Splitsider

We’re only a week into summer movie season, and it’s already overloaded with superheroes. More excitement is coming too, as Hollywood rolls out what are expected to be its biggest hits this time ever year. There's no shortage of comedies this summer, as Batman and Spider-man will be duking it out at the box office with the likes of Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and, um, Wes Anderson.

What's in store for us comedy wise? The return of the Men in Black! A movie based on a pregnancy guidebook! A comedy based on a novel by Saddam Hussein! And a comedy that had to change its name because of the [...]

The Paley Center for Media, which has locations in both New York and LA, dedicates itself to the preservation of television and radio history. Inside their vast archives of more than 120,000 television shows, commercials, and radio programs, there are thousands of important and funny programs waiting to be rediscovered by comedy nerds like you and me. Each week, this column will highlight a new gem waiting for you at the Paley Library to quietly laugh at. (Seriously, it’s a library, so keep it down.)

I don't think I'm going out on a limb here if I say that the bulk of the people reading this article have probably seen [...]

Looks like Kristen Wiig is going to star in Ben Stiller's remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, based on the short-story and worldwide required 8th grade English class reading assignment by James Thurber. Wiig would play "the co-worker about whom Mitty, a henpecked photo manager at a magazine, fantasizes as he dreams his way out of a humdrum life." The larger-than-life fantasy sequences in that story will probably be a good way to showcase Wiig's broader comedic talents. Also I bet there will be fun outfits.

Lost Roles is a weekly column exploring what might have been in TV and film comedy, taking a different comedian, writer, or work each week and examining the casting possibilities and career moves that almost came to be.

The late 80's were a stagnant era in comedy. Besides Letterman and SNL's Hartman-Carvey resurgence, there wasn't a whole lot happening. The Larry Sanders Show, Conan, Seinfeld, Bill Hicks, The State, Mr. Show, The Simpsons, and The Onion were right around the corner, but things were looking pretty dismal at the time. Death took John Belushi and Andy Kaufman from us, while ex-SNL’ers like Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, and Chevy Chase, [...]

The newest addition to Akiva Schaffer's comedy with Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn and Jonah Hill is…the eyes-on-his-hands dude from Pan's Labyrinth! Doug Jones will most likely gonna continue his streak of playing non-mortal-Earthlings in the comedy "about a group of dads who join the watch to escape the pressures of their families, only to stumble upon an intergalactic plot to destroy the world."

Was I the only one who forgot that this movie was going to be about aliens until they, you know, cast an alien? I was expecting small-town hijinks, maybe a struggle to confront a bully from the past. I guess it's possible that I'm [...]

Currently in the midst of its second season, Adult Swim’s 11-minute crime-comedy Eagleheart has quickly emerged as one of the fastest and funniest shows on TV. For the uninitiated, Eagleheart stars Chris Elliott, Maria Thayer (Strangers with Candy), and Brett Gelman (Comedy Bang Bang) as a trio of sociopathic U.S. Marshals who wind up in all kinds of exceedingly strange and hyper-violent scenarios week to week. Eagleheart is put out by Conan O’Brien’s production company and written by longtime Conan writers Michael Koman and Andrew Weinberg and Human Giant's Jason Woliner, who manage to cram a full 30 minutes worth of story into each 11-minute installment.

Eagleheart's second season [...]

The first teaser trailer for Neighborhood Watch (the alien comedy directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill, and Richard Ayoade) is here, and it is not pleased that you've been TP-ing local houses. It might have to take you downtown and have some confusing words with you in a room with a single lightbulb. Or worse still, look at you sternly.

Welcome back to the trade roundup, or as it should rightly be called, the Steve Carell Movie Tracker. Dude's just added ANOTHER project to his list of upcoming movies. This one's called Lunatics and it's about "two soccer dads whose conflict with each other grows into a series of escalating events until both of them are sent running for their lives." Ooh, a series of escalating events. Sounds…pretty typical for a movie, actually.

It looks like Ben Stiller is going to be making some TV shows! He has a general production and development deal with ABC that lasts till 2013, which is definitely enough time to round [...]

In all seriousness, imagine how delicious Sean Penn's lunch probably would be. I'm imagining a series of ever so sumptuous mousses and foams in an array of crystalline containers. Oh, and of course cookies, since he mentioned them by name. Billy Clinton (a typo, but I'm keeping it) turns to Hollywood's least greatest minds in Funny or Die's "Clinton Foundation: Celebrity Brainstorm" without much luck. Famous people might not be too smart, but at least their hearts are in the right place. Well, at least they are trying. Well, at least most of them are thin. Beautifully, beautifully thin!

One of the downsides of living in Los Angeles (thankfully I can count them on one finger) is the fact that I live three hours behind the rest of the world. After reading “RIP Lil’ Sebastian” tweets around 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday last May — over two hours before I would have a chance to watch that episode of Parks and Recreation — I now have officially warned all my east coast friends to keep their damn mouths shut until Friday morning. Lately I’ve been shutting my laptop, skipping outdoors, basking in the warm California sun, and avoiding the cold-hearted east-coasters’ attempts to cast their time-shadows on me.

With the Between Two Ferns: A Fairytale of New York debuting Sunday at 8:30 before the Comedy Awards, I thought it was a perfect time to look back at the Between Two Ferns series. B2F has been incredibly popular, bringing in over 80 million views across the entire series, on Funny or Die alone. Beyond that, whenever a new one is released, it nearly instantly reaches Internet omnipresence.

It's hard to say why exactly the series has had such enduring popularity, as it has maintained relevance for over four years now (which is nearly four zillion years in Internet time or 28 years in dog time). Of course, it's wildly funny and unique [...]

Ben Stiller will star in, direct, and executive produce a comedy pilot for HBO called All Talk. Written by Jonathan Safran Foer, it's about "the daily and life-altering dramas of a Jewish family in Washington, DC" and is being called “politically, religiously, culturally, intellectually and sexually irreverent.” That is a lot of ways to be irreverent. Let's see if I can be irreverent in all those ways in one sentence: "Hey Obama, Jesus, Broadway and Noam Chomsky: wanna fuck?" NAILED IT.

Paul Feig is on board to direct and executive produce an HBO pilot of his own, from Darren Star, the creator of Sex and the City. The [...]