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      Can Taylor Tomlinson Have It All and a Life, Too?

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      In September, the night before the comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: “Why do I feel like it’s not enough?”This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. “There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” she said.Tomlinson, 30, who undertook her first theater tour just two years ago, has emerged as one of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars in comedy, the rare young stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape. After two Netflix specials produced in her 20s (and a third premiering next month), she became the only woman to make the top 10 grossing comic tours of 2023. She performed 130 shows, more than anyone else on that list, including Kevin Hart, who topped the list. And to follow that up, she is taking over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS, debuting Jan. 16 as the host of the comedy show “After Midnight.”I followed Tomlinson for 10 months, tracking the development of her new special, periodically seeing shows and debriefing her afterward. What I saw up close is that spending the year in and out of hotels is isolating, but so is being a rapidly ascendant comic at her level of success. “There sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone my age to talk to,” Tomlinson told me.Tomlinson with Stephen Colbert when it was announced she would be taking over the late-night spot following his show.Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images“IF YOU WANT to make yourself feel sad, compare your career to Taylor’s,” Dustin Nickerson, her good friend and the opening comic throughout her recent global tour, told me, before comparing her to a five-tool player in baseball who has all the skills to be great. “Watching her this past year has been watching someone become a celebrity.”The actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder described Tomlinson as “the voice of her, of our generation,” before calling her the Taylor Swift of comedy. “She talks about universal experiences — relationships, love — but in a new way. She’s the most evolved comic out there. She’s for everyone.” Einbinder paused, adding: “It’s hard to be for everyone.”Tomlinson is too modest (and a die-hard Swiftie) to accept the comparison to the pop star, but it’s a useful one. Just as Swift established herself in country music, Tomlinson, another blond, wholesome-seeming prodigy, began in a conservative niche: the church circuit. Both Taylors are prolific artists whose work resonates with broad swaths of people through personal stories, sometimes about ex-boyfriendsTomlinson began working on her new hour focusing on comedy about being single after many years of serial monogamy. Then she started seeing someone, so she incorporated him until they broke up, which she told me was inevitable because she was working on new material and Swift was putting out an album. “All the signs were there,” she joked. “Those are my horsemen of the apocalypse.”After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.Around the time of the Radio City performance, she was interviewing for “After Midnight,” a show built on a rotating cast of comics joking about memes or viral stories. She got the job in November, becoming one of the few comedians hosting a nightly show on network television, the kind of plum gig that has long been a Holy Grail for entertainers. Yet when the show’s producers asked her in an interview why she wanted the job, Tomlinson said she responded: “I’m kind of lonely.”She has been open in her comedy about mental health issues, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and she has a joke where she says every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in during high school. Mixing goofy act-outs with punch-line-dense jokes filled with surprising pivots, Tomlinson makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny. Her sets never go long without a laugh.Offstage, she has a more patient and coolly professional manner, impeccably grateful, remarkably free of kvetching and trash talk. She enjoys analyzing the mechanics of comedy and is at her most expansive there, in the details. But there is a certain haunted quality that periodically emerges, a past hovering over her present, one that she has been excavating in therapy.“I stopped talking to my father last year,” she said in a club in 2022, then noticed something shift in the crowd: “People get really sad when you say you don’t talk to your parents anymore because they wish they had the balls to do it.”When I first met her, backstage at a February show in Boston, that bit was gone and she said she missed some of the heavier subject matter she used to include in her set, without being more specific. Some of that would creep back in, on the margins. One funny bit refers to taking a boyfriend to meet her parents as visiting “the scene of the crime.”Raised in a conservative Methodist family north of San Diego, she has talked about the scars left by her mother’s death from cancer when Tomlinson was 8. It bonded her to her siblings, all of whom remain close. Brinn, two years younger than Taylor, the oldest, told me by phone that Taylor took the role of “surrogate parent.”When the producers of the new late-night show “After Midnight” asked Tomlinson why she wanted the hosting job, she said she told them, “I’m kind of lonely.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMany comics come off as the reckless kid looking for attention, but part of what makes Tomlinson’s comic persona different is that she projects the image of a responsible young adult who can’t help but reveal the insecurities and bubbling emotions beneath. In the weeks before taping her special, she lost her voice, and only a few days before, her doctor told her she had mono. She took a steroid and did the show, brushing aside any possibility of postponing. “A lot of people have pushed through far worse,” she told me not long after. “Maggie Smith had cancer when she filmed ‘Harry Potter.’ Like, I’m fine.”Her father has lately been a more remote figure in her comedy specials than her mother. He was, however, critical to her stand-up origin story. He not only drove her to a comedy class that got her started on this path. He also took the class with her when she was 16. In the show at the end of the course, with an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church, she got the closing spot. When asked why her father didn’t, she said matter-of-factly: “’Cause I was better.” Sensing how this might come off, she added: “Look, he can sing and I can’t.”SINCE SHE WAS YOUNG, Tomlinson has known she wanted to do something creative, be an actor, a writer. But that first show was when, as she described it, the “real me” came out. Her best friend, Courtney Lem, was one of the audience members sitting on folding chairs that day and described the show as a revelation. “She was someone else, not nervous or shy,” Lem told me. