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      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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      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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      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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      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

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      Dave Chappelle Laments ‘Nightmare’ Facing Israelis and Palestinians

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      The comedian, whose remarks about the Israel-Hamas war last week made headlines, returned to the subject at a show in North Carolina.Dave Chappelle was about 24 minutes into his set on Wednesday night in Raleigh, N.C., when he briefly touched on remarks he had made about the Israel-Hamas conflict at a show in Boston last week that had led to cheers, some walkouts and headlines.“Right now, I’m in trouble because the Jewish community is upset,” Mr. Chappelle told a packed crowd of more than 20,000 people at PNC Arena. “But I cannot express this enough: No matter what you read about that show in Boston, you will never see quotation marks around anything I said. They don’t know what I said.”“It’s all hearsay,” said the comedian, who, like many others, requires audience members to surrender their smartphones at shows.Mr. Chappelle, a satirist whose reputation for diving into polarizing topics has increased in the latter stages of his comedic career, returned to the Israel-Hamas conflict near the end of his set Wednesday.“The other night, I said something about Palestine in Boston and got misquoted all over the world,” Mr. Chappelle said. “And I will not repeat what I said.”A woman in the crowd responded by shouting, “Free Palestine.”“Please, please, miss,” Mr. Chappelle responded. “Listen. Don’t start it up or I’m going to be in the news cycle for another week. This thing that’s happening in the Middle East is bigger than everybody.”“This is what’s happening and, believe me, I understand what’s happening in Israel is a nightmare,” Mr. Chappelle said. “What’s happening in Palestine is a nightmare.”He continued: “There’s only two kinds of people in the world: people who love other people and the people that have things to make them afraid to love other people. Pray for everyone in Israel. Pray for everyone in Palestine.”“And remember that every dead person is a dead person,” he said, calling the situation a “tragedy.”At the show last Thursday in Boston’s TD Garden, Mr. Chappelle was drawn into speaking about the conflict by members of the audience. He raised concerns about how a group of Harvard students had been treated since signing an anti-Israel letter, condemned the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and criticized Israel for its role in causing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to remarks first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times reported that perhaps 200 people in the roughly 17,000-person audience in Boston had departed toward the end of the show.A few minutes after initially discussing the interaction on Wednesday, Mr. Chappelle noticed a commotion stemming from the arena’s upper level. “That still might be the Jews coming for me,” said Mr. Chappelle, who has often used his penchant for causing offense as fodder for jokes.He urged for someone in the crowd to call emergency medical responders before being reminded that audience members did not have their phones. He said he had never thought about what would happen without them in an emergency.“Sorry,” Mr. Chappelle said, stretching out the word. “I don’t want the Jews to know what I said.”On Wednesday night, Mr. Chappelle, wearing a red, black and gray flannel shirt with cutoff sleeves and taking frequent drags from a cigarette, filled his set with jokes about Madison Cawthorn, a pro-Trump former North Carolina congressman and material about transgender people that has drawn widespread criticism. He also joked about being attacked onstage last year by an armed man while performing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.The audience cheered him loudly, and the hour-and-15-minute set did not appear to have caused the kind of walkouts that marked the Boston show. More

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      With a Chuckle and a Cool-Girl Smirk, Beth Stelling Moves Up a Comic Class

