In school, he started a project in which he planned to interview firefighters, but he put that aside and ended up making shorts, including "The Chumley Factor," a switched-at-birth comedy that won an award at the Long Island International Film Expo a year ago.
The only Indian re-birth comedy that comes to mind for me is the 2012 bilingual Telugu and Tamil-language fantasy-comedy Eega, about a man who is murdered only to come back as a housefly that cleverly metes out revenge on his killer.
On the strength of his empathetic, probing interviews, he developed a loyal audience, helped popularize podcasts and played a critical role in the birth of the comedy boom.
And he was right there at the birth of alternative comedy, his song The Young Ones inspiring the TV show of the same name, back in 1982.
"The birth of modern comedy," he writes, "occurred when Chaplin donned his derby hat, affixed his toothbrush mustache and stepped into his impossibly large shoes for the first time".
Over the years his parents, Nate and Isabel, have turned the disturbing story of Auggie's birth into high comedy involving a flatulent nurse who fainted at the sight of him, and they persuade him to go to Beecher by riffing hilariously on the name of the school's director, Mr. Tushman.
And listening to Edwards as he wrings every last comic nuance out of Shakespeare's intricate prose speeches (he plays Benedick as an affable, would-be suave smoothie who uneasily knows that the audience can see through his pose of confirmed bachelorhood), you realise that you are hearing in Much Ado the birth of Restoration comedy.
ABOUT A BOY (NBC) Nick Hornby's novel, which already spawned a film starring Hugh Grant, now gives birth to a comedy pilot directed by Jon Favreau, with the always-on-the-verge actor David Walton ("Perfect Couples," "Bent") as the jerk waiting to be reformed.
"It was on the subway, the birth of my comedy".
A more topical departure came with the birth-control movie comedy, Ronald Neame's Prudence and the Pill (1968), starring Deborah Kerr and David Niven.
The second great Breslau work is Minna von Barnhelm (1767), which marks the birth of classical German comedy.
