Search Results for: comedy

Doughnuts, Witches and Start-Ups: Five Stories About Secret Subcultures

Photo: GôDiNô

What makes a secret society? Is it the codes and the handshakes, the physical language? Perhaps it’s accessibility—you might know an organization exists, but you’ll never be a member. Take this: I rushed a sorority—the same sorority!—three times, because I wanted to be able to walk into any room on my small college campus and see a welcoming face. I wanted the anonymity, the lettered sweatshirt, the history. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself, something a little mysterious. Sure, I could study the colors and crest and memorize the majors and extracurriculars of every glossy-haired member, but that wasn’t the same as being in. I didn’t get in, obviously.

This urge to rush a sorority over and over (insanity, by Albert Einstein’s definition, I know) has manifested itself before. Middle-school me devoured books about the rich and privileged—Gossip Girl, The Clique, Private–because I knew there was a secret and I had to find out what it was. I had to, or I would be stuck reading the “How to Be Popular” WikiHow guide for the rest of my life. Kindergarten me yearned to sit next to the most popular girl in class during circle time, only to be snubbed by her henchmen. See a pattern? My identity crises have perfectly styled hair and would never wear last season’s Tory Burch flats. I continue to be fascinated—less pathetically, hopefully—by these exclusive subcultures. Luckily for you, I didn’t include any essays about the angst of privileged boarding school students. Instead, I’ve packed this list full of success stories, start-ups, witchcraft and comedy. Read more…

The ‘Airplane!’ Guide to Joke Delivery

We found that it was easier to keep an audience laughing than to start them up all over again.

—David Zucker, in New York magazine, on how he and his co-directors, Jim Abrahams and brother Jerry Zucker, approached comedy and rapid-fire joke delivery with the classic 1980 movie Airplane!. Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker broke down the origins of their classic joke “…don’t call me Shirley.”

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Resolving to Read, Write, and Travel More in 2016

Let’s be real: My 2016 resolutions are intentionally vague. I tend toward self-loathing, so settling on achievable goals is important for my mental health. But I’m still excited for a fresh year and a fresh start, even if time is a social construct. My intentionally vague, utterly achievable resolutions are as follows: Read more…

Longreads Best of 2015: Arts & Culture

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in arts and culture writing.

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Shannon Proudfoot
Senior writer with Sportsnet magazine

The Late, Great Stephen Colbert (Joel Lovell, GQ)

Stephen Colbert has pulled off the rare feat of being a public figure for the better part of a decade while keeping his true self almost entirely obscured behind a braying façade. Here, with such uncommon intelligence, sensitivity and nuance, Joel Lovell shows us who’s been under there the whole time. The writer is very present in the story, sifting through the meaning of what he finds and tugging us along behind him through reporting and writing that starts out rollicking and then turns surprisingly raw and emotional. But Lovell never gets in his own way or turns self-indulgent; that’s a tough thing to pull off. The word I kept coming back to in thinking about this story was “humane”—it just feels so complex and wise, and unexpectedly aching, buoyed with perfect, telling details and effortlessly excellent writing. Read more…

The Ultimate Feel-Furious Movie About Wall Street

Longreads Pick

How director Adam McKay, best known for producing a series of “hugely popular bromantic comedies” with Will Ferrell, is making a comedy out of the biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression.

Published: Nov 29, 2015
Length: 25 minutes (6,317 words)

The Life of a Teen Beauty Pageant Host

Has Zak Slemmer found his calling? He’s not sure. He loves Korea and politics, teaching and comedy—but he’s really, really good at hosting Miss Teen pageant contests. Laura Shin shadowed Slemmer for Narratively.

It’s the rehearsal for the New York City Miss Teen pageant. Though he is giving the same spiel for almost the 20th time, he makes it fresh, and people are not only paying attention but laughing. When [Jen] Klem, the pageant director, who participated in and won teen pageants herself, demonstrates the spins that the girls will do on the Xs marked onstage, Slemmer asks the audience, “Did she do this?”—and here, he walks bent over at the waist, head down like he’s hunting treasure, until he reaches the X, at which point he stomps his feet on it. Then he shows how he would do the spins instead—and does them while keeping his head aloft, eyes forward and tossing his head this way and that, as if it were a delicate, fluttery scarf.

Behind me a woman laughs, and a girl says, “He’s very funny.”

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The Art World: Like Time Travel for Women

It’s strange, in the years of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer changing comedy, and Tina Fey making room in TV, and Hillary Clinton making her cicada-like, quadrennial return, to pan the camera across the rigid men’s club of the arts. From the Chelsea galleries to the spring and fall auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which offer the gender composition of a pro football team) to the museums where schoolchildren walk hesitantly on field trips to see the visual products the culture has treasured. Where every other aspect of American life has changed, the Art World offers this wonderful scientific breakthrough of time travel.

