title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney's third comedy special, titled "The Comeback Kid", was released on November 13, 2015, on Netflix. His second stand-up show, "New in Town", which premiered on Comedy Central in 2012, is also on Netflix. "The Comeback Kid" received critical acclaim, with David Sims of "The Atlantic" calling it "a reminder of everything that makes Mulaney so singular: storytelling rich with well-observed details, delivered with the confidence of someone decades older than 33". In 2016, Mulaney received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for "The Comeback Kid", losing to Patton Oswalt's "Talking for Clapping".


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney's fourth stand-up comedy tour, "", kicked off its first leg in May 2017, concluding in July of that year. A second leg began in September 2017 in Colorado Springs, Colorado and concluded in April 2018 in Jacksonville, Florida. The tour featured seven shows at Radio City Music Hall in New York City in February 2018, one of which was filmed for another Netflix special. "" was met with critical acclaim, with Steve Greene of "IndieWire" calling it "one of the year's best pieces of writing". David Sims of "The Atlantic" praised Mulaney's talents as a standup writing, "With Kid Gorgeous, Mulaney is proving he can endure in a field that even the most successful and talented comics can struggle to stay afloat in." At the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards, Mulaney received an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for "Kid Gorgeous".


title: John Mulaney

text: In 2017, he was invited to appear alongside Steve Martin, Martin Short, Bill Murray, Jimmy Kimmel, and Norm MacDonald to honor David Letterman, who was accepting The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at The Kennedy Center. When accepting the prize, Letterman stated, "John Mulaney, this is the future of comedy, ladies and gentlemen." That same year, Mulaney was also invited to appear to do standup at Jon Stewart's charity event "Night of Too Many Stars" (2017) on HBO, and Seth Rogen's charity event "Hilarity for Charity" (2018) on Netflix.


title: John Mulaney

text: In January 2019, it was announced that Mulaney would be touring with Pete Davidson together in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts for a limited series of comedy shows titled "Sundays with Pete & John". Mulaney and Davidson have become close, appearing together on "The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon" and "Saturday Night Live".


title: John Mulaney

text: In December 2020, Mulaney sought treatment for alcoholism and cocaine addiction, and prescription drug abuse in a 60-day program at a rehab facility in Pennsylvania. In May 2021, Mulaney returned to stand up comedy working out new material titled, "John Mulaney: From Scratch". Mulaney performed for several sold out shows at City Winery in New York City before announcing a tour starting in Boston where he sold out 21 shows.


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney honored Robin Williams posthomously in the Netflix special "", which was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium as part of the Netflix is a Joke Fest in Los Angeles. Mulaney appeared in the special alongside Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle, Pete Davidson, and Chelsea Handler. In May 2022, during his "From Scratch" tour, Mulaney invited Chappelle to open his show, which drew criticism due to jokes made by Chappelle that have been seen as transphobic. In 2022, Mulaney attended "" with Olivia Munn.


title: John Mulaney

text: In May 2013, NBC passed on picking up Mulaney's semi-autobiographical sitcom pilot, titled "Mulaney". In June 2013, Fox ordered a new script while considering whether to order the production of several episodes. In October 2013, Fox announced that they picked up the show for a six-episode season order. Mulaney was the creator, producer, and writer of his eponymous series until its cancellation in May 2015. Mulaney is quoted as saying he "wanted to do the type of live-audience multi-camera sitcoms that I grew up on". The series received poor reviews, including playwright and "The New York Times" TV critic Neil Genzlinger's, who wrote "It rips off "Seinfeld" so aggressively that in Episode 2 it even makes fun of its own plagiarism. But one thing it forgot to borrow from "Seinfeld" was intelligence."


title: John Mulaney

text: In 2015, Mulaney served as an writer for the IFC mockumentary series "Documentary Now!" (2015–present). The series was created by Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Seth Meyers. During the first season he served as consulting producer before moving as a co-executive producer. His first acting role on the show was in the episode "" in Season 3. Mulaney also co-wrote the episode and the songs with Seth Meyers. In the episode Mulaney plays the fictional Simon Sayer, a character based on composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The episode spoofs the landmark D.A. Pennebaker documentary "" (1970). The episode features a fictional ill-fated 1970 Broadway musical "Co-op", with songs detailing the joys and pains of a New York City housing cooperative. The episode also featured performances from Renée Elise Goldsberry, Richard Kind, and Alex Brightman. The episode received widespread critical acclaim with "Esquire" magazine writing, "Original Cast Recording: Co-op" may be the best episode of the faux-documentary TV series yet".


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney regularly performs as George St. Geegland, an elderly man from the Upper West Side of New York. St. Geegland and fellow New Yorker Gil Faizon (portrayed by Georgetown classmate and comedian Nick Kroll), host a prank show called "Too Much Tuna" in which guests are given sandwiches with too much tuna fish. Mulaney has toured the United States alongside Kroll in a show called "Oh, Hello", with both in character as George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon, respectively. The show premiered on Broadway on September 23, 2016, and concluded its run on January 22, 2017. The Broadway production was filmed and released on Netflix on June 13, 2017. Steve Martin was the celebrity special guest, with a bonus clip showing Michael J. Fox as the guest. Matthew Broderick appeared as himself in a brief cameo towards the end of the special.


title: John Mulaney

text: In December 2019, Mulaney released a children's musical comedy special titled "John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch" on Netflix. The special was inspired by "Sesame Street", "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood", "The Electric Company", "Free to Be... You and Me", and "3-2-1 Contact". The special features Mulaney, along with fifteen child actors and singers, aged 8 to 13. Celebrity cameos include Tony Award winner André De Shields, David Byrne, Richard Kind, Natasha Lyonne, Annaleigh Ashford, and Jake Gyllenhaal as "Mr. Music". The special has been universally praised, receiving a 96% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. Critic Alan Sepinwall of "Rolling Stone Magazine", wrote "It is, like "Galaxy Quest", "The Princess Bride", or "Jane the Virgin", one of those gems that manages to simultaneously parody a genre and be an excellent recreation of it." In 2020, Mulaney received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) and Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for his work on the special.


title: John Mulaney

text: In 2020, Mulaney interviewed actor and playwright André Gregory for the Chicago Humanities Festival where they talked about Gregory's latest memoir, "This Is Not My Memoir," as well as discussing his life and career.


title: John Mulaney

text: On July 5, 2014, Mulaney married multimedia artist Annamarie Tendler. Their wedding ceremony was performed by friend Dan Levy in Boiceville, New York. Their separation was announced in May 2021, the same month it was reported that Mulaney had begun a relationship with actress Olivia Munn. Mulaney filed for divorce in July of that year, and the divorce was finalized in January 2022. In September 2021, Mulaney announced that he and Munn were expecting a child. Their son was born on November 24, 2021.


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney has stated that he believes in God. In 2017 on "WTF with Marc Maron", Mulaney explained his religious views align closer with Jewish theology than the Catholic ideas of his upbringing.


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney has spoken extensively about his love of basketball in his comedy and frequently attends NBA games. Mulaney is a fan of the Chicago Bulls and enjoys going to Brooklyn Nets games when he is in New York.


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney has discussed his struggles with drugs and drinking onstage. In a 2014 interview, he stated that he had been sober since September 22, 2005. In December 2020, he checked into a drug rehabilitation center in Pennsylvania for alcoholism, cocaine addiction, and prescription drug abuse. He moved into outpatient care in February 2021. In his first appearance on television in 2021, Mulaney explained that he had checked into a rehabilitation facility in September 2020, left the recovery program, hosted "Saturday Night Live" in October following his stint in rehab, and relapsed once again following the show. Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Natasha Lyonne and other friends then staged an intervention for Mulaney preceding his December 2020 rehab stint.


title: John Mulaney

text: In 2016, Mulaney appeared at an event honoring the Armed forces at Joint Base Andrews entitled, "A Celebration of Service" organized by the USO. Mulaney performed standup comedy alongside comedians Jon Stewart, Hasan Minhaj, Mike Birbiglia, Kristen Schaal, and David Letterman. Also in attendance were then President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Jill Biden.


title: John Mulaney

text: While hosting "Saturday Night Live" on February 29, 2020, Mulaney noted that Julius Caesar was stabbed by the Senate for being a maniac, and joked, "That would be an interesting thing if we brought that back now!", in reference to Donald Trump. This joke led to him being investigated by the United States Secret Service. A Secret Service agent contacted NBC on March 2 to try and get in touch with Mulaney's lawyers, but ultimately did not contact him and recommended no action, closing the file on March 5.


title: John Mulaney

text: In a 2019 "Esquire" magazine interview, Mulaney stated that he donated to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. On June 2, 2020, Mulaney was seen with his then-wife at a Black Lives Matter protest in Washington D.C.


title: John Mulaney

text: In his opening monologue on "Saturday Night Live" the weekend before the 2020 United States presidential election, Mulaney described the election as an "elderly man contest" and commented, "Rest assured, no matter what happens, nothing much will change in the United States. The rich will continue to prosper while the poor languish. Families will be upended by mental illness and drug addiction. Jane Lynch will continue to book lots of projects." Mulaney's statement that "nothing much will change" caused some controversy among audiences. "The Daily Beast" criticized Mulaney, writing, "To tell the millions of people watching "SNL" three days before the election that there is essentially no difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden can only be described as deeply irresponsible." The joke was described by some as "tone deaf", while others praised Mulaney's allusions to the issues of wealth inequality and drug addiction, and pointed out that Mulaney later urged viewers to vote. In a later appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live", Mulaney reflected he "deserved the backlash" and said he "forgot to make the joke good".


