Jack Handey

Kurt Andersen talks with ultraviolent novelist Chuck Palahniuk about why we love watching gruesome things that we hope never happen to us. A Foley artist explains how she uses sound effects to make hurting seem nastier. Jack Handey — of Saturday Night Live “Deep Thoughts” fame — talks tough to our enemies. Plus: Elvis Costello […]

Kurt Andersen talks with Woody Allen about Scoop, which reunites the New York filmmaker with Scarlett Johansson and the city of London. Singer and pianist Lisa Germano performs in the studio. And Jack Handey, the creator of Saturday Night Live’s “Deep Thoughts,” offers our listeners some sure-fire ideas for paintings.

The secret lives of monkeys, giraffes, and sexy jungle explorers. Comedy writer Jack Handey reinvents the television nature documentary — it’s not pretty. The young tabla master Suphala stops by the studio to perform, and trumpeter Terrence Blanchard composes music for a broken New Orleans.

In honor of Halloween, we talk to aspiring make-up artists learning how to give zombies that special glow of decomposition. We tour a haunted house that’s intended to scare folks out of sinning. Comedy writer Jack Handey offers tips for making your skeleton scarier. Plus, Annie Lennox on her new record, Songs of Mass Destruction. […]

Creativity against all odds. A stroke survivor dictates his memoir by blinking his left eye, a story told in the film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” We’ll explore an Emily Dickinson poem written from beyond the grave in our American Icons series. And Jack Handey takes on our extraterrestrial enemies, in a story called […]

Meet some true believers. Director Spike Lee cannot imagine a loss for Barack Obama. Unemployed theater geeks miraculously get their musical to Broadway. Collectors embrace computer art, glitches and bugs and all. Plus, little tiny stories from Jack Handey.

This week, on the eve of the Tony Awards, Studio 360 meets some of the stars who gave Broadway a remarkable year. Tom Hanks and George C. Wolfe tell Kurt Andersen about working on the last play by the late Nora Ephron, and Tim Minchin performs some songs from Matilda, the category-killing musical. And we […]

This week, Studio 360 gets weird. For one thing, there’s “Weird Al,” playing a totally normal cover version of an Elvis Costello hit. Carl Hiaasen tries, once again, to convince America to revile Florida as much as he does. And we get an exclusive preview of Jack Handey’s tropical adventure, The Stench of Honolulu. Plus, […]

This week in Studio 360, some anxiety about money. The makers of the lady-buddy-cop movie The Heat are feeling the heat to match the success of Bridesmaids, or Hollywood’s women will get sent back to the rom-coms. And an indie-rock veteran puts his reputation on the line to complain publicly about his Pandora royalties; will […]

This week, Kurt talks with the director of the disturbing and singular new documentary The Act of Killing; it takes us into the minds of paramilitaries, where they re-imagine their massacres with fantasy dance sequences. We meet a biologist who wants to bring extinct species back to life — it’s not science fiction anymore. And […]