Archive for the ‘Comedy’ Category
The Silly Side of New York Comic Con » Fanboy.com
There are those fans who will tell you that cosplay is a high art to be taken seriously — and what follows is a photo essay which doesn’t feature those fans! Shown above is Waldo doing a photo bomb of Princess Leia Organa.
And… Scene.
It was the winter of 1999, and Amy Poehler was in a grimy bathroom on West 22nd Street, pulling used condoms out of a toilet. For three years, the 28-year-old Poehler and her fellow members of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe—Matt Besser, Matt Walsh, and Ian Roberts—had been performing sketch and improv anywhere they could. Now, thanks to Rudy Giuliani’s anti-porn crusade, they had their own theater in a defunct strip club. “The women’s locker room was all Prince mix tapes and bikinis,” Poehler remembers. “It was as if there’d been a nuclear disaster and everyone had just turned into dust and left all their shit behind.”
Poehler, Besser, Walsh, and Roberts (a.k.a. “the UCB Four”) had moved to New York from Chicago in 1996, a time when Manhattan’s comedy scene was in the first stages of gentrification. The city’s stand-up scene was thriving, but many of its nervier sketch troupes—most prominently Exit 57 and the State—were winding down, and long-form improv was all but nonexistent. On TV, Saturday Night Live was at the tail end of a weak period; Seinfeld and Friends, though set in New York, were strictly Los Angeles products. But in downtown Manhattan, scruffy young comics were coalescing around venues like Luna Lounge, Surf Reality, and KGB’s Red Room. Their style was free-form and deliberately unslick, and almost by accident, they fashioned a movement, one that would be given the vague tag of “alternative comedy.”
via And… Scene..
THE BENNY HILL SHOW – The Museum of Broadcast Communications
Thanks to his work in television, especially The Benny Hill Show, Benny Hill is the most universally recognised of British comedians. However, what most audiences outside of the United Kingdom know as The Benny Hill Show, was in fact a compilation series of 111 half-hour episodes, composed of sketches and numbers drawn from his British ITV series produced over a 20 year period from 1969 to 1989, and syndicated on American television from 1979 onwards.
This series picked up a cult following, making Hill the most popular British comedian to appear on U.S. television. The compilation series was sold in over 90 other foreign language markets, including Russia and China, that normally did not buy British comedy. However so much of Hill’s series was based on sight gags and humour that audiences in many parts of the world came to appreciate the comedy. In point of fact, the early series of The Benny Hill Show appeared on the BBC. Hill’s television career was launched in 1955 and his show ran, off and on, on the BBC until 1968 with a brief season with ATV in 1967. In 1969 he moved to Thames Television and it was there that he was to make the programs on which most of his fame rests.
via THE BENNY HILL SHOW – The Museum of Broadcast Communications.
