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      in Theater

      Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad Tackle Another Book (Not Mormon)

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      Twelve years after opening “The Book of Mormon,” the two actors — and good friends — return with “Gutenberg! The Musical!”Josh Gad still remembers the first time he and Andrew Rannells met, in June 2010 in a Los Angeles audition suite. No matter what Gad did during their scenes together, Rannells didn’t laugh. Not once.Rannells was auditioning for “The Book of Mormon,” the new musical from the creators of “South Park.” Gad, then a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” had long been attached. The producers wanted a celebrity opposite him, and they’d invited several to these tryouts. Rannells, a replacement actor in “Hairspray” and “Jersey Boys,” was not remotely famous. Confronted with Gad’s cyclone energy, he chose stillness.“I was so intimidated. And it really upset me,” Gad said, over dinner at Chez Josephine, a theater district mainstay where Rannells, in younger days, used to work the coat check. Gad turned to Rannells. “I had that Tony locked until you walked in the door. And I still had a grudge because you beat me out for ‘Jersey Boys.’” (It was unclear if Gad was joking. Then again, Gad is almost always joking.)“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser. Both men were nominated for a Tony Award and both men lost out to Norbert Leo Butz for “Catch Me If You Can.” Somewhere along the way, they became close friends, which was apparent over dinner, a symphony of bits, riffs and callbacks between bites of tuna tartare and duck breast. They had ordered identical meals and identical Diet Cokes.Rannells, 45, has spent his post “Mormon” years in other Broadway shows and on television (“Girls,” “Black Monday,” “Girls5Eva”). Gad, 42, has since become a voice-over luminary (“Frozen,” Frozen 2,” “Central Park”). Now they are reuniting, one block south and one block east of their “Mormon” haunts, in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” which begins previews at the James Earl Jones Theater on Sept. 15.“Gutenberg!” directed by Alex Timbers and written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, is a farcical, largehearted duet about a pair of nursing home workers, Bud and Doug, bitten grievously by the Broadway bug. Using an inheritance and the proceeds from the sale of a home, they rent a Broadway theater for one night, hoping to find a producer for their deeply misguided and tragically under-researched original musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type and the publisher of the Gutenberg Bible.“The Book of Mormon” opened in 2011, to rapturous reviews, with Rannells as the strait-laced Mormon missionary Elder Price and Gad as his co-evangelist Elder Cunningham, whose laces are a lot looser.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTwo old friends finding a vehicle for a Broadway return has the whiff of a vanity project. But this deliriously silly show, in which the two actors play dozens of characters and wear a combined 107 baseball caps, demands that vanity be left at the stage door.Over dinner, Gad joked (probably!) that when Timbers had sent him a photo of those 107 hats, each inscribed with the name of one of the show’s characters, he’d tried to back out.“It was too late,” Rannells said.“I know,” Gad said. “I read my contract last night.”The day after dinner, at a rehearsal space at the Alvin Ailey Extension, Gad and Rannells were stumbling through (with an emphasis, perhaps, on stumbling) the second act of “Gutenberg!” In a scene at the top of the act, as Bud and Doug introduced themselves to the audience, Rannells hit Gad in the face, perhaps accidentally.“That’s assault,” Gad said.“You walked into it,” Rannells replied. Moments later they were standing cheek to cheek, singing spooky oo-oo-oos.Rannells was wearing a shirt and shorts in complementary greens, his wavy hair reliably perfect. Gad was all in black. He was also drinking an iced coffee. Given his typical energy levels, this seemed like a bad idea. He had burst into the rehearsal room after the lunch break singing “Unchained Melody” with heavy vibrato. He also riffed on a line from “Sunset Boulevard”: “We taught the world new ways to dream.”“No,” Rannells said. He hugged Gad. Or maybe he gave him a mild version of the Heimlich maneuver. This is more or less their way, with Gad as an avatar of chaos and Rannells in smirking control.Casey Nicholaw, the director of “The Book of Mormon,” had noted this contrast. “Josh’s comedy basically just says, ‘Watch me. Love me.’ Josh is just out there,” he said. “And Andrew’s is sneaky. Andrew knows how to just hold himself with grace and dignity and then just go for it.”Each has a different process, a different style, a different affect. Collaborators I spoke with compared them to famous comic duos — Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Gad cited “The Odd Couple.”“I definitely am more anxious than he is,” Gad said over dinner. “I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to learning dances. I’m a bundle of anxiety when it comes to getting lines right.” Gad said that he is also a hypochondriac and that sometimes, offstage during “The Book of Mormon,” Rannells would suggest possible diseases for him.“He’s got a mean streak,” Gad said. “I can say that now.” Rannells, sipping his Diet Coke, didn’t deny it.Despite that mean streak, a friendship endures. Nikki M. James, their “Mormon” co-star, recalled watching it begin. “Onstage, they played very different people who end up becoming each other’s best friends,” she said in a recent interview. “That camaraderie and friendship and love and sense of family, it was very clear offstage as well.”That show left them inextricably linked. “When I die, if I get an obituary in The New York Times, Josh’s name will also be in it,” Rannells said, somewhat darkly.And after they departed “The Book of Mormon,” each for a quickly canceled sitcom (“1600 Penn” for Gad, “The New Normal” for Rannells), they would often talk about how they might work together again. A revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” was mooted. So was a revival of “The Producers.” About four years ago Timbers (“Moulin Rouge,” “Beetlejuice”) had another idea.Brown and King (“Beetlejuice”) had first conceived “Gutenberg!” more than 20 years ago. Back then, King was a musical theater intern at Manhattan Theater Club. Tasked with sifting through the slush pile, he found himself listening to home-recorded tapes and CDs of new musicals, most of them sung through by the author or authors, most of them hopeless. King thought that he and Brown could write something just as bad. Worse even.“We tried to come up with, like, what’s a terrible idea for a musical?” King said.But what began as a way to prank King’s boss evolved into something just a little more sincere. As King put it, “We fell in love with our own dumb stuff.”In 2003, Brown and King performed a 45-minute version of the show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. It ran for about two years. With encouragement from a producer, they wrote a second act and took it to London. The show that emerged was never about the real Gutenberg — Bud and Doug have only the vaguest ideas of how movable type and medieval history work. Instead it was a loving lampoon of Broadway wishes and tropes.Gad and Rannells’s characters in “Gutenberg! The Musical!” hope to find a producer for their musical about the inventor of movable type.Adam Powell for The New York TimesBut for the Off Broadway premiere in 2006, directed by Timbers, the creators stepped out in favor of actual actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos, which made it feel more like a real show and less like a goofball routine written by two starving artist roommates.There had been conversations about moving the show to Broadway. Those conversations had never been especially earnest. Then Timbers slipped Gad the script, hoping that he would share it in turn with Rannells. Which is exactly what happened.With Brown and King and Timbers, the actors met for a reading in workshop in Los Angeles in March 2020, an inauspicious moment for Broadway-bound musicals. The reading went well. To succeed, the friendship between Bud and Doug has to feel ardent, unbreakable. Gad and Rannells had that.So after a delay of about three years, conversations began again. A two-person show felt overwhelming, especially one in which the actors also had to serve as their own crew, moving each prop and set piece. Gad described it as “more intimate, and yet much more insane than even ‘Mormon.’” Still, he and Rannells agreed.In rehearsal, that insanity was in evidence. The two men were playing not only Bud (Gad), the composer, and Doug (Rannells), the book writer, but also every other baseball-capped character. And they had to play them with all the naïveté and enthusiasm that newbie writers would bring, but also with the necessary skills of a practiced musical theater performer, because bad acting and bad singing aren’t funny for long.“You have to commit to doing fully lived-in characters by performers who otherwise would not be on Broadway,” Gad said.“It’s literally a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat,” Rannells sighed.Hats aside, they seemed to be having a pretty good time, particularly during one sequence where Rannells reenacted an eagle attacking a sea gull, while Gad, playing a pubescent girl, did a sexy, scary skeleton dance.It wasn’t all skeletons and sea gulls. Opening a Broadway show is stressful. “I think our actual human sweat will give us away,” Rannells said. “I’m going to be a real mess 10 minutes into the show.” Opening a Broadway show with a best friend in accidental smacking distance is stressful in a different way. But it’s also pretty nice. “Gutenberg!” is about two characters supporting each other, through thick and thin and third reprise. And as Gad and Rannells tell it, that tracks for the actors, too.“There are times where I want to fall down and just cry at how tiring the show is,” Gad said. “Then I look at Rannells and I’m like, ‘OK, he’s going to keep me upright.’”He turned to Rannells, adding, “I’m so happy you got ‘Jersey Boys’ now. Now I actually think they made the right choice.” More

