Latest news with #comedy
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Aussie is praised for booing at UK comedian after 'deeply sickening' joke sparks heated back and forth in front of audience: 'That was extremely insensitive'
An Aussie disability campaigner has been praised after furiously hitting out at an English comedian over a 'deeply sickening' joke about diabetes. Carmen Azzopardi, a type 1 diabetic, was appalled when Paul Foot launched into a ten minute skit on diabetes sufferers during his show at the Moth Club in Hackney, east London, last Wednesday. Ms Azzopardi called out the comedian on stage but Foot hit back and said he disagreed his comments were 'insensitive'. In the ten minute skit, Ms Azzopardi claimed Foot 'made fun of people' who wear continuous glucose monitors - a device diabetics use to keep track of their blood glucose levels. He then mimicked a diabetic having a hypoglycaemic episode by shaking on stage, before suggesting they die after suffering a heart attack. In footage shared on TikTok by Ms Azzopardi, she could be heard booing and calling out the comedian following the skit. 'That was a s*** joke. I have type 1 diabetes, that was extremely insensitive and mis-informative,' she said. Foot hit back and said he didn't believe he was being insensitive as he attempted to continue his set. 'I don't think it's up to you to decide if it's insensitive or not,' Ms Azzopardi said. The pair continued to clash in a tense exchange as the comedian argued 'comedy is subjective' while the audience could be heard nervously laughing intermittently. Foot went on to blame her for the show's 'awkward' ending. 'Due to the failure of you to grasp that simple intellectual point, cause you fail to grasp the difference between these issues, cause of that it's ending in an awkward way,' he said. Ms Azzopardi said her friends urged her to leave the gig, but she wanted to stand her ground and avoid the comedian making fun of her once she had left. Foot then called out Ms Azzopardi for talking while he was finishing up his set and said they would never agree over his comments as he was sharing 'an intellectual argument' while she was on 'the emotional side'. The disability campaigner explained why she was angered by Foot's comments in a video following the exchange. 'All in all, deeply embarrassing for him, deeply deeply sickening to witness as someone who is living with that disease,' Ms Azzopardi said. 'It's probably one of the most blatant acts of ableism that I have ever personally experienced since being diagnosed with this illness, because that's what it is, it's an illness, not a punch line to a joke.' Social media users overwhelmingly agreed with Ms Azzopardi. 'Is the joke in the room with us? I don't understand which part is meant to be funny. Well done for calling him out!' one said. 'This is so weird? Did someone with diabetes break up with him? This is such a random gripe to have,' another wrote. 'Why were people laughing? Not a single thing in this clip was funny,' a third added. 'I have type 1 diabetes and I used to do stand up and there is a way to make tasteful jokes about YOUR own illness and experience but this ain't it,' a third said. However, disagreeing with the campaigner, one wrote: 'God forbid a comedian tells a joke.'
Irish Times
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Sam Tallent's Running the Light: Tale of a god-gifted comedian masquerading as joker and joke
Running the Light Author : Sam Tallent ISBN-13 : 978-1399632898 Publisher : White Rabbit Guideline Price : £20 Writing tutors call it subcultural insider information. Anthony Bourdain blew the lid off the psychic cesspit of restaurant back rooms with Kitchen Confidential. FX Toole exposed all the dirty tricks employed by fight corner cut-men in his short story collection Rope Burns. Now we have comedian Sam Tallent's fictional tell-all Running the Light. If Bourdain's first readers and champions were fellow line cooks, Tallent's original audience was his peers. Running the Light's original incarnation was as an online venture, self-published in May 2020, as Covid snuffed out the last lights of the live circuit. Five years later, White Rabbit are publishing it in physical form. The lag is fortunate. Half a decade ago, the culture was still too censorious and self-righteous to tolerate such a spiritually rotten protagonist as Billy Ray Schafer. We're not talking Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks here. This is the tale of a god-gifted but ageing, violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted comedian masquerading as joker and joke, running on a misery wheel of airport bars, rental cars and cheap hotel rooms for 200 days of the year, solitary but always in service, numbing the ghosts with coke, smokes and booze. Schafer's existence is a netherworld of strip mall Bud bars, of one-nighters spent acting as dancing monkey for good old boys in the secret sanctums of country club back rooms, slouching onstage after terminal cancer testifiers and geek show