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After Kevin Smith’s Dogma returned to Cannes last month and received a seven-minute ovation, per Deadline, the portrayal of God on screen is back in the public consciousness. While Dogma is definitely a comedy — serious religious films don’t feature Jay and Silent Bob as foretold prophets — Smith didn’t hire a comedian for his Almighty, choosing Alanis Morissette instead “because I always thought God would be Canadian.” But other films and TV shows have tapped comic actors for their Gods, correctly imagining that He has an epic sense of humor.

Here are five comedians who’ve taken their turn at playing God…

1 Groucho Marx

What happens when a bunch of comedians in their 50s and 60s try to make a movie about 1960s counterculture? You get a mess like Skidoo, featuring Groucho as a mob boss (and maybe more?) named God. Groucho says his performance as God was “God-awful,...

Nancy Cain, a member of the Videofreex collective that utilized the first portable videotape recorders to capture the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early ’70s, has died. She was 81.

Cain died Aug. 22 at her home in Desert Hot Springs, California, her sister, Linda Grossman, announced.

Cain, also an author, painter, photographer, performer and filmmaker, was married to Paul Krassner, the author and political activist who coined the phrase the Yippies, from April Fools’ Day in 1987 until his death in July 2019.

In 1969, Cain, then an assistant to CBS producer Don West, was ...

Nancy Cain, a member of the Videofreex collective that utilized the first portable videotape recorders to capture the social and cultural upheaval of the late 1960s and early ’70s, has died. She was 81.

Cain died Aug. 22 at her home in Desert Hot Springs, California, her sister, Linda Grossman, announced.

Cain, also an author, painter, photographer, performer and filmmaker, was married to Paul Krassner, the author and political activist who coined the phrase the Yippies, from April Fools’ Day in 1987 until his death in July 2019.

In 1969, Cain, then an assistant to CBS producer Don West, was ...

John Langley, who created the long-running TV show “Cops” which helped usher in the reality TV era, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack in Baja, Mexico, according to his reps. He was 78. Langley was competing in the Coast to Coast Ensenada-San Felipe 250 off-road race.

“Cops” was canceled in 2020 after the George Floyd protests, and had become controversial for showing primarily the point of view of the police.

For 32 seasons, it was a reality TV juggernaut, running for over 1,000 episodes and introducing the cinéma vérité style of documentary to television. The familiar theme song by Ian Lewis of Inner Circle became a part of pop culture. It remains in production for overseas networks.

After being canceled by Fox in 2013, “Cops” moved to the Spike network, now Paramount Network before being canceled again in 2020. A podcast had detailed how police were able to remove portions of the shows that showed them...

Tony Sokol Jul 22, 2019

Paul Krassner got tips from Lenny Bruce, tripped with Groucho, and turned political activism into a Marx Brothers movie.

Journalist, satirist, standup comedian, and author Paul Krassner, who was one of the architects of the '60s protest movement, died Sunday at his home in Desert Hot Springs, California, according to his daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson, who confirmed the news to the Associated Press. No further details of Krassner’s death have been revealed. The founder of the Youth International Party, best known as the Yippies, had recently transitioned to hospice care after an undisclosed illness. Krassner was 87.

Krassner was born in Brooklyn on April 9, 1932. A child violin prodigy, in 1939 he became the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall. He was six years old.

He went on to ride the bus with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became intimately acquainted with some of the...

Paul Krassner, an author and radical political activist credited with naming the Yippies, has died. He passed Sunday at his home in Desert Hot Springs, according to his daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson. He was 87.

Krassner was an old-line counterculture figure whose political activism made a large impact on the 1960s.

The Youth International Party, which became more widely known as the Yippies, ran a pig for president and threw dollar bills on the New York Stock Exchange floor, to name two political pranks.

Krassner was a free speech advocate and later a widely known author who appeared at many political and entertainment events, lending the voice of experience to the Diy movement.

Sorry to hear this. One of a kind, truly.

— Michael McKean (@MJMcKean) July 21, 2019

Rip the satirical genius Paul Krassner. His insanely ballsy approach to political comedy stands ever taller today. We did a couple of live shows together...

MidWest WeirdFest have announced its first programming wave for their third annual festival – a cinematic celebration of all things fantastic, frightening, offbeat, and just plain weird – which takes place March 8-10th 2019 at the Micon Downtown Cinema in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Says festival founder and programming director Dean Bertram:

This year’s fest line-up is set to delight fans of cutting edge horror, sci-fi, underground, and documentary cinema. We’ve put together a heady and eclectic mix of speculative genre offerings, underground strangeness, and paranormal revelations: From a psychedelic Manson Family reimagining and a post-apocalyptic dance-off epic, through tales about a reanimated electrokinetic teenager, haunted stoners, and inept buddy superheroes, to a bonkers lake monster adventure and the most in-depth Bigfoot documentary ever produced. And that’s just from MidWest WeirdFest’s first programming wave of 2019!

Discounted festival passes are now on sale at www.midwestweirdfest.com. Individual tickets...

Paul Krassner is an author and journalist who also served as the editor and publisher of The Realist magazine, which published such works as the “Disneyland Memorial Orgy” poster and “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” A prominent figure in the 1960s counterculture scene, he is a founding member of the Yippies and one of the members of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. “Zapped by the God of Absurdity: The Best of Paul Krassner” will be published in 2019 by Fantagraphics.

The current FBI has swung a pendulum from 50 years ago, when the FBI was an enemy of progressive activists. An agent’s poison-pen memo attempted to smear Tom Hayden with the worst possible label they could invoke with fliers: Yep, an FBI informer. Others distributed a caricature depicting Black Panther leader Huey Newton “as a homosexual,” and ran a fake “Pick the Fag” contest, referring to...

Donald Trump has been trying very hard to do a lot to this nation, thus far with pathetically little success. However, while he might not be making America great, he’s most certainly been making American comedy fantastic.

Take Stephen Colbert. After he took over The Late Show, he has been losing badly to The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon. Then the Manchild from Hell won the election – thanks to a little help from his friends – and that very evening Colbert had something of a nervous breakdown, live on CBS. To his vast credit, he put all that energy into his job: making jokes at the expense of our Megalomaniac-In-Chief. Now, six months later, he’s leaped over Fallon in the ratings.

Certainly, there’s no shortage of material. Indeed, many other comics have made similar journeys on the Trump Turnpike (“what will that asshole think of next?”). Seth Myers,...

A trailer for The Last of the Manson Girls, now in post-production, kicks off today’s Horror Highlights. Also: cover art and three preview pages for The Berzerk Death Dealer and excerpt pages and cover art for Dark Horse Comics’ Children of Lovecraft.

The Last of the Manson Girls Trailer: “January 1972. Convinced there’s more to the Manson murders than meets the public eye, counterculture journalist Paul Krassner embarks on an LSD-tinged investigation of the last of Manson’s disciples: Brenda McCann, Sandra Good, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. What he finds could change how the world sees the ’60s… if he lives long enough to tell the story.”

Currently in post-production, The Last of the Manson Girls is eyeing a 2017 release.

Stay tuned to Daily Dead for more details, and to learn more, visit:

http://lastmansongirl.com/index.html

———

Check Out Three Preview Pages & Cover Art for Berzerk Death Dealer:...

Pop culture can be a funny thing. I don’t mean “Ha ha” funny, although that is also sometimes true. I mean funny as in a head-shaking “Ain’t that a bitch,” kind of way.

For example, yesterday I went to see Ted. I didn’t want to, but it was the Number One box office hit this weekend and my son, the genius, is doing a blog on the subject, and he was in town for the Del Close Marathon. It’s not a very good movie, in my opinion, but I’m not a huge fan of Seth McFarlane. He’s okay, and I will always support him because his work points out the blistering hypocrisy of our shared alma mater . And I like fart jokes more than the average little old Jewish lady.

Still, I found myself tearing up. Did the film have unexpected emotional depth? No.

James O'Keefe, the man who slew Acorn and on Wednesday toppled the CEO of NPR, is some new kind of journalist - Johnny Knoxville meets Glenn Beck in Michael Cera's body. His critics call him a sneaky little punk who cheats context to destroy careers and lives. His supporters, including his media mentor, Andrew Breitbart, call him the right wing's answer to a long line of left-leaning "hybrid troublemakers who get put on the cover of Rolling Stone, like Paul Krassner and Abbie Hoffman." Also read: 'Republicans: NPR's Ousting of CEO, Fundraising Chief...

In the early 1980s, conspiracy theories were all the rage. There seemed to be a cottage industry in debunking the conventional theories about the Kennedy assassination. Paul Krassner once said that he read so many articles on the subject in Penthouse magazine, next to the pin-ups, that he became aroused every time someone mentioned the Warren Report.

These ideas were everywhere. I remember seeing a long rant (printed up, on a poster in Washington Square Park) explaining that Mark Chapman and John Hinckley were both brainwashed by the CIA as assassins, with Chapman’s murder of John Lennon being a test run for the attempt on President Reagan.

While this seemed far-fetched, there was one aspect that made sense to me. Both Chapman and Hinckley were said to have acted in imitation of Travis Bickle, the character played by Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Robert DeNiro has never been more...