Download or read book Ringside at Roast Battle The First Five Years of L A s Fight Club for Comedians written by Julie Seabaugh and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-04 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Every Tuesday night at midnight in a dark corner of the Comedy Store, a beautiful and hilarious fight breaks out. Starving comedians drown their prejudice in comedy. It's scary. It's hilarious. It's completely punk rock. Burgeoning comics and cast-aside performers have moments of heroism, and we all get the rare chance to cleanse our sins in humor." - director Jason Reitman Accidentally conceived in July 2013 at a small, sweaty Comedy Store open mic to avoid a comedian fistfight, insult-joke competition Roast Battle has since become a global phenomenon. Taking cues from two seemingly divergent insider traditions - Friars Club roasts and urban rap battles - the show melded both into a mainstream format accessible to anyone who dared take the stage. The rules were simple: No subject was off limits, original material only, and at the end of the battle, competitors hugged. Equal parts blood sport and personal catharsis, the show instantly caught on with performers, industry members scouting the next big thing, and audiences who preferred their punchlines off-color. As host and referee, Brian Moses assembled a zany cast of supporting characters including revered Roastmaster General Jeff Ross, who was hooked from his first night. Ross gave the show instant legitimacy. He also brought his celebrity friends along to judge. Tastemakers like Judd Apatow, Jim Carrey, Jason Reitman, Dave Chappelle, Jimmy Kimmel, Snoop Dogg, Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen, and John Mayer counted themselves among Roast Battle's devotees. The show caught early breaks at the New York Comedy Festival and South by Southwest. Just as a TV deal seemed inevitable, tensions rose and egos flared. Founders squabbled over ownership rights. Factions formed. Friendships were irrevocably broken. But for the creators and competitors who believed Roast Battle's potential was bigger than the sum of its (often raunchy) parts, freedom of speech was more than a political talking point. It was everything comedy's most enduring legends fought for since the advent of brick-wall backdrops. Five years since its inception, Roast Battle remains the most adventurous, influential comedy show in the world. Imitators exist in every city with a local comedy scene. In addition to three stateside seasons on Comedy Central, the TV brand has expanded to South Africa, Mexico, and the U.K...the latter of which became Comedy Central U.K.'s most-watched series of all time. Yet despite the growing pains, the L.A. original stubbornly retains its gritty, underground spirit, reaching capacity weekly without a lick of advertising. With on-the-scene photos by Troy Conrad showcasing the venues, competitors, riotous cast of characters, and celebrity judges this "Verbal Boxing" and "Fight Club for Comedians" has welcomed along the way, longtime comedy journalist Julie Seabaugh's Ringside at Roast Battle chronicles the emergence of a new fourth pillar of live comedy. From the coming-together of the principal players to the continuing influence the show will wield in years to come, the book explores the organic diversity, DIY nature, and politically-charged atmosphere encouraging a new generation of comedians to laugh in the face of tragedy.

Download or read book I Swear I ll Make It Up to You written by Mishka Shubaly and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An odyssey of family, heartbreak, violence, punk rock, brokenness, broke-ness, sex, love, loss, drinking, drinking, drinking, and an unlikely savior: distance running. A misfit kid at the best of times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a twenty-four-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school's campus, then learned that his parents were getting divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the family and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to avenge the wrongs against his mother, but instead plunged into a magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol. Almost two decades later, Shubaly's life changed again when a fateful five-mile run after a bar fight inspired him to clean up his life. And when he finally reconnected with his estranged father, he discovered the story of his childhood was radically different from what he thought he knew. In this fiercely honest, emotional, and self-laceratingly witty book, Shubaly relives his mistakes, misfortunes, and infrequent good decisions: the disastrous events that fractured his life; his incendiary romances; his hot-and-cold career as a rock musician; meeting his newborn nephew while out of his gourd on cough syrup. I Swear I'll Make It Up to You is an apology for choices Shubaly never thought he'd live long enough to regret, a journey so far down the low road that it took him years of running to claw his way back.

Download or read book Boxing written by Kasia Boddy and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers, and filmmakers have recorded and tried to make sense of boxing. From Daniel Mendoza to Mike Tyson, boxers have embodied and enacted our anxieties about race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. In her encyclopedic investigation of the shifting social, political, and cultural resonances of this most visceral of sports, Kasia Boddy throws new light on an elemental struggle for dominance whose weapons are nothing more than fists. Looking afresh at everything from neoclassical sculpture to hip-hop lyrics, Boddy explores the ways in which the history of boxing has intersected with the history of mass media. Boddy pulls no punches, looking to the work of such diverse figures as Henry Fielding and Spike Lee, Charlie Chaplin and Philip Roth, James Joyce and Mae West, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Dickens in an all-encompassing study that tells us just how and why boxing has mattered so much to so many.

