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      Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

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      An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More

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      Samantha Irby Says It’s OK to Hate Your Body

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      As far as descriptions of writers go, “humorist” has an old-fashioned, almost quaint ring to it, the literary equivalent of haberdasher or lamplighter. But across four book-length collections — the newest is the best seller “Quietly Hostile” — Samantha Irby has always brought scabrously honest, never pat and, it must be said, operatically scatological vivacity […] More

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      ‘Come for Me’ Review: Catherine Cohen’s T.M.I. Comedy Set

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      In her autobiographical new show with songs, Catherine Cohen delivers a heightened version of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok.Attending Catherine Cohen’s new show “Come for Me” is like being swept up by a tornado, or maybe watching “Fast & Furious: The Vaudeville Years.” The pace of her new comedy show is so unrelenting that by the time you catch your breath after a joke, three more have zipped by. Filming sex with her boyfriend? Listening to true-crime podcasts? Freezing her eggs? Entire acts have been built on less. But in “Come for Me,” the follow-up to last year’s “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous,” Cohen spends just a few minutes on each, if that, and moves on.As for the musical numbers — for she is that modern rarity, a singing comedian — they pack more delicious hooks than most pop albums do.It’s a great tease: Cohen suggests that she has enough material to go on for days, but chooses to give us only an hour’s worth.Even Cohen’s trademark meta annotations, like announcing “bridge!” in the middle of a number, are delivered breathlessly. She holds dramatic poses — leaning seductively against a wall, for example — but only briefly. In the middle of songs at last Friday’s show at Joe’s Pub, she commanded members of the crowd to “uncross your arms!” but did not pause for a reaction, smoothly segueing from singing to demanding and back to singing. (In contrast, the loopy absurdism of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s 30-minute opening set benefited from his slow, deliberate formality.)This is par for the course for Cohen, who taunts us only as a way to spice up her real subject: herself, or rather the act of revealing herself. She mocks the postures of our confessional era while reveling in them.The Catherine Cohen we meet onstage is a fabulous, relentlessly bouncy narcissist for whom too much information is never enough. The set includes gleeful accounts of her sex life with her boyfriend (and the people they have been inviting to partake) in which self-deprecation and gloating fuse into a heightened version — or is it? — of millennial oversharing and confidence run amok. “Dating me,” she crows, “is what critics and fans alike have described as an immersive experience.”“Come for Me” is simultaneously more graphic and sweeter than her previous show, but it also gives off floral notes of doubt and vulnerability. The first song, “The Void,” suggests, without being remotely maudlin, a fumbling need to fill an emptiness, while the closing number, “Good Not Bad,” playfully subverts its cheery melody. Happily, this slight expansion of Cohen’s emotional palette — echoed by her musical one, since she’s now backed by a three-piece band rather than just a pianist — has not hindered her sunny, gonzo vitality. More, here, is more.Come for MeThrough June 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Danny McBride Keeps It Righteous

