The following outline provides an overview of and topical guide to entertainment and the entertainment industry:
Summerfest is an annual music festival held in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. First held in 1968, Summerfest is located at Henry Maier Festival Park, adjacent to Lake Michigan and Milwaukee's central business district. Summerfest attracts approximately 800,000 people each year, promoting itself as "The World's Largest Music Festival", a title certified by Guinness World Records in 1999, but has been surpassed in attendance by Donauinselfest with over three million in 2015. While Summerfest has one of the highest aggregate attendances in the world, the daily attendance of Summerfest is lower than other major American music festivals. In 2022, the daily attendance of Summerfest was 49,500.
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman was an American entertainer and performance artist. While often called a "comedian", Kaufman preferred to describe himself instead as a "song and dance man". He has sometimes been called an "anti-comedian". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in an interview, "I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him. My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can."
Stand-up comedy is a comedic performance to a live audience in which the performer addresses the audience directly from the stage. The performer is known as a comedian, comic, or stand-up. It is usually a rhetorical performance but many comics employ crowd interaction as part of their set or routine.
Leo Anthony Gallagher Jr., known mononymously as Gallagher, was an American comedian who became one of the most recognizable comedic performers of the 1980s for his prop and observational routine that included the signature act of smashing a watermelon on stage with a wooden sledgehammer. For more than 30 years, he played between 100 and 200 shows a year, destroying tens of thousands of melons with the sledgehammer he called the "Sledge-O-Matic". This last sketch was meant to poke fun at infomercials who peddled similarly inane products and whose popularity apexed in the late 1970s/early '80s before waning during the '90s.
Brian Joseph Regan is an American stand-up comedian who uses observational, sarcastic, and self-deprecating humor. He is known for incorporating body language and facial expressions into his act. His performances are often described as clean as he refrains from profanity as well as taboo subject matter. Regan's material typically covers everyday events, such as shipping a package with UPS, mortgages, and visits to the optometrist. While he does not define himