sobelle, who counts Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton among his influences. “It was all about looking at theater before language.”The aspect of “Food” he enjoys most, he said, is the unpredictability of the performance. Sometimes an audience member eats the cherry pie he has set down. Sometimes a cellphone gets swept away when he removes the tablecloth. Sometimes audience members try to deconstruct the show in their responses to his prompts.“It’s not a play, but a performance,” he said, “one in which the audience plays just as big a role as me.”His son chose that moment to overturn a bowl of aioli, which Bortolussi rushed to mop up. Sobelle handed her a napkin. (“We always do at least one spill,” he said.)“OK,” he called to the kids. “Eating time is swiftly coming to a close.”That was fine with them: Elliott was snapping photos with a toy camera, and Louise was leafing through a French picture book.Sobelle sighed.“You don’t always get a cooperative audience,” he said. More

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      in Television

      Daniel Sloss on Russell Brand and Comedy About Dark Topics

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      The Scottish standup went viral for being the sole comic to go on the record in support of Russell Brand’s accusers. He’s made a career of finding humor in “things that we should not be laughing at.”The Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss likes to flout conventional humor.His earliest Netflix special, “Dark,” in 2018, was about the death of his younger sister when he was 8. He also has material about disability (his sister had cerebral palsy), mental illness and sexual assault. “I think there’s ways for everything to be funny,” he said in a video interview this week, before quickly clarifying, “I don’t think everything should be joked about in every way.”Brutality on its own doesn’t make a good punchline, he said. “The art is making the audience laugh at things that we should not be laughing at.”Sloss, 33, was the only comedian to speak on the record, using his real name, in the Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand and in the accompanying newspaper investigation which detail the sexual assault allegations made by four women against the British actor and comic. That Sloss was the only performer to acknowledge the comedy scene’s long-running rumors about Brand left him shaken, he said. (Brand has denied the allegations.)In his 2019 HBO special “X,” Sloss describes learning that a female friend of his was raped by another friend, part of a group of guys he had long been buddies with. The special — in which he mostly jokes about his own shortcomings — becomes an impassioned plea for all men to do more to call out and prevent misconduct. (He workshopped it with survivors of assault.) After the Brand investigation, clips from the show went viral.Sloss, who performs at the New York Comedy Festival on Friday, grew up in an erudite household: His mother is a scientist who consults for the U.N. around clean energy, and his father is a programmer who also designs robotics. He started performing in clubs at 17, quickly rising through the ranks at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to become an international touring star. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and 21-month-old son, and now, much to his chagrin, does jokes about fatherhood.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The way you talk about your upbringing, it seems like your family expressed love by roasting each other.Yeah. That’s just a very Scottish thing. The way you talk about yourself is self-deprecating. You have to take yourself down in Scotland, because if you don’t, society will do it for you. Tall poppy syndrome exists here — if you stick your head too far up and you’re too proud. I’ve been brought down by the Scottish public several times over my career.In his special “X,” Sloss talked about the sexual assault of a friend after getting her permission to discuss it. HBOYou found success early.I was marketable: young, white, accent. Arguably good looking. I was confident. And I was decent. But a lot of it was right moment, right time, given opportunities that other people deserved.How did you decide to turn to different material?I think it was my fourth Fringe show when I decided to do darker jokes, stuff that wouldn’t make it on television. And I think every