Comedy and Humor

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Tyler James Williams Lifts His Spirits With bell hooks and Tom Ford

      by

      The “Abbott Elementary” star keeps nourished, body and soul, with D’Angelo’s music, Earl Grey lattes and early 2000s rom-coms.Tyler James Williams has had a winning season.A Screen Actors Guild award that he and his “Abbott Elementary” castmates won for their work on the ABC mockumentary about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.A Golden Globe for best supporting actor for his own performance in the series, as Gregory Eddie, a substitute teacher who finds a sense of purpose and permanence in the job.And, as he took the Globes stage, a standing ovation from Eddie Murphy.“The award is great — I appreciate it. But that did more for me than anything ever could,” Williams admitted in a video call from Los Angeles.The actor, 30, has also morphed into something of a heartthrob in the role, which the “Abbott Elementary” creator Quinta Brunson, whom he’d met on “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” wrote for him after they became lockdown pals.All of the accolades don’t overshadow what he considers his most significant achievement.“We haven’t seen characters like Gregory and Janine” — a teacher played by Brunson with whom Gregory has a slow-burn kind of thing — “exist on television,” Williams said.“There’s not a heavy trauma story line. It’s just Black people living everyday lives and seeing the beauty in that,” he added. “Very rarely do we see that recognized in the awards platforms, so that for me is what I hope that win does.”Still, Williams, who has Crohn’s disease, may have never arrived at this moment had he not had a near-fatal flare-up when he was 23.“When I came out of the other side of it, I realized I had a choice,” he said. “I could be really busy and try to make a bunch of money. Or I could do things that felt like my heart was just bathed.”A few days after wrapping the second season of “Abbott” last month, Williams talked about his deep dive into bell hooks’s work, how D’Angelo captured the feelings of his youth and the Burberry trench he can’t leave behind. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1bell hooksIn 2020, when it became apparent that we were going to be locked down for some time, I was getting book recommendations from people. I had just finished “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and Miss Lawrence, who was a castmate, had recommended “We Real Cool” by bell hooks. I read it and fell in love with her voice, and felt seen in a way I had never felt seen before, and understood things about myself I didn’t know. Then everything she had ever written, I was just diving through. To me they really question masculinity standards, particularly Black masculinity standards, which, with Gregory, I try to dismantle as many of those as I can.2‘Voodoo’ by D’AngeloI had to be 8 or 9 the first time I heard that album played in my house. And I was like, “Who did this? Who took my insides and made it sonic?” I listen to that album once every day, usually at the top of the day. D’Angelo, he’s kind of everything to me.3CinemaSinsIt’s a YouTube channel that points out all the tropes and archaic things that happen in our industry, where everything is so austere and we make art. It’s usually how I end my night when I’m in bed and winding down. Just to have some guy somewhere break it all down and dismantle it is really funny to me.4Earl Grey LatteDue to Crohn’s, I had to stop drinking coffee when I was younger, and I was a big latte person. So I got this great combination of Earl Grey teas that you mix together. Froth up the milk. It feels like a coffee, but you have the flowery notes that are in the tea. In the wintertime, you could do a dash of nutmeg, even some cinnamon, and a single sugar. And if it’s one of those days where it’s like, “This is going to be a heavy lift,” you do two tea bags.5Skywalker MarijuanaThat’s my favorite strain. Also Crohn’s-related, my doctors wanted me to eat more. My appetite response isn’t the same as everybody else’s — I need something to tell me that I’m hungry. And they were like, “Hey, there’s marijuana.” It seems to do all the things we need it to do.6Tom Ford CandlesI was shooting a show called “Whiskey Cavalier” in Prague, right before “Abbott,” and I stumbled on this candle at one of the stores on Parizska Street. There’s notes that are very masculine, but then there’s this soft powder behind it that’s feminine and light. I was like, “This is what I want my house to smell like at all times.”7‘Brown Sugar’This movie felt like a story that could happen to me: Two New York kids who love hip-hop could essentially just fall in love over that. It was simple. I’m a huge fan of the ’90s/early 2000s rom-com. I feel like we peaked as a society right there.8GoldThere’s something about it aesthetically that has always brightened my day. I’ve tried to get into silver, but it doesn’t really do it for me. There’s something about the way sun hits gold that the world gets brighter. It’s kind of like when you take sunglasses off. Everything becomes more vibrant.9Black Burberry Trench CoatI don’t buy a lot of things, and my closet’s very small. I just have stuff that I’m absolutely in love with. And Burberry has always done the trench better than everybody else. It’s something that I pull out literally all the time. It goes so perfectly with everything, always. I left it in New York when I came back from Christmas to finish shooting, and I was like, “What am I doing? I have to go back and get this.” I need this everywhere I go.10DuragsDuring the pandemic, my hair was really long. I couldn’t see a barber, so I ordered a durag and would put it on. I would compress over and over and over again and just kind of brush it out because I didn’t have any other choice. By the time we had shot the pilot of “Abbott,” I had been wave brushing for almost a year, and that became Gregory’s look. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Richard Belzer Had a Ball With the Relationship Between Comic and Crowd

