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    Colin Jost Falls Flat at White House Correspondents Dinner

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    The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has occasionally featured some great stand-up comedy. This “S.N.L.” veteran’s set will not join that list.People in the media have long worried about the impact of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on journalism. The concern is that it makes the press look too chummy with politicians it’s covering. But what is the impact on comedy?A high-ceilinged hotel ballroom filled with television anchors and network executives is a tough room for stand-up, but no more so than an awards show. Trevor Noah was funnier two years ago at the dinner than he was at this year’s Grammys.A murderer’s row (George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Conan O’Brien, Wanda Sykes) has taken this assignment because it’s one of the most high-profile live comedy sets of the year. And there has been one truly great performance (Stephen Colbert), some very good ones (Seth Meyers, Larry Wilmore) and one so thrillingly biting (Michelle Wolf) that the next year they replaced the comic with a historian.Colin Jost’s set this year does not belong in that pantheon. Without his Weekend Update partner Michael Che next to him, he came off muted, vanilla, less assured than usual. With long pauses between jokes, eyes darting side to side, he occasionally took a drink of water and at least once acknowledged the lack of laughter in the room. His jokes leaned on wordplay more than a specific or novel perspective. “Some incredible news organizations here,” began one of his pricklier jokes, finished by: “Also, some credible ones.”He focused much fire on former President Donald J. Trump. “Now that O.J.’s dead, who is the front-runner for V.P.?” he asked. “Diddy?” Like Biden, Jost has always benefited from low expectations. No one that handsome could be funny, right? But he has grown into his role at “Saturday Night Live,” proving to be an especially strong straight man adept at the comedy of embarrassment. You could see his timing in one of the odder moments when he said Robert Kennedy Jr. could be the third Catholic president and the C-SPAN camera cut to President Biden (the second) clapping. Jost retreated on Kennedy’s chances one beat later: “Like his vaccine card says, he doesn’t have a shot.”For the third year in a row, President’s Biden’s age played a big role in the comedy (“Technology wasn’t invented when he was in high school” Jost said of Biden), even in the president’s own set. Two years ago, Biden joked that he was friends with Calvin Coolidge. Last year, he referred to his “pal Jimmy Madison.” The president took a slightly different and more confrontational approach this time. “Age is an issue,” he said early. “I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Christopher Durang, Playwright Who Mixed High Art and Low Humor, Dies at 75

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      In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown.Christopher Durang, a Tony Award-winning playwright and a master satirist, died Tuesday night at his home in Pipersville, Pa., in Bucks County. He was 75.His agent, Patrick Herold, said the cause was complications of aphasia. In 2016, Mr. Durang was found to have a rare form of dementia, logopenic primary progressive aphasia. The diagnosis was made public in 2022.An acid, impish writer, Mr. Durang never met a classic (“The Brothers Karamazov,” “The Glass Menagerie,” “Snow White”) that he couldn’t skewer. In a career spanning more than 40 years, he established himself as a hyperliterate jester and an anarchic clown. Regarding subject and theme, he pogoed from sex to metaphysics to serial killers to psychology, and he had a way of collapsing high art and jokes that aimed much lower.“He’s so scaldingly funny,” the actress Sigourney Weaver, a friend and collaborator since she met Mr. Durang at the Yale School of Drama, said in an interview. “You laugh with horror at what’s going on and your sheer inability to do anything about it.”But even in his most uproarious work — like his early play, the sex and psychoanalysis farce “Beyond Therapy,” or his late hit “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a delirious homage to Chekhov — there was often a strong undertow of melancholy.Mark Alhadeff and Cynthia Darlow in a 2014 production of Mr. Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” at the Actors Company Theater in New York.Marielle SolanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Christopher Durang, the Surrealist of Snark

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      In works like “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” the playwright would force you to laugh, not to dull the pain but to hone it.Pickpocketing Chekhov for dramatic capital is almost a rite of passage among playwrights, but only Christopher Durang invested the loot in beefcake.In his play “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” Vanya and Sonia are more-or-less familiar transplants from the Russian hinterlands to Bucks County, Pa., dithering so much about the purpose of life that they neglect to have one. Masha, though a movie star, is a Chekhov type, too: endlessly fascinating, especially to herself.But you will not find Spike anywhere in the canon; a jovial, amoral, ab-tastic himbo, he is apparently unfamiliar with the function of clothes. They keep coming off.Durang, who died on Tuesday night at 75, was likewise a stripper, peeling the pants off serious theater, both to admire and ridicule what it was packing beneath. When “Vanya” won the Tony Award for best play in 2013, it was the culmination of a writing life spent remaking the respectable precedents and characters of the past in the snarky image of his own times. Drama became comedy, but then — surprise! — swung back toward drama, then swung back again, never quite settling. In making us laugh and then demanding a retraction, Durang became an absurdist Neil Simon for a post-great generation.Billy Magnussen as Spike, with Genevieve Angelson as Nina, in Lincoln Center Theater’s 2012 production of “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOften enough, the laughing was of the can’t-catch-your-breath variety, further dizzying the ambivalence of the culturati by punching both high and low. I didn’t see any of the plays and sketches he wrote while a student at the Yale School of Drama in the early 1970s, often collaborating with pals like Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep, Albert Innaurato and Wendy Wasserstein, but the titles tell you a lot: “Better Dead Than Sorry,” “The Life Story of Mitzi Gaynor,” “When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth,” “The Idiots Karamazov.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New Online Speech Law Could Chill Political Humor in Sri Lanka