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      in Television

      5 Stand-Up Comedy Specials to Stream for the Labor Day Weekend

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      Todd Barry, Tracy Morgan, Sasheer Zamata, Chris Fleming and Jason Fried riff on weird characters, middle age, lost histories and more.Todd Barry, ‘Domestic Shorthair’Stream it on YouTubeTodd Barry speaks fluent sarcasm. After decades of refinement, honing his low-key deadpan into something flexible and distinctive, he can turn a sentence inside-out with the mildest shift in intonation, instantly divorcing what he says from what he means. The pivots in his jokes are subtle but crisp. Ever since David Letterman retired from late night, sarcasm has no better champion. Barry starts waving its flag as soon as the applause settles down on his very funny new special. “That is the type of forced fraudulent crowd response that will propel this whole show,” he says, enough of a hint of a smile to soften the blow.Barry is a taut joke teller more than a yarn-spinner. But his punchlines emerge from anecdotes filled with details about curious characters he’s met, tales that have the quirkiness and surprise of what you find in a sensitively observed short story. There’s the Uber drive who apologizes for not talking during the ride, the waiter who warns against the Italian dressing in a whisper and the cabinet salesman who says he loves his job because it allows him to eat with his customers. He filters the slightest interactions with them through his arch responses, mocking but not mean. His real adversaries are not people but hyperbole, nonsense or any pointless excess of emotion. And some of his most unexpected laughs are in his own mixing up of mountains and molehills. “My printer broke recently,” he said, gently shifting gears to a parody of concern. “Sorry to bum you out.”Tracy Morgan, ‘Takin’ It Too Far’Stream it on MaxIt’s been a rough couple of years for Tracy Morgan, the veteran comic, “30 Rock” scene stealer and all-time great talk-show guest. He almost died after being hit by a Walmart truck, then during the pandemic, his marriage fell apart. In his baggy new special, he says his wife “took that social distancing too far.”If you were looking for a bracing and introspective hour on his troubles, you came to the wrong place. Morgan just brings up his problems to crack wise about them. There is little attempt at timeliness (the expiration date on jokes about the slap at the Oscars has passed) or ambitious set pieces with tight jokes snapping into place. This is a comic coasting on charisma, which he can do as well as anyone. His main subject is middle age. He’s out to prove you don’t need to be mature in your 50s. Instead, he doubles down on sex and fart jokes, yanking his shirt up, rubbing his belly, finishing with a dozen or so minutes on what it’s like to sleep with older women. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the fact that aging changes you. Morgan confesses he pushed a lap dance away at a strip club, shouting: ‘You know my sciatica flared up!”Sasheer Zamata, ‘The First Woman’Stream it on YouTubeWhy does everyone know Amelia Earhart but not Jerrie Mock, the first woman to fly solo around the world? According to the comic Sasheer Zamata, whose second stand-up special is full of hidden histories, it boils down to marketing. Mock kept to herself, saying, “The kind of person who enjoys being alone in a plane is not the kind who enjoys being continuously around other people.” Zamata says she doesn’t “like going places or doing things,” so perhaps she can relate. Earhart married her publicist, and Zamata calls her the “original Kim Kardashian.”Her digression, filled with punchlines, is just one example of how this special unpacks lost or taboo stories. The political centerpiece of the set is about how we should talk more about female sexuality, especially for girls. She relates a story about masturbating for the first time with a lint roller, then opens the topic to the audience, resulting in some colorful crowd work. Zamata, a former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, turns jokes into carefully crafted vignettes, often hinging on a twist that leads her to widen her eyes for a long pause. She’s a poised performer, effortlessly moving from crowd work to dating tales to political gibes. Her description of being hit by a car becomes a peg for how people (including doctors) ignore Black women when describing pain but pay attention to them on the question of what is cool. Her solution? Black women should champion illness (“Sickle cell is sick as hell!”), and disease will be “gentrified out of our bodies.”Chris Fleming, ‘Hell’Stream it on PeacockWhenever a new Chris Fleming video appears on my feed, I stop and pay attention. In a scroll of sameness, he’s thrillingly unexpected, a shaggy-haired Los Angeles absurdist who often begins with an offhand and narrow idea (sitting in his car, considering the appeal of Adam Driver, say), then riffs on it with a gusto and flamboyance that accumulates its own comic momentum. His is a pointedly niche sensibility but responsible for some of the biggest laughs I have had on social media. His debut, a scattershot affair that mixes a performance at a theater with sketches, has some very funny oddball ideas, like his celebration of the Nissan Cube as the “one true asexual icon in American culture.”His precise dissection of basic families who think they’re really eccentric is a characteristic hobby horse. But these bursts of lunacy don’t build on one another. In the translation to long form, the pacing gets a little slack. Part of the problem might be editing (you must kill your darlings, especially when they involve sketches that go on too long) and an undercooked overall conceit. Fleming can’t seem to entirely decide if his aesthetic is going to be polished or ragged, his material revealing or purely absurd. He’s smart enough to commit to the personal and the weird, but absurdity requires its own rigor.Jared Fried, ‘37 & Single’Stream it on NetflixIn the crowded field of dating jokes, Jared Fried, an amusingly hyperventilating self-deprecator exploring red flags, online profiles and tensions between millennials and Generation Z, distinguishes himself in a couple of ways. In his very strong act-outs, he does an inspired impression of fake laughing that projects real discomfort. It gooses a familiar bit about married people talking to singles about the perils of matrimony into something spiky and layered. Secondarily, not since Leslie Jones has a comic done more with bulging eyes. While dead eyes can kill an act, expressive ones can illuminate it. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Amsterdam: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Find your perfect street food
      Between the Lindengracht Markt and the neighboring Noordermarkt, a pricier, organic market that also has antiques, handmade jewelry, artisanal pickles, soaps and honey to browse, there are plenty of street-food stalls to choose from. (Walking while eating is frowned upon in Dutch culture, so grab a picnic table). On the Lindengracht side, try a sabich (€7.50), a stuffed vegetarian pita at Abu Salie, or for a classic Dutch lunch, go for the speciaal beenham and braadworst (a sandwich piled high with sausage, ham and sauerkraut, €6) at Fluks & Sons. Stalls throughout the markets also sell raw herring, sometimes covered in onions. Join locals at the Noordermarkt for fresh oysters (from €3.50 each; find them beside the entrance, next to the church tower). Dutch sweets also abound, including the ever-popular poffertjes (mini pancakes in powdered sugar or syrup) or warm and gooey stroopwafels. More

