Frankie Thomas

Two young men from New Zealand are playing acoustic guitars and rapping in front of a live audience. This is supposed to be funny in itself, and indeed, the audience is appreciative. The joke isn't particularly clever or original, and the two men, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, exhibit...

Has anybody else noticed American comedy's strange obsession with dads these days? Freud would have a field day with the newest generation of comedians -- but do they really suffer from daddy issues? Or have dads simply replaced Polacks as the new inherently funny minority?

Notice I say "dads," not...

I've always been the girl with the Cool Mom. You know exactly what I mean: the mom with the streaked hair who goes out disco-dancing with her young gay friends and listens to more hip-hop than her kids do. When I was a baby, she would entertain me by playing...

Johnny Hart died of a stroke on Saturday. He was 76.

If you don't recognize his name, either you aren't good with names or you never read the newspaper comics. To the rest of us, Mr. Hart's name, handwriting, drawing style, and personality were as familiar as a weirdo neighbor...

Congratulations are in order for Sarah Silverman: her new show, The Sarah Silverman Program, has single-handedly debunked Christopher Hitchens's assertation that women aren't funny, and as a result, she has won my contest. (I don't know whether she was aware of the contest, but I firmly believe that...

Okay, ladies, this is it. It's time to stand up for your sex, once and for all. Enter the contest: we're going to make Christopher Hitchens laugh.

I must admit, I was pretty excited when I saw that Mr. Hitchens had written a new Vanity Fair piece called "Why...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Poor Lindsay Lohan.

Why now? Because everyone, including our own dear Huffington Post, is excoriating her recent literary endeavor -- a condolence letter to the family of Robert Altman. It was almost too easy to pick on her clunky...

Bush won the 2004 presidential election, and I've always felt partly responsible.

At the time, I was a precious few months -- weeks, really -- from my 18th birthday. Like Cinderella barred from the ball, I watched longingly as millions of my fellow citizens ("More like fellow IDIOTS," I raged...

My boyfriend is majoring in video games.

No, seriously.

I know it sounds like a comic hyperbole illustrating the shocking laziness of my generation ("You think it's a real kick to goof off all day, don't you, son? We'll see how far you get with a degree in video games!"),...

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It's been a great year for creepy pedophiles.

First there was John Mark Karr, bedizening newspapers once again with the creepy little face of JonBenét Ramsey. When that story lost its creep factor, we got Mark Foley in all his horny splendor; and once we're Foley-ed out, we can go...