Erik Griffin is a workaholic. Workaholics, the show that introduced him to a broader audience with his portrayal of Montez Walker, recently ended its seventh and final season. But Griffin is keeping himself on the radar this summer with his role in I’m Dying Up Here and his first hour-long comedy special, The Ugly Truth, […]
Continue ReadingAs you probably have heard, Selina Meyer, as played to perfection by Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is gearing up for another presidential run. Her increasingly diminishing political legacy has been boosted, ironically, by the unending incompetence of her former White House Press Secretary Mike McClintock (Matt Walsh). This was just one of many revelations to […]
Continue ReadingIf you think acting is a job for soft, pampered elites, you should know that actor Brian Sacca got sunburned on his eyeballs while shooting the TBS series Wrecked. Now in its second season, Wrecked is basically the comedy version of Lost. Sacca, best known for his web series Fact Checkers Unit and his role […]
Continue ReadingComedy Central’s newest half-hour standup series, Kevin Hart Presents: The Next Level, continues this Sunday night at 11/10c with up-and-coming Chicago comedian Taneshia “Just Nesh” Rice. Nesh is a relatively young comic, having spent just a little over five years onstage. She ran the light at her first open mic but a year and a half […]
Continue ReadingRob Huebel is maybe a quintessential “right place, right time” example for an aspiring comedian. The place was New York and the time was the late ‘90s, and Huebel was a 27-year-old “struggling wannabe comedian” who hadn’t quite found his specialty yet in the comedy world. That was until his roommate dragged him to some […]
Continue ReadingHood Adjacent with James Davis premiered Wednesday night on Comedy Central, and it’s already proven itself a worthy successor to the network’s groundbreaking Chappelle’s Show and award-winning Key and Peele. Hood Adjacent sits somewhere between those two series both comedically and anthropologically. Just like its host. “It’s my ode to how I grew up in […]
Continue ReadingEpisode #4 of my new Laughly exclusive miniseries, On Second Thought, is out now with my guest Jackie Kashian. On Second Thought asks: If tragedy plus time equals comedy, then comedy plus time equals what now? We don’t have to go very far back to find Kashian already second- and third-guessing her decision to open her latest […]
Continue ReadingOther than a mere year of overlap on Saturday Night Live (which produced one of the greatest sketches of all time, “Short Shorts for the USA”) and mostly isolated screen time in the no-one-knows-what-it-means-but-it’s-provocative Blades of Glory, Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler have never performed together in a proper two-hander. Which is no laughing matter […]
Continue ReadingBefore Jason Mantzoukas was being asked about the logistics of breaking into the comedy world, he was traveling the real world. Living for almost two years abroad on a trip funded through the Watson Fellowship, a grant that enables graduates to pursue an independent study internationally, Mantzoukas had only one restriction: he could not return […]
Continue ReadingFew mainstream filmmakers treat the full range of cinema as their playground quite like Edgar Wright does. With each film he releases, the British director (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) —known for his innovative yet playful visual language — pushes the boundaries of what we’ve come to accept about the limitations […]
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