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Andrew Hudgins is a prominent poet, but what he'd really rather be doing is telling jokes — the more daring, the better. His new memoir, The Joker, explores the way uncomfortable and taboo jokes create learning and communication, and the important role they've played in his life.
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Launched as an alternative to the stale stylings of the '80s stand-up circuit, Beth Lapides' event bills itself as a venue for "idiosyncratic, conversational comedy." It's helped establish careers for performers from Kathy Griffin to Randy and Jason Sklar.
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Bassem Youssef, the wildly popular host of an Egyptian political satire TV show, pokes fun at Egypt's president, Islamists and others. But he's now facing a slew of legal suits accusing him of everything from insulting the president to apostasy. His legal troubles are in many ways a test case for freedom of speech in the new Egypt.
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He rose to fame in the 1960s with frequent appearances on The Tonight Show and roles in such movies as It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. In the '80s, he was on TV's Mork & Mindy. Winters' comedy albums are considered to be classics. He was 87.
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Former SNL cast member Julia Sweeney has written a new memoir of her life as a Midwestern mother. She speaks to NPR's Scott Simon about her decision to adopt from China, how her daughter got to be named Mulan (yes, after the Disney character), and gaining a new appreciation for her own mother.
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Rob Delaney has almost 670,000 Twitter followers. He talks to NPR's Audie Cornish about what that means for his traditional standup career, and whether he cares if you call him a "Twitter comedian."
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Diller, who presented herself as a odd-ball housewife with a husband name Fang, was a staple on '50s television.
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In the 1950s, when Diller started being funny for a living, there were no female standup comedians making it big. Some critics have said she succeeded because a lot of her material was about mocking herself. She died at home, where she'd been in hospice care after a fall, at the age of 95.
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Graduate student Robert Lynch is on a quest to deconstruct our built-in instinct for humor, and find out why making people laugh could be important to the way we've adapted to survive.
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Which is weirder: to laugh at a situation that you know is kind of sad, or not to laugh at a situation that you know is kind of funny?