Photo by GENE SMIRNOV Our man Gene Smirnov just won a big deal award from The New York Chapter of the American Photographic Artists with this portrait of Fred Armisen for my May 2014 Magnet Magazine cover story, which goes like this… “Do you have Questlove’s cellphone number?” Beyonce’s drummer asks nobody in particular. She twists around from her perch in the front seat of a black Escalade that NBC has sent to ferry us from a downtown Manhattan rehearsal studio to the storied Art Deco tower of power that is 30 Rock, and looks around to her bandmates in […]

But you didn’t hear it from us.

SLATE: The [Fifty Shades Of Grey] actress put that faux-innocent persona to good use while hosting SNL this week, especially in a short, controversial sketch that saw her play the departing daughter of Taran Killam. The bit starts as a saccharine spoof of a Toyota Camry commercial, but it becomes clear that Johnson isn’t leaving for college, or the U.S. army, when a truck pulls up mounted with machine guns and a militant Kyle Mooney. But don’t worry! As Johnson notes, “it’s just ISIS.” MORE

  Richard Linklater’s epic and altogether wonderful Boyhood chronicles the days in the life of a boy named Mason from age 5 to 18 and was filmed over the course of 12 years with the same actors. (You can read Phawker film critic Dan Buskirk’s review HERE) Ethan Hawke, who plays his father, assembles a definitive mix CD of solo Beatles for Mason’s 12th birthday. These are the one-from-the-heart liner notes that go with it, they derive from the liner notes he wrote for the solo Beatles comp CD he once made for his real-life daughter. Mason, I wanted to […]

  EDITOR’S NOTE: There is more to Sarah Silverman than just ‘fake-racist meta-jokes’ and fucking Matt Damon. There is also doody jokes. But seriously folks, after 34 episodes of The Sarah Silverman Show, 30 movies, two Emmys, and one memoir, she’s just getting started. On the doody jokes. Just kidding. You’ll see. The following is an exclusive excerpt from my 6,300 word MAGNET cover story. Enjoy. ________ When I meet Sarah Silverman for the first time she is coming out of the bathroom. It seems somehow fitting. Her sets are rife with grimy bathroom humor, ‘doody’ is her favorite word […]

Illustration by EVERYBODY’S GOT TO BE IN A GANG Harry Shearer — aka the voice of Mr. Burns, Mr. Smithers, Ned Flanders, Otto The Bus Driver and Moe the Bar Tender, aka Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls, aka the voice of reason on NPR’s Le Show, director of the muckraking Katrina documentary The Big Uneasy that dared to speak the truth about the actual cause of the flood of New Orleans — is a man of many hats, and the voices that go with those hats. His latest project, ‘Nixon’s The One,’ finds him donning the face and voice of […]

Illustration by DREW FRIEDMAN via LOWBROW READER DISCUSSED: Groucho Marx, Dick Cavett, Milton Berle’s cock, Ben Kingsley, Katharine Hepburn, F-Troop’s Larry Storch, Forrest Tucker’s cock, Boris Karloff, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, the Screen Actors Guild, Communists, the Godfather, fucking Marilyn Monroe, Richard Nixon, Danny Aiello, getting fired from SNL, Eddie Murphy, The Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, Do The Right Thing, getting fired by Aflac, suing the pants off Aflac. EDITOR’S NOTE: Preparing for our Q&A with Gilbert Gottfried I came across this elegantly-rendered and wizardly-reasoned assessment of Brand Gottfried by Jay Ruttenberg in the Lowbrow Reader. He says it better than […]

F*cking funny and, best we can tell, largely true.