"Funniest Comedian LARAINE NEWMAN vs ROBERT NEWMAN"

Laraine Newman (born March 2, 1952) is an American actress, comedian and writer, who was part of the original cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live and played the main villain Lawanda Dumore in the 1991 film Problem Child 2. Newman took her first Improvisational theatre classes when she was 15. After finishing high school she auditioned for four acting schools in England including the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and Bristol Old Vic. She was not accepted after the second round of auditions for all four schools, so she went to Paris to study mime with Marcel Marceau for a year. By the age of 19, Newman returned to the United States, and moved to Los Angeles, where she did a brief stint at a secretarial school. Committed to continue performing, she was a founding member of the pioneering comedy improvisational group The Groundlings. At the same time, Newman was working for a booking agent who worked with rock bands, typing up contracts. Newman cites Eve Arden, Madeline Kahn and Richard Pryor as her first major influences, saying “They led me into my life of comedy, they led me into understanding ‘The Art of Play’."

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Robert "Rob" Newman (born 7 July 1964) is a British comedian, author and political activist. Newman found mainstream fame with The Mary Whitehouse Experience before forming a successful partnership with one of the programme's other comedians, David Baddiel, in the early 1990s. In 1993, Newman and his then comedy partner David Baddiel, supported by Sean Lock, became the first comedians to play and sell out the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena in London. Newman's first speaking appearance was with Third World First (now known as People and Planet), the student political organisation. Newman began his comedy career as an impressionist in the late 1980s before gaining fame when he appeared alongside fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel, Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt in the BBC radio and TV programme The Mary Whitehouse Experience (1989–92). The title referred to the main campaigner for "moral decency" on television, Mary Whitehouse. With The Mary Whitehouse Experience Newman and Baddiel had become "unlikely pin-ups as, in the early 1990s, comedy was being fêted as 'the new rock and roll'," leading to their own series, Newman and Baddiel in Pieces (1993). The partnership with Baddiel was widely reported as being fraught with tension. Unlike most double acts, their shows (both on TV and stage) were characterised by the two alternately delivering monologues, rarely appearing together except in sketches (most famously, History Today). During the "Live and in Pieces" tour, relations deteriorated further and the Wembley show was widely and accurately predicted to be their last appearance together.

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