Hear 30 of the Greatest Standup Comedy Albums: A Playlist Chosen by Open Culture Readers

in Comedy | February 22nd, 2016

I knew such things as comedy albums existed. I’d spied a couple of them in my parent’s record collection. But they seemed like such quaint and dated things. After all, I’d grown up on Eddie Murphy’s scandalous HBO specials, had seen George Carlin and Richard Pryor pace the stage delivering epic comic commentary. I had imbibed a steady stream of standup and sketches on Comedy Central. What need had I of a comedy album?! The facial expressions, rare props, ridiculous outfits… weren’t these visual cues necessary to carry the jokes?

Then I heard Lenny Bruce’s live double album from his 1961 concert at Carnegie Hall and flipped out (hear an excerpt above). I didn’t know very much about Bruce at the time—not much more than the name. But after listening to that record enough times to memorize every line and inflection, I became very interested in how comedians brought listeners to tears of laughter with only their voices. Bruce was a master. “Onstage,” writes Richard Brody, “he was a one-man cartoon, doing all the voices and poses of movie parodies that he infused with his own stringent and paradoxical morality.” So cartoonish was his act at times that one joke became an actual cartoon—“Thank You Mask Man,” a NSFW classic.

Bruce’s act swung like a jazz performance, sometimes hitting a blue note, and pulling his audience down with a serious scene, then ramping right up into wild, nasal runs of high-pitched comic virtuosity. Other comics, like the deadpan Bob Newhart, hardly ever varied their volume, tempo, and tone, and therein lay the understated appeal of Newhart’s “Button-Down Mind.” Then there are the characters and impressions of Lily Tomlin, the unhinged rants of Richard Pryor, the screaming of Sam Kinison, the narcoleptic drone of Steven Wright, the childlike warble of Emo Philips… Every comic uses his or her voice as an instrument, tapping into the audience’s musical sense of rhythm and timing as much as their intellectual sense of irony and absurdity.

Today, we bring you a playlist of 30+ standup comedy albums, ranging from current comic masters like Amy Schumer, Tig Notaro, and Louis C.K. to beloved comics from decades past like Gilda Radner and Bill Hicks. (You can purchase copies of these classic albums here.) We’ve got the famous duo of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner (yes, they do “2000 Year Old Man”), we’ve got Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, and even… hell, why not? Andrew Dice Clay. And Lenny Bruce’s Carnegie Hall Concert made the cut as well, an absolute must-hear. Most of these picks were chosen by Open Culture readers on Twitter, with a few taken from this Spin list of the “40 Greatest Comedy Albums of All Time.” If there’s an album you think we absolutely have to add to the playlist above, let us know in the comments. If you don’t have Spotify, download it free here. And if you object to using the service, why not preview some of these, then go buy the ones that crack you up the hardest? All of the albums on the playlist can be found on Amazon here.

Richard Pryor Does Early Stand-Up Comedy Routine in New York, 1964

Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of Comedy (NSFW)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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27 Movies References in The Simpsons Put Side-by-Side with the Movie Scenes They Paid Tribute To

in Animation, Comedy, Film, Television | February 19th, 2016

If an entire generation of American adults suffers from Cinematic Chicken Vs. Egg Syndrome, it’s The Simpsons’ fault.

Editor Celia Gómez’ side-by-side shot comparison above makes plain how a 30-year-old Citizen Kane virgin could experience a sense of deja vu on his or her inaugural viewing. The Simpsons pulled from it for “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” when said viewer was but a little tot. Three years later, they did it again wit 1993’s “Rosebud.”

Parents who would never have allowed their sensitive little darlings in the room while screening Full Metal Jacket or Requiem for a Dream relaxed their vigilance where the family from Springfield was concerned.

When The Simpsons’ kilted Groundskeeper Willie chastely recrosses his legs in an interrogation room, no kid is going to fixate on what lies beneath. (FYI, it’s a notoriously commando Sharon Stone in 1992’s NSFW thriller, Basic Instinct.)

What makes these homages so great is the attention to detail. Be it Itchy and Scratchy or Michael Madsen and Kirk Baltz as his cop victim in Reservoir Dogs, count on the camera to drift to an empty doorway when the action gets too intense.

Spoilers abound. Those who’ve not yet seen Thelma and Louise, Psycho, or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest can consider themselves forewarned.

