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      12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

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      ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

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      Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “The Big Short” and “Vice” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”The stakes are higher still in “Don’t Look Up,” which grows progressively more frenetic and wobbly as the inevitability of the catastrophe is finally grasped by even the most ridiculous of the movie’s buffoon-rich cast of characters. One problem is that some of McKay’s biggest targets here — specifically in politics and infotainment — have already reached maximum self-parody or tragedy (or both). What is left to satirically skewer when facts are derided as opinion, flat Earthers attend annual conferences and conspiracy theory movements like QAnon have become powerful political forces?Even so, McKay keeps swinging hard and fast, and from the start, establishes a sense of visceral urgency with loose, agitated camerawork and brisk editing that fits the ticking-bomb story. He slings zingers and stages bits of comic business, making fine use of funny faces, jumping eyebrows, slow burns and double takes. Part ethnographer, part sociologist, he is especially good at mining the funny-ha-ha, funny-weird spaces in between people. But he’s not always in control of his material, including some cheap shots that slide into witless sexism. Presidential vanity is always a fair target, but too many of the digs directed at Streep’s character play into gender stereotypes.Streep is a great deal of fun to watch when she’s not unintentionally making you cringe, and Lawrence gives the movie a steady emotional pulse even at its most frantic. McKay’s work with DiCaprio is particularly memorable, partly because Dr. Mindy’s trajectory — from honest, concerned scientist to glib, showboating celebrity — strengthens the movie’s heartbreaking, unspeakable truth: Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.Don’t Look UpRated R for violence, language and the apocalypse. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Theater

      Continuing ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’

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      Lily Tomlin, who first performed this comically cosmic play, and Jane Wagner, its author, discuss a new production with Cecily Strong and Leigh Silverman, its new star and director.Should you ever have the chance to converse with Lily Tomlin, you don’t have to tell her it’s an honor. “Believe me, it’s not,” Tomlin said recently in her distinctive deadpan.At 82, Tomlin is not precious about her reputation or the esteem she enjoys as a comedian and actor. But she remains fiercely proud of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” the one-woman play that was written for her by Jane Wagner, her wife and longtime creative collaborator.“Search for Signs,” which had its Broadway debut in 1985, is a comedic and philosophical whirlwind in which Tomlin Ping-Ponged across 12 roles, including the sullen teen punk Agnus Angst; the feminist activists Edie, Lyn and Marge; and the wealthy, urbane Kate. Their scenes are framed and interwoven by the character of Trudy, an enlightened vagrant who believes she is in communication with aliens.Tomlin’s performance in the Broadway production of “Search for Signs” won her the Tony Award for best actress in a play. That production ran for more than a year, and the play became an emblematic entry in the careers of its author and its star; Tomlin continued to perform it in other cities, in a 1991 film adaptation and in a Broadway revival that ran from 2000-1.Lily Tomlin in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 2000.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Search for Signs” has become a treasured work to performers like Cecily Strong, the “Saturday Night Live” cast member, and directors like Leigh Silverman (“Well,” “Violet”). As Silverman, 47, said, “This play gives us a sense of purpose and a meaning while telling us all the time how meaningless it is. It holds us up and supports us and loves us. It cherishes the audience in a way that no other theater experience I’ve ever had does.”Now Silverman is directing Strong in a new production of “Search for Signs” that will be presented at the Shed. This incarnation, which is choreographed by James Alsop, begins performances Dec. 21 and opens Jan. 11; its limited run is scheduled to end Feb. 6.While they are still working through the play’s ambitious and ample material, Strong and Silverman said their preparations are testing them to their fullest extents. “There’s no plan to this,” Strong, 37, explained. “I said nobody else bug me until February — all of my time and my brain and my heart and my soul is here, and that’s where it has to be.”Tomlin and Wagner, who are executive producing, are content to observe these rehearsals from afar, weigh in when needed and reflect on what the play has meant to them. (Or simply to kibitz affectionately, as in one moment when Tomlin turned to her wife and audibly observed, “We’ve lived a long time, sister.”)Wagner, 86, said she was confident in the approach that Silverman and Strong were taking. “I have such a feeling