Ask David Brenner what’s funny, and his answer is simple: “If people laugh, it’s funny. That’s the only way you can tell.” Take one of Brenner’s classic jokes. He first told it as he was setting up his microphone at a show one evening. He thought it was weird, not necessarily funny. Yet many people…
The Anti-Defamation League called on “Fashion Police” host Joan Rivers to apologize for a Holocaust reference she made on the show. Rivers on the E! Entertainment Television program of February 25, commenting on a dress worn by German-American supermodel Heidi Klum, said, “The last time a German looked this hot was when they were pushing…
What do you do if you’re “a Yid who thinks he’s a Goy”? You go to your gentile friend “Boris,” of course, for help writing “The Aveirah Song.” Aveirah is Hebrew for “sin,” which, “Boris,” being a gentile and all, would be an expert on. And what kinds of sins does a gentile (or wannabe-gentile)…
Jerry Seinfeld took a break from driving around and getting coffee to do some standup on Letterman last night. Watch him talk about what’s annoying now. Or five years ago. Whichever.
We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy By Yael Kohen Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux 336 pages, $27 In the early 1980s, while I was reporting a story on female stand-ups for Ms. magazine, Adrianne Tolsch, the host at New York City’s Catch a Rising Star, agreed to arrange a special night…
The best class I took in my last quarter of college didn’t have tests or quizzes. The teacher made us laugh. Our homework was (literally!) fun. And the final exam was an oral presentation… in the back of a bar. Bad grades? Not an issue. Bad jokes? Now that was something to stress over. I…
When my mother retired not long ago, I suggested she join Twitter. “You’ll love it,” I insisted. “It’ll make you laugh.” She gave it a go, but claims that only old standbys like Albert Brooks and The Daily Show’s Twitter accounts crack her up reliably. Far be it from me to defend Twitter’s raison d’etre…
Ira Glass is no Howard Stern — yet. By that we mean he isn’t the King of All Media (Stern’s self-anointed title), but at the very least he’s the crown prince and heir apparent. Glass, of course, is the host of Chicago Public Radio’s popular program This American Life. More recently, he’s taken on the…