title: John Mulaney

text: In June 2021, Mulaney appeared alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as openers for a concert featuring the Strokes, which served as a fundraiser for New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley.


title: John Mulaney

text: Mulaney has received numerous awards nominations and wins for his work in television. In 2009 Mulaney won a Peabody Award alongside the writers of "Saturday Night Live" for their satirical work on the 2008 United States presidential election. He has received many Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on "Saturday Night Live" and "Documentary Now!" He won his first Emmy Award in 2011 for co-writing the song "Justin Timberlake Monologue" with Seth Meyers and Justin Timberlake, which aired on "Saturday Night Live". He won his second Emmy in 2018 for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for his standup special "".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980) was a British politician during the 1920s and 1930s who rose to fame when, having become disillusioned with mainstream politics, he turned to fascism. He was a member of parliament and later founded and led the British Union of Fascists (BUF).


title: Oswald Mosley

text: After military service during the First World War, Mosley was one of the youngest members of parliament, representing Harrow from 1918 to 1924, first as a Conservative, then an independent, before joining the Labour Party. At the 1924 general election he stood in Birmingham Ladywood against the future prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, coming within 100 votes of defeating him.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley returned to Parliament as Labour MP for Smethwick at a by-election in 1926 and served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–31. In 1928, he succeeded his father as the sixth Mosley baronet, a title that had been in his family for more than a century. He was considered a potential Labour Prime Minister but resigned because of discord with the government's unemployment policies. He chose not to defend his Smethwick constituency at the 1931 general election, instead unsuccessfully standing in Stoke-on-Trent. Mosley's New Party became the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was imprisoned in May 1940 and the BUF was banned. He was released in 1943 and, politically disgraced by his association with fascism, moved abroad in 1951, spending most of the remainder of his life in Paris and two residences in Ireland. He stood for Parliament during the post-war era but received very little support. During this latter period he was an advocate of pro-European integration. He is also known for the influence he had on the thinking of the founders of the Soil Association, a catalyst for the organic farming movement in Great Britain.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was born on 16 November 1896 at 47 Hill Street, Mayfair, Westminster. He was the eldest of the three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet (1873–1928), and Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), daughter of Captain Justinian H. Edwards-Heathcote of Apedale Hall, Staffordshire. He had two younger brothers: Edward Heathcote Mosley (1899–1980) and John Arthur Noel Mosley (1901–1973).


title: Oswald Mosley

text: The family traces its roots to Ernald de Mosley of Bushbury, Staffordshire, in the time of King John in the 12th century. The family was prominent in Staffordshire and three baronetcies were created, two of which are now extinct. His five-time great-grandfather John Parker Mosley, a Manchester hatter, was made a baronet in 1781. His father was a third cousin to the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of the future Queen Mother.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: After Mosley's parents separated, he was raised by his mother, who went to live at Betton Hall near Market Drayton, and his paternal grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. Within the family and among intimate friends, he was always called "Tom". He lived for many years at his grandparents' stately home, Apedale Hall, and was educated at West Downs School and Winchester College.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was a fencing champion in his school days; he won titles in both foil and sabre, and retained an enthusiasm for the sport throughout his life.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In January 1914, Mosley entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, but was expelled in June for a "riotous act of retaliation" against a fellow student. During the First World War he was commissioned into the British cavalry unit the 16th The Queen's Lancers and fought in France on the Western Front. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, but while demonstrating in front of his mother and sister he crashed, which left him with a permanent limp, as well as a reputation for being brave and somewhat reckless. He returned to the trenches before the injury had fully healed and at the Battle of Loos (1915) passed out at his post from pain. He spent the remainder of the war at desk jobs in the Ministry of Munitions and in the Foreign Office.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: On 11 May 1920, he married Lady Cynthia "Cimmie" Curzon (1898–1933), second daughter of the 1st Earl Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925), Viceroy of India 1899–1905, Foreign Secretary 1919–1924, and Lord Curzon's first wife, the U.S. mercantile heiress Mary Leiter.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Lord Curzon had to be persuaded that Mosley was a suitable husband, as he suspected Mosley was largely motivated by social advancement in Conservative Party politics and Cynthia's inheritance. The 1920 wedding took place in the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace in London. The hundreds of guests included King George V and Queen Mary, as well as foreign royalty such as the Duke and Duchess of Brabant (later King Leopold III and Queen Astrid of Belgium).


title: Oswald Mosley

text: During this marriage, he began an extended affair with his wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, and a separate affair with their stepmother, Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, the American-born second wife and widow of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. He succeeded to the Baronetcy of Ancoats upon his father's death in 1928.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Among his many travels, Mosley travelled to British India accompanied by Lady Cynthia in 1924. His father-in-law's past as Viceroy of India allowed for the acquaintance of various personalities along the journey. They travelled by ship and stopped briefly in Cairo.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Having initially arrived in Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka), the journey then continued through mainland India. They spent these initial days in the government house of Ceylon, followed by Madras and then Calcutta, where the Governor at the time was Lord Lytton.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley met Mahatma Gandhi through C.F. Andrews, a clergyman and an intimate friend of the "Indian Saint", as Mosley described him. They met in Kadda, where Gandhi was quick to invite him to a private conference in which Gandhi was chairman. They enjoyed each other's company for the short time they were together. Mosley later called Gandhi a "sympathetic personality of subtle intelligence".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Cynthia died of peritonitis in 1933, after which Mosley married his mistress Diana Guinness, "née" Mitford (1910–2003). They married in secret in Nazi Germany on 6 October 1936 in the Berlin home of Germany's Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was their guest of honour.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and tried to establish it on a firm financial footing by various means including an attempt to negotiate, through Diana, with Hitler for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany. Mosley reportedly made a deal in 1937 with Francis Beaumont, heir to the Seigneurage of Sark, to set up a privately owned radio station on Sark.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: By the end of the First World War, Mosley had decided to go into politics as a Conservative Member of Parliament, as he had no university education or practical experience because of the war. He was 21 years old. He was driven by, and in Parliament spoke of, a passionate conviction to avoid any future war, and this seemingly motivated his career. Largely because of his family background and war service, local Conservative and Labour associations preferred Mosley in several constituencies – a vacancy near the family estates seemed to be the best prospect. He was unexpectedly selected for Harrow first. In the general election of 1918 he faced no serious opposition and was elected easily. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons to take his seat, though Joseph Sweeney, an abstentionist Sinn Féin member, was younger. He soon distinguished himself as an orator and political player, one marked by extreme self-confidence, and made a point of speaking in the House of Commons without notes. Mosley was an early supporter of the economist John Maynard Keynes. The economic historian Robert Skidelsky described Mosley as "a disciple of Keynes in the 1920s".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was at this time falling out with the Conservatives over its Irish policy, and condemned the operations of the Black and Tans against civilians during the Irish War of Independence. He was secretary of the Peace with Ireland Council. As secretary of the council, he proposed sending a commission to Ireland to examine on-the-spot reprisals by the Black and Tans.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In late 1920, he crossed the floor to sit as an independent MP on the opposition side of the House of Commons. Having built up a following in his constituency, he retained it against a Conservative challenge in the 1922 and 1923 general elections.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: By 1924, he was growing increasingly attracted to the Labour Party, which had just formed a government, and in March he joined it. He immediately joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) as well and allied himself with the left.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: When the government fell in October, Mosley had to choose a new seat, as he believed that Harrow would not re-elect him as a Labour candidate. He therefore decided to oppose Neville Chamberlain in Birmingham Ladywood. Mosley campaigned aggressively in Ladywood, and accused Chamberlain of being a "landlords' hireling". The outraged Chamberlain demanded that Mosley retract the claim "as a gentleman". Mosley, whom Stanley Baldwin described as "a cad and a wrong 'un", refused to retract the allegation. Mosley was noted for bringing excitement and energy to the campaign. Leslie Hore-Belisha, a senior Conservative, recorded his impressions of Mosley as a platform orator at this time, claiming that his "dark, aquiline, flashing: tall, thin, assured; defiance in his eye, contempt in his forward chin". Together, Oswald and Cynthia Mosley proved an alluring couple, and many members of the working class in Birmingham succumbed to their charm for, as the historian Martin Pugh described, "a link with powerful, wealthy and glamorous men and women appealed strongly to those who endured humdrum and deprived lives". It took several re-counts before Chamberlain was declared the winner by 77 votes and Mosley blamed poor weather for the result. His period outside Parliament was used to develop a new economic policy for the ILP, which eventually became known as the Birmingham Proposals; they continued to form the basis of Mosley's economics until the end of his political career.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was critical of Winston Churchill’s policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer. After Churchill returned Britain to the Gold Standard, Mosley claimed that "faced with the alternative of saying goodbye to the gold standard, and therefore to his own employment, and goodbye to other people's employment, Mr. Churchill characteristically selected the latter course".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1926, the Labour-held seat of Smethwick fell vacant, and Mosley returned to Parliament after winning the resulting by-election on 21 December. Mosley felt the campaign was dominated by Conservative attacks on him for being too rich, including claims that he was covering up his wealth.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1927, he mocked the British Fascists as "black-shirted buffoons, making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers". The ILP elected him to Labour's National Executive Committee.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley and Cynthia were committed Fabians in the 1920s and at the start of the 1930s. Mosley appears in a list of names of Fabians from "Fabian News" and the "Fabian Society Annual Report 1929–31". He was Kingsway Hall lecturer in 1924 and Livingstone Hall lecturer in 1931.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley then made a bold bid for political advancement within the Labour Party. He was close to Ramsay MacDonald and hoped for one of the Great Offices of State, but when Labour won the 1929 general election he was appointed only to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position without Portfolio and outside the Cabinet. He was given responsibility for solving the unemployment problem, but found that his radical proposals were blocked either by Lord Privy Seal James Henry Thomas or by the Cabinet.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Realising the economic uncertainty that was facing the nation because of the death of its domestic industry, Mosley put forward a scheme in the "Mosley Memorandum" that called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance and transform the British Empire into an autarkic trading bloc, for state nationalisation of main industries, for higher school-leaving ages and pensions to reduce the labour surplus, and for a programme of public works to solve interwar poverty and unemployment. Furthermore, the memorandum laid out the foundations of the corporate state which intended to combine businesses, workers and the government into one body as a way to "Obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley published this memorandum because of his dissatisfaction with the laissez-faire attitudes held by both Labour and the Conservative party, and their passivity towards the ever-increasing globalisation of the world, and thus looked to a modern solution to fix a modern problem. But it was rejected by the Cabinet and by the Parliamentary Labour Party, and in May 1930 Mosley resigned from his ministerial position. At the time, the weekly Liberal-leaning paper "The Nation and Athenaeum" described his move: "The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley is an event of capital importance in domestic politics... We feel that Sir Oswald has acted rightly – as he has certainly acted courageously – in declining to share any longer in the responsibility for inertia." In October he attempted to persuade the Labour Party Conference to accept the Memorandum, but was defeated again.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: The Mosley Memorandum won the support of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who stated that "it was a very able document and illuminating". Keynes also wrote, "I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme. That is what it amounts to. ... [The] manifesto offers us a starting point for thought and action. ... It will shock—it must do so—the many good citizens of this country...who have laissez-faire in their craniums, their consciences, and their bones ... But how anyone professing and calling himself a socialist can keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter."


