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Learning laughter: an expert’s guide on how to master standup comedy

October 4, 2017TheGuardian

Stephen Rosenfield, founder of the American Comedy Institute, reveals how to make an audience laugh while using on-stage nerves to your advantage

As the founding director of The American Comedy Institute, a dedicated student of standup, and someone whose tutelage has bolstered the careers of Lena Dunham and Jim Gaffigan, Stephen Rosenfield is an authority on the complicated craft of standup comedy. And in his new book, Mastering Stand-Up: The Complete Guide to Becoming a Successful Comedian, he makes an otherwise terrifying art form – Americans reportedly fear public speaking more than they do death – remarkably accessible to both the layman and the comedy buff. Rosenfield spoke to the Guardian about the finer points of standup, from structure to subject matter, that are included in his book.

Talking Comedy and Politics with Former Obama Speechwriter David Litt

September 19, 2017splitsider

Not many people can claim that they landed their first post-college job as a 24-year-old speechwriter and joke writer for the President of the United States, which is just part of what makes David Litt’s new book Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, out today, so fascinating. Now head writer at Funny or Die’s new DC […]

Trump’s ‘Sweet Valley High’ Spec Novel Notes, by Kit Lively

September 18, 2017splitsider

Donna is a smart, beautiful, popular girl. Really, really big boobs, maybe? But they let her be head cheerleader anyway, because she can do all of the complicated routines and flips and so on, even though her boobs are like, huge.Most of the other girls are jealous of her, and of her awesome pony. They’re […]

Sara Pascoe: how I overcame my Jane Austen prejudice

September 1, 2017TheGuardian

Austen’s women have the same rights as children; her ‘romantic’ match-making smacks of desperation. So how did the standup see the funny side of Pride and Prejudice for her new stage adaptation?

“Why does no one talk about how funny Jane Austen is?” I ask my friend Katie. We’d done English literature for three years at Sussex University – how was I only discovering these perceptive comedies a decade later?

“It’s all anyone ever says!” Katie is annoyed with me. “I tried to tell you how great she was but you insisted you’d never read any 19th-century novels.” She’s right. I got through my entire degree avoiding anything from the 19th century. I didn’t care if the steam train ended up in the workhouse, or the bonnet ran out of gruel. Regency literature was too coal-y for me, too long-winded and describey. I preferred modern books where you had to read other books explaining what the first book meant to know what happened.

How could there be any romance, any love, when females were wedding-night virgins, dependants with little respect?

Lydia Towsey: how I discovered the Venus in me

August 30, 2017TheGuardian

From Botticelli to glossy magazines, women have been idealised and misrepresented for centuries. Performance poet Lydia Towsey reveals how her own near-fatal eating disorder set her on a path to explore new ways of looking at female bodies

Botticelli’s painting of the Birth of Venus was the first female nude painted and exhibited life size, and in many ways the medieval blueprint for every covergirl to come. It was about the birth of beauty, sexuality and glamour. But what would happen if, instead of washing up on an ancient Cypriot beach on her magnificent scallop shell, the Roman goddess were to arrive naked and vulnerable on a UK beach in the 21st century? This question is the starting point for my show, The Venus Papers.

It’s about lots of things – a theatrical performance combining poetry, humour, art, movement and music, in which I introduce Venus to my world. She encounters customs officers, tabloid newspapers, the male gaze, bars, Primark, life modelling, the perils of breastfeeding in public and something I’ve previously struggled to talk about in my work – the eating disorder I had for approximately seven years.

Will Ferrell to Produce and Star in ‘The 100 Year-Old Man’ Adaptation

August 23, 2017splitsider

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 […]

An Excerpt from ‘The Best American Emails,’ by Amanda Meadows

August 7, 2017splitsider

You’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 […]

Dan Harmon Is Developing a TV Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘The Sirens of Titan’

July 19, 2017splitsider

Dan 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) […]

An Excerpt from ‘Away with Words,’ by Joe Berkowitz

June 19, 2017splitsider

We’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 […]

Jenny Slate: ‘Ivanka Trump is a fake feminist and should be ashamed’

June 18, 2017TheGuardian

The 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).

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