of security, really, with the two of them,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I’ll start feeling pressured again, I’m sure.”Tomlin, Wagner, Strong and Silverman gathered earlier this month for a video interview in which they spoke about their individual and collective journeys on “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Lily and Jane, can you recount the origins of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”? How was it created?JANE WAGNER I was in a New Age phase. I was reading some philosophy and I began to be aware that I was being aware. [Lily Tomlin laughs.] That’s an insight that I hadn’t even thought about having.LILY TOMLIN I was on the road a good part of that time.WAGNER Which was very good for us.TOMLIN She would send me a load of pages every now and then. I remember the first packet I got, I was playing in Lexington and she sent me a huge stack of papers all about Trudy. Every line, one after another, was so observant and perceptive. I read them at a show one night and there was a raucous and wonderful response. When I read Trudy saying, “Frankly, I think they find us quite captivating,” I knew where the play was headed. But I had no idea how she was going to get there.Tomlin, right, and Jane Wagner in 2001 with their Tony Award nominations for the revival of “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.”Henry Ray Abrams/Agence France-PresseCecily and Leigh, how did you each discover the play?CECILY STRONG The first time I encountered it was in my library in high school, looking for monologues. I was very serious about being an actor and I remember finding this cover with a long crazy name. What could this show be? I looked at a couple of Trudy monologues and I wanted to do something like this. This is a stupid thought, but I had it: I’ve got to marry a writer. I need to have someone write this show for me. I certainly never thought it would be a possibility to do this.LEIGH SILVERMAN I saw it at the Kennedy Center [after the show’s original Broadway run]. I was 11. My mother took me and we were sitting in the front row. It really sent me on a journey to see a performance like Lily’s. It was radical — written by a woman, performed by a woman who played all kinds of characters. Lily was so masculine, androgynous, highly feminine — she was all of it, the full package. I felt like my whole being was rearranged and maybe for the first time put into place.Lily, you continued to perform the play for many years in different settings. Does it remain in your body from production to production?TOMLIN You have a lot of muscle memory from it. When you start working on it again — this doesn’t feel right, I must have moved over here — then it falls into place. It comes back to you very quickly.WAGNER I’ve gotten by as a writer with no muscles. All my life, I’ve never had muscles.TOMLIN She’s at an age where the muscles would come in handy.Would the play change depending on the time and place where you were doing it?TOMLIN In 2001, right after the 9/11 attacks, we opened in San Francisco. Jane used to collect a lot of old Whole Earth Catalogs from her hippie days, and she cited this quote from Whole Earth Catalog. I used to end the production in San Francisco with this same quote because I felt it was so meaningful. It’s anonymous: “Humans are finally the bits of earth that leap up from the planet’s surface, tell what they see to each other, and then die. The sum total of all this seeing and telling is the story of one planet waking up to itself.” We loved that. That’s how we felt at that time.Did you get protective when other people would ask to put on the play? There were solo shows and versions with larger casts playing all the characters.WAGNER We did once we saw one of the productions you just described. It was pretty awful.TOMLIN In the old days, the requests would come in and I would deal with the agent. He’d say it’s a good theater or whatever, and we’d let them do it. Sometimes they would send us a film of what they’d done.WAGNER That’s where it went wrong, I think. [Laughter.] I’m more easily beaten down than she is.TOMLIN That’s why we keep her from the theater. She stays locked in a hotel room and I go, “I’ll be back in three or four hours”WAGNER I’m thinking about us doing it when we had no producer.TOMLIN I was the producer!WAGNER Well, I didn’t know that. I’d send you pages and you’d do them or toss them.TOMLIN Very often in the development process, I’d come in from a night at the theater and I’d talk to Jane about some monologue. I’d say, “If you can just make it — blah blah blah.” Instead of just adjusting some small phrase, she’d just write another monologue. I had like six or seven drafts of some monologues in my head, and I would move sections around, trying to find what the key would be. I was so steeped in it, I was able to just put it out and fly with whatever I could fly with. That’s what an actor really hopes for.“Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin?” said Strong, who’s been rehearsing with Silverman at the Shed. Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesLeigh, what got you interested in reviving the play?SILVERMAN When we were in the darkest moments of the pandemic, I was feeling so lost. I have done a lot of solo plays in my career. Most recently I did “Harry Clarke” with Billy Crudup. We were actually supposed to do it again during the pandemic and it was canceled. I had this moment where I thought I never want to do another solo show, ever, ever, ever again. I had a conversation with the Shed and they said, “We want to reopen and we’re looking for the right theatrical experience to do that with. Do you have any ideas?” I said no. And then I had a second call and I said, “I really don’t want do another solo show. But I do think this play should be done, and this is the time.”How was Cecily chosen? How did everyone get comfortable with that choice?SILVERMAN When we were talking about people, very serendipitously, there was the finale of “S.N.L.” last season and I was watching Weekend Update, where Cecily dove headfirst into a giant box of wine and drank her way out. Watching that, I had this moment where I was like, she can do it. She had the combination of the stamina, the skill, the courage and deep, deep empathy. The wild curiosity to just be outrageously funny.STRONG Of course I wanted to do this. The biggest reason to say no is, why would you ever put yourself in a position to be compared to Lily Tomlin? But you hear Leigh talk about it and you start tearing up. It’s like, yes, yes, let’s do this. Just the way the show feels, physically — I get to go through this wonderful catharsis every time we run it.WAGNER Lorne [Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live”] has an uncanny ability to understand talent, and he believed in you so much. You wouldn’t have been on “S.N.L.” if you weren’t pretty great.TOMLIN I was totally for it because I wanted Jane’s authorship to stand. So often, I’m thrown into the mix as her collaborator. It’s just not true. Jane is a solitary writer and that’s all there is to it. She writes pages and pages, and if you asked her now to write about this bottle of water, she’d probably come up with 2,000 words.Cecily, you recently performed a Weekend Update character, a clown named Goober who tells jokes about abortion, that felt like she could have fit into this play. Was that piece inspired by your work on this show?STRONG Not consciously writing it. It came from, I’m going to take Ambien and I’m going to write essays to myself every night, or I’m going to remain frustrated and do weird things. Obviously this is something I wanted to get out. I kept posing it to people — I’m thinking it’s about a clown talking about her abortion — and everybody was like, okaaay. I certainly felt scared, and then I felt like I came closer to earning this show. [Speaking to Tomlin] To your bravery, your courage, and what a bombastic, badass thing it is.Jane and Lily, were you ever criticized for your depictions of feminist characters in this play? They are affectionately rendered but still allowed to be laughed at and joked about.WAGNER Oh, yeah. We heard that a little bit.TOMLIN What was there?WAGNER Do you want me to name names?TOMLIN No, you don’t have to name names.WAGNER There are always people that say you shouldn’t. One time somebody insisted we shouldn’t have a monologue that was a half an hour long.TOMLIN Oh, yeah, well, that’s old stuff. You have to make those decisions yourself. Don’t be influenced.WAGNER When I went to a consciousness-raising session — and I only went to one, because I was kind of in shock — I knew that I had to talk about it. People looking at their genitalia and everything like that, there was something satirical there that you could use. I still love the movement and believe in the movement.Cecily and Leigh, how do you begin to tackle a play like this, where one actor is responsible for this much material?SILVERMAN There’s so much that you put down one coat of paint and then you keep going.STRONG I don’t think I’ve ever taken on anything like this, where I’ve been so challenged. How do I put on a coat and I’m trying to sing and I’m trying to quote Buckminster Fuller? It’s so many things but the minute we get one thing right it just feels so good. I feel like my brain is changing a little.Do you allow yourself to have favorite characters within the play?STRONG Something new tickles me every day. Leigh just gave me a big cart of stuff and was like, put it somewhere. What do you do with this thing? It was a great way to enter into Trudy. The other day, I was talking to a plant. I was like, ooh, I like the sound of how that plant shakes.Do you seek notes or input from Lily and Jane? Do they just weigh in when they want to, like the voice of God?STRONG I’ll take anything I can get.WAGNER We like the voice of God concept. [Laughter.]TOMLIN We’re trying to come [in person].WAGNER I have trouble with my leg. Loss of muscle memory, I guess. SILVERMAN We send them video and they’re with us always. There’s a line in the play where Trudy says that she puts some time aside each day to do “awe-robics,” and I will say that so much of working on the play is an exploration of “awe-robics.”WAGNER They’re wonderful, the way you communicate. I think you’re going to do something that actually makes our brains crack. Which could be good for the run of the show. More

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      The Most Adventurous Comedy Right Now Is Also the Most Real

