newcritics

Because Jon Swift is a nominee for Funniest Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, I often get asked, “What’s funny?” Of course, nothing makes comedy funnier than to explain it. I often find that I don’t get a lot of jokes until someone explains why they are funny, and sometimes not even then. According to [...]

This week, newcritics kicks off its first ever blogathon, devoted to the subject of all things funny, timed to coincide with the New York Comedy Festival (and its ancillary programming at The Paley Center for Media). While newcritics’ writ is large, the focus of the comedy fest is narrower: standup comedy, and so it’s here [...]

It’s M.A.Peel here, reporting in from Comedy Central, the one where you don’t have to worry about the writers going on strike. FINALLY we will learn what the purest moments of comedy are for bloggers of every ilk across the blogosphere . . . or other things somewhat approximating that idea.

Nov. 11
LazyEyeTheatre’s [...]

The news from Hollywood is that Meryl Streep will be playing Julia Child in a new movie to be written and directed by Nora Ephron, which seems fair enough since Streep played Ephron in “Heartburn,” an autobiographical account of a food writer’s disastrous marriage.
I can horn in on this inbred arrangement with advice to Streep [...]

New York City in the early 1970s was a grim and pitiless place–filthy on its surface, venal and corrupt at its core. Riven by poverty and racial strife, it was a town that pushed its inhabitants to the wall–either you were a hustler or a mark, a hipster in the know or a rube so [...]

There is a moment in Alan Bennett’s wonderful novel in miniature, The Uncommon Reader, recommended here by Maud Newton, when the royal literary figure in question realizes the joy of discovering a favorite writer has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting only discovery and a hundred or so quiet evenings. A few years ago, I [...]

When I was a kid it confused and bothered me that All Saints’ Day comes before All Souls. I knew that Halloween was the vigil of a commemoration of the dead, and I didn’t understand how it could leap over this Saints thing.
Then it became more clear that the “hallowed” of all Hallows Eve means [...]