Want a crash course in The Godfather? Watch the Simpsons.

No offense to the human actors who originated the roles, but it’s incredible how the animators can imbue their characters with all the relevant emotions. Their eyes are little more than dots on pingpong balls! (Check out Homer’s dead expression on 1994’s Terminator 2 parody, “Homer Loves Flanders.”)

The complete list of films featured above:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Requiem for a dream (2000)

The Gold Rush (1925)

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

The Fugitive (1993)

Terminator 2 (1991)

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

The Birds (1963)

Risky Business (1983)

Citizen Kane (1941)

Psycho (1960)

The silence of the lambs (1991)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Basic Instinct (1992)

Official and Gentleman (1982)

One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (1975)

2001: A space Odissey (1968)

Trainspotting (1996)

Thelma and Louise (1991)

The Godfather (1972)

Taxi Driver (1976)

The Shining (1980)

Spiderman (2002)

ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Dr. Strange Love (1964)

The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki

Thomas Pynchon Edits His Lines on The Simpsons: “Homer is my role model and I can’t speak ill of him.”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

in Comedy, History | February 18th, 2016

By Scott Saul:

Richard Pryor is a legendary comic, and for good reason. He had extraordinary gifts as a mimic, storyteller, physical comedian, satirist, and improvising actor — gifts he brought together in an act that had the dangerous electricity of an uninsulated wire. Meanwhile he established a feedback loop between his act and his personal life, making use of all those stage chops to draw comedy out of a life that was painfully full of self-sabotage, mayhem, and various forms of abuse.

It was my task, as Pryor’s biographer, to probe the legends of his life, starting with the vivid stories he told of his formative years in the red-light district of Peoria, Illinois. In his stage act and reminiscences, Pryor related how he’d been raised in a brothel by a grandmother and father who worked, respectively, as madam and pimp, and how he had both suffered at their hands and learned from them. He told, too, how he’d made his way in a larger world that, while brutal, was also touched with grace — that grace he felt when he ventured onstage, at school or in a club, and started to find himself as a performer.

Earlier biographers had wondered how much Pryor had embellished his past in building his act around his life story. In my research I discovered a motherlode of material — family photos, court records, newspaper articles, and more — that not only corroborated the outlines of Pryor’s story but also filled in the picture and gave it a historical depth. I could see, for instance, how Pryor’s taboo-busting comedy was rooted in his childhood environment, a black working-class underground where taboos were busted on a regular basis, and hypocrisies called to account. You can watch a short, four-minute film above that sets the story of the young Richard and his family against the backdrop of “Roarin’ Peoria.”

Ultimately, I discovered so much in my research into Pryor’s formative years that I felt it couldn’t be contained in the book I was writing (in which Pryor’s first two decades in Peoria make up only one of five sections). So I built a digital companion where you can explore over 200 documents from “Richard Pryor’s Peoria”. Here you can see, through the young Richard’s report card, how he struggled in the confines of Peoria schools. You can see, through the divorce case of his parents, how his mother (contrary to reports that she abandoned him) tried, unsuccessfully, to steal Richard away from his grandmother and father, and from the red-light district itself. You can see, through the paper trail of Richard’s formidable grandmother Marie, how she fought — with wiliness and blunt force — against her abusive husband and against the system of Jim Crow. And you can visit the various scenes of Richard’s youth, from his family’s tavern and the community center where he first took the stage to the sometimes raucous, sometimes stylish clubs where he got his start as an entertainer.

Richard Pryor was an exceptional human being — a genius who changed the rules of comedy in America — and the website aims to show how the seeds of that genius were planted. At the same time, it suggests how Pryor’s life story makes richer sense when set against larger historical backdrops: the story of how the Midwest’s premier “Sin City” became, during the Cold War, a leading “All-American City”; the story of how black neighborhoods were demolished in “urban renewal” efforts (Pryor’s childhood home was itself targeted by a wrecking ball so that Peoria might be linked to an interstate highway); and, most of all, the story of how black Americans, while locked into segregation in the Midwest, defied that system in inventive and forceful ways.

This post is by Scott Saul, the author of Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches American history and literature at UC-Berkeley, and also is the host of the Chapter & Verse podcast. Follow him on Twitter @scottsaul4.