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      John Wilson, Eric Andre and others are drawing on unscripted encounters to elicit deeper laughs but also more vulnerable moments.At the start of the second season of the HBO series “How To With John Wilson,” the titular star, a stammering innocent, visits a mortgage broker to get a loan. Asked his occupation, he sounds stumped. “I’m an, uh, documentarian,” he says, struggling to categorize his work. “Like, uh, it’s kind of like memoir, essay, um.”Pity him. It’s not easy to define this singular show. But one tip-off comes when Wilson offers as collateral a collection of printed-out reactions (including a Mindy Kaling tweet) inside a folder labeled “good reviews.” The exasperated look on the face of the lender operates as a punchline.Wilson, who writes, stars and narrates this self-portrait of sorts, is the quietly radical auteur of a rapidly ascendant branch of comedy that uses the raw materials of unscripted slices of the real world to make jokes. The latest Dave Chappelle controversy or topical “Saturday Night Live” sketch get more headlines, but in a less heralded corner of comedy, a quiet revolution is taking place.Chris (Eric André), center, and Bud (Lil Rel Howery) ask a woman for advice in “Bad Trip.”NetflixThe best gross-out comedy of the year was Eric André’s “Bad Trip,” a movie that blended public interactions between actors and real people into its fiction. The most biting political film in recent memory was not made by Oliver Stone or Adam McKay. It was the 2020 sequel to “Borat.” And the most innovative portrait of New York was not cooked up by Martin Scorsese. It was the HBO series “How To With John Wilson.” I’m not sure if this group of documentary comedy artists, who have elevated a legacy still connected to lowbrow prank humor, can be considered a scene, but they are cross-pollinating and growing in ambition.At the top of this family tree is Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”), whose blockbuster comedies take planned narratives and weave in ridiculous interactions between his outlandish characters and unsuspecting, real people. His heirs includes Jena Friedman, one of the writers of “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” who in her “Soft Focus” Adult Swim specials added savvy feminist punch to daring documentary comedy, integrating scenes with real frat boys and online gamers into a comic exposé of our sexist culture. Her recent follow-up is the superb spoof of murder documentaries, “Indefensible” on Sundance TV. “Bad Trip” (2021) belongs to a broader strain, tied to the raucous juvenile stunts of “Jackass,” whose co-creator Jeff Tremaine produced the feature.Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova hit the streets in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”Amazon StudiosNathan Fielder, who has also worked with Baron Cohen, pioneered a more personal, emotionally tender strain in “Nathan for You” (which ended in 2017) playing a mild-mannered consultant who helps small-business owners achieve their dreams. His cringe comedy often began as a spoof of the hustle of American entrepreneurs, but invariably spun off into melancholy, oddly poetic moments. This set the stage for the most ambitious and cerebral example of the genre, “How To With John Wilson,” whose executive producers include Fielder.Wilson builds every episode around teaching some new skill before getting interrupted by a diversion that seems to stumble into a philosophical meditation on a broader theme. An episode on appreciating wine asks how to engage with society without becoming conformist; one about finding a parking spot is a brief for the virtue of boredom. (“Maybe life is just circling just waiting for a spot.”) It’s a show that gathers loose parts (a montage of shots of personalized license plates, say) and somehow turns them into wildly eccentric, oddly poignant comedy.Wilson, our intrepid guide, is incredibly smart at playing dumb, alert to moments of minor revelation, disturbing oddness and layered meanings. But unlike most of the great deadpan comics, he stays off camera, telling his stories through narration, interviews with strangers and carefully curated scenes of New York. The show shares elements with critical video essays by the likes of Matt Zoller Seitz and with Thom Andersen’s fascinating documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” which also invites you to see a city through new eyes. But the new season of “How to,” written by a staff that includes the author Susan Orlean and the comic Conner O’Malley, is much more autobiographical. New York isn’t the main character, as the cliché goes, so much as shots of it are the language used to describe Wilson.Detours take us into his checkered early filmmaking career, including a disastrous early film, “Jingle Berry,” he has stashed away but can’t quite destroy, and brief video of old roommates and a girlfriend. The most surreal (and chilling) personal revelation is a story of organizing a failed rebellion in college when his a cappella group attended a conference hosted by Keith Raniere, the convicted sex trafficker who founded the cult Nxivm.All great comedy reveals the artist, but these intimate new episodes dig deeper, making Wilson more vulnerable than you’d expect. Wilson comes off as an anguished subject, anxious and afraid of confrontation but struggling to connect. This tension is reflected in the form: We only actually see him in quick glances in mirrors or old clips, but the stories are told entirely from the perspective of his camera. Most of his emotional reactions are illuminated by street scenes. When he talks about feeling shock, he shows an image of a Gothic building whose windows resemble a face with a mouth agape.The roots of this brand of comedy date to the pranks of “Candid Camera.” Another touchstone is the late-night talk show tradition of turning interactions with strangers into comedy, from Steve Allen in the 1950s to the literate remote segments by Merrill Markoe on “Late Night With David Letterman” in the 1980s. It’s a strain of comedy that inspired artists like Billy Eichner. The recent documentary comedy examples stretch the canvas created by their forerunners, offering a wider emotional landscape and more complicated ideas.