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      The party started early. Like, 10:30 a.m., still-drinking-lousy-hotel-coffee early. It was late March, a warm and overcast coastal morning, and all I knew of the day’s schedule was that Danny McBride, the creator and star of the HBO comedy “The Righteous Gemstones,” planned to swing by with a driver who would take us to an oyster farm, located somewhere among the islands and salt marshes of South Carolina Lowcountry.I did not expect him to arrive in a fully stocked party bus with several of his closest associates, including his longtime collaborator David Gordon Green, though in retrospect perhaps I should have. While reporting a different story two months earlier, I had met Walton Goggins, who plays the oily televangelist Uncle Baby Billy in “Gemstones.” When I told him that I was going down to Charleston to see McBride, who lives and produces the series in the area, Goggins responded, “I hope you like tequila.”As an icebreaker, I shared this anecdote with McBride. On cue, his wife, Gia, an art director, furnished a bottle of Código 1530. “This is George Strait’s tequila!” McBride beamed, and a look ping-ponged around the bus that asked, “Too early?”It was not too early. As we raised candy-colored plastic shot glasses in the glow of two TV screens made to look like aquariums, I decided to stash my notebook for a while: Day 1 of my visit would be less about taking notes than about taking in the life McBride has made for himself since moving here from Los Angeles.McBride does little press, so getting to know him was, of course, the goal. When “Gemstones” returns on Sunday for Season 3, it brings back what has been the most Danny McBride of his creative efforts. It is his third HBO series — following the cult-favorite baseball comedy “Eastbound and Down” (2009-13) and the deranged public school comedy “Vice Principals” (2016-17) — and he created it alone. It sets a new personal benchmark for creative cursing and comic male nudity, which was already high.McBride created “The Righteous Gemstones” and stars as Jesse, the eldest son in a family of televangelists. (With Walton Goggins.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOMcBride’s characters offer “a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America,” said his “Gemstones” co-star Edi Patterson. (With Adam Devine.)Jake Giles Netter/HBOIt is also his most Southern show. Both previous HBO series were set down South, but “Gemstones” is the first since he and his production company, Rough House Pictures, which he shares with Green and another longtime collaborator, Jody Hill, moved from Los Angeles to Charleston in 2017. It’s a true hometown production.Of McBride’s various creations, his most beloved have been Southerners who embody a flamboyantly American brand of male chauvinism, and Jesse Gemstone is no exception. The eldest son in a dysfunctional family of rich televangelists, Jesse vies perhaps only with the hard-partying narcissist Kenny Powers of “Eastbound” for McBride’s biggest blowhard, a high bar.It is the kind of satire that comes from a deep place of knowing. The kind whose execution appears so effortless that its target might not realize it is satire.“I know probably not his whole audience sees it the way I do — they’ll think, like, ‘Oh, I’m exactly like Kenny Powers,’ or whatever — but I think that’s part of the fun and part of the appeal,” said Edi Patterson, who plays Jesse’s unhinged sister, Judy, and is a “Gemstones” writer. “It’s such a funny and deeply complex view of men in general, especially men in America.”But “Gemstones” has also seen McBride, 46, broadening his creative range. He oversees every script, directs episodes. Its cast is a true ensemble, and its many characters and subplots have enabled him to explore new kinds of stories and relationships, some with tear-jerking sensitivity.Friends and colleagues reliably describe him as genuine, inclusive, a deep thinker. But more than many screen stars he is both blessed and dogged by fans who sometimes have trouble remembering he is not his boorish characters.I wondered whether the lines ever blurred for him, and whether the fan confusion chafed. The answer to both, he insisted, was no. He had left Hollywood and built a tight creative community 2,500 miles away for many reasons, and one of them seemed to be to preserve his integrity of self.“You can think I’m whatever, and if it makes you like the show more because you think that’s me, go for it,” he said the next day as we toured the “Gemstones” studios, located at a mall, inside a former Sears. “I would rather people not know what my deal is than clearly have an understanding of where the line is drawn.”“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesFunny enough, comedy is not McBride’s favorite genre — he prefers horror and reality TV — nor is it something he always pursued.Early on, he also didn’t imagine himself on camera. He wanted to write and direct. Raised Baptist, mostly in Fredericksburg, Va., he went to film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, in Winston-Salem, where he met Green; Hill; John Carcieri, another writer for “Gemstones”; and Ben Best, who created “Eastbound” with Hill and McBride and died in 2021. The film school was tiny, and then only two years old.