day of that run, I watched about 15 or 20 people leave. That was never fun, but I was fine with it because I’m like, I stand behind everything I’m saying now. I will defend that this is funny.The best standup, for me, is the sort that makes you think. I remember the first time I saw Jim Jefferies do his gun control routine. It’s so funny, but it’s made me think profoundly about it. And I could see it making people in the audience think.You can get away with some of these things because people believe that you have a moral center.Yes. I think there’s something about being vulnerable to people — it’s honesty, and I think they see goodness in that.When I did “Dark,” the feedback was really good. I loved the silences. I loved the challenge of it. How am I going to make people laugh with the death of a 6-year-old disabled girl? How can you pull humor out of that? And the answer is the same way that my family pulled humor out of it. You don’t laugh at the tragedy itself. You acknowledge the tragedy. And while looking around it, you can find things to make fun of, because the most powerful thing in the world is to laugh in the face of death.You talk in “X” about learning the stats on how common, and underprosecuted, sexual assault and rape are after your friend, who gave you permission to discuss it, disclosed what happened to her. Did you wonder why more men don’t learn about that? What made you want to talk about it?Because me and the group of friends, we felt so stupid, man. He admitted it the second we confronted him — which blew our minds. Looking back, there were plenty of signs, which we chose to ignore, because we put it down to banter, like, “Hey, he’s just saying things that we all say.”Whenever “X” goes viral, I hate it, because it destroys the message of the show. They just take that 90-second clip, where it’s me yelling at men. You cannot make men learn anything if you yell at them. And that sucks. It would be so nice if yelling at men worked; we could fix all of the problems. But it never works.So I made sure the show is bringing men in. The whole point is that I’m a deeply flawed man. I have toxic traits; I’ve been toxic in the past. I am completely and utterly imperfect. But that doesn’t make me a predator. I believe most men are good, and I want them to listen to me.When we toured “X,” I was really expecting some backlash from men. I was expecting walkouts. And every single night, without fail, I got DMs, emails, messages from men, like, “I sat beside my wife, I sat beside my daughter, my sister, my girlfriend. And when you started talking, I didn’t realize how ignorant I had been, and I was mortified. And then after the show I spoke to the women in my life. They told me a story which broke my heart.” It was so many men just coming to the same realization as me.What did you make of the response to the Brand exposé and the fact that you were the only voice from the comedy world speaking in support of women?I didn’t know I was the only one. I’d seen the clip with me in it. But they hadn’t shown me the context [that no one else came forward]. Devastating. I’m still processing it. To be honest with you, I’m still angry.The focus should never have been about me, ever, at any point. The only reason was because I looked brave. And I was only brave by omission. I was only brave because other people were cowards.Let’s be honest: I did the bare minimum. I acknowledged a rumor that we had all heard. So that’s why I thought so many people would do the bare minimum. They didn’t, and then they just continued being like, “I wasn’t asked.” Well, you can still say something now. Like, just because you missed the starting pistol doesn’t mean you don’t finish the race. Join in!You’ve said that becoming a father has made you a better person and a worse comedian.Yes, but that’s true for everyone. I don’t know what it is. I think maybe it’s such a higher level of empathy than you had before that it actually blunts your edges. I mean, I like pushing boundaries. But before I would certainly say callous things just for the sake of saying callous things.I used to have a joke that would split the audience down the middle, and I loved that. And I now realize that it’s because the joke was about harm happening to children. Before I was a parent, I found the joke very, very funny. And now I don’t. And that makes me hate myself, because that means I’m a comedian who’s offended by one of his own jokes. More