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      in Theater

      Meet Edinburgh Festival Fringe’s Breakout Clown

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      Around 2 a.m. one recent Saturday, Julia Masli laughed as she glided up to an audience member in a sweaty basement room at Edinburgh’s Monkey Barrel comedy club.Wearing a ghostly outfit with dolls’ legs sticking from a black hat, she pointed a microphone at the panicked-looking man and asked a simple question: “Problem?”After a confused “Er,” he blurted out a genuine issue for most people in the basement. “I’m quite warm,” he said.Masli, looking concerned, led the man onstage and made him sit on a stool. Then she pulled a huge electric fan from a nearby cupboard and duct-taped him to it.As the audience laughed, the clown was already moving on. “Problem?” she said, pointing the microphone at another audience member.Masli, right, had planned for “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” to run only two weeks.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesMasli’s show “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” (running through Aug. 27) has become the surprise hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Britain’s largest arts and comedy festival. She considered it a work in progress and had planned for only two weeks of performances, but word-of-mouth enthusiasm and rave newspaper reviews quickly sold out the run, forcing Masli to extend it in the only available time slot: 1:30 a.m.On Wednesday, the show was nominated for the fringe’s main comedy award, and Masli announced a three-week London run next year.Viggo Venn, another clown and Masli’s partner, said the show had gripped audiences because “it feels so risky and exciting,” with little possibility of planning. “She just has to trust the comedy gods that something magical will happen,” Venn said. “And it does. Every day.”In one recent show, Venn recalled, a man said he had a strained relationship with his mother, so Masli called her at 2 a.m., leading to an emotional chat onstage. That wasn’t something you get from many comedy acts, Venn said.During a recent interview in an Edinburgh pub, Masli, 27, said she developed shows by coming up with games to play, “and then from those I find where the meat is.” Last year, she started a routine where she’d walk up to audience members and say “Ha” in increasingly silly ways, seeing how they responded. If they echoed her, she tinkled a bell. If they misplaced the phrasing, she screamed.Saying “Problem?”, Masli found, quickly made audience members share startling tales.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOne night, she decided instead to say “Problem?” and see what happened. She found that audience members quickly shared startling tales. Working with Kim Noble, a performance artist, she said they realized: “This is it. The ‘Problem?’ is the show.”Performing “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” has changed Masli’s own perspective on the world, she said. At an early show, a man said he was overweight, so she began running around the venue with him to help him burn calories. “It was wild,” she recalled.But when another man said he too felt fat, she said, she concluded the problem lay not with the men, but with how society saw them. She asked other audience members if they felt the man looked overweight, then kicked out anyone who agreed.“Clown is really about connection,” Masli said in the interview when asked why she thought the show was a success. “Maybe right now everyone just wants to be connected.”The daughter of two lawyers, Masli grew up in Tallinn, Estonia, until age 12 when her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in England. Masli has said she spoke so little English at the time that she would mime to be understood.As a teenager, her heart was set on becoming an actor and performing the great tragedies on London stages. She auditioned for British drama schools, she said, “but got nowhere because I had this really strong accent.” So she moved to Étampes, France, to study under Philippe Gaulier, a clowning instructor whose past students include Sacha Baron Cohen.Masli uses a microphone taped to a golden mannequin leg as a reminder of her first Fringe show.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesFor nine weeks of a 10-week module, Masli said, she failed to make anyone laugh. In the final week, Gaulier told her to perform as a plumber. She came onstage, looked at the pipes and said, “Oh, God.” When everyone fell about, she couldn’t stop thinking about how to make it happen again.Venn, Masli’s partner, said there was something in Masli’s eyes — “this innocent but cheeky look” — that could make anyone laugh with a glance.After returning to London, Masli struggled to make it as a clown. At one point, she stopped performing for 18 months and became so depressed she couldn’t get out of bed. Things only changed in 2019, she said, when she took her first show, “Legs,” to the Fringe. Made with the Duncan Brothers, two other clowns, it featured skits such as Masli shaking hands with audience members using her feet.Only two people saw the first performance, Masli recalled, but the show won a prize for comic innovation. Masli now tries to highlight the appendage in all her shows. “‘Legs’ saved me,” she said. “It was the biggest ‘Keep going.’” Last year, she returned to Edinburgh with “Choosh!” a solo show about a migrant struggling to make it in the United States, for which The Daily Telegraph named her the Fringe’s “best sad clown.”Masli onstage. On Wednesday, her show was named as one of eight nominees for the Fringe’s main comedy award.