1 Thing I Think Is Great:
There is no one else like Jo Firestone. Very rarely, you see a performer who is totally unique. Even rarer is for that performer to be unique and a joy to watch (after all, it's a lot easier to be idiosyncratically terrible).
Jo manages to thread the needle with her seemingly endless supply of new shows. Here's a recent sampling of ones that I've had the privilege of being involved with: 1) A show where the last remaining audience member won a cash prize and nearly fifty comedians deliberately told terrible jokes to try and make the crowd leave. It lasted six hours. 2) A silent synchronized dance show where all the performers had their faces painted different colors of the rainbow. 3) A show where 6 comedians competed to improve the life of one sad audience member. The strategies involved a crystal cleansing, winning a recreated version of America's Next Top Model, and learning how to walk like the president.
If you're in NYC, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go to Jo's solo show "Try To Love Yourself" on January 30 at Ars Nova (tickets on sale soon). If you can't make it to the show, check out Jo's website or this interview I did with her for Wag's Revue.
1 Thing That Made Me Laugh:
Famous Writers Play Taboo is just a perfect humor piece. Thank goodness Josh Gondelman provided us with the jokes about Ernest Hemingway and Emily Dickinson that we didn't even know we needed. If you're not familiar with Josh's other work, you should check him out. He works on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" and he's an all-around source of kind-hearted hilarity.
1 Interesting Thing:
"A Katy Perry song was playing on the radio. 'Art is that which science has not yet explained,' he said. 'Imagine that the vocals are mediocre in an otherwise amazing song. What if you could have forty people record different vocals, and then test it by asking thousands of people, 'Which ones is best?' To me, that's a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.'"
Andrew Marantz goes inside the operations of the viral internet and discovers a future that's almost literally out of a dystopian George Saunders novel. The King of Clickbait
Ok, thanks for reading! More details on shows and my full schedule online atwww.chrisduffycomedy.com/calendar/
Have a great weekend,
Chris