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”One of the jokes Tomlinson told eventually made its way into her first late-night set on “Conan.” Its premise was that being abstinent was hard for a religious kid because “every time I miss a period, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m carrying the messiah.’”When her mother died, her father remarried 10 months later. At the time, Tomlinson didn’t think that was too soon, but as she got older, her mind-set shifted. “I’ve said to him as an adult: I wished you waited longer for us. He did not agree with me.”She described her childhood relationship with her father as rocky but felt on more solid ground after doing stand-up. “When I could do this trick, when I was a good performer, he was interested. And he was impressed. And I was somebody worth paying attention to.”In her telling, her father was a performer, a singer, who chose having a family and stable career as a teacher over pursuing his dreams. She was on the same path, she said, explaining that her entire family got married between the ages of 18 and 22. That was her plan, too. In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing standup on the side. When her future husband broke up with her, he told her that she should keep doing comedy. It’s a conversation she describes as formative, but not as much as her next boyfriend, a comic, saying she was funny but didn’t work hard enough. “He’s very funny and talented and I have a lot of jokes about him,” she said. “Got a lot of closers out of that guy.”Her career took off soon after she left school for the college stand-up circuit, which led to a stint on “Last Comic Standing.” At 23, she was booked on “Conan” and received a network development deal. Tensions between her past and future emerged. She lost a church gig over this tweet: “I’m a wild animal in bed, way more afraid of you than you of me.” She eventually quit Twitter and stopped doing church gigs.Her first exposure on Netflix, a 15-minute set in the 2018 series “The Comedy Lineup,” was a turning point for her career and her relationship with her father and stepmother. “They liked the success but they didn’t like what I was saying,” she said. “They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”Over the past year, she’s examined this part of her life in therapy and locates a lot of her trouble here. “There were times when I felt my self-worth is so tied up in this job and what I could do and why is that?” she said, then added, referring to her father, “A big part of it is I felt it impressed.”Tomlinson projects the image of a responsible young adult, even pushing through mono instead of postponing a show.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesParadoxically, Tomlinson is an introvert, uncomfortable in groups of people. Dustin Nickerson said she’s the kind of person who wants to get invited to the party but won’t attend. When asked when she’s happiest, he mulled it over before saying: when she is making a connection with one person.And yet her work has often resonated most when she digs into her own personal mess. She describes herself not as a topical or political comic, but as one who finds humor that other people can relate to by drilling down into her own life. Before putting out her second special, which dealt with mental illness and her mother’s death, she showed it to her friend Lem, who was in town to help her move stuff out of a boyfriend’s place after a breakup. Lem was amazed that she could be so open, asking, “How could you talk about this stuff?” Tomlinson recalled telling her, “I can’t really help it.”She’s trying to pick her spots more now. She describes her new special as “lighter” than her last one, though it’s vulnerable in subtle ways, like how much it ingratiates or refuses to. She said she had been more sparing about what she reveals in podcasts and interviews. And the late-night show will, she hoped, provide a stabilizing force, a home base, a community where she will once again be a parental figure of sorts. Her sibling Brinn, who just recently left the restaurant business to work for their sister, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”After she got the late-night show, Tomlinson said she heard from a lot of people, including friends and family. Asked if that included her father, she paused for several long seconds, considering her next move. Then she very politely thanked me for the question but said she would rather not talk about it.Tomlinson knows she can’t appeal to everyone, but her goal is to appeal to as many people as possible — and that makes her alert to what resonates. For a comic who cares about being relatable, success can be tricky to navigate. What will not change is how she prioritizes stand-up above all else. She agreed to take the late-night job only after being assured she would just need to shoot the show three days a week, allowing her to tour over the weekend.Ever since watching and studying comics like Kathleen Madigan and Maria Bamford in high school, she has not only connected with standup but leaned on it. She said that she first lost some religious faith when her mother died (“They told me praying would work. That shook me.”) but just as important, she said, was entering stand-up. “I was raised in this environment where if you’re not Christian, you’re probably a bad person because no one’s holding you accountable,” she said. “In clubs, I found a lot of these people are more empathetic and kinder and open-minded than people I’ve been around. Far less judgmental in the stand-up world.”Even as a late-night host, what Tomlinson sounds most excited about is the community of stand-ups. And she thinks, rightly, that the show will provide a valuable new platform for young comics. She said she wished she was more social earlier in her career. When asked if Taylor Swift’s trajectory holds any lessons, she pointed to how the musician had evolved but didn’t completely reinvent herself and cited the musician’s Eras Tour charting her different phases: “She’s still her but saying, ‘This is the place I am at right now.’”You could say that Tomlinson is now entering her late-night era. She said that when she was younger, she used to dream of being a legend; she talked about that with Lem, her friend. They saw Swift in concert together last year in Los Angeles.A few eras into the show, Tomlinson said, she turned to Lem and said, “I changed my mind. I want to be a legend.” Tomlinson cracked up reflecting on this moment, then added: “Two eras later, I was like: ‘Looks too hard. Think of the amount of stalkers.’” More

