From THR:

" 'A Million Ways to Die' follows a cowardly sheep farmer (MacFarlane) who chickens out of a gunfight and sees his girlfriend (Seyfried) leave him for another man. When a mysterious woman (Theron) rides into town, she helps him find his courage. But when her outlaw husband (Neeson) arrives seeking revenge, the farmer must put his newfound courage to the test.

Sources say Silverman would play the town’s well-worn prostitute, who engages in all sorts of lewd activities but refuses to have sex with her fiancé (Ribisi), believing that as Christians the couple should wait until marriage before lying down together."

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Under Orthodox law, which is observed at the Western Wall and upheld by law, women's public prayer rights are limited--including the ability to wear prayer shawls. According to a spokesperson for the site, wearing a prayer shawl is a right reserved specifically for men.

Susan Silverman told Reuters that "They (police) said 'take off your prayer shawls', and we said 'no'." She criticized the law, comparing it to "spitting on Sinai."  Irrespective of gender, "all Jews are in a covenant with God," she said.

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Say it with me: Are women funny? Since this question was first answered in the negative in the pages of Vanity Fair by the late, redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, it seems to have been designated by the chattering classes as one of the great unanswerables of the universe, destined to be dredged up every time someone’s looking for page hits by pissing off the wrong person at some heavily trafficked and influential ladyblog (#sorryfeminists!). To everyone else, this may seem like a settled a matter of simple logic: Women are human beings (no matter what some Republican members of Congress might believe); some human beings are endowed with an innate talent to make others laugh; ergo, some women are funny. The end.

And yet, it is with this specious query (if there is a God, then surely the fact that this piece of lazily reasoned hackwork seems destined to be the most quoted of all the Quotable Hitchens is His karmic revenge) that Yael Kohen chooses to open “We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy,” forcing from the beginning what could have been a transcendent and inspiring work of oral history into an oddly defensive crouch. What was almost certainly meant as a topical gambit — the book was born out of an article the author wrote for Marie Claire — feels a bit like reading a novel with a prologue like: “I know you’re probably wondering why you should care about anything I’m about to tell you since I just made it all up in my head, but please let me spend the next 300-plus pages trying to convince you!”

Also strange is Kohen’s emphasis of focusing on her subjects’ relative shortcomings. Under this surely unconscious lens, a fanatically hardworking trailblazer like Joan Rivers is a frustrated actress who failed to take over the desk at “The Tonight Show” and curdled into a bitter insult comic; Carol Burnett, an unchallenging sketch comic; Lily Tomlin, an underground weirdo that nobody knew what to do with. Talents like Sandra Bernhard and Whoopi Goldberg are mostly heard complaining about getting stuck performing in the Belly Room, the all-female performance venue inside L.A’s former Comedy Store (which, in their descriptions of the narrow space and rickety staircase you had to take to get there, sounds like the world’s most hilarious mechitza), but little attention is paid to Goldberg’s subsequent blockbuster film career apart from her briefly noting a sleazy studio executive commenting distastefully on her inherent “unfuckability.” The hilarious Rachel Dratch is encouraged to talk about how affinity for playing unglamorous characters may have hurt her career. Others pontificate — not uncattily, may I add — on how a young Sarah Silverman got stage time because everyone wanted to sleep with her. Why talk to these extraordinary, successful, brilliant women, only to dwell disproportionately on their disappointments? Why treat them as a race apart, or explore their stories mainly relation to men? As Tina Fey, whose voice is notably absent here, said in her memoir “Bossypants” on what she says to young women who come looking to her for advice: “Remember: Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”

That’s not to say there’s not some great stuff here. “We Killed” is a well-meaning effort, at times even a noble one. Kohen clearly has a gift for drawing her subjects out: Merrill Markoe’s four-page, stunningly clear-eyed testimony on the rise and fall of her relationship with David Letterman is like a three-act play. Considering how she wound up making her fortune, all the snide comments about the young Kathy Griffin are good for cackle. And the ambitious chronology of the chapters deftly illustrate how the rise of women in comedy mirrored the rise of the women itself, from frustrated housewives to ambitious power-suited baby boomers to sexually frank post-feminists in heels and Spanx. The recurring theme of Johnny Carson’s appalling treatment of female comedians who broke his stringent rules of acceptability speaks a cathartic truth to power, even when the power in question is moldering in the grave.

