Comedy

On HBO's comedy Veep, Tony Hale plays Gary Walsh the loyal, put-upon, anxious aide to Selina Meyer, vice-president turned president. It's a part he relates to.

On the Netflix series, Ellie Kemper plays a woman who was kidnapped by an apocalyptic Christian cult leader and was rescued after living for 15 years in an underground bunker. Now free and forging a new life in New York City, Kimmy has to make up for lost time.

The creators of The Good Wife now have a political satire that's also a science-fiction comedy.

How Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show music videos, James Corden's Carpool Karaoke, and Jerry Seinfeld's Comediens in Cars are changing how comedy is being viewed online.

Actor Gary Cole who plays a political consultant and polling expert with no people skills on the HBO show Veep, and he played an smarmy boss on the cult hit Office Space discusses his work.

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Comic Jerrod Carmichael is the creator and star of the NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show. On the show, he plays a character, also named Jerrod Carmichael, who debates with his family about complicated, often uncomfortable topics.

Comic W. Kamau Bell finds humor in the parts of America that make him uncomfortable. Speaking to Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Bell likens his new CNN series United Shades of America to a travel show that takes him "to all sorts of different places that I [am] either afraid to go, or you wouldn't expect me to go."

Growing up, comics Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz never dreamed that they would one day co-star in a sketch-comedy series about two immigrant Muslim women in Brooklyn. But Manzoor who grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim community in London, and Vaz who grew up in India now star in the web series Shugs & Fats. The series won a Gotham Award for breakthru short form series.

At 46, former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee says she's not very concerned with what people think of her.

"Being in my late 40s has been absolutely freeing and liberating for me," Bee tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I'm a married woman with kids. I'm a professional. People just can't [put me] me in a tiny box that makes sense to them, so now I just don't care that much what people think of me ... and now I do my own thing."

Ever since Everybody Loves Raymond, the actor says he has been trying to take on more dramatic roles. In the HBO drama Vinyl, he plays a record company executive who contemplates suicide.

The comic, who died Thursday, told Fresh Air that it took him years to develop a style — and then he got dumped. "That was really the beginning of the Garry Shandling dating years in stand-up."

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Trevor Noah, talks about taking over the Daily Show from Jon Stewart, growing up in South Africa the son of a black mother and a white father under apartheid when mixed marriage was illegal, and adapting his stand-up comedy to American audiences.

Growing up in the 1980s, brothers Jay and Mark Duplass weren't into typical family movies. Their friends were enthralled by Star Wars, but Jay tells Fresh Air's Ann Marie Baldonado that he and his brother were more interested in "whatever showed up on HBO," including Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie's Choice and Hannah and Her Sisters.

Bassem Youssef created what became the most popular TV show in Egypt's history, but the government had the show cancelled, and Youssef fled Egypt.

Crimmins, who died last week, mentored Bobcat Goldthwait when they were up-and-coming comics in the '80s. The two men spoke to Fresh Air in 2015 about their documentary Call Me Lucky.

Critic David Bianculli says the commentary, questioning and ridicule of Jon Stewart, Larry Wilmore, John Oliver and Bill Maher help keep news outlets — and news-makers — honest.