When I was five minutes old, my father gave my umbilical cord to a man in a pinstriped suit, who was waiting in the hall. “He’s going to bank your cord blood, son. It might be useful someday. God knows they want a king’s ransom, but your mother and I want you to have every advantage.”
“Ga,” said I.
My sainted mother fought thrush infections in both her breasts and cracked nipples that bled like open wounds in order to provide me with mother’s milk until I was two years old. “I want to tear my chest off,” she cooed in my ear, “but I can’t imagine not giving [...]
"Two weeks is a passable mustache. It’s like, 'Yeah, that’s a mustache.' But it takes longer for the upper nasal labial whiskers to reach the top lip. To grow the full ’stache is five to six weeks. Fun fact: facial hair is the provenance of the makeup department, not the hair department. We have this amazing makeup head named Autumn Butler, and she takes a lot of pride in maintaining Ron Swanson’s mustache."
–Nick Offerman, talking to The Believer, about his luscious lip fur.
C.J. Toledano is a familiar face in the Chicago comedy community. He’s a stand-up comedian, and has a natural ease that sets him apart from many other stand-ups his age. At 25, he’s already written for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and is currently a consulting writer for the O.N.N. He takes his craft seriously, and is hard working, imaginative, and focused. But that wasn’t always the case. “I was a punk,” Toledano recalls of his college years, and his academic record can verify that. His GPA was a rocky 1.8, and he had dropped out of film school only to enroll in a university right next to his old [...]
These days, it’s safe to say every college in the country has an improv group. Most of them perform “short-form” games, but several have also adopted the “long-form” style best known in cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. While many of these groups are located in those regions, or have Ivy League pedigrees, a good number have miraculously sprung up in the country’s unlikeliest of corners, from the swamps of Florida to a few miles from the Canadian border in Washington state.
Despite their regional differences, it’s interesting how similar many of these groups are. Most have around 9-12 members. All of them are extremely popular on [...]
I recently had the worst comedic experience of my life.
My college’s satirical newspaper, The Brown Noser, had been invited to the first "National Intercollegiate Humor Conference" at Princeton University. I was excited to write with my friends and meet funny people from other schools. The organizers even encouraged pranks (so long as they adhered to a sizable list of guidelines, of course).
The crowd at the conference was pretty much what you’d expect at a gathering of college comedy writers: an overwhelming majority of bearded white guys and a smattering of bearded white girls. Pimples made a great showing, as did t-shirts with jokes on them.
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