Comedy Central Insider Blog

In what will surely be regarded by history as a giant middle finger to all the haters, Comedy Central was nominated for 14 Primetime Emmy Awards this year. All of the usual suspects — The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park and The Sarah Silverman Program — are well represented. But by far the most important thing nominated for an Emmy this year — and in any year ever that has happened, or will happen –  is The Daily Show's "Ask a Correspondent" series, produced for comedycentral.com:

Check out the full list of nominations after the jump:

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Here at Comedy Central Insider, our mission is to bring you the most interesting, most important comedy news every day. So what will it be today? New Paul Rudd video from Funny or Die? Interview with Eugene Mirman? Carlin and Pryor rising from the dead to woo Scarlett Johansson in the new Woody Allen movie?

Nope. There's a Seinfeld porn movie now. Observe:

We were extremely impressed with the Seinfeld porn’s [link NSFW] slavish attention to detail. But that was before we realized that Newman’s strikingly similar stand-in was actually Wayne Knight, who appears to have dropped a few notches on the showbiz totem since his Must-See TV peak. Any way you slice it, however, Elaine’s losing this contest.

So, that exists. You're welcome.

[Image via AVN (NSFW)]

Hanging out with Bob Saget is a lot like hanging out with your dad.  The light joking around. The late night trips for fried food. The random, stream of consciousness musing about Jeffrey Ross's bowel movements. The New York Times has the scoop.

BOB SAGET can’t even get through the door without his worlds — the wholesome and the profane — colliding.

Outside the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan’s West Village, a couple stopped to stare at the man they recognized as the lovable dad from the 1980s sitcom “Full House.” Remember when he dandled the Olsen twins on his knee when they were toddlers?

That man, meanwhile, is busy talking a blue streak to a fellow comic, telling him that a friend is running late because of an “explosive” digestive malady.

To find out just how much Ross had to poop, take a look at the rest of the piece.

…Or, more specifically, the "other women of SNL." But considering people like Gilda Radner and Tina Fey make their list, it's hard to imagine who the primary women they have in mind are. Ann Risley, perhaps? Or the girl who plays the harp in the G.E. Smith band? Either way, it's really worth a read:

GILDA RADNER

The first major female comedic talent on Saturday Night Live, Radner stood out as a top talent on the show from 1975 to 1980 even though she worked next to such all-time greats as Bill Murray, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase.

Memorable characters: Roseanne Roseannadanna; Baba Wawa (spoof of Barbara Walters), Patti Smith parody.

Outside the show: Radner did a successful one woman Broadway show in 1979. She went on to marry comedian Gene Wilder, whom she met on the set of the Sidney Poitier movie Hanky Panky. She died of ovarian cancer in 1989, at the age of 42.

Hilarious stuff! And there's more…

Mike Judge is one of his generation's most criminally underexposed filmmakers. We found this trailer in a tape library in the basement of a broken staircase warehouse behind razor wire under the working title "Wilmer Valderrama Vanity Project." Thankfully, we weren't fooled:

Adventureland is the movie that would result if Porky's and your most heartrendingly tender childhood memory had sex and exploded. In a just world, it would have kicked the crap out of the latest Nicholas Cage crap-fest last weekend, rendering it a mere Nicolas Cage fest.  We don't live in that world, unfortunately. We do live in one, however, where we get an incredible interview with director Greg Mottola in today's A.V. Club to swoon over:

The A.V. Club: Adventureland is at least partly based on your experiences. What inspired you to go back to that time in your life?

Greg Mottola: It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life….

Everyone has that first relationship where you look back and go, "Oh, that one was different. I evolved from pure infatuation and horniness. This is when I started to see the person of the opposite sex as a flesh-and-blood human being." Usually that relationship is one that hurt you badly. But it's the first time you'd let them in, the first intimacy that let someone close enough to you to scar you for life. So I thought back to those one or two relationships that were like that, and for better or worse, I decided "I'm going to make fun of my youthful self." I was naive, I was sheltered. I had illusions about who I was going to be, delusions, and a little bit of pretentiousness. And I thought, "I'll write the guy like that. It'll allow me to make fun of everyone else if I make fun of myself."

He also talks a bit about Superbad and his new film Paul, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Read it, for justice's sake.

I knew kicking over old women to steal their candy was a symptom of diabetes, but I always thought it was associated with Type 2. Sorry, Elmwood Nursing Home. I have no excuse except my insatiable thirst for blood and simple sugars, apparently.

Abraham Lincoln and Judah Friedlander have two things in common — they both don't like slavery, and they both wear distinctive hats. It is the latter that gets a closer look in this week's Philadelphia Weekly:

PW: You're known both on the show and in real life for your hats. How'd that get started and how much time do you spend on hat creation?

JF: I make all my own hats and I make up all the sayings. Once in awhile on 30 Rock — I'd say once or twice a season — they will actually write a hat into the storyline. I still make the hats, but they will actually write a comment about my hat that one of the characters will say, or they'll come up with a plot line that uses the hat.

Here's how it happened: As a comedian or an artist, you create things. I used to do painting. Or a joke, you think of a joke and put it out there. I was like: Why do we always have to buy clothes that are advertising somebody else's stuff? That's one of the amazing marketing things that the clothing industry has done, where it's become cool to wear clothes that actually have the name of the clothes on it. So all you are is a billboard for a giant corporation that is already making tons of money.

More about Judah's hats here and here.

Today started off like any other day at the offices of Comedy Central Insider. We sat down at our desks, wrote sentences referencing "the offices of Comedy Central Insider," realized we didn't have offices, or even a single office and resigned ourselves to another office-less day and a lunch of disappointing sandwiches. But all that changed when we found this:

Last May, there was a special "Sandwich Day" episode on 30 Rock. In a climactic scene, Liz Lemon, Tina Fey's character, rushes to the airport to catch her then-crush Floyd, but gets stalled at the security gate—her sandwich's dipping sauce exceeded the three ounce limit. "I can have it all," she says, choking it down before racing after Floyd. Almost a year later, and Caroline of Devil and Egg still wants to know the juicy sandwich's origins.

"If you troll around the interweb, you'll read a lot of people theorizing that it's Defonte's in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which now has a location on Third Avenue in Manhattan. But in a happy and one might say, karmic, coincidence, I happen to have a very good friend who's husband works on the set of 30 Rock."

That friend's husband's arms were twisted, and Eureka! Turns out it's from Fiore's Deli in Hoboken, New Jersey.

One thing was clear. We needed to go.

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A bunch of really good comedians are in a movie together called The Hangover. Based on the new trailer, it's about a bunch of guys who drive to Vegas for a night of churchgoing, Vegan baking and appreciating their platonic friendships with women. Take a look!