It’s no joke for new shows as classic favourites live on while investment in sitcoms and sketches falters
There is a quip beloved of comedians, when asked if their industry is going down the pan: “Nostalgia? It ain’t what it used to be.”
But for fans of well-worn jokes, and the shows in which they appear, 2024 could be truly a golden era.
Continue reading...Will Stewart’s satire still cut through in a post-pandemic world of disinformation, polarisation and fragmented media?
Barack Obama was US president. Britain was a lynchpin of the European Union. Harvey Weinstein was a powerful movie mogul. Meghan Markle was starring in Suits. “TikTok” did not mean anything and fake news meant a satirical TV program with pretend reporters.
That was the world Jon Stewart left behind when he hosted his last episode of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central network on 6 August 2015, denying a legion of fans his lacerating take on the election, presidency, impeachment, defeat, impeachment again and comeback of Donald Trump.
Continue reading...Tom and brother Dick’s groundbreaking CBS show was pulled when they took a stance against Vietnam war and for civil rights
Tom Smothers, half of the comedy group the Smothers Brothers, has died at the age of 86.
Smothers was described as “not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life”, but as “a one-of-a-kind creative partner”, according to a statement by his brother Dick Smothers on Wednesday shared by the National Comedy Center.
Continue reading...‘I will now have the opportunity to finally shed this “Larry David” persona and become the person God intended me to be,’ star says
After almost 25 years playing Larry David, Larry David has announced that his award-winning comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm is ending with the next season.
The Seinfeld co-creator has played a curmudgeonly version of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm since 2000, making it HBO’s longest-running comedy. Much like Seinfeld, the show draws on the humour in everyday life but the dialogue is mostly improvised around an outline written by David, who plays a semi-retired television writer.
Continue reading...Actor played Thelma Ferris, wife of Rodney Bewes’ Bob, in popular BBC1 sitcom that aired from 1973-74
Brigit Forsyth, who starred in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, has died at the age of 83, her agent has confirmed.
The Scottish actor played Thelma Ferris, the long-suffering wife of Rodney Bewes’ character, Bob, in the 70s BBC sitcom. She died “peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her family” in the early hours of Friday morning, her agent, Mark Pemberton, confirmed.
Continue reading...Justin Trudeau and Adele among public figures to speak fondly of actor best known as Chandler Bing in Friends
World leaders and Hollywood stars have hailed the “comedic genius” of Friends star Matthew Perry after the actor’s death at 54.
The American-Canadian star, best known for playing Chandler Bing in the sitcom Friends, was found dead in an apparent drowning at his Los Angeles home on Saturday.
Continue reading...In a 20-minute video, the comedian disputes the magazine’s suggestion that he went too far in exaggerating his experiences
A month after the comedian Hasan Minhaj was accused of misleading audiences with his personal stories, the Daily Show alum has responded with an in-depth video. His argument: there’s a difference between his political TV comedy and the personal stories he tells in his standup.
A New Yorker article suggested that Minhaj, who is Muslim, had gone too far in exaggerating his own experiences with racism, Islamophobia and political backlash, including claims about an FBI informant at his childhood mosque and the hospitalization of his daughter in an anthrax scare. The story may have undermined his chance to be the next Daily Show host.
Continue reading...Unique research shows cardiovascular gains recorded in patients who were shown TV comedy
The old adage that “laughter is the best medicine” may contain an element of truth when it comes to heart health.
A study has demonstrated that having a chuckle causes the tissue inside the heart to expand – and increases oxygen flow around the body.
Continue reading...Tributes have flowed across Australia, with both politicians and entertainers sharing messages praising the late comedian
Tributes have flowed in Australia for Barry Humphries, with politicians and fellow entertainers remembering him as an “icon” who left an “indelible legacy on the history of Australian comedy”.
Humphries – best known for his character Dame Edna Everage – died surrounded by family in an inner-Sydney hospital on Saturday, where he had been receiving treatment for complications after hip surgery he had after a fall earlier this year. The 89-year-old had been living in London, and had travelled to Sydney for Christmas, falling ill during his trip.
Continue reading...Ricky Gervais, Rob Brydon and Matt Lucas among those paying homage to the Dame Edna Everage star who has died aged 89
Comedy stars from around the world have paid tribute to the late Barry Humphries, hailing him a “true great”.