hucksters peddling duck shit bingo. READ MORE All this would be pointless degradation without the redemptive factor of the craft. Tallent writes exceptionally well about the grind, yes, but also the reason for the grind, the daylong gravitational pull towards showtime, the controlled ordeal of the gig, the large adrenaline spike followed by hours drinking with anyone who'll stand your company, squalid episodes in public restrooms, the desperate lengths the solitary comedian will go to in order to avoid the hollow comedown of returning to an empty hotel room, snorting alone, drinking alone, afraid to face the phantoms of betrayed ex-wives and the contempt of estranged sons. Tallent writes: 'When he was young he could take off on a premise running only to catch up to his own flight of imagination sixty minutes later, his clothes soaked and the air itself crackling with the urgency of what he'd done. Those days were gone, but even drunk and coked and spun and pilled, he still killed harder than the reductive drivel being peddled in theaters and arenas by the skeletons he envied. Despite his failures with sobriety, monogamy, business and fatherhood, he was still funny, and funny is the hardest thing to be.' But this flimsy bravado is laced with toxic self-disgust. This is not Bukowski-lite. The performer's psyche is conveyed here as a volatile cocktail of ego and fragility, a queasy bipolar roundabout of gut-level sadness balanced by resilience: Schafer's kindred are Bad Blake in Thomas Cobb's Crazy Heart or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, the modern day equivalents of washed-up pugs looking for one last pay-day, or the old pro too old to rock 'n' roll and too young to die. The only deliverance to be found is in love or family, but it's too late for that. Billy Ray's sins are not too grievous to be forgiven by others, but by himself. As he drives across the southwest over the course of the week that maps this book's plunging narrative arc, he penetrates deeper into America's Heart of Darkness, yes, but also an internal wasteland. He's done hard time for the worst of crimes, but he's too institutionalised to leave the prison of his soul, choking on his own one-liners, the smile becomes a rictus grin. The bottom-out, when it comes, is horrific. Thrown down among the transients, wandering the streets of Denver, he witnesses the entropic pageantry of the 5th Annual Zombie Crawl: 'He had never heard of such a thing but it made sense. As a species, humankind was bored and increasingly bullshit passed for fun. Their mirth disgusted him. Their happiness was ostracizing. Numb to inorganic novelty, he pitied them their false calamity. Their lives – staid, monotonous – were so safe and predictable these people were forced to organise chaos and pretend they were dead. It was disappointing, For a moment he thought he'd made it to Armageddon.' Running the Light is Dante as gag-artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep. I did, through my fingers. Peter Murphy is a writer, journalist and spoken word artist. He records and performs under the name Cursed Murphy
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Which '90s TV Shows And Movies Didn't Age Well?
Plenty of movies and TV shows — no matter how popular they were in their day — have aged poorly by today's standards. The '90s was no exception. For example, the Seinfeld "Soup Nazi" was played as a joke, but in the current political climate and with reports of a certain prominent public figure seemingly doing a Nazi salute, it comes across as way too flippant a use of such a word. Related: How Long Would You Last In A Zombie Apocalypse? Build Your Survival Squad To Find Out And when I first watched the Saved by the Bell episode where Screech plays chess against a Russian exchange student, I remember being shocked by how casually they bullied him for being a "commie." Related: Choose 11 Yummy Dishes At This International Buffet And We'll Reveal What You Need At This Exact Moment And in the Ace Ventura: Pet Detective scene where Ace reveals that Lt. Lois Einhorn is a trans woman by ripping off her clothes is just grossly anti-trans — and it's an example of a harmful trope where a character's gender identity is used as a big reveal or twist. So, what's a scene from a '90s TV show or movie that has aged poorly, in your opinion? Why? Share your answers in the comments, and they may be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed Community post! Also in Community: Eat Foods From Across Asia And I'll Guess Your Hair Color Also in Community: If You Can Name These 15 Recurring Disney Channel Characters, You're Officially Getting Old Also in Community: Enjoy A Buffet And We'll Guess Your Favorite Music Genre
Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Adults' Peaks In Episode 6 With Julia Fox, Ketamine, And Charlie Cox Eating Raw Chicken
