When the actor Maya Rudolph first appeared as Kamala Harris on “Saturday Night Live,” in September 2019, she established a few motifs: Cocktail at the ready, Ms. Harris was America’s fun aunt (“I call that a ‘funt,’” she said) and a “smooth-talking lady lawyer” with sex appeal and subpoena power. …
Read More »‘It’s Florida, Man’ Reveals the Lives Behind Bizarre News Stories
“It’s Florida, Man,” premiering Friday at 11 p.m., on HBO, takes a “Drunk History” approach to the intimacy and portraiture of “How To With John Wilson.” It uses familiar comedic actors in cheeky re-enactments of real events, but those events are all personal sagas; they are obscure and strange, sometimes …
Read More »They’re ‘Saturday Night Live’ … and You’re Not
It’s easy to get lost watching “Saturday Night”: Jason Reitman’s new film drops us backstage at a moment of maximum confusion — 90 minutes before the 1975 debut of a new NBC show called “Saturday Night.” At the center of all the hubbub is creator-producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel …
Read More »‘Saturday Night Live’ and the Underappreciated Influence of Carol Burnett
What makes Lorne Michaels laugh? That’s no small question. Half a century of aspiring stars have thought hard on it. The answer has launched and stymied many careers while going a long way to defining modern comedy. The hagiographic new movie “Saturday Night” focuses on Michaels as he puts together …
Read More »Jokes and Offbeat Auctions for the Troops: Standup Comedy Sweeps Ukraine
Onstage in a Kyiv theater, Anton Tymoshenko tells a joke about Ukrainians who are never satisfied with the weapons their country gets from the West — if they got nuclear weapons, he says, they would probably grumble about the quality of the uranium. He mocks the Odesa mayor (for being …
Read More »A Day in the Life of Tim Heidecker, Glendale Dad
From the moment he showed up at Tim Heidecker’s house, the Chihuahua in the dragon costume seemed a little freaked out. Mr. Heidecker — an actor, comedian and singer-songwriter — lives on a low-key, tree-shaded street in Glendale, Calif. On a recent morning, he was in his converted garage, getting …
Read More »Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator
Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87. …
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