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
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Dummy Land
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 […]
We Are All Teenage Werewolves
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 […]
The Goat Boy Rises
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 […]
The new offenders of standup comedy
Political correctness used to rule comedy, but now comics routinely offend their audiences. How did things get so nasty?
Back in the Hall
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
Something About Meryl
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.
The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian
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
The comedy TV writer who helped elect Richard Nixon
Nixon said … that appearing on Laugh-In is what got him elected – and I believe that. And I’ve had to live with that. – George Schlatter, Creator of Laugh-In
Longreads Best of 2012: Andrea Pitzer
Andrea Pitzer is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Best Innocence Story “The Innocent Man” (Pam Colloff, Texas Monthly) What if you were convicted of murdering your wife, and you didn’t do it? What if, after decades in prison, you learned that the prosecution had held proof of […]