      by

      Unlike his TV characters, his live shows were marked by spontaneity and physicality. He could even keep up with Robin Williams line by line.When Richard Belzer did stand-up on “Late Night With David Letterman,” he always entered to the opening riffs of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, dancing his way onstage, looking like the life of the party in dark shades. Once he arrived at the microphone, he made a point of engaging with the studio audience in a way you rarely saw on television. More than once, he asked, “You in a good mood?” and waited for a cheer. Then his tone shifted: “Prove it.”With that opening pivot, he turned the relationship between comedian and crowd upside-down. The expectation was now on the people in the seats: Impress me.Belzer, who died Sunday, is best known for his performances as a detective on TV, but his acting career was built on a signature persona in comedy, as a master of seductive crowd work who set the template for the MC in the early days of the comedy club. Often in jackets and shirts buttoned low, he cut a stylish image, spiky and louche. He could charm with the best of them, but unlike many performers, he didn’t come off as desperate for your approval. He understood that one of the peculiar things about comedy is that the line between irritation and ingratiation could easily blur.Throughout the 1970s, he ran the show at the buzziest of the New York clubs: Catch a Rising Star, stand-up’s answer to Studio 54. He roasted the crowds while warming them up, quizzing them about where they were from and what they did, establishing rapport and dominance. Long before Dave Chappelle dropped the mic at the end of shows, Belzer regularly did so.If the crowd wasn’t laughing, he could lay on a guilt trip: “Could you be a little more quiet? Because I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” And if someone heckled, look out. According to a story from the comic Jonathan Katz, one night someone in the crowd yelled, “Nice jacket!” and Belzer responded that he got it on sale in his mother’s vagina.Belzer didn’t get famous as quickly as many of his peers, but he was a cult figure with wide influence in comedy. You can hear his clipped cadences, not to mention his use of the word “babe” as a nickname, in the act of Dennis Miller, who once referred to him as “the dark prince” of Catch a Rising Star. Andy Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton was partly inspired by Belzer (notice the glasses).Even as an MC, Belzer was his own star attraction. He became famous for taking an incredibly long time to introduce a comic. In an interview for a documentary on him that has yet to be released, Belzer recalled once taking an hour and forty-five minutes to bring up the next comic. The writer Bill Scheft, who is producing the movie, said Belzer ad-libbed many lines “that became stock MC lines for others.”Few of Belzer’s live shows were taped, but you can find traces online. An all-purpose showman who could sing and dance, he even did pratfalls while spoofing a hipster pose. One wonderfully goofy bit involved getting his hand stuck while running it through his hair, dragging his whole body down to the ground. He leaned hard on flamboyant impressions including those of Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and especially Mick Jagger. There’s a wonderful competitive moment from the 2011 show “Green Room” when, in the middle of a conversation, Belzer gets into a “Jagger-off” with the comic Rick Overton. He triumphs, doing an impression he always called “peacock on acid.”More than any joke, what stands out from a deep dive into Belzer’s online comedy was an attitude: impatient, sarcastic, friendly but quick to jab. There was a percussive sound to his running retorts to the crowd: “Yeah, right, sure.” These move-it-along interruptions had a rhythm and sound that was quintessentially New York. When he dove into a familiar premise, his voice could move from dry to wry in a blink, mocking himself. It’s no wonder that Letterman, another ironist whose attitude perpetually commented on and upstaged his own jokes, booked him so often.Today, crowd work is much easier to see, in specials but also all over social media, where it has become a critical part of marketing and selling tickets for young comics. But in the 1980s, unless you went to a club, you didn’t often find people turning “Where you from?” into spontaneous comedy, so it’s striking that in his 1986 HBO special, he included plenty of such basic interactions. “There’s a lot of parts of New Jersey that are very nice,” he said, responding to one guy from the state. “I can’t think of any right now.”As early as 1978, he opened sets with a touch of hostility, looking up and asking, “Could you make these lights brighter? I’d like to go blind.”Nothing on video displays his stature as much as a 90-minute show celebrating the 10th anniversary of Catch a Rising Star that aired on HBO in 1982. It’s a terrific portrait of New York comedy at the time, with a long bill including Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Rita Rudner and David Brenner, along with the singer Pat Benatar, who was managed by the club’s owner, Rick Newman. Belzer introduces them all, keeping things just sarcastic enough to prevent anyone from taking themselves seriously. Once Joe Piscopo finished a Frank Sinatra impression in full costume and makeup, Belzer marveled: “What an honor. What a surprise. What a man. What a toupée.”At the end, Robin Williams heckled Belzer from the crowd, before going onstage and improvising a series of scenes to close out the night. Whereas Belzer was relatively unknown to the mainstream then, Williams was a giant television star and powerhouse live performer, frenetic and wildly unpredictable. Williams riffed punch lines effortlessly, but Belzer kept up and matched him, line by line. That some don’t land only adds gravitas to the feat, since it proves this was not an act polished for HBO but a real attempt to translate high-wire improv to television.This ephemeral work is not the part of comedy you tend to see in movies or specials, but when done well live, it can be thrilling. And part of the job of the MC is to be alert to the value of spontaneous moments. Belzer understood this as well as anyone.“The greatest thing for me is when I make the audience laugh in a moment that could only happen that night with that audience,” he said in a recent interview. “Sometimes I laugh with the audience because I’m hearing the joke the same time they are.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!,’ He’s Too Hot to Live