“Everybody in that school was a misfit or a reject,” Green said. Their group bonded over one another’s VHS collections and found creative kinship and freedom. “It was all just a bunch of kids that kind of were trying to figure it out,” he said.Green was the first to make a splash after college with the critically lauded indie film “George Washington” (2000). After a main cast member of his next feature, “All the Real Girls” (2003), bailed a week into shooting, Green called “the funniest guy I know,” McBride, who was doing below-the-line postproduction work in Los Angeles.McBride asked his boss for time off, was denied, then quit and drove to North Carolina, where Green was shooting. The film debuted to rapturous reviews.Still, McBride’s break came a few years later with “The Foot Fist Way” (2008). Directed by Hill and written by Hill, Best and McBride, the film starred McBride as a Southern strip-mall taekwondo instructor whose ego grossly outstrips his skills. Copies circulated after its 2006 Sundance debut, landing eventually with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, then producing partners, who got it into theaters. “Eastbound,” which McKay and Ferrell executive produced, soon followed.“With comedy, one of the tricks is knowing how you come off just physically,” McKay said. “And Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping.”McBride said he was always satirizing a certain kind of guy he grew up with, a kind of guy he was not. He seemed amused by the outward contradiction.“I don’t see myself as some alpha, and so I feel like there’s something inherently that makes me laugh about trying to present myself like an alpha,” McBride said over lunch on Day 2 at a restaurant near his home. (McBride lives on an island near Charleston, and he had driven us there in his golf cart.)“They’re all just sort of dudes that I think have subscribed to this antiquated way of what the rules are, like what a dude’s supposed to be,” he added. “They’ve committed to it, and then the reality of it isn’t adding up to the illusion.”“Danny knows he comes off like a guy who, if you cut him off in the parking lot of a Sam’s Club, would key your car while you’re in there shopping,” Adam McKay, a past collaborator, said.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesMcBride and I talked a lot about masculinity, about fathers and sons. It is a central theme of “Gemstones” — and the Bible, he noted — with its “Succession”-like story about a powerful megachurch pastor (John Goodman) and his three feckless children. (Adam Devine plays the younger brother, Kelvin.) McBride’s own father left when he was young, and he hasn’t seen him since high school. But he insisted he isn’t resentful.“I like how my life turned out,” said McBride, himself a father of two. “Him exiting from our life is probably part of what enabled me to be able to go on and do the things that I did.” The biggest effect it had on his life, he said, was to make him more determined to be a supportive parent.McBride loves his characters and the South in the complex, sometimes ruthless way of familial love. On the surface, “Gemstones” picks some easy marks — megachurches, new money, homoerotic jocks; Season 3 promises monster trucks and militias — but soft targets can be tougher to nail. What allows for authenticity is affection, however complicated.“That’s the tightrope,” he said. “A lot of times I see, when things in the South are presented, it’s always such a boring take.”Back on Day 1, after we all spilled out of the party bus, we wound up on a muddy oyster skiff off Wadmalaw Island, several shots down, pulling salty Sea Cloud oysters straight from their floating cages. Still, having only just met McBride, it was hard not to wonder how much of the day’s events were a show put on for the benefit of a reporter — a good-time performance by a performer who plays characters who are constantly performing.I asked everyone I talked to about him afterward; they all insisted I shouldn’t flatter myself.“I want you to feel really special right now, but that’s kind of Danny,” said Cassidy Freeman, who plays Jesse’s beleaguered wife, Amber. When McBride is the ringmaster, “everyone’s invited,” she added. Hill called him “the fun coordinator of our group.”Cassidy Freeman, who plays the wife of McBride’s character in “Gemstones,” described him as an inveterate host.Jake Giles Netter/HBOWhen I reported back to Goggins, he put it this way: “He’s certainly not doing that as a way to impress you.” Whoever shows up, McBride “just rolls out the red carpet.”McBride seems to find community wherever he goes. Otherwise, he imports it. Green moved from Austin to Charleston. Rough House’s president, Brandon James, who was on the boat, moved with McBride from Los Angeles. As of last month, Hill was preparing to move there with his pregnant wife. For a time, the country singer Sturgill Simpson was in the Charleston crew. He’s in Season 3.It seems like creative utopia. The region’s lower production costs have made it easier for Rough House to develop an array of dream projects, relying on local crews fed and ferried by local businesses. Green’s 2018 “Halloween” sequel, which McBride helped write, was an early example. Green’s first film in their “Exorcist” sequel trilogy, for which McBride has a story credit, is scheduled for October.“I think what they’re doing is going to now become the norm with what’s changing here in Hollywood and the way commercial entertainment is made,” McKay said. “I think stuff is going to go hyperlocal, and I think it’s going to be really cool.”Dare to dream. For now, McBride seems genuinely grateful to have found a way to keep poking fun at things with his closest friends — to keep the party going.“Ultimately it’s really just trying to entertain people and give them something funny to laugh at,” he said. “It makes us laugh. And so we assume hopefully it will make other people laugh, too.” More