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesBoth those shows featured some audience interaction, but nothing compared to what happens in “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” During the recent Saturday performance, the problems ranged from the trivial (someone’s glasses were broken) to the seemingly insurmountable (a man said he was a hypochondriac). Masli tried to solve them all.She only seemed stumped once, when an audience member said that she was devastated after splitting up with her girlfriend. Masli empathized, but that didn’t seem to help. She solicited relationship advice from other audience members. That didn’t work, either. So Masli suggested something a little more left field: that the person crowd surf.Approaching 2:30 in the morning, the audience member leaped into the crowd, who then carried her from the front of the room to the back. Her heartbreak was far from solved, but for a minute, at least, she seemed to forget all about it. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Bottoms’ Review: Physical Education

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      In this buddy comedy, senior outcasts played by Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri attempt to woo two cheerleaders through a fight club.Josie and PJ are high school seniors, and they have some pressing unfinished business. “Do you want to be the only girl virgin at Sarah Lawrence?” PJ (Rachel Sennott) asks Josie (Ayo Edebiri) during the dark-night-of-the-soul conversation that begins “Bottoms.” Yes, Emma Seligman’s comedy takes off with tires screeching.It is imperative for our buddies to have sex, stat, but that is a complicated proposition: Not only are they unpopular outcasts — “the ugly, untalented gays,” as opposed to the ones who breezily sashay down the hallways — but they have set their sights on two unapproachably hot cheerleaders. It is obvious that PJ and Josie will need some devious scheming to win over their crushes.Going along with a rumor that they’ve spent time in juvenile detention, the pair acquire an instant reputation as tough girls and the school lets them start a self-defense club in which the most vicious brawls are somehow allowed. Even Josie’s object of desire, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), is impressed by consciousness-raising through punching, even more so after she learns her quarterback boyfriend (Nicholas Galitzine, of “Red, White & Royal Blue”) is cheating on her.Seligman and Sennott’s first collaboration was the quietly unsettling “Shiva Baby” (2021), which took place almost entirely over the span of one afternoon at the title wake, and progressively ensnared Sennott’s character in a web of deadpan, discomforting humor. For their follow-up, the collaborators (Sennott wrote the movie with Seligman) have gone down a completely different stylistic road, putting a queer spin on teenage sex comedies à la “Superbad” and “American Pie.” They have replaced the death by a thousand cuts of “Shiva Baby” with a gleeful broadness. It ultimately fizzes out, but “Bottoms” confirms that Seligman and Sennott are major new forces in American comedy.A lot does click here, including several delicious supporting performances, most notably the former N.F.L. running back Marshawn Lynch as the fight club’s loopy faculty adviser and Ruby Cruz as Hazel, a cool classmate whom, naturally, PJ does not even see. The script also lands many corkers, as when a student named Annie (Zamani Wilder) complains “this is the second wave all over again” after realizing PJ and Josie were prioritizing self-serving goals over sisterhood.That last aspect is what feels most undernourished and, in the end, unexpectedly timid. Not much is made of the fact that PJ is one of the biggest liars and bullies of the story and uses her gift of gab to cynically deploy empowerment messaging. And while the movie is set in a surreally heightened universe in which football players never leave their uniform and teachers read girlie magazines in class, it is oddly more comfortable goofing off with outrageous violence than elementary sexuality.For most of its tight running time, “Bottoms” hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.BottomsRated R for typical teen language, fight-club violence and football run amok. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      Mike Epps’s Favorite Things