      by

      Reich, a comedian and writer, transforms into the avatar of Gen Z disaffection in his taut, biting solo show at Greenwich House Theater.The British writer and comedian Leo Reich styles himself as a walking caricature, his cropped mop of slick curls and high cheekbones framing his frequently half-rolled eyes. Roving the compact stage of the Greenwich House Theater, where his darkly hilarious solo show “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!” opened on Sunday, Reich is frenetic and restless, a self-consciously exaggerated cliché.You know the type. Raised with smartphones in hand and prone to hyperbole, they are experts of self-presentation who use words like “literally” and “iconic” as filler. Onstage, Reich, 23, fashions himself as a hyperkinetic Gen Z avatar, playing off prevailing assumptions associated with those perennially known as “kids today.” He identifies as queer and hot, he says, preening with ironic self-regard. (A faux memoir he reads from onstage is titled, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Ripped Slut.”)But Reich’s over-the-top vanity and arch detachment are another form of misdirection, his favored comedic strategy. The flippancy implied by the title of his 60-minute show, a taut and often mordant stand-up set punctuated with musical numbers (by the “Six” co-composer Toby Marlow), masks the profundity of the question it really asks: of how to look forward to life when the future seems, by all accounts, pretty bleak.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Every generation finds its reasons for disaffection, and those facing young people today are undeniably harsh. Of course, few among us are inured from the consequences of extreme digitization, climate change, war and a yearslong pandemic. But Reich points to the particular, twisted flavor of experiencing all of that at an age when the promise of innocence has disappeared from the menu. He says he first saw hard-core pornography online at age 9, spent his early 20s typing “death toll” into Google rather than casually dating and imagines that homeownership is so out of reach he’ll still be living with his parents in 2042.None of this feels remotely like hand-wringing, though, and Reich is drolly circumspect (it’s not like 70-year-olds in the audience actually lived through the Holocaust, he tells us). But his show offers a keen and incisive distillation of how much has changed since the turn of the century, and how dizzying and absurd it can seem to people of any age. Musings about how to cope with the crises of modern life are interspersed with pivotal moments from his queer coming-of-age, lending the show a cohesive structure. But it’s Reich’s brashness and wry, reflexive panache that give “Literally Who Cares?!” its embodied dynamism.Partly, this is thanks to how he builds momentum. Under the direction of Adam Brace, Reich flits seamlessly between bits, with punch lines cleverly enjambed at the ends of his sentences. (Rapid shifts in tone are greatly aided by the wit of Daniel Carter-Brennan’s lighting design.) The show traverses an impressive range of subjects as a result, while staying anchored in Reich’s own experience of being gay (a boon for branding, but still a psychological nightmare, he says), Jewish (doesn’t God seem like another controlling boyfriend?) and perpetually online, where signifiers of identity have become salable commodities.There was a moment during childhood, Reich recalls, when he did a somersault, not realizing it would be his last one. He plays this realization with mock sentimentality, but the metaphor is a poignant one. Life is an accumulation of losses, and their pace is accelerating — privacy, innocence and the illusion of invincibility have all grown tougher to hold onto for long. If you’re wondering where all of this could be headed next, ask a young person who’s weathering the chaos with a wicked sense of humor.Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!Through March 11 at Greenwich House Theater, Manhattan; leoreich.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Marc Maron, Roseanne Barr and Nathan Macintosh Have New Specials

