And now for something completely delicious: a rare gem from the Monty Python vault called Away From it All, featuring John Cleese as Nigel Farquhar-Bennett, a voice-over artist badly in need of a holiday.
The 13-minute film is a parody of the mind-numbing travelogues they used to show in movie theaters.

Terry Gilliam’s funny debut film, Storytime, features three early examples of the Monty Python animator’s twisted take on life. The film is usually dated 1968, but according to some sources it was actually put together several years later.

Bill Murray, surely both America’s most and least approachable movie star, seems for almost everything yet unavailable for almost anything. Rarely granting interviews, limiting himself (mostly) to roles he actually cares about, and famously working without an agent, he tends to pop up in places you wouldn’t expect him to.

Tom Lehrer earned a BA and MA in mathematics from Harvard during the late 1940s, then taught math courses at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and UC-Santa Cruz. Math was his vocation. But, all along, Lehrer nurtured an interest in music.

“I’m too young to have been around when these were current,” reads one YouTube comment posted to a piece of Firesign Theatre material, “but as soon as I heard their first four albums or so, my dad’s jokes suddenly made sense.

In this rare footage from 1975, a 26-year-old John Belushi warms up with some eyebrow calisthenics before doing his signature Marlon Brando impression in a screen test for a new late-night television program called Saturday Night Live. He got the part, of course, and his star rose rapidly along with the show’s.

In the early 1970s, Jim Henson was worried that the Muppets were becoming typecast as children’s entertainment. So in December of 1974 he produced a pilot episode for The Muppet Show and gave it a name that was about as far away from Sesame Street as you could get: “Sex and Violence.

There’s probably not a standup comedian bigger than Louis CK right now. His FX television show, Louie, earned him two Emmy Award nominations in 2011, and his recent comedy special, Live at the Beacon Theater, made history when CK distributed the show via the web (not HBO) and netted $1,000,000 in sales in a matter of days.

They say a man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her ears. In this scene from Twin Peaks, David Lynch pours on the ear-shattering charm. The scene is from episode 25 of the second and final season (1991).

It’s part of the beauty of Werner Herzog. His films engross us, and the director provides the entertainment on the side. You have seen him take a bullet during an interview in LA. You’ve heard him read “Go the F**k to Sleep” in New York City.