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      Michael Batayeh, Comedian and ‘Breaking Bad’ Actor, Dies at 52

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      Mr. Batayeh starred in three episodes of the Emmy-winning series and performed stand-up comedy.Michael Batayeh, an actor best known for his brief role in the Emmy-winning series “Breaking Bad” and a comedian who was popular in the Arab-American community, died at his home in Ypsilanti, Mich. He was 52.His sister Ida Vergollo said he died on June 1 in his sleep after a heart attack. A coroner later found issues with his heart, she said.Mr. Batayeh appeared in “Breaking Bad” as Dennis Markowski, the steady manager of a laundromat that was a front for a meth lab. The character was killed after he showed interest in speaking to the Drug Enforcement Administration in exchange for immunity.As a comedian, Mr. Batayeh performed in major clubs in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as around the country and internationally.He also had credits on several popular television series, including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “The Bernie Mac Show” and “Boy Meets World.”Mr. Batayeh’s role as a cabdriver on “Everybody Loves Raymond” in 1998 signaled to his family that he had arrived as an entertainer, according to Ms. Vergollo, “because that’s when my dad first saw his last name on TV.” She said, “My dad was so proud of him and let him know that.”Michael Anthony Batayeh was born on Dec. 27, 1970, in Detroit, the seventh child of Abraham Batayeh, a Ford factory worker, and Victoria (Dababneh) Batayeh.The couple immigrated to the United States from Jordan in 1955. Michael Batayeh attended Wayne State University for three years before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the arts and start his own comedy troupe with a friend.“He was actually made to be a performer since he was very, very young,” said Ms. Vergollo, who recalled that her brother began playing the tabla, a pair of hand drums, at 5 years old and continued throughout his adult life.“My dad used to drag him up onstage at all the weddings,” she said.Mr. Batayeh is survived by his sisters Ida Vergollo, Diane Batayeh-Ricketts, MaryAnn Joseph, Madeline Sherman and Theresa Aquino. His eldest sister, Jeannie Batayeh, died from cancer in 2016.Mr. Batayeh often used his family as fodder for comedy. “He made fun of us a lot,” Ms. Vergollo said.And an affinity for accents made him popular in the Arab-American community, said Ms. Vergollo, who called him “so spot on.”At the invitation of the Jordanian royal family, his sisters said, he performed at a comedy festival in Amman, Jordan’s capital. He was also featured in a comedy special for Showtime Arabia.The family is asking for memorial contributions to an organization that provides recreation and mentoring programs for youth in southwest Detroit.“He would voice to us how important it was and how good he felt when he went back home and talked to kids or mentored people who wanted to start out,” Ms. Vergollo said. She noted that Mr. Batayeh moved back to Michigan from California permanently in 2016 when his sister Jeannie was ill, but would travel back and forth for work.“He cared about his community and wanted to give back,” she said, “and that’s the type of person he was.” More

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      Comedian’s Malaysia Joke Prompts Threats and a Diplomatic Incident

