asmaa malik

I’d never seen Patton Oswalt live and before his one-night-only solo show at Metropolis, I had a slightly insecure feeling. Kind of like when you force yourself to go to a party where you know everyone will be way too cool for school.

Now, Oswalt’s comedy albums are edgy, with his ironic delivery and razor wit. And in the last few years, he’s become quite a character actor, working with directors like Steven Soderbergh and Jason Reitman. This made me worry that perhaps the show would be too hip. Perhaps the craft would still be there, and surely it wouldn’t lack indie cred, but would it be really funny?

It turns out, as it often does, that I had nothing to worry about.

Yes, his show had all of the pop-culture references his fans have come to expect: Werner Herzog, Snake Plisskin, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Oswalt even commented on Metropolis’s velvet curtains and Victorian-style chandeliers a few times: “I feel like I’m in the red room at the end of Twin Peaks.”)

But not only was Oswalt hysterical, he was a surprisingly disarming performer.

Read the complete review at montrealgazette.com.

As a girl growing up in Long Island, N.Y., Amy Schumer was obsessed with Gilda Radner, Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett.

“I was hungry for comedy, especially women in comedy,” Schumer says. “That’s not a ‘political choice’ when you’re 10.”

At the end of her recent Comedy Central special, Schumer even came out to do a Q&A with the audience, an homage to Burnett’s signature routine.

Blond with a bubbly, girl-next-door onstage personality, Schumer certainly channels the ebullience of her comedy inspirations, but when she opens her mouth, it’s hard not to blush.

Schumer, who is coming back to Just for Laughs’ Zoofest with her show Slaughterhouse, is not afraid to tackle sexual taboos with her edgy blend of raunch and reality: “I finally slept with my high school crush,” goes one of her jokes. “Now he expects me to go to his graduation.”

Her breakout performance on last fall’s Roast of Charlie Sheen landed her a lot of attention – and not all positive.

Her joke about deceased Jackass star Ryan Dunn angered fans as well as the co-star of the MTV show, Steve-O, who subsequently called her a “no-name slut.”

Schumer stands by her barb, directed at Steve-O, who was also at the roast. She said to him, “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend Ryan Dunn. I know you were thinking, ‘It could’ve been me.’ And I know we were all thinking, ‘Why wasn’t it?’ ”

“With a roast, you’re going for the jugular,” Schumer says. “That’s what the nature of those jokes is supposed to be.”

A few weeks ago, Steve-O actually called her to apologize for his insulting remark. “It was sweet,” she says. “I was very forgiving because truly, I didn’t give it a thought.”

As for the death threats that came from Jackass fans across the Internet, Schumer was unfazed. “I didn’t at all take it personally. For whatever reasons, people needed to place that anger on me and vilify me.”

Five years after being a finalist on NBC’s reality show Last Comic Standing, Schumer, 31, is already familiar with the risks of pushing boundaries in her act, which is often about her own sexual and relationship experiences. In a recent article for Men’s Health magazine, she wrote about the ground rules of humour in the bedroom. And on her album, Cutting, she pushes a lot of buttons, touching on race, the morning-after pill and AIDS, to name a few.

Read the complete article on montrealgazette.com.

When he came to Montreal last year, Hannibal Buress played five solid nights at Just for Laughs, killed Snoop Dogg’s Ain’t No Fun at Hip-Hop Karaoke and got a jaywalking ticket.

The three-police-officer intervention resulted in a $37 fine and a priceless bit in his stand-up routine. After being stopped for what he felt was an absurd infraction, Buress decided to have some fun with the officers, even asking one of them how much money he made.

But Buress, who’s coming back to Montreal for his new show, Still Saying Stuff, part of the Just For Laughs festival, is unrepentant. “I’m going to do my shows. See my friends. Drink,” he says, on the phone from his hometown of Chicago. “And I’m still going to jaywalk.”

The chronically laid-back Buress, 29, who has been described by Chris Rock as the love child of Steven Wright, Mos Def and Dave Chappelle, seems to relish uncomfortable moments in real life and on stage.

Last year, I took my 11-year-old nephew, who is a fan, to see Buress at Theatre Ste. Catherine. I tweeted about it before we went and we sat in the front row.

