Latest news with #MaeMartin
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Just For Laughs: Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster, Mae Martin to Receive Best Podcast Award
Handsome Podcast hosts Tig Notaro, Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin are set to be honored at the Just For Laughs comedy festival on Friday. Comedy-driven podcasts, where comedians interview celebrity guests, have become big business in the entertainment world. Comedians Notaro, Feimster and Martin, who launched their audio series targeting an LGBTQ+ fan base in 2023, will receive the podcast of the year trophy at the Just For Laughs awards show from Canadian comic and actor Sabrina Jalees. More from The Hollywood Reporter Venice Strikes Back: Alberto Barbera on His Powerhouse 2025 Festival Lineup Paramount Execs Tell Staff That Africa Offices and Channels May Close Amid Strategy Review (Exclusive) Disability Advocate, AGC Studios Boss, 'Poor Things' Producer, Berlinale Boss Set for Locarno Pro Guests on the Handsome Podcast include Tom Hanks, Mindy Kaling and Jennifer Aniston. Podcast co-host Martin in 2023 was also in Montreal to receive the rising comedy star of the year at the Just For Laughs festival. Fest organizers earlier announced that Ryan Reynolds will present the Generation Award to Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney), a fellow executive producer of Welcome to Wrexham. Other prize winners already announced include Roy Wood Jr. presenting a lifetime achievement award to Amazon's Clean Slate comedy co-star George Wallace; and Benito Skinner, known for his online persona Benny Drama and as the creator and star of the Prime Video comedy Overcompensating, will receive a breakout comedy star of the year prize from Mary Beth Barone. The rising comedy star of the year award will go to Hannah Berner, the reality star turned podcaster and stand-up comedian. The Just For Laughs Award Show will be part of the ComedyPRO 2025 industry programming in Montreal. Fest programmers also said Tuesday that Cat Cohen had joined the the awards show lineup as a presenter, while Matthew Broussard will emcee the prize-giving event. Best of The Hollywood Reporter From 'Party in the U.S.A.' to 'Born in the U.S.A.': 20 of America's Most Patriotic (and Un-Patriotic) Musical Offerings Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Most Notable Deaths of 2025 Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Parvati Shallow Reveals How 'The Traitors' Led to Her Coming Out
Parvati Shallow Reveals How 'The Traitors' Led to Her Coming Out originally appeared on Parade. For members of the LGBTQ+ community, every coming out story is different. For Parvati Shallow, it was a dropdown list. The Survivor legend sat down recently for an interview on "The Pride Has Spoken," a podcast on the "Rob Has a Podcast" network that focuses specifically on interviews with alumni of the CBS reality stalwart from the LGBTQ+ community. In the chat, she spoke about what led to her realizing she was queer, and shocking the internet with her announcement back on New Year's Eve 2023. And it turns out it was at least partially due to her return to reality TV that would only come about a month later, with her star turn on Season 2 of The Traitors. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 "When I was on Traitors, the show is about to air," Shallow recalls. "They sent me, um, like, a PR form for marketing and stuff. And they're like, 'Okay, well, tell us what your preferences are, so we organize your marketing and publicity for what fits you. And so they had a drop-down for LGBTQ+ and they said, 'Are you? Are you an ally, or none of the above?' And I was like, 'I'm an ally.' And Mae is like, '...No, you're not.'" Mae, in this case, is referring to Mae Martin. Shallow had been dating the comedian since March 2023 at the time of the story. The four-time Survivor player told People in January that their relationship is currently in an "in flux situation." However, at the time, she heavily credits Martin with helping her realize her own sexuality. "Oh my god, it blew my mind," she says. "I was like, 'oh my god, I'm queer, exciting!' And so then I just really went for it. I told everybody, and I've never put myself back in the box, and I never will." Related: Indeed, since coming out, Shallow has been able to undergo an entire rebirth of her on-screen career. Following her run on The Traitors as one of the titular cloaked agents of chaos, she made a deep run on Deal or No Deal Island. Later this year, she'll be making her return to Tribal Council as a part of the all-star cast of Australian Survivor: Australia v. the World. And she's even in the process of releasing a memoir, Nice Girls Don't Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power, set to release on July 8. And Shallow claims in the interview that discovering this new part of her identity has allowed her to enter reality TV in a completely different way than she did the first decade-plus of her career. "It just gives me more maneuverability," she says. "There's more ways to connect with people. I don't know that it reduces my threat level in any way, but it does make people curious about me. They want to understand. So I think even though people know that I'm a threat and that I'm a dangerous player, they still want to get close to me because they want to figure me out. So I think adding in the layer of now I'm queer, people are like, 'Wait what? She wasn't before, now she is?' And it sort of boggles people's minds. So they can't wrap their head around me and contain me, and they can't put me in a box. How do you fight a shadow? You can't." Despite the shadow metaphor, Shallow's star is arguably shining brighter than ever. And it's all thanks to that dropdown question from a year and a half Shallow Reveals How 'The Traitors' Led to Her Coming Out first appeared on Parade on Jun 29, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 29, 2025, where it first appeared.