Pat Lipsky, writing in The Awl about the difficulty of being a woman in the art world. Lipsky’s essay, which draws on her personal experiences as an artist coming of age in the ’60s, is beautiful, vivid, and deeply depressing.

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Coining Catchphrases on ‘Seinfeld’

“Humor can be dissected as a frog can,” E.B. White famously wrote, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” It’s from this quotation that Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today’s Top Comedy Writers, Mike Sacks’ 2014 collection of interviews with humorists, takes its title, and contrary to White’s claim, the discussions are enlivening, revealing, and likely of interest to an audience beyond just die-hard comedy nerds. From Sacks’ interview with journalist and television writer Peter Mehlman, a look at how some of Seinfeld‘s catchphrases were unintentionally coined:

You wrote twenty-two episodes of Seinfeld. Quite a few lines from these episodes became well-known and found their way into the popular vernacular, including “yada yada yada” and “double-dip.” Did you have any idea while you were writing these scripts that a particular line would later hit with the public?

No, I never had an idea. I never knew, really, what would become popular. It always surprised me, actually.

So none of the lines were written to be a catchphrase?

No. Every line was written just to be funny and to further the plot. But, actually, there was one time that I did think that a certain phrase would become popular. And I was completely wrong. In the “Yada Yada” episode [April 24, 1997], I really thought that it was going to be the “antidentite” line that was going to be the big phrase, and it was not. That line went: “If this wasn’t my son’s wedding day, I’d knock your teeth out, you antidentite bastard.” The man who said it was a dentist. And no one remembers that phrase; it’s the “yada yada yada” line that everyone remembers.

But it’s interesting. When a phrase or word becomes popular on a show, it’s like a pop song. Everybody remembers the hook. Nobody really listens to the verses.

In 1993, you wrote a Seinfeld script called “The Implant” that included the “double-dipping” line. Did the story come from a real-life experience?

It did, yes. I was at a party and somebody flipped out because someone else double-dipped a chip. They didn’t say “double-dipped.” I had to make up the phrase, but that wasn’t exactly a tough phrase to make up. To me, “double-dipping” sounded funny and it fit, but I never intended it to stand out. I never consciously thought, Oh, my god, I can actually add to the lexicon.

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Angela Carter on Myth and Deception in Hollywood

Angela Carter’s short story “The Merchant of Shadows” first appeared in The London Review of Books in 1989. Set in Hollywood, the narrator is a young, male student conducting research on a famed but mysterious director. The story bends and twists, ricocheting between dark comedy, deep camp, and Carter’s signature surreal, Gothic sensibility. Carter was an ardent fan of the movies, and “The Merchant of Shadows” is rich with cinematic conceits and allusions. (It also contains some searching, if subtle, feminist critique: another Carter hallmark.) I love it for these reasons, and for its lush, playful prose, its gentle damning of the narrator, and the overall self-awareness and exuberance that Carter brought to her work:

Aliens were somewhat on my mind, however, perhaps because I was somewhat alienated myself, in LA, but also due to the obsession of my roommate. While I researched my thesis, I was rooming back there in the city in an apartment over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a science fiction freak I’d met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the chance intimacy of the mutual runs in Barcelona. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on ahem intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the people you met on the streets were aliens cunningly simulating human beings. He thought the Venusians were behind it. He said he had tested Hiroko’s reality quotient sufficiently and she was clear but I guessed from his look he wasn’t too sure about me. That shared diarrhoea in the Plaza Real was proving a shaky bond. I stayed out of the place as much as possible. I kept my head down at school all day and tried to manifest humanity as well as I knew how whenever I came home for a snack, a shower and, if I got the chance, one of Hiroko’s courteous if curiously impersonal embraces. Now my host showed signs of moving into leather. It might soon be time to move.

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Are We Done Hating Television?

Image by Surtr.

In fact, perhaps ironically, if you doubt for a moment that there is still a cultural class distinction between television and film or television and novels, look to the eagerness of people who are enthusiastic about television to compare it to film or novels. It’s the new cinema! It’s the new novel! Is TV better than movies? Are movies better than television? Is this show so lovingly made that it can be called … cinematic?

If you ask these questions, let me ask you these questions: Is an avocado better than a hammer? Is a fish better than a skateboard? Who cares? Things are different from each other. Ranking a television comedy against a television drama is bogus enough without dragging movies and books into it. And yet: here we are. Not because these distinctions are particularly well supported by evidence, but because they are expedient, and because they help people organize their cultural worlds – which is a very understandable impulse growing out of the sad, beautiful fact that we’re all going to miss almost everything.

— NPR’s Linda Holmes, in one of a week-long series of essays on the state of television in 2015, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.

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