Comedy
Story Stream
King of Fools: The Oral History of Danny McBride May 02, 2025
Danny McBride’s characters are, with a few exceptions, magnetically terrible. Over the past 20 years, he’s written himself a collection of profane, overconfident, wrongheaded, tacky Southern men whose delusions and ineptitude keep them from becoming ...
How Wokeness Killed Sitcoms April 28, 2025
With the disastrous performance of the new live-action Snow White, it is now official: the Woke Era for entertainment is over, and the Slop Era has begun. As is his wont, the Critical Drinker best encapsulates this truth with his characteristic humor...
Plathanasius of Massachusetts April 23, 2025
Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. Th...
Laura Loomer Is Degrading Politics April 21, 2025
One of comedy’s greatest stock characters is the guy who’s his own worst enemy. You know the type: Kramer from Seinfeld; Michael Scott from The Office; the fanatical Wile E. Coyote who stalks the desert in perpetual and fruitless pursuit of his nemes...
How Robert Crumb Channeled Mid-Century Teenage Angst April 16, 2025
Elvis Presley was on the air, Allen Ginsberg was diagnosing the country, and the “sick” comedy of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, and Stan Freberg was rising. Unlike the reassuring jokes of, say, Bob Hope, these comedians peeled back the Am...
Climate Crisis as Divine Comedy April 16, 2025
As the writer Joy Williams strolls the beef barn at the county fair, she notes mournfully the lovely eyelashes of the future filets mignons. “There’s such a disconnect here,” she says. While charmed by the farm animals of southern Michigan, she knows...
A Tale of Two Cinematic Universes April 11, 2025
I’ve never played Minecraft in my life—but then I’m not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of “A Minecraft Movie.” He’s best known for “Napoleon Dynamite,” from 2004,...
Hollywood’s Jester April 10, 2025
Seth Rogen is itemizing all the ways in which, when he’s producing a film or TV show, he’s inclined to agonize about his contribution. “Are my notes helping?” he says. “Am I making things worse? Am I actually inspiring the writers to create better th...
The Excesses of 'Mickey 17' April 04, 2025
Cast adrift in an inky abyss and cleaved from the terrestrial realm that defines us, the human is forced by the hostile vacuum of outer space into a confrontation with body and being. Director Bong Joon-ho’s preferred mode of storytelling has long be...
Comedy’s Most Erudite Buffoon March 25, 2025
Conan O’Brien’s peak moment of triumph at the Academy Awards earlier this month followed one of his spicier jokes. “Anora uses the F-word 479 times,” the late-night veteran and first-time Oscar host said of the eventual Best Picture winner. “That’s t...
The White Lotus Is a Houellebecq Horror March 21, 2025
When the Covid lockdown started, five years ago, many in the laptop classes leaned into the glorious social dislocation. They embraced Zoom. They took in home deliveries and forgot to care about the carbon footprint. And they pretended to stay connec...
John Mulaney’s Playhouse March 20, 2025
Nine days before the premiere of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Mulaney and the writing staff are gathered around a table in the show’s Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. It’s mid-afternoon, and the writers are kicking around ideas they imagine ...
The Bill Burr–naissance March 19, 2025
If you’re looking for a snapshot of Bill Burr’s worldview, I recommend listening to the comedian’s wide-ranging interview he sat for on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. Burr was promoting his latest stand-up special, Drop Dead Years, which premiered on Hul...
The Sexual Conservatism of Sally Rooney March 17, 2025
‘Sex sells” is a truism few would dispute—and it holds true for the successful career of the Irish literary star Sally Rooney who has remarked that in her work, “the driver is erotic tension or desire.” Her novels are typically categorized as realist...
Conservative Women Build an Alternative to the Manosphere March 12, 2025
On Jan. 30, the day the first episode of her new show dropped on YouTube, Brett Cooper threw a sold-out surprise live show in the basement of the Stand, a New York City comedy club near Union Square. Appearing onstage with no opener, Cooper admitted ...
The Unbreakable Bond Between Anime and the NBA March 07, 2025
Jordan Poole is best known for getting buckets as the leading scorer on the Washington Wizards. But when he’s not torching defenses, the NBA champion recharges by watching Death Note—a Japanese manga-turned-Netflix series about a notebook that can ki...
Why Politics Kills Comedy February 24, 2025
Humour is a strange thing. Back when Christopher Hitchens was both alive and still playing his assigned role of Naughty Little Provocateur, he attracted some controversy over an article titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” But the truth is that most peop...
Just Stop Fixing the All-Star Game February 19, 2025
I’m happy The White Lotus is back for Season 3, though there’s now a slight disappointment at the beginning of each episode. The series’ trippy theme song has been altered beyond recognition. This is an especially niche 1st world problem and I’ll sti...
REVIEW: ‘Nightbitch’ February 03, 2025
The horror-comedy Nightbitch, now streaming on Hulu, centers on an unnamed Mother (Amy Adams), who struggles to adapt to her life as a stay-at-home mom two years on. She and her son spend most of their days at home, punctuating their lives with occas...
2025 Golden Globe Nominations December 10, 2024
The 2025 Golden Globe nominations went their own way, as this infamous awards show does every year. Emilia Perez may have been the subject of social media scorn for the past month, but these voters—who, yes, do tend to forecast a good chunk of Oscar ...
How Ricky Gervais Took on the ‘Woke Brigade’ December 10, 2024
Andy and Tracey stand in the cold night outside the Brighton Centre with the slightly furtive look of recently escaped convicts. They don’t want their children to know where they have sneaked off to: Ricky Gervais’s new show, Mortality.“Loads of peop...
'English Teacher' Gets Gen Z September 24, 2024
“Woke mind virus” is a pretty funny phrase. It wasn’t meant as a joke when Elon Musk first started using it in 2021. If anything, the utterly dire seriousness with which its wielders intone it makes the phrase even funnier. It sounds ridiculous on th...
The Season of the Witch September 19, 2024
To prepare for playing a witch on television, Kathryn Hahn called a real one. They talked every week leading up to shooting Agatha All Along, a miniseries that feels like a live-action version of a Simpsons Halloween special: There’s comedy, horror, ...
The Emmys and the TV Content Overdose September 17, 2024
Award ceremonies are always more fun when there’s a surprise or two stuffed into the envelopes. There was a big one waiting at the end of last night’s 76th Primetime Emmy Awards: Despite a whopping, record-breaking 23 nominations (some for televised ...
The 21st-Century Bad Vibes Movie Canon September 12, 2024
You’re probably familiar with the concept of feel-good movies: the tried-and-true serotonin boosters that can improve your mood in the midst of a bad day, week, or, God forbid, month. (Shout out to my current go-to, Everybody Wants Some!!, a coming-o...