CBC
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Is Just for Laughs back? Montreal festival announces stacked lineup after scaled-down 2024
The company was in financial trouble last year. Its assets were seized and it was later acquired by ComediHa!, which put on a smaller show. This year's edition will include Tom Segura, Mae Martin as well as the return of the Nasty Show.
New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What's So Funny About These Albums?
Comedians have always wanted to be pop and rock stars — or at least, enough of them have gotten comfortable with a guitar and a drum track to make it seem so. It's a long and eclectic tradition, including Steve Martin, Weird Al, Bo Burnham, Rachel Bloom, Donald Glover, Randy Rainbow and John Early. Now there's a new crop of albums from entertainers across the comic spectrum. Some of them regularly use music as part of their act, like Cat Cohen, whose repertoire is all cabaret style. And some are left-field turns, like the profane opus from the writer and actor Jordan Firstman, or the thoughtful, genuine emo tunes of Mae Martin. Then there's Kyle Mooney, whose record is either all gags — or none. In comedy, like music, it's all in how you hit the beat. Jordan Firstman The social media favorite Jordan Firstman didn't expect to release a record, let alone a concept album based on the private confessions of strangers on the internet. But on 'Secrets,' out this month, he lets it rip, in ways that are almost entirely unprintable here. Its party anthem single describes a dude quest to bond over anatomy. (The video, directed by the boundary-pusher Cody Critcheloe, has more than a quarter-million views.) 'Secrets' began as a pandemic-era riff, when Firstman, 33, publicly responded to his Instagram DMs. He accumulated tens of thousands of private missives — he requested the most 'depraved' but also 'Beautiful. Lyrical. And Random' stuff; endless inspiration. A few years later, with a friend — the musician and producer Brad Oberhofer — he began song-ifying them. 'I'm like, such a lyric queen,' he said, and the secrets were ready-made titles, misspellings and all, like 'I'm I Lesbian,' the album's Lilith Fair-flavored closer. Capitol Records bought his pitch before he even left its parking lot, he said in a video interview. Each of the 16 tracks on 'Secrets' is a different style, vocals included. 'I'd get kind of drunk and go through them, like, 'What could this be?'' he said. His songwriting beverage of choice — Four Loko — was the great clarifier. Firstman has a flair for impressions, ever since he was a 7-year-old on Long Island imitating Kramer from 'Seinfeld' to make his family laugh. Doing musicals in high school, he pulled off a Michael Bublé croon, and he broke out during lockdown with videos anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. Now he's an actor in Los Angeles, appearing as an on-off love interest in FX's sitcom 'English Teacher,' and in an upcoming HBO project from Rachel Sennott. Making an album for a major label, with multiple producers, was 'surreal,' he said, especially when he reeled in dream collaborators like Rufus Wainwright, Bloodhound Gang and Suki Waterhouse. And though he made playlists of 'who I'm copying, basically,' he said, 'I don't consider it a parody album.' But 'if I get sued by anyone, it is a parody album, 100 percent.' Mae Martin The stand-up and actor Mae Martin has carved an unusually sincere path as a comic, plumbing their life, sexuality and addictions with a lot of charm, and little sarcasm. Their album 'I'm a TV' is also a departure — no punchlines, no bits, just dreamy indie rock that explores longings, identity and friendships on the verge of something else. With Martin on guitar, piano, bass and harmonica, the album was produced by Jason Couse and Wes Marskell of the Canadian art-rock duo the Darcys. (Couse and Martin are childhood friends.) Martin, 37, hit the stage early, playing comedy clubs in Toronto at 13. 'I was a really extroverted kid,' Martin said. 'But privately, I was an emo kid, in my room with my guitar.' They tried musical comedy for a while, 'but then the talking between the songs just got longer and longer, until the songs stopped.' About five years ago, when Martin was working on their loosely autobiographical Netflix series 'Feel Good,' they grew deeply intrigued by scoring. 