Comedy

John Podhoretz on the creaky, predictable return of the ’90s sitcom ‘Murphy Brown.’

As the comedian pivoted from political comedy to become a legend, so too will another generation of funny-men and -women—and soon.

Daily Show host Trevor Noah has expressed the novel view that France’s recent victory in the World Cup is an “African victory,” since most of the players on the team are of African descent. This didn’t go over well with the French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud, who wrote a terse…

Sarah Silverman found a new edge: niceness.

Stormy Daniels’s turn on Saturday Night Live is a microcosm of what’s wrong with comedy in the Trump era.

In this latest episode of the Substandard, Sonny reviews The Death of Stalin, a movie Vic did not see because he refused to pay for parking. The return of Jony Ive is met with skepticism. Recriminations are launched, profanities are hurled. It's the crankiest Substandard yet!

Will exposed creep Louis C.K. try to make art that honestly confronts what he did—or will he go the way of Woody Allen?

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” a scrap of verse by the English journalist William Norman Ewer, has over the years had many answering refrains. “Not odd, you Sod / The Jews chose God” is one; “What’s so Odd / His son was one” is another; and a third goes “This surely was no mere…

A Los Angeles news anchor and former model on Thursday accused Sen. Al Franken of sexually assaulting her during a USO tour to the Middle East in December 2006.

Comedian Rob Schneider decided to make paella, and got himself into a paella pan of hot water thanks to the culinary-correctness police.

As John Tyler Wheelwright sat in Harvard's Holden Chapel listening to Charles Eliot Norton lecture on the fine arts in January 1876, "Ralph Curtis snapped at me a little three-cornered note—'Come to Sherwood's room after lecture. We are to start a College Punch.' " From that paper football sprang a…

As John Tyler Wheelwright sat in Harvard's Holden Chapel listening to Charles Eliot Norton lecture on the fine arts in January 1876, "Ralph Curtis snapped at me a little three-cornered note—'Come to Sherwood's room after lecture. We are to start a College Punch.' " From that paper football sprang a…

Gene Wilder, the comedic actor and director who died Monday at the age of 83, had the qualities of a good character actor: an idiosyncratic voice, a mop of curly hair, and a familiarly quirky manner. But somehow, he became a star in a string of successful comedies in the 1970s and 1980s, including…

Free speech requires the Socratic "recognition that you almost certainly don't know everything," says Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff, the founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), diagnoses a humility deficiency in the new documentary Can We Take A Joke?

In an interview with free speech advocacy group FIRE, George Carlin's daughter Kelly Carlin, Richard Pryor's daughter Rain, and Lenny Bruce's daughter Kitty confirm their dads would have a few choice words on today's "thought police."

The Second City comic team on display at the Kennedy Center for The Second City's Almost Accurate Guide to America is a good one. Ryan Asher, Marla Ceceres, Tyler Davis, Sayjal Joshi, Andrew Knox, and Ross Taylor are all excellent comic actors, with impeccable timing, quick wits, and charming stage…

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton joked Monday that "the last thing" America needs "is a bully in the pulpit" – a gag meant to dig into rival Donald Trump. She apparently hasn't used the line since.

President Obama will appear on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart. The appearance will be next week in New York City. Stewart's last scheduled show is August 6.

Several months ago, comedian Patton Oswalt, theretofore a favorite among the bien pensant Internet types, angered the online left with a plea for satire over self-victimization. After being accused of all manner of horribles, from “victim-blaming” to “victim-shaming,” he attempted to win back his…

In an interview with Vulture.com, Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels concedes that mocking Republicans is easier than going after Democrats.

The fizzy and exuberant cinematic confection called Pitch Perfect fits its title. This broad comedy about collegiate a cappella groups—made up of 8 or 10 kids who sing entirely without accompaniment and use their voices as their instruments—manages to be amusingly cartoonish and sweetly heartfelt…

Via Powerline, titled "Hitler Learns that Walker Won the Recall Election."

What makes Stephen Fry so (his words) “slappable .  .  . odious .  .  . punchable”? Part of it is the smug expression, the striped socks. We may also curse the ubiquity. Here he is on dramatic television (Bones), film (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), hosting documentaries, whipping up novels,…

NBC's Saturday Night Live poked fun at Mitt Romney in the cold opening of last night's show. Watch it below:

Across the Great White North, "Human Rights Comissions" are running amok and making a mockery of the Canadian Charter of Rights, which guarantees "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."

I Found This Funny

I record with interest and, perhaps, a measure of surprise and sorrow a brief dispatch from the frontiers of culture—in this case, the hallowed precincts of the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Suffice it to say that the 92nd Street Y is the sort of place where Charlie Rose might…

Ever since then-CNN president Jon Klein declared himself “firmly in the Jon Stewart camp” after the comedian's bombastic appearance on Crossfire in 2004, something like an anti-cult has formed around that very camp—including as it does The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and the many books and…

Andy Ferguson reviews Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great in the Wall Street Journal: