"Funniest Comedian MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE vs CHRIS O'DOWD"

MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE

Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 – November 8, 1994) was an American writer and performer. He was known for his dark and destructive style of comed...

Michael O'Donoghue (January 5, 1940 – November 8, 1994) was an American writer and performer. He was known for his dark and destructive style of comedy and humor, was a major contributor to National Lampoon magazine, and was the first head writer of Saturday Night Live. He was also the first performer to utter a line on that series. O'Donoghue was born Michael Henry Donohue in Sauquoit, New York. His father, Michael, worked as an engineer, while his mother, Barbara, stayed home to raise him. O'Donoghue's early career included work as a playwright and stage actor at the University of Rochester where he drifted in and out of school beginning in 1959. His first published writing appeared in the school's humor magazine Ugh! After a brief time working as a writer in San Francisco, California, O'Donoghue returned to Rochester and participated in regional theater. During this period, he formed a group called Bread and Circuses specifically to perform his early plays which were of an experimental nature and often quite disturbing to the local audience. Among these are an absurdist work exploring themes of Sadism entitled "The Twilight Maelstrom of Cookie Lavagetto", a cycle of one-act plays called Le Theatre de Malaise and the 1964 dark satire The Death of JFK. His first work of greater note was the picaresque feature "The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist", published as a serial in Evergreen Review. This was an erotic satire of the comic book genre, later released in revised and expanded form as a book by that magazine's publisher, Grove Press. Drawn by Frank Springer, the comic detailed the adventures of debutante Phoebe Zeit-Geist as she was variously kidnapped and rescued by a series of bizarre Inuit, Nazis, Chinese foot fetishists, lesbian assassins and other characters. Doonesbury comic-strip creator Garry Trudeau cited the strip as an early inspiration, saying, " very heavy influence was a serial in the Sixties called 'Phoebe Zeitgeist'. . . . It was an absolutely brilliant, deadpan send-up of adventure comics, but with a very edgy modernist kind of approach. To this day, I hold virtually every panel in my brain. It's very hard not to steal from it."

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CHRIS O'DOWD

Christopher O'Dowd (born 9 October 1979) is an Irish actor and comedian. He has appeared in a range of television shows, films, and plays, mostly in t...

Christopher O'Dowd (born 9 October 1979) is an Irish actor and comedian. He has appeared in a range of television shows, films, and plays, mostly in the United Kingdom and United States. O'Dowd was born and raised in Boyle, County Roscommon. After failing to complete a degree in politics and sociology at University College Dublin, he relocated to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He came to broad attention as Roy Trenneman, one of the leading characters in the Channel 4 comedy The IT Crowd, which ran for four series between 2006 and 2010. Moving into film, he appeared in Bridesmaids (2011), This Is 40 (2012), The Sapphires (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Calvary (2014), and St. Vincent (2014). O'Dowd created and starred in the Sky 1 television series Moone Boy, which aired between 2012 and 2015, earning O'Dowd Irish Film and Television Award nominations in acting, writing and directing. Since 2017, he has appeared as Miles Daly in the Epix comedy series Get Shorty. He had a recurring role on the comedy-drama series Girls. His performance in the British comedy TV series State of the Union, won him a Primetime Emmy Award. He made his Broadway debut in the play adaptation of Of Mice and Men in 2014, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. In 2020, he was listed at number 39 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

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