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      The star of the Netflix sitcom “The Upshaws” borrowed some of his comedic timing from Redd Foxx and was inspired to act from watching Denzel Washington.When Mike Epps was growing up in Indianapolis, his grandmother’s house was home base for the entire family.“My grandma had 11 kids. And some of those 11 kids had five or six kids each,” he said in a phone interview in July, before the SAG-AFTRA strike began, adding: “You got aunts and uncles and all them coming over and hanging out, checking each other out — a house full of people.”In time, her house also became the place the future comedian tried out his earliest material.“That was my first breaking ground,” he said. “My first experimental jokes were in that house among my cousins and my family and my people.”It is part of the inspiration for “The Upshaws,” Epps’s sitcom about a blue-collar family in Indianapolis whose new season becomes available Aug. 17 on Netflix.“If you look at the show, it’s my voice. It’s who I am. It’s my city, my friends, it’s my family. It’s my everything,” Epps said.He talked about some of the other components — the books, TV shows, unicycle — that make up his life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Sanford and Son’I love “Sanford and Son.” That was a show that modeled itself from our people, from Black people. It was definitely a template of what we are and who we are. I watched it every day. I borrow a lot of timing from that show. Redd Foxx’s timing was impeccable, more than you could chew off.2ChessI play chess so well in my normal life that it’s almost hard to do it on the board sometimes. The game is a reflection of who I am and the decisions that I make. So, sometimes I can play the board game and see where I was delinquent in my life or see where I could move better or see the sacrifice. The game is very parallel to my life. So, when I’m playing, I’m thinking about those decisions.3‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’Robert T. Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad” changed the way I thought about money and people with money. It also reinforced how I grew up. It’s easy to be poor when you don’t have a lot of goals. Once I started having goals of wanting more, it was over with. I was like: I got to have more in life. I deserve more. There is more. I don’t have to settle for being poor.4‘Creed’I have some positive jealousy about “Creed.” I can really box, but I was too old to be in the movie, and I think Michael B. Jordan did a great job. When you’re a Black man and you see a Black movie like that that is macho, you know, you want to be a part of it in some capacity.5UnicycleI love riding one wheel. When I was a kid, I always tried to find something that made me stick out and be different from everybody else. So I learned how to ride a unicycle — short and tall. When people see me riding it, they look at me like I’m crazy and say: “What the hell you doing? Why did you do that?” And then they try to get on it. That’s what it does to you.6Denzel Washington“Glory” was the first movie that I saw that inspired me. When I saw Denzel Washington, I was like, That’s what I want to do, right there.7Jackson Hole, Wyo.I’ve vacationed in Miami, the islands, all the tropical spots. But I’m a Black cowboy. I love the cowboy feeling of something. I love dirt. I love desert. Jackson Hole, Wyo., is a really quiet, subdued place. To get a cabin there in the summertime — oh, man, it is breathtaking.8Killer MikeIt’s always good to hear a voice in our community speaking the truth. Killer Mike is one of those guys that has been blessed to have that voice for our people. His songs are thought-provoking, they move you in a lot of ways. He’s touching on a lot of good points in the hip-hop industry, in the Black community itself, and white America.9Treasure HuntingWhen I’m out on the road telling jokes, the first thing I want to hit is a vintage store. I want to hit the vintage clothing store, and I want to hit the antique furniture store. You go to a store in one of these cities outside of where you live, man, and you find some jewels up in there. Some of these old people, they bring stuff in these places that you wouldn’t believe, and in perfect shape.10DetroitMy favorite city to perform in is Detroit. They have the most fun. They love to come out and celebrate. My audience in Detroit, man, they got fur coats on, they got diamonds, they got thick glasses on, the women are looking good — they sparkling. That’s my audience. More

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      in Movies

      In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird

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      Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character.Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did (“I know you are but what am I?”), in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, from improv theaters to late-night talk shows to the movies to Saturday morning television.That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.The first time I saw him do Pee-wee was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he was one of the oddballs the show’s executives would spotlight when they couldn’t book real stars. Unlike Brother Theodore, Harvey Pekar or Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee introduced no hostility or even conflict to the show. His appearances on that most ironic of late-night shows were like invasions from Candy Land. He brought toys and disguises, and he would get up and dance even before the music played. There was a joy in his presentation that was bracing. You laughed not because the jokes were funny, but because they were told with such commitment to the fun of it all.Letterman didn’t know what to make of him. You did get the sense that the host enjoyed his guest’s adolescent jerkiness. But there was more there. Even though Pee-wee was a broad character, something about him seemed more real than any conventional comic slinging punchlines or movie star selling a movie. This was a Bugs Bunny level of charisma, built to last.Paul Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) started his career doing many characters for the sketch group the Groundlings, and he went on to embody even more extreme characters, including the monocled father of the Penguin in “Batman Returns” and an Austrian prince with an ivory hand in “30 Rock.”But once Pee-wee became a hit with crowds in the 1970s, he mostly abandoned his other roles, to the frustration of Phil Hartman, his improv peer and a future “Saturday Night Live” star, who thought he was wasting his talent focusing on just one part.By the time he was starring in a Pee-wee movie directed by Tim Burton, Reubens was credited only as the writer. Pee-wee Herman played himself. This blurring of character and actor added a sense of mystery, and odd authenticity, to this stylized performance. A natural outsider, Pee-wee excelled at fish-out-of-water comedy. In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) a classic comedy that is still Burton’s best movie, Pee-wee finds himself winning over unlikely people in a quest narrative about his search for his bike.He accidentally knocks over the motorcycles of a bunch of grizzled Hells Angels types, before charming them by jumping on the bar and dancing to the Champs’ surf tune “Tequila.” In another bit, he is talking in a telephone booth and trying to explain where he is, so he peeks his head out to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright.” A team of cowboys responds in unison: “Deep in the heart of Texas!”The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly. The movie, along with his anarchic Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” melded a child’s energy with a love of show business. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla., nearby the winter headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed to imbue such entertainment with the spirit of performance art, while never taking the easy route of going mean or dark. His work just got weirder.Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced, and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on “Saturday Night Live” against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone.The one time I talked with Reubens, around seven years ago in an interview, he was, not surprisingly, quite different from his character: thoughtful, reserved, sober-voiced. He was modest about Pee-wee, who eventually returned.No character that beloved, that meme-able, would not be pulled back to action in our current nostalgia-driven culture. There was a Pee-wee Herman Netflix movie and a Broadway show, and, while there were small updates here and there, the character remained in essence the same: giddy, exuberant, singularly strange and primally tapped into childhood.Pee-wee got older but he never grew up. His career is an update on the Peter Pan story, except no one in Neverland would say: “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” More

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      Liz Kingsman’s ‘One Woman Show’ Lands in N.Y.C.

