In 2002, the then struggling Dane Cook spent his last $25,000 on his Web site http://www.DaneCook.com, the popularity of which soon fueled his meteoric rise. Since Cook braved the path to the Web for standup comedians, who's followed him?There was once a stigma attached to...

Comedian Laureano Marquez has poked fun at politicians for decades without getting into trouble with the law, so he didn't think twice about writing a tongue-in-cheek newspaper editorial based on a dialogue between President Hugo Chavez and his 9-year-old daughter.But Marquez and a publishing company...

With pressure mounting on the Chicago Cubs as they struggle to clinch the NL Central, manager Lou Piniella found someone to ease the tension: comedian Bill Murray.The Cubs' No. 1 fan hung out with the team during batting practice before Thursday's game against the Florida...

When Mark Malkoff thought about where he could stay while his New York City apartment was being fumigated for cockroaches, he quickly ruled out friends' places (too small) and hotels (too expensive).Instead, the comedian and filmmaker decided to move into an Ikea store in suburban...

Starting from a premise that [Comedians] is novel and rich with antic possibility, the play manages to scuttle itself with perfunctory, self-righteous anger. Set in Manchester, Comedians begins with a group of young men who aspire to be nightclub comics, meeting in one of those dismal cubicles of adult education…. There is one student … who we perceive has a genuine and personal comic imagination, whose humor, at least in the classroom, goes much deeper than that of his fellow students. Among ...

The six young apprentice comics who attend the evening classes organised by one-time master comedian, Eddie Waters [in Comedians], are under no illusions about the state of their chosen profession…. [They are training for] TV-satiated audiences who have come to accept a whole new repertoire of outspoken radicalist and ugly, sexual jokes. 'It's not the jokes. It's what lies behind them,' insists their teacher who is trying to maintain his humane standards against the increa...

Trevor Griffiths's Comedians … is a distinctly worthwhile play, but there are some difficulties in the way of its full appreciation. The first arises from the American audience's unfamiliarity with its background. The second is a diffusion—perhaps more apparent than real—in the play's composition. Though Comedians is an altogether appropriate title, it tends to disorient the spectators because it sets up an expectation of continuous hilarity. The play is for the mos...