'That was the first time that I felt kind of professionally empowered to have opinions about music,' Martin said in a phone interview. 'I loved it so much, I started learning how to use GarageBand and making demos.' Moving to Los Angeles was a turning point: 'I just had top surgery and I was feeling really good — like I had more confidence to be honest.' They rented a studio and recorded what they still thought of as a 'passion project.' It was released on Universal (Canada) in February. The sound is heavily influenced '90s emo and pop — 'the era that I fell in love with music and felt like I was in a movie all the time,' Martin said. They booked a few stage shows, which they found transformative and invigorating, like learning a new language, as they put it. 'Trying to express something with stand-up or with TV, you have to crystallize and distill it down,' Martin said. In songwriting, 'it's nice to not have to neatly tie everything up with a bow — just express the feeling, instead of the conclusion. Because so much of life is that ephemeral, you know?' Cat Cohen 'Boys never wanted to kiss me,' Cat Cohen sings, over jazzy piano, 'so now I do comedy.' It's the closest the New York performer, whose act centers on her smart, pop-florid musicality, has to a mission statement. Since 2016, she's earned fans with shows at Joe's Pub, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and her 2022 Netflix special 'The Twist …? She's Gorgeous.' On 'Overdressed,' her debut album released in November, Cohen, 33, had a full runway for material rooted in the musical theater she studied growing up in Houston, her millennial pop leanings and the bawdy traditions of Bette Midler and Sandra Bernhard. 'I just like things that are very glamorous and over-the-top,' she said in a video interview. 'It feels like the most high-octane way to put on a show.' She already had more than a dozen songs polished last year when she met a representative from Elektra Records, who suggested an album — 'I'm like, I completely agree' — and that a good entry point would be a holiday offering. 'I was like, 'I'll throw some holiday words into my songs,'' Cohen said. 'I'd be saying 'Valentine's Day' for no reason. Whatever it takes.' Cohen recorded 'Overdressed' in just nine days in London, with the producer and multi-instrumentalist Couros. 'He totally got the, 'I want it to sound like a sexy pop song but I'm gonna say these disgusting things,'' vibe, she said. Her concert persona is an overconfident femme whose inner foibles are revealed in every bridge. ('I had a threesome, and almost came,' she boasts on the dance track 'Going Out Top.') Her songwriting starts with melody and lyrics; on her last special, 'Come for Me,' she played guitar, but, she said, she always enlists 'a properly trained musician friend' for composition help. One track, 'Time of Year,' was surreptitiously recorded in the same studio Adele uses. 'I was like, 'I'm Adellllle,'' she said of the session. 'I love being in the studio,' she added. 'I love that energy of just being in a room for 15 hours and kind of losing your mind and finding the thing and just going off like, pure gut instinct. I think that's so fun.' Kyle Mooney 'I don't want to be a clown anymore,' Kyle M (as in Mooney), huffs dramatically in a short video announcing his debut album. On 'The Real Me,' released last month, the filmmaker ('Y2K') and former 'Saturday Night Live' star swears he is deeply serious. 'I promise, there is nothing comedic about the Kyle M project.' The record, he said in a possibly too-earnest phone interview, is his way of letting 'the world know that I'm here, and I want to make music.' Mooney, 40, who left 'S.N.L.' in 2022 after nine seasons, played guitar and trumpet growing up in San Diego, and doodled pictures of rock stars. 'I kind of thought that was my life,' he said. He played in a youthful pop-punk band called Prop 84 (his birth year); during a teenage 'underground hip-hop phase,' he made beats. Comedy overtook his creative life in college, but he still composed musical snippets for his early digital shorts at 'S.N.L.' On 'The Real Me,' he played everything — keys, guitar, electronic drums. 