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      Jocelyn Chia’s line about the 2014 missing airliner was part of a Comedy Cellar set in April. But when video was posted this week, outrage poured in.At the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan this spring, the stand-up comedian Jocelyn Chia performed a routine that she had reliably included in her sets for more than a year, about the historical animosity between Singapore, the city-state in Southeast Asia where she was raised, and its neighbor Malaysia.But when Chia and the club posted a clip from the April 7 set to TikTok and Instagram this week, it provoked a heated backlash. The 89-second video showed the comedian bantering with an audience member who volunteered that he is Malaysian. And it concluded with Chia’s making light of the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people onboard. Angry Malaysians flooded the comment sections on Chia’s social media accounts. The Comedy Cellar received 4,000 one-star reviews on Google almost overnight and its website was hacked, its owner said. TikTok removed a clip of the joke from Chia’s account, flagging it as “hateful behavior” and a violation of its community guidelines, according to a screenshot Chia shared with The New York Times.Even Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, weighed in, condemning Chia and apologizing for her “horrendous comments” in a tweet noting, “She certainly does not speak for Singaporeans.”The incident demonstrated the fraught line toed by comedians when edgy routines are removed from their natural habitats in dark, late-night, alcohol-lubricated clubs and posted to social media for all to see. Managers of the Comedy Cellar and the West Side Comedy Club, where Chia has performed, said they had received or been threatened with negative reviews as part of the backlash. Chia said that her family and friends had received hate messages.At a club, “you can get away with saying stuff that’s kind of outrageous,” said Noam Dworman, the Comedy Cellar’s owner. “You can’t put that same moment into a small screen that you’re watching over morning coffee.”But Chia, who performed this week in New York and has future gigs planned, said in an interview on Friday that the fallout had not damaged her career. “I’m in no way canceled in America, in any sense of the word,” she said. “Now people want to come see me.”Chia, who was born in Boston and held joint American-Singaporean citizenship until adulthood, was a lawyer who decided her true calling lay in stand-up comedy.Her extended routine, which the clip abbreviated, mentions the former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew and how he appeared to tear up in 1965 when the city-state was expelled from Malaysia “because he thought we were not going to survive,” Chia says in the video. “But then 40 years later, we became a first-world country. And you guys, Malaysia, what are you now? Still a developing country. Awww.”Likening the 1965 rupture to a breakup, she imagined Malaysia trying to woo Singapore back and explaining it hadn’t visited because “my airplanes cannot fly.” Then she added, to laughter, “What? Malaysia Airlines going missing not funny?”The complete routine has been one of her most successful recent bits, she said. “It gets raucous,” she said. “The full bit is well set up — I build up emotion.”The set seemed to set off an international incident only after its appearance this week on social media. Following the backlash, Chia removed the clip at the Comedy Cellar’s request, then reposted it to TikTok without the club’s logo. That’s when TikTok removed it.“I didn’t want the haters to think they had won and got me to back down,” she said. “Audiences at the Comedy Cellar see the best comedians and they love it, so how can I be embarrassed by it?”Felicia Madison, the managing partner and talent booker at the West Side Comedy Club in Manhattan, said she had been threatened with negative reviews by fans who figured out that Chia had appeared there. “We’re a pretty new club,” she said. “When people want to see if they should go, they look at reviews.”Dworman argued that the spate of negative reviews — which dragged down the Comedy Cellar’s overall rating before Google restored it — went beyond people exercising their right to be offended.“You’re entitled to dislike it and complain about it, but they’re trying to make it too risky for me to allow this woman to speak onstage,” he said. “That’s not a refutation of what she said, or a thoughtful appeal to the fact that this is something she should consider was too hurtful. This is essentially using brute force to make the other side say ‘uncle.’” More

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      The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home

