Hey! It’s been a while! But when our show’s most loyal fan, Herb Koss, celebrated his 80th birthday a few days before our March 9th show I knew we had to do something to address it. Brian Vestal does an absolutely amazing characterization of Herb here – even if you don’t know him, you’ll really enjoy it!!
This one came out well. Obviously this past Sunday in Top Story! Weekly we had to hit the Jason Collins coming out story. But I wanted to do something more on the reaction, almost uniformly supportive. I thought about making it supportive to a ridiculous degree, and some really good acting all round made it pay off big time!
A little confession for you guys: I first wrote this sketch for a class I’m taking and decided to tweak it for TS!W. It’s inspired by my own difficulties keeping up with all the TV shows we “have” to watch these days (I’m only halfway through season two of “Breaking Bad”!). Probably better in concept than execution, but take a look and enjoy!
When Justin Bieber hosted “Saturday Night Live” about a month ago, Tillery Johnson happened to be in the cast of Top Story! Weekly that week. And since Tillery bears an uncanny resemblence to Biebs I wrote a sketch about the afterparty with Justin indulging in the pot and sizzurp and naked butt Instagramming of which he seems to have been so fond lately. It didn’t make it in that week, although I got good feedback. But when Till was in the show again the weekend of Biebs’ 19th birthday, I resubmitted it – this time, with the addition of Brian Vestal’s awesome Mark Wahlberg (who had just been in the show a few minutes earlier). Enjoy!
Thinking about how to approach the Supreme Court argument about the health care bill in a comedic way, I thought I could combine it with the other great meme of last week: Megan Draper’s dance at Don’s birthday party on “Mad Men.” Of course, the success of such a conceit depends upon the audience recognizing what’s going on, and I don’t think many folks in our audience got the reference – maybe because “Mad Men” airs at the same time our show goes up! Still, Grasie Mercedes did a great job with the dance.
As we finished up our readthrough Thursday night for Top Story! Weekly, we realized we didn’t have a particularly strong political sketch for that week’s show. Then we saw the video from that night of President Obama singing at the Apollo Theater:
And from there, writing the Republican candidates singing their own versions of 70’s soul hits became pretty easy. All the actors really nailed this one.
Trying to figure out how to get comedy out of last week’s big story – the death of Steve Jobs – it dawned on me that the way to approach it would be to focus on what happened at Apple the day before: the underwhelming launch of the new iPhone 4S. The audience reaction isn’t huge in this video – it was the opening sketch, and I think they were warming up – but I think it’s a pretty solid effort. After all, references to hoverboards are always funny.
We do a show every Sunday night at iO West based on the news of the previous seven days. And when I saw that this past Sunday would be September 11, it posed a quandary: we couldn’t just ignore the anniversary, but anything we did would have to be tasteful and respectful while still being funny. And then I hit on it: make the sketch about the very difficulty we were having on doing a comedy show on the anniversary of a tragedy, only set it on the anniversary of another, analogous tragedy. I’m pretty proud of the results; I got more compliments on this sketch than on any I’ve written in a while.
Mike Hughes' blog 
Watch “Clinton: The Next Generation” from Top Story! Weekly Episode 246: “Dude…Where’s My Dog?”
April 24, 2014A quick piece I wrote in response to Chelsea Clinton’s baby news!
CLINTON: THE NEXT GENERATION by Michael Hughes
Starring Brian Vestal (Bill Clinton) and Kipleigh Brown (Hillary Clinton)
Directed by Sean Cowhig
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Tags:Bill Clinton, Brian Vestal, Chelsea Clinton, Chelsea Clinton pregnancy, Clinton grandchild, Hillary Clinton, Kipleigh Brown, Michael Hughes, Mike Hughes, Top Story! Weekly
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