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    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Ready to Sell Out,’ Mike Epps Moves Past the Beefs

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      His new special nods at his past resentment of Kevin Hart and others. It’s part of a stand-up tradition of feuds like the ones fueled by Katt Williams.Mike Epps may be the only stand-up comic alive who’s upset that Katt Williams didn’t insult him.In a now notorious, wildly viral three-hour interview with Shannon Sharpe (59 million views and counting) last month, the comic Katt Williams fired salvos at a festival’s worth of comics including Kevin Hart, Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer. Then came the response videos, the counterattacks, the commentary. Epps, unmentioned by Williams, said he was jealous. “Say something bad about me,” he pleaded in a video. “I need the press.”Of all the gifted stand-ups to emerge from the “Def Comedy Jam” scene of the 1990s, Epps is the one most likely to find humor in failure, minor humiliation, missing the boat. He understands that comedy is more about losing than winning. “I know you guys see me in the movies, but the money’s gone,” he tells an Arizona crowd in his new Netflix special, “Ready to Sell Out,” released Tuesday. Then he jokes: Why else would he be in Phoenix?Pacing the stage in a brown leather jacket and new sneakers, Epps is unquestionably a star, with credits in film (“Next Friday”) and television (“The Upshaws”), not to mention three previous specials on Netflix. But part of his persona is that he makes poor decisions. “I tried to be Muslim but got caught with a ham sandwich three days in,” he once joked.Hailing from Indianapolis, Epps is quick to tell you that he dropped out of high school and spent time in jail. He explains to the crowd in his new hour that he made all his movies on cocaine, and while he is not boasting, the way he relates his drug stories make a mockery of righteousness about addiction. “When I be doing coke,” he says, then slightly stammers and starts again: “When I used to do coke.” Then his eyebrows dance.Onstage, Epps convincingly plays that rascal who has charmed his way out of trouble. Sometimes, his charisma is a crutch. His writing can coast, especially early in this hour when he seems to be at his most generic, doing pandering or familiar jokes about prison rape, fat girls and code-switching. His most surprising moments are not punchlines, but when he says something that could in different hands come off as serious, like when he mentions he’s been pretending to dislike white people for 40 years. There’s also a moodier side to him that you get peeks of in his stand-up but that probably deserves fuller expression.His personal material is where this is most evident, especially in his commitment to digging into his own flaws, to celebrating the screw-ups in life. He pulls this off with an unexpected, even religious conviction. How is this for a comically counterintuitive defense of doing the wrong thing: “Give God a chance to keep working with you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Dating Woes? Nina Conti Has the Answer, or at Least Some Jokes

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      In “The Dating Show,” the British comedian and ventriloquist initiates close encounters of the potentially romantic kind. Laughs will definitely ensue.Meaningful, long-lasting connections can take a while to form, but when Nina Conti met her future partner-in-crime, she knew they were simpatico right away.“It was one of those moments where I felt very grounded as soon as I saw his face,” Conti, a British performer and writer, said in a video conversation. “It was the chemistry between my personality and something so cozy about him. You can put him in a handbag, no problem.”It might be worth mentioning that the face in question belongs to Monkey, the puppet that has been Conti’s main scene partner for most of her nearly 25 years as a ventriloquist.“You can actually project anything onto that face,” she said. “Wisdom is what I choose to project onto it. When I look at him, I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch. But it’s weird because onstage it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Creating and sustaining personal relationships seems to matter to Conti, who inherited the dummy collection of her lover and mentor, the theater maker Ken Campbell, after he died in 2008. (She explored that grief-stricken time in the 2012 documentary “Her Master’s Voice,” which also follows her to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky.) Now, close encounters of the potentially romantic kind are at the center of “The Dating Show,” which Conti is performing at SoHo Playhouse through March 2.Monkey, however, is not her main collaborator in that piece — the audience is.“I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch,” Conti said of Monkey. “Onstage, it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      ‘The Vince Staples Show’ Is Part Art House, Part ‘Home Improvement’