      by

      In the mix this month are hour sets from a maturing Marc Maron, a very funny Nathan Macintosh and a pandering Roseanne Barr.Marc Maron, ‘From Bleak to Dark’HBO MaxIn his new hour, Marc Maron says he refuses to outgrow blaming his parents for his problems. “They did it,” he grumbles, concisely. His graying hair bouncing off a dark leather jacket, Maron, 59, has remained a vital comic voice by staying in touch with his inner brooding teen. And yet, don’t be fooled: Maron is maturing. His comedy has become more intricate, varied in timing and tone, and politically astute. After decades of leaning over stools, his years of touring theaters — and perhaps film work — have turned him into more of a showman, with a repertoire of small scenes, satires (his spoof of the TED Talk is pitch perfect) and act-outs.The emotional centerpiece of his new special is the 2020 death of his partner, the director Lynn Shelton. Here is where he really shows his evolution, because he handles this passage with a light touch, humbly and without the melodramatic negativity of his title. What stands out is his lack of philosophizing or waxing poetic. There’s a lot of art, including comedy, that exploits the gravity of death. And why not? Our greatest play, “Hamlet,” is about a neurotic, grief-struck young man who can’t stop obsessing over the death of a loved one. But Maron brings an older man’s perspective. He tells us he’s not the victim. Shelton is. He calls his loss ordinary, common. Can art help? People send him “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and it does nothing for him except make him compare himself unfavorably to Joan Didion.What does help, he says, is “the Jewish thing.” Maron has long been fascinated by religion and spirituality, but this hour is his most Jewish by far, featuring the most jokes on the religion, including punch lines about the Holocaust and antisemitism. He says he finds solace in the Jewish epithet “May her memory be a blessing.” This phrase, dating at least to the Talmud, contrasts with the Jewish stereotypes of neurosis and kvetching. Maron pokes fun at the idea of him doing an emotional Jewish one-man show about the death of his girlfriend, but in a way, he has done it — or at least, his version. Looking to the wisdom of religion is perhaps the most hack move possible, but one of the things you learn as you get older is that clichés exist for a reason.Nathan Macintosh, ‘Money Never Wakes’YouTubeWhen it comes to stand-up specials, it’s a “best of times, worst of times” situation. There have never been more being made, released and available to a global audience than right now. According to Sean McCarthy’s newsletter Piffany, there have already been 55 released this year — more than one a day. While most hours are terrible, rote or entirely mediocre, there are gems that would have remained entirely obscure in previous eras.Take Nathan Macintosh, an inauspicious-looking blond guy dressed in khaki pants, a white T-shirt and a button down. His new hour did not get picked up by any major platform, but you can watch it free on YouTube and, if you’re like me, convulse with laughter. His jokes won’t translate well to the page because his delivery is so eccentrically goofy while still managing a momentum that keeps building and building. His main mode is end-of-your-rope exasperation, with eyes popping, voice squeaking and a jittery physicality. He can be funny on mute.The panic in his voice is a perfect match for his preoccupation: The confusing way money works and the infuriating inequities of class. That makes him sound didactic, but his jokes stay close to the ground and unexpected, sympathizing with much-mocked figures like landlords or subway drivers. There’s a novelistic detail in his description of his own apartment, with rats scurrying above the ceiling. (“Have you ever heard rats above you having a better life?”) His self-loathing bit on losing money on crypto is a wonderful time capsule of our moment.But his funniest jokes are about the pampered rich, whom he portrays as aliens speaking to one another and oblivious of everyone else. In dark comic set pieces, they are forced into contact with ordinary people, who must treat them with extreme deference. He acts out one scene in which a rich person complains about his chicken being cold at a fancy restaurant. The manager says with practiced professionalism, “Look, we’ll have the waiter murdered in front of his family.”Roseanne Barr, ‘Cancel This!’Fox NationIn the oral history “We Killed: The Rise of Women in Comedy,” Roseanne Barr explained how she adjusted her stand-up act in the 1980s to fit in with comedy clubs. “I had to make it less political and more mainstream,” she said. This clearly worked. Barr became one of the most successful comics in history, turning her fed-up housewife persona into one of the best sitcoms of the era. But now, several years after an offensive tweet led to her being fired from a reboot of that show, Barr has adjusted again by becoming more political, aggressively courting right-wing audiences as a conspiracy-minded victim of cancel culture.Her new special, which arrives on the Fox Nation streaming service, feels like a mix of rally and fan convention, with some stand-up sprinkled on top. Barr, who alternates between long pauses and flashes of anger, gets an applause break from saying “Baby blood drinking Democrat community” and a big laugh from “I don’t want to talk to no Hillary donors.” It’s a balky production, with abrupt edits and occasional tangents that belong more to the green room than the stage, like an extended gripe about doing promos for her sitcom.It’s the culture war material, though, that gets her crowd fired up. She berates #MeToo victims, suggests that taking the vaccine will prevent you from getting pregnant, and in bemoaning the decline of men, orders the ones in her audience to tell their wives and girlfriends to sit down, shut up and make them a sandwich. Barr says she plans to offend, but this has become another pander, since obviously her crowd loves the grievances, the resentments. She even clarifies that she likes doing promos for Fox.Watch Barr’s early sets and you will find not only a quick comic mind, but also tightly written jokes. Neither appear here. Of course, it’s not just Barr who has changed. Comedy has, too. The scene is more political, polarized, desperate for outrage. Jim Jeffries prefaces the trans jokes in his new Netflix special by saying he’s doing them because he wants the press that Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais received. I’m sure he’d say it’s a joke, but I believe it. When Barr trots out a stale gag about gender, riffing on the question “What is a woman?” she gets a predictable roar. It’s a reminder that Barr once ran for president, and how much comedy and politics have blurred. Cheap nostalgia can be powerful in both arenas. At one point, Barr jokes, “The world has changed a lot since I was alive.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Amrit Kaur of ‘Sex Lives of College Girls’ Runs on ‘Super Soul Sunday’ Podcasts

