Will Ferrell just lined up another movie role. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ferrell has signed on to produce and star in an adaptation of Jonas Jonasson’s bestselling 2012 novel The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Adam McKay is also attached as a producer, and Jason George will write […]
Continue ReadingYou’re Invited to a Screening of ~HOCKEY JERKS~ To: amandasjunkmail@ymail.com From: thescreenery@screenery.film Subject: You’re Invited to a Screening of ~HOCKEY JERKS~ SCREENINGS’ GREETINGS! Hey [amandasjunkmail@ymail.com], Thanks for participating with The Screenery! We’d like to invite you to a screening in your area of the upcoming feature film, Hockey Jerks! Here’s all of the information you […]
Continue ReadingDan Harmon is working on a new TV project. According to Variety, Harmon has teamed up with Evan Katz (Small Crimes) to develop a TV adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan. Here’s the logline for the project: UCP is also working on Sirens of Titan, with Dan Harmon (Rick & Morty) […]
Continue ReadingWe’ve now reached the pun solstice, the verbal equinox. The Henry Pun-Off is six months away, a comfortably far-off X in next year’s calendar. That’s five more Punderdomes for anyone who plans on heading to Austin in the spring. My performance at the December Dome was an improvement so marginal it would take nanotechnology to […]
Continue ReadingThe US actor, standup and author on her new film, Gifted, rescuing her career after being fired from Saturday Night Live, inspirational women and the terrifying situation in the White House
Jenny Slate, 35, is an American comedian, actor and author. The middle of three sisters, with a ceramicist mother and poet father, she was raised in Milton, Massachusetts. While at Columbia University, Slate performed standup and improv. Moving to Los Angeles with then-husband, director Dean Fleischer-Camp (they’ve since amicably divorced), Slate joined Saturday Night Live in 2009, but accidentally swore in her first episode and was fired after one season. A stop-motion short animation made with Fleischer-Camp, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, became a viral hit, leading to New York Times bestseller children’s books and plans for a feature-length movie.
With her distinctive voice, Slate featured in Zootopia and The Secret Life of Pets. On television, she appeared in Parks and Recreation, Married and Girls. Her performance in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, playing a comic navigating a pregnancy termination, won her awards including the Critics’ Choice award for best actress in a comedy. Slate stars in another Robespierre film, Landline, due out in the summer. In her latest film, Gifted, she plays a teacher who becomes involved with a man (Chris Evans) caring for his maths prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace).
Continue ReadingDuring his time on air, David Letterman was aware that he was comedy establishment, but this knowledge fueled him, becoming fodder to satirize the fanfare and spectacle that now consumes the late night landscape. Jason Zinoman’s recently released biography, Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, manages to capture this, and Letterman, in his cutting-edge, […]
Continue ReadingWHAT WILL TODDLERS EAT? Food used to be one of your top five things—remember brunch?—but toddlers ruin food. You try to serve them healthy things, lovingly crafted, only to see them reject or smash them. Just a short bit ago, you were trying so damned hard to get them off the bottle, and now eating […]
Continue ReadingWHAT WILL TODDLERS EAT? Food used to be one of your top five things—remember brunch?—but toddlers ruin food. You try to serve them healthy things, lovingly crafted, only to see them reject or smash them. Just a short bit ago, you were trying so damned hard to get them off the bottle, and now eating […]
Continue ReadingTom Shillue can be seen on FOX News, where he hosted the late late-night comedy panel show, Red Eye, and still appears regularly in other hours, offering his homespun comedic values to the day’s news.Shillue has been featured on Comedy Central’s Broad City, and he can be seen and heard from time to time on […]
Continue ReadingThe dry-witted US essayist talks about how he went from working as an elf in Macy’s to becoming ‘the American Alan Bennett’
David Sedaris’s partner of 25 years, Hugh Hamrick, calls the first chunk of the essayist’s diaries, published under the title Theft By Finding, “David Copperfield Sedaris”. And it’s true, Sedaris concedes, the book – which covers the years from 1977, when he scribbled his first entries on the backs of coffee shop placemats while travelling around, to 2002 – has a certain rags-to-riches quality. In the second volume, on the other hand, “I just go from shopping at Paul Smith to shopping at Comme des Garçons, and I’m on airplanes all the time”. The thought prompts a memory of a recent plane trip, first class from Hawaii to Portland, Oregon. “This woman said, you are so lucky to be seated up front, it’s a great spot for people-watching. And I said, hmm, it could be, but we don’t really count you as people.” He bursts out laughing, and so do I, even though I know I oughtn’t. What on earth did she say? “She laughed, she knew I was kidding. Hugh was horrified. Horrified.”
There’s something about that one-liner that characterises Sedaris’s writing: a flash of directness, even brutality, that threatens the social veneer (especially in first class); the reassuring feeling that of course he’s kidding, with the faint background feeling, “but not entirely”; the spreading realisation that he’s getting at something far more complex about human nature, absurdity and awkwardness. “He’s like an American Alan Bennett,” says the quote (from this newspaper) on the back cover of Theft By Finding. Both writers occupy that space in which their subversiveness and caustic records of daily life run up against the foam blanket of “humour”, as if we can maximise the cuddliness and minimise the edge by focusing on the laughs.
Related: Read extracts from Theft By Finding Volume One – by David Sedaris
Related: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls review – recollections of a resolute outsider
And I said, could you close the door, please? And he shut the door in her face and I never saw her again
Related: David Sedaris at Edinburgh: ‘I’ll never run out of things to laugh about’
In the lanes of Sussex, he is known as the American who picks up the litter, for which he has a passionate hatred
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