Nothing is off limits for Louis CK
Multiple venues
November 3-8, free – $104.50
www.nycomedyfestival.com
New Yorkers can always use a laugh, especially around election time – you do know we’re voting for mayor on Tuesday, right? – so the New York Comedy Festival is always welcome. This year’s event features some great comedians, including Louis C.K., Bill Maher, Andrea Martin, Tracy Morgan, Ricky Gervais, and Bruce Springsteen, at such venues as Carolines on Broadway, Town Hall, the Beacon Theatre, and those hotbeds of comedy, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Madison Square Garden. There are also special presentations at 92Y Tribeca, the Gotham Comedy Club, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and the Paley Center, which will celebrate the writers of LATE NIGHT with Jimmy Fallon and THE COLBERT REPORT. Perhaps the strangest show will be “Funny Business,” a night of comedy from four CEOs – what could possibly be funnier that that?
Tuesday, November 3 New York’s Funniest Stand-up – Finals, Carolines on Broadway, $20, 9:30
Wednesday, November 4 Blue Water Grill Comedy Show, hosted by Julian McCullough and featuring Marina F, Blue Water Grill, 7:30
Wednesday, November 4 Celebrity Autobiography, featuring such performers as Kristen Johnston, Carol Kane, Andrea Martin, Richard Kind, Carson Kressley, Alan Zweibel, and creators Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel, Carolines on Broadway, $38.25, 9:30
Bill Maher should find a sympathetic crowd at Lincoln Center
Wednesday, November 4 Hot Mess with Cipha Sounds, Carolines on Broadway, $27.35, 9:30
Wednesday, November 4 Comedy Central Presents, Gerald Lynch Theater at John Jay College
Wednesday, November 4 Myspace Secret Stand-up Show: Tom Green, Carolines on Broadway, 12 midnight
Wednesday, November 4 Stand-Up for Heroes: A Benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation, featuring Stephen Colbert, Louis C.K., Bruce Springsteen, and others, hosted by Brian Williams, Town Hall, $100-$500, 8:00
Wednesday, November 4 Your Favorite Band Sucks…at Comedy: A Night of Hilarious Musical Acts, featuring Adira Amram, God’s Pottery, Stuckey & Murray, Thin Skin Johnny, and Snakes, hosted by Anthony King & Scott Brown, UCB Theatre, $10, 8:00
Thursday, November 5 Dane Cook and Friends, Madison Square Garden, $39.50-$104.50, 7:00
The multibillion-dollar bailout is sure to come up during CEO David Moore's "Funny Business" show
Thursday, November 5 David Moore’s Funny Business Show, featuring CEOs Jon Tisch, Stephen Siegel, Stew Leonard, and David Moore, Carolines on Broadway, 7:30
Thursday, November 5 Jake Johannsen at Gotham Comedy Club, benefit for the MS Great 8 Foundation, featuring Jon Dore, $20-$95, VIP cocktail reception 7:00, showtime 8:30
Thursday, November 5 Mike Birbiglia: I’m in the Future Also, Town Hall, $30-$35, 8:00
Thursday, November 5 Ricky Gervais: Out of England II, Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Pereleman Stage, $42.50-$87.50, 8:00
Thursday, November 5 The Best Sketch in NY Showcase, featuring Curtis Gwinn & John Gemberling, Murderfist, and Pangea 3000, hosted by Donald Glover, UCB Theatre, $10, 8:00
Thursday, November 5 You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up… A Love Story, with Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn, 92Y Tribeca, $12, 8:00
Thursday, November 5 Artie Lange Live, Beacon Theatre, $39-$74, 7:30
Thursday, November 5
through
Sunday, November 8 Mario Cantone, Special Engagement, Carolines on Broadway, $46.50
Friday, November 6 Bill Burr: Let it Go, Town Hall, $30-$39.50, 8:00
Friday, November 6 Keeping It Fresh: Television Writing in the Internet Age, featuring Rory Albanese, Jim Downey, Al Jean, John Riggi, and Peter Tolan, moderated by Virginia Heffernan, the Paley Center, $25, 6:30