“How To With John Wilson” turns to Quick Evic to get advice about tenant-landlord relations.HBOBut a dark undercurrent remains, one that exploits the humiliation of unsuspecting foils for cheap laughs. Wilson is clearly aware of this and even cops to it. The first episode of this season begins with him buying a building from his landlord. Describing his online real-estate hunt, he says: “You feel like the invisible man. Getting to be a voyeur without any consequences.” His self-awareness doesn’t erase the smirking pleasures of his show, which emerge in the handling of characters like the person who claims to be the reincarnation of President John Adams or the businessman who makes car-shaped caskets. But Wilson rarely mocks. And he isn’t aiming for quick laughs as much as compassionate consideration. His camera treats the figures it encounters with loving attention and usually a lack of judgment.His shows are a reminder of how rarely you see banal details of city denizens doing their jobs on prestige television: The unglamorous everyday of real estate agents, construction workers, commuters. Wilson balances the mundane with the extraordinary (every episode has a moment or two that you can’t believe really happened), heavy subjects with light jokes. He introduces us to people who look like targets (a fan group of “Avatar” obsessives) and makes us see the beauty in their community. This isn’t a show of heroes and villains, but quick portraits of real, complicated people, and its foundational faith is that they are funnier than anything performed by actors. There’s plenty of evidence.Consider a recent viral video of the Fox host Laura Ingraham having a frustrated conversation with a guest talking about the Netflix show “You.” Every time he mentioned the show, she thought he was referring to her, and the dialogue came to seem like a cable-news update of an Abbott and Costello routine. Almost immediately, this minute-long misunderstanding went viral with people of all political stripes retweeting and praising it. One of the only dissents came from Andy Richter, who tweeted: “The fact that people are actually laughing at that Laura Ingraham thing makes me feel like I’ve wasted the last 35 years of my life.”Why did people love this? It was delivered with spot-on comic rhythm, and of course, people love to laugh at cable hosts embarrassing themselves. But part of the reason it worked is because it seemed like a genuine moment, a true burst of spontaneity in a media climate filled with predictable narratives. As soon as the participants confessed it was fake, the interest online vanished.To take another example, the Sacha Baron Cohen comedies that forgo unscripted encounters with real people, “The Dictator” and “The Brothers Grimsby,” did not have the urgency and verve of his documentary comedies.Authenticity has been rightly picked apart by critics, who argue that it’s easily manufactured and so vaguely defined as to be meaningless. And yet, its power and influence on audiences remains undeniable. Authenticity is part of the popularity of stand-up, with comics performing in characters bearing their names and likenesses. And when a standup does something that seems at odds with his persona, the public’s fascination is intense. See John Mulaney, a squeaky-clean comic who recently became a staple of tabloid coverage after drug rehab, divorce and news of a new girlfriend and baby on the way. “You know your life has gone a little downhill when you announce that you’re having a baby, and you get mixed reviews,” he joked at a recent show.Wilson gets at the enduring power of the real in an origin story of sorts in which he describes being denied entry into a Dungeons and Dragons group as a kid and rebelling against fantasy. “When I watched fiction, I could never suspend disbelief and fully immerse myself in the world.” I suspect he’s not the only one.And yet, in the same episode, he tries to change, searching out the value in fantasy (“If you only think about stuff that already exists, the world will never change”) and even recording his dreams. One is of a laundromat where the washers and dryers are replaced by stoves. In one oddly magical coup de théâtre, he actually builds this business, then trains his camera on New Yorkers cracking up and marveling at this bizarre new addition to the neighborhood.It’s a bizarre stunt, proudly random, but also, what a perfect joke for this boundary-blurring genre: Actually making your dream come true. More

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      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More

