-Saturday Night Live is close to hiring five new featured players: Beck Bennett, John Milhiser, Kyle Mooney, Noël Wells, and Michael Patrick O’Brien.
-Also, Wild ‘N Out’s Mikey Day has been hired as an SNL writer, and Dave McCary, from Mooney and Bennett’s sketch group Good Neighbor, has been added as a director a la SNL hiring The Lonely Island in 2005.
-Patton Oswalt did a great Twitter bit with a series of faux-offensive two-part tweets.
-Steve Martin and Kermit the Frog performed “Dueling Banjos” for Funny or Die.
-Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks joined the cast of Community for its upcoming fifth season.
-We talked to Jim Rash about co-writing The Way, Way Back and playing ‘Dean Pelton’ on Community, Jim Norton about his latest special, American Degenerate, Matt Braunger about stand-up and his work on Up All Night, Rory Scovel about improv and his new TBS sitcom, and Kurt Braunohler about his debut album, How Do I Land?.
-Ricky Gervais wants to make a movie about his Office character David Brent.
-Aziz Ansari is writing a book about romance.
-We collected the wisdom of Chris Rock, remembered A. Whitney Brown, and discovered the Woody Allen movie hiding inside Lake Bell’s In a World.
-The A-listers keep rolling in as now both Andy Samberg and Aziz Ansari have been added to Comedy Central’s Roast of James Franco.
-Fox won the bidding war for Tina Fey’s new comedy depicting an all-womens college that begins letting men attend for the first time, beating out NBC.
-The late, great Patrice O’Neal’s third posthumous album, Unreleased, dropped.
-Dave Chappelle is on the cover of Prince’s new single.
-Yahoo! debuted trailers for five original comedies coming soon from Jack Black, Ed Helms, Cheryl Hines, and more.
-Dave Attell is hosting a new late night standup show and doing a new hour special for Comedy Central.
-We recommended the week’s best podcasts, the week’s best Vine videos, and this letter written by a 19-year-old Lena Dunham to Time Out New York’s sex advice columnist.
And here are your Top Five Web Comedy Videos of the Week:
Funny or Die - “Steve Martin and Kermit the Frog in ‘Dueling Banjos’”
Kyle Mooney - “lost”
Suzi Barrett - “I Hate California: San Francisco” (via Funny or Die)
Dan Klein and Don Fanelli - New York Car Guys - Episode 2
BuzzFeeD - “3000 Things Absurdists Love with Kurt Braunohler”
