When Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return was announced, it made a lot of nerds very nervous. There are few shows so ardently (yet combatively) loved by its fans. “Joel vs. Mike” was one of the biggest arguments in the early days of the internet. Adding a “vs. Jonah” to the equation could potentially have […]
Continue ReadingReading Brandon Wardell’s Twitter account is like looking at online humor and culture through a prism. He seems to reflect our every joke, meme, and pop culture reference into his surreal persona. Brandon is “online as hell.” He popularized the “Dicks Out for Harambe” meme last year, and he regularly hosts a Comedy Central Snapchat […]
Continue ReadingThe comedy podcast universe is ever expanding, not unlike the universe universe. We’re here to make it a bit smaller, a bit more manageable. There are a lot of great shows and each has a lot of great episodes, so we want to highlight the exceptional, the noteworthy. Each week our crack team of podcast […]
Continue ReadingSome deaths remain fresh wounds that refuse to heal or dissipate with time. They remain eternally painful. The deaths of Johnny Cash and David Bowie and Philip Seymour Hoffman are like that for a lot of people. For many podcast and comedy fans, so was the death of Harris Wittels on February 19th, 2015. Harris […]
Continue ReadingIf you want to be disturbed and yet also oddly reassured that American politics cycle through the same themes again and again, look no further than the 1992 political mockumentary Bob Roberts written, directed by, and starring Tim Robbins as the eponymous Pennsylvania senatorial candidate, a Yale educated financial man with a serious fencing habit-turned-down-home, […]
Continue ReadingI know, I know, I wrote about Josh Ruben recently, but this piece is different, because it’s not just about him. There’s a larger story to Freddy Derryl and how it all came to be. Shot on New Years Eve, 2016, in Ruben’s native Woodstock, New York, the short–which also stars Bettina Skye in a […]
Continue ReadingThe concept of “making it” in showbiz is perhaps made up itself. There is no defining body of who makes it and who doesn’t, and sometimes your big wins will look small in retrospect, just like your minor wins could fill you with the most amount of pride eventually. That being said, it’s also not […]
Continue ReadingSo I was watching the season finale of Crashing, the one where Pete Holmes goes to a big outdoor adult baptism. One of the people getting baptized is Ellen, a woman visibly miffed when the ceremony gets hijacked by Pete and his estranged wife’s marital drama, and she does a lot of facial expressions and […]
Continue ReadingSo I was watching the season finale of Crashing, the one where Pete Holmes goes to a big outdoor adult baptism. One of the people getting baptized is Ellen, a woman visibly miffed when the ceremony gets hijacked by Pete and his estranged wife’s marital drama, and she does a lot of facial expressions and […]
Continue ReadingFor comedy professionals in particular, Aaron Sorkin’s hilariously self-righteous camp classic Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has to be one of the most hate-watched and lovingly maligned pop culture misfires of all time. The show furiously insisted that an alternately mediocre and bewilderingly pretentious sketch comedy show modeled on Saturday Night Live was so […]
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