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      Jo Koy Responds to Golden Globes Criticism: ‘It’s a Tough Room’

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      In an interview on the ABC program “GMA3” the morning after the awards show, Koy said he would “be lying” if he said the criticism “doesn’t hurt.”Hosting a Hollywood awards show can be a notoriously difficult job, with its audience of image-conscious A-list celebrities on the receiving end and a large television audience scrutinizing the material in real time. After Jo Koy’s performance as the host of this year’s Golden Globes drew criticism, he acknowledged Monday that it had been “a tough room.”“Well, I had fun — you know, it was a moment that I’ll always remember,” Koy said Monday on the ABC program “GMA3,” noting that he had only had a week and a half to prepare. “It’s a tough room. And it was a hard job, I’m not going to lie. Getting that gig, and then having the amount of time that we had to prepare — that was a crash course.”At Sunday’s awards show, parts of Koy’s opening monologue seemed to fall flat in the ballroom, drawing a defensive aside from the comedian. “I got the gig 10 days ago!” he said. “You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down, I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”Koy’s material gravitated toward more standard celebrity teasing. Last year, when Jerrod Carmichael was the host, he delivered a provocative performance, immediately addressing the turmoil over a lack of Black voting members at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that ran the Golden Globes until it was dissolved.Koy’s opener did address diversity, pointing out the whiteness in the room, but it otherwise stuck with more standard fare, including a joke about Hollywood’s favorite weight loss drug. (“By the way, ‘The Color Purple’ is also what happens to your butt when you take Ozempic,” he joked.)Many of the onscreen cutaways showed tepid reactions, but the responses on social media and from some critics were harsher. (A headline in The Guardian read: “The joke’s on Jo Koy: Golden Globes host delivers a bad gig for the ages.”)Koy said in the interview that he would “be lying” if he said the criticism “doesn’t hurt.”“I hit a little moment there where I was like, ‘Ah, hosting is just a tough gig,’” Koy said. “Yes, I am a stand-up comic but that hosting position, it’s a different style.”One reaction from the crowd became an instant meme: When Koy joked that the Globes would have “fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” than N.F.L. telecasts — referring to the frequent reaction shots of her recent appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games to cheer on the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce — Swift, who was seated in the audience, looked unamused, coolly sipping from her drink. In his interview, Koy acknowledged that the joke fell “just a little flat.”So, one of the interviewers asked, if he could do it all again, would he say yes to the hosting invitation?“That’s a tough gig,” he replied, “I’m not going to lie.” More

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      Shecky Greene, High-Energy Comedy Star, Is Dead at 97

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      A Las Vegas institution, he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.Shecky Greene, a high-energy stand-up comedian who for many years was one of the biggest stars in Las Vegas, died on Sunday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 97.His daughter Alison Greene confirmed his death. Mr. Greene was a frequent guest of Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson and other television hosts, and had acting roles in movies and on television. But he never reached as wide an audience as many of his fellow comedians, probably because his humor was best experienced in full flower on a nightclub stage rather than in small doses on the small screen. In Las Vegas, though, he was an institution. A versatile entertainer of the old school — he told stories, he made faces, he ad-libbed, he did impressions, he sang — he would do just about anything for a laugh, including physical comedy so broad that it sometimes left him black and blue.He was not one to stick to a set routine. “I wasn’t an A-B-C-D comic. ‘Hello, ladies and gentlemen’ and then the next line,” he told the comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff in 2011. Audiences who went to see Shecky Greene never knew quite what to expect.“One of the greatest I ever saw in a nightclub,” his fellow comedian Pat Cooper told Mr. Nesteroff. “I saw him climb the curtain and do 20 minutes on top of the curtain! He destroyed an audience.”Some said he was at his funniest when he was angry, which was often. “He’s got to be somewhere where he hates the owner, hates the hotel,” the comedian Jack Carter once said, “so that he’s got something to go on.”He was at least as unpredictable off the stage as he was on it. He became famous not just for his act but also for his drinking binges, gambling sprees and erratic, often self-destructive behavior.“I should have been fired maybe 150 times in Las Vegas,” Mr. Greene told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996. “I was only fired 130 times.”Probably the most famous Shecky Greene story involved the time he drove his car into the fountain in front of Caesars Palace. In a 2005 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he confirmed the story, but admitted that the way he told it in his act was slightly embellished: He did not really greet the police officers who rushed to the scene with the words “No spray wax, please.” That line, he said, was suggested to him after the fact by his friend and fellow comedian Buddy Hackett.Another of his best-known jokes was also, he insisted, based on a true story. Frank Sinatra, the joke went, once saved his life. Five men were beating Mr. Greene, but they stopped when Sinatra said, “OK, boys, that’s enough.” Onstage, Mr. Greene told stories, made faces, ad-libbed, did impressions and sang. He also appeared on various television shows.