The standup comedian is used to writing for public performance, but her remarkable book Little Weirds was written as private consolationJenny Slate is sitting in the middle of a storm. She’s safe inside, somewhere on a Massachusetts peninsula, and it’s…
Continue ReadingThis is my 11th consecutive year covering Montreal’s Just For Laughs, but the first in which I’ve experienced serious blowback while still at the festival. What’s going on here? A few different things, and I’ll try to clear the air on as many of them as I can. Usually, comedians, comedy fans and the industry […]
Continue ReadingTom Clark is a stand-up comedian and actor who has been in comedy for 23 years. His comedy credits include TBS’s Conan, CBS’s Late Late Show, The Bob & Tom Radio Show, and Comedy Central’s Premium Blend, Montreal’s New Faces at the prestigious Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, The Capetown Comedy Festival in South Africa; and acting roles on NBC’s Outsourced, TNT’s The Closer, Hallmark’s TV-movie The Wish List, and films Big Miracle and Freaks […]
Continue ReadingThis essay originally appeared on Medium and is republished here with permission by the author. What are female comics doing these days? What’s the situation? Did we solve it yet? I’d like to check in and take stock. But before I do that, I should say this: I’m just one lady and my experience is […]
Continue ReadingThe dry-witted US essayist talks about how he went from working as an elf in Macy’s to becoming ‘the American Alan Bennett’
David Sedaris’s partner of 25 years, Hugh Hamrick, calls the first chunk of the essayist’s diaries, published under the title Theft By Finding, “David Copperfield Sedaris”. And it’s true, Sedaris concedes, the book – which covers the years from 1977, when he scribbled his first entries on the backs of coffee shop placemats while travelling around, to 2002 – has a certain rags-to-riches quality. In the second volume, on the other hand, “I just go from shopping at Paul Smith to shopping at Comme des Garçons, and I’m on airplanes all the time”. The thought prompts a memory of a recent plane trip, first class from Hawaii to Portland, Oregon. “This woman said, you are so lucky to be seated up front, it’s a great spot for people-watching. And I said, hmm, it could be, but we don’t really count you as people.” He bursts out laughing, and so do I, even though I know I oughtn’t. What on earth did she say? “She laughed, she knew I was kidding. Hugh was horrified. Horrified.”
There’s something about that one-liner that characterises Sedaris’s writing: a flash of directness, even brutality, that threatens the social veneer (especially in first class); the reassuring feeling that of course he’s kidding, with the faint background feeling, “but not entirely”; the spreading realisation that he’s getting at something far more complex about human nature, absurdity and awkwardness. “He’s like an American Alan Bennett,” says the quote (from this newspaper) on the back cover of Theft By Finding. Both writers occupy that space in which their subversiveness and caustic records of daily life run up against the foam blanket of “humour”, as if we can maximise the cuddliness and minimise the edge by focusing on the laughs.
Related: Read extracts from Theft By Finding Volume One – by David Sedaris
Related: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls review – recollections of a resolute outsider
And I said, could you close the door, please? And he shut the door in her face and I never saw her again
Related: David Sedaris at Edinburgh: ‘I’ll never run out of things to laugh about’
In the lanes of Sussex, he is known as the American who picks up the litter, for which he has a passionate hatred
Continue ReadingPlaying House star Jessica St. Clair has been through a lot over the past year, and as she revealed in a new essay for Stand Up To Cancer this week, it was a lot more than just raising her young daughter. In the essay, St. Clair reveals she was diagnosed with breast cancer back in […]
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