The Comedians
Season 1 Episode 1 “Pilot”
Directed by Larry Charles
Written by Larry Charles
Starring Billy Crystal, Josh Gad, Megan Ferguson, Larry Charles, and Stephnie Weir
FX
Air Date: Thursday, April 9th, 2015 10pm

The Comedians should be hilarious. You have the legend Billy Crystal. You have the newcomer in Josh Gad. You have veteran comedy writer/director Larry Charles. Everything adds up… almost. Like most pilots, you can only hope you’re left with a desire to see where the show is going. Do you want to take the ride with these characters? After a bit of a bumpy start, yes I do.

Josh Gad, the rising star of such titles as the hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, Love & Other Drugs, TV sitcom 1600 Penn, and the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic Jobs, where he plays Steve Wozniak, has been set to play Sam Kinison in an upcoming biopic directed by Seinfeld writer/producer Larry Charles.

The larger-than-life Kinison was a huge stand-up comic presence in the ’80s, known for screaming many of his jokes in way that would make Lewis Black seem shy and soft spoken. Kinison jumped from a life of religious preaching into comedy and quickly rose to fame before drugs and alcohol consumed him and brought everything to an abrupt halt. He would eventually overcome these issues and get clean, but before he could ever really return to the spotlight, he was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.

Continue below for more, and to see Kinison performing on Rodney Dangerfield’s classic Young Comedians Special, which would propel him into stardom.

It’s being reported that Sacha Baron Cohen will be playing quite the interesting role in an upcoming movie: infamous Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

The movie, which is fittingly titled The Dictator, is based on a book called Zabibah and the King. The book is a romance novel (sorta), which is said to have been written (or ghostwritten) by Hussein, painting himself as a hero to a woman (the people of Iraq), who’s married to an evil man (that’d be us) that abuses and rapes her.

In a press release by Paramount Pictures, they describe the movie as telling the “…heroic story of a dictator who risked his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.”

Religulous
DVD
Directed by Larry Charles
Starring Bill Maher
Lionsgate Entertainment
Release Date: February 17, 2009

Bill Maher isn’t shy about his disdain for religion. Though raised by a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, Maher has since renounced his faith and has since turned his sharp wit into combating organized religion.

With Religulous, Maher travels the world, visiting (and frequently being kicked out of) the holiest locations on Earth. Along the way, he makes stops and religious museum and amusement park while taking time to speak to Jews, Christian, Muslims, and Mormons.

Religulous is not an attempt to scientifically disprove all of the world’s major religions. It is a comedy, it is meant to poke fun at religion, all religion, but in the end has a serious reason for doing so. Watching this film for the first time, I got the strong impression that most people of faith will not watch it. I can’t blame them, as they would be almost certainly setting themselves up to be offended.

By BAADASSSSS

Religulous
Directed by Larry Charles
Starring Bill Maher, Tal Bachman,
Larry Charles
Rated R
Release Date: October 1, 2008

Religion has always been one of the few topics that seem to be off limits in our national discourse. Any mere mention of the word can set off arguments and the occasional war before the combatants can take a step back and figure out why they were fighting in the first place. So in a nation that is more openly religious than any other in the world having a civilized discussion about religious beliefs and what leads us to believe in them still remains mostly taboo. But atheists, who once were one of America’s silent minorities, are coming out strong with their balls firmly placed on the table. Books such as Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion have climbed the best seller lists. Now the atheist movement is heading full steam ahead into cinemas, and the star of Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is leading the charge.

Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s Real Time, has teamed with Larry Charles, the former Seinfeld writer and director of Borat (and also the director of the notorious Bob Dylan bomb Masked and Anonymous) to make a feature-length documentary about his favorite comedic target — organized religion — is a prospect too good to be true. Thankfully the resulting film Religulous (an appropriate amalgamation of the words “religion” and “ridiculous”) fulfills the promise that team-up would guarantee by being provocative, thought-provoking, and most importantly funny as hell.