An Oral History of the Rise and Fall (and Rise) of ‘The Dana Carvey Show’
Steve Carell. Stephen Colbert. Louis C.K. Charlie Kaufman. Robert Smigel. Some of comedy’s greatest minds got one of their biggest breaks on the short-lived but much-loved “The Dana Carvey Show.” Fifteen years later, in this exclusive oral history, the players recount the brief but fertile life of a truly unusual show
That’s Not Funny, That’s C.K.
He talked for a while about how difficult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. “For one, I couldn’t really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn’t do that at all; I couldn’t talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, ‘Oh, shit, there goes my act.’ ” He didn’t really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn’t been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. “I just sat in my pajamas for like two years,” he said. “And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t fuck around like this.’ I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, ‘Everything’s based on them now.’ “
Will You Be My Black Friend?
My Craigslist post said, among other things, “I’m a 36-year-old white guy. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and have always gone to diverse schools. I’ve always had a decent number of black friends. That’s changed over time. I work in the publishing industry, which is super white, and I’ve realized that my group of friends is getting whiter and whiter.… It’s amazing to me that almost everyone I know has either black friends or white friends, but not both. We could have a black president, and still not have a very mixed country.” Then I added a few more lines about don’t let me show up at the bar and you’ve got a horse tranquilizer for my drink. I guess you could say the post ran a little long. I guess you could say I was worried about the possibility of a misunderstanding.
Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph High School Basketball Scandal
He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life. But Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year’s Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry’s brand-new life. There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.
Blow-Up: An Oral History of Transformers Director Michael Bay
In 1998, a national magazine asked in an article “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” Thirteen years later, you can still buy T-shirts that answer yes. The 46-year-old director has long been treated by cineastes as the macho spawn of Ed Wood—a testosterone-sweating embodiment of everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood. (Those quotes up there are from actual reviews of his movies.) It also doesn’t help his image that on his film sets he can be a notoriously domineering prick. Bay has flourished, though, not just because his eye-strafing event movies rake in so much money but also because—and let’s whisper here, lest the film snobs are listening—so many of them kick ass. Sure, the dialogue is often subliterate and his fast-cutting style can cause epilepsy. But! Movie stars look dripping hot, never better, in front of his camera.
Chris Evans: American Marvel
I sincerely wish I remembered this better. It definitely had a pool table, because at some point there was a “jump over the pool table” contest, not that I have any recollection of what that entailed. In the car, Chris is enjoying explaining to everyone that at some point I decided to crawl out a window and wander off into the night. “So then my buddy’s like, ‘I think your friend is having some trouble,’ ” Chris says, “and I look over, and there’s Edith in the gutter!” (Not lying in the gutter. This I remember. Sitting on the curb, trying and failing to call a cab.)
Destroying Detroit (in Order to Save It)
On this June morning, with the heat and humidity rising, residents emerge from their homes one by one: mostly women, mostly older, mostly taking care of their mothers and grandkids. They’ve been calling the city, they say, for years without response and feel as abandoned as the houses that surround them—the foreclosed, devitalized structures that require immediate wrecking. They have questions for Lorenzo. Comprehensive to-do lists for this man who has powerful machines and, so, they figure, actual power. They ask when the dead trees are coming down. They want to know when the drug dealing will stop. Does Lorenzo’s boss have a job for their sons, by any chance? Or for their nephews? Or what about for themselves?
Just Desert
Osama bin Laden is dead, but the wars he provoked rage on, claiming lives in all kinds of ways. Consider the bizarre case of Phil McDowell, a decorated American soldier who completed his four-year tour of duty but now may be deported from Canada and court-martialed as a deserter. How can you go AWOL when you’re not even in the army anymore?
Inside Al Jazeera
On a cold March evening in Manhattan, Ayman Mohyeldin rode in the back of a black Lincoln Town Car on his way to an appearance on The Colbert Report. Mohyeldin (pronounced moh-hee-deen) is the Cairo correspondent for Al Jazeera English, which helps explain two things: (1) accustomed to the temperate winters of the Triumphant City along the lazy Nile, he was sorely underdressed for the windy stabs of Manhattan, and (2) after his network’s critically acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian uprising, he was in town to take his star turn on Stephen Colbert’s hot seat, constituting what promised to be a pop-cultural coming-out for Al Jazeera in the United States.
Game On! The Untold Secrets and Furious Egos Behind the Rise of SportsCenter
Have Keith Theodore Olbermann spend a few seasons working at your television network and see how you feel. Sort of like Kansas after a twister. If Olbermann hadn’t been so brilliant and talented, few would have put up with him. But Olbermann has a talent that can’t be taught. He can relate to people on the other side of the camera and, indeed, relate to the camera itself in a way that comes across as second nature. And yet he once told an interviewer that on some level, he’s always making fun of television: “Like, ‘Look how ridiculous this is, me sitting here and you sitting on the other end, watching me—what are you doing that for?’ I think that’s always been my attitude.”