A not-so-funny thing happened to Amy Tan back in 1993 on the day of a gala premiere of The Joy Luck Club, the film adaptation of her phenomenally successful 1989 first novel. "Annette Bening was introducing the screening," Tan recalls, seated in the elegant eight-room condominium decorated in what she jokingly calls "Marco Polo Chinese," in San Francisco's Presidio Heights, where she and her husband Louis De Mattei have lived for nearly 11 years. "My mother was there; she was ...

Soupy Sales, a comedian from the golden era of television, died Thursday. He was 83. The funny man seen many times on popular game shows died at a New York hospice, said Paul Dver, Sales' longtime friend and manager. "We have lost a comedy American icon," Dver said. "I feel the personal loss, and I also feel the magic that he had around him being gone. That's a much more severe loss than a loss of a friend." Sales was ...

It was a glass half-full, glass half-empty kind of weekend at the box office for "Funny People," writer-director Judd Apatow's comedic meditation on fame, humor, life, and death. According to figures from Hollywood.com Box Office, it opened at the top spot with an estimated $23.4 million, better than Apatow's The 40 Year-Old Virgin ($21.4 million) -- hence, the glass is half full. But that figure is far lower than the debut for Apatow's "Knocked Up" ($30.7 million), and it's ...

Comedy is hard; dying is easy. Any stand-up will tell you that. Let's have a hand, then, for Judd Apatow. Hollywood's most successful contemporary comedy producer isn't resting on his laurels but continues to push toward risky subject matter: male sexual insecurity in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," unwanted pregnancy in "Knocked Up" -- and now the big C. No, not cancer -- though Adam Sandler's superstar comedian George Simmons is stricken with an appropriately eccentric form of leukemia. No, this ...

"If a kangaroo accidentally gets hit by the train, you don't really feel it," conductor Scott Fels informs me as the scrublands and giant termite mounds of the Australian Outback whisk by. "But if the train drivers see a camel on the tracks, believe me, they get away from the windows." Camels in the Outback Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel ...

It's tough to find a foreclosure sign in Bismarck, N.D. Banners announcing "Now Hiring" are much more common. Over at the mall, the Scheels sporting-goods store is so busy on weekends that some shoppers have sworn to go only during the week. Want to make jokes about North Dakota Sure, the state's got three times as many cattle as people, and a typical day in January is a balmy 20°F. But the folks who live here, unlike those ...

When a film cast includes names like Ben Stiller, Robin Williams and Owen Wilson, a bit of improvisation on set is to be expected. "I think the movie is really only 25 percent scripted, maybe even less than that," said Shawn Levy, director of the new film "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian," which boasts those comedic actors and several others. "It just so happens that the scenes that get some of the biggest laughs are the improvised ...

You know things are getting weird when Britain's largest mass-market daily, the Sun, co-opts a regicidal 17th century republican who shut down Parliament at gunpoint as an avatar of democracy. But Oliver Cromwell's angry exhortation to MPs supplied the paper's front-page headline yesterday: "In the Name of God, Go." British voters — or at any rate, those voters who work for Britain's robustly opinionated media — are calling for heads to roll as each day brings new ...

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Skip the "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience" -- the only major wide release this weekend and more or less review-proof -- and check out the new releases down at the local DVD store instead. I was up for this assignment. We all know how close "Slumdog Millionaire" came to bypassing theatres. The film was initially bankrolled by Warner Independent, and when that boutique shingle was rolled into parent Warner Bros., ...

Matt Groening laughs -- a lot. Sometimes it's a chuckle of uncertainty, as when he talks about the fact that his weekly comic strip, "Life in Hell," is being dropped by its flagship newspaper, LA Weekly, after 22 years. Sometimes it's a snort of mischief, as when he describes working with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, with whom he allegedly has a feud. But mostly it's a big, rollicking guffaw, the sound of a man who still can't quite believe ...