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      The stand-up, who has a new Netflix special, delights in inappropriate laughs — none more so than in her bits about aging and childhood.The stand-up Beth Stelling reminds me so much of my best friend from high school.I relate this as full disclosure (comedy is subjective, especially when it intersects with your life) but also because it illustrates one of her considerable strengths. Some comics build a persona that is the best vehicle for their jokes. Stelling belongs to a different tradition: Her comedy emerges from an onstage character as rich and resonant as a great movie protagonist. Even if you don’t know someone like Stelling, her fully realized performance makes you feel as if you do.In “If You Didn’t Want Me Then,” a superb hour on Netflix that reveals a nimble storyteller who has leaped to a new artistic level, she carries herself with the steely cynicism of someone who has seen some things. Dressed all in black, she describes herself as grizzled by the time she was in high school and displays a delight in inappropriate laughs. She tells two stories about relationships with large age gaps and says, “I feel like the only time men believe women is when we’re lying about being 18.”After such lines, she tends to unleash a grunting chuckle that evokes Butt-Head more than Beavis along with a cool girl smirk. A laid-back dirtbag comic energy infuses her act. She never looks as if she were trying too hard. The feat of her standup is how it gradually makes her hard shell transparent, revealing vulnerability, compassion and feminist fire, through her revisiting of a childhood marked by divorce.Her last special, “Girl Daddy” (on Max), introduced audiences to her father, a conservative with a showman streak. “He moved to Orlando, Florida, to become an actor, which is not where you go,” she says, in a sentence that moves quickly before stopping on a dime. While he didn’t get many roles in movies or television, he did create a business dressing up in costumes as advertisements, like playing a leprechaun in front of an Irish bar. She once again uses him as a comic target, telling scathingly deadpan stories about his eccentricities, centering one bit on his raccoon collection. But watching her roast him you can’t help but think that some of his performance chops rubbed off on her.What stands out more in the new show is her sneakily loving portrait of her mother, who raised her in Dayton, Ohio, where the special was shot. The hour opens with a view of the city’s modest skyline alongside chunky red letters announcing the title with a heavy-metal guitar riff. When she says of Dayton that “not everyone showed us the respect we deserve,” Stelling could be talking about her mother, a teacher of more than three decades whom she has presented as a Marge Simpson type.Stelling opens with a story about a boy in her second-grade class who cracked an obscene joke at her mom’s expense that she had found hilarious. What follows is something of a fakeout. While she pauses to celebrate this boy’s joke, she’s setting up a belated if cheerful revenge, delivering the brutal comeback that she didn’t serve up when she was young and that her mom, a proper professional, never would.Her mother is unfailingly supportive of her career, always hyping her up, albeit clumsily, saying if she was in the Olympics, she would win the gold medal. Then Stelling, pausing and imitating her mother, finishes the compliment: “in women’s standup comedy.”One of Stelling’s sneakiest assets is her voice, a Bamfordian instrument that moves effortlessly from grunts to accents to girlish squeaks to bourgeois entitlement. She has a joke about how you’re a gymnast when you’re young because “you’re unaware of the many ways your neck can break” that gets most of its laughs from the change in speeds and intonations of its delivery.And yet, early in her set, she does a bit about how she plans to age and not get plastic surgery. “If I do get surgery,” she says, “it’s going to be a lobotomy.” Then comes her trademark chuckle before imagining telling her friend as if a whacked-out character: “Let’s get our heads done.” She then repeats the line but in a lower register closer to her own.She says she ran this joke by her mother and, imitating a cheerful Midwestern woman, the response was, “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Stelling looked stunned. “Curveball, Diane!” she marvels about her mom. Stelling clearly always saw herself as the dark one, but this special is a portrait of her getting older, wiser, seeing things anew. With a mix of melancholy and admiration, she adds, “I used to be able to shock her.”Shock is part of Stelling’s tool kit. She has two punchlines in this special that pull it off extremely well, both of which require too much context to ruin here. They produce the kind of belly laughs that can only come from surprising jokes not safe for work. But my favorite moments are the quieter ones, like the line about not being able to shock her mother, a soft laugh at best. It lingers because there’s subtext. She’s performing getting older and realizing her mother might be different than she thought.It suggests that the easy categories one might assume from her stand-ups — fun, reckless dad and square mom — don’t capture them in full. And through that realization, Stelling reveals a deeper version of herself. You might even recognize yourself in this moment. We all get older and see our childhood from new perspectives. And in your darker moments, getting your head done might even seem, for a moment, like sweet relief. More

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      Suzanne Somers, Star of ‘Three’s Company,’ Is Dead at 76