Thanks to FX's Adults, a new comedy series that follows five twenty-something roommates as they struggle to navigate adulthood, I now see life in two phases: the roast chicken phase and the raw chicken phase. While I love a good coming-of-age story that seeks to replicate Friends/Girls/New Girl vibes, the fresh but familiar series from Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw admittedly took a while to grow on me. In early episodes, the writing and deliveries of certain jokes felt-try hard to a distracting degree. As the series progressed, characters and personalities started to feel much more lived-in. And in Season 1, Episode 6, 'Roast Chicken,' everything clicked. Hilarious spoilers for Episode 6 ahead. The standout installment — written by Sanaz Toossi and directed by Jason Woliner — showed Billie (Lucy Freyer), Samir (Malik Elassal),Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele) throwing their very first dinner party for special guest, Mr. Teacher (Charlie Cox), the 42-year-old high school educator Billie's been dating. On the menu? Roast chicken and a heaping side of pressure, because Billie needed the night to go perfectly so she could impress her new man and prove the roommates have their shit together. 'We are more than capable of throwing a dinner party, despite what people say about people our age — that we're neurotic, irresponsible, directionless, or that we lie about using menstrual cups,' Billie told her pals in a pre-dinner party pep talk. 'Tonight we're gonna prove them wrong. We are in the roast chicken phase of life. We can be mature. And we can be normal. And we can cook a roast fucking chicken like the goddamn grown ups we are.' Minutes before Mr. Teacher rang the doorbell, Billie was thriving. She changed into a stunning black dress, did her hair and makeup, put an apron on, and popped her chicken in the oven. The vibe she was curating? A sophisticated evening full of delicious food, good banter, and thoughtful discourse over The Atlantic articles. Did Samir's dad's suit that made him look like he 'runs Gotham City' fit in with her dream dinner decor? No. Did Anton's short velvet suit jacket and ass-less leather chaps, aka his bartending uniform, clash with the event? Yes. But like Issa said, 'There's napkins on tables. There's nuts in bowls. This is basically a gala!' Despite the early red flags, Billie tried her best to relax and convince herself perfection was within reach. When the doorbell rang in unison with the fire alarm, however, it should have been a clear sign that the night would be all downhill (complimentary) from there. Though Mr. Teacher made an A+ first impression, minutes after Samir took his coat, he revealed he was on a large, introductory does of ketamine and asked Samir to keep the secret between them. For literal seconds, Samir obeyed his former educator. Even after telling Anton 'he's tripping his balls off,' Samir couldn't stop overthinking the problem and longed to loop in Billie. With Disaster #1 in motion, Adults took a detour to introduce Disaster #2: Paul Baker's mystery dinner guest, Jules. Issa, confident in herself and her relationship with Paul, was excited to meet his good friend, 'Foxy J.' But when actress and model Julia Fox answered the door looking glam AF with an edgy black and white fit, bleach blonde hair and eyebrows, and a famous glow to her, Issa full-on spiraled with insecurity. While 'the A++ version' of Issa was 'being interesting all over the sofa,' Billie remained in the kitchen determined to conquer the roast chicken, and Samir followed a wandering Mr. Teacher into a bedroom, where he found one of Billie's old yearbooks and had a ketamine-induced epiphany. 'I have to end it with her! Oh fuck! What the fuck am I doing? This girl was a child! I'm dating a child,' Cox's sky-high character said before performing a random somersault and fleeing the room. Meanwhile, Julia Fox ate all the crab dip! And Issa went into her closet and changed into her best Julia Fox fit! Sadly, she couldn't compete with Jules' stories about hanging in Lorne's office at Saturday Night Live, her poetic toast, or Mr. Teacher's chaotic dancing to Boney M's 'Sunny.' But despite everyone's best efforts, the real star of the show was Billie's roast chicken, which genuinely looked great until Mr. Teacher carved into it and blood splattered across the table. 'Did she forget to thaw that out?' Julia Fox, also a culinary genius, asked the group. Yes. Yes, she did. But Mr. Teacher was so high that he didn't notice he was serving everyone raw chicken drizzled with raw chicken juices. As everyone looks on in disgust and bewilderment, Cox's character chowed down on the uncooked bird in a gag-inducing, laugh-out-loud-worthy culmination of the episode's mounting chaos. Samir took the moment to free himself from the shackles of his secret and told Billie her Teach was on drugs. And rather than collapsing on his plate for the night, Cox jolted upward and kept his scene stealing streak going, dialing up his unhinged performance by shouting at the group for not saying grace, then hiding out in the bathroom, where he broke up with Billie. In a genuine show of maturity and capable problem-solving, a