Milton Berle: Mr. Television and the 97% Audience Empire
In late-1940s Detroit, the city water department panicked over a mysterious pressure drop every Tuesday at 9:05pm. The culprit wasn't a busted main, it was a comedian, and an entire city collectively ...
23 Juni 23min
Moe Howard: The Gentle Bookworm Behind the Three Stooges Boss
On screen, Moe Howard would slap, poke, and pipe-whip his best friends without hesitation, the ultimate slapstick bully. Off the soundstage, he was a quiet Brooklyn kid who devoured Horatio Alger nove...
23 Juni 21min
Mitch Hedberg: The Shy Genius Who Rewired Stand-Up Comedy
In 2001, a rising comic told Penthouse exactly how he'd want to go: get famous first, then overdose. Less than four years later, Mitch Hedberg did precisely that, and because the news broke right befo...
23 Juni 18min
Rowan Atkinson: The Oxford Engineer Behind Mr. Bean
In 2001, over Kenya, a private plane's pilot fainted at the controls and the aircraft began losing altitude. The man who stepped up to the yoke wasn't a former military pilot, it was Rowan Atkinson, t...
23 Juni 20min
Nikki Glaser: From Sarah Silverman Cover Band to Golden Globes
At 18, an insecure college freshman sat in a Kansas cafeteria filtering the whole room through someone else's lens, asking herself what Sarah Silverman would say, because she had no idea what her own ...
23 Juni 20min
Phil Silvers: King of Chutzpah and the Lovable Con Man
In a sweltering 1920s movie theater, the projector broke and an angry mob demanded their nickels back, until an 11-year-old boy stepped into the darkness and started singing until the room quieted. Th...
23 Juni 20min
Patrice O'Neal: The Comedian Comedians Were Afraid Of
Imagine paying a cover charge to see a comic, only to have him pull cash from his pocket and pay you to leave the room. Patrice O'Neal did exactly that, an act of supreme dominance from a man who path...
23 Juni 21min
Red Skelton: The Clown Who Turned Grief Into Joy
We like our legacies to run in straight lines, comedy or tragedy, never both. Then there's Red Skelton, a man who defined physical comedy for three generations of television, yet made more money priva...
23 Juni 19min