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesAs amusing as the stories of Mr. Greene’s behavior were, the truth is that he had severe mental health problems, including bipolar disorder and panic attacks, which were apparently exacerbated when he developed a dependence on his prescription medication. He had other ailments as well, including cancer, and by the mid-1980s he had stopped performing.Mr. Greene, who had a family history of mental illness, went public with his condition in the 1990s and, with the help of a new therapist and new medication, gradually resumed his career. He even incorporated his illness into his shtick.“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”By 2005, although he was happily describing himself as retired, he could be persuaded to perform at private parties. In 2009 he made his first Las Vegas appearance in many years, at the Suncoast Casino, and he continued to perform occasionally in Las Vegas. As early as 1996, Mr. Greene was performing, he said, for one reason only. “I’m not in it for a career anymore,” he told The Sun. “I had my career. I’m in it to enjoy myself.”Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive. “He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”Fred Sheldon Greenfield was born on April 8, 1926, in Chicago. (In 2004 he legally changed his name to Shecky Greene, long after his professional first name had come to connote a certain kind of brash, aggressive, old-school comedian even to people who had never seen him perform.) His parents were Carl and Bessie (Harris) Greenfield. His father was a shoe salesman and his mother sold hosiery at a department store before quitting to focus on raising their three children. Mr. Greene performing on “The Hollywood Palace” television show in 1965.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesAfter serving in the Navy during World War II, he enrolled at Wright Junior College (now Wilbur Wright College) in Chicago with plans of becoming a gym teacher. But he was sidetracked by his interest in performing.He took a summer job at a resort near Milwaukee, where, he once recalled, “They paid me $20 a week and gave me a fancy title, ‘social director.’” He became a performer, he said, because the resort couldn’t afford to hire big-name acts. “I wasn’t Red Skelton,” he recalled, “but I got a few laughs.”He returned to college that September but also continued developing a comedy act and occasionally performed in nightclubs. It would be a few years before his commitment to show business became full time.He left college to accept a two-week engagement in New Orleans; that booking stretched into three years, and ended only when the nightclub burned down. Unsure of his next move, he returned to Chicago and went back to college, but left for good when the comedian Martha Raye offered him a job as her opening act in Miami.“This time,” he said in an interview for his website, sheckygreene.com, “I made up my mind: I would stick with show business. I was only 25 years old and making $500 a week. Besides, I had a silent partner to support — I had discovered how to bet the horses.”He first ventured into Nevada, then in its early days as an entertainment mecca, when the Golden Hotel in Reno hired him for four weeks in 1953. His opening-night performance so impressed the hotel’s owners that they held him over for 18 weeks and offered him a new contract, for a guaranteed $20,000 a year (the equivalent of more than $200,000 today). He was soon headlining in Las Vegas, where for one week in 1956 Elvis Presley was his opening act.Mr. Greene on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson in 1975.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesBy 1975 he was making $150,000 a week (more than $800,000 in today’s money), one of only a handful of comedians in that salary range at the time. He liked to say that he gambled most of it away, but that it didn’t matter because he had more money than God — whose weekly salary, he happened to know, was only $35,000.He was also gaining a reputation for his sometimes violent offstage behavior. A decade later, his mental health problems had brought his career to a halt.He eventually overcame those problems, for which he gave much of the credit to the support of his wife, Marie (Musso) Greene, whom he married in 1985.His first two marriages, to Jeri Drurey and Nalani Kele, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Alison, he is survived by another daughter, Dorian Hoffman — Mr. Greene and his first wife adopted both of them at birth — and by his wife. He moved to Las Vegas several years ago; previously, he had lived in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, Calif.Although destined to be remembered primarily as a Las Vegas performer, Mr. Greene had a considerable television résumé, as both a comedian and an actor.He had a recurring role on the World War II series “Combat!” in 1962 and 1963 and appeared on “The Love Boat,” “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mad About You,” as well as variety and talk shows. (He was an occasional “Tonight Show” guest host in the 1970s.) He appeared in a few movies as well, including “Splash” (1984) and Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I” (1981).Interviewed by The Washington Times in 2017, Mr. Greene looked back on his career philosophically:“Why did I do this and that? At 90 I still don’t know. Once in a while I’ll have a nice sleep. Most nights I wake up yelling, ‘Why did I do that?’“Life is strange, but if you’ve had a mixture of a life like I had, it’s all right.”Alex Traub More