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      The comedian talks about her slightly goofy, slightly surreal style, and why New York has proved to be “the hardest translation” yet.When it came time to create a trailer for her one-woman show — which is titled, of all things, “One Woman Show” and is playing at the Greenwich House Theater — Liz Kingsman researched what other productions had done. One video especially made her laugh.“It was for one of the Shakespeare histories and it was just close-ups of a man fondling his cuffs and touching his tie,” Kingsman said on a recent afternoon. “You’re like, ‘Is that Kit Harington?’ And then a bit of hair. It’s teasing Kit Harington, and in the end it is Kit Harington.”She decided to deploy the same gimmick for her own promotional trailer, complete with none other that Harington himself (though that “Game of Thrones” star, to be clear, is not in Kingsman’s show). “I’m not famous, so a trailer where it teases me…,” Kingsman said. “No one’s ever heard of me, so who cares?”A similar slightly goofy, slightly surreal style is at work in the Olivier Award-nominated “One Woman Show,” in which Kingsman sends up both a specific subgenre and its stars — boldly confessional, sexually frank, endearingly messy young women — for a “sharply observed satire,” as Jason Zinoman put it in his review for The New York Times.“Liz’s comedy has a sense of authorship that not lots of other comedians are lucky enough to have,” the comedian Alex Edelman said on the phone. (His Broadway solo, “Just for Us,” and “One Woman Show” were directed by Adam Brace, who died in May.) “She’s both totally committed to the character and totally committed to the laceration of the character.”And she has found an audience: Since a one-off outing of the concept in 2019, “One Woman Show” has traveled to the West End and at the Sydney Opera House. Now Kingsman is ready to move on, and says the New York run, which ends on Aug. 11, will be the production’s last.Jason Zinoman called Kingsman’s show a “sharp satire” about a messy attention-seeker grasping at relevance.Joan MarcusAfter growing up in Sydney, Australia, she attended Durham University in England. There she formed the sketch-comedy trio Massive Dad with Tessa Coates and Stevie Martin, and they performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014 and 2015. Kingsman went solo, firming up a drolly understated sensibility. Most notably, she has spent three seasons as the eye-rolling, unflappable British assistant-turned-lobbyist Rose Pilkington in the French series “Parlement,” a witty cross between “Veep” and “The Thick of It.” (It’s available on Topic in the United States.) “No one I know has ever seen the show so it feels like I’ve made the job up,” she said, laughing.Kingsman, who declined to give her exact age but said “I remain 12 years old,” arrived for the interview with her cockapoo, Emmett, and marveled at the access he enjoyed in New York. “You can go shopping with your dog here,” she said. “Like, you can take them into clothes shops, and you can’t do that in London. That’s really revolutionizing things.”The pair sat down for some hummus and a doggy biscuit at a West Village restaurant near Kingsman’s rented home away from home. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you move to Britain?My mom is British, one of the “Ten Pound Poms”: They needed an immigration boost in Australia so they handed out 10-pounds tickets to British people. When it came to [university], I just went to England — I wanted to go and live in an old building and read books in a little nook somewhere. I quickly learned that it is cold and damp [laughs]. But there is a brilliant industry in London and once I started working, it was very hard to leave.How does humor travel?I’ve definitely found New York to be the hardest translation of the show because I think an American audience believes things that are meant to be ironic at the top. When my character says “Women’s voices aren’t getting heard in theater,” a U.K. audience knows that’s me doing a joke about a woman who would say that very sincerely onstage. But an American audience has been clapping at that line. I don’t know what to do with that because I can’t be, “No, that’s ironic!” I don’t want to generalize too much, but my experience is that there has been a tendency to sort of buy into it a little bit more here.What makes you laugh?I find very serious theater amusing. I saw “Sweeney Todd.” I really enjoyed it, but there’s a sort of big moment where a character dies and the next line was “Oh, no.” The actor had to deliver it with gravitas and I was like, “How are you going to do that? Somebody’s died: ‘Oh no.’ ” I just started laughing at a very serious-themed play. I can’t help it, I just find it funny.The lady does not prefer dungarees: “It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, ‘ecch.’” OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK, but what kind of comedy do you find funny?Commitment to something incredibly stupid makes me laugh — really stupid stuff taken very seriously. There’s a clip from “Parks and Recreation” when [Leslie Knope] is on her campaign run and she has to give a speech in the middle of an ice rink. I’ve watched the clip so many times. It’s quite physical and I love slapstick. The scene generally is very funny, but I also like the idea of how much fun those actors would have had that day. It makes me want to be in a show like that more than anything.I love that you’re wearing dungarees in “One Woman Show,” although apparently it’s a nod to one Phoebe Waller-Bridge wore in “Fleabag”?It’s not, actually. All the one-woman shows I saw, they wear overalls or dungarees because there’s a little bit of “girl next door” about it. If you ever go to any of those festivals like Edinburgh or Brighton, it’s just a sea of women wearing overalls, dungarees or boiler suits. I couldn’t do the show in a boiler suit so I was like, “It’s got to be dungarees.” It was never a specific reference but people started saying that my costume was a reference to one episode of one TV show. And I was like, “ecch.” Also, if I wanted to parody a costume, I’d do a better parody.American female comedians don’t appear to be into dungarees to the same extent.It’s just an unflattering outfit, basically.I think they’re cool! Like something the tomboy George would wear in an Enid Blyton book.But don’t you think there’s a slight kink about that? It’s very hard to describe. Maybe it’s very specific to the U.K. In the script it’s written that she’s wearing messy braids that have been made to look deliberately a little bit messy. She basically has to look casual, like she’s thrown it on but thought has gone into it. It’s all character: It’s what this woman would wear — I would not wear that outfit. Now I will never wear dungarees ever again. And I’m never doing a French braid ever again after August 11! More