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      Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.When Joan Rivers died in 2014, ending one of the greatest careers in modern comedy, several groups were interested in acquiring her archives, which included a meticulously organized collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes.Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, recalled a conversation with a representative from the Smithsonian Institution who wanted the catalog of jokes but said it would not be on permanent display. Her mind instantly went to the final tracking shot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked inside a crate and placed in a vast warehouse with hundreds of other crates.“I couldn’t do that because so much of who she was is in those files,” Melissa Rivers told me on a video call from Los Angeles. For her mother, a pioneering stand-up and withering critic of celebrity fashion, “a view was always important.”Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.The museum is in the planning stages of an interactive exhibition that will center on Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015. The show will allow visitors to explore the file in depth.Jamestown is where Lucille Ball grew up, and “Joan Rivers was the first headliner I booked for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival the year we announced to the world our intention to build the National Comedy Center,” Journey Gunderson, the executive director, told me by phone. Melissa Rivers, a television personality in her own right, was on hand for the groundbreaking in 2015.When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said. In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.Along with this bounty of material, the collection includes snapshots of other aspects of this major cultural figure, including her sense of fashion, like the pearls and a little black dress she wore early in her career as well as the multiple boas from her later fashionista years. Here’s a look at a few of the artifacts headed to the center.Insults in CharacterThe jokes were categorized by topics like fashion and career, and even cross-referenced.Joan Rivers EstateAs you can see from these cards, Joan Rivers often made herself the butt of the joke, leaning on tight, snappy punchlines to describe herself as unwanted or ugly or old. Gunderson said the self-deprecating gibes emerged from a character “she was using as a position of power to comment on the plight of woman.” In real life, Melissa Rivers said that “every now and again, she would say that for whatever age she was, she looked good. But that was that.” Rivers added that those jokes came from a real place. “That was a part of her, but maybe not as crippling as everyone assumed it would be,” she said. “But she also knew she looked good.”An Unparalleled CatalogIn a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.Break Thru Films/IFC“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (from 2010 and available on major platforms) is one of the greatest documentaries about a stand-up comic ever made: candid, unflinching and alert to the brutal amount of work necessary to succeed in show business. It also introduced the world to the cabinet of jokes that Rivers kept in her home. Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described the catalog as one of “the crown jewels of comedy that exist on planet Earth.”Help With HecklersWhen Rivers was starting out, she planned her responses to hecklers.Joan Rivers EstateRivers, a fixture on television who never stopped performing live, loved sparring with a crowd. But early in her career, she prepared for rambunctious audience members with this list of comebacks that could be weaponized to mock hecklers without losing the tempo of her set. Melissa Rivers said she saw her mother upset by a heckler only once, when later in her career someone was offended by a joke about Helen Keller. “She spun around and said: ‘Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.’”Early AmbitionsRivers hoped for a career as an actress and regularly went to the theater.Joan Rivers EstateBefore Joan Rivers became a comedian, she wanted to be a dramatic actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned this series of head shots to display her range. She didn’t make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote (with her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and Lester Colodny) and starred in. It closed after nine performances. But Rivers remained a stalwart fan of the stage, a regular at shows and a savvy commentator on the television series “Theater Talk.” When she went to the theater, she always dressed up and insisted her family do the same. Melissa Rivers said: “She always said, ‘This is church.’”Ticket From a Momentous TimeThe short-lived late-night show proved both a high and low point in Rivers’s career.Joan Rivers EstateWhen Joan Rivers left her position as the permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC to start her own version in 1986 on the then-fledging network Fox, she became the first woman in the modern era to host a late-night talk show. It was a bold move, a career landmark that also preceded a painful period of her life. She made an enemy of the “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. “That made her angry,” Melissa Rivers said. “Like she often said, if it had been a man, it would have been the great send-off to my protégé.” Rivers was banished from the Carson show and fired from her own the following year. Her husband, a producer on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” died by suicide months later. “It took a huge toll on their marriage and our family,” Melissa Rivers recalled, describing the period represented by this ticket as one of “great elation and great horror.” More