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      Dave Chappelle Releases a New Netflix Special, ‘The Dreamer’

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      “The Dreamer” predictably includes trans and disabled jokes but punches down in other ways, too. Chappelle is part of a comedy elite that Gary Gulman pokes at.The wildest moment in the new Dave Chappelle special, “The Dreamer” (Netflix), arrives about two-thirds of the way through when the comic says he’s about to tell a long story. That’s not the unusual part.Some 36 years into a storied comedy career, Chappelle, 50, is better known for controversial yarns than carefully considered punchlines. At this point in the special, he tells the crowd in his hometown, Washington, D.C., that he is going to get a cigarette backstage, asks them to act as if he were finished and says he would prefer a standing ovation. He then does something I have never seen in a Netflix special: He walks off for a smoke and costume change, leaving the stage empty. He strolls back as everyone waits, politely clapping. No one stands. He sits down and even mentions that he didn’t get the standing ovation, grumpily.He could have cut that out but didn’t. Why? Was it to reveal that his crowd refused to be told what to do, how he doesn’t mind, as he said at another point, if most people didn’t laugh at some jokes? Was it to include a momentary reprieve from the self-aggrandizing tone of the hour, which begins with rock-star images of Chappelle walking to the stage in slow motion and ends with a montage of him with everyone from Bono and Mike Tyson to the Netflix C.E.O. Ted Sarandos? I have no idea, but what sticks with you in Chappelle’s sets these days is less the jokes than the other stuff, the discourse-courting jabs, the celebrity gossip, the oddball flourishes.Later, Chappelle says, “Sometimes, I feel regular.” As an example, he describes being shy at a club where a rich Persian guy surrounded by women recognizes him and the comedian imagines him telling the story of seeing Dave Chappelle the next day. The idea that this is Chappelle’s idea of regular is funny.The last time he released a Netflix special on New Year’s Eve was in 2017, which now appears to be a turning point in his career. After vanishing from popular culture for a decade, Chappelle came out with four specials that year, a radically productive run that was the start of a stand-up phase that would grow to overwhelm the memory of his great sketch show, which then dominated his legacy.“Chappelle’s Show,” now two decades ago, began with a brilliant sketch about a blind Black white supremacist named Clayton Bigsby. It was inspired in part by Chappelle’s grandfather, a blind man named George Raymond Reed, who had served on the D.C. mayor’s commission for the disabled. Reed was funny. His Washington Post obituary reported that in describing how to spell his name, he would joke: “Reed with no eyes.”Back in 2017, Chappelle began making jokes about transgender people — and he hasn’t stopped, in special after special, show after show. How you feel about this fixation is baked in, at this point. He begins his new hour with a labored trans joke, before saying he’s finished making them. (Fat chance: They are as much a part of his brand as his name on his jacket.) Then he says he has a new angle: disabled jokes. “They’re not as organized as the gays,” he says. “And I love punching down.”He covers other topics. There’s a big set piece about Chris Rock getting slapped at the Oscars, the most popular subject of 2023 in comedy, and he does some cheap racial jokes, like an elaborate bit merely meant to set up his doing an Asian voice.At one point, he tells the audience that people in comedy think he’s lazy because he’ll tell a joke for a crowd of 20,000 that makes only two or three people laugh, but they will laugh hard. He goes on to tell that joke, an impression of the dead people on the Titanic seeing the doomed OceanGate submersible coming toward them, and it’s silly and fun, a throwback to earlier days. The truth is the more common criticism you hear these days is not that Chappelle aims for a niche but that he seems to prefer making points to getting laughs.This happens to some star comics. This month, Ricky Gervais released a dutifully predictable collection of jokes about supposedly taboo subjects. That special, “Armageddon” on Netflix, makes Chappelle look fascinating and unexpected by comparison.Gervais trots out complaints about people being easily offended, before setting up bits that lean so hard on the assumption of that response that there isn’t much more to them. His fans eat it up. But what’s striking about his hour is the justifications, the defensive explanations, the spelling out of themes. Fine, make your Holocaust and pedophile jokes. But how about: Show, don’t tell.Comedy is a crowded field, but for most audiences, it’s still defined by its biggest stars. Chappelle and Gervais are part of that elite, and the distance between them and the rest of the stand-up world feels greater than ever. That growing inequity is one of the subjects of Gary Gulman’s new special, “Born on 3rd Base” (Max), a meticulously funny hour that digs into the gap between the haves and have-nots.He attacks this subject in a variety of ways, in jokes dissecting the comedy world, an inspired bit about how people order at Chipotle and a rebuttal to the argument that welfare payments destroy initiative. As different as Gulman is from Chappelle in the choice of targets, style and level of fame, they share some qualities. Gulman, 53, also likes jokes that only some will get, and he has a distinct sense of timing that insists on the crowd adjusting to him. He begins his special with the word, “Anyhow.” Is he in the middle of a thought or the end? Either way, we’re disoriented. He likes us there. He plays at his own off-kilter pace.One tactic is the stop-and-go move of slowing down to let his viewers get ahead of him. He announces he has a one-man show called “Mommy, Look,” and the title, he explains, stems from his theory of “just about every one-person show.” Then he pauses and holds, and the crowd laughter grows as they anticipate his point about the origin of the artistic impulse. “You show me a 4-year-old on a diving board to an unreceptive audience,” he says, “I will show you a theater major.”But Gulman also likes to get ahead of his audience, with language-drunk sentences, references intended to be over some heads (“bandicoot,” “paramecium”) and others that wallow in wordplay. One gets the sense that he has whole jokes that are, among other things, an excuse to say words like “burglar” or “guillotine.”This is the only special that dares to engage in this debate: What is the most pretentious suffix in the English language?You’ll have to watch to find out. But the second most pretentious, he argues, is “-esque,” before qualifying the point in the most pretentious way possible: “Unless you’re talking about something French.”“I pander to my base,” Gulman confesses, “which is librarians.” More

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      ‘Dinner for One,’ a German New Year’s TV Tradition, Moves Online

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      The British comedy short has aired annually in Germany and other European countries for decades. Now, members of Gen Z are having fun with it on social media.“OK, the butler’s setting the table,” the YouTuber Ryan Wass begins, skeptically.In his video “American Reacts to ‘Dinner for One’ (First Time Watching),” which he uploaded 11 months ago and now has 180,000 views, Wass takes a look at the beloved cult comedy short on the recommendation of one of his followers. It’s part of a longstanding tradition for the creator: On his YouTube channel “Ryan Reaction,” Wass films himself being introduced to local German idioms, customs and old movies and TV programming from the perspective of an unwitting American viewer who responds with confusion and awe.But “Dinner for One” is no ordinary slice of quirky German culture. The 18-minute, black-and-white comedy of manners, filmed in 1963, is about a quintessentially British butler orchestrating a solo birthday celebration for his 90-year-old employer, the cheery Miss Sophie (May Warden), whose closest friends and customary guests have all long since passed away. (The butler, James, played by the comedian Freddie Frinton, is obliged to fill in for the missing attendees, including quaffing each of their drinks.) It’s very British in style and setting, and, apart from a brief German introduction, the action plays out in English.“I have more questions than I did before it started,” Wass says as the screening comes to an end, burying his face in his hands. “Like, how is this a German tradition?”

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      @beac_basti Was sind so eure Vorsätze fürs neue Jahr❓ #silvester #neujahr #dinnerforone #dönerforone ♬ Originalton – Sebastian 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?  More