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      The hip-hop star’s wit has long shone in his critically acclaimed music and on social media. Now, it is the center of his new Netflix sitcom.Vince Staples is not someone you would describe as “excitable.” During a recent conversation about his new Netflix sitcom, “The Vince Staples Show,” his deliberate drawl remained steady throughout. But his clear pride in the series, out Thursday, broke through his placid exterior a few times, such as when he talked about the cameo by the high-living rapper Rick Ross or the show’s Swedish film influences. He also knows that the mere fact of its existence is exceptional.“I don’t think there are many people who have been able to write and produce and star in their first television show, on a network that’s this big, that comes from where I come from,” Staples, 30, said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles.Staples said he had ambitions to make his own show since he released his debut album, “Summertime ’06,” in 2015. On that LP and the four that followed, Staples wove stories about his upbringing in Long Beach with a sardonic delivery — a perspective that proved to be his through line between multiple mediums. His interviews and social media posts, in which he casts off irreverent one-liners and blunt social critique, have generated enough material for greatest hits collections.Staples made his acting debut in 2015 playing an inept sidekick in the comic coming-of-age film “Dope”; he has since starred in other movies, including the 2023 “White Men Can’t Jump” reboot, and in series like “Lazor Wulf,” an animated comedy on Adult Swim. He’s been able to incorporate some of his wit and other aspects of his personality in more recent roles, like the deadpan but well-meaning romantic interest he plays in “Abbott Elementary,” opposite the show’s creator Quinta Brunson.Staples, right, has acted in films including the 2023 reboot of “White Men Can’t Jump.”Hulu“The Vince Staples Show,” which counts Staples and Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) among its executive producers, is a more idiosyncratic kind of sitcom. In the world of the series, in which Staples plays a fictionalized version of himself wiggling through day-in-the-life predicaments, a trip to the amusement park becomes a treacherous sojourn and gun-culture satire runs alongside physical comedy. It’s part art house, but Staples insists it’s also just him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      How Taylor Tomlinson Nailed the Closing Joke in her Netflix Special

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      Images: The New York Times (Taylor Tomlinson in Boston, Dallas, Tucson and Seattle); Margaret Norton/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images (Bob Newhart); Martin Mills/Getty Images (Shelley Berman); Cable Stuff Productions (George Carlin “Complaints and Grievances”); Columbia Pictures (Richard Pryor “Live on the Sunset Strip”); Netflix (Taylor Tomlinson “Have It All”).Produced by: Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. Video editor: Caroline Kim. Senior video producer: Jeesoo K. Park. Production manager: Caterina Clerici. Additional production: Shane O’Neill, Rumsey Taylor, Josh Williams and Lucky Benson. Cinematography: Allie Humenuk, April Kirby, Stephanie Rose and Emily Rhyne. Additional cinematography: Manuel López Cano and Alex Miller. Additional editing: Stephanie Goodman and Alicia Desantis. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Jon Stewart Returns to His Old ‘Daily Show’ Seat

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      On Monday night, the longtime host of the Comedy Central news satire kicked off his new tenure in classic form.Jon Stewart returned on Monday night as host of “The Daily Show,” the Comedy Central news satire he turned into a cultural force before leaving in August 2015. It was the beginning of a plan, announced in January, that will bring Stewart back to the show on Mondays through the presidential election. He will also serve as an executive producer.“Why am I back?” he said. “I have committed a lot of crimes. From what I understand, talk show hosts are granted immunity — it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but take it up with the founders.”Stewart’s first night back found him grayer — at one point he used his own wizened face as a prop in a joke about the presidential candidates’ ages. But he was otherwise in classic form.Opening with “Now where was I,” Stewart mixed silliness and absurd, often self-deprecating, jokes with righteous indignation as he kicked off the 2024 edition of one of the show’s signature franchises, its “Indecision” election coverage. Proposed titles, he said, included “Indecision 2024: American Demockracy”; “Indecision 2024: Electile Dysfunction”; and “Indecision 2024: Antiques Roadshow.” He riffed, from his familiar left-leaning perspective, on the Super Bowl and the Taylor Swift conspiracy theories that surrounded it.“It’s almost like the right’s ridiculous obsession with politicizing every aspect of American life ruins everything,” he said.Later he anchored a bit that found the show’s correspondents Ronny Chieng, Desi Lydic, Michael Kosta and Dulce Sloan reporting from the same diner, a goof on the campaign coverage trope. They and Jordan Klepper, who did a desk bit, will take turns hosting the show Tuesdays through Thursdays. The guest was Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Second City Expands to New York

