Elayne Boosler, one of my all-time favorite comedians and a real trailblazer — the first female standup to do contemporary, observational humor — explains the sexist obstacles she had to overcome to have a successful career.
Two different takes on the leaked audio of Louis CK’s recent comedy club set, in which he joked about the Parkland shooting students and non-binary youth. Their pieces are not about his material, but about whether it’s right to judge the work-in-progress of a comedian trying out material on stage.
My friend, comedian Will Durst, looks back at the year that was… Sit the kids down. Let the dogs out. Prop the grandparents up. The nation’s patience has been richly rewarded, because the eagerly awaited list of the Top Ten Comedic News Stories of 2018 has been officially released. This truly is the most wonderful […]
I haven’t been to a comedy club in years. The standups I want to see (e.g. John Mulaney, Kathleen Madigan, Brian Regan, Paula Poundstone) have all graduated to playing bigger venues that don’t have a two-drink minimum. But on a recent road trip, I had an evening free and decided to go see what the […]
This is a clip of ventriloquist Nina Conti, who strapped a Vent-Mask to the face of an audience member she pulled onstage. The Vent-Mask was invented by Joel Hodgson, the guy behind “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” who did it in his act in a Minneapolis comedy club in the late 1980s. Ronn Lucas, who headlined […]
There have been a few times when I’ve sworn I was done with Bill Maher because he did something incredibly anti-science on his show, like his dangerous anti-vaccination remarks or the interview with the “doctor” who claimed he had an AIDS cure made from the milk of arthritic goats (which I covered on my radio show […]