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David Foster Wallace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Story “A Little Fable” (and Explains Why Comedy Is Key to Kafka)

in Comedy, Literature | February 16th, 2016

Just last night I was out with a novelist friend, one of whose books a reviewer described as “the funny version of Kafka.” While he surely appreciated the praise, my friend had an objection: “But Kafka is already comedy!” Casual readers, many of whom haven’t set eyes on Franz Kafka since college, might carry with them a mental image of the early 20th-century Austria-Hungary-born writer as a craftsman of pure bleakness: of frustratingly inaccessible castles, of persecution for unexplained crimes, of hopeless battles with bureaucracy, of salesmen transformed into giant bugs. But Kafka enthusiasts know well the humor from which all that springs, and their ranks have always contained quite a few other novelists willing to point it out.

None of them have done it quite so eloquently as David Foster Wallace, who delivered a ten-minute speech on the subject at the 1998 symposium “Metamorphosis: A New Kafka,” which later appeared in print in Harper’s Magazine, where he acted as contributing editor. He begins, by way of illustrating Kafka’s comedy, with the shorter-than-short 1920 story “A Little Fable”:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

He also mentions that he’d already given up teaching the story in literature classes (one of whose syllabi we’ve previously featured), which leads him to explain the “signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students,” that “it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny… nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories.” Part of the problem arises from the fact that “Kafka’s humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary U.S. amusement,” especially to “children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.” So what kind of jokes can we find in Kafka’s stories, if we know how to get them?

Therein, Wallace argues, lies another part of the problem: “It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them that humor is something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have,” all of which gets in the way of perceiving “the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.” Of course, as Wallace adds in one of his signature footnotes, since “most of us Americans come to art essentially to forget ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and all walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s no accident that we’re going to see ‘A Little Fable’ as not all that funny.” But read enough Kafka, preferably outside the walls of a classroom, and you’ll get a much more expansive sense of humor itself.

Related Content:

David Foster Wallace’s 1994 Syllabus

Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life: The Oscar-Winning Film About Kafka Writing The Metamorphosis

The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907–1917

The Animated Franz Kafka Rock Opera

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Hear the Experimental Piano Jazz Album by Comedian H. Jon Benjamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

in Comedy, Music | January 22nd, 2016

I wonder: do the fan bases of modern comedy and modern jazz overlap at all? At first, it’s hard to imagine two artistic worlds farther apart, with the comedians seeming like unserious goofballs who consider nothing sacred and the jazz players seeming like serious artists who regard their musical tradition as sacred indeed. But look closer and the difference doesn’t seem as stark as all that: comedy and jazz, both performative pursuits, demand from those who want to succeed in them an almost obsessive commitment to improving their craft. And the best practitioners of both, despite acknowledging the importance of learning and building upon the work of their antecedents, have to know when to break from tradition and experiment.

So perhaps H. Jon Benjamin’s new album Well, I Should Have…, which brings comedy and jazz together but not in the way any of us would have expected, comes as something of an inevitability. Benjamin, a comedian best known for doing voices on such animated shows as Archer, Bob’s Burgers, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and Home Movies, has put out not a record of sketches or stand-up material, but of actual jazz music, with him sitting at the piano. The comedic element? The album has a subtitle: … Learned to Play the Piano.

“I don’t play piano at all,” Benjamin deadpans in the trailer for Well, I Should Have… at the top of the post. “And I’m not a huge fan of jazz. I never was. And that’s why I thought it would be funny to make a jazz album.” To compensate for his total lack of skill or experience at his instrument, Benjamin brought three genuine jazz professionals into the studio to fill out the quartet: Scott Kreitzer on saxophone, David Finck on bass, and Jonathan Peretz on drums, all of whom do their best to build legitimate compositions around Benjamin’s near-random poking and slapping of the ivories. Here we see — or rather hear — revealed something else in common between comedians and jazz musicians: both need to improvise.