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      in Television

      Taylor Tomlinson to Host New CBS Late-Night Show after ‘Colbert’

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      The popular comedian will take over the show, which is based on “@midnight,” at a time when the job is being held only by men.In a shake-up of the late-night television landscape, the stand-up comic Taylor Tomlinson, 29, will take over the time slot after “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on CBS. The move makes her not just the only woman in the job on a late-night show on network television now, but also the youngest by two decades.Tomlinson will serve as host of “After Midnight,” based on “@midnight With Chris Hardwick,” a series that premiered on Comedy Central in 2013 and was canceled four years later. That show, with Hardwick as the host, featured a panel of comics.Among the executive producers of the new show is Stephen Colbert, who announced the news on his program on Wednesday. Tomlinson will start in 2024.The comedian, who is based in Los Angeles, is a film and television novice, but in a very short time, has become one of the most acclaimed and popular stand-up acts in the country, building on the strength of two specials on Netflix, “Quarter-Life Crisis” and “Look at You.” She is currently on a global tour of big theaters.She got her start performing as a teenager and played the church circuit early on. Her big break on Netflix came courtesy of a 15-minute set on “The Comedy Lineup” in 2018. Her next special will premiere on the streaming service in February.Tomlinson is essentially filling the position vacated when James Corden retired from “The Late Late Show” earlier this year. Before him, Craig Ferguson and Tom Snyder had served as hosts of programs that followed “The Late Show With David Letterman.”The list of women getting such opportunities on network television is extremely short. Joan Rivers was the first in the modern era, becoming host of a short-lived Fox series in 1986. In 2019, Lilly Singh replaced Carson Daly in the late-late slot on NBC. But when that show went off the air in 2021, network television became an all-male club. More

