Comedy
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Tuesday, August 7th, 2012Mark O’Donnell, who wrote the book for “Hairspray” and other shows, has died suddenly in his Upper West Side building. Mark was a top-flight comedy writer who nevertheless, pre-Hairspray, used to tell me he was “destitute” and was glad to write brief (and hilarious) book reviews for me when I was an editor at People [...]
“The Newsroom” Debuts
Sunday, June 24th, 2012In my Sunday column, a look at Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO show “The Newsroom.” Yes, I devote a lot of space to destroying one of his contentions, but I could have gone on in the same way for thousands of words. (Jonah Goldberg’s “The Tyranny of Cliches,” for instance, has already debunked a lot of [...]
Luvvies
Wednesday, June 13th, 2012Asked why he blew off a “Family Guy” script meeting, Seth MacFarlane (couldn’t he behave a bit better, at least temporarily, while a reporter was tailing him?) first told The New Yorker it was “because I don’t get vacations” (I wonder if the legendary fact-checking squad assessed that fact) and once worked for “fifteen months, [...]
Naked Emperor News
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012I’m speechless at Obama’s attempt to shoehorn a policy issue into a musical comedy sketch. This is the guy whose most unassailable attribute is that he’s supposedly cool? The man obviously cannot do comedy. He’s been a public figure for eight years and I’m not aware of him ever spontaneously being amusing or witty. [...]
The New “Office”
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012There’s a funny show on BBC2 that’s sort of like “The Office” with MBAs all around. It’s a satire of corporate buzzwords set against an organizing committee for the London Olympics. The show is called Twenty Twelve, and according to The Sun (I couldn’t find it online) such phrases as “It’s virtually a virtual front [...]
More on Lena Dunham’s “Girls”
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012As I said before, I hugely enjoyed the first three episodes of HBO’s “Girls,” which stars and is being run and directed by twentysomething Lena Dunham, whose debut film “Tiny Furniture” I loved a couple of years ago. I don’t think the show is particularly groundbreaking — it’s basically “Sex and the City” in the [...]
Lefty Toasts Breitbart
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012A nice story about Seth MacFarlane, the “Family Guy” guy, sharing a nip from a flask with Andrew Breitbart at Bill Maher’s show. Makes me like MacFarlane more, though I can’t really handle all the cheap shots on his show. (Though the Star Wars parodies are very good.) Question: Is the frenzied nature of political [...]
Tim Is Back
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011HBO’s twisted office-drone comedy “The Life and Times of Tim” returns this Friday night. The first episode of season three is not one of my favorites, but check out the show anyway, for reasons I mentioned in my look at the first two seasons.
The Second Life of “The Life and Times of Tim”
Thursday, September 8th, 2011I was psyched to see that HBO un-canceled “The Life and Times of Tim” in much the same way that “Family Guy” returned from the dead. HBO canceled the show immediately after I went out on the limb to praise it (my editor said something like, “No one has ever written about this show,” which [...]
Tina Fey: Memorist or No?
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011I much enjoyed the two New Yorker excerpts from Tina Fey’s book “Bossypants,” which may or may not be a memoir. I always enjoy it when professionals discourse on the nature of comedy, and Fey had some astute points about male comedy writers (who tend to leave their own urine lying around in jars and [...]
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