Next Oscar season, you might be seeing Louis C.K. around all these fancy awards shows as part of a nominated film. C.K. is in talks to join the cast of an Oscar bait-y movie from filmmaker David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter), according to The Hollywood Reporter. It's a period drama formerly called American Bullshit that centers on con artist Mel Weinberg who directed a wide-ranging FBI sting operation called Abscam. C.K. is in negotiations to play a supporting role as an FBI agent. The rest of the cast includes Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Amy Adams. If Louis C.K. officially signs on, he'll [...]
You're gonna wanna read the New York Times Magazine's new profile on Jerry Seinfeld and why he keeps doing standup all the time despite being worth as much as a Saudi royal. Above, a pretty amazing look at his writing process, which is all done by hand on legal pads.
If you need further convincing, here's a pretty facinating bit on why Seinfeld will never pull a Louis and create a new hour of material every year, tossing his old material in the trash:
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.)
There are shows that come around every once in a while, like Deadwood or 30 Rock where you know you're getting the creator's voice, [...]
"First of all, [Louis C.K.] made it be ‘Retro Comedy of the '80s' and I was like, 'I was not doing comedy in the '80s. I don't need you to age me more! It was the early '90s!' Oh my God, when I finally watched it, they put the videos in there. It was so crazy to watch. [Louis] especially. That was the kid I met!"
- Sarah Silverman to The Hollywood Reporter about her appearance on Louie last season and Louis C.K. editing their old TV appearances into a fake retro stand-up show.
For a stand-up comedian there is, it turns out, a fate worse than bombing. Though enduring the heckles and hostile silences of a belligerent audience while a sickening flop sweat shivers over your entire body is never a pleasant prospect, it must seem like somewhat mild torture when compared to the crushing futility of performing to no audience at all. And yet on many a hopeless night during the lean years of the early ‘90s, after the stand-up boom finally crashed, that’s exactly what Louis C.K. did. “There would literally be nobody in the audience and they’d make you do the show,” remembered the comedian about his time at [...]
We're at a rest period in the middle of SNL's 38th season, and now seems like a good time to present all the Nate Silver-esque data I've been compiling over the past few months. Below are some stats from this season, including ratings, online views, cast member screen time, hosts, and top sketches, which will whet your appetite before the show returns on January 19.
Overall I've been pleased with this season. The departures of Kristen Wiig and Andy Samberg suggested the show might go through another rebuilding year, but the cast has filled in nicely, with new female cast members emerging as breakout stars, Jay Pharoah stepping up [...]
ADHD, the Fox network's upcoming late night animation block, continues to pump out cool web videos. Their latest is "A Charlie Brown Christmas Reunion," which combines Peanuts with Louie, following a middle-aged Charlie Brown returns home as he sees all the depressing things that have happened to his friends. Sure, it misses the guy flipping off the camera in the opening credits, something that other great Louie parodies haveincluded. Aside from that, though, it's pretty solid.
In the second episode of his Vice web series, All-Around Losing, columnist Harry Cheadle tries out stand-up comedy for the first time in New York's rough open mic scene. Cheadle's quest takes him to places like Cha Cha's Cafe and Bar, where the Hawaiian shirt-clad owner, a man named Cha Cha, demonstrates his own comedy prowess outside. Cha Cha has finally found a way to combine beloved comedy topics like racism and "I can't get laid" into one clever, tight joke. By the end of his journey, Cheadle soon learns that being Louis C.K. is harder than it looks, and that C.K.'s opening credits are much easier to recreate [...]
"It gets me a little angry when people say, 'Oh, Louis C.K. It’s a new model where you pay him five dollars and he’s doing it all himself.' A lot of money was spent by big companies to get him to a place where he can do that. Time Warner and Adult Swim paid a lot of money for Eric and I to make stuff, and then they spent a lot of money promoting. People aren't coming out of nowhere and getting careers just by putting their stuff online."
-Tim Heidecker of Tim & Eric fame, talking toThe LA Timesabout Louis C.K. and how people often misinterpret [...]
HBO just announced in a press release today that they're releasing Louis C.K.'s new hour-long stand-up special sometime next year. The as-of-now untitled special will be filmed during one of the shows for C.K.'s current 16-city tour, which wraps in February. This will be Louis C.K.'s second hour-long for HBO after 2007's Shameless. C.K. tweeted that he'll be releasing the hour online for $5 via his website a few months after it airs on HBO, which is how he released his last hour Live at the Beacon Theater and album WORD: Live at Carnegie Hall.
It's a surprise to see C.K. opting to go with HBO [...]
While binging on Netflix and OnDemand over the holidays, Season Three of Louie and Season One of Girls deserve back-to-back viewing.
It’s not only the best way to get a picture of what counted as avant-garde television (I’m cringing as I write that phrase) in 2012, but also helps us see how these very different shows deal with similar themes of loneliness, generational anxiety, failed aspirations, and familial love — often simply from opposite approaches. By watching each series in the context of the other’s perspective, we learn more about both.
To argue this, it’s best to look at two of their respective season’s highlights: two episodes that seem [...]
This never-before-seen hour-long chat with Louis C.K. was posted online last week by Reserve Channel. Our own Ramsey Ess wrote about the interview here last week. It's a 2010 discussion between C.K. and Time magazine's TV critic James Poniewozik at the Paley Center, following the first season. It's kind of quaint to watch Louis C.K. talking about the first season of the show after we've seen two more seasons of him pushing things even further, but this is still a nice look into his creative process and a must-watch for fans of the comedian who everyone is fans of right now.
Tig Notaro's acclaimed Largo set, which was released on Louis C.K.'s website and became a huge success, was the most talked-about standup performance of the year, and Notaro has been keeping kind of a low profile since. Here she is in a rare recent interview with Pitchfork TV, talking about the awful fourth months point in her life she was at during the Largo performance, her tennis plans with Taylor Dayne, and her affinity for the song "Mississippi Queen."
"I did a benefit reading at his kids’ school… and it was the greatest cast ever: Marisa Tomei, Nathan Lane, Mario Cantone — Mike Daisey did the stage directions — and Louie and me. Afterward, he said, 'I want you to come on the show — I’d really like you to play my therapist.' I had just seen it a few weeks before and I was like, 'Oh, my God, I would love to.'
… He said: 'O.K., I know what I’m going to do with you. I’ve wanted to do it for a while, and it’s a mix of a couple of different stories and characters.' And then he [...]
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