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      in Television

      Richard Moll, Towering Bailiff on ‘Night Court,’ Dies at 80

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      In a career that spanned more than four decades, the actor was best known for playing the imposing but lovable Bull Shannon on the NBC sitcom.Richard Moll, the 6-foot-8 actor who delighted television audiences with a childlike charm in his role as the hulking bailiff on the NBC sitcom “Night Court,” died on Thursday at his home in Big Bear Lake, Calif. He was 80.His death was confirmed on Friday by his publicist, Jeff Sanderson. No cause was given by the family.In a career of more than four decades, Mr. Moll played a variety of roles on television shows and in films. But he was best known for portraying the baldheaded, wide-eyed Aristotle Nostradamus (Bull) Shannon on all nine seasons of “Night Court,” which ran from 1984 to 1992 and competed with other hit television sitcoms like “The Cosby Show” and “The Golden Girls.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018.Kathy Hutchins/Hutchins Photo Agency, via Associated PressBull Shannon’s dimwitted persona offered an air of lighthearted innocence on the series, which was set inside a fictional municipal night court in Manhattan and starred Harry Anderson, who played Judge Harry Stone and died in 2018, and John Larroquette as the prosecutor, Dan Fielding.Mr. Moll was “larger than life and taller too,” Mr. Larroquette, said Friday in a post on X.Richard Charles Moll was born on Jan. 13, 1943, in Pasadena, Calif. to Harry and Violet Moll. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, with a degree in history and passed over his father’s wishes that he pursue a law career, to take up acting.He started with theater work, performing in Shakespeare plays in California. His first television and film roles came in the late 1970s, and included a part in the 1977 movie “Brigham” and an appearance in an episode of the television series “Welcome Back, Kotter” in 1978.“Probably auditioning for ‘Night Court’ would be my first big break,” Mr. Moll said in a 2010 interview with MaximoTV. He noted that he had been asked if he was willing to shave his head for the part.“I said ‘Are you kidding?’ ” he recalled. “‘I’ll shave my legs for the part. I’ll shave my armpits. I don’t care.’”After “Night Court” ended in 1992, Mr. Moll went on to do voice-over work on various cartoons, including roles as Two-Face, a disturbed villain with a disfigured mug on the “Adventures of Batman & Robin” on Fox, and as Scorpion, one of the many adversaries on “Spider-Man: The Animated Series,” on the same network.Richard Moll, far right, with the cast of Night Court in 1988.Gary Null/NBC, via Getty ImagesThough largely known for his comedic work, including in movies such as “Scary Movie 2” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” Mr. Moll was also featured in horror and science-fiction films. His first major movie roles included the 1985 horror feature “House” and the 1986 indie fantasy “The Dungeonmaster.”Mr. Moll worked as an actor and voice-over artist as late as 2018, according to IMDb. His final notable appearance was in the 2010 live-action film “Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster,” in which he played the mysterious lighthouse keeper Elmer Uggins.Mr. Moll retired to Big Bear Lake in the Southern Californian mountains, where, according to his family, he reveled in the idyllic scenery and exercised his love of bird-watching.He is survived by a daughter, Chloe Moll; a son, Mason Moll; his ex-wife, Susan Moll; and two stepchildren, Cassandra Card and Morgan Ostling. More

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      in Movies

      The Comedy Club Was as Intimate as a Living Room. Actually, It Was One.

