There’s a sucker born every minute, and apparently a lot of them wind up at foreign news organizations. By now, most Americans are familiar with the Onion — a fake news outlet founded in 1988 that’s full of wickedly funny satire. It was the pioneering frontrunner to the Daily Show,…

Thinking Cap Theatre’s production of The Rover is, among several things, a fashion show. Imagine the excavation of a thrift store, a costume shop, and Victoria’s Secret, run deliriously amok. Credited to set designer Chastity Collins and director Nicole Stodard, the wardrobe includes fur shawls, studded boots, and florid skirts…

Nobody likes going to see the doctor. But when your sleepwalking condition has become so detrimental that, in a somnambulatory state, you collapse through the second-story window of a La Quinta Inn and require 33 stitches in your leg, it might finally be time to see a specialist. This incident…

“Lummox” may be the most existential art project ever to showcase glittering crystal codpieces. It chronicles the making of a band that never was — called Lummox — during the lead-up to its first and only “performance,” at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005. In the process, it asks a…

It was inevitable in this age of social-­media ubiquity: a play written by Facebook. The genesis of Unleashed, a so-called online social experiment conceived by local actor James Carrey, came straight from Mark Zuckerberg’s little website, specifically randomly submitted lines from 26 friends that were incorporated as dialogue in the…

Named after a stage direction from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Lauren Gunderson’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear opens with an everyday American scenario: A man is duct-taped to an old recliner in a ramshackle cabin in the rural Georgia woods. He’s surrounded by venison and honey — all the better…

Like holiday cutlery, It’s a Fabulous Life is the kind of show that’s brought out once a year, polished, and probably best enjoyed with spiked eggnog. A gay-themed redux of It’s a Wonderful Life, it premiered as a shoestring sketch from the 60-voice South Beach Gay Men’s Chorus back in…

Like Bob Saget and Gilbert Gottfried before her, Wanda Sykes walks the comedic tightrope between family films and foul-mouthed filth. Her high-pitched, instantly recognizable voice has led to jobs on such animated trifles as Over the Hedge and Barnyard, but her faithful fans prefer the unhinged Sykes, where she hurls…

In a May 2012 study that likely surprised no one under 50, researchers at New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University found that television viewers who watched only Fox News Channel were the least informed news consumers in the country — faring much worse than respondents who watched no news at all…

The title of cabaret crooner Avery Sommers’ debut album was “You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” a presumptuous claim that has been more than borne out by the soulful singer’s increasing stature in South Florida and elsewhere. An accomplished stage and film actress for the past 30 years, she won a…

Chances are, the name Louis C.K. means different things to different people. Some appreciate his standup comedy, a craft he has been honing with observational filth and wicked social commentary since the mid-1980s. For others, their main affection may be for his uncomfortably confessional comedy series — the underrated HBO…

Back in 2007, polemicist Christopher Hitchens wrote one of his most controversial articles ever, and that’s saying something. In a Vanity Fair screed titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he argued that it was simply not in women’s nature to be funny, because unlike men, they don’t need humor to lure…

The South Florida Boogie Woogie Piano Festival, a two-night celebration of the consonant piano blues style, has been migrating northward since it launched in Coral Gables in August 2010. Last year, it hit Fort Lauderdale in September, and this year, it’s found residency at Delray Beach’s Arts Garage, just in…

These days, if you want to dive into the oeuvres of Ernest Hemingway, H.G. Wells, or Rud­yard Kipling, you can Google them, Kindle them, or, if you’re really old-fashioned, check them out from a library. Fifty Shades of Grey may be out of stock, but don’t worry: These books will…

Stanley Kubrick didn’t need to write dialogue for R. Lee Ermey as the sadistic drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. Those perversely poetic insults — “you slimy fucking walrus-looking piece of shit,” “you are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit” — were all Ermey’s, then an unknown actor…

The name Alan Turing might not roll off the tongue with the familiarity of Edison or Gutenberg, but his impact on technology is arguably just as vital. A brilliant British mathematician who all but created the field of computer science, Turing broke codes for the Allies in World War II…

In Thinking Cap Theatre’s The Drawer Boy, Scott Douglas Wilson is the picture of a citified dork in the early 1970s. He plays Miles, a playwright in a Canadian theater company who has descended upon a rural farmhouse to study its residents’ lives for a play about farming. To the…

The paintings and collages of artist Helga Wolfenstein King are fascinating pieces on their own. They blur the line between abstract and figural, capturing the essences of people and places with a rough-hewn grace. But the work is even more impressive when you know the artist’s backstory: From 1941 to…

If Twin Peaks morphed into a jukebox musical staged inside Davie’s Round Up, the result might be something like Della’s Diner: Blue Plate Special, the first sequel in a popular soap-opera parody series by Tom Edwards. On Christmas Eve in a diner atop a mountain that houses a secret nuclear-waste…

One of the great things about Pineapple Grove’s Arts Garage is that it suffers from cultural schizophrenia: A classical-music performance one night could yield an underground hip-hop show the next; divas in drag could pave the floor for a scorching blues act. The one-night fundraiser Grunge & Glamour celebrates the…

The newest exhibition at Girls’ Club is all about lines: straight ones, curvy ones, squiggly ones, colorful ones, elaborate ones, simple ones. Some create abstract arrangements, and others build recognizable shapes, sizes, and phantasmagoric visions. All form the basis of “Following the Line,” a show intended to advance audiences’ understanding…