Jon Stewart on Trump: less war leader, more ‘grandpa who’s lost his filter’

Late-night hosts checked in on Donald Trump’s costly “improv” war in Iran, which he cannot seem to focus on for more than one minute.This week marks a month of Donald Trump’s unauthorized war in Iran, “and as we all know, one month is the elevated threat anniversary”, joked Jon Stewart on Monday evening.“Trump is threatening to escalate our bombing campaign unless Iran opens the strait that they closed in response to Trump’s bombing campaign,” the Daily Show host explained. “I believe we’ve entered what General Patton used to refer to as the ‘human centipede portion’ of the war.”Stewart then mocked news coverage of the strait of Hormuz closure, which focused on potential disruptions to the supply of Dubai chocolate, the chocolate bar with pistachio paste that has become a favorite treat of influencers

Smiley Face: finally, a stoner comedy for the girls who get overstimulated at the supermarket

Gregg Araki’s comedy-of-errors film stars Anna Faris trying to complete everyday tasks in an astronomical state of high. It’s downright terrifyingGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIt’s hard not to feel a strange sense of kinship with each of the hapless heroines played by Anna Faris. Though she’s generally underrated, her signature blend of anything-for-a-laugh slapstick and absurdism makes her an adorkable standout in every project. While she has been praised for some of her work (The House Bunny, Scary Movie), her portrayal of an empty-headed LA stoner in Gregg Araki’s 2007 comedy Smiley Face remains an unsung triumph.Landing three years after Araki’s dark, critically acclaimed drama Mysterious Skin, Smiley Face was a left turn: a stoner comedy following the mishaps of perpetually buzzed, often unemployed economics student-turned-actor, Jane

‘After one gig, someone stole my car with my dole money in it’: Morcheeba on how they made The Sea

We’d made our first album and were waiting for it to come out. But we wanted to carry on writing more stuff while we were in the mood. I even cut Christmas dinner short at my uncle’s in Brixton, London, so we could get back to the studio. We would work until we passed out, then I’d sleep underneath the mixing desk with my head in the bass drum, as that’s where the pillow was.One night in early 1996, my brother Paul and I stayed up all night drinking vodka, trying to write as many songs as we could, and we came up with much of the Big Calm album

Jayson Gillham announces tour with Palestinian-Jordanian musician ahead of MSO court case

When Jayson Gillham took a stand at Melbourne’s Iwaki Auditorium in August 2024, he was told by his supporters he was “ahead of his time”.“Actually, I think I was 10 months late,” the Australian-British pianist says, a year and a half after the furore first hit.It was processing the media reports of genocide in Gaza that shifted something fundamental in Gillham, the realisation that his role as a performer could no longer remain siloed from the world outside the concert hall.“I felt I had to say and do something – respond in a musical way to what I was seeing,” he says. “That was really the moment where I thought, well, something has to change about my career

Shaun Micallef: ‘Charlie Pickering said that’s the only thing keeping him going – to vanquish me’

Your latest novel, De’Ath Takes a Holiday, is a vampire comedy, a satire of gothic fiction and a revision of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Why?Well, I love that period of writing, and one of my favourite books is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, which is a satire of Victorian values. I took a leaf out of his book in wanting to do a satire of how the world got to be the way it was. I’m basically blaming this proto-Dracula figure – the Comte De’Ath – for introducing the rather bloodless, exploitative way the world works. So [in my book] he meets a whole bunch of people throughout history, including Sigmund Freud and Henry Ford, and influences them

Jimmy Kimmel on Mike Johnson’s new award for Trump: ‘You can almost feel his spine exiting his body’

Late-night hosts mocked the Republican party’s inaugural “America First” award for Donald Trump as he finally reveals the “present” he received from Iran.Jimmy Kimmel had a field day with the Republican National Committee’s inaugural “America First” award, presented to Trump on Wednesday by Mike Johnson, the House speaker, who described the prize as “appropriate for the new golden era in America”.“I can’t figure out who should be more embarrassed: the guy who came up with the new award, or the guy who proudly accepted the new award,” Kimmel laughed.“Watch Mike Johnson here,” he added before a clip of the lawmaker’s speech. “You can almost feel his spine exiting his body