Yes, I am trying to be funny.
The Coachella Music Festival has been in the news lately, partly because it’s just that time of year and there’s never enough content to go around so somehow an overpriced outdoor concert is transformed into ‘news’, but mostly because of allegations that Philip Anschutz (the owner of AEG, the entertainment …
Recently, a meme was going around that your real age is 100 minus the number of bands playing at the Coachella music festival that you’ve actually heard of before. In my case, this turned out to be 63 — a good number, placing me (as in real life) right at …
As I’ve discussed endlessly in this space, one of my favorite things about the right-wing persecution complex that’s been so carefully cultivated by conservative politicians over the last 50 years or so is hearing people complain about things that are not only not actually happening, but are the opposite of …
It’s inevitable, in the face of any great political defeat or party realignment, for loyalties to get a bit shaky. Confusion rules the day, and the ally of yesterday is the heretic of tomorrow. Only a few months ago, when it looked like the Republican Party was about to shake …
2016, the little year that absolutely could not, is almost over, and with the exception of people for whom it was a raging success — morticians and neo-Nazis, in the main — most of us are eager to see the end of it. Starting out, as all years do, with …
As a reminder to my readers, during the 1980s, I penned a column for the New York Times entitled “Life’s Little Construction Worker”, in which I passed on to impressionable subscribers wisdom gathered from my father and his drinking buddies. The column lasted for just over three years, at which point …
Christopher Guest is a divisive figure in the comedy world. The comedies he makes with his stock company of gifted improvisers — ranging from This is Spinal Tap to For Your Consideration — tend to be loved by critics and fans, but Guest also has a reputation (well-earned, from my personal experience) as a difficult …
High-concept sit-coms are hard to pull off. Setting a half-hour, joke-heavy TV show in anything but an ordinary setting requires an awful lot of heavy lifting: not only do you have to spend a lot of time and effort on stuff like sets and costumes, but you also need to …
Last night’s debate between centrist plutocrat Hillary Clinton and (in comedian John Mulaney’s nice phrase) amateur-night pimp Donald Trump wasn’t particularly instructive, but it certainly seems to have thrown a significant portion of the populace into a tizzy. The ‘town hall’ format, allowing as it did for hooting orangutans and …
Two of the most frequently encountered modalities in the modern world of television comedy share a common weakness: the way the negative personalities of the main characters tend to get in the way of the laughs. Comedies centered around protagonists with mental illness can succeed, and the genre has produced …
Well, look at this! It’s the night of the very first and very exciting presidential debate, in which Hillary Clinton, a woman who embodies the American ideal that if you want something really bad people should give it to you and not ask a lot of annoying questions, and Donald …
So another handful of ‘polls’ have been released, which seem to indicated that presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton has failed to charm the electorate and that Chee-To-dusted stray stem cell Donald Trump is closing the ‘gap’ which allegedly exists between them. Many explanations have been offered for this development: It’s all …
Every election year, we are asked to make a momentous decision: to choose between the two official party-approved multimillionaires who are allowed to become President of the United States. This year, the choice seems especially important, because one of the candidates is a wealthy, unlikable real estate speculator who feels …
There are, in the vast field of toil we call the entertainment industry, people who have a tremendous amount of ability, but never get quite the right project. They are often possessed of a very singular talent, one that can’t easily be plugged into a generic formula, and as a result …
Six months ago, if you had a grown adult wearing a t-shirt with a children’s character crash into you in a public place because they had their face buried in a cell phone screen and weren’t’ paying attention to their surroundings, odds were pretty good they were just using Duolingo …