Humphries, best known for his character Dame Edna Everage, died in hospital in Sydney on Saturday aged 89.
Continue reading...Agent pays tribute to ‘unique talent loved by many’ who played Gladys Pugh in BBC comedy series
The Hi-de-Hi! actor Ruth Madoc has died aged 79 after a fall.
Madoc became a household name playing “chief yellowcoat” Gladys Pugh in the BBC One sitcom. The show ran for eight years from 1980 and was set in a fictional holiday camp, Maplins, during the 1950s.
Continue reading...Reports suggest that the character actor appears to have suffered a medical emergency before crashing his car in Hollywood
Actor Leslie Jordan has died after a car accident in Los Angeles on Monday at the age of 67.
Law enforcement sources told TMZ and then the Los Angeles Times that they suspected the beloved actor suffered a medical emergency before crashing his BMW into the side of a building in Hollywood.
Continue reading...BBC Comedy development drive to fuel search for ‘relatable British characters’
The BBC will double the number of half-hour comedy pilots it makes and invest an extra £10m in the genre in a bid to find the next Fleabag or Motherland.
Sharing plans for the future of comedy at the corporation, the director of BBC Comedy, Jon Petrie, said his department was investing in its “development process”.
Continue reading...They were pigeonholed, derided – and even shot at. With The Marvelous Mrs Maisel back on TV screens, we find out what life was really like for women who dared to be funny in the postwar years
Back in the days when they were still called comediennes, an older comedienne turns to a younger one and says: “What is your persona?” The younger woman is confused. Bob Hope and Lenny Bruce don’t have personas, she says. They are just allowed to be funny as themselves, so why isn’t she? “They have dicks,” snaps back Sophie Lennon, one of the most memorable characters in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.
In the hit Amazon show – set in 50s and 60s New York – Midge Maisel discovers her talent as a standup. She’s an accidental comic, getting up on stage at a Greenwich Village club one night, drunk and angry and confessional, after her husband leaves her for his secretary. At the time, there is really only one mainstream female standup: Lennon, whose persona is that of a Queens housewife, complete with feather duster, fat suit and grating catchphrase. Maisel, with her shocking, electrifying set – it ends with her getting arrested – represents a new style of comedy, particularly for women.
Continue reading...As we slowly rediscover a world of bad wifi and slow lifts, the US Office writer and creator of Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine explains why he can’t wait to get back
One of the first things we knew back in early 2020 was that we wouldn’t be going to work for a while. We thought that we would take a quick break – a week, maybe – and then reassess. So we cleaned out our cubicles and desks, and grabbed a few snacks from the kitchen (and toilet paper from the bathroom). One week became two, which became a month, which became a series of question marks spanning endlessly into the future, as the Zooms and FaceTimes and home office conversions gradually made the very idea of spending our workdays with other people seem like a quaint memory. Like childhood birthday parties, or answering machines, or properly functioning democracy.
Some of us might never go back. Every so often we will hear about companies reassessing their relationship to the office, which has been proved unnecessary or at least outdated.
‘In 1987,’ photographer Steven Ahlgren says, ‘when I was bored and unfulfilled, working as a banker in Minneapolis, I began taking frequent trips to look at a painting by Edward Hopper, Office at Night. What first drew me was its setting, which I related to each and every workday at the bank. But what kept pulling me back was its ambiguous narrative – who were these two people, what was their relationship, and why was the woman looking at that piece of paper on the floor?’
Continue reading...From defiantly turning her back on male approval to her seamlessly snappy defiance of the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Midge is a warrior whose example still resonates
The best line so far in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – the Emmy award-winning comedy drama about a New York-50s-housewife-turned-standup-comic – isn’t a joke she delivers in a set on a dingy club stage. It isn’t even one of the endless, off-stage zingers by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (also behind Gilmore Girls). It is, in fact, the searing three-word reply that Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) fires at her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen), halfway through season one, when he asks why she won’t give their marriage another shot: “Because you left.”