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      Denis O’Brien, Force in Ex-Beatle’s Film Company, Dies at 80

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      He and George Harrison created Handmade Films to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” Other successes followed, but the partnership ended badly.Denis O’Brien, who with George Harrison, the former Beatle, founded a production company that made several audacious hit movies, beginning with “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” in 1979, before the partnership and the company’s fortunes soured, died on Friday in Swindon, west of London. He was 80.His daughter Kristen O’Brien said the death, in a hospital, was caused by intra-abdominal sepsis.Mr. O’Brien became Mr. Harrison’s business manager in 1973, hired to bring some stability to Mr. Harrison’s financial affairs, which had been muddled since the Beatles broke up four years earlier. And when Mr. Harrison’s friend Eric Idle, of the Monty Python comedy troupe, went to Mr. Harrison with a problem in 1979, it was Mr. O’Brien who nudged Mr. Harrison into producing movies.Monty Python had begun work on a follow-up to its 1975 hit, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The new movie was a satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah. Mr. Idle’s problem was that EMI, the entertainment conglomerate that had been financing the new movie, had gotten cold feet and pulled out just as production was gearing up. He asked if Mr. Harrison could help financially, and Mr. Harrison in turn consulted Mr. O’Brien.“Denis called me back a few days later and said, ‘OK, I think I know how to do it: We’ll be the producers,’” Mr. Harrison told The Advertiser of Australia in 1986. “He was laughing because he knew that my favorite movie was ‘The Producers’” — the Mel Brooks comedy — “which I’d watched over and over.”Mr. Harrison, putting up as collateral his estate in Henley-on-Thames, England, provided some $4 million to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” It was the first release of Handmade Films, the production company that he and Mr. O’Brien created. As Mr. Idle told the story, Mr. Harrison had a simple reason for financing the film: He wanted to see the movie.“At $4 million, this is still the most anyone has ever paid for a movie ticket,” Mr. Idle wrote in an essay in The Los Angeles Times in 2004.In his telling, Mr. O’Brien had actually structured the project assuming that the film would lose money and that it could be a tax write-off; instead, it became a hit and a beloved entry in the annals of comedy films. Time Out recently ranked it No. 3 on its list of the 100 greatest comedy movies of all time, trailing only “Airplane!” and “This Is Spinal Tap.”With “Brian,” Handmade Films was off on a run of quirky critical and often financial successes, including “The Long Good Friday” (1980), a crime drama with Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren; “Time Bandits” (1981), directed by Terry Gilliam of the Python troupe and featuring other Pythons; the noir drama “Mona Lisa” (1986), another vehicle for Mr. Hoskins; and the comedy “Withnail & I,” which became a sort of cult classic and was ranked No. 7 on that Time Out list.Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison were executive producers on these and numerous other Handmade films, and their early successes were credited with helping to revive the moribund British film industry. They shared a taste for offbeat scripts.“We tend to do movies that come to us because no one else wants to make them,” Mr. Harrison told Newsweek in 1987.That was certainly the case with “Time Bandits,” a hard-to-categorize movie about time-traveling dwarves that they had trouble getting distributed, securing a deal with the independent Avco Embassy Pictures only after the major studio distributors had declined.“There were any number of majors who walked out of the screenings,” Mr. O’Brien told The Los Angeles Times in November 1981, just after the film had enjoyed a robust opening weekend.But Handmade’s Midas touch didn’t last. Some of its movies were costly bombs, most famously “Shanghai Surprise” (1986), a widely panned adventure yarn that starred Madonna and Sean Penn.By the 1990s the company was in financial trouble, and Mr. Harrison soon turned on his longtime partner, accusing him in a 1995 lawsuit of mishandling his money. A court later awarded Mr. Harrison more than $11 million. When Mr. O’Brien sought to declare bankruptcy, Mr. Harrison tried to block that declaration.In 2001, when Mr. Harrison, by then ill with cancer, did not show up to give a deposition in that court challenge, a bankruptcy judge dismissed the case. Mr. Harrison died later that year at 58.In the years since, Mr. O’Brien took most of the criticism for the collapse of Handmade, which was sold in 1994 to a Canadian concern. In a rare interview, with The Belleville News-Democrat of Illinois in 1996, Mr. O’Brien, who lived in the St. Louis area at the time, gave his own interpretation.“As long as we were successful, we had a wonderful relationship,” he said of Mr. Harrison.“The money is not the important aspect here,” he added. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it were a dollar or a million dollars. It’s George not knowing how to accept failure or take responsibility for it.”Ms. O’Brien, his daughter, used to visit Mr. Harrison’s estate with her father as a child, playing in the elaborate gardens that were Mr. Harrison’s pride and joy. The falling-out, she said by email, was painful for her father.“I know he felt just as hurt and betrayed as I am sure Harrison felt,” she said.Eric Idle, center, in a scene from “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). A satire about a man who is mistaken for the Messiah, it was the first movie produced by Handmade Films.Python (Monty) PicturesDenis James O’Brien was born on Sept. 12, 1941, in St. Louis. His father, Albert, worked for Ralston Purina, where he rose to president; his mother, Ruth (Foster) O’Brien, was office manager for an interior-decorator shop as well as a homemaker.Mr. O’Brien played basketball at Webster Groves High School, near St. Louis, before earning a bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University and a law degree at Washington University in St. Louis.He worked with the Paris law firm Coudert Frères from 1967 to 1969, then held finance positions at N.M. Rothschild & Sons and the EuroAtlantic Group, working out of London.In 1971 he began advising the comic actor Peter Sellers, who recommended Mr. O’Brien to Mr. Harrison, a friend.Mr. Harrison was known to enjoy Pythonesque humor, but Mr. O’Brien also had a sense of impishness. Michael Palin, one of the Pythons, recalled by email that Mr. O’Brien used to call him up and pretend to be Mr. Sellers. Funny accents were a favorite gag — Kristen O’Brien said that when she or her sister, Laura, would call their father, they would sometimes find themselves speaking to “Fritz the German.”On “Life of Brian,” Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Harrison let the Pythons do the filmmaking, but Mr. O’Brien later became more involved in the creative side of movies he was financing. His detractors said this had contributed to the company’s downfall; however, the screenwriter Stephen Rivele (“Ali,” “Nixon”), who with his writing partner, Chris Wilkinson, wrote seven scripts for Handmade in its later years (though none were produced), said his experience with Mr. O’Brien had been positive.“On every draft, he gave careful, handwritten notes, which were always as perceptive as they were polite,” Mr. Rivele said by email. “He had very keen insights and original ideas which invariably made the scripts better.”Mr. O’Brien moved back to England in 2008 after living near St. Louis for a time. At his death he lived in Little Somerford. He was married four times, most recently to Phyllida Riddell O’Brien, who died in 2019. In addition to his daughters — who are from his first marriage, to Karen Lazarus — he is survived by a brother, Douglas.Ms. O’Brien said that in the last year her father had been showing signs of dementia, which seemed to alter his memory of his relationship with Mr. Harrison.“He seemed to have forgotten there was ever a falling-out,” she said, “and in this last year he loved to hear George’s music, and it would transport him back to some really good times in his life. He had nothing but good memories left.” More

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      ‘The Real Charlie Chaplin’ Review: Not Enough Funny Business

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      The documentary attempts to restore a sense of mystery to Chaplin’s life and work, but the filmmakers mostly run through a well-trodden timeline.The biographical documentary “The Real Charlie Chaplin” looks to restore a sense of mystery to its beyond-famous subject. The filmmakers, Peter Middleton and James Spinney, mostly run through the well-trodden timeline of Charlie Chaplin’s life and fame — from poverty to ubiquity to exile in Switzerland — but they keep up a wondering, questing approach.Narrated by the actress Pearl Mackie (“Doctor Who”), the film maintains a sprightly tempo, trying out angles on Chaplin: his technique of working out comedy bits and scenes on camera; the story of an impersonator named Charlie Aplin; his satire of Adolf Hitler in “The Great Dictator”; and his virtuosic creation, the Little Tramp, which is linked to the star’s impoverished upbringing in South London. There is also commentary by the actor and director Mack Sennett, the actress Virginia Cherrill (star of “City Lights”), and Lita Grey Chaplin, who worked for Chaplin at 12 years old and married him at 16.The film features two dramatizations of audio interviews by lip-syncing actors (a method the directors also used in “Notes on Blindness”). In one chat, Chaplin imparts behind-the-scenes tidbits to Life magazine at his Swiss mansion; in the other, an older neighbor in South London reminisces about Charlie to Kevin Brownlow (who himself co-directed the important three-part 1983 series “Unknown Chaplin”). There’s also a recreation of a contentious press conference from 1947.Middleton and Spinney address Chaplin’s romantic scandals but sympathetically dwell on his persecution by anti-Communists in the United States. The tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.The Real Charlie ChaplinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters, and on Showtime platforms Dec. 11. More

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      Meg Stalter Rejoices With Dolly Parton and a Loyal Chihuahua