      by

      The actress, one of the stars of the HBO Max comedy, wakes up with elaborate chai rituals and unwinds with “90 Day Fiancé” episodes.Amrit Kaur was glowing. “It’s like I’m doing a Pantene Pro-V ad,” the actress, freshly coifed, said with a flip of her shorter new ’do on a video call from her home in Toronto.She had gotten too attached to her long hair, she said, “so it’s like, chop it all off.”Kaur was also fresh off the buzz of Season 2 of the HBO Max comedy “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” in which she plays an eye-on-the-prize aspiring comedy writer trying to navigate messy campus romances and cringe-worthy social climbing. The series, which has been renewed for a third season, has taught her “how to become funny,” she said.This year, Kaur pivots from college calamities on TV to a mother-daughter story on film. Tentatively titled “Me, My Mom & Sharmila,” it focuses on a Pakistani Muslim woman and her Canadian-born daughter, who come of age in different eras but share an obsession with Bollywood. Kaur, who is also Canadian, plays the daughter as well as the mother in her youth, which at times has meant shooting one character in the morning and the other in the evening.“I got to stretch myself artistically and learn a new language,” she said of Urdu. “It’s very vulnerable.” The film will make the festival rounds in the coming months, headed for release later this year or early 2024.On a cold winter day after her return from filming in Pakistan, Kaur talked about her elaborate chai fixings, a return to her faith and escapism in reality TV. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Morning RitualsI wake up after being mean to my alarm a couple of times. Finally, by the third time, I’m like, fine, you’re right, I should start my day. I do morning pages, which is stream-of-consciousness writing. The days I need to do it the most are the days I resist. Then I’ll get up and listen to Japji Sahib, which is a morning prayer, and then I have my chai. I have a cupboard in my kitchen just for chai spices. Every day I wake up, and I’m like, what do I want today? What does cardamom go well with? Do I want fennel seeds? Do I want ginger? That’s really nice. Some people have that with coffee. For me, it’s chai.2Acting ClassI’ve been studying at the Lonsdale Smith Studio in Toronto for six years now, continuously. I take classes, even while on set, every Sunday. When I’m not on set, I’ll take class a couple of times a week. It’s a religious place for me. Acting class in many ways was my first religion. In Pakistan, I took class from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., virtually.3A Special Piece of PaperI have this paper, which you’re supposed to keep in your pocket, but I keep it in my bra so that it’s closer to my heart. The paper holds an exercise we did in acting class where you write down three things that are true of yourself that you don’t wish to be true. The whole idea is to come to terms with and face the parts of myself that hurt the most, or that I don’t like, to come into consciousness of who I truly am.4SikhismI aspire to be far more in touch with my faith. I think it’s in my nature to be quite devoted; it’s in the bones of who I am. When I found out I’d be going to Pakistan, there were so many messages that I needed to go on a pilgrimage. I went first to Nankana Sahib on the border of India and Pakistan, which is the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the creator of Sikhism. People who are Muslim and Hindu still go to show him respect, and I think that is so telling. I stayed overnight, spoke to the priest and learned so much about my culture and my history.5Gift-givingI’ve never been a gift giver. I love it now. I’ve always had a dream of giving my mother a beautiful gold jewelry set — and it’s now off my dream list. One of the questions I asked the priest was, “What is the purpose of money?” And he said, “It’s about giving it away.”6Artistic VisionOne of my dreams is to create a school in Hoshiarpur, the city where my dad is from in India, for girls who don’t have the opportunity to study. My artistic vision is to be part of a future where girls are not living in oppression and to be part of relaying that message. I’m going to be doubling down on writing and creating my own material to inspire women and girls to be their true selves, to be big and bold in the world.7International TravelIn the last year I’ve been to New York, California, Nova Scotia, Italy, Istanbul, Karachi, Lahore and more. I’m really lucky and grateful that I’ve been able to travel. The dream is to be an international artist, and I’m working toward that, telling stories and working with artists in different parts of the world.8‘Super Soul Sunday’I religiously listen to “Super Soul Sunday,” Oprah’s podcast, when I’m running. All these thoughts are going through my head, and I’m like, “I’m going to get through it, I’m going to run through it. Yes, Oprah, tell me!” It’s so powerful to run through the wind and listen to all of these people who have so much insight into life.9WhatsAppWhatsApp is a very Indian thing, I think. I use it so much that now all my Canadian friends are on it. It’s just so much easier because I travel so often. And I love looking at people’s faces. I’m a very big video caller.10Reality TVI love to watch “90 Day Fiancé,” “Too Hot to Handle” and other trashy shows. When I’m on vacation, that’s my favorite thing to do, just lying down on my couch with my best friend, getting all the chocolate on Uber Eats, watching all of these people behave so badly and not having to think. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      How Many Comics Does It Take to Joke About a Dim Bulb?