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      A sweeping new law on online speech threatens the political humor that has helped the island nation get through tough stretches.Even in the darkest of times, Sri Lankans held on to their humor.In 2022, when the island nation’s economy collapsed and the government announced a QR code system to ration gasoline, a meme spread online: “Scanning Fuel QR Code Now Makes You Forget Last Three Months.”And when public anger forced the strongman president to flee his palace, with protesters venturing inside to fry snacks in his kitchen and jump into his pool, another meme captured the mood upon their departure: “We Are Leaving. The Key Is Under the Flower Pot.”It is this kind of online expression, which helped fuel the largest citizens’ movement in Sri Lanka in decades, that activists and rights groups fear is now endangered.They are concerned about a new law, the Online Safety Act, that gives the government wide-ranging powers to deem speech on social media to be “prohibited statements.” Under the law, a committee appointed by the president will rule on what is prohibited, and violations could bring penalties ranging from fines of hundreds of dollars to years in prison.The public security minister, Tiran Alles, told Parliament that the legislation would protect against online fraud, the spread of false information and the abuse of women and children. But he also made clear its potential political applications, saying it could be used against those who insult members of Parliament on social media.Sri Lanka is taking a page from other countries in the region that are increasingly policing what people say online, most notoriously Bangladesh, where a 2018 law known as the Digital Security Act has led to the imprisonment of activists and opposition leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: For ‘Jack Tucker,’ Failure Is the Only Option

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      Zach Zucker delivers a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic at SoHo Playhouse.In one of his most quotable lyrics, Bob Dylan sang about a woman who knows “there’s no success like failure/ And that failure’s no success at all.” She clearly never saw the comedy of Jack Tucker.With sweaty insecurity, Tucker steps on his punchlines and clanks the setups. His tech malfunctions. When he sketches the familiar hourglass shape in the air to draw attention to a woman’s figure, he ends up looking like a chicken. His crowd work ends in despair. On the rare occasion when he lands a joke, he celebrates by having a co-worker take a photo, but something always destroys the shot.As played by Zach Zucker, in a raucously funny portrait of a catastrophically dim stand-up comic, Tucker fails in bunches, in quantity and quality, flopping so fast you might miss some errors. Just when you think he can’t stumble again, he does. And it’s a triumph.Not since “The Play That Goes Wrong” have I seen mistakes this meticulous. Zucker, who trained with the French guru Philippe Gaulier, doesn’t just pratfall and malaprop. He finds new ways to get laughs from spilled beer, a series of variations on a splash that lead to a drunkenly fun call back.“Jack Tucker: Comedy’s Standup Hour,” written by Zucker and directed with a firm attention to detail by Jonny Woolley, is the latest solo show to emerge out of the burgeoning scene that features comics like Natalie Palamides, Courtney Pauroso, Alexandra Tatarsky and Bill O’Neill. (O’Neill’s acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe show “The Amazing Banana Brothers” is onstage at SoHo Playhouse tonight and Wednesday.) As the host of Stamptown, a bicoastal showcase for many of these artists, Zucker has been at the center of this movement. It’s a younger generation than the new vaudevillians like Bill Irwin and David Shiner, but this group has the same inventiveness, ambition and dedication to breathing new life into old shtick. But their work is more visceral and topical. (If anyone’s moonlighting at Cirque du Soleil, I’d be surprised.)Clowns and stand-ups tend to operate in different circles, so this show could be seen as a shot from one camp to the other. And in the voice of Tucker, Zucker does float countless hack stand-up premises — some swaggering, others oblivious, like “I guess men and women are different after all.” As satire, this show is toothless. It’s far too stylized to mount a stinging critique, and its one-disaster-after-another structure risks becoming repetitious. But the surprises are in the form, not the content.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Lewis and ‘The (Blank) From Hell’

