Vinson Cunningham profiles Tracy Morgan as the comic films the second season of his Jordan Peele-produced TBS show “The Last O.G.” and explores the complex audience dynamics of black comedy.

Here, are a handful of stories centering on the creators and aficionados of the romantic comedy.

A Hollywood Reporter conversation between Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Gina Rodriguez, Ellie Kemper, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Kate McKinnon.

An excerpt from Armstrong’s book Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted, on how Treva Silverman helped create TV’s most memorable characters:

One night in 1964, Silverman was playing at a piano bar in Manhattan’s theater district—it was another one of those dark, smoky places, but this one had a well-tuned baby grand. She took her requisite set break, listening to the glasses clink and the patrons murmur in the absence of her playing. Still energized from her performance, she struck up a conversation with an intense, bearded, hippie-ish guy and his girlfriend sitting near her at the bar. Soon they were chatting about their mutual love of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. Beards were only just on the brink of acceptable mainstream grooming at the time, a signal of a certain kind of rebelliousness that endeared this guy to Silverman. Guys with beards tended to smoke weed, be creative, listen to cool music. They were Silverman’s people. Even more so when they could talk Fitzgerald and Salinger. It figured that he was there with a woman, though. Those guys were always taken.

The guy, Jim Brooks, worked at CBS as an assistant in the newsroom.

On Tom Lehrer, one of the most influential people in comedy who abruptly stepped away from the spotlight:

He began performing internationally in 1959, when the Palace Theatre in London asked him to perform the first two Sundays in May. “In England in 1959, you couldn’t put on a play, [on Sunday] so the theaters were closed,” Robinson recalled. “But you could put on a concert.”

Lehrer filled the 1,400-seat theater both weekends and was a big enough hit that they kept him on through the end of May, after which he booked several more performances throughout England in June and early July.

Yet despite his enormous success, global popularity, and the release of his second album, More Songs by Tom Lehrer that year, it was exactly at this time that Lehrer first told Robinson he wanted to stop performing. Lehrer has told friends and various interviewers that he didn’t enjoy “anonymous affection.” And while his work was widely enjoyed at the time, it was also something of a scandal — the clever songs about math and language were for everyone, but Lehrer’s clear-eyed contemplation of nuclear apocalypse was straightforwardly disturbing.

Meet the man who created “Deep Thoughts” and “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”—and who is about to release his first novel, The Stench of Honolulu:

“’A lot of comedy is going the extra step,’ Handey continued. ‘An unfrozen caveman was funny — but that’s not enough.’ Later, he e-mailed me a sheet of sketch ideas he typed up in 1991. The sketch seemed to be a combination of two ideas: ‘Too Many Frozen Cavemen,’ in which a surplus of frozen Neanderthals drive scientists crazy, and ‘Swamp Bastard,’ about a Swamp Thing-like creature who keeps stealing everyone’s girlfriends. ‘I guess my brain put these things in a blender,’ he wrote, ‘and out came Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.'”