Gawker - Ha! It’s Comedy Week at Gawker

By Olivia Craighead

The comedian and star of The Bear is done being nice, even to old friends

Ayo Edebiri is very talented. An actor, writer, and stand-up comedian, you probably know her best from her work as Sydney on The Bear, where she plays a Type A chef thrown into the chaos of a divey Italian beef counter. Or maybe you know her as Missy from Big Mouth, a show for which she was also a writer. Or maybe you have an Apple TV+ account and watched Dickinson (good show!), on which she also wrote and played Hattie.

But to me, more important than all of that is that she is my dear friend of almost a decade. Or so I thought. As you will learn in this interview, becoming a Thom Browne girl and getting awards buzz has gone straight to her head, and she no longer remembers my face, voice, or name.

It’s great to see you.

It’s really nice to meet you.

We have actually met before.

I’m sure! I know these industry events can be so crazy and stuff. Pre-pandemic, right? I’m so face blind also, just because of the masks and stuff. Continue reading

By Fran Hoepfner

A chat with the mastermind behind Britain's funniest export

Allow me to introduce you to Taskmaster, a British reality show that has made me laugh harder for the past few years than every single streaming service no-laughs comedy combined (you know the ones I mean). The premise is simple: five comedians are assigned tasks to complete – ranging from the foolishly simplistic (“Destroy this cake. Most beautiful destruction wins. You have five minutes.”) to the bizarrely complex (contestants had to unknowingly buy themselves time before being instructed to hold gallons of milk up in the air as long as possible). There are tasks for a live studio audience as well, that range from prize tasks (the contestants bring in, say, the most “jaw-dropping” object they own) to other live tasks like painting a unicorn with a brush affixed to their forehead.

These tasks are judged by the titular Taskmaster, comedian Greg Davies, whose wanton bullying and harsh rule dictates the law of the land, but the ideas come from the mind of his “assistant” and show creator Alex Horne. Horne, a successful comedian in his own right, is the leader of comedy band The Horne Section, featured in a new series that’s airing currently across the pond, as it were. He sat down with Gawker to discuss task generation and the magic of montage. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

The beloved actor and writer builds rich interior lives for the wacko characters they take on, including America’s spookiest First Lady

Cole Escola wears many hats, in the sense of being a writer, producer, and actor, but more importantly they wear many wigs, often alternating hairpieces between frames, playing multiple characters in the same scene. Escola’s particular gift is rooted in a melancholy observation of human nature, always offering bleak realism to absurd characters like soul-searching Donna in their failed “NBC pilot” Pee Pee Manor or seething neighbor Chassie Tucker on At Home With Amy Sedaris. They are, in my opinion, one of the funniest people alive.

Escola opened up to Gawker about childhood icons (including a neighbor woman named Sally with a metal plate in her head with late-in-life homophobic tendencies), shooting a 1970s-inspired Western on a soundstage in Greenpoint, and their forthcoming play about Mary Todd Lincoln, in which Escola stars as Mary herself. The wig budget on that thing is going to be out of control. Continue reading

By David Odyssey

The vicious British satire saw us all coming

Not much happens in the pilot of Absolutely Fabulous: two washed-up party girls, Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), throw a fashion show, snort blow, and fall out of cabs piss drunk. Premiering on the BBC on November 12, 1992, Absolutely Fabulous was meant to satirize the excess of early ’90s lifestyle consumerism, with its wannabe It Girl harridans climbing the death spire of thinness, wellness, and spiritual superiority, only to plummet spectacularly by each episode’s end. But 30 years later, Eddie and Patsy have risen from farcical to avant-garde to prophetic: the Cassandras to a world order of intermittent fasting, iso tanks and meditation retreats. The series may now be considered a classic, but it feels more savage than ever: so cruel, and so correct, that it could never be made today.

Absolutely Fabulous, which was created and written by Saunders based on characters from her long-running sketch show French and Saunders, is centered on Edina, the “modern mother” of the ’90s, a PR executive careening through the nonsense hierarchies of London High Fashion, clad in the most on-trend and outrageous assortments of La Croix, Gaultier, and Givenchy. Continue reading