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Thirty years later, in 1961, Richard Crossman wrote, "this brilliant memorandum was a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking." As his book, "The Greater Britain", focused on the issues of free trade, the criticisms against globalisation that he formulated can be found in critiques of contemporary globalisation. He warns nations that buying cheaper goods from other nations may seem appealing but ultimately ravage domestic industry and lead to large unemployment, as seen in the 1930s. He argues that trying to "challenge the 50-year-old system of free trade ... exposes industry in the home market to the chaos of world conditions, such as price fluctuation, dumping, and the competition of sweated labour, which result in the lowering of wages and industrial decay."


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In a newspaper feature, Mosley was described as "a strange blend of J.M. Keynes and Major Douglas of credit fame". From July 1930, he began to demand that government must be turned from a “talk-shop” into a “workshop.”


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1992, the then UK prime minister, John Major, examined Mosley’s ideas in order to find an unorthodox solution to the aftermath of the 1990-91 economic recession.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Its early parliamentary contests, in the 1931 Ashton-under-Lyne by-election and subsequent by-elections, arguably had a spoiler effect in splitting the left-wing vote and allowing Conservative candidates to win. Despite this, the organisation gained support among many Labour and Conservative politicians who agreed with his corporatist economic policy, and among these were Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan. Mosley's corporatism was complemented by Keynesianism, with Robert Skidelsky stating, "Keynesianism was his great contribution to fascism." It also gained the endorsement of the "Daily Mail" newspaper, headed at the time by Harold Harmsworth (later created 1st Viscount Rothermere).


title: Oswald Mosley

text: The New Party increasingly inclined to fascist policies, but Mosley was denied the opportunity to get his party established when during the Great Depression the 1931 General Election was suddenly called – the party's candidates, including Mosley himself running in Stoke which had been held by his wife, lost the seats they held and won none. As the New Party gradually became more radical and authoritarian, many previous supporters defected from it. Shortly after the 1931 election, Mosley was described by "The Manchester Guardian":


title: Oswald Mosley

text: When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform – who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England. First that gripping audience is arrested, then stirred and finally, as we have said, swept off its feet by a tornado of peroration yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: After his election failure in 1931, Mosley went on a study tour of the "new movements" of Italy's Benito Mussolini and other fascists, and returned convinced, particularly by Fascist Italy's economic programme, that it was the way forward for Britain. He was determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF was protectionist, strongly anti-communist and nationalistic to the point of advocating authoritarianism. He claimed that the UK Labour Party was pursuing policies of "international socialism", while fascism's aim was "national socialism". It claimed membership as high as 50,000, and had the "Daily Mail" and "Daily Mirror" among its earliest supporters. The "Mirror" piece was a guest article by the "Daily Mail" owner Viscount Rothermere and an apparent one-off; despite these briefly warm words for the BUF, the paper was so vitriolic in its condemnation of European fascism that Nazi Germany added the paper's directors to a hit list in the event of a successful Operation Sea Lion. The "Mail" continued to support the BUF until the Olympia rally in June 1934.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: John Gunther described Mosley in 1940 as "strikingly handsome. He is probably the best orator in England. His personal magnetism is very great". Among Mosley's supporters at this time included John Strachey, the novelist Henry Williamson, military theorist J. F. C. Fuller, and the future "Lord Haw Haw", William Joyce.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley had found problems with disruption of New Party meetings, and instituted a corps of black-uniformed paramilitary stewards, the Fascist Defence Force, nicknamed "Blackshirts", like the Italian fascist Voluntary Militia for National Security they were emulating. The party was frequently involved in violent confrontations and riots, particularly with communist and Jewish groups and especially in London. At a large Mosley rally at Olympia on 7 June 1934, his bodyguards' violence caused bad publicity. This and the Night of the Long Knives in Germany led to the loss of most of the BUF's mass support. Nevertheless, Mosley continued espousing anti-Semitism. At one of his New Party meetings in Leicester in April 1935, he said, "For the first time I openly and publicly challenge the Jewish interests of this country, commanding commerce, commanding the Press, commanding the cinema, dominating the City of London, killing industry with their sweat-shops. These great interests are not intimidating, and will not intimidate, the Fascist movement of the modern age." The party was unable to fight the 1935 general election.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In October 1936, Mosley and the BUF attempted to march through an area with a high proportion of Jewish residents. Violence, since called the Battle of Cable Street, resulted between protesters trying to block the march and police trying to force it through. At length Sir Philip Game, the Police Commissioner, disallowed the march from going ahead and the BUF abandoned it.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley continued to organise marches policed by the Blackshirts, and the government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which, amongst other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations and came into effect on 1 January 1937. In the London County Council elections in 1937, the BUF stood in three wards in East London (some former New Party seats), its strongest areas, polling up to a quarter of the vote. Mosley made most of the Blackshirt employees redundant, some of whom then defected from the party with William Joyce.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In October 1937 in Liverpool, he was knocked unconscious by two stones thrown by crowd members after he delivered a fascist salute to 8,000 people from the top of a van in Walton.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: As the European situation moved towards war, the BUF began to nominate Parliamentary by-election candidates and launched campaigns on the theme of "Mind Britain's Business". Mosley remained popular as late as summer 1939. His Britain First rally at the Earls Court Exhibition Hall on 16 July 1939 was the biggest indoor political rally in British history, with a reported 30,000 attendees.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: After the outbreak of war, Mosley led the campaign for a negotiated peace, but after the Fall of France and the commencement of aerial bombardment during the Battle of Britain overall public opinion of him became hostile. In mid-May 1940, he was nearly wounded by an assault.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Unbeknown to Mosley, MI5 and the Special Branch had deeply penetrated the BUF and were also monitoring him through listening devices. Beginning in 1934, they were increasingly worried that Mosley's noted oratory skills would convince the public to provide financial support to the BUF, enabling it to challenge the political establishment. His agitation was officially tolerated until the events of the Battle of France in May 1940 made the government consider him too dangerous. Mosley, who at that time was focused on pleading for the British to accept Hitler's peace offer of March, was detained on 23 May 1940, less than a fortnight after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Mosley was interrogated for 16 hours by Lord Birkett but never formally charged with a crime, and was instead interned under Defence Regulation 18B. The other most active fascists in Britain met the same fate, resulting in the BUF's practical removal at an organised level from the United Kingdom's political stage. Mosley's wife, Diana, was also interned in June, shortly after the birth of their son (Max Mosley); the Mosleys lived together for most of the war in a house in the grounds of Holloway prison. The BUF was proscribed by the British Government later that year.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley used the time in confinement to read extensively in classics, particularly regarding politics and war, with a focus upon key historical figures. He refused visits from most BUF members, but on 18 March 1943, Dudley and Norah Elam (who had been released by then) accompanied Unity Mitford to see her sister Diana. Mosley agreed to be present because he mistakenly believed that it was Lady Redesdale, Diana and Unity's mother, who was accompanying Unity. The internment, particularly that of Lady Mosley, resulted in significant public debate in the press, although most of the public supported the Government's actions. Others demanded a trial, either in the hope it would end the detention or in the hope of a conviction. During his internment he developed what would become a lifelong friendship with fellow prisoner Cahir Healy, a Catholic Irish nationalist MP for the Northern Irish parliament.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In November 1943, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, ordered the release of the Mosleys. After a fierce debate in the House of Commons, Morrison's action was upheld by a vote of 327–26. Mosley, who was suffering with phlebitis, spent the rest of the war confined under house arrest and police supervision. On his release from prison, he first stayed with his sister-in-law Pamela Mitford, followed shortly by a stay at the Shaven Crown Hotel in Shipton-under-Wychwood. He then purchased Crux Easton House, near Newbury, with Diana. He and his wife remained the subject of much press attention.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: After the war, Mosley was contacted by his former supporters and persuaded to return to participation in politics. He formed the Union Movement, which called for a single nation-state to cover the continent of Europe (known as Europe a Nation) and later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe to this end. He had connections with the Italian neo-Fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, and contributed to a weekly Roman magazine, "Asso di bastoni", which was supported by his Europe a Nation. "The New European" has described Mosley as an "avowed Europhile". The Union Movement's meetings were often physically disrupted, as Mosley's meetings had been before the war, and largely by the same opponents. This led to his decision, in 1951, to leave Britain and live in Ireland. He responded to criticism of him abandoning his supporters in a hostile Britain for a life abroad by saying, "You don't clear up a dungheap from underneath it." In the 1950s, Mosley advocated for Africa to be divided into black and white areas, but the decolonisation of the 1960s put an end to this proposal.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley was a key pioneer in the emergence of Holocaust denial. While not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps, he claimed that they were a necessity to hold "a considerable disaffected population", where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to "incessant bombing" by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people, and sought to discredit pictures taken from places like Buchenwald and Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it. He criticised the Nuremberg trials as "a zoo and a peep show".


