Give it up for your host, everybody! Thanks for supporting live comedy! Before we get started, let’s hear it for all the brave men and women in the Armed Services I replaced with ruthless efficiency! How are you folks doing? Good? Do we have any out-of-towners with us tonight? Any Syrian wedding parties in the audience? Seriously. If there are, please keep your hands raised for the duration of my set to avoid losing said hands in a tragic “accident.

The film version of Orson Scott Card’s beloved 1985 sci-fi best seller Ender’s Game finally hits screens after ten months of a media firestorm over Card’s shocking writings, which has overshadowed the movie itself: The right-wing, devoutly Mormon author has a well-documented history of public homophobia and has published numerous anti-gay screeds since the nineties. The lead-up to the film’s release has seen boycotts from LGBT groups, and the stars and director have been peppered nonstop with questions about how they reconcile Card’s beliefs with their participation in the movie, which has become a journalistic afterthought.

Val Kilmer as Mark Twain in Cinema Twain. Reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s recent New York Times profile of Val Kilmer, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Batman and Tombstone actor’s twin obsessions are Christian Science and Mark Twain. Christian Science, as Kilmer tells it, is what made it possible for his car to physically pass through incoming drivers “without material disturbance to either of their bodies or vehicles” during a car crash.

A Simple Favor The type of contemporary movie that gets called “noir” nowadays doesn’t bear much resemblance to the films of the genre’s golden era. For one thing, they tend to be a lot less funny. Classics like The Big Sleep and Double Indemnity are shadowy and sordid, but they never brood — the characters that inhabit them talk and crack wise till the sun comes up (if it ever does).

The turd became a story, and the story became a podcast. In 2018, two Brits named Karen Whitehouse and Helen McLaughlin were holding their wedding reception on a boat in Amsterdam when the unthinkable happened: A sizable turd was discovered on the floor of the women’s bathroom, its origins mysterious. While the couple’s memory of the day remains largely rosy, the errant excretion was such a bizarre occurrence that it would linger over their recollection of the event like a spectral figure.

The impact of the writers’ strike on soap operas is unique, but not a total plot twist. More than one week into the strike by the Writers Guild of America, we still have so many questions begging to be answered: How long will the strike go on? What does this mean for my favorite show? Why are the studios and streamers being so withholding while their top executives have such inflated salaries?

“I think it really helped that I let go of winning. I was so Zen-like and happy.” What is … a yellow-hued defeat? After winning an astounding 40 games, amassing over $1.3 million in winnings, and cementing her status as an all-time Jeopardy! legend, Amy Schneider was defeated on Wednesday’s episode by Rhone Talsma, a librarian from Chicago with impeccable taste in eyewear and zippy buzzer skills. The slaying occurred at the end of the Final Jeopardy round, when Talsma, within reach of Schneider’s winnings, pounced with his robust geographical knowledge; he knew the answer to “the only nation in the world whose name in English ends with ‘h,’” while Schneider did not.

It’s clobberin’ time! We’ve finally found the opposite of teflon: It’s whatever the new Fantastic Four movie is made of. Ever since Fox’s reboot of the Marvel superteam was announced, the film has proven constitutionally unable to generate the slightest bit of anticipation or goodwill. In a world where even the most minor pieces of superhero-movie news are treated like gifts on Christmas morning, nearly every nugget about Fantastic Four arrived on the blogosphere like a lump of wet coal — and many of the filmmakers’ attempts to stem the bad buzz only succeeded in making it worse.

A tour of Dobrik’s messy past and even messier present. After hitting 18.8 million YouTube subscribers and debuting his new $9.5 million house, some may say David Dobrik is at the peak of his career. But what happens when you reach the top? Well, there’s only one way back down. Since joining the platform in 2015, Dobrik’s charm and cheeky personality quickly shot him to YouTube superstardom. The now-24-year-old social-media mogul is known for his four-minute-and-20-second weekly vlogs, which showcase him and his friends, also known as the Vlog Squad, running around Los Angeles pulling pranks, causing havoc, and ultimately looking like they are having more fun than anyone else.

Louis Black, Ira Kaplan, Kathy McCarty, Jeff Feuerzeig and more share their fondest memories of the late Texas indie icon. According to Jeff Feuerzeig, Daniel Johnston is “right up there on the Mount Rushmore of greats like Dylan, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, and Andy Warhol.” Photo: Courtesy of Jeff Feuerzeig According to Jeff Feuerzeig, Daniel Johnston is “right up there on the Mount Rushmore of greats like Dylan, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, and Andy Warhol.