In the middle of a particularly profane riff, Buress stopped cold and said, “Somebody said they were going to bring an 11-year-old to my show tonight. I’m not gonna tone it down for no 11-year-old.” The audience laughed and he flashed my nephew a knowing smile. It made his year.

So, what did Buress want to be when he grew up?

“As a kid, I watched a lot of Fresh Prince of Bel Air. And then, Howard Stern had a show on the E network. I was like, ‘Yo, Howard Stern seems cool. I want to be the black version of that.’ ”

Read the complete story at montrealgazette.com.

During his three years on Twitter, comedian Rob Delaney has amassed 488,051 followers – and he’s probably lost quite a few more due to his sharp, raunchy sense of humour.

Delaney, who had been performing improv and stand-up in relative obscurity for about six years before his social media profile exploded, recently beat out the likes of Steve Martin, Aziz Ansari and Stephen Colbert to win Comedy Central’s award for Funniest Person on Twitter.

The Boston-born comic tweets about everything from Kim Kardashian’s questionable marriage to inappropriate sexual encounters, and even though a recent unprintable joke about menstruation caused a mini-exodus of followers, he remains unapologetic.

“For me, my joke was sort of a grand slam. It was disgusting. It was all-inclusive,” says Delaney, who performs July 25 to 28 at Café Cléopatre as part of Just for Laughs. “A lot of people unfollowed me after that. And to those people, I say, good riddance!”

He loves pushing people’s buttons and is quick to weigh in on the recent controversy over fellow comedian Daniel Tosh’s apology for a rape joke directed at a female audience member.

“It wasn’t funny, but that’s not a crime,” says Delaney, pointing out that Internet commentary on the issue has drifted far from the facts of the incident. “It’s an open-and-shut case. Rape is horrific and indefensible and wrong. What’s interesting to me is how bonkers people have gone. It’s a little disgusting.”

But while Delaney seems to delight in playing the provocateur on Twitter, he often takes a break to voice his political and personal views. A few years ago, on his blog, he even wrote candidly about his ongoing struggle with depression. He’s working on a memoir that is expected to be published next year.

“If you read two or three of my tweets, you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m an insane monster who should definitely be in solitary confinement in a super-max prison under a mountain in Colorado,” Delaney says. “But if you read 10, 15, 20 tweets, I think a clearer picture of humanness is going to emerge.”

Read the entire story at montrealgazette.com.

From my Facebook news feed (not their real names): Christine Y. is reading “Sex and the over-60s.” Peter J. is reading “Why are smart people usually ugly?” Ali K. is reading “Pakistan: Bombs, spies and wild parties.”

It’s called frictionless sharing. And it instantly notifies your friends about all of the “actions” – reading, listening, watching – you’re taking part in on Facebook.

So, when you click on a story on the Guardian social reader application, for example, you will see your reading selections appear in your Timeline and in your news feed.

You also will see what your friends are reading and where your interests overlap.

While you can opt to turn the social notifications off on most applications, sharing is the default. After all, isn’t that what Facebook is all about?

Knowing that my selections will be public, at least to my friends, makes me feel like someone is always reading over my shoulder. I’m conscious of not clicking around too much so that my timeline doesn’t show my having “read” three stories within three minutes. Will that give people the impression I’m not a careful reader? I’m also aware of which stories I actually read on the apps. I’ll leave the more salacious ones for my Web browser because, after all, my mother is my Facebook friend.

It’s hard to believe it was only five years ago that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced Beacon, which connected your account with sites like Amazon and instantly transmitted news of your purchases. There was a huge furor at the time over Beacon’s impact on personal privacy and in response, Facebook quickly shut the service down.

Fast-forward to last fall, when Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s enhanced Timeline and its ambitious Open Graph plan.

The new Timeline features allow users to display their photos, links, wall posts and life milestones in chronological order, going all the way back to their date of birth. Open Graph is the engine of frictionless sharing. Before its launch, Facebook gave select companies, including the social music site Spotify, The Washington Post and The Guardian, access to develop the first Actions applications. An additional 60 related apps will be rolled out this month.

Where Beacon’s instant updates were met with suspicion, and there continue to be concerns about the invasive quality of Actions, most people and organizations have now come to accept information-sharing as the price they pay for taking advantage of the life-changing features of social networks.

