RATING: R STARRING: Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams, Bill Cosby, Robert Klein, Jay Leno, Kevin Nealon, Colin Quinn, Chris Rock, Garry Shandling, George Wallace DIRECTOR: Christian Charles DISTRIBUTOR: Miramax Films (Disney) GENRE: Documentary/Comedy INTENDED AUDIENCE: Adults and Older Teens SUMMARY: Comedian is a...

(SAMUEL BECKETT THEATER; 99 SEATS; $50) NEW YORK A New Group presentation of a play in two acts by Trevor Griffiths. Directed by Scott Elliott. Sets, Derek McLane; costumes, Mimi O'Donnell; lighting, Jason Lyons; sound, Ken Travis; production stage manager, Valerie A....

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...

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...