In the end, you could listen to this as either a conceptual comedy album, a conceptual jazz album, or both. You can hear selections from it (though, given the videos’ geo-restriction, that depends on which country you’re in) in the playlist just above. For most of us, showing up to a recording session completely ignorant of the instrument we have to play constitutes the stuff of nightmares, but Benjamin uses it as an opportunity to play a role he calls “Jazz Daredevil.” Does this count as real comedy? It certainly gets me laughing. I’ll leave the other obvious question to the serious jazz aficionados, who seem to enjoy only one thing almost as much as listening to jazz: arguing over what counts as jazz. If Benjamin has a particular joke to make with all this, it may be on them.

via Metafilter

Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997)

10 Great Performances From 10 Legendary Jazz Artists: Django, Miles, Monk, Coltrane & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

David Bowie Sings Impressions of Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Studio Outtakes (1985)

in Comedy, Music | January 22nd, 2016

We knew David Bowie could pretty much do it all—glam rock, jazz, funk, Philly soul, cabaret, pop, drum and bass, folk, avant-garde, you name it. In front of the camera, he could stretch himself into the beautiful but wounded alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, the scary-sexy-cool Goblin King of Labyrinth, the mystical genius Tesla in The Prestige. Nothing he attempted seemed beyond his grasp, including, as you can hear above, off-the-cuff, mostly spot-on impressions of friends and fellow singers like Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and Bruce Springsteen.

The audio clip you hear comes from outtakes producer Mark Saunders happened to capture on tape during the 1985 sessions for the Absolute Beginners film soundtrack (“a better soundtrack than it was a movie!” Saunders remarks).

While recording a lead vocal, Saunders writes, Bowie “broke into the impersonations and I realized that these might get erased at some point, so I quickly put a cassette in and hit ‘record.’” You can read his full recollections at The Talkhouse in a short essay he wrote to accompany the audio—introduced by Zach Staggers of indie band the So So Glos, who writes:

Bowie goes through a handful of sung impressions, including but not limited to, Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Loud Reed and Anthony Newly, who was such a big influence on the iconic singer that the impersonation almost sounds like Bowie mimicking himself. Between takes you can hear Bowie having fun and going back and forth with the engineers. Jokes.

Bowie also does what sounds like Bob Dylan (or Tom Petty, or Marc Bolan as some have speculated?) in the second take and a passable Neil Young in the last. His Springsteen, Reed, and Pop are excellent (Bowie called the Iggy impression “difficult, he’s somewhere between all of them.”) He closes the impromptu performance with “That’s it, night night.”

Bowie did indeed have jokes, though anyone who followed him over the decades knows of his comedic talents, whether playing straight man to Ricky Gervais’ obnoxious superfan or displaying impeccable timing in his deadpan delivery of “Bowie Secrets” from Late Night With Conan O’Brien in 2002.

Despite the kiss-off he gives Gervais in their comedy bit, those who knew and worked with Bowie all testify that he never took himself too seriously or, as Saunders remembers, threw his weight around by “using a big rock star ‘Hey, I’m David Bowie and I want it done my way.” He may have seemed to many like an alien or a god, but he was apparently in person a pretty humble, and very funny, guy.

via Rolling Stone

David Bowie Gives Graduation Speech At Berklee College of Music: “Music Has Been My Doorway of Perception” (1999)

David Bowie (RIP) Sings “Changes” in His Last Live Performance, 2006

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good”

in Comedy, Creativity, Writing | December 23rd, 2015

So you want to be a rock and roll star? Or a writer, or a filmmaker, or a comedian, or what-have-you…. And yet, you don’t know where to start. You’ve heard you need to find your own voice, but it’s difficult to know what that is when you’re just beginning. You have too little experience to know what works for you and what doesn’t. So? “Steal,” as the great John Cleese advises above, “or borrow or, as the artists would say, ‘be influenced by’ anything that you think is really good and really funny and appeals to you. If you study that and try to reproduce it in some way, then it’ll have your own stamp on it. But you have a chance of getting off the ground with something like that.”

Cleese goes on to sensibly explain why it’s nearly impossible to start with something completely new and original; it’s like “trying to fly a plane without any lessons.” We all learn the rudiments of everything we know by imitating others at first, so this advice to the budding writer and artist shouldn’t sound too radical. But if you need more validation for it, consider William Faulkner’s exhortation to take whatever you need from other writers. The beginning writer, Faulkner told a class at the University of Virginia, “takes whatever he needs, wherever he needs, and he does that openly and honestly.” There’s no shame in it, unless you fail to ever make it your own. Or, says Faulkner, to make something so good that others will steal from you.