The social media site, Mashable, calls these kinds of “social gestures,” one of the tech trends to look out for in 2012: “With 800 million people already on Facebook, its growth is bound to be slow. But if sharing becomes automatic, the volume of content on Facebook will continue to grow at an accelerated pace.”

In a way, frictionless sharing works like a lazy “Like” button. But, as everyone knows, just because you read something doesn’t mean you endorse it.

Like most people, I strive to control the image of myself that appears on my Facebook Timeline. It is a carefully constructed composite sketch of who I am, not a direct pipeline to my id – at least I hope it isn’t.

Read the rest of the column at montrealgazette.com.

I went to a Catholic elementary school. And in third grade, when everyone was preparing for their first communion, my parents and their friends with daughters in my class, decided to pay for an Islamic studies teacher to keep us occupied during religion period.

Baby, as she was nicknamed, was 20 and didn’t seem to care about teaching us anything. The class was spent reading and watching her paint her nails.

Once, she even took us to Pizza Hut – without a permission slip.

At the end of Baby’s first month, my mother handed me a five-dollar bill to give her. It happened to be the day of the book sale and since my mother didn’t believe in paying for books, I didn’t get any spending money.

I like to think that my 7-year-old self knew Baby didn’t deserve the five dollars and that it would be better spent buying Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois comics and MadLibs. But I just wanted to own books instead of always having to borrow them from the library.

When I got home later, my mother asked if I’d paid Baby. “Yes,” I lied.

A few weeks went by and soon it was Halloween. We went to a family friend’s house where the kids would go trick-or-treating while the adults socialized.

Wearing my Strawberry Shortcake costume, I ran to play in the basement before we headed out.

What felt like not even five minutes later, my mother yelled down the stairs: “Asmaa, we’re leaving. Now.”

On the tearful ride home, she told me she had met Baby upstairs and she said she’d never received the money. My mother was mortified.

The punishment for my deceit: no Halloween. “That’s not fair!” I yelled. My dad, who was driving, was silent.

As we got closer to home, I could see kids in Star Wars costumes carrying pillowcases and plastic pumpkins full of candy from door to door. My sobs grew louder.

We pulled into our driveway and my mother went inside. My dad switched off the headlights and turned to me in the back seat. With a stern look, he told me to stop crying and put on my mask.

“We’ll go to five houses,” he said. “That’s it.”

Under my plastic Strawberry Shortcake grin, I smiled.

Read more firsts on montrealgazette.com.

At first, I thought it was spam.

The email was from my husband’s account, but the subject line was “Kitten nightmare.” I cautiously opened it and found a link to a YouTube video. The message read: “I just watched this 10 times in a row.”

So, I clicked on the link. The video, titled “Cat Hugs Baby Kitten Having a Nightmare,” definitely delivers. It shows a tiny kitten waving its paws and meowing in deep sleep. The mama cat instinctively rolls over and hugs her baby as she soothes it back into slumber.

“I can’t get enough of this videooo! I have watched this video more than 100XXX!” blares an all-caps comment from an enthusiastic YouTube viewer, one of the more than 2 million who have watched it since it was posted in May.

It is a cute video. But why did my husband, a usually indifferent Internet user who rarely posts links to viral videos or changes his Facebook status in solidarity with the latest cause, feel the urge to send it to me?

My friend Karina, who received a similar email, says she wondered the same thing when she got the link. “Are you OK?” she asked Omar the next day when we went over.

He said the video had turned up in his Facebook news feed and its title piqued his curiosity during a particularly dull afternoon at work. Watching it, the captured moment struck a chord and he felt the urge to repost it, along with countless other people.

With 48 hours of video uploaded every minute and over 3 billion videos viewed each day, YouTube has become the repository of our obsessions – lasting and fleeting. And what we like says a lot about who we are.

Read the rest of the column at montrealgazette.com.

Suffering from writer’s block a few years ago, while working on the screenplay for her next movie, Miranda July turned to the PennySaver classifieds flyer for distraction.

She quickly found herself drawn to the stories that lay between its pages. In our age of eBay and Craigslist, July wanted to know more about the people selling used hair dryers, leather jackets and even baby leopards through the little print ads.

The Los Angeles-based writer, director and performer spoke in Montreal this week, touring with It Chooses You, her new book about the interviews she documented with these strangers.