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Mosley briefly returned to Britain to stand in the 1959 general election at Kensington North. He led his campaign stridently on an anti-immigration platform, calling for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants as well as a prohibition upon mixed marriages. Mosley's final share of the vote was 8.1%. Shortly after his failed election campaign, Mosley permanently moved to Orsay, outside Paris.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1961, he took part in a debate at University College London about Commonwealth immigration, seconded by a young David Irving. He returned to politics one last time, contesting the 1966 general election at Shoreditch and Finsbury, and received 4.6% of the vote. After this, he retired and moved back to France, where he wrote his autobiography, "My Life" (1968). In 1968, he remarked in a letter to "The Times", "I am not, and never have been, a man of the right. My position was on the left and is now in the centre of politics."


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1977, by which time he was suffering from Parkinson's disease, Mosley was nominated as a candidate for Rector of the University of Glasgow in which election he polled over 100 votes but finished bottom of the poll.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley's political thought is believed to have influence on the organic farming movement in Great Britain. Henry Williamson, the agricultural writer and ruralist, put the theories of “blood and soil” into practice, which, in effect, acted as a demonstration farm for Mosley’s ideas for the BUF. In "The Story of a Norfolk Farm" (1941) Williamson recounts the physical and philosophical journey he undertook in turning the farm’s worn-out soil back into fertile land. The tone contained in this text is more politically overt than his nature works. Throughout the book, Williamson makes references to regular meetings he had held with his “Leader” (Mosley) and a group of like-minded agrarian thinkers. Lady Eve Balfour, a founder of the Soil Association, supported Mosley's proposals to abolish Church of England tithes on agricultural land (Mosley’s blackshirts “protected” a number of East Anglian farms in the 1930s from the bailiffs authorised to extract payments to the Church). Jorian Jenks, another founder of the Soil Association, was active within the Blackshirts and served as Mosley's agricultural adviser.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: In 1924, Lady Cynthia Curzon joined the Labour Party, and was elected as the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent in 1929. She later joined Oswald's New Party and lost the 1931 election in Stoke. She died in 1933 at 34 after an operation for peritonitis following acute appendicitis, in London.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Oswald Mosley died on 3 December 1980 at Orsay. His body was cremated in a ceremony held at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and his ashes were scattered on the pond at Orsay. His son Alexander stated that they had received many messages of condolence but no abusive words. "All that was a very long time ago," he said.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley's ancestral family residence, Rolleston Hall in Staffordshire, was demolished in 1928. Mosley and his first wife, Cynthia, also lived at Savay Farm, Denham. Immediately following his release in 1943, Mosley lived with his second wife, Diana, at Crux Easton, Hampshire In 1945, he moved to Crowood Farm, located near Marlborough, Wiltshire, which he ran. In November 1945, Mosley was summoned to court for allegedly causing unnecessary suffering to be caused to pigs by failing to provide adequate feeding and accommodation for them. When the decision of the court was announced, Mosley, who had pleaded not guilty, and summoned his own defence, was responsible for an outburst. The hearing lasted for five hours.


title: Oswald Mosley

text: Mosley's residence in Fermoy, Co. Cork, Ireland, known as Ileclash House, was put up for sale in 2011, and again in 2016, 2018 and 2020. A Georgian style house, it was built in the 18th century and by 2011 was accompanied by 12 acres. It had fallen into a state of disrepair until it was purchased and restored by Mosley in the 1950s. In the same decade, he bought and restored Clonfert Palace, also in Ireland.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Natasha Bianca Lyonne Braunstein ( ; born April 4, 1979) is an American actress, director, writer, and producer. She is known for playing Nicky Nichols on the Netflix comedy-drama series "Orange Is the New Black" (2013–2019), for which she received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress, and for her portrayal of Nadia Vulvokov on the Netflix series "Russian Doll" (2019–present), which she also co-created, executive produces, writes, and directs. For the latter, Lyonne has received nominations for three Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne made her feature film debut in 1986 with a small, uncredited appearance in "Heartburn". She played more prominent parts in "Dennis the Menace" (1993); "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996); "Slums of Beverly Hills" (1998); "Detroit Rock City", "", and "But I'm a Cheerleader" (all 1999); "Scary Movie 2", "The Grey Zone", and "Kate & Leopold" (all 2001); "Die, Mommie, Die!" and "Party Monster" (both 2003); "" (2004); "All About Evil" (2010); "Sleeping with Other People", "Hello, My Name Is Doris", and "Addicted to Fresno" (all 2015); "Antibirth" and "Yoga Hosers" (both 2016); "Show Dogs" (2018); "Honey Boy" and "Ad Astra" (both 2019); "Irresistible" (2020); "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (2021); and "DC League of Super-Pets" (2022). She is also known for portraying Jessica in the "American Pie" film series (1999–2012).


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne was born in New York City, the daughter of Ivette Buchinger and Aaron Braunstein, a boxing promoter, race car driver and radio host, distantly related to cartoonist Al Jaffee. Lyonne's parents were from Orthodox Jewish families, and she was raised Orthodox. Her mother was born in Paris, France, to Hungarian-Jewish parents who were Holocaust survivors. Lyonne has darkly joked that her family consists of "my father's side, Flatbush, and my mother's side, Auschwitz." Her grandmother Ella came from a large family. Only she and her two sisters and two brothers survived, which Lyonne credits to their blond hair and blue eyes. Lyonne's grandfather Morris Buchinger operated a watch company in Los Angeles. During the war, he hid in Budapest as a non-Jew working in a leather factory. Lyonne lived the first eight years of her life in Great Neck, New York.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne and her parents emigrated to Israel, where she spent a year and a half. During her stay with her family in Israel, Lyonne participated in the 1989 Israeli children's film "April Fool" (), which began her interest in acting. Her parents divorced, and Lyonne and her older brother, Adam, returned to America with their mother. After moving back to New York City, Lyonne attended the Ramaz School, a private Jewish school, where Lyonne said she was a scholarship kid who took honors Talmud classes and read Aramaic. She was expelled for selling marijuana at school. Lyonne grew up on the Upper East Side, where she felt she was an outcast. Her mother moved their family to Miami, where Lyonne attended Miami Country Day School. She did not graduate from high school, leaving before her senior year to attend a film program at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Her high school graduation depended on completing her first year at Tisch, but she left the program because she could not pay the tuition.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne was estranged from her father, who was a Democratic candidate for City Council for the sixth District of Manhattan in 2013, and lived on the Upper West Side until his death in October 2014. She has said she is not close to her mother and has essentially lived independently of her family since age 16.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: As a young child, Lyonne was signed by the Ford Modeling Agency. At age six, she was cast as Opal on "Pee-wee's Playhouse", followed by film appearances in "Heartburn", "A Man Called Sarge", and "Dennis the Menace". Of working as a very young child actor, Lyonne has said: "I didn't have the best parents. I don't think they are bad people. Even if they were ready to have children, it is kind of a wacky idea to put your child in business at six years old."


