Beyond

I occasionally write elsewhere.


I appeared on The Lunchbox, Chicago Public Radio's weekly live chat, to discuss the 2010 Just For Laughs Chicago comedy festival. Other panelists included Darel Jevens of the Chicago Sun-Times, Justin Kaufmann of WBEZ, Andrew Huff of Gapers Block, Madeline Nusser of Time Out Chicago, and Ernest Wilkins of Metromix.com.

Because it was online, not broadcast, the live chat resulted in an instant transcript. Check it out here.




When my friends in the leading independent Chicago comedy troupe Schadenfreude heard I was attending the 2007 HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., they asked me to cover it for their website.  It was my pleasure.

Six months later I started this blog, and shortly thereafter HBO canceled the festival after thirteen hilarious years. Thus, although I attended it many times, this was the only time I wrote about it:



You may not have been aware that several bloggers cover the New York Times crossword puzzle. One of them is Rex Parker, a quick solver and acerbic writer whose hugely popular site attracts over 20,000 readers a day.

He asked me to sit in for him on Saturday, May 15, 2010 and I happily obliged. Check it out here.

I also pinch-hit for Rex on Sunday, August 8, 2010. Check it out here.




The New Yorker magazine hosts an annual celebration of culture and ideas every fall in New York City, creatively named the New Yorker Festival.

I have covered a number of Festival events for Emdashes, a popular website about the New Yorker:



      Also for Emdashes, I reviewed a panel of four New Yorker cartoonists -- Robert Mankoff, Roz Chast, Ed Koren and Pat Byrnes -- who appeared at the 2009 Chicago Humanities Festival.  Predictably, they were highly entertaining:





      Bestselling author Dave Eggers publishes a popular literary magazine, McSweeney's.  Its online presence, Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency, runs a short piece of original humor every day.

      On Election Day 2000, I wrote such a story for an online message board catering to Chicago improvisational comedy performers.  Gratified by the warm response there, I submitted it to McSweeney's, which published it the very next day.

      In the interest of avoiding a Fiona Apple situation, I will refer to it with a shorter version of its insanely lengthy actual title:

      "Daley Reminder"