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      She became famous for playing, as she put it, “one of the best dumb blondes that’s ever been done,” then became a sex-positive health and diet mogul.Suzanne Somers, who gained fame by playing a ditsy blonde on the sitcom “Three’s Company” and then later built a health and diet business empire, most notably with the ThighMaster, died on Sunday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was one day away from turning 77.The cause was breast cancer, Caroline Somers, her daughter-in-law, said.“Three’s Company” first went on the air in 1977. The show told the story of two roommates — Chrissy Snow, a secretary, played by Ms. Somers; and Janet Wood, a florist, played by Joyce DeWitt — who welomed a man to join them as a third roommate: Jack Tripper, a culinary student played by John Ritter. Since their landlord would frown on an unmarried man living with two single women, the group pretended that Jack was gay.High jinks ensued. The show featured slapstick comedy, lighthearted misunderstandings and jokey one-liners.By the show’s fifth season, “Three’s Company” was one of the nation’s most popular sitcoms. Ms. Somers’s acrimonious contract negotiations with ABC became news. In 1982, The Times reported that she had wanted a raise to $50,000 from $30,000 an episode. In recent years, Ms. Somers repeatedly said that she had sought $150,000, in line with Mr. Ritter’s pay.She did not get the pay increase. Instead, she was fired.“I’ve been playing what I think is one of the best dumb blondes that’s ever been done, but I never got any credit,” she told The Times that year. “I did it so well that everyone thought I really was a dumb blonde.”Ms. Somers’s first notable role came in the 1973 film “American Graffiti.” She appeared only briefly, mouthing “I love you” to one of the stars, Richard Dreyfuss; the credits listed her as “Blonde in T-Bird.”But that scene was beguiling enough to earn her a spot on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, who, Ms. Somers recalled earlier this year in an interview with Page Six, introduced her as “the mysterious blonde in the Thunderbird from ‘American Graffiti.’”Ms. Somers in New York in 2020. After leaving “Three’s Company,” she appeared in many other television shows, including “Step by Step.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAppearing on “The Tonight Show,” she said, got her the audition for “Three’s Company.”In the years after “Three’s Company,” Ms. Somers remained recognizable for frequent appearances in movies and on television, including the 1990s sitcom “Step by Step,” a stint co-hosting the television series “Candid Camera” and a wide variety of talk shows.But her later reputation sprang from her business acumen — which proved to be more formidable than ABC’s executives appreciated in 1980.She and her husband, Alan Hamel, made the ThighMaster, a workout device, one of the most recognizable products in infomercial history, thanks in part to Ms. Somers’s many leggy appearances alongside the product. The ads showcased her beauty and her advice that is “it’s easy to squeeze, squeeze your way to shapely hips and thighs.”More than 10 million units of the ThighMaster have been sold over the years at an average price of about $30, Caroline Somers said. She is not only Ms. Somers’s daughter-in-law but also the president of her mother-in-law’s company, which owns the ThighMaster and has overseen Ms. Somers’s other business and entertainment activities.In the mid-2000s, Ms. Somers was appearing on the Home Shopping Network for more than 25 hours every month. She was the pitchperson for everything from cowboy boots to waffle irons.Ms. Somers also wrote more than 27 books, including 14 best sellers, which tended to focus on issues related to the body and aging.Some of the methods she promoted — particularly bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, a treatment that she called “the juice of youth” for menopausal women — have often been criticized by doctors as unproven and possibly unsafe, even as the market for them has grown.The foundation of her business efforts was the sex positivity that she had embodied since “Three’s Company.”“A sexual person,” she told The Times for a profile in 2020, “is a healthy person.”Suzanne Marie Mahoney was born on Oct. 16, 1946, in San Bruno, Calif. Her father, Francis, had some success as an athlete but not enough for a lasting career, and he spent much of Suzanne’s youth working at a brewery. Her mother, Marion (Turner) Mahoney, was a medical secretary.Suzanne Mahoney was kicked out of a Catholic high school when nuns discovered love letters she had written. She graduated from Capuchino High School, a public high school, in San Bruno.She attended Lone Mountain College (which later became part of the University of San Francisco), but she dropped out after she discovered in 1965 that she was pregnant, and she married the baby’s father, Bruce Somers.They divorced in the late 1960s. Not long afterward, she worked as a prize model on a game show hosted by Alan Hamel, a frequent TV host. They quickly began dating and married in 1977.In addition to Caroline Somers and Mr. Hamel, Ms. Somers is survived by Bruce Somers, her son from her first marriage; two stepchildren, Stephen and Leslie Hamel; two siblings, Maureen Gilmartin and Dan Mahoney; two granddaughters; and four step-grandchildren.Ms. Somers was first diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer more than 20 years ago. She pivoted from selling mainly jewelry, apparel and weight loss and diet products to focusing on organic skin care and cleaning goods, along with her promotion of hormones.She managed to sustain an energetic calendar of live performances. An autobiographical show on Broadway, “The Blonde in the Thunderbird,” was critically panned and closed after only 15 performances, but she had better luck in Las Vegas, where she enjoyed many years of song-and-dance gigs, featuring flamboyant costumes and no small amount of glitter.At the time of her Times profile in 2020, Ms. Somers had recently fallen from the private tram on her 93-acre compound in Palm Springs while partying with friends. Yet a reporter observed her at a spa in New York City managing the feat of walking with “a vampy strut” even while using crutches. More