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.
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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
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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
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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 […]
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Goat Boy Rises (#HappyBirthdayBill)
Goat Boy Rises (#HappyBirthdayBill) 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 […]
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“The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. He finally said, ‘Yeah, but we’re really […]
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Harmon calls his circles embryos—they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story—and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV […]
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Comedy is also an industry of paying dues: Many long-time performers regard their first ten years as a kind of clueless wandering, and veteran comics tend to treat newbies like replacement troops: They are young, dumb, and could be gone soon, so it’s best to wait till they survive a while before learning their names. […]
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Writer David Hill: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011
David Hill writes Fading the Vig for McSweeney’s, writes about basketball for Negative Dunkalectics, writes sketch comedy for The Charlies, and starting next month will write a monthly column for Grantland. He is on Twitter at @davehill77. *** “Too Much Information,” John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote many notable things in 2011. I […]
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New York Magazine's Ben Williams: My Top Longreads of 2011
Ben Williams is the online editorial director at New York Magazine. ••• 1. Celebrity profiles are the hardest genre to make fresh. So props to GQ for doing it not once but three times, with Jessica Pressler on Channing Tatum, Edith Zimmerman on Chris Evans, and Will Leitch on Michael Vick. With Pressler and Zimmerman, […]