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: At age 16, Lyonne was cast in the Woody Allen-directed "Everyone Says I Love You" (1996). This led to appearances in a variety of films over the next 10 years, including starring roles in the independent features "Slums of Beverly Hills" (1998), for which she received two Teen Choice Award nominations, and "But I'm a Cheerleader" (1999). During this time, she appeared as Jessica in the highly successful teen comedy "American Pie" (1999), reprising the role in two of its sequels. Lyonne's other films during this period included "Detroit Rock City", "" (both 1999), "Scary Movie 2", "The Grey Zone", "Kate & Leopold" (all 2001), "Party Monster" (2003), and "" (2004). Her later film appearances include "All About Evil" (2010), "" (2011), "Girl Most Likely", "Loitering with Intent", "Sleeping with Other People", "Hello, My Name Is Doris", "Addicted to Fresno", "#Horror", "Yoga Hosers", "Antibirth", "The Intervention", "", and "Honey Boy". She also made a cameo appearance as herself in the 2022 Netflix film "".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne made her New York stage debut in the award-winning New Group production of Mike Leigh's "Two Thousand Years".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: She was part of the original cast of the award-winning "Love, Loss, and What I Wore", a play by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the book by Ilene Beckerman.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2010, Lyonne received positive reviews for her performance in Kim Rosenstock's comedy "Tigers Be Still" at the Roundabout Theatre Company: "a thorough delight in the flat-out funniest role, the grief-crazed Grace, so deeply immersed in self-pity that she has cast aside any attempts at decorum".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2011, Lyonne starred opposite Ethan Hawke and Ann Dowd in New Group's production of Tommy Nohilly's "Blood From a Stone". The next year, she participated in New Group's benefit performance of "Women Behind Bars".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Of working in the theater, Lyonne has said, "There's something about theater that squashes the self-critical voices because you have to be in the moment. I'm glad that I didn't do this before I was ready before I was capable of showing up every day. That is not a skill set I had before".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne has made guest appearances on the series "Grounded for Life", "Weeds", "New Girl", "Will & Grace", and "".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: From 2013 to 2019 she appeared as Nicky Nichols in the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black". The role is Lyonne's first television job as a series regular. She received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series in 2014, and was twice awarded the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, along with her co-stars.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2014 Lyonne was cast in Amy Poehler's NBC comedy pilot "Old Soul", directed by David Wain. In 2016 she began voicing the character Smoky Quartz on the Cartoon Network show "Steven Universe". She has also appeared as various characters on IFC's sketch comedy series "Portlandia". In 2018 she voiced the character Gaz Digzy on Adult Swim's comedy series "". She has voiced characters on "The Simpsons" and Netflix's "Big Mouth".


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Her performance in the 2019 Netflix series "Russian Doll" has been praised as "astonishing". Alan Sepinwall of "Rolling Stone" called it "brilliant". The series received 13 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Lyonne's performance as Nadia Vulvokov, and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2017, Lyonne was approached by Kenzo's creative directors Carol Lim and Humberto Leon to direct the 5th installment in their short film series. For this, her directorial debut, she began writing a script with Maya Rudolph in mind to star. The surrealist short film was titled "Cabiria, Charity, Charlotte "and starred Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Greta Lee, Leslie Odom Jr. and Macaulay Culkin.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In September 2017, Lyonne's project "Russian Doll" was given an eight-episode straight-to-series order by Netflix. The comedy, co-created and executive produced by Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland, premiered on February 1, 2019. Lyonne has multiple roles in the series. She is credited as the lead actress and is one of the series's executive producers with directorial and writing credits.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2018, Lyonne and Rudolph co-founded the production company Animal Pictures. Its first greenlit project was "", which Lyonne directed.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne directed an episode of "Orange Is the New Black" in its seventh and final season, as well as an episode of Hulu's "Shrill", "WAHAM", and an episode of "High Fidelity", "Weird...But Warm."


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: When she was 18, Lyonne used the paycheck from her work on "Everyone Says I Love You" to buy a small apartment near Gramercy Park. During the early 2000s, she experienced legal problems and was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, and for incidents involving her neighbors. In 2005, she was evicted by her landlord, actor Michael Rapaport, following complaints by other tenants about her behavior.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: In 2005, Lyonne was admitted (under a pseudonym) to Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, suffering from hepatitis C, a heart infection, and a collapsed lung; she was also undergoing methadone treatment for heroin addiction. In January 2006, a warrant was issued for her arrest after she missed a court hearing relating to her prior legal problems. Her lawyer said an emergency had arisen but did not give details. Later that year, Lyonne was admitted to a drug and alcohol treatment center, and she appeared in court afterward. A judge sentenced her to conditional discharge.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne underwent open-heart surgery in 2012 to correct heart valve damage caused by her endocarditis heart infection, which could have resulted in sudden death if untreated. She recovered from the surgery and discussed her past health problems on "The Rosie Show" in March 2012.


title: Natasha Lyonne

text: Lyonne lives in New York City's East Village. She and "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Fred Armisen began dating in 2014; Lyonne confirmed they had ended their relationship in April 2022.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Taskmaster is a British comedy panel game show created by comedian and musician Alex Horne and presented by both Horne and Greg Davies. In the programme a group of five celebritiesmainly comediansattempt to complete a series of challenges, with Horne acting as umpire in each challenge and Davies, the eponymous "Taskmaster", judging the work and awarding points based on contestants' performances. The concept for the programme was first created by Horne for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010; he later secured a deal with Dave to adapt it for television with the first episode premiering in 2015. After the ninth series in 2019, the programme was acquired by Channel 4 who commissioned six new series to be broadcast over the following three years.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: "Taskmaster" proved a success on British television, spawning a tie-in board game, two books, and leading to the creation of international versions of the programme in Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the United States, New Zealand, Croatia, Portugal and Quebec (as of 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic Horne hosted #HomeTasking, a series of tasks for people to film in their own homes; for each task, a montage of attempts was posted on YouTube that featured Davies awarding points to his favourite entries.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: "Taskmaster" was the brainchild of comedian Alex Horne whose idea was inspired by "The Crystal Maze", his work for "Big Brother", and his envy of his close friend Tim Key winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2009. The original concept of the programme took place over the course of two years. In 2009, 20 comedians including Stuart Goldsmith, Josie Long, Mark Watson, Tim Key, Joe Wilkinson and Mike Wozniak, received monthly tasks by email over the course of a year stipulating a variety of tasks. Horne then presented their efforts as part of a two-hour show titled "The Task Master", at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe which focused on demonstrating the differing attempts by the contestants before revealing who won based on their performances. Mike Wozniak won the first Taskmaster competition. In 2011, Horne conducted another stage show titled "Taskmaster II", with ten contestants tackling tasks.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Both stage shows proved a success with their audiences, leading Horne to recruit production company Avalon to help produce an adaptation of his concept for television before pitching his idea to several different broadcasters. British television channel Dave took interest in the idea and bought the rights to it, with comedian Greg Davies recruited to help present the programme alongside Horne. However the channel's Deputy Director of Commissioning at the time, Hilary Rosen, was concerned with the structure of the show. Horne assured Rosen that the programme was not like a traditional panel show but "more like a sitcom", to account for the involvement of the same group of contestants who would appear across a series. Another problem with the format of Horne's concept was that shooting a traditional pilot became implausible, despite studio segments having no issues being tested. One plan for the programme was for Davies to use a cane with a golden "T" on the base, but this was later dropped. The pilot premiered on 19 September 2014, and proved a success with viewers. After the pilot was aired, a series of six episodes was commissioned though intended to be shown in any order. Rosen later determined the show should be arranged in an order, pointing out that "this was a show you record and transmit in the same order". The first series proved a success that led to additional series being commissioned over the course of five years; the involvement of comedian Frank Skinner as a contestant in the first series, at Horne's request, also helped to entice other comedians to take part in the programme.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: In November 2019 rumours that "Taskmaster" was being moved to another channel were later confirmed by Channel 4 who had secured the rights to the programme, renewing it for six series over the course of three years.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: "Taskmaster" is a comedic game show, in which a group of five contestants – mainly comedians, but sometimes including other well-known television personalities – compete against each other by completing tasks assigned to them. In each episode, contestants are shown tackling a series of tasks, supervised and sometimes assisted by Horne. Davies then judges each contestant's performance in each task to determine how many points they receive, generally ranking them from one to five points. The contestant with the highest score in each episode wins a collection of prizes submitted by the contestants themselves as one of the tasks; the one with the highest cumulative score at the end of a series wins a trophy.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Tasks given to contestants range from simple physical challenges, such as "eat as much watermelon as you can in one minute", to more complex or artistic tasks. Some tasks may be timed, consist of multiple stages, or both. In some cases, contestants conduct tasks as a team with one or two other contestants; in such cases all members of a team receive the same score. To complete tasks, contestants often have to apply a level of logic, creativity, or lateral thinking in order to achieve the end goal. Contestants can be disqualified and awarded no points for a task if they fail to achieve the task's objective, inadvertently break one of the task's rules, or cheat. Conversely, they can be given bonus points. Occasionally, prank tasks are given to one contestant alone, who is led to believe the others are performing the same task; Davies may award bonus points for these.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Tasks are mostly pre-recorded before an episode's broadcast; the majority are usually conducted in or around the Taskmaster house, a former groundskeepers' cottage located on the outskirts of a golf course in Dukes Meadows, Chiswick. Two tasks are usually conducted during studio segments: an introductory Prize task, in which each contestant supplies an object they possess that conforms to a set theme, all of which will be awarded to the winner of the episode; and a final "Live" task, which the contestants perform onstage in the studio. In the event of a tie in the top score at the end of the episode, either a pre-recorded tiebreaker task between the tied contestants is shown, or a quick live task is performed to determine the winner.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Tasks are filmed with each contestant separately in a house in Chiswick, London. However, Alex Horne's initial plan was to carry out the tasks in the comedians' houses, saying in an interview: "I didn't realise how impractical that would be both in terms of cost – and their lives." Filming tasks takes roughly one day per contestant per episode, filming around eight tasks a day, with the days of filming spread out across several months. Before the studio filming, contestants are forbidden to discuss their tasks and are not shown any footage from the tasks, so that studio reactions are genuine.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Horne designs the tasks to avoid the need for any specialist equipment, so that "people at home [are] able to do the same things". Initially, they planned to have Horne show the right way to complete the task after showing the contestants' attempts, but this was abandoned as "it supposed there was a right way". He also notes that some tasks in the first series involved the general public, but later series avoided this in order to prevent coming across as a "prank show". Some tasks are vetoed by producers for pragmatic reasons, such as "paint the biggest thing red". Others do not turn out as expected, such as "burst all these bubbles [on a massive roll of bubble wrap] – fastest wins", which had been attempted in three different series but not shown in any of them, as "it always ends with people jumping on it for hours".