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      The improv comedy institution is under new ownership after missteps, and now it has a gleaming new home in Williamsburg. From the very beginning of the improv theater Second City, its name made clear that it wasn’t a New York institution and didn’t aspire to be.But after 65 years, the Chicago-based institution that has strongly influenced modern comedy is opening an outpost on Monday in Brooklyn, in what is the First City. It’s a seemingly counterintuitive time to expand. Improv, once a thriving part of the comedy scene in New York, is at an ebb, and the company itself has been through tough times.Two weeks before the lights were set to officially go up, Ed Wells, Second City’s chief executive, showed off its new 12,000-square-foot home on North Ninth Street in Williamsburg even as he acknowledged the headwinds facing the expansion.There is a 190-seat main stage theater with a wraparound mezzanine and a 50-seat black box theater for student shows. A training center with classes for amateurs as well as a career-track conservatory program. The Bentwood restaurant, named after the chair that Second City actors use onstage, sometimes as a prop.Wells said that the company was drawn to Williamsburg partly for its demographic mix. “You have a large local population that is looking for entertainment and nightlife and culinary experiences,” he said, noting that it is also popular with tourists. “You’re telling local New York stories that appeal to New Yorkers, but also appeal to the people that are coming to hear New York stories.”The city’s improv scene shrank during the pandemic when the Upright Citizens Brigade closed its New York theater and training center in 2020; the Magnet and the Pit also scaled back. Lockdowns were one culprit, but the financial model was also called into question. In 2020, Second City faced economic problems as well as new criticism about the company’s lack of diversity and inclusion. In an open letter, company leaders wrote, “We are prepared to tear it all down and begin again.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Brian McConnachie, Humor Writer ‘From Another Planet,’ Dies at 81

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      A contributor to National Lampoon, “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV,” he had a patrician presence that belied a whimsical and sometimes anarchic wit.Brian McConnachie, who brought absurdist humor to three comedy touchstones of the 1970s and ’80s — National Lampoon magazine and the NBC television series “Saturday Night Live” and “SCTV Network” — died in hospice care on Jan. 5 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Ann (Crilly) McConnachie, said.Mr. McConnachie — who stood 6-foot-5 and often dressed in a bow tie, suit and saddle shoes — had an elegant, patrician presence that set him apart from the wilder, more disheveled writers (most of them men) who often surrounded him.“Look, if you told me that he had been a welcomed member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he was there with James Thurber, I’d get that,” Alan Zweibel, an original “S.N.L.” writer who worked with Mr. McConnachie, said in a phone interview. “The rest of us were hooligans.”Yet even if he appeared to be more of a grown-up than other writers in the Lampoon and “S.N.L.” orbits, Mr. McConnachie’s laid-back, whimsical style — with some anarchic, disturbed twists — fit in well with the other writers’ contributions.“If the story of the National Lampoon were a script by Rod Serling,” Rick Meyerowitz, a leading illustrator there, wrote in “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” (2010), his history of the magazine, “the main character would have been Brian McConnachie, a man who his colleagues were convinced was from another planet.”In addition to writing for National Lampoon, Mr. McConnachie appeared in its “1964 High School Yearbook Parody,” among other places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Try Stand-Up for the First Time

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      Delivering a deluge of hard jokes, this double act aims directly for the nostalgic pleasure centers of their fans.To hear them tell it, the origin story of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, one of our greatest comedy duos, hinges on a moment in 1994 on tour with Second City in Waco, Texas, when they met an Australian woman wearing a sling who spoke “lovingly” about the return of the dead cult leader David Koresh.The comedians turned to each other and mouthed in unison: “Let’s get out of here,” in coarser language.“I knew I had a partner for life,” Poehler said with feeling on their new Restless Leg Tour, which has set up shop at the Beacon Theater in New York through Feb 18. “And I knew,” Fey added in a drier, deeper register, “that we would be very evenly matched work friends.”The comedy double act has been making a comeback. Chris Rock and Kevin Hart just released a documentary about touring together, which ends with them onstage riffing off each other. Jim Gaffigan and Jerry Seinfeld have joined forces. But it was Steve Martin and Martin Short who kicked off this trend, with a long-running live show in which their love for each other comes through in bruising insult comedy.Poehler and Fey mount a similarly punchy, warmly hilarious variety act that aims directly for the nostalgic pleasure centers of their fans. When Fey asks if there are dads in the crowd who had either of the comics as hall passes two decades ago, many hands shoot up. If the phrase “mom jeans” makes you instantly crack up, you will love this show. Whereas Short and Martin built a roasting antagonistic relationship, this is a more affectionate and fleshed-out portrait of friendship, a study in contrasts (the musical “Wicked” is referenced more than once). Fey is all sharp edges and slashing wit, her deadpan unshakable, keeping the audience and her partner at a distance. Poehler is more vulnerable, even a bit fragile, discussing kids, trauma or aging. “My memory is like a cat: It will not come when called.”The show itself is a throw-everything-at-the-wall mess, a visually indifferent collection of parts, some that probably would have been cut or honed by a ruthless director. The stars begin in gowns and end in pajamas; they perform sharp, award show-style monologues, a freewheeling question-and-answer session and some disappointing improv, which is swallowed up in the vast theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More