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      in Movies

      Tom Smothers and the John Lennon Connection

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      He was close with John Lennon, and had a sophisticated understanding of wine, politics and literature. He only played the bumpkin onstage.I read the news today, oh boy.John Lennon’s lyric popped into my head Tuesday as soon as I read the texts from my friend Marcy Carriker Smothers. The first was a photo of a guitar next to a fire and Christmas poinsettia. The second included the news. “Beautiful and peaceful passing today at 1:40P. We had a lovely Christmas.”Tom Smothers had been in hospice for months so word of his passing induced a sigh not a gasp. I thought of the “Day in the Life” lyric not because of the circumstances of his death — Tom was 86 and died of lung cancer — but because Lennon and Tom were close. At the 1969 Montreal recording of “Give Peace a Chance,” only two acoustic guitars strum along. One is held by Lennon; the other by Tom.Tom came to the antiwar movement with sad bona fides. His father was a West Pointer who said goodbye to his namesake son in 1940, before heading to the Pacific to defend liberty. He never returned.Nothing funny about that origin story. Still, through music, Tom and his younger brother, Dick, found their way to comedy and created an act that instantly impressed Jack Paar, the “Tonight” show host, who remarked in 1961, “I don’t know what you guys have but no one’s going to steal it.”Six years later, the brothers debuted “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” their seminal variety show that used comedy to satirize issues like the Vietnam War, racial politics and drugs.Despite the heavy topics, Tom came across as lighthearted and simple. During an audience question-and-answer session, a woman once asked, “Are you both married?”“No, ma’am. We’re just brothers,” Tom said.Smothers was close with John Lennon and played guitar on “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 in Montreal. In real life, Tom thought and felt deeply. He cared about social justice and the creative process. He labored over details. The biggest contradiction was Tom’s onstage persona. A classic Smothers Brothers sketch would begin with the two singing a song until Tom interrupted or screwed up the words so badly that Dick pulled the plug. This would lead to wry observations or an argument that built to a punchline. The brothers would then return to the song, providing the sketch with a natural and satisfying finish. At heart, this was character comedy with Dick playing the bass and the straight man and Tom playing the guitar and the fool.In an early episode, the brothers came out singing the Maurice Chevalier hit “Louise” while sporting boater hats. They paused to discuss the French and romance, and Tom instantly claimed familiarity. “You really know about those French wines and women?” Dick challenged Tom.“Oh I know all about that stuff.”The audience laughed, doubting his claim.Dick was not about to let Tom off the hook. “French wine — what do you know about it?” he pressed.“It gets you drunk,” Tom replied, nailing the punchline with exquisite timing.In real life, Tom knew everything about wine. For decades, he owned and operated a vineyard in Sonoma that produced award-winning merlot and cabernet sauvignon. At first, he lived in a barn on the property, then later designed a main house with a huge stone fireplace and views in every direction so that you could follow the sun throughout the day. If the hot tub could talk, it would tell spicy stories about parties in the 1960s and ’70s and probably be the only one that could remember what happened.By the time I visited Smothers-Remick Ridge Ranch, the hot tub was a place for kids to splash around. I’d first met Tom in 1988, when I was hired as a writer for the variety show’s second life. While working on the reboot, I roomed with the associate producer, Marcy Carriker, who married Tom in 1990. Their two children — Bo and Riley Rose — would play with my own two kids. Marcy co-hosted a food and wine radio show with Guy Fieri, so dinner was always delicious. After the meal, Tom would sit by the fire, reading a thick novel.Smothers played the guitar and the fool; his brother played the bass and the straight man.Mark Junge/Getty ImagesIt was a picture of domesticity that didn’t last. Soaking in wine country meant a lot of drinking, and the more Tom drank, the less fun he became. Knowing how brilliant and generous he could be, I found it painful to watch his behavior shift. If this seems harsh, I mention it because the truth mattered to Tom. Marcy and I would go on long walks to discuss the situation. We came up with a phrase that summed things up: “It’s tomplicated.”Tom and Marcy separated 15 years ago but never divorced. And when Tom grew ill, she was there for him along with their children. “They have been rocks,” Marcy texted me hours after he died. She told me that over the last few months, Tom had never had a stranger care for him. She, Bo, Riley Rose and Marty Tryon, Tom’s former road manager, watched over him.And so Tom spent a lovely Christmas Eve and Day surrounded by his family. He slipped away the next afternoon. As always, exquisite timing.I hope Tom will be remembered. He was last on TV three decades ago, so except for comedy nerds, no one under 40 would have reason to recognize him. If you’re curious, there’s a smart 2002 documentary, “Smothered,” about the brothers’ getting fired from CBS, and an excellent book by David Bianculli, “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Both the film and book reiterate what history has made clear: Tom was absolutely right about war being stupid and civil rights being worth fighting for. In his own way, he, too, defended liberty.Or try sliding down a YouTube rabbit hole where you’ll stumble over early routines from Steve Martin, whom Tom hired as a writer before encouraging him to perform. I never met an entertainer who was more respectful of other people’s talents than Tom. He adored so many fellow artists, including Harry Belafonte, Harry Nilsson, Martin Mull, and (Mama) Cass Elliot, who lights up one of my favorite sketches from the 1968-69 season.The concept is simply Elliot singing her hit “Dream a Little Dream” to Tom as he tries to fall asleep in a big brass bed. Tom doesn’t say a word but gets plenty of laughs. The bit is sweet, original, musical and funny. When you strip away the tomplications, Tom was all those things. More

