Journalism
How Maria Bamford made comedy a team sport on ‘Lady Dynamite’ / Fusion
Maria Bamford’s comedy is a combination of storytelling and wait-for-it, perfectly aligned punchlines, all with the ability to transport viewers through a completely surreal experience. Bamford is on everyone’s mind because of the release of her new episodic sitcom,...
How to make your wedding speech viral-worthy / DailyDot Lifestyle
It’s that special day, and for many of us it only happens once in a lifetime. Not birth or death—it’s your wedding day! Thanks to social media, there’s even more pressure to make sure your performance is exactly what all the glossy wedding magazines and the Wedding...
With ‘Orange Is the New Black’ season 4, drama becomes formulaic / DailyDot Entertainment
Orange Is the New Black has become a slowly molding piece of bread. It’s unpleasant to chew and swallow. And what’s the point? Once upon a time, we were hooked on the super binge-worthy Netflix show, based on the memoir by Piper Kerman about her year in a women’s...
Mood Chat for iOS gives your conversations an added layer of emotion / DailyDot Tech
A new iOS app is changing the way its users converse. Mood Chat is about sending something shorter than a voicemail but with the Internet-y flair of your #currentmood. Internet artist, goofball, and developer Tom Galle’s new iOS app Mood Chat gives conversation...
Let comedian Katina Corrao plan your hot date night / DailyDot Entertainment
Ask anyone in show business, and they’ll tell you that the path to success is lined with delusion, hope, and hard work. It’s a combination that NYC-based comedian/actor/writer Katina Corrao knows rather well. After 10 years of putting herself out there through standup...
Fred Melamed on his heralded new Netflix series, ‘Lady Dynamite’ / DailyDot
Show business isn’t for the faint of heart. People tend to think of entertainment industry managers and agents as cutthroat types who lunge at opportunities and fight to the death for their A-list clients. But what if that's not true? In Maria Bamford’s new Netflix...
Review: Tumblr-turned-book ‘How May We Hate You?’ / DailyDot
Like many millennials, Anna Drezen and Todd Dakotah Briscoe graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with big ambitions but no clear paths to stardom. So they did what many of us with dead-end day jobs do: They started a blog about their experiences working as...
Jibz Cameron’s Alter Ego Dynasty Handbag Tells It Like It Is / Artsy
Dynasty Handbag is a performer you won’t easily forget. She is visually striking, typically wearing outlandish outfits onstage, such as a black spandex swimsuit or a vintage long-sleeved shirt and transparent tights tucked into oversized, gold granny panties. Her...
Sam Richardson from ‘VEEP’ on TV’s Hottest Political Sitcom / MAXIM
It’s hard to hate a do-gooder who is charmingly oblivious. Take Richard Splett, played by Sam Richardson plays on HBO's hit political cringe comedy hit Veep.Splett is an idealistic political lackey who’s extremely eager to please, yet somehow manages to constantly...
What Is the Lesbian Dick Pic? / New York Magazine
To the extent that there’s a defining image of the current era in sex trends, it’s the dick pic. It’s increasingly normal to find that people who date — or maybe even just know — men have a few megabytes worth of dicks on their phones. Dick pics are, for better and...
‘Broad City’ animator Mike Perry sends out psychedelic color splashes / DailyDot Entertainment
Wordplay is an art. Sometimes it takes the form of puns on Twitter or weaves its way into standup jokes. Other times, the words themselves become ecstatic visual experiences. Artist Mike Perry, who created the title animations for the hit TV show Broad City, knows...
WhoHaha is a new comedy channel for emerging female voices / DailyDot Entertainment
There’s a lot of funny content on the Internet, but you have to know where to look. Is Twitter your short zinger jam? Is it video you’re looking for? You might just want to go right to WhoHaha, a new site launched by actress/producer/director Elizabeth Banks. Its...
What these 4 TV shows tell us about texting and dating / DailyDot Entertainment
Don’t sweat that text reply from the person you’re crushing on. If we’ve learned anything from these four streaming TV shows, it’s that if the cutie is interested, they’ll text back. Sometimes it feels like the days of being unavailable or unreachable are over, but in...
Breasts, Bernie, and face tats: Exploring the video art of Andrew DeYoung / DailyDot Entertainment
Filmmaker Andrew DeYoung was just chilling on the Internet one day, when Kate Berlant’s “Lampshade Susan” video popped up on his Facebook feed. After being stunned by her brilliance and hilarity, he decided that he had to seek out more of her. So he did what any...
The many faces of Lauren Lapkus / DailyDot Entertainment
Not every comedian can boast that they’ve performed 70 different characters. Lauren Lapkus can. One of Lapkus’s standby characters, Whitney Peeps, opens her 30-minute Netflix special The Characters. At the beginning of her episode, Peeps strolls out of her dressing...
