How Lorne Michaels’s Biographer Got Him on the Record
Saturday Night Live, now in its 50th year, is more than TV’s longest-running variety series—or the highest-rated entertainment show on broadcast television among a key demographic. As a new biography of the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, makes clear, the American public has taken ownership of SNL and refused to relinquish its grip. The show has […]
The Grand Master of Slime
Chase Kellebrew was in demo mode in the basement laboratory of SoHo’s Sloomoo Institute, which bills itself as a “multi-sensory slime experience.” The institute was founded in 2019, to take advantage of the slime craze popularized by tweens on TikTok. (During the pandemic, adults joined in, drawn by slime’s apparent ability to alleviate anxiety through […]
Kevin Nealon Is Hiking and Laughing and Drawing
Kevin Nealon—the venerated standup and comedic actor seen in more than twenty movies, many written and produced by his friend Adam Sandler—never intended to start a YouTube talk show. “I was hiking with Matthew Modine in the summer of 2017,” Nealon said from his Bel Air home, in Los Angeles, not far from a series […]
Why My Favorite Character in The Breakfast Club Is the Janitor
It really wasn’t all too ago that I strongly identified with the main characters in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club—not just two or three, but all. I saw in each what I wanted to see, depending upon my mood. Not only as a stand-in for myself but also as potential friends. As with all things […]
Mike Judge’s Secret Art of Satire
On March 8, 1993, “Beavis and Butt-Head” premièred on MTV. The show’s title characters—two gross, immature, violent, strangely lovable, and very American teen-agers—were like little else onscreen. Each episode involved the pair idling around their Texas town, indulging in petty acts of vandalism and moronic conversations. In between these adventures, they watched TV and made […]
‘We Weren’t Concerned With Making Anyone But Ourselves Laugh’ Monty Python’s Terry Jones on how the legendary group’s work was almost lost to history.
Terry Jones was the most intellectual Python in perhaps the most intelligent comedy group to ever exist — and this was a six-headed cerebral monster who wrote and aired a sketch called the “Summarize Proust Competition.” Born in Wales in 1942 and graduating from Oxford, Jones was incredibly bright, as were all the Pythons, and yet this was […]
A Comedy Education From Late Legend Buck Henry
A shorter version of this interview was originally published in Mike Sacks’s 2009 book And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft. In 2009, I put out a book of interviews I conducted with my favorite comedy writers. It was called And Here’s the Kicker. The writers I interviewed included David Sedaris, […]
John Swartzwelder, Sage of “The Simpsons”
It’s been nearly twenty years since the reclusive, mysterious, almost mythical comedy writer John Swartzwelder left “The Simpsons,” and yet, to this day, one of the biggest compliments a “Simpsons” writer (or any comedy writer) can receive is to have a joke referred to as “Swartzweldian.” Meaning: A joke that comes out of nowhere. A […]
Bruce Jay Friedman: An Interview
During his five-decade writing career, Bruce Friedman published eight novels, four story collections, numerous plays, and such screenplays as Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), for which he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. On June 3, 2020, he passed away at the age of 90. In 2009, I interviewed him for my book And Here’s the Kicker. The interview, cut […]
Justine Bateman Has Some Thoughts on the Fame Cycle… and Geoffrey Owens Working at Trader Joe’s
Justine Bateman, perhaps most famous for her seven-season run as Mallory Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties,has written a book. She puts any idea that the compact, searing volume will be yet another logy, loquacious Hollywood quickie, written by an actor too young to write a memoir about a not-so-exceptional life, saying a lot but revealing […]