One theory of how this works in literature comes from critic Harold Bloom, who argued in The Anxiety of Influence that every major poet more or less stole from previous major poets; yet they so misread or misinterpreted their influences that they couldn’t help but produce original work. T.S. Eliot advanced a more conservative version of the claim in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” We have a “tendency to insist,” wrote Eliot, on “those aspects or parts of [a poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else.” (Both Eliot and Faulkner used the masculine as a universal pronoun; whatever their biases, no gender exclusion is implied here.) On the contrary, “if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”

It may have been a requirement for Eliot that his literary predecessors be long deceased, but John Cleese suggests no such thing. In fact, he worked closely with many of his favorite comedy writers. The point he makes is that one should “copy someone who’s really good” in order to “get off the ground.” In time—whether through becoming better than your influences, or misreading them, or combining their parts into a new whole—you will, Cleese and many other wise writers suggest, develop your own style.

Cleese has liberally discussed his influences, in his recent autobiography and elsewhere, and one can clearly see in his work the impression comedic forbears like Laurel and Hardy and the writer/actors of The Goon Show had on him. But whatever he stole or borrowed from those comedians he also made entirely his own through practice and perseverance. Just above, see a television special on Cleese’s comedy heroes, with interviews from Cleese, legends who followed him, like Rik Mayall and Steve Martin, and those who worked side-by-side with him on Monty Python and other classic shows.

John Cleese’s Eulogy for Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’

John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play

John Cleese, Ringo Starr and Peter Sellers Trash Priceless Art (1969)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Art Exhibit on Bill Murray Opens in the UK

in Architecture, Art, Comedy, Film | December 21st, 2015

Somebody get us Bill Murray stat!

The actor and secular saint has no direct involvement with BILL MURRAY: A Story of Distance, Size, and Sincerity at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art but the interview with artist Brian Griffiths, above, suggests that he should.

The majority of creatives piggybacking on Murray’s popularity these days would seem to be entrepreneurial craftspeople, whereas Griffiths is a fine artist. Previous projects include a Romani wagon comprised of secondhand furniture and a series of historically costumed busts cast from actor Peter Lorre’s death mask.

BALTIC’s website provides some context for the current installation, a series of nine model buildings in various architectural styles, festooned with Murray’s face and other visual indicators from his considerable oeuvre:

Bill Murray is always authentic. He is consistently ‘BILL MURRAY’. His singularity breaks into irreducible ambiguities and contradictions – Bill the global superstar, the guy-next-door, anti-brand brand, irrepressible lothario, dignified clown and droll philosopher. This exhibition takes these and many other characteristics as an approach, turning them into a fantasy caricature and a poetic tableau of scaled down architecture and collections.

Perhaps Griffiths was having an off day when the camera crew showed up to interview him about BILL MURRAY: A Story of Distance, Size, and Sincerity. A Creative Art Practice student who attended his guest lecture at Sheffield Halam University earlier this year found him to be an entertaining and similarly unpretentious speaker.

The five minute talk above had the opposite effect.

I’d like to propose a reshoot, starring Bill Murray. Imagine what his particular comic genius could bring to the transcript above?

Saint Bill has demonstrated that he is willing to work below scale when he believes in a project. Perhaps he would accept an exhibition t‑shirt in return for livening up this limp artistic statement.

(Might be what the artist was angling for all along…)

A photo posted by BALTICCentreForContemporaryArt (@balticgateshead) on Nov 21, 2015 at 12:32am PST

A photo posted by BALTICCentreForContemporaryArt (@balticgateshead) on Nov 17, 2015 at 10:20pm PST

A photo posted by BALTICCentreForContemporaryArt (@balticgateshead) on Nov 20, 2015 at 1:25am PST

via Hyperallergic

An Animated Bill Murray on the Advantages & Disadvantages of Fame

Bill Murray Sings the Poetry of Bob Dylan: Shelter From the Storm

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear 30 of the Greatest Standup Comedy Albums: A Playlist Chosen by Open Culture Readers

27 Movies References in The Simpsons Put Side-by-Side with the Movie Scenes They Paid Tribute To

New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

David Foster Wallace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Story “A Little Fable” (and Explains Why Comedy Is Key to Kafka)

Hear the Experimental Piano Jazz Album by Comedian H. Jon Benjamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

David Bowie Sings Impressions of Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits & More In Studio Outtakes (1985)

John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Anything You Think Is Really Good”

Art Exhibit on Bill Murray Opens in the UK

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