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      The comedian talks about banishing the worst of 2021 in Amazon’s “Yearly Departed,” while celebrating the best in real life.Meg Stalter is famously her own biggest fan — if not you, then who? — but even she has been a little awed by her recent success.Her live comedy shows sell out in minutes. She stole scenes in her first acting gig as an ebulliently inept assistant to a talent agent on HBO Max’s “Hacks.”Now she is laying the worst of 2021 to rest. On Dec. 23 she’ll bid farewell to “hot vaxx summer” in a flirty-girl get-up, in the second edition of the Amazon annual special “Yearly Departed.”The hyperchatty Stalter was star-struck by a lineup of fellow comics that included Yvonne Orji, Chelsea Peretti and Dulcé Sloan. Then Jane Fonda walked onto the set to shoot her segment.“No one could talk,” she said. “We were all drooling and I think she thought we were weird because at first we couldn’t speak. And she was like, ‘Is everything OK?’”In a word, very.But after paying her dues in comedy for eight years, Stalter sees her ascent during the pandemic as bittersweet.“Everything is starting to happen now and it’s really strange to be so worried about other people — we’ve experienced so much devastation — and also to stop and be like, ‘How lucky am I to be living my dream right now?’” she said. “I guess that’s what life is. You have to just embrace the good parts, even when it’s scary and hard.”Calling from London, where she was making her British stand-up debut at the Soho Theater, Stalter did an impromptu riff on her own Top 10 of 2021, from Dolly Parton’s inclusiveness to the joy of private karaoke rooms. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Dolly PartonI’ve listened to her every year, but especially this last year. She is the best celebrity because she feels, to me at least, that she just supports everyone. She’s the true meaning of a Christian because she loves God, and then she loves people, and she accepts everyone for who they are — which is what we should have all learned this year, just to love each other and take care of each other.I’m somebody who grew up in church and doesn’t go now. I’m this bisexual person who still believes in God. Dolly doesn’t have any judgment on anyone else’s life, but still keeps some of the beliefs that she grew up with.2. The “Free Britney” MovementMy friends and I are so happy for her. Everyone always knew that she didn’t have control over her life, so it was really powerful and exciting to see her now get control. We’re celebrating — and it’s her birthday today! I bet she’s somewhere strange with her boyfriend, like dancing on a boat.3. TakeoutI’d love to cook more, but I am addicted to ordering takeout or Grubhub or Postmates. In London, I haven’t been able to figure out their ordering food apps. It’s like moving to a different planet.4. Instagram LiveWhen the pandemic started, I did a bunch. Every night I would do a different crazy-themed one. I’d be like, “OK, we’re going to Paris tonight.” And then I’d decorate my apartment with stuff that I could find that made it look like Paris. It was a way for me to connect to other people. I was in New York alone, really scared, and I felt like the only thing keeping me sane was doing that at night.5. High-Waisted JeansThere’s something really classic about wearing a good pair of high-waisted jeans. I like a plain shirt and jeans during the day, and then wearing this beautiful gown at night for a show. That’s really appealing to me. I think both are a little bit of structure that we didn’t have during quarantine, because we were wearing sweatpants.6. Time With FamilyMy family is truly everything to me. When would we ever have spent this much time in the same house as when we quarantined together? It was really lifesaving to be laughing in the same house again.7. “The Office”It’s one of my comfort shows. I watched it a lot this year. It still holds up. The dinner party episode is my favorite. The boss invites people to come to dinner at his house and he’s being very passive-aggressive with his girlfriend. Either people think it’s the funniest episode of TV or they’re like, “I can’t even watch it.” It’s kind of my sense of humor.8. Dining in Restaurants AgainSomething I really was missing in quarantine was the feeling of being at a table with all of your friends and everyone’s laughing and you don’t even remember why and everyone’s talking over each other. It’s exciting that we are experiencing that again slowly. Every hangout feels precious and thrilling.9. Private Karaoke RoomsLast night I did a private karaoke room with a couple of friends, and we had the best time. It felt safe. We just sang for hours. It makes sense for it to be more popular now than it was. My friend was on a trip and he did a solo karaoke room. I don’t know if I would like that or not. I like to be in front of an audience, even if it’s three friends.10. Quarantine AnimalsI feel like everyone should have a pet now. I think it’s lifesaving. I have a Chihuahua who’s 15 years old. She was a family dog, but she came to live with me during quarantine and I am attached to her. Animals are so empathetic and they can tell when you’re sad and they just really calm you down. I’m afraid of when she passes because she’s so old. My sister is begging me to get another animal, but I feel like my dog doesn’t want me to get another dog. She likes to be alone with me. More