Pop culture blog Vulture is holding its "Comedy Week" right now, and they've loaded up their page with plenty of fun stuff to read like an obsessive history of Jon Hamm's personal obsession with comedy and Pete Holmes's piece recounting the agonizing six months he spent waiting to hear if his TBS talk show would make it to air. Check out Vulture's Comedy Week or just stay here, where we live every week like it's Comedy Week.
Over the past few weeks, Vulture has been holding its "Sitcom Smackdown" tournament, pitting a bunch of amazing shows against each other in a bracket to determine the best sitcom of the past 30 years. The Simpsons won yesterday, narrowly beating Cheers. Seinfeld, Community, Roseanne, Arrested Development, and Sex and the City also made it pretty far in bracket. Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz wrote the argument for why Simpsons is the better of the two excellent, very different shows:
A decade-plus past its prime, The Simpsons has a stronger presence in American life than Cheers, Seinfeld, Community, or any other sitcom you can think of. Since Matt Groening’s show debuted in [...]
"On Fallon, we would have these pitch meetings. And every single time I would pitch, it would be the biggest disaster of all time. Some of the writers would laugh, but Jimmy would always stare at me as if I was trying to make fun of him, which I wasn’t at all. The producer said to me a couple times, 'Listen, we all know you’re funny, but these bits you’re pitching, they’d be great for The Anthony Jeselnik Show, but they’re not right for The Jimmy Fallon Show.' And after a couple times hearing that, I was like, 'God, that Anthony Jeselnik Show sounds really funny.'"
- Anthony Jeselnik, star of Comedy Central's new series The Jeselnik [...]
Here's another one comedian Julie Klausner's videos for Vulture, in which she sits down with actor Paul Giamatti to reenact some romantic scenes from movies like Twilight, You've Got Mail, and Magic Mike. I could watch them recreate every movie.
Musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates (Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci) are the latest to contribute a story to Vulture and UCB's half-animated video series "Pop Culture Memory Lane." Their tale concerns meeting their hero and namesake John Oates, of Hall and Oates fame, and performing a show with him. Unfortunately, Lindhome's mom messed up when filming the set and only recorded the audio. John Oates contacted Garfunkel and Oates on MySpace, but it was 2008, so that's forgivable. I have a feeling that John Oates is still using MySpace, though, wondering to himself, "Where did everyone go?"
Vulture made a list of "50 Comedians You Should and Will Know" (full disclosure: we at Splitsider contributed names to said list), featuring talented people like John Mulaney, Broad City, The Birthday Boys, Jerrod Carmichael, James Adomian, June Diane Raphael, Hannibal Buress, and Tig Notaro. Some of the blurbs about the "comedians you should know" were written by comedians you do know, like Bill Hader, Patton Oswalt, Casey Wilson, Scott Aukerman, and Jenny Slate, so get over to that list if you enjoy comedians you do and/or do not know.
"[It was] one of the great auditions of my life … That evening, around 5 p.m., I called and I said, 'May I speak to Garry?' … He came on the line. I said, 'I've never done this in my entire career, but I really want to play Hank. I would normally never call … ' And Garry said, 'No, but Hank would.' And that was great. That sealed it. I was in the mindset of my character. Hank would have done that."
- Jeffrey Tambor telling the story of how he landed the role of Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show in an interview with Vulture in which [...]
Here's a new web series (via Vulture) called "Bob's Buskers" in which big-time musicians cover silly songs from Bob's Burgers. Then, the animators for Bob's Burgers draw the musicians playing said song in front of Bob's Burgers' titular storefront. In the first installment, St. Vincent covers the song "Bad Tina" from a Season 2 episode of the show. Hopefully, a future episode in the series will feature whoever plays the Arrested Development ukulele theme song covering the Bob's Burgers ukulele theme song.
Splitsider alum Jesse David Fox picked the "Top 10 Stand-Up Specials of 2012" over at Vulture this week, selecting the best of the best from what's been an excellent year for live comedy specials and albums. Vulture's top picks were the latest specials from Tig Notaro, Kyle Kinane, John Mulaney, Paul F. Tompkins, Patrice O'Neal, Maria Bamford, James Adomian, Reggie Watts, and Rory Scovel, who are all just plain old delightful.
Vulture and the Upright Citizens Brigade have teamed up to create a new web series called "Pop Culture Memory Lane," in which comedians share their embarrassing stories about their relationship with entertainment in a mix of videos and animation. The series kicked off with Happy Endings star Casey Wilson telling an embarrassing story from her high school days in which she lied about being a journalist in order to hang out with a boy she liked who was an understudy in the musical Rent. Hopefully, this will be the start of a new TV show in which Casey Wilson gives teenage girls tips on how to create elaborate [...]
Here's a new Vulture video in which rival podcasters Chris Hardwick and Julie Klausner become rival Pictionary players. And don't worry, it's pop culture pictionary, so you won't be forced to hear/watch things that aren't pop culture-related for even a second.
"It’s weird. I mean, I bumped into Michael Showalter on the subway and we were having that discussion and came up with the funny idea of some type of show or web series about the last remaining few people in New York like me, him, you, H. Jon Benjamin. Even some people we have talked about have already moved to L.A. in the last few months … We had a funny idea for a show called Stayin Put!"
- Jon Glaser talking to Eugene Mirman for Vulture about being two of the last 15 comedians who still live in New York.
"Five or ten years from now, there's a good chance we'll recognize NBC as the Peacock in the coal mine, the first one to fall as the broadcast era came to a close — or, at least, morphed into something far different than what we've known for the past 60 years."
- from a Vulture piece about NBC's abysmally-rated 2012-2013 brodcast season, entitled "Has NBC Passed the Point of No Return?"
While all the other major networks' ratings have been down this year, NBC, which has been in last place for a few years now, has been experiencing the best start to its season in a decade. Josef Adalian over at Vulture has a piece today analyzing the so-called NBC comeback. The trick to really kicking this comeback into high-gear? More "The More You Know" segments, obviously.