Download or read book Darling Nova written by Melissa Cundieff and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut full-length poetry collection of Melissa Cundieff

Download or read book Death in the Afternoon written by Ernest Hemingway, Ernest and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-01-17 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in the Afternoon is a non-fiction book written by Ernest Hemingway about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting, published in 1932. The book provides a look at the history and what Hemingway considers the magnificence of bullfighting. It also contains a deeper contemplation on the nature of fear and courage. While essentially a guide book, there are three main sections: Hemingway's work, pictures, and a glossary of terms.

Download or read book A Confederacy of Dunces written by John Kennedy Toole and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “A masterwork . . . the novel astonishes with its inventiveness . . . it is nothing less than a grand comic fugue.”—The New York Times Book Review A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, is "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times).

Download or read book Get Me Ellis Rubin written by Dary Matera and published by Backinprint.com. This book was released on 2006-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically acclaimed memoirs of one of America's most famous, colorful and controversial defense attorneys. A champion for the little man, this fast-paced account reads like Perry Mason and covers some of the most publicized legal issues of our time, including the world-famous "Television Intoxication" case and the history-making "Battered Daughter Defense."

Download or read book Practical Ethics written by Peter Singer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.

Download or read book The Big Sea written by Langston Hughes and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Big Sea" by Langston Hughes. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book Pugilistica written by Henry Downes Miles and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book McGraw Hill s Dictionary of American Idoms and Phrasal Verbs written by Richard A. Spears and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2006-02-03 with total page 1100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn the language of Nebraska . . .and 49 other states With more entries than any other reference of its kind,McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs shows you how American English is spoken today. You will find commonly used phrasal verbs, idiomatic expressions, proverbial expressions, and clichés. The dictionary contains more than 24,000 entries, each defined and followed by one or two example sentences. It also includes a Phrase-Finder Index with more than 60,000 entries.

Download or read book Evocative Objects written by Sherry Turkle and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with." For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects—an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer—are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable. Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes—the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Download or read book Better Brother written by Simon Gravatt and published by eBook Partnership. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Merriweather's carefully planned life is blown off course when he receives a call to tell him that his father has cremated himself. Michael then learns from a small-town lawyer that he stands to inherit a small fortune he previously knew nothing about, but only if he sacrifices his accountancy career to take over the family funeral business with his brother, Jack, whom he despises.Sucked back into the small provincial world and the family funeral firm he has rejected, Michael can no longer avoid his loathsome sibling. Jack Merriweather has no idea what he's done to deserve his brother's hostility, but he's about to suffer the consequences. Then, when his patience finally breaks, he will exact delicious revenge.The Better Brother is a darkly comic tale of sibling rivalry laced with the power, passion, revenge and everyday friction of family business. It explores what happens when two warring brothers are forced to work together. Will Michael and Jack learn to love and respect each other? Or will their acrimony escalate? If so, who will come out on top? Who is the better brother?

Download or read book Right Ho Jeeves written by P. G. Wodehouse and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this, the second novel in P.G. Wodehouse's delightful Jeeves series, the family fumbles through a comedy of errors that is set in motion by a marriage proposal and a downward spiral of miscommunication and crossed wires. This hilarious novel contains many of the most beloved scenes and set pieces from the series. A must-read for Wodehouse fans and lovers of top-notch humor writing.

Download or read book The Adventures of Sally written by P. G. Wodehouse and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as one of the most skilled humor writers ever to write in English, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse's works of fiction usually pillory the British upper classes that represented the social milieu into which he was born. In The Adventures of Sally, Wodehouse turned his attention to a young American heiress whose sudden wealth brings with it an array of unforeseen problems.

Download or read book Always an Adventure written by Hugh Aylmer Dempsey and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hugh Dempsey recounts his interesting and varied careers as journalist, historian, archivist and museum administrator.

Download or read book Spell of Fate written by Mayer Alan Brenner and published by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-11-09 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Spell of Catastrophe and Spell of Intrigue delivers “a winner . . . An off-the-wall kind of fantasy” in the third Dance of Gods adventure (Interzone). Trouble is converging on the imperial city of Peridol, and whatever dance the gods are planning, Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable wants to stay out of it. No such luck, though—it’s up to Max and his friends the Great Karlini and the Creeping Sword to unseat the despotic gods, who treat the mortal realm like a giant chess board. But with the gods fighting amongst themselves, no one is going to win this battle anytime soon—until a long-forgotten player re-enters the dance . . . “I was utterly hooked . . . The nearest I can get to the general tenor is The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with magic rings instead of talking pens.” —Interzone “Like riding on a racing carousel.” —Kliatt