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      in Theater

      Leo Reich Likes Nothing Better Than a Movie Where Nothing Happens

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      “Any movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European,” said the comedian, who has a special on Max. “Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town.”Like a lot of comedians, Leo Reich works out the kinks in his stand-up routines by pacing the floor and talking to himself.During the pandemic, that process reached a fever pitch.“I think that’s where a lot of the angst in the show was from,” he said about “Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!,” his Gen Z lampoon now streaming on Max, “the fact that I was at home in the childhood bedroom where I’d always lived with all of my old posters on the wall, just furious about the state of affairs that I was finding myself in.”Under that strain, what began as a confessional, rather traditional set eventually morphed, he recalled in a video call from London, into a kind of self-parody “of the worst excesses of my own personality.” During the new set, Reich, 25, flop-sweats across the stage in short shorts and black eye makeup.“It’s so funny having done a show that tries to send up on some level that whole idea of the fetishization of young talent,” he said, before elaborating on snobbery, eating animals and the freedom of humiliation, “and then essentially become what I was trying to lovingly criticize.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Two Pints of Beer and a CigaretteIt can be hot sun, Coronas and a Camel Blue. It can be dead of winter, subzero temperatures, two pints of Guinness and a Marlboro Red. What I will say is that after you’ve had two pints of beer and a cigarette, that is actually scientifically peak physical performance that a human being can get to. You will never feel as good as that in any other context.2Bird Watching and Pondering the Natural WorldThere was a period when I was 9 to 15 where I was a really obsessive bird watcher. Not to get religious about this, but sometimes in our lives we have to sit back and be in awe of the majesty of nature. It also makes you think, “God, I really know nothing about the universe because this little guy is dressed in bright, bright blue, and there is no possible explanation for that that I could possibly make sense of.”3Bad Sketch ComedyI passionately believe that perfection is the enemy of joy. To watch someone onstage do something that is on some level quite humiliating, but have the absolute best time doing it, you get a feeling of freedom and human connection that is unparalleled.4Movies Where Nothing HappensAny movie by Alexander Payne, Lena Dunham, Greta Gerwig, anything European. Anything where a woman with ennui wanders around a medieval town and runs her hand along a curtain. Something where someone wonders, “Is this all there is to life?” That’s perfect to me.5OffalIf you’re going to kill and eat an animal, you should do it in the style of a Renaissance king and make sure that you eat the whole thing. The perfect intersection of that for me is eating a liver, a kidney, some intestines — something where you truly cannot hide away from the fact that what you are doing out of your own free will as a human being is biting into something that was once alive.6Snobbery and Reverse SnobberySome things I’m a snob about: superhero films, interior design, restaurants, grammar, weirdly. Things I’m not a snob about: coffee, wine, reality TV, pop music. You’ve got to choose a couple of things where you’re like, “Listen up, I know more than you about this.” And some other things where you’re like, “Don’t over-intellectualize it. I’m just here to have fun.”7PiningYou don’t need any material reason or justification for it. You can pine after literally anyone, and your brain and heart will create the most gorgeous back story out of absolutely nothing that will sustain you, in my experience, years at a time.8Dancing to ’80s PopI mean, if you are dancing in a club that’s got lasers in it and, I don’t know, some Pet Shop Boys, come on. It rewires your brain forever.9Novels Where Nothing HappensThe person wandering around the city is probably from the ’20s or ’30s, and they’re doing something like planning a party or collecting a package. The whole novel is a metaphor for civilizational decline. I’m talking “Mrs. Dalloway” — almost any novel by Virginia Woolf will work for this. I’m talking Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education.” Something that if someone saw you reading it, they’d go, “Oh, the guy’s an intellectual.” Little do they know you don’t understand a thing that’s going on.10Saying Something StupidI think that one of the nicest things in the world is to embarrass yourself in a social setting and just accept that it’s happened. More

