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Ha ha. Love this. It’s not even technically a “prank,” so much as a very good method for finding out what former co-workers really thought about you. All you do is wait until they are on a nationally syndicated program, and then call up the show pretending to be someone named “Coco” from “New Hampshire.” You don’t even have to mask your voice! Read More
Louis C.K. might play a downtrodden pervert on TV, but does that make him one in real life as well? According to a group of fliers found in California, Mr. C.K. might be even worse than an average Joe Jack-Off: His photo has been connected on the posters to a suspected peeping tom.
But maybe it’s just great viral marketing? Read More
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Google Analytics has done a fine job creating a series of humorous television spots–apparently targeted at British businesses–that shows what a Google Search would look like in real life. That is, if real life was a supermarket full of David Brent-type incompetents and a bureaucracy reminiscent of the one from Brazil. Read More
The star of FX’s Louie—widely considered to be the comedian of the moment— Louis C.K. is a tough ticket these days, especially for New Yorkers, whose venues are almost never big enough to accommodate either the sold-out crowds or the greedy hands of ticket scalpers. This principle was demonstrated to especially pronounced effect earlier today, when Brooklyn venue The Bell House announced that he would be testing out an hour of new material tonight. Not just for one show, but three separate shows.
Three separate shows that have since sold out and infuriated people. Read More
David Rakoff, an “East Asian Studies Major Who Has Forgotten Most of His Japanese” and one of New York’s finest essayists, passed away Thursday evening following a long battle with cancer. He was 47. Read More
Director William Friedkin has always been attracted to lurid movie material. From the gruesome, overcooked The Exorcist to the vile and unhinged Cruising, he craves plots about deeply conflicted characters who are hopelessly alienated, disconnected from both the society that surrounds them and even their own lives. One craves another well-crafted action nail-biter like his Oscar-winning The French Connection, but at 76, his view of the world just gets darker than ever. Small wonder, then, that he has found his literary soulmate in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, whose twisted, controversial and fascinating work has found its way to the screen through Mr. Friedkin’s jaundiced camera twice—first in the repellant schizophrenic thriller Bug, and now in the toxic trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe. When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as “the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.” For shock value, cut to Gina Gershon, crawling across a filthy kitchen floor covered in blood to perform fellatio at gunpoint on a Colonel Sanders drumstick, and you have a high-water mark in tastelessness that gives depravity a bad name. Read More
Billy Eichner makes a living harassing people, and he’s very good at it. Mostly in his Chelsea neighborhood, he abruptly approaches strangers and assails them with manic interrogations about low-brow culture. However, they do get a chance to make some cash.
It’s all part of his frenetic and hilarious show, Billy on the Street, currently Read More
Armando Iannucci’s new HBO series Veep, which premiered on Tuesday night at the Time Warner Center, looks like a winner—more Biden than Bentsen. Starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the shaky-cam comedy is to the West Wing what a bucket of Popeye’s is to a bowl of flax-dusted Brussels sprouts (less wholesome but considerably tastier).
During the cocktail hour preceding the screening, the premise of the show gave us an excuse to ask everyone : Who is your favorite vice president? Fortunately, guests were in a festive and charitable mood. No doubt they were already anticipating the post-screening filet mignon awaiting them at Porter House.
“You know what? I’ve never been asked that before,” Fran Lebowitz replied when we tracked her down in a corner of the 10th-floor reception area. “That’s a great question.” She thought a little. “Well, there was Johnson, and he became the president. Which is why you can’t nominate someone like Sarah Palin.” Read More
To the new trend of female-empowerment comedies written, produced, directed by and starring tough, ambitious, talented women, add Kat Coiro’s L!fe Happens. I liked Jennifer Westfeldt’s Friends With Kids better, because it made more of an attempt to include men in the love, sex and parenthood equation. In L!fe Happens, the women do everything on their own. Almost. So far, I don’t know of any women who serve as the sole contributors to their own sperm banks. Still, as a riff on the perils of single motherhood, L!fe Happens and Friends With Kids would make a keen double feature. Read More
Lee Aronsohn, showrunner, executive producer, and co-creator of Two and a Half Men, is nobly trying to take up the torch of blatant misogyny in the face of the crisis currently faced in comedy: women and their labia. As we all know, there has been a dearth recently of men yelling about how not funny women are ever since Christopher Hitchens passed away and Eddie Brill was fired from Letterman, but Mr. Aronsohn is obviously up to the challenge. (And should have extra time on his hands after his show dies.)
But Sunday while talking to The Hollywood Reporter at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference, Mr. Aronsohn, who knows comedy when he sees it (which is why Two and a Half Men is the most critically lauded piece of humor writing around and is doing really well these days) just laid it all on the line re: his feelings about the comedic ability of ladies who talk about their gross, disgusting vaginas. He applauds them, but also thinks that it’s time to move on, you know? Read More
