Over at the Times, comedy critic Jason Zinoman takes a look this week at the flourishing storytelling scene in NYC, talking about stories and shows by Ophira Eisenberg, Dave Hill, Kevin Allison and others. It's worth a read if you're interested in this oft-overlooked form of comedy.
UCB's 14th annual Del Close Marathon will be held in New York from June 29 to July 1. Cancel your plans, submit shows, begin sculpting a life-size wax bust of Del Close. Do what you gotta do.
It was inevitable that a city so saturated with comedians would stumble onto a storyline so unexpected from their jaded ironies and hipster quips. New York is in the middle of its own romcom and, true to form, the object of its affection is the very thing it always swore it hated: Los Angeles. But if New York is all about the bookish grad-schooly dry wit of, say, Jon Stewart and LA quintessence is the vain bubblegum blather of a Kardashian, then what kind of drama unfolds when the two lock eyes? Turns out: none.
This is not drama. Drama has mystery and tension, and what’s going on with [...]
Chris Gethard has been invited to Chicago's Just For Laughs festival, so of course he used the invite as an excuse to launch a "New York Is Better Than Chicago" campaign and competition. And he's not just talking about comedy scenes, either, he's throwing down the gauntlet on everything about Chicago. As the man says, "New York is the best at everything and there isn't a single aspect of life in Chicago that is better than New York." You gonna take that, Chi-town?
Jeez, the Onion's editorial staff is really leaving New York. Well, uh, five out of the sixteen of them are. This story has the details of who's staying (Joe Randazzo, Joe Garden, Baratunde Thurston) and who's going (Seth Riess, Will Tracy), as well as the story of the holdouts' failed efforts to find a buyer for the paper who would let them stay in New York. The move may eventually end up being a return to the paper's Midwestern roots, and a boost for the Chicago comedy scene, but right now tearing this staff apart seems like it's gotta result in a big loss of quality. [...]
This essay by Conan writer Todd Levin about the status obsession in LA is a fun, if slightly depressing, read. Here's what he has to say about parking on a studio lot:
It’s not just people; even the places in Los Angeles are designed with subtle status-checking devices. The studio “drive on” versus “walk on” is a classic example. Those invited to drive directly onto a studio lot are imbued with higher status, while the rest are forced to park across the street in a (filthy! disgusting!) parking structure, then exit said structure, cross the street (for everyone to see!) and walk through the studio to your meeting [...]
There is a lot of beautiful stuff packed into Genevieve Koski's Patton Oswalt interview at the A.V. Club, including Patton's complete and utter disdain for living in New York. "I would open the doors to the hotel in the lobby, and even the two doormen would look back, like, 'All right, dude, here it comes,' and just this wave of garbage air would pummel you," Patton says, describing his current three-month stint in the city. "It was like a shockwave of stink. I was almost excited to do it in the morning to see what new, horrible smell would come down there."
Despite smelling like the hot, wet [...]
This week's issue of New York is all about optimism. So a natural choice for a cover boy was Jimmy Fallon, who's provided a nice alternative to the jaded, negative comedy that can sometimes feel like it's taken over TV. Here's a bit from the profile inside: It took a while for the show to hit this tone. Shoemaker remembers an early struggle, in the first months, to figure out exactly how to joke about the then-ubiquitous Susan Boyle. “Everyone else was talking about how she looked or her fifteen minutes of fame,” he says. Letterman, for example, did a top-ten list of “Worst Summer Jobs,” which included [...]
There are just 13 days left to donate to the Kickstarter page for The Creek and the Cave, the comedy theater in Long Island City. Let's get these guys a marquee.
It was announced last month that as a cost-saving measure, The Onion would be packing up its NYC offices, where all the funnies are written, and moved to Chicago, where ad sales and The AV Club live. Based on this new missive from "publisher emeritus" T. Herman Zweibel, the writers aren't too pleased with the decision. Unless this isn't the thinly veiled shot across the bow that it obviously appears to be:
Disturbing reports have been reaching my bronze ear-horn over the past few weeks concerning the goings-on at the many Eastern sea-board offices of The Onion news-paper. Evidently, if accounts from my disgustingly subservient dogsbodies in [...]
It turns out that Alec Baldwin's mayoral run is not just a great excuse to peruse Jack Donaghy quotes on the company dime ("Stand outside in a crowd like some Italian? I don't think so."), it's also a reality we can all look forward to…at some point. Once he takes a bow at 30 Rock, Baldwin tells the New York Times that he plans to go back to grad school in fall 2012 for a master's in politics and government, to better prepare himself for a future election.
The NYT article is also jam-packed with insane gems that COULD be Jack quotes if they were slightly less absurd. [...]
