What innovations are there in television? Multi-camera filming, laugh tracks, color, the variety show, cable, reality TV, HD, digital filming, and a handful of other landmarks (including a few major ones I’m sure I’m forgetting) that have sprung up. The point is, in nearly 100 years of television we’ve seen that it’s not a form […]
Continue ReadingRekha Shankar is a comedy writer, performer, and video editor in Brooklyn. She improvises at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and writes for MTV News’s Decoded and Reductress. She has made videos for Clickhole and Funny or Die, and has worked on a pilot for comedian Hari Kondabolu. She also makes videos with the group […]
Continue ReadingWhat do you do when you need more life experience to create new and innovative comedy, but you want to make things now? You go down wormholes, looking for inspiration. Weird wormholes. 3am wormholes that expose you to things like “El Cuco”– the Portugese and Spanish answer to the American Boogeyman. He punishes bad children and […]
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Second City Archives, in which we post an exclusive clip each week of some of comedy’s biggest superstars performing early in their careers on the legendary Chicago stage. Second City has generously given us a glimpse into their extensive archive of live performances, and over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing some […]
Continue ReadingSeptember 7, 1806 SOME PERSONAL NEWS STOP I HAVE WORKED AT JOHNSONVILLE ADVERTISER FOR THREE YEARS STOP AND COVERED ALL MANNER OF HAPPENINGS IN JOHNSONVILLE GOVERNMENT AND BEYOND STOP BUT TODAY MARKS BEGINNING OF NEW ADVENTURE STOP ON OCTOBER 4 I WILL START AS A NEWS-PAPER MAN AT HAPSBURG CHRONICLE-DEMOCRAT STOP FOCUSING ON IDIOSYNCRASIES OF […]
Continue ReadingPod-Canon is an ongoing tribute to the greatest individual comedy-related podcast episodes of all time. Sean Clements and Hayes Davenport’s Hollywood Handbook has been in a fascinatingly meta, intricate and multi-layered groove as of late. Earwolf’s obsessively loved show-business satire has devoted episode after episode to giddily deconstructing the elements of podcasting, comedy, and show […]
Continue ReadingRae Sanni is a comedian and writer from Brooklyn, NY who has been bringing her unique perspective on everything from pop culture to race and gender relations to audiences all over. Sanni has worked on Comedy Central and Lifetime, and she has been published in New York Magazine, The Decider, and Buzzfeed. This week, Sanni […]
Continue ReadingLots of sketch pitches feature emojis. Most of them are just okay, because they rely on a kind of knee-jerk creative commentary on our modern world. The mere fact that emojis exist and serve as colorful proxies for our emotions and desires isn’t enough. Rebecca Blaine Carton and Kira McCarthy saw that and built something special. In the latest installment of […]
Continue ReadingWelcome to The Second City Archives, in which we post an exclusive clip each week of some of comedy’s biggest superstars performing early in their careers on the legendary Chicago stage. Second City has generously given us a glimpse into their extensive archive of live performances, and over the coming weeks we’ll be sharing some […]
Continue ReadingIn the days after you first broke through London on the express and found the true country with the poppies and the rains and the Forbidden Forest, where the half-giant Hagrid cabined as a kindly vagrant, in those first days before the great unvirgining of the War, if you could keep from making too many […]
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