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      The comedian, who died on Wednesday, said he coined the ubiquitous phrase. An episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” about a “nanny from hell” recounted his efforts to get credit for it.Go ahead and call Richard Lewis the comedian from hell. You’d be paying him a compliment.The stand-up comedian, who died on Tuesday, was known for his dark clothes, dark sense of humor and a recurring role as a, yes, even darker version himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He was a fixture in the comedy world for over half a century. But his most indelible legacy could be one simple phrase, spoken so often that its origin might never be questioned.“The (insert hated thing here) from hell.”It’s a phrase that seemingly has been around since time immemorial. The flight from hell, the day from hell, the lunch from hell. We’ve all been there, and we all know what it means, but where did it come from?According to Richard Lewis and the “Yale Book of Quotations,” it came from him.Posting on X, known then as Twitter, Mr. Lewis asked, “Where was my Nobel Peace prize?” and linked to a 2006 UPI article about his appearance in the “Yale Book of Quotations.”In a 2008 interview with Interview Magazine, Mr. Lewis said that “the truth of the matter is that whatever gift I have as a comedian, most of it was in the phrase ‘from hell.’”“I’m credited with popularizing that phrase because I felt victimized by everything,” he said.Mr. Lewis elaborated in a 2014 interview with the Nashville Scene.“I totally popularized the phrase in the late ’70s,” he said. “If you go on YouTube, you can see on Letterman, David would cut me off, and go, ‘You mean it was the bar mitzvah from hell?’ ‘That’s right!’ And I stopped saying it. I felt self-conscious. I was getting applause for it. I guess subconsciously I thought I was a victim of everything.”Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” did not give him credit for the phrase, which became a story line in the episode “The Nanny,” during season three of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”The episode, which aired in 2002, weaves in Lewis’s attempts to get into Bartlett’s.“It was a real solid for Larry to do that for me,” he said. “That really immortalized it in some respects.” More

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      Nikki Haley Appears on ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      Ayo Edebiri hosted in a show that focused much of its energy on politics, along with Taylor Swift conspiracy theories and a “Dune” popcorn bucket.“Saturday Night Live” resumed its election-season tradition of bringing on political candidates to play themselves, inviting Nikki Haley for a cameo in its opening sketches this weekend.Haley, who has tried to make use of comedy and popular culture as she trails former President Donald J. Trump in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, appeared in a segment that was presented as a CNN town hall event with Trump (played by the show’s resident Trump impersonator, James Austin Johnson).Johnson fielded questions from other “S.N.L.” cast members, explaining how he planned to beat President Biden and would “stop Taylor Swift from infiltrating the Super Bowl.” The town hall moderators then introduced a question from an audience member “who describes herself as a concerned South Carolina voter.”That voter turned out to be Haley, the former governor of South Carolina (as well as an ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration). “Yes, hello,” Haley said to Johnson. “My question is, why won’t you debate Nikki Haley?”“Oh my God, it’s her!” Johnson said. “The woman who was in charge of security on Jan. 6. It’s Nancy Pelosi.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Recap: Jacob Elordi Hosts ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      Jacob Elordi hosted an episode in which Alaska Airlines was mocked with a parody ad about finding the upside in a flight where a door plug blew out.With 2024 underway and the presidential race in full swing, it was time for “Saturday Night Live” to get back to doing what it loves best: lampooning former President Donald J. Trump.In its first new broadcast of the year, hosted by Jacob Elordi and featuring the musical guest Reneé Rapp, “S.N.L.” kicked off with a sketch featuring its resident Trump impressionist, James Austin Johnson. It parodied Trump’s impromptu remarks outside a courtroom in Lower Manhattan where he is again on trial facing accusations that he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll, after an earlier jury verdict in May that Trump defamed and sexually abused her.After a brief introduction by Chloe Fineman, who played Alina Habba, Trump’s lawyer, (“I am new at this, and I am learning,” she said), Johnson entered as Trump and quickly dressed down his own legal representation.“You’re great on TV,” Johnson told Fineman, adding: “Maybe the worst lawyer I’ve ever had, which is quite an accomplishment. Look at this team — this is the bottom of the barrel, folks, this is who said yes. I’m in the lead for president, and this is the best I can get. Feels like a red flag, no?”Johnson addressed his remaining lawyers and said, “You’re not getting paid, by the way.”He promised to abide by a gag order that prevented him from discussing the current defamation trial. “So I will not be saying that the judge is an idiot,” Johnson said, “or where he lives or what kind of crappy car he drives. I didn’t know they still made Wagoneers.”Johnson celebrated a first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses by taking potshots at rivals like Ron DeSantis (“Ron DeStupid,” he said. “It just works. We’re going with Ron DeStupid”) and Vivek Ramaswamy (“who dropped out of the race and has agreed to live in my suit pocket,” he said. “I love my little ‘Ratatouille.’”)He went on to contrast himself with President Biden, his likely rival in this year’s election. “He sniffs little girls’ hair,” Johnson said. “I am different, of course, I do far worse than that. You ever see that video of me dancing with Epstein? Boy, is that some dark energy.”Johnson predicted he would prevail because of his loyal voters: “We just need ’em to stay alive till November,” he said. “Stay alive till November. Just pull that lever and drop dead.”No matter what, Johnson predicted that 2024 would be an exciting year for him. “I’m either going to jail, be president or frankly, the Purge,” he said. “Perhaps all three; let’s spin the chamber.”Celebrity worship of the weekThe awards season has already produced several viral video clips of celebrities talking to one another in conversations inaudible on camera. So who better to interpret what they’re saying than a pair of professional lip readers, played by Elordi and Bowen Yang? Well, probably anyone else — the two were genuinely terrible, but hilarious, as they misconstrued a romantic heart-to-heart between Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner and an obvious joke from Jennifer Lawrence. Aptly, for a comedy sketch about spoken language and its meaning, no written words can fully do justice to the dopey voice that Elordi adopts when trying to lip-read Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.Fly the friendly skies of the weekThere’s basically no upside to the episode this month in which an Alaska Airlines flight had a door plug blow out shortly after takeoff. But that didn’t stop “S.N.L.” from seeking a positive spin in this fake commercial for Alaska Airlines, which reveals the company’s (fake) new slogan: “You didn’t die and you got a cool story.” The ersatz ad also points out that Alaska was the carrier in an episode in which an off-duty pilot was accused of trying to cut the engines on a flight in October and was charged with more than 80 counts of attempted murder. As a flight attendant, played by Kenan Thompson, says: “Now we’re so proud to say that’s our second-worst flight.”Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the 2024 presidential election.Jost began:Well, guys, it’s 2024. But is it? [His screen showed photographs of Trump and Biden] I don’t know about you, but when I think of the year 2020, I never think we should run that one back. And if you’re feeling confused, you’re not the only one. At a rally on Thursday, President Biden said he was mixed up when he claimed he had just taken a photo with a woman who wasn’t even there. Then the next day, Donald Trump repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. Guys, I don’t know if we should do this election. It’s honestly starting to feel like elder abuse. And I don’t even blame them — I blame us for allowing it. It reminds me of those bum fight videos, where they made two homeless guys fight for money. And now we look back on it and we’re like, how did we as a society let that happen? So I think the best solution is, we should just tell Trump and Biden that they both won. And that we’re very proud of them. And that they can rest now.Che:In Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis beat out Nikki Haley for second place. [His screen showed a photograph of DeSantis smiling awkwardly.] Well, that ought to put a — whatever this is — on his face.Weekend Update desk segment of the weekOff Friday’s news that Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina had endorsed Trump at a rally in New Hampshire, Devon Walker performed an impersonation of Scott, seeking to justify his endorsement. After poking fun at Scott’s voice (“My voice is like if Bill Clinton was actually Black,” Walker said. “I sound like the princess and the frog. I sound like if Forrest Gump was doing an impression of Ja Rule”). Walker explained that he didn’t see color: “When I looked at all the people at Trump’s rally, I did not see a single color,” he said. He also contended that it was not “a racist dog whistle” to ask whether Haley was born in America. Walker then took out what he said was an actual “racist dog whistle” and blew on it, seemingly to no effect — until Jost, wincing in discomfort, asked, “What is that noise?” More