July told the story of a man named Domingo, whom she found via his sister’s ad in the PennySaver. He was a gentle soul who collected and filed magazine photos of women, babies and the LAPD into labelled manila envelopes.

On one wall of the apartment he shared with his sister was a calendar, filled with scribbles and circles marking important dates and mustdo tasks. July noticed it only once she began reviewing photos from her PennySaver visits.

She found that all of her interview subjects had one thing in common. They didn’t have computers. In every home, she had spotted a calendar, an old-fashioned organizer that helped them keep track of their lives. iPhone, Google and Outlook calendars didn’t have a place here. And the PennySaver was another way for them to connect with the rest of the world.

Through this discovery, July says she found that, in its seeming ubiquity, the Internet had started to encroach on her very feelings and imagination.

“The things outside of the Web were becoming further from me, and everything inside it seemed piercingly relevant,” she writes.

“It’s not that my life before the Internet was so wildly diverse – but there was one world and it really did have everything in it.”

Listening to July read Domingo’s story, I was struck by how we often overestimate the power and the reach of the Internet. We think we are all connected – and yet, we miss so many. The drawbacks of not being connected to the Internet are big, felt most strongly perhaps in very rural and disadvantaged communities. Cut off from the speed of technological and political change, people are left behind as the world charges ahead without them.

Read the complete column at montrealgazette.com.

The new Facebook Timeline transforms your profile into a scrapbook of your life’s milestones. It intuitively strings together the dates you added your friends, your siblings’ birthdays, your vacation adventures and even, if you choose, the dates your loved ones passed away, into a seamless, scrollable experience.

It’s not unlike seeing your life proverbially flash before your eyes in the seconds before you die: your own movie. Or perhaps, more accurately, your own reality show.

Earlier this week, I was talking about the new Timeline with my friend Rachel Dubrofsky, a communications professor who studies reality television. She says she finds Facebook and shows such as Survivor and The Bachelor actually have a lot in common.

“Reality television isn’t radically original,” she says, “but it’s certainly a significant modification.” And while it takes concepts of characters and stories from scripted TV and uses documentary styles to present them, its differences help create a unique language that people have come to universally understand: being voted off the island, not receiving a rose, making an on-camera confession.

Facebook, in turn, takes cues from the now-established reality genre and adds other familiar concepts like photo-sharing, networking and commenting. But it puts them into a different context: its own.

When new social concepts take hold – whether its social networking, geo-location or recommendations engines – the paradigms shift and we have to rethink our traditional frameworks to understand their impact on our lives.

So, as the 800-million-member-and-growing social network keeps building upon its distinct identity, introducing new concepts like “friending” and “liking,” it becomes more difficult to compare Facebook to anything that has existed before it. It can be hard to remember now, that in 1992 when MTV was first looking for housemates for the first Real World, no one wanted to move in.

Read more of this story at montrealgazette.com.

I am sad to report that after years of resistance, I have succumbed to the lure of the emoticon. : (

To be clear, I’m not referring to the animated yellow blinking-andwinking smiley faces with their wagging pink tongues but to the simple sideways punctuation that passes for feeling.

With so much of my personal interaction taking place through written words – via email, Facebook, Twitter, GoogleTalk – I’m not always sure that my tone translates to text. That’s why expressions like the winking and the pouting : ( have started to creep into messages to my friends and family.

Why are mere words not enough anymore? Critics say the English language is broad and deep enough to convey all kinds of nuance without any made-up punctuation. But our digital communications move faster than the speed of traditional discourse. A query is sent within a matter of seconds and a reply is expected within minutes. And often, there are multiple messages pinging back and forth at the same time.

You’ve got to get back to your husband about tonight’s dinner. Your friend is inviting you to his housewarming party and you need to weigh in on the latest office developments. How much time are you going to take responding to each email? And how are you make sure that each reply has just the right tone?

In our brave new world of rapidfire communication, it’s no surprise writer and psychologist Daniel Goleman calls email “emotionally lean-toimpoverished when it comes to sending the non-verbal messages that add nuance and valence to words.”

The default neutral tone of email is more often construed as negative than positive, says Goleman, author of the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence. That means, when we’re left to fill in the blanks in an email, minus the physical nonverbal cues, we tend to infer the negative. The emoticon is a shorthand attempt to reflect the tone and body language emails can’t convey.

Read the complete story at montrealgazette.com.