      by

      Nate Bargatze, Chase O’Donnell and the star of “Cunk on Earth” find smart nuances in pretending that they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.If there’s one group of people who have been made fun of more than any other, it’s the stupid.From Homer Simpson to Zoolander to Rose from “The Golden Girls,” no satirical target has produced more laughs. Jokes about the dumb are ancient and show up in nearly every country. Certain kinds go out of fashion (you don’t hear Polish jokes much anymore), but the idiocy of others has proved universally funny.Why don’t we feel guilty about this? Sometimes, we do. But savvy comics have always found ways to mitigate the cruelty and condescension of mocking the moronic. And these days, when audiences can be particularly sensitive to the direction comedy is punching, the dumb joke often requires a lighter touch. Two deft new stand-up specials dig into stereotypes about the unintelligent, dust them off and renovate them for a new era, while a new mockumentary gets even bigger laughs through the stunt of placing a fool in a variety of intellectual arenas.Nate Bargatze — whose new special, “Hello World,” is his first hour for Prime Video after breaking out with two popular and well-crafted Netflix efforts — told The Daily Beast that he wanted his comedy to be “the right amount of dumb.” His brand of clueless Christian dad self-deprecation isn’t buffoonish. He presents himself as a little slow in a world that seems far too fast. He speaks with a hint of a drawl, and his delivery moseys as he settles into a gem of a story about the time he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the light in a hotel room.Nate Bargatze in his new special, “Hello World.” He presents himself as a little slow, not buffoonish.Amazon PrimeBargatze, 42, says he knows he utters  idiotic things, with a bit of bashfulness. “I try to keep it in front of large groups,” he explains in the special. “When you say something dumb one on one, it’s a lot for that person.”The moment is characteristic: thoughtful about his lack of thought. Bargatze, who has a gift for making something out of seemingly nothing, has emerged as one of the finest clean, family-friendly comics in America, firmly in the conversation with Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Brian Regan. His last three specials begin with his adorable daughter introducing him. But he’s putting an updated spin on another comedy tradition, the Southern rube, poking fun at his own dimness but also at those who would look down on him.Bargatze draws attention to his roots (a previous special is called “The Tennessee Kid”), but unlike Larry the Cable Guy or Jim Varney, he doesn’t lean on exaggerated accents or dopey language. When he tells you Andrew Jackson is from his town, it’s to set up a scene in which a snotty interviewer informs him that Jackson was a bad man. “I stopped him and was like: We didn’t, like, know him or anything,” Bargatze says, the slightest touch of defensiveness mixed with minor annoyance. “We didn’t move there because we were fans.”There is a gentleness to his ignorance, one that taps into a fertile area for laughs: childhood anxieties. Even his joke about struggling to turn off the light is designed not to make you laugh at him but relate to him. He acts out a kind of helplessness that we all once had and often still do. It’s a dumb joke that makes you feel if not smart, then at least less alone in your stupidity.While perhaps not as old as punch lines about country folk, the dumb blond joke has been around as long as America. Scholars trace it to a 1775 French one-act satire, “Les Curiosités de la Foire.” The archetype boomed in the middle of the last century with the stardom of Marilyn Monroe in movies like “Gentleman Prefer Blondes.” As that title suggests, blonds have favorable stereotypes attached to them, which makes poking fun at