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: When asked why he did not present the show, Horne has said that "that was never the plan [...] My role as sidekick is to be sneaky and you can run it from the sides in a really funny way." Horne and Greg Davies had never worked together before "Taskmaster"; Davies was chosen "because of his authority", Horne says in an interview. He adds that in the pilot, Davies acted as a "dictator figure cross with everyone", but his tone in the show is more relaxed, as "if someone doesn't do something well we really enjoy it so he can be himself".


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: The series director for "Taskmaster" is Andy Devonshire, who was previously series director on "The Apprentice" and the BBC versions of "The Great British Bake Off." Peter Orton was director for three episodes in 2016. Production designer James Dillion is responsible for the studio and filming locations as well as the caravan featured from series four onwards, having been past known for designing the original set for "The Crystal Maze". The show's theme music was written and performed by The Horne Section, a jazz band led by Horne.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: The British show is also broadcast in Belgium, Iceland, Sweden, South Africa, Norway, Finland, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Croatia and Portugal. On 26 April 2021 a single episode of the spin-off Challengemaster was live streamed in Belgium. In Australia, SBS Viceland started to air "Taskmaster" episodes on 27 July 2020. The most recently broadcast series is available on SBS on Demand.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: In the United States, The CW acquired series 8 and 9 of "Taskmaster" for a late-Summer run premiering on 2 August 2020. However, the series opened to extremely low viewership (in comparison to the Canadian import, "Fridge Wars", which premiered the same day), and was consequently pulled from the network's schedule on 5 August. The CW added the entirety of Series 8 to its "CW Seed" streaming library on 10 August.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: A subscription streaming service, "Taskmaster SuperMax+", debuted in March 2022. It allows worldwide access to the British version of "Taskmaster", free from ads. It followed the show's cult popularity in America, despite little streaming availability; a U.S. version of "Taskmaster" and broadcast of the British version on The CW were not successful. Horne stated that adding international versions to the service may occur at a later date.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: International versions of the programme have been made in Belgium (as ) (literally "The Greatest Light", but meaning "The Brightest Bulb"), Sweden (as ) ("Best in Test"), Norway (as Kongen befaler) (literally "The King Commands", Norwegian for Simon Says) and Spain (as ) ("Said and Done"). In Denmark the programme is titled ("Grandmaster") and premiered on 25 August 2018. In April 2017, a US version with Reggie Watts as the Taskmaster and Horne as the assistant was announced, made by Avalon, the same production company for the UK version and originally aired on Comedy Central on 27 April 2018. A German version featuring Atze Schröder as the Taskmaster was commissioned by RTL in 2017; two episodes were recorded but not broadcast.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: In 2019 it was announced a New Zealand version would be produced, hosted by Jeremy Wells and Paul Williams. Two series have been broadcast in 2020 and 2021 and a third series was confirmed in April 2022 for broadcast later this year. Finnish network MTV3 aired a local version "Suurmestari" [Grandmaster] starting on 12 April 2020. An international adaptation, "Direktor svemira" [Director of the Universe], by Croatian broadcaster RTL, began to air on 24 November 2021. Portugal's RTP1 announced in 2021 that a Portuguese version would start broadcasting in early 2022, hosted by and Nuno Markl. In October 2022, Network 10 announced an Australian version would be produced which will be broadcast from early 2023, hosted by Tom Gleeson and Tom Cashman.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: A tie-in book, "Taskmaster — 200 Extraordinary Tasks for Ordinary People", was written by Alex Horne and published by Penguin Random House on 6 September 2018.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Task 185 in the book provided the latitude and longitude of a Buckinghamshire park, with instructions to meet there at midday on 14 September 2019 for a picnic and Taskmaster tour. The event was attended by around 1800 people with Horne himself present to show attendees filming locations from the show.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: In September 2019, a paperback edition was published, with 20 new tasks. As well as writing additional tasks, Horne removed the expiration date of 31 December 2019 where it appeared, and replaced tasks that had a set completion date.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: In September 2021, a new book titled "Bring Me The Head Of The Taskmaster — 101 Next-level Tasks (and Clues) that Will Lead One Ordinary Person to Some Extraordinary Taskmaster Treasure" was released. It offered readers the chance to win a real-world Taskmaster prize.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: The board game "Taskmaster" was released in autumn 2019, initially selling out. It contains 200 task cards, along with secret tasks that individual players must perform, and video tasks featuring Alex Horne.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: From March to June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and a period of lockdown in the UK, Alex Horne organised a series of tasks in the style of "Taskmaster" for the public to perform and record in their own homes. Entries were submitted on Twitter and compilation videos, including scoring of the ten best entries by Greg Davies, were published by the Taskmaster YouTube channel. The first task was "Throw a piece of A4 paper into a bin. Most spectacular throw wins." There were 20 tasks in total.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: A new series of Hometasking, started during another lockdown in the UK, began on January 14, 2021, featuring tasks previously performed on the TV show.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: On 15 October 2020, an official podcast began. It is hosted by Ed Gamble, the winner of Series 9, who comments on each featured episode with a special guest. Initially it focused on Series 10, with each podcast released immediately after each "Taskmaster" episode was broadcast. Episode 12 of the podcast focused on the 2021 "New Year Treat", and then from episode 13 onwards it returned to the very beginning starting with "Taskmaster" Series 1 Episode 1, returned to "real-time" episodes during the broadcast run of series 11, 12 and NYT 2022 before returning to the older series after the newer series concluded.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: A second official podcast, called "Taskmaster: The People's Podcast", was launched in April 2022. It is hosted by Series 8 champion Lou Sanders and comedy writer Jack Bernhardt. The hosts chat with "Taskmaster" fans as well as with cast and crew members.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Andrew Billen of "The Times" gave a five star review of the show's first episode, "Melon Buffet", calling it "funny, revealing, and glorious" and comparing it to "The Generation Game". In another review of the first episode, Filipa Jodelka of "The Guardian" describes "Taskmaster" as a panel show with an "edgy parlour-game twist". Jodelka praises the "molten-hot banter" between contestants and Davies, and compares the arbitrary awarding of points to "QI" and "Numberwang". Also reviewing "Melon Buffet", Ellen Jones of "The Independent" praised the show as entertaining despite its "informal and cheap-looking" style.


title: Taskmaster (TV series)

text: Wesley Mead of "Den of Geek" wrote a positive review in 2016, praising the show as the "crowning jewel" of original programming on Dave, and approving of the design of the tasks and the range of approaches that contestants demonstrate. Mead believed that the second series was an improvement on the first, but criticised that the first three series had only one female contestant apiece.


title: Software

text: Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.


title: Software

text: At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed to "jump" to a different instruction, or is interrupted by the operating system. , most personal computers, smartphone devices and servers have processors with multiple execution units or multiple processors performing computation together, so computing has become a much more concurrent activity than in the past.


title: Software

text: The majority of software is written in high-level programming languages. They are easier and more efficient for programmers because they are closer to natural languages than machine languages. High-level languages are translated into machine language using a compiler or an interpreter or a combination of the two. Software may also be written in a low-level assembly language, which has a strong correspondence to the computer's machine language instructions and is translated into machine language using an assembler.


title: Software

text: An algorithm for what would have been the first piece of software was written by Ada Lovelace in the 19th century, for the planned Analytical Engine. She created proofs to show how the engine would calculate Bernoulli numbers. Because of the proofs and the algorithm, she is considered the first computer programmer.


title: Software

text: The first theory about software, prior to the creation of computers as we know them today, was proposed by Alan Turing in his 1936 essay, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (decision problem). This eventually led to the creation of the academic fields of computer science and software engineering; both fields study software and its creation. Computer science is the theoretical study of computer and software (Turing's essay is an example of computer science), whereas software engineering is the application of engineering principles to development of software.


title: Software

text: In 2000, Fred Shapiro, a librarian at the Yale Law School, published a letter revealing that John Wilder Tukey's 1958 paper "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" contained the earliest known usage of the term "software" found in a search of JSTOR's electronic archives, predating the OED's citation by two years. This led many to credit Tukey with coining the term, particularly in obituaries published that same year, although Tukey never claimed credit for any such coinage. In 1995, Paul Niquette claimed he had originally coined the term in October 1953, although he could not find any documents supporting his claim. The earliest known publication of the term "software" in an engineering context was in August 1953 by Richard R. Carhart, in a Rand Corporation Research Memorandum.


title: Software

text: Programming tools are also software in the form of programs or applications that developers use to create, debug, maintain, or otherwise support software.