In that moment, Mrs Maisel becomes the ultimate single woman’s icon. In a world that measures her success and identity by her marital status, she makes the decision to be a single mother and blindly embrace whatever is ahead. While the social stigmas attached to being unmarried might have relaxed since Midge’s time, the reality today is this: in 2019 five hospital trusts and six clinical commissioning groups banned single women from accessing IVF; our prime minister once said the children of single women are “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”; single people feel priced out of owning a house while couples have a double income; and – take it from someone who knows – if you’re not standing on a soapbox shouting “single, fierce and independent!”, friends and family assume you’re sitting at home feeling sad with the cat (or without the cat, because the landlord won’t allow it).
Continue reading...Having escaped an ‘existential lightning bolt’, you might expect the comic actor to be slowing down. You’d be wrong
For at least a couple of weeks after it happened, Bob Odenkirk couldn’t remember he’d had a heart attack. He would wake up, feeling pretty good, and think about heading to work. “And everyone would say: ‘Calm down, you had a heart attack,’” he recalls. There is an absurdity to this daily revelation of bad news that I think Odenkirk – a connoisseur of the absurd – might enjoy.
“Here, let me show you this,” he says. “This is something my daughter made for me because every day was the same thing of not remembering.” He gets out his phone and finds a picture he took of a whiteboard with a timeline of the events of that week or so in July last year – collapsing on the set of his TV drama Better Call Saul, hospital, his family arriving – so that Odenkirk would know what had happened. He holds it up to the screen. On day one, she has written “die” (the quote marks are hers).
Continue reading...After a meandering third season, Rachel Brosnahan is back on ferocious form as a ‘girl comic’ fighting to regain her career
After a treacly, uneven third season, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon Prime) appears to have found its fangs again. “Revenge … I crave it. I am completely consumed by the need for it,” purrs Midge/Miriam (nobody seems to call her Midge any more), rediscovering her sharp edges, now back on a small stage in a dingy nightclub, with an act that is heavy on the F-word. This show is never better than when Miriam is having to fight tooth and nail for her spot in the limelight, and it is a welcome relief to see her having to do it again. “That’s life. Shit happens,” she declares, ending the routine on a surprisingly acerbic note.
I say surprising because, while the first two seasons were a lot of fun, Mrs Maisel found herself in a rut during the third, which paired huge set pieces with a meandering plot and episodes that felt far longer than they were. Season three all-but guaranteed that Miriam was going to make it big, until her seemingly certain path to stardom and home ownership hit not so much a road block as a solid brick wall, when she accidentally(ish) outed the biggest star in the world to his adoring audience. It appears that few picked up on the Judy Garland references that felt a little ahead of their time, but it was enough to get her fired from her fame-making tour, and bring her back to where it all started.
Continue reading...Paramedics at the ready! Ten years after their last bone-crunching outing, the juvenile daredevils are at it again
The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.
When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.
Continue reading...Forty years after his breakthrough role in Little House on the Prairie, the actor is thrilling TV audiences as a drug cartel money launderer. But he almost threw his career away
Jason Bateman appears on a Zoom screen from Los Angeles, bespectacled, calm and in uncluttered, butter-coloured environs. It’s as if Michael Bluth, the character he played in Arrested Development, had dressed up as a therapist for some hilarious purpose. To fans of the show, its entire cast will always have traces clinging to them, as if they have all been, well, arrested in that dysfunctional family. But today we’re here to talk about Ozark, a drama with a reputation that has been climbing each season (it’s now in its fourth and final) and so has, arguably, become even more defining for Bateman.
Tense and lingering, Ozark has the dizzying pace and visual sumptuousness that the modern long-running box set demands. What was haunting about it from the start were the subtle performances of Bateman and his co-star, Laura Linney; just a regular, affluent, middle-aged couple, except he was about to launder $500m for a drug cartel and she’d just watched the murder of the lawyer she was having an affair with. They were on the run, but only sort of. They hated each other, except they didn’t. What passed between them gave such propulsive energy to their characters that from the very beginning you could trust one thing: it might be improbable, but it was never going to be boring. But all that nuance was a double-edged sword. “Marty and Wendy are really intelligent characters,” Bateman says. “Sometimes that narrows your options as a writer, trying to keep things plausible. They can’t do really stupid things. The smart thing to do is to turn yourself in. Then the show’s over.”
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