their intelligence, as well as their superficiality, a little more palatable. Because we think blonds have more fun, people can have more fun with them. And yet this has been under some scrutiny lately, reconsidered in movies about objectified stars like Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears and Monroe herself. (The recent drama about her was titled “Blonde” as if her hair color was her Rosebud).The performer Chase O’Donnell plays more ditsy then dumb, but she leans into it. Years ago, she starred in a cabaret double act called “Too Blondes,” and her new special, “People Pleaser,” an enjoyable YouTube distraction, is full of self-deprecating jokes and precisely timed malapropisms. Her most faithful strategy is to begin a joke, pause, bug out her eyes in an innocent glare, then shift direction to upend expectations. When a date tells her to dye her hair, she acts offended. “I literally died,” she says, glaring. “My hair the next day.”Chase O’Donnell in “People Pleaser.” She specializes in precisely timed malapropisms.Steve NguyenThe quality of her joke-writing is not as assured as her persona. It’s a low-budget production with rough edges, but like Bargatze, O’Donnell finds laughs in being more innocent than those around her. There are some darker undercurrents if you want to look for them, which you probably won’t. A show about the consequences for a woman who can’t say no is not what this breezy act is going for. And credit where it’s due: It’s hard to stay this light. She performs obliviousness with enough savvy to make you not quite believe it.In the hilarious “Cunk on Earth” (now on Netflix) Diane Morgan performs imbecility in an entirely different way. She’s an actor, not a stand-up, and as the spectacularly ill-informed anchor Philomena Cunk, she doesn’t wink at the audience. She commits, brilliantly. Dressed stylishly in an overcoat and boots, speaking in the sober and dispassionate cadences of high-toned public television, she stands in the desert, musing pensively: “Looking at the pyramids tonight, it’s hard not to be struck by the thought they are just big triangles.”This five-episode series, produced by the “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker, is based on a simple idea — place a dummy among posh, smart elites — but it’s exactingly executed. The show is beautifully shot and edited, impeccably deadpan and dense with jokes. In episodes that explore the history of civilization, our most popular religions or our greatest inventions, it captures a refined BBC aesthetic: staged in front of sweeping landscapes, inside museums or near ruins and featuring a collection of academics, authors and other intellectuals. How fully realized this world is only makes it funnier when Morgan, sitting across from a professor of Middle Eastern history, asks: “Were numbers worth less in ancient times?”As with so many artists in the growing documentary comedy genre, Morgan uses real people as foils for her scripted lines. But in this case, they belong to a single class of experts whose tasteful clothes and thick spectacles project intelligence better than any design department could muster. There’s cringe comedy in their fluster opposite her flamboyant imbecility. At no point does she break character. Her confidence is impenetrable, though sometimes she does use vulnerability strategically, as when she tells an academic she’s worried that her question will sound stupid before asking about Aristotle saying, “Dance like no one’s watching.” This is a cagey manipulation that extends the scene and shifts the dynamic into something more polite than it otherwise would be.It’s a reminder of a piece of wisdom from David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, the metal band at the center of the greatest mockumentary: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Bob Orben, One-Man Gag Factory and Speechwriter, Dies at 95

