O.C.D. in N.Y.C.
You’ve seen me. I know you have. I’m the guy wearing gloves on the subway in October. Or even into April. Perhaps I’m wearing just one glove, allowing my naked hand to turn the pages of a book. No big deal. Just another one-gloved commuter, heading home. If it’s crowded, you may have noticed me […]
Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s Fake Yacht Rock Band Just Got a Real Music Video
Helen Mirren claims that their music “lasts forever.” Writer Chuck Klosterman lauds their landmark 1974 album Catalina Breeze: “Every song was a single and every single was great.” Sure, The Blue Jean Committee has been forgotten over the years, but in their prime—the early to mid-1970s—their country-tinged, melodious sounds wafted dreamlike from convertibles, transistor radios, wedding halls, wending its way […]
David Spade on Why He Turned Down the Chance to Replace Letterman
Three decades into a career that has included stints as a standup, a featured player on television (Saturday Night Live, Just Shoot Me), lead parts in movies (Tommy Boy, The Emperor’s New Groove, Joe Dirt), and numerous appearances on radio and podcast interviews (with Howard Stern, Dennis Miller, and many others), David Spade has succumbed […]
The Truth: The Redemption of The Game Author Neil Strauss
Ten years ago, the author of The Game was a hero for aspiring Lotharios—and a headache for their moms and would-be conquests. Now he’s back with a new book about… love. In 2005, Neil Strauss unleashed The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists onto the world, and, like herpes, it seems incapable of ever leaving […]
Tom Scharpling Interview: ‘The Best Show,’ Death, Comedy And Radio (Not Necessarily In That Order)
The long-form radio comedy and music program The Best Show ran on Jersey City, New Jersey’s WFMU from 2000 to 2013. This past year, The Best Show segued into the podcast-only realm, where it streams live every Tuesday night at 9:00 PM EST at thebestshow.net. Past radio shows, dating back to 2000, can be found at https://wfmu.org/playlists/BS. In May, […]
Jesus Christ Superstar (1970 Concept Album and 1973 Film)
Some random thoughts and bits of trivia concerning one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, Jesus Christ Superstar. There are many versions of JCS, but for this piece, I’m writing about the original 1970 concept album (for the music) and the subsequent 1973 movie version (for the music and the imagery). Anyway, here we go: While […]
The Colbert Report’s First Head Writer Remembers the Show’s Early Days and the Correspondents’ Dinner
On December 18, after ten seasons and over 1,400 episodes, The Colbert Report will come to a close. Allison Silverman was the show’s first co-head writer and eventually its executive producer, working on the show from 2005–2009. She’s credited for coming up with the character-defining idea of having Stephen Colbert come out to the interview […]
18 Things You Learn After Interviewing 80 or So Comedy Writers
In 2009, I published a compilation of interviews with comedy writers called And Here’s the Kicker. Badly in need of a large sum of money to pay for a recent cosmetic surgery (I had my Adam’s apple shaved to appear less frightening to my child), I decided last year to write a sequel to that […]
Screwed In Times Square With Josh Alan Friedman
Vanity Fair’s Mike Sacks is one of the world’s great comedy nerds and he’s got the published bona fides to prove it. Funny in his own right (his book of comic essays, Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason had me laughing out loud on nearly every single page) Mike’s proven himself incredibly adept at getting top humor writers […]
Everything’s Turning Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals
One of my favorite books of the last few months is Everything’s Coming Up Profits: The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals. Co-written by Steve Young, a long-time writer for Late Show with David Letterman, and Sport Murphy, a professional musician and pop-culture historian, the book is a tribute to a bizarre, fascinating world that I never knew […]