Josh Gondelman on Twitter pep talks and honest comedy / DailyDot Entertainment
Some comedians don’t take shit from anyone. Josh Gondelman is truly an exception. In fact, he’ll hold your shit if you hand it to him and ask nicely. Gondelman recently hosted a release party in Los Angeles for his new album,Physical Whisper, the title of which comes...
The celebrity DM is the great equalizer / DailyDot Entertainment
It’s not every day that we hear about a gay lady couple with a 32-year age difference. So goes the story of actress Sarah Paulson and her much older lady love Holland Taylor, whose relationship first hit the Internet a few months ago. It was hard not to swoon over...
Cameron Esposito on standup comedy: ‘It’s a rock show, at the end of the day’ / DailyDot Entertainment
If there were a gay lady comedy version of Sheryl Sandberg’sLean In, it would most definitely be written by L.A-based comedian Cameron Esposito. A lot has happened to the Chicago-born Esposito since moving to the Best Coast, including getting engaged and married to...
Instagram’s ‘Crazy Jewish Mom’ explains how she drives her daughter nuts / DailyDot LOL
At some point, every close knit mother-daughter relationship takes a turn toward Crazytown. Kate Siegel and her mother Kim Friedman, however, have never left the place. It goes a little something like this: Mom and daughter love each other, but they want to kill each...
Infinite Return: Jenny Yurshansky Traces Her Soviet Jewish Roots / KCET Artbound
For years, Los Angeles artist Jenny Yurshansky has asked her mom the same question: When will they go back to Moldova? The small country, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, is part of her family's story. Yet, she's never even seen it. Yurshansky's mother and father...
The art world meets Kate Berlant’s brain in new Netflix special / DailyDot Entertainment
When Kate Berlant graced the stage of performance/video artist Dynasty Handbag's new monthly show Weirdo Night at El Cid late last month, she admitted that she was having some problems leaving the stage. She kept walking off and returning, as if some force kept...
Twenty Years Later, Returning to a Pioneering Black Lesbian Film / Hyperallergic
It’s the 1990s when a young, ambitious filmmaker goes on the hunt for “the Watermelon Woman,” a black actress who played mostly mammy roles in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood films. So goes the plotline for The Watermelon Woman, a movie by Cheryl Dunye, a black, lesbian...
Comedian Melissa Villaseñor is perfecting her impressions on Vine / DailyDot Entertainment
On Valentine’s Day, comedian Melissa Villaseñor welcomed a very special guest to her Vine account: Kristen Wiig, who let us know exactly what she’d be doing that day. Those who laughed could definitely relate. Vine is just one of the platforms where Villaseñor been...
Joe Cool / The New Inquiry
TODAY’S consumerism is riddled with elaborate and often meaningless choices: Which brand of pasta should you buy? Would that be best with Ragu, Amy’s Organic, or Muir Glen marinara sauce? Should that be accompanied by Kraft or DiGiorno preshredded parmesan? Who cares....
Supercharged Sex and Corporate Control in a Queer Erotic Novel / Hyperallergic
In Lex Brown’s book My Wet Hot Drone Summer, #4 in the Badlands Unlimited New Lovers series (Hyperallergic previously reviewed #1), the artist/writer looks at a world not unlike our own, where sex, surveillance, and loss of privacy are intertwined in a commodified...
How comedian Mo Welch channeled depression into a morbidly funny Instagram comic / DailyDot Entertainment
Comedian Mo Welch and her Instagram character Blair are very different, but she admits they’re pretty tight. Welch writes down the random depressing thoughts that cross her mind, and hands them over to her crude line-drawing creation. Blair, also known as Barely...
A Filmmaker Probes the Magic and Madness of Female Adolescence / Hyperallergic
LOS ANGELES — As a woman who was once a teenage girl, I have a certain fondness for any filmic or visual art that harkens back to that time of intense, unbridled feelings, awkward physical changes, and sexual desires running wild ’n free. Now that I am far from my...
Lesbian Pussy Tales – Queen Mobs Teahouse
In a quest for sex, Alicia encounters two intense kitties I thought I was someone who loved cats. As a lifelong animal lover, I had a cat growing up — Penny was her name. Swiping around on Tinder just hours after landing at LaGuardia from LAX that summer, I noticed a...
Subvert Valentine’s Day: remake the celebration of love in your own image / The Guardian
Valentine’s Day is an awkward, sensitive holiday whether or not you have a significant other and, perhaps especially, if you are single. To be “without love” on a day designed to celebrate it as loudly and publicly as possible can make even the most secure single...
The 9 best memes for sliding into DMs on Valentine’s Day / DailyDot LOL
There's no better way to say “I like you, wanna go out?” then to slide into your cutie’s DMs and make it explicitly known. And here at the Daily Dot, our Twitter moves are tight—how do you think we got so many followers? If you’re looking for a way to make your...