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      At Apartment Fest, audiences piled into a Harlem home for four nights of jokes from comedians who have to fight for stage time elsewhere.When Eitan Levine, who’s been doing comedy for about 15 years, announced to his roughly 20,000 followers on Instagram that he would be holding a four-night stand-up comedy event called Apartment Fest in his two-bedroom Harlem home, he wasn’t too surprised when 157 applicants submitted audition tapes.“Good stage time is very hard to come by and bad stage time is also very hard to come by, so you take all of it,” said Levine, 34, who was offering peers a highly coveted 10 minutes each. “I’ve applied to worse shows for less time.”The event, which on some nights featured two 90-minute shows, complete with a headliner and six comedians, took over his apartment. Last Thursday, as Levine pushed back a large sectional sofa, set up some 25 chairs and made sure there was enough beer and water for guests paying up to $25 apiece, he worried about train delays and whether audiences would even show up. “All of those stressors are amplified 5,000 percent because the show is literally in my living room,” Levine explained. He needn’t have worried. The shows were all sold out.This D.I.Y. spirit is reminiscent of the New York’s music scene in the early 2000s, when bands like the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were getting their starts in grimy apartments on the Lower East Side. Just as those groups were to the left of the mainstream at the time, today many early-stage comedians have to create their own spaces to be heard. And just like back then, an apartment works perfectly.Eitan Levine, the organizer, pushed a sofa against the wall to make room for the audience.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrittany Starna helped with the audio for Apartment Fest.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine’s open-plan living area is painted from floor to ceiling in bold stripes that range from orange to bright teal. A window spans much of the back wall, and the space is open enough to snugly accommodate the crowd that faced a microphone stand.Chloe Radcliffe, 32, worked as a staff writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” has a studio comedy feature in development and most recently appeared in a mini-series directed by Steven Soderbergh called “Command Z.” On Thursday, she biked from Ridgewood, Queens, to Harlem to perform at Apartment Fest. She touched up her makeup in Levine’s bathroom and prepped her set from a bench in his bedroom, which was strewn with pizza boxes and was serving as a green room.Radcliffe opened with a bit about the birthmark on her cheek: “I was on the sidewalk and somebody dropped their AirPod and I picked it up and gave it to him and said, ‘Have a good day.’ He smiled, looked at my birthmark and said, ‘Get well soon.’”The crowd responded with uncontrollable giggles. “I would love to find that guy in a couple of years and be like, ‘It won’t go away! I don’t know how to get rid of it!’” she continued.Despite Levine’s nerves, this wasn’t the first time he had held comedy shows in his apartment. He originally got the idea after a rejection in 2019.“I was applying to a bunch of comedy festivals and one day I got an email from a festival rejecting me and I realized I never even applied to it,” Levine said, adding that he “came to stand-up from the improv and sketch communities where it’s very D.I.Y. — you can put a show on anywhere — so I just took that idea.”The idea for Apartment Fest was borrowed from the D.I.Y. spirit of the New York music scene in the early aughts.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrandon Barrera, 27, host of the first show on Saturday night, agreed with the D.I.Y. label and described the event as Levine “basically throwing a house party with the people who make him laugh the hardest.”Because of the many comedy clubs in New York, the city is one of the only places in the country where stand-ups can get onstage multiple times in one night. But even then, they can hope to end the evening with 15 minutes of total stage time. Radcliffe, for instance, had two more shows on the docket later Thursday.But bars and club owners can be picky, resulting in more pressure on comedians. Barrera, who moved from Los Angeles when his friend offered him a job as a golf caddy and a place to live in the nearby caddyshack in New Jersey, records multiple podcasts in addition to performing live. Other comedians at Apartment Fest also regularly appear on or produce podcasts, all while constantly posting material on social media, which is often where club and festival bookers find their work.Social media wasn’t as much of a consideration for Levine as he put together Apartment Fest’s bills. Though many of the performers who made the cut were his friends and had thousands of followers on social media, he also included younger comedians who were just starting to share their work online.“The minimum buy-in to some other festivals is 15,000 Instagram followers and 50,000 TikTok followers,” Levine said. “Other festivals are trying to sell something or they’re trying to be a festival that makes money. This festival is literally just the funniest people that submitted videos.”Brandon Barrera was the host of the first show on Saturday night.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine was worried that audiences wouldn’t show up, but every set was sold out.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesRadcliffe has a significant following on social media, and while she understands it can be limiting for comedians, she said such platforms have “broadened access by orders of magnitude: underrepresented voices get noticed; more people are tangibly able to participate; comedians can build their own audience and the monetary exchange is more direct,” Radcliffe said.Festivals often pay only in potential exposure. Even as pop-up shows in unexpected places around the city have become more popular, it’s common for bookers to take home the bulk of the money while splitting meager amounts among the comedians.For Levine’s show, the host was paid $30, the featured acts were paid $20 and the headliners were paid $75. The money left over from the ticket proceeds — $1,500 — was donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.Levine chose the organization after first encountering it at age 10 when he was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. It’s also how he found his way into comedy. After his first wish, a BattleBot, was denied, “I ended up asking them to put me on a comedy show in New York,” said Levine, who grew up in Springfield, N.J. “So they put me up on a show at Caroline’s” comedy club.Levine filmed his sets for use in a special later.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesHe currently appears on an Amazon sports comedy show, “Game Breakers,” and plans to cut a special from sets of his performances that were filmed at Apartment Fest.As for the other comedians, the stage time in a homey apartment offered a chance to connect with an audience in a low-pressure setting.Stef Dag, 28, was quick to point out that while she may be “staring at Domino’s on the floor and clothes everywhere,” she wasn’t nervous. “It almost feels like I’m at a sleepover party — not that sleepovers haven’t been the most traumatizing nights of my life.”“Festivals, especially when you first start doing them, there is like a certain amount of — pressure is a little strong, but you want to do well,” says Ryan Thomas, a 32-year-old comedian from Brooklyn. “Here, the scale is so much smaller, and it makes it so much more fun because everyone is in on the weirdness of the situation and it makes it way more fun to play with the audience.“I just did my set and there was a joke that they didn’t really like, and I got to just talk them through. You’re actually able to look people in the eye.” More

