Twitter is the perfect medium for comedians: It’s quick, text-based, and social, meaning that there’s a potential audience of millions for a great, concise joke. As such, we follow a lot of professional funny people, from Sarah Silverman to Aziz Ansari to Eugene Mirman. But we have found, often to our great surprise, that not all of our favorite comedians are funny on Twitter. Whether they’re saving their material for paying gigs, have other social media concerns outside of entertaining us, or just can’t translate what they do on stage to the Internet, they just aren’t making us laugh. We’ve rounded up ten top offenders after the jump.
We’re not being hyperbolic when we say Dangerous Minds saved our sweaty, potentially miserable, 101-degree New York City Friday by posting some wonderful work by Jason Mecier. Using everything from household trash to food to cosmetics to pills, Mecier creates witty and appropriate collage portraits of cultural icons: Jerry Seinfeld in cereal, Andy Warhol in Campbell’s soup cans and plastic bananas, Dolly Parton in hairspray, Courtney Love in pills. His work is heavy on gay icons (hello, RuPaul in makeup), and each piece is so delightful we struggled to limit our gallery to 20 pieces. Check out our favorite Mecier portraits after the jump, and then do yourself a favor and head to his website, which truly has something for everyone. Oh, and one final note of warning: The last page of this post is a wee bit NSFW.
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, Rodman Flender’s intimate documentary account of the comedian’s 30-city “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour,” goes into limited release tomorrow. Aside from being uproariously funny (with O’Brien at his spontaneous, reactive best), it is also a fascinating account of a superstar comedian’s life on the road: the rehearsals, the travel, the meet-and-greets, the stress. Of course, Flender isn’t the first documentarian to take a close look at the business of stand-up, or the complex psychology of the working comedian; we’ve assembled just a few of the best documentaries about comics after the jump.
The first season of Louie, the FX sitcom written and directed by star Louis C.K., hits DVD and Blu-ray today; this innovative, somewhat subversive, and reliably uproarious series takes the notion of the tightly-constructed stand-up sit-com and turns it on its head, with a stream-of-consciousness narrative style and surrealist streak that brands it a true original. Of course, the stages of comedy clubs (and, before that, coffee houses and vaudeville stages) have been television’s most reliable source of comedy stars; Louie is the latest in a very long line of television series created for (and sometimes by) stand-up comedians.
In assembling this list of our favorites, we concentrated only on those who starred in their own series, rather than in a supporting role in someone else’s (so no Andy Kaufman, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Billy Crystal, or Kathy Griffin); only those whose sitcoms were hits (sorry, Margaret Cho); and only those who were successful stand-ups first (hence, no Larry David — by his own admission). The rest is opinion, and sorry, there’s no convincing us that either Tim Allen’s stand-up act or Home Improvement were funny. With those parameters in mind, our list of the best stand-ups-turned-sitcom stars is after the jump.
The Paul Reiser Show premieres tonight on NBC — but we surely don’t have to tell any of you, what with all those “watch party” invites we’ve been getting on Facebook. Reiser’s back, what what? Party like it’s 1993. At any rate, the premise of the show is such: Reiser is playing a fictionalized version of himself, a rudderless former sitcommer tooling around Hollywood getting himself into trouble. Sound familiar? The New York Times notes: “Mr. Reiser’s new series mostly proves what everybody already knows: Curb Your Enthusiasm really is inimitable.”
While the reviews for Mr. Reiser’s attempt at a meta-sitcom aren’t exactly glowing, one can’t blame him for the effort: in our celebrity-obsessed culture, several stars of stage and screen have taken the opportunity to send up their own image by playing themselves (or a comically exaggerated version thereof) on television and in film. We’ll rank a dozen notable examples, from worst to best, after the jump.
Barack Obama, leader of the free world and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, can now add children’s book author to his resume: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to my Daughters, a picture book penned by the President, hit bookstores yesterday. Written in 2008 after the election but before Obama took office, the book tells the story of 13 American heroes and heroines, including Albert Einstein, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Martin Luther King, Jr. But he’s hardly the first celebrity who has delved into kiddie lit. Here are 15 more children’s book authors you might know from elsewhere.
To borrow a favorite refrain of blog comment trolls, there’s oil spilling into the ocean, soldiers are dying in Afghanistan… and Jerry Seinfeld is angry about Lady Gaga sitting in his fancy Mets seats. In an interview on WFAN radio, Seinfeld had some harsh words for the pop star who was seated in his private Citi Field box after being besieged by paparazzi at a June 10 Mets game. We are big fans of both parties here, but we sure wish Seinfeld would stop talking like Frank Costanza. Some choice quotes are after the jump.
Last night made us proud to be an American. At the White House, President Obama awarded Paul McCartney the prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. In return, Sir Paul serenaded the FLOTUS with (what else?) “Michelle,” and just about every famous person in the world sang “Hey Jude.” Think we’re kidding? The Beatle and the first family were backed by Jack White, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dave Grohl, a Jonas brother, and… Jerry Seinfeld?
Honestly, Seinfeld is kind of the best part of this video. What is he doing there? What does he have to do with music? It doesn’t matter! As always, his awkwardness is endearing.
The cryptic new trailer for JJ Abrams’s Super 8 is so well-executed that it actually makes us want to pay $15 to watch the entire film. (What’s inside that armored boxcar?!) It is refreshing. There’s no godlike voiceover, violin crescendo, too-revealing dialogue selected from the best scenes, or increasingly rapid stream of images climaxing with a sober shot of the movie’s title. To celebrate this departure from fixed formula, we’ve rounded up ten trailers from the past decade that were brave enough to defy the standard Hollywood fanfare. Viva creativity.