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      in Music

      Sandra Bernhard Still Has Plenty to Say

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      Sandra Bernhard was early for a midmorning Chelsea coffee date, already perched at the cafe with a hefty cup. She sat not inside at the reserved table, but outdoors in a street shed, in full view of passers-by. She waved at neighbors and greeted her dog walker in a barrage of “honeys” and blown kisses, trilling a song to one of her charges — “Regiiiina” — that stopped the puggle (and some other pooches) in their tracks.The comedian, actor and singer has lived in Chelsea for more than two decades, raising her daughter, Cicely, now 25 and a Brooklynite, there with her partner, Sara Switzer, a writer. Since the ’80s, she has been an emblem of the city’s downtown cool, a spiky transgressive with enough cultural currency to set Broadway aflame with a one-woman show. She sold a Los Angeles home around 2010, and now, unlike most celebrities of her vintage, has only the one local address. (“I don’t need three country houses,” she said.)It’s only natural, then, that Bernhard’s year-end shows at Joe’s Pub, which she started performing in 2005, are as much a part of the city’s holiday season as Midtown gridlock and glittery department store displays — which Bernhard has a stake in too. This year, Cicely, an artist, worked on the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, her mother said with pride.Her daughter also inspired a musical choice in “Easy Listening,” the latest Joe’s Pub series: a Lana Del Rey song; Cicely had been a fan in high school. “She would apply the winged liquid eyeliner, and it got everywhere, so that drove us crazy,” Bernhard said. “But now I’m really into Lana, and I do really get it.”That cover was all Bernhard, 68, would reveal about “Easy Listening,” which runs Dec. 26 through New Year’s Eve. It’s billed as a tour of her musical inspirations, including the Supremes, Tina Turner and Joni Mitchell, and will also include all new material and comedic riffs (which she wouldn’t share either). Bernhard likes to keep it fresh for her many returning fans. “There’s been so much to write about — not all of it pleasant,” she said. “But the trick is to find a way into it that makes it sort of ironic, or madcap.”Politics get only sidelong attention. Focusing directly on the state of the world, she said, “becomes very intense and melancholy and a little bit depressing. That’s just not my thing at all.” Even in her recent roles on “Pose” and “American Horror Story: NYC” — both set in the 1980s New York demimonde she inhabited — she brought a righteous earthiness, with some joie de vivre.“You had to have a little bit of an edge,” Bernhard said of her early days, “otherwise I would have been crushed.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesAndy Cohen, the Bravo executive, is a longtime friend, a fan — he’s hardly ever missed a Joe’s Pub gig, he said — and an enabler, featuring Bernhard frequently on his late-night show “Watch What Happens Live” and giving her a home on his Sirius radio channel. “The things that go through her filter are so specific and unique,” he said, whether she’s reminiscing about her starter job as a manicurist in 1970s Beverly Hills, or taking on the series “Yellowstone” — “which is a show I don’t watch,” Cohen said, “but I still want to hear her riff on it.”“She has her own rhythm, she has her own language — I think she’s something of a poet,” he added. And as a cultural figure, “I don’t think she gets enough credit.”Bernhard has clocked a lot of cutting-edge moments: A generation before Ali Wong earned acclaim for doing raunchy comedy while pregnant, Bernhard was blazing the theater world, including on Broadway with her solo show “I’m Still Here … Damn It!” — foul-mouthed with a sheer dress and a baby bump, that she pointedly never addressed. “First of all, being pregnant is so, sort of, pedestrian,” she said. “There’s a billion people having babies all the time, so why talk about it? It wasn’t my jam. And I loved it. I had so much fun being pregnant, being onstage, performing, and not just sitting around waiting to have a baby.” (The show also drew criticism for a bit about Mariah Carey that the singer found racist; Bernhard has said her language was socially acceptable commentary at the time, but also acknowledged that comedy standards have changed.)She hosted a 10 p.m. talk show for A&E long before the chatter about women taking the helm in late night. And years before Ellen DeGeneres came out, Bernhard played one of the first openly queer characters on TV, as Nancy, a friend on “Roseanne,” in the ’90s; she was also an outspoken presence during the peak of the AIDS epidemic.“She was one of the people who taught us — who taught me — how to activate, how to be present and show up,” said Billy Porter, her co-star on “Pose,” the FX series about underground ball culture, whose characters are haunted by the disease.For Bernhard, it was a chance to mine her real-life emotions — she lost many friends to AIDS, she said — in a character, a nurse, who was, as she put it, unglamourously “in the trenches.”She and Porter were the two cast members who had personally experienced the first wave of the AIDS crisis. “We really connected on that — the other people were acting a history lesson, but we had actually lived it,” he said. “We were telling stories of intense trauma, and it was great to have her there to help me.”In a marigold sweatshirt, mom jeans and high-tops, her auburn curls still effortlessly springy, Bernhard cuts a youthful, relaxed figure. Her vibe is surprisingly calm. “I’m not a frantic person,” she said. “I don’t need to run from one thing to the next to feel fulfilled.” Over coffee, we talked about parenting, schools, real estate; she is blissfully domestic, and loves doing dishes and laundry. “It’s very meditative,” she said.Where once she was known for tearing up the town with her onetime pal Madonna, now you might find her glued to TV sports. “I adore bowling, it’s my favorite thing to do on Sunday, watch bowling on ESPN,” she posted on Instagram a couple of years ago. A Michigan native, she also loves the Detroit Lions. From age 10, she was raised by her artist mother and proctologist father in Scottsdale, Ariz., the youngest of four siblings and the only daughter. “I knew when I was 4 or 5 that I would be a performer,” she said.Bernhard, left, onstage with Madonna at a 1989 benefit. These days, Bernhard spends her free time closer to home.Vinnie Zuffante/Getty ImagesEarly in her career she was known for tearing down celebrity culture with more than a little bite. Being tough was something of a persona — starting out in the ’70s, as a woman performing, “You had to have a little bit of an edge,” she said, “otherwise I would have been crushed.”Now she doesn’t have the zeal to skewer the social media-influencer-industrial complex; it doesn’t interest her, and anyway, she has evolved. “It takes a lot of energy to stay with your dukes up, right?” she said. “But I do like it when certain people are a little intimidated by me. It’s better that way.”Though she was too demure to name names, she has influenced a younger generation of performers.“She was so out there and wild with her style and the tone of her material,” said the comic Cameron Esposito, whose conservative Catholic family forbade her from watching Bernhard on “Roseanne” or in her many ribald appearances on the “Late Show With David Letterman.” (She did anyway.) “Everything about her was outside the television landscape that I was being fed, her mannerisms, how brash she was,” Esposito said.For the actor and comedian John Early, who like Bernhard uses music in his act, she was a path-setter — “a real hero,” he said.“The way she unapologetically drops into covers and sings them with total abandon and sincerity gave me permission to do the same,” he said. “She’s like a psychedelic cabaret artist.”Her off-kilter delivery and flair — “her grooviness,” he called it — also inspired him. “One time I sat right at the edge of the stage of her holiday show and she roasted me for ordering the pizza popcorn,” he added. “It was an honor.”Her fan base is devoted, flying in from out of town, Bernhard said; one night, she did five encores. But she doesn’t rehearse the storytelling in advance — she’s still mainlining the spontaneity she had starting out. “She’s very much in the moment,” said Mitch Kaplan, her musical director, who has worked with her since 1985. “When she’s singing songs, too, she’ll never sing them the same way. One of the thrills in performing for her is you really have to listen to her, and follow her.”For die-hards like Cohen, the holiday show is Bernhard at her best. “It’s celebratory; it’s funny; it’s raw; it feels underground, like everything she does. I find it really inspiring,” he said.“I ran into her at the gym the other day,” Cohen added, “and I said, Please tell me you’re going to be talking about Barbra Streisand’s audiobook at the Joe’s Pub show! I said, I need this into my veins. She was like, I’m still figuring it out, honey. She always surprises me.”Requests from famous fans aside, Bernhard said her normal life offstage has helped her endure. “I’m always happy doing dishes,” she said. “And I’m also happy when I get onstage and the band is playing and I walk out and I see people who are having fun and connecting. I love that moment. That has all the meaning that I need.” More