What are lawyers doing behind the scenes at today’s Late Shows and why?
Category: Other Controversies
Debates and Conversations in the Public Square
Bill Meets Greg: A Rare Moment of Civility in a Brutal Culture War.
Bill Maher and Greg Gutfeld meet and find common ground amid the ongoing culture war. Will this pattern of civil discourse hold?
Jad Sleiman: Is the Ban on Comedy Moonlighters a Last Acceptable Prejudice?
Talk of expanding one’s career horizons and you might think of moonlighting as one of those harmless pursuits that people indulge in, sometimes for money, other times just for the hell of it. Except maybe when it comes to comedy, it seems. Recently, we saw the case of journalist Jad Sleiman, who works for…
Sarah Silverman Sues ChatGPT’s Owner: Should Comedians be Worried about AI?
What does the AI invasion of the artistic communities mean for contemporary comedy? Should comedians be worried?
Comedy Versus Free Speech: Deconstructing a Never-Ending Story
What’s really behind the never-ending faceoff between Comedy and Free Speech?
Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle Attacked Onstage: An Open Season on Comedians?
Do the onstage attacks on Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle indicate an open season of assaults on comedians over their material, or is something else really at play here?
Confronting Trump and Nixon: Comedy’s Changing Perspectives
Why did the comedy community treat Trump and Nixon differently even though both men were so similar in the way that they were quite divisive and controversial presidents?
The Brave New World of Muckraking Comedy
Is muckraking comedy a good thing?
Spy Magazine and Today’s Brutal Political Satire: An Origin Story?
A remarkable feature of today’s political satire is what appears to be its “snark and insult” character. By most accounts, it wasn’t always this rough and mean. Perhaps the most persuasive theory on how we started down this brutal path is that the now defunct Spy magazine from the 1980s and 1990s put us on…
Seriously, Can Comedy and Cancel Culture Live on the Same Planet?
Comedy is at a quite different place today than it was just a generation ago. In that simpler time, comedy was essentially about making people laugh, whether it was slapstick humor or one involving social commentary. Then society as a whole started to change, beginning in the 1960s, with the push to create a more…