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      Pat Cooper, Comedian of Outrage, Is Dead at 93

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      He built his act on making fun of his Italian American heritage. He later publicly insulted stars he had worked with, including Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern.Pat Cooper, the stand-up comic who made outrage his act, progressing from mocking Italian American families like his own to publicly insulting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern, died on Tuesday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 93.The death was announced in a statement by his wife, Emily Conner.For more than 50 years, Mr. Cooper, clad in a tuxedo and Clark Kent spectacles, ranted comedically about his background, his family, the people who he felt had wronged him and just about anything else that bothered him.He developed the act, laced with sound effects, in small clubs in Baltimore and New York in the 1950s, and it proved a novelty at the time, when there were far more Jewish than Italian American comedians making jokes about their families and their culture.He broke through with an appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show” in 1963, then became a regular opening act for entertainers like Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. at clubs and casinos, including the Copacabana in Manhattan and the Sands in Las Vegas. He appeared on television shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Dean Martin and Mike Douglas, and released several albums, most memorably “Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights” (1966).The title of that album was a parody of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” (1965), whose cover depicted a woman apparently clothed only in whipped cream. Mr. Cooper’s cover depicted him slathered in marinara sauce, apparently naked but for a mound of spaghetti.“I got a genuine Italian mother — four feet eleven,” Mr. Cooper said during a typical routine, included on his album “Our Hero” (1965). “She has a bun over here, knitting needle over here, gold tooth over here, mole over here.”“She says, ‘Put garlic around your neck, it keeps away the evil spirits,’” he continued. “I ain’t got no friends, what spirits?”Mr. Cooper’s 1966 album cover was a spoof of one put out by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass the year before.J.P. Roth CollectionAudiences laughed at the Italian stereotypes, but an Italian American anti-defamation group did not get the joke and threatened to sue him. (No suit was ever filed.)Mr. Cooper’s act had dire consequences in his personal life. He became estranged from his parents and siblings, then from his first wife, Dolores Nola, and his children. He said they could not stand his success.“The only way I can beat them, I made fun of them,” Mr. Cooper said in an interview for this obituary in 2014.Later in his career he let the world know when he thought that stars had wronged him. In “How Dare You Say How Dare Me!” (2011), a memoir he wrote with Rich Herschlag and Steve Garrin, he accused Paul Anka of never saying hello when they did more than 50 shows together and then firing him for bringing it up. He claimed that an inebriated Johnny Carson once urinated on his foot in a men’s room, and that after loudly objecting with an expletive, he was not invited back on Carson’s “Tonight Show.”Another time, opening onstage for Sinatra, Sinatra asked him to remove a joke from his set. As Mr. Cooper told The Daily News of New York in 1997, he replied, “Hey, Frank, do I tell you what songs to sing?” Sinatra fired him.During an interview with the talk show host Tom Snyder on NBC in 1981, Mr. Cooper castigated Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett and Lola Falana, saying they did not treat their opening acts respectfully. When Mr. Snyder asked whether Mr. Cooper might be jealous, he denied it. “I want to stop the nonsense of some of the stars in my business who think they own a Pat Cooper,” he said.“We’re comics,” he added. “We’re not dogs.”His agent called him afterward and told him that he was finished in show business. But Mr. Cooper disagreed, and the episode actually raised his profile.“Everybody thought I lost my career — I raised my price!” he said in the 2014 interview. “In those days that was a terrible thing to say, what I did. Now it’s a reality show!”Howard Stern, drawn to Mr. Cooper’s vitriol, invited him on his radio show in the mid-1980s. But perhaps predictably they had a falling-out. Mr. Stern put Mr. Cooper’s estranged son, Michael, and his former wife on the air, and Mr. Cooper refused to interact with them. Then Mr. Cooper began berating Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern stopped having him on the show.Mr. Cooper continued performing at clubs and casinos and at Friars Club roasts until he retired in 2012. And he continued to insist that the industry had treated him poorly. “They don’t want me because I say what’s on my mind,” he said, “and they punish it.”Mr. Cooper in Las Vegas, where he made his home, in 2005 at a screening of “The Aristocrats,” a popular documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke. He also appeared with Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” and its sequel, “Analyze That.” Bryan Haraway/Getty ImagesPasquale Vito Caputo was born on July 31, 1929, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and raised in the Midwood and Red Hook sections of the borough. His father, Michele, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Louise (Gargiulo) Caputo, was a homemaker. He did not have a happy childhood.“I think I broke a record in my neighborhood — I think I must have run away 14 times,” he said. “People don’t run away from good homes.”He tried to escape, seeking to join the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, but he was rejected from each branch because of “hammerhead toes,” he wrote in his memoir. He was drafted into the Army in 1952 and stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C., but he was soon discharged, because of his disruptive behavior, according to Mr. Cooper.He then returned to New York, where he married Ms. Nola and had two children with her. He also began developing his act while supporting himself by driving a cab. “I was a stand-up comic who happened to be sitting down at the time,” he said.Mr. Cooper Americanized his name while performing in the Catskills in the early 1960s, a decision that further infuriated his family. The Oxford English Dictionary says that he coined the term “Bada-bing,” heard during a routine titled “An Italian Wedding” on the “Our Hero” album. (Mr. Cooper himself did not claim authorship.)He went on to appear alongside Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” (1999) and its sequel, “Analyze That” (2002), which also starred Billy Crystal; and alongside many other comedians in “The Aristocrats” (2005), the acclaimed documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke.Mr. Cooper’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1961. He almost never saw his children, Michael and Louise Caputo, again. Michael Caputo wrote a book about their poor relationship and appeared on the talk show “Geraldo” in 1990 to discuss what he saw as his father’s neglect.Mr. Cooper called in to “Geraldo” to argue that he was not at fault, and to castigate his son.“Let me tell you something, I don’t have to be your father, you’re not that thrilling,” Mr. Cooper said, adding, “And I don’t want to be your father.”The show’s host, Geraldo Rivera, interrupted him, saying: “Pat, enough, enough. You’re upsetting me even.”Mr. Cooper’s second wife, the singer Patti Del Prince, died of cancer in 2005. He married Ms. Conner in 2018. In addition to her, he is survived by his children from his first marriage as well as a daughter from his second marriage, Patti Jo Weidenfeld; three sisters, Grace Ferrara, Carol Caputo and Marie Caputo Mangano; and five grandchildren.Mr. Cooper said his son Michael had tried to reconcile with him over the years. He remained uninterested.“He said, ‘Well, now I want’ — what’s it? — ‘closure,’” Mr. Cooper said. “I said, ‘Well, then get a closet.’” More