title: Software

text: Software is written in one or more programming languages; there are many programming languages in existence, and each has at least one implementation, each of which consists of its own set of programming tools. These tools may be relatively self-contained programs such as compilers, debuggers, interpreters, linkers, and text editors, that can be combined to accomplish a task; or they may form an integrated development environment (IDE), which combines much or all of the functionality of such self-contained tools. IDEs may do this by either invoking the relevant individual tools or by re-implementing their functionality in a new way. An IDE can make it easier to do specific tasks, such as searching in files in a particular project. Many programming language implementations provide the option of using both individual tools or an IDE.


title: Software

text: People who use modern general purpose computers (as opposed to embedded systems, analog computers and supercomputers) usually see three layers of software performing a variety of tasks: platform, application, and user software.


title: Software

text: Computer software has to be "loaded" into the computer's storage (such as the hard drive or memory). Once the software has loaded, the computer is able to "execute" the software. This involves passing instructions from the application software, through the system software, to the hardware which ultimately receives the instruction as machine code. Each instruction causes the computer to carry out an operation—moving data, carrying out a computation, or altering the control flow of instructions.


title: Software

text: Data movement is typically from one place in memory to another. Sometimes it involves moving data between memory and registers which enable high-speed data access in the CPU. Moving data, especially large amounts of it, can be costly; this is sometimes avoided by using "pointers" to data instead. Computations include simple operations such as incrementing the value of a variable data element. More complex computations may involve many operations and data elements together.


title: Software

text: Software quality is very important, especially for commercial and system software. If software is faulty, it can delete a person's work, crash the computer and do other unexpected things. Faults and errors are called "bugs" which are often discovered during alpha and beta testing. Software is often also a victim to what is known as software aging, the progressive performance degradation resulting from a combination of unseen bugs.


title: Software

text: Many bugs are discovered and fixed through software testing. However, software testing rarely—if ever—eliminates every bug; some programmers say that "every program has at least one more bug" (Lubarsky's Law). In the waterfall method of software development, separate testing teams are typically employed, but in newer approaches, collectively termed agile software development, developers often do all their own testing, and demonstrate the software to users/clients regularly to obtain feedback. Software can be tested through unit testing, regression testing and other methods, which are done manually, or most commonly, automatically, since the amount of code to be tested can be large. Programs containing command software enable hardware engineering and system operations to function much easier together.


title: Software

text: The software's license gives the user the right to use the software in the licensed environment, and in the case of free software licenses, also grants other rights such as the right to make copies.


title: Software

text: Open-source software comes with a free software license, granting the recipient the rights to modify and redistribute the software.


title: Software

text: Software patents, like other types of patents, are theoretically supposed to give an inventor an exclusive, time-limited license for a "detailed idea (e.g. an algorithm) on how to implement" a piece of software, or a component of a piece of software. Ideas for useful things that software could "do", and user "requirements", are not supposed to be patentable, and concrete implementations (i.e. the actual software packages implementing the patent) are not supposed to be patentable either—the latter are already covered by copyright, generally automatically. So software patents are supposed to cover the middle area, between requirements and concrete implementation. In some countries, a requirement for the claimed invention to have an effect on the physical world may also be part of the requirements for a software patent to be held valid—although since "all" useful software has effects on the physical world, this requirement may be open to debate. Meanwhile, American copyright law was applied to various aspects of the writing of the software code.


title: Software

text: Software patents are controversial in the software industry with many people holding different views about them. One of the sources of controversy is that the aforementioned split between initial ideas and patent does not seem to be honored in practice by patent lawyers—for example the patent for aspect-oriented programming (AOP), which purported to claim rights over "any" programming tool implementing the idea of AOP, howsoever implemented. Another source of controversy is the effect on innovation, with many distinguished experts and companies arguing that software is such a fast-moving field that software patents merely create vast additional litigation costs and risks, and actually retard innovation. In the case of debates about software patents outside the United States, the argument has been made that large American corporations and patent lawyers are likely to be the primary beneficiaries of allowing or continue to allow software patents.


title: Software

text: Design and implementation of software vary depending on the complexity of the software. For instance, the design and creation of Microsoft Word took much more time than designing and developing Microsoft Notepad because the former has much more basic functionality.


title: Software

text: Software is usually developed in integrated development environments (IDE) like Eclipse, IntelliJ and Microsoft Visual Studio that can simplify the process and compile the software. As noted in a different section, software is usually created on top of existing software and the application programming interface (API) that the underlying software provides like GTK+, JavaBeans or Swing. Libraries (APIs) can be categorized by their purpose. For instance, the Spring Framework is used for implementing enterprise applications, the Windows Forms library is used for designing graphical user interface (GUI) applications like Microsoft Word, and Windows Communication Foundation is used for designing web services. When a program is designed, it relies upon the API. For instance, a Microsoft Windows desktop application might call API functions in the .NET Windows Forms library like "Form1.Close()" and "Form1.Show()" to close or open the application. Without these APIs, the programmer needs to write these functionalities entirely themselves. Companies like Oracle and Microsoft provide their own APIs so that many applications are written using their software libraries that usually have numerous APIs in them.


title: Software

text: Data structures such as hash tables, arrays, and binary trees, and algorithms such as quicksort, can be useful for creating software.


title: Software

text: Computer software has special economic characteristics that make its design, creation, and distribution different from most other economic goods.


title: Software

text: A person who creates software is called a programmer, software engineer or software developer, terms that all have a similar meaning. More informal terms for programmer also exist such as "coder" and "hacker"although use of the latter word may cause confusion, because it is more often used to mean someone who illegally breaks into computer systems.


title: Will Ferrell

text: John William Ferrell (; born July 16, 1967) is an American actor, comedian, and producer. He first established himself in the mid-1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show "Saturday Night Live", where he performed from 1995 to 2002, and has subsequently starred in comedy films such as "Elf" (2003), "" (2004), "Kicking & Screaming" (2005), "" (2006), "Semi-Pro" (2008), "Step Brothers" (2008), and "Land of the Lost" (2009). He founded the comedy website Funny or Die in 2007 with his writing partner Adam McKay. Other notable film roles include "The Other Guys" (2010), "The Campaign" (2012), "Get Hard" (2015), "Holmes & Watson" (2018), and the animated films "Curious George" (2006), "Megamind" (2010) and "The Lego Movie" film franchise (2014-2019).


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell is considered a member of the "Frat Pack", a generation of leading Hollywood comic actors who emerged in the late 1990s and the 2000s, including Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, Paul Rudd, and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson. He received an Emmy Award nomination for his work on "Saturday Night Live", and three Golden Globe Award nominations for acting in "The Producers" (2005) and "Stranger than Fiction" (2006) and for producing "Vice" (2018). He was also named the best comedian of 2015 in the British "GQ" Men of the Year awards. Ferrell received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 24, 2015.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell was born on July 16, 1967, in Irvine, California, to Betty Kay (née Overman; born 1940), a teacher who taught at Old Mill School elementary school and Santa Ana College, and Roy Lee Ferrell Jr. (born 1941), who played saxophone and keyboards for the Righteous Brothers. His parents were both natives of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. They moved to California in 1964. Ferrell's ancestry includes English, German, and Irish. As an infant Ferrell suffered from pyloric stenosis and had a pyloromyotomy to correct the condition. He has a younger brother, Patrick.


title: Will Ferrell

text: When he was eight years old, his parents divorced. Ferrell said of the divorce: "I was the type of kid who would say, 'Hey, look at the bright side! We'll have two Christmases'." The divorce was amicable, and both parents were committed to their children. The biggest problem was his father's line of work. As a person in show business, his paychecks were never steady, and he traveled from home for months at a time. Growing up in this environment made Ferrell not want to go into show business and instead have a steady job.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell first attended school at Culverdale Elementary and later attended Rancho San Joaquin Middle School, both in Irvine. He attended University High School in Irvine, and was a kicker for the school's varsity football team. He was also on the soccer team and captain of the basketball team, as well as serving on the student council. Ferrell called third grade "a pivotal year." He realized he could make his classmates laugh if he pretended to smash his head against the wall, or if he tripped and fell on purpose, and said it was a great way to make friends. He said the dullness of Irvine contributed to the growth of his humor:


title: Will Ferrell

text: In his senior year of high school, Ferrell and a friend would perform comedy skits over the school's intercom system, with cooperation from the principal; the two had to write their own material. Ferrell also performed comedic skits in the school's talent shows. He was voted "Best Personality" by his classmates. He enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied sports broadcasting and joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. In college, he was known for a few pranks. On occasion, he would dress in a janitor's outfit and stroll into his friends' classes. He was also known for streaking around campus with a few other people from the Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Ferrell earned an internship at a local television station in the sports department, but he did not enjoy the work.


title: Will Ferrell

text: After graduating with a B.A. degree in sports information in 1990, he knew he did not want to do broadcasting. He took up a job as a hotel valet where, on his second day, he tore a baggage rack off the top of a van by trying to drive it under a low beam. He also worked as a teller at Wells Fargo, but came up short $300 the first day and $280 the second; he was not stealing the money, but was just careless and error-prone. In 1991, encouraged by his mother to pursue something he liked, Ferrell moved to Los Angeles. He successfully auditioned for the comedy group The Groundlings where he spent time developing his improvisation skills.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Before joining The Groundlings, Ferrell's attempts at standup comedy had little success. He started in the advanced classes and grew to love improvisation. He realized he also liked to impersonate people, and one of his favorites was Harry Caray, the Hall of Fame baseball announcer. Soon he began to create original characters, and by 1994 he had joined The Groundlings. With fellow Groundlings member Chris Kattan, he created the Butabi Brothers, who go out to dance clubs to try to pick up women but are constantly rejected. While taking classes, Ferrell got a job at an auction house via his friend Viveca Paulin. The job was ideal as it was flexible enough for him to audition and go to rehearsals while also being employed. By 1995 he was receiving small roles, including appearances in TV series "Grace Under Fire" and "Living Single", low-budget films such as "A Bucket of Blood", as well as commercials. One winter, he served as a mall Santa Claus.


