If you spent your be-cloaked high school days practicing funny walks and recreating the Spanish Inquisition with the rest of your drama department buddies, head over to the Onion's AV Club. Your old pal John Cleese declares his favorite Python movie (and how American  vs. British sensibilities come into play), what it's like to work with Peter Sellers and dine with Peter Ustinov, and  why he doesn't write feature film scripts for himself anymore.

Or you could fire up another episode of Dr. Who. It's really up to you.

The Dream is, apparently, possible: Wain in Talks for 'Wet Hot' Musical

(Much of the) cast of Freaks and Geeks will reunite this Sunday as part of the San Francisco Sketchfest, in a panel moderated by Patton Oswalt.

(Via The Sound of Young America blog): Andy Kindler's classic "Hack's Handbook", originally published in the National Lampoon in 1991, is finally on the internet: The Hack's Handbook by Andy Kindler.

These days everyone writing about comedy has had the idea of making a handy guide to comedy cliches - which is itself a cliche and we're all hacks! Oh, the irony. Would you add anything to Kindler's guide?

Esquire Magazine is compiling their What I've Learned feature according to categories. Today, comedians tell us their life lessons:

Mel Brooks

Producer, 81, Los Angeles

"The iron test is: Do you laugh? If you laugh, you know they're gonna laugh."

For more: What I've Learned: The Comedians

I just discovered Sesame Street's new online video library and I'd almost forgotten how amazing this show is. Seriously, all nostalgia aside, they're some of the funniest shorts I've watched in a really long time. Click on the big blue monster to the left to see for yourself.

Also, some of the captions describing the videos are almost as funny as the clips themselves:
    ~Cookie Monster sings a song about cookies.
    ~Are many cookies better than one cookie?
    ~Cookie Monster decides which cookie to eat.
    ~Cookie Monster tries to stop eating cookies.

Second City legend Del Close is further legend-ized in August's The Believer:

"I met Second City comedy legend Del Close only once before he died. Close, with his white wizard’s beard and menacing baritone growl, held court at his usual table near the back of Chicago’s Old Towne Ale House. As he was famous for doing, Close entertained the grizzled regulars and his own tagalong admirers with outrageous stories from his past. Tonight he was 'reminiscing' about his experiences in a traveling midnight spook show called “Dr. Dracula’s Den of Living Nightmares,” which he joined during the early ’50s while still in high school. His duties, he said, involved running through the pitch-black theater and tossing handfuls of cooked spaghetti onto the unsuspecting audience while calling out, 'A plague of worms shall descend upon you!' Several audience members fainted, and at least one, he told us with maniacal glee, 'shat himself.'"

Read a longer excerpt and more about Del Close

Previously: Del Close marathon at UCB

Slate has a really interesting video slide show on the history of the laugh track. (Kudos to them for including Sorkin's Sports Night, one of the strangest uses of the laugh track ever.)

(via Pop Candy)