Throughout Saturday Night Live's history, the show’s cast has been largely imported from comedy training grounds like the Second City in Chicago or The Groundlings in LA, but Fred Armisen’s path to the show was a little different than most of his peers’. Armisen spent the better part of the 90s as a musician. His main gig was drumming for the punk band Trenchmouth but after the group broke up, he briefly served as background drummer for the Blue Man Group and had his own salsa band before switching to a career in comedy in his early 30s.
“Fred Armisen’s Guide to Music and South by Southwest” (1998) Living [...]
The SXSW comedy lineup is here, and incidentally, it's almost exactly the same as the invitation list for my dream wedding! (It's only missing Jughead from Archie Comics and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn's characters from Wedding Crashers, because what's a dream wedding without crashers?) In addition to standup and improv galore, the schedule features live episodes of WTF, Comedy Bang Bang, Doug Loves Movies, You Made It Weird, and The Chris Gethard Show. As for the comedians themselves, there are almost too many great comics to name (for a start: Marc Maron, John Hodgman, Kristen Schaal, Mike Birbiglia, Amy Schumer, Eugene Mirman, TJ Miller, Reggie Watts, Kumail Nanjiani), [...]
South by Southwest has responded to the hubbub about their comedy offerings at this year's festival consisting of 30 dudes and 1 lady. Here's their statement in full: If you follow SXSW, you may know that our initial announcements are rarely complete, and this year is no exception. While we're proud of the roster of great comedians set to join us in Austin next month, we were disappointed by the fact that we could only include one woman in our initial release.
We've been working on finalizing arrangements with other well-known female comics for quite some time and we hope to announce more soon.