But for all the dazzling breadth of Kohen’s sources, “We Killed” remains notable for what it leaves out. In her telling, the story of women in American comedy began with Phyllis Diller and Elaine May sometime in the early 1960s. There’s no Fanny Brice or Sophie Tucker; no Dorothy Parker or Frances Marion or Anita Loos; no 1930s screwball heroines that put paid to the former Apatovian notion of the female as eternal straight man. Hollywood scarcely exists at all; the realms of theater and print are totally absent. The name “Nora Ephron” is not mentioned once. Lena Dunham, like robot maids or clothes that change color with your mood, is merely a shadow of a faraway and unknowable future.

Of course, that’s the difficulty of the oral history: You can only talk to people who are alive, or about people who are in living memory, or are willing to talk to you. But if you’re trying to make a definitive case on the potential for hilarity of the double X chromosome, that seems like an awful lot to leave out.

Which brings us to the second problem of writing only about what people want to tell you: It doesn’t leave a lot of room for outside analysis. We hear that Johnny Carson hated female comics and John Belushi refused to perform in anything he knew a woman had written. But neither Kohen nor anybody else tries very hard to explain why. Because ultimately, the question to ask isn’t whether women are funny; the question is why it’s so important to some men that they not be.

Interestingly enough, it’s Christopher Hitchens himself who gives the game away in his essay that started a cottage industry, saying: “Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates … People in this precarious position do not enjoy being laughed at, and it would not have taken women long to work out that female humor would be the most upsetting of all.” Humor is power. We kill, and something inside them dies.

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Zac Efron, Selena Gomez, Ellen DeGeneres, Jonah Hill and Joseph Gordon Levitt also appear in the Vote 4 Stuff video unveiled Monday, joining other stars in a call to voters to post tweets, photos and short videos about concerns they feel deserve presidential attention.

"This is one of the most important elections of our lifetime," said DiCaprio, whose production company, Appian Way, is a sponsor of Vote 4 Stuff. "We are using the power of social media throughout the Vote 4 Stuff campaign to incite bipartisan conversation around real issues, encourage registration and voting in November."

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Not willing to let any grass grow under its zeitgeisty, metaphoric feet, today the Times notices "Female Comedians, Breaking the Taste-Taboo Ceiling." Have you heard of this Sarah Silverman person? Because apparently she is rather raunchy. And lest you find yourself wondering how you woke up in 1998, and if so, whether Dawson's ever going to hook up with Joey, let me assure you, this story actually ran in the New York Times in November 2011. Coming next, a piece on how people are using emoticons. Oh, wait.

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But don’t worry, Sarah, there’s a new player in town who wants to wine and dine you, and that’s the Serenading Unicorn.

The Serenading Unicorn makes no effort to hide who he is: Although there is no Juicy Fruit featured anywhere in the video itself, all of the Serenading Unicorn’s videos have been uploaded from the gum maker's account. Take that, Don Draper.

I have high hopes that the S.U. can become the new Old Spice Guy: i.e., a viral marketing entity that transcends commercialization and enters memehood based on its own cleverness, not from all the money thrown at it by its parent company. Because after checking out some of the other videos from the Serenading Unicorn, I’m pretty sure I want to buy the whole album of Unicorn songs if it includes numbers like:

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Back in January 2007, when Vanity Fair published Christopher Hitchens' irritating "Why Women Aren't Funny," clearly written in the depths of a Bushmills bender, the funny (ha!) thing was that female comedians were actually doing better than ever: Tina Fey was starring in the best sitcom on television after a winning tenure at "Saturday Night Live," Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph were kicking ass on that show, Sarah Silverman had been the subject of a fawning New Yorker profile and was about to launch her own comedy show, etc. So it was puzzling why Hitch chose that moment to publicly perform his own verbal wedgie. Maybe it was a slow month.

