Here's the debut episode of Kumail Tours Portlandia, a new Portlandia web series starring amazingly-funny comedian and Portlandia regular Kumail Nanjiani, in which he walks around Portland, Oregon, trying to find real people and things similar to those on the show. In the first installment, he visits a feminist book store called "In Other Words" that was the partial inspiration for Portlandia's "Women & Women First." Future episodes will see Nanjiani visiting a chicken retirement home, the Portland Steampunk Society, and a vegan strip club. It should be pretty tough to find the real mayor of Portland's secret reggae band, though.
"In the history of the show we've only had to shoot the cue-card guy twice."
-Lorne Michaels in a Wall Street Journal profile of Saturday Night Live's cue card guy Wally Feresten, who's been with the show since 1990. The profile gives a behind-the-scenes look at SNL from an unusual perspective, and it delivers logical answers to questions like "Why does SNL still use cue cards?", "Why not just use a teleprompter?", and "Seriously, it's 2012. What gives?"
Hulu's A Day in the Life series has an episode up now that follows Marc Maron as he records a WTF episode with Mindy Kaling and does some time at the Comedy Store. Fair warning: a good percentage of this episode is devoted to fixing Maron's espresso machine.
As part of this week's cover story on The Daily Show in New York Magazine, their reporters had an opportunity to sit in for a rewrite of a segment with Jon Stewart, head writer Steve Bodow and and co-executive producers Rory Albanese and Josh Lieb. Here's a sample of them working through a visual joke:
Bodow: I think actually the way you gotta do it is like a Where the Wild Things Are head on a Liberace body, like in the bedazzled clothing or something. Or what’s-his-face throwing a bucket of confetti with a werewolf head …. Stewart: The gay monster … you know what, fuck it, go Liberace on [...]