      by

      He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, died on Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”In 1968, Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and United States senator, knew Red Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.A 1975 profile of President Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his off-color remarks.“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”Mr. Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.Mr. Orben at the White House with President Ford in 1976. He fed jokes to the president and coached him on how to deliver them.Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.John Mihalec, a speechwriter for President Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mr. Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”Robert Orben was born on March 4, 1927, in the Bronx to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in Manhattan, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Dick Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Mr. Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’”Mr. Orben never returned to the White House. But he kept writing joke books, among them “2500 Jokes to Start ’Em Laughing” (1979), “2100 Laughs for All Occasions” (1983) and “2000 Surefire Jokes for Speakers” (1986).He also continued to write his newsletter through 1989, as well as writing speeches for business executives and working as a consultant to IBM.Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.In 1974, Mr. Orben was helping Vice President Ford rehearse his speech for the Gridiron Club dinner. One line, about Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, worried Ford: “Governor Reagan does not dye his hair. Let’s just say he’s turning prematurely orange.”He asked Mr. Orben, “Do you think the governor would take offense at that?”“Now, I’m looking at this blockbuster joke of the year go up in smoke, but I think I gave him a fair, honest answer,” Mr. Orben said in the 2008 oral history interview. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, Reagan has been in show business a good part of his life. He has gone through a thousand roasts and I’m sure he has heard dyed-hair jokes. So I really don’t think so.’”To Mr. Orben’s relief, Vice President Ford delivered the line. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      John Cleese to Reboot ‘Fawlty Towers’ With His Daughter Camilla Cleese

      by

      Mr. Cleese will write and act alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese in a revival of the renowned BBC comedy.“Fawlty Towers,” the renowned 1970s British sitcom that starred John Cleese as a surly and snobbish hotel owner, will be rebooted with Mr. Cleese returning alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese, Castle Rock Entertainment announced on Tuesday.The original show, which Radio Times declared the best British sitcom of all time in 2019 after a survey of comedy experts, ran for two seasons of six episodes each, in 1975 and 1979. Mr. Cleese, now 83, played Basil Fawlty, who was forced to contend with disasters and ludicrous situations while displaying all the kindness and hospitality of sandpaper.In the reboot, Mr. Cleese’s character will open a boutique hotel with his daughter, whom he has just discovered he had, and deal with a more modern set of problems.Mr. Cleese, an original member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, has recently been dealing with a more modern set of problems in his real life as well.On social media, he has frequently railed against “cancel culture” and what he has deemed “woke” behaviors. He has signed up to host a show on GB News, a British right-wing television network, in which “no one will be canceled — and no topic will be too controversial for discussion,” the network said.In 2020, an episode of “Fawlty Towers” was removed from some streaming services because it contained racial slurs. Mr. Cleese called the decision “stupid,” telling the newspaper The Age that “if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them.”Some fans have also accused him of transphobia for his comments in support of J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series.As with other British series in the 1970s, the original “Fawlty Towers” was shown in the United States on PBS. Despite interest from American broadcasters, the show’s small number of episodes and half-hour run time, without commercials, made it unable to fit American TV schedules.Castle Rock Entertainment did not say where the new series would air.Mr. Cleese said in a statement that he and his daughter developed the concept for the reboot with one of its executive producers, Matthew George, a producer of the films “Wind River” and “A Private War.”“When we first met, he offered an excellent first idea, and then Matt, my daughter Camilla, and I had one of the best creative sessions I can remember,” Mr. Cleese said. “By dessert, we had an overall concept so good that, a few days later, it won the approval of Rob and Michele Reiner. Camilla and I look forward enormously to expanding it into a series.”Mr. George, the Reiners and Derrick Rossi are the executive producers of the new “Fawlty Towers” series.“John Cleese is a comedy legend,” Mr. Reiner said in a statement. “Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh.”Amanda Holpuch More