crushed Billie called her 42-year-old ex's ex wife to come pick him up, and after Foxy J got a car home, the friends said 'Fuck Mr Teacher!' before Billie let out one final scream into the oven in a delicious dinner party conclusion. While the chicken wasn't cooked, the episode absolutely ate. Adults delivered a wild, hilarious 24-minute ride that featured seamless writing, delightful performances, and smart callbacks that made viewers feel like they were part of the friend group — from Issa's Jane Fonda story and Paul Baker's 'weird milk,' to the boys not knowing how to waft. Cox fully embraced the chaos, delivering an amusing performance ripe with physical comedy. And Fox was perfectly cast as someone with just the right amount of fame, fashion, and influence to impress viewers while rattling Issa. As Samir said, 'she knows Sandler,' but she's not SO famous that she wouldn't believably befriend Paul Baker at Meals on Wheels. The episode unequivocally proved that Adults' core characters (and crucially, Mr. Andrew Teacher) are still in their raw chicken phase of life. But at least they're trying! They're making solid efforts to figure themselves, their careers, their relationships, and their futures out. And who among us can't relate to that journey? At the end of the day, we're all just adults hoping to successfully reach our roast chicken phases. (Unless you're vegan like Jules!) And when Adults serves up raw, relatable (occasionally heightened) moments of fear, humor, love, heartbreak, humiliation, and chaos, the show has the power to shine. Adults Season 1 is now streaming on Hulu with new episodes airing Wednesdays on FX.
The Review Geek
5 hours ago
- Business
- The Review Geek
Mountainhead (2025) Movie Review – Lacks novelty but entertains nonetheless
Lacks novelty but entertains nonetheless Two years after Succession, Jesse Armstrong brings us his feature film debut, Mountainhead. We follow a poker night between three billionaires and one multi-millionaire tech bros and their insufferably absurd minds. As a result, you might stumble upon a gold mine of dialogue like: 'Running a country like Paraguay is easier than breaking into a mature consumer sector' (they are talking about coffee shops, by the way). As their interests in the meeting come to the surface, so does their paranoia, and things start to get dangerous. The cast is incredible, and all of them are believable as these ridiculous satires. Steve Carell (Randall), Jason Schwartzman (Soup), Cory Michael Smith (Venis), and Ramy Youssef (Jeff) prove once again they're the right picks for any comedy movie. Adding to this, it delves not only into a credible problem but one we're already fighting to some degree. An unmonitored and deeply problematic AI is being used to create distrust, controversy, and even armed conflicts. Obviously Venis, its creator, doesn't listen to reason for a second and only thinks about increasing his net worth. Armstrong has the characters in the palm of his hand, fully understanding what goes through their heads. Venus is the best example of that. While talking with Randall, he asks his friend if he believes in people, displaying vulnerability that neither seems to see. This nuance only gets more interesting when we see that his AI is the start of a plan to transcend humanity and rely more on technology. His fears are in plain sight, but they're too superficial to realize. Every character gets moments like this, and we comprehend Soup is a suck-up and the punching bag of the group way before he admits his insecurities. Still, even with incredible stars and good nuances, Mountainhead has a jarring problem. It's lacking a sense of novelty or excitement. This satirical 'Eat the Rich' genre has been especially popular recently, with big names like Saltburn, Ready or Not, Triangle of Sadness, and Knives Out to name but a few. With that, the billionaire/tech bro archetype only feels stale. We've seen the same traits repeated there several times, and, in almost two hours, Armstrong unfortunately can't bring anything new to the table. Although he tries with the AI situation and the slapstick humor, it's a 'small fish in a big pond' problem. A big pond that — for better or for worse — he helped create with Succession. Even its absurdness seems grounded at times. During the second half of the feature, we see a fun twist when three of the characters decide they must kill their other friend. It's funny seeing they fail at that in the dumbest ways possible. However, the viewer can't shake the feeling that the script is confining the story's potential. It's as if the movie is always one more twist or genius idea away from becoming great. Even in its final moments, it feels like Armstrong tries to do that. But he never can, and the screen fades to black. Even though there's nothing groundbreaking about it, Mountainhead is still a good time. When some of the jokes land, they're hilarious. And the character's chemistry never feels off, only when intended. If you're a fan of the genre, it'll likely be a fun watch.