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      Dave Chappelle and the Perils of Button-Pushing Comedy

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      His comments on the Mideast conflict have been the subject of news reports, but the polarizing coverage has ignored how comics have treated the situation.Halfway through a sold-out show at the PNC Arena in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday, Dave Chappelle stopped to ask the audience about screaming coming from the balcony. “I’m scared it might be the Jews coming for me,” he said, a mischievous tone in his gravelly voice.This was a reference to a previous show, in Boston, where Chappelle’s criticism of Israeli policies reportedly led to cheers and pushback from the crowd, hundreds of walkouts and one patron posting online that she never felt more “unsafe.” Press descriptions of the event were often vague. The reports of cheers for Hamas didn’t specify if they were coming from one person or a large group. But what seems clear from the reports is that along with defending Harvard students who had signed a letter saying Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence, Chappelle had denounced the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis and got sidetracked when someone in the crowd told him to be quiet.Chappelle’s follow-up show on Wednesday was as much the work of a diplomat as a provocateur, telling the audience to pray for both Israelis and Palestinians and calling the situation for both a nightmare. At one point, he addressed American Jews, saying, “Whatever they can do to take the violence or the danger out of a situation, they should do it.” Then he added, “I’m not about antisemitism, but I’m allowed to disagree with whoever I want to.”Chappelle, wearing a sleeveless flannel shirt that hung down to his thighs, never figured out what the commotion at the top of the arena was about, but he said he had heard someone say there was a medical issue. Chain-smoking, Chappelle made a few jokes, then added: “You know what it will say in the paper tomorrow: Dave Chappelle makes fun of man as he dies.”It’s an understandable complaint. Of course, Chappelle seeks out contentious subjects — his lawyerly explanation of the antisemitism of Kanye West on “Saturday Night Live” last year does not help his cause in this current controversy — and no one exaggerates their own victimhood more. He’s still saying, “Any minute they’re going to cancel me” despite the fact that he’s performing for huge crowds and has another Netflix special on the way. But the media attention that Chappelle’s comedy gets is obsessive, polarized and often tediously literal.It brings to mind one of the most memorable bits of this century, his 2004 joke about Ja Rule being asked to weigh in on Sept. 11. Mocking how our media ask celebrities to be sober authorities making sense of tragic events, Chappelle said, “I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now.”This joke has aged tremendously well. Social media has only amplified the opinions of the Ja Rules of the world. The algorithms that run our feeds are making sure you have Justin Bieber and Gigi Hadid to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now every corporation and middle school seems to have its own foreign policy. Comedians have been perhaps the most outspoken of artists, with Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer consistently commenting on Israel and antisemitism on social media, earning praise and condemnation. The comic Bassem Youssef went viral for his appearance on Piers Morgan’s show. Obviously, in a democratic society, it’s important for people to feel free to speak out on matters of gravity, and an emotional response on this issue is not only understandable but necessary. But it’s also reasonable to think that you should want some answers that Dave Chappelle might not have right now.Chappelle is a tricky case, because since his Ja Rule joke, he has embraced the sober truth-teller role, telling magnetic stories that sometimes end in lessons, not punchlines. His take on Israel has been mostly sober, but other comics are incorporating the issue into their work. Matt Ruby put 10 minutes of his jokes from a club set online, defending himself by saying, “This is how Jews handle crisis.” The German stand-up Shahak Shapira released a 25-minute special, “Baklavas From Gaza.” Both sounded like rough drafts, but they seem motivated less by a blunt interest in changing hearts and minds than in comforting them.The seeming hopelessness of the conflict in the Middle East has always drawn comics looking to push buttons. In one of the most high-risk “Saturday Night Live” monologues ever, Louis C.K. likened Israelis and Palestinians to his daughters fighting, with him as America trying to mediate. Since he had sandwiched this metaphor between a joke about his “mild racism” and another about trying to understand pedophilia, he managed the feat of making the subject seem safe.In recent years, several sharp Muslim comics have made funny comedy on television from the Palestinian perspective. In “Mo,” set in Texas, the Palestinian American comic Mo Amer, who plays a likable fool, gives his pitcher nephew a pep talk on the mound of a Little League game, telling the boy that he’s a Palestinian so “if there’s one thing you can do is throw things accurately.” Then, as another adult tries to shuttle him off the field, he advises the boy to imagine a tank coming at him.This show was created with another comic, Ramy Youssef, whose own superb, self-named Hulu series, “Ramy,” recorded an episode in Israel portraying daily life in the occupied territories of the West Bank, including the tedium of waiting at a checkpoint to cross over. Playing a jerky American bull in a China shop, Youssef tries to relate to a Palestinian love interest by saying he gets it, comparing the experience to traffic at the Lincoln Tunnel. Both these shows humanize the Palestinian experience in ways that feel new.No one has been funnier on this least funny of subjects than Larry David and an episode of his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about an incredible Palestinian chicken restaurant that causes controversy by moving next door to a Jewish deli. It’s invariably high on lists of the greatest installments of the series. It ended with David walking between competing protest groups: one from the chicken restaurant led by his Palestinian girlfriend (dirty talk during sex includes her calling him an occupier and him quoting Theodor Herzl) and another made up of many of his Jewish friends waving signs in front of a deli.The anguished look on David’s face, eyes bulging, face contorting in confusion, has become a popular meme. It’s used so often that people don’t even realize what it refers to. My sense from Chappelle’s show is that he could relate.While Chappelle still jokes about transgender people, which was the focus of his last special, his new hour, due in December, throws fewer bombs than his last one. It’s a bit humbler and even has a silly side along with some moony philosophizing about the Will Smith slap, with him calling Smith and Chris Rock “fellow dreamers I met along the way.”In Raleigh, the one time he told the crowd he would do a “dangerous joke,” it turned out to be something like a parody of one: “Two Jews walk into a bar. I’d say the punchline, but there might be a transgender person here.” He smiled as if he knew how corny this sounded.When a woman in the audience yelled out, “Free Palestine,” he told her he heard her but added: “Don’t start that up or there will be a news cycle for another week.” More