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(Featured Longreader Justin Heckert’s pick of the week.) Every September, Helen, a town of 750 people clustered on two square miles in a mountain valley, braces to accommodate up to 300,000 guests over the course of this uber-party. Steins will be hoisted; spindly, pale thighs will chafe under lederhosen; and someone inevitably will fall and […]

Stewart isn’t just being a bully here. He is being disingenuous, and he knows it. Worse, he’s tapping into the collective fantasy without knowing it. He’s the gunslinger saying he’s going back to the farm while at the same time putting notches in his belt. More precisely, he’s the presumptive Edward R. Murrow saying that […]

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

I’m at the Vent Haven ConVENTion where, each July, hundreds of ventriloquists, or “vents,” as they call themselves, gather from all over the world. For four days, they attend lectures on the business, getting advice on AV equipment, scriptwriting, or creating an audience through social networking. They listen to a keynote address by Comedy Central’s […]

MTV’s “Teen Wolf” was conceived as a darker, sexier reimagining of the “Teen Wolf” story, and also a gorier one. Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, for example, Posey’s character, Scott McCall, discovers the naked, dismembered body of a young woman in the woods. So it’s clear right away that this will […]

On October 1st, 1993, the comedian Bill Hicks, after doing his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show, became the first comedy act to be censored at CBS’s Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Letterman is now in residence, and where Elvis Presley was famously censored in 1956. Presley was not allowed to be shown from the […]

Political correctness used to rule comedy, but now comics routinely offend their audiences. How did things get so nasty?

No one made sketch comedy, that most Canadian of comic forms, like the Kids in the Hall — which makes their return to television a big deal

Since she turned 38, Meryl Streep has been waiting for her career to crater. Instead, at 60, she is more of a box-office powerhouse than ever—and coming off her indelible performance in Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, she’s being pursued by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin this month in the romantic comedy It’s Complicated.

He’s a boxer, a Buddhist, a hoops junkie, and a kind of Yoda to every funny person born since 1965 (Sandler, Silverman, Apatow, Gervais, Baron Cohen…). A rare sparring session with Garry Shandling, the reclusive master of American comedy