title: Will Ferrell

text: After SNL's decline in popularity in 1994–1995, and in need of new cast members for the next season, a producer saw "The Groundlings" and asked Ferrell, Kattan, and Cheri Oteri to audition for SNL's main producer, Lorne Michaels. Ferrell joined "Saturday Night Live" in 1995 and left in 2002 after a seven-year tenure. He has hosted the show five times, thereby becoming a member of the show's Five Timers Club.


title: Will Ferrell

text: During his time on "SNL", Ferrell made a name for himself with his impersonations, which included US President George W. Bush, Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray, singer Robert Goulet (crooning a cappella pieces of music by Sisqó, Baha Men, and The Notorious B.I.G.), singer Neil Diamond, "Inside the Actors Studio" host James Lipton (who favored Ferrell's impersonation), Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, United States Attorney General Janet Reno, convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, game show host Alex Trebek, fictitious private detective John Shaft, professional wrestler Jesse Ventura, US Vice President Al Gore, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and Cuban President Fidel Castro.


title: Will Ferrell

text: His original characters included "Morning Latte" co-host Tom Wilkins, Mister Ed the Horse's twin brother Ned, fictional Blue Öyster Cult member Gene Frenkle (physically modeled after the band's vocalist Eric Bloom), music teacher Marty Culp, cheerleader Craig Buchanan, Dale Sturtevant from "Dissing Your Dog", Hank of the Bill Brasky Buddies, David Leary from "Dog Show", angry and inattentive Dr. Beaman and night clubber Steve Butabi in sketches that were turned into a feature film in 1998's "A Night at the Roxbury". Although a one-shot character, one of Ferrell's most memorable "SNL" characters is Dale McGrew, a "highly patriotic" office worker who comes to work wearing a half t-shirt and short shorts that Ferrell improvised into a thong just before the skit aired live, leading to genuine laughter from the cast and guest host Seann William Scott. Ferrell became the highest paid cast member of "Saturday Night Live" in 2001 with a season salary of $350,000.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell returned to "Saturday Night Live" as a guest host on May 14, 2005; May 16, 2009; May 12, 2012; January 27, 2018, and November 23, 2019. For the first two hosting appearances, he reprised his role as Alex Trebek in the "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches. On the May 14 appearance, Ferrell reprised his role as Robert Goulet in a fake commercial advertising a series of ringtones and, during the performance of the song "Little Sister" by musical guests Queens of the Stone Age, Ferrell came on stage playing the cowbell.


title: Will Ferrell

text: In a 2014 poll taken as part of a commemorative "SNL" feature on "Grantland", Ferrell was voted the best "Saturday Night Live" cast member of all time.


title: Will Ferrell

text: On December 12, 2015, Ferrell appeared in the cold open of the show in character as George W. Bush. He reprised this role when he returned as host in 2018.


title: Will Ferrell

text: During his time on "Saturday Night Live", Ferrell appeared in several movies: "", "A Night at the Roxbury", "Superstar", "The Ladies Man", "Dick", "Drowning Mona", "", "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back", and "Zoolander".


title: Will Ferrell

text: His first starring role after his departure from "Saturday Night Live" was as Frank "The Tank" Richard in "Old School" (2003). The film "belongs to Mr. Ferrell," declared "The New York Times", which described how he "uses his hilarious, anxious zealotry to sell the part." "Old School" was a success and Ferrell received an MTV Movie Awards nomination for Best Comedic Performance.


title: Will Ferrell

text: The title role in "Elf" (2003) followed, as did another MTV Movie Awards nomination. Ferrell continued to land comedy roles in 2004 and 2005 in films such as "Melinda and Melinda", "", and "Starsky & Hutch" earning himself a place among Hollywood's Frat Pack. In 2005, Ferrell earned . In 2006, Ferrell starred in "Stranger Than Fiction" and "". Both received critical and box office success. Ferrell's performance in "Stranger Than Fiction" introduced audiences to the dramatic potential of Ferrell's acting talents, while "Talladega Nights" was his highest grossing live-action opening as of 2010 at $47 million. On , 2006, "The Magazine" named Ferrell as one of its three actors of the year in their 2006 year in review issue. A sequel to Anchorman, "", was released in 2013.


title: Will Ferrell

text: In 2008, Ferrell starred in the movie "Step Brothers" with John C. Reilly. It was directed by frequent Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, who was also a co-writer of the movie. The movie earned $128 million worldwide.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell appeared as part of a pre-game video package for the Rose Bowl along with University of Texas at Austin alum Matthew McConaughey. Ferrell sang a song at the ESPY Awards in 2006 about Lance Armstrong and Neil Armstrong. He and John C. Reilly performed a spot during the 2008 ESPY Awards within which they made demands in order for them to appear at the ESPYs, such as asking Portland Trail Blazers' center Greg Oden to tuck them in at night and tell them stories of the old times or to bring back the Cold War so the Olympics can be interesting again.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell participated in a 79th Academy Awards musical-comedy performance with John C. Reilly and Jack Black, wherein they sang a song about comedies being snubbed by the voters in favor of dramas.


title: Will Ferrell

text: In May 2009, it was announced that Ferrell was in talks to star in a feature film, "Neighborhood Watch" (later "The Watch"), a comedy about an urbanite who moves to the suburbs and uncovers a conspiracy. In negotiations to direct was David Dobkin, who gave Ferrell a cameo in "Wedding Crashers". In August 2009, Ferrell decided not to do the film.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell starred in the feature film "Land of the Lost" (2009). It was a commercial and critical flop, earning on opening weekend—about two-thirds of what the studio expected. In 2010, he was the executive producer and star of "The Other Guys", a buddy cop film which also has an ensemble cast including Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Steve Coogan, Ray Stevenson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Dwayne Johnson. The film was a commercial success earning over $140 million and was positively reviewed by critics.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell appeared in the 2011 music video for "Make Some Noise" by the Beastie Boys, in the front of a limo playing a cowbell. He stars in "Casa de Mi Padre", a telenovela spoof comedy set in a ranch with Mexican stars Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. The movie is told in melodramatic telenovela form and features English-language subtitles. He starred alongside Zach Galifianakis in the 2012 political comedy "The Campaign", which garnered mediocre reviews and grossed $104 million against a budget of $95 million. Also in 2012, he appeared in the comedy "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie" and starred as Armando Álvarez in the Spanish-language comedy "Casa de Mi Padre" which was directed by frequent collaborator Matt Piedmont.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, who have had a long-running joke feud over their similar appearance appeared on the May 22, 2014 episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" for a charity drum-off battle. Despite Smith clearly giving the better performance, Ferrell was named the winner and awarded a giant gold cowbell. Both were joined by Smith's Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmates for a performance of "Don't Fear the Reaper," with Ferrell playing cowbell. On June 10, 2014, Ferrell and Smith challenged Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich to a drum-off with Ferrell, saying Ulrich looks "eerily similar" to the two of them. Ulrich accepted the challenge two days later.


title: Will Ferrell

text: In 2015, he starred in the buddy comedy "Get Hard" and the comedy "Daddy's Home", with the latter reuniting him "The Other Guys" co-star Mark Wahlberg. He reprised his role, Jacobim Mugatu, in the "Zoolander" sequel, "Zoolander 2" (2016).


title: Will Ferrell

text: His film projects include the comedy-drama "Zeroville" (2016), based on the novel of the same name; and portraying director Russ Meyer in "Russ and Roger Go Beyond" (2017), a comedic biopic documenting the making of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls", which was written by film critic Roger Ebert (played by Josh Gad).


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell has worked as a voice actor in several animated television programs and films, including his portrayal of Bob Oblong, a 1950s-style father with no arms or legs, in the short-lived animated television series "The Oblongs". He has had several guest appearances on "Family Guy" where he played the Black Knight in "Mr. Saturday Knight," as well as Fat Greek Guy and Miles "Chatterbox" Musket in "Fifteen Minutes of Shame". Ferrell also starred as Ted (a.k.a. The Man in the Yellow Hat) in the film "Curious George" and guest voiced on an episode of the FOX sitcom "King of the Hill" as a politically correct soccer coach. He voiced the title character in the 2010 DreamWorks Animation feature film "Megamind" (replacing both Robert Downey Jr., who dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, and Ben Stiller, who also turned down the role and was instead cast in a minor role as Bernard the curator) as well as President Business in "The Lego Movie", released in 2014. He reprised the latter role in "", released in 2019.


title: Will Ferrell

text: Ferrell made his Broadway debut taking on departing U.S. President George W. Bush in a one-man show called "You're Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush." The show started performances on , 2009, in previews—Bush's final day in office—at the Cort Theatre and opened officially on . The limited engagement played through , 2009.


title: Will Ferrell

text: In February 2019, Ferrell launched "The Ron Burgundy Podcast" in collaboration with the iHeart Radio Podcast Network. The show was originally slated for two seasons of twelve episodes each. In 2022, the podcast was renewed for a fifth live season.