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And when you use the word "frack" too often in your column, the world shoves your own geeky reference in your face by putting it into Summer's dialogue on "The OC." And when you insult "The OC," the world makes "The OC" more interesting by getting rid of Mischa Barton and giving neurotic overachiever Taylor a leading role. Then, just when you're beginning to like the new "OC," with its fake French lovers and fake French talk shows (Je Pense!) and its careless, pregnant middle-aged moms, the world cancels "The OC" and blames it all on you for not championing it through the hard times (i.e., the last three seasons).

What I'm trying to tell you, honey lambs, is that when you're feeling disappointed in general, the boob tube offers you specific disappointments on which to project your feelings of generic malaise, from the glacial, soapy pace of "Battlestar Galactica" to the harebrained behavior of Orange County's so-called "Real Housewives" to the disgusting digressions of overly self-indulgent comediennes.

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So just as we find ourselves easing into the unsettling, alluring rhythms of Silverman's patter (about, say, the dangers of using words like "Chink" on TV even when you're making a joke that's implicitly, if not overtly, anti-racist), we're whisked away from that auditorium, and away from the illusion that we're part of that live audience, and confronted with pieced-in footage of Silverman wandering around a set, troubadour-like, in a Marlo Thomas "That Girl" dress and hairdo, singing a song about racism.

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"Dear Judge Murtaugh," the letter began, and after that initial misspelling, went downhill from there. Bruce asked that he be named the attorney of record for the trial. He asserted that London had withheld important evidence from the court. And then, as Ronald Collins and David Skover note in their exhaustive chronicle, "The Trials of Lenny Bruce," he "proceeded to take the justice on a magical mystery tour through the Webster's Third New International Dictionary."

Bruce was at the end of his rope. The cops and the courts seemed to be on a vendetta against him. No nightclub would book him. He would soon be convicted of obscenity by the New York justices, a conviction that would stand until last December, when Bruce was pardoned by New York Gov. George Pataki. By then, of course, Bruce was long dead, driven by prosecutors, paranoia and his own heroin addiction to an overdose in August 1966.

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I was caught up in an attempt at mildly cynical, hip, deadpan ironic humor, which didn't work, and now I've appeared as a fool before an icon of my generation. I also found a nice Jewish therapist and put a nice Jewish lawyer on retainer that night, so at least I have a cushion upon which to fall back.

A rainy Thursday evening is a decent time for the most popular actress on television to go out with her husband and some friends for a bit of edgy urban comedy; such an evening is equally decent for two Pho-bloated young rabbinical students to do the same, so it was not surprising that we found ourselves in line at the box office together: myself, rabbi-to-be Justin Kerber, Sarah Jessica, Matthew and their two friends, one of whom, I later learned, once had a funny gig on the Comedy Channel with a prosthetic nose.

It was the penultimate performance of the sold-out Sarah Silverman show "Jesus Is Magic." Silverman, an attractive, young, mildly cynical, hip, deadpan ironic comedienne has appeared on, to offer a brief sampling, "Saturday Night Live," "Politically Incorrect" and a show on the Fox network with puppets. "Penultimate" means that the next night was the last show. (It was also Shabbos the next night. Good Shabbos.)

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It's just a theory. But if I'm right, that little glass panel is now
shattered, the box emptied and the contents -- a cover of Pamela
Anderson squeezing her bosoms together, the headline "Breasts!" and a salute
to "The Triumph of Cleavage Culture" -- are available today for purchase on
your newsstand. It is at least the best explanation I can come up with for
this seeming self- href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/service/1999/01/11service.html">parody,
save perhaps to eradicate memory of the much-guffawed-over "Cocktail
Culture" cover of 1997 (proving that, pace the old journalistic
maxim, it no longer takes three examples to make a trend, just two Cs).
Welcome to Cleavage Culture; your D-cup is ready.

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