Friday, November 6 Myspace Secret Stand-up Show: Rob Schneider
Friday, November 6 Time Out New York Approved, featuring Tom Shillue, Morgan Murphy, Donald Glover, Marina Franklin, Snakes, Paul Downs, and special guests, hosted by Jane Borden, UCB Theatre, $10, 7:00
Tracy Morgan moves from Rockefeller Center to Carnegie Hall for comedy fest
Friday, November 6 Tracy Morgan: Tracy Morgan’s Hard Knock Life, Carnegie Hall, Stern Auditorium / Pereleman Stage, $32.50-$59.50, 8:00
Friday, November 6 Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine, with Lew Schneider, Dana Gould, Andrea Martin, and Andrew McCarthy, hosted by Dani Klein Modisett, Carolines on Broadway, $22, 4:00
Saturday, November 7 The Mike Epps is Rottin’ in the Apple Comedy Show, Beacon Theatre, $39-$54, 8:00
Saturday, November 7 Writing for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: The Writers of NBC’s LATE NIGHT Discuss Their Process and Look Uncomfortable, the Paley Center, $25, 2:00
Saturday, November 7 The Truthiness Behind the Lines: An In-depth Look Behind the Scenes with the COLBERT REPORT Writers, moderated by Zachary Kanin, the Paley Center, $25, 5:00
Saturday, November 7 Patton Oswalt Live, Town Hall, $32.50-$35, 8:00
Saturday, November 7 Andy Samberg and Friends Live from Town Hall, $50-$60, 8:00
Sunday, November 8 An Evening with Bill Maher, Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, $45-$82, 7:00
Ricky Gervais will be setting up office in Carnegie Hall during New York Comedy Festival
Sunday, November 8 Louis CK: Special Engagement: One Night Only, Carolines on Broadway, $43.75, 10:00
Sunday, November 8 Urban Myth: Comedy Storytelling, featuring DC Benny, Vic Henley, Lynne Koplitz, Jay Oakerson, Toddy Lynn, and Colin Quinn, Gotham Comedy Club, $20 cover plus two-beverage minimum, 9:00
Released a few years before the Summer of Love and Prague Spring, Miloš Forman’s LOVES OF A BLONDE is a very funny romantic black comedy that also has a lot to say about women’s burgeoning sexual freedom. The delightful Hanu Brejchovou stars as Andula, a young factory worker whose sexual liberation is ahead of its time in an old-fashioned small town. When a trainload of military reservists arrives, most of the single women do their best to attract the uniformed men at a big party, but Andula is more interested in pianist Milda (Vladimíra Pucholta). In a scene for the ages, three men try to pick up Andula and her two friends, with hysterical results. Later, when Andula visits Milda in Prague, she meets the piano player’s parents (Milada Jezková and Josef Sebánek), who are a droll riot. A Czech New Wave classic that evokes Godard and Truffaut, LOVES OF A BLONDE, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, caused a sensation when it played the New York Film Festival and introduced Forman (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, AMADEUS) to the world. Notably, assistant director and cowriter Ivan Passer, who also worked with Forman on THE FIREMEN’S BALL, defected to America following Prague Spring and went on to make such films as BORN TO WIN and CUTTER’S WAY.
In case you were wondering whether the current spate of vampire-related books, music, television, and movies has jumped the shark yet, along comes EULOGY FOR A VAMPIRE, a lame gay-softcore horror flick that lacks any kind of a bite. An amateurish mix of DARK SHADOWS and late-night scinemax, EULOGY is set in an isolated monastery filled with snarky brothers who all fall for a hot, mysterious stranger with a past hidden even from himself. While the brothers of the Order of the Pathetic – um, we mean the Order of the Pathicus – want to sink their teeth into Sebastian, Father Anthony is worried that the truth of what happened twenty-five years ago will rise from the grave.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. 