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      Donald Trump Isn’t Funny Anymore

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      In 1986, when I was a college student, I bristled every time I saw yet another fawning profile of a certain arrogant young real estate developer. The person of whom I speak is, of course, Donald Trump. As polarizing as he is now, Mr. Trump was then enjoying a press honeymoon — even Mike Wallace, the resident bulldog at CBS’s “60 Minutes,” went easy on him, breathlessly declaring in a 1985 profile, “He talks of millions the way most of us talk of nickels and dimes.” This repellent man needed to be knocked down a peg and I thought I knew of one effective way to do it: with jokes.So when I came across a fledgling satirical magazine, Spy, that articulated precisely what I was thinking, I was smitten. In its inaugural issue, Spy named Mr. Trump one of the “10 Most Embarrassing New Yorkers,” noting his tackiness, his shady tactics as a landlord and his “hustler-on-his-best-behavior manner.” Yes! My people!I was so smitten, in fact, that I cold-called the magazine’s office, offering myself up for a summer internship. I joined the staff full-time in 1989 and we continued to chronicle Mr. Trump’s offenses against taste and decency. We came up with a slew of epithets for him, including the one that stuck, “short-fingered vulgarian.” Then, as now, Mr. Trump was thin-skinned, and obsessed with his press coverage. He sent angry, threatening letters to Spy, which only heightened our joy.So you might think I’d revel in our current golden age of Trump mockery. When “Saturday Night Live” returns this week, we’re likely to see him incarnated by the comedian James Austin Johnson, who uncannily recreates Mr. Trump’s fragmentary locutions and deteriorating speaking voice as it whipsaws from a bellow to a gargle to a whisper.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More