'It was really just me, plugging in in my bedroom, and trying to tell these stories that I've had inside of me for a long time,' he said, in a trademark deadpan. Eventually, he shared his lo-fi compositions with his friend Peanut Butter Wolf, the D.J. and producer, who released the album on his indie label, Stone's Throw Records. They did not rerecord anything: 'What you hear is what I gave,' Mooney said. The 11 tracks, totaling 19 minutes, encompass many genres, at least in theory. There's 'Gwendolyn Bartley,' 'which some people have said is sort of Beatles-esque,' according to Mooney. 'I Gotta Dance Tonight' is a synth-y club non-banger. Mostly the album is him singing sort of tunelessly over gentle strums. 'I feel like I can speak more directly through songs than I can through a comedy sketch or a character,' he said. 'A wall is taken down.' As Kyle M, he never betrayed even a hint of a joke: The album, he insisted, is heartfelt and authentically him. Asked what musical traditions he saw himself a part of, he said, 'If anything, I'd hope that I'm in lineage with some of the great musicians through history.' 'I'm saying that,' he added, 'while trying to be humble.' He is already working on plans to tour.
CBC
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Comedian Mae Martin on their move into music — and dealing with onstage nerves all over again
Like many performers who make a move into music, Mae Martin was nervous that their debut album, I'm A TV, would come across as inauthentic. "My great fear is that it'll feel like I'm trying to be a rock star," the Canadian comedian tells Q 's Tom Power in an interview. "But it felt like it sounded like me and like an extension of my other work, and so maybe people would be more receptive to it." You might know Martin for their hit stand-up special SAP, their semi-autobiographical comedy series Feel Good, or their popular Handsome podcast, which they co-host with comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster. But when it comes to performing music, Martin says their success as a comedian wasn't enough to ease their onstage nerves. WATCH | Mae Martin's full interview with Tom Power: "I thought that all those years of stand-up would translate to feeling super chill and confident, because I don't get that stage fright anymore, but it really has not been the case," they say. "I was quivering, shaking." The very first time Martin performed music for an audience was at Largo at the Coronet, a Los Angeles club known for its live music and comedy shows. "I do a monthly show there and I would always have musical guests," Martin says. "And so I would play a cover, and that was the first time I played music in front of people. I loved the energetic shift with the audience, like you could suddenly hear a pin drop. And it was terrifying because I'm so used to breaking that tension with the punchline, you know?" My muscle memory is like, if no one's laughing, I'm bombing. - Mae Martin While Martin thinks all creativity comes from the same muscle, they say performing feels really different between music and comedy. In particular, when you're used to getting laughs on stage and feeding off the adrenaline of the crowd, it can feel alarming to be met with a silent, attentive audience. "With comedy you can bail halfway through a joke if it's not working," Martin says. "My muscle memory is like, if no one's laughing, I'm bombing. So if I'm playing a song and people are just silent and paying attention, I'm like, oh God." The other big difference is that earnest songwriting requires a lot more vulnerability than comedy. "With stand-up, you have to be so careful not to be too earnest or you could be described as being preachy with your message," Martin explains. "With music, yeah, people are up for that vulnerability and they're open to it. There are some things and ideas and thoughts that we have that aren't easily packaged into a set-up in a punchline structure … so it's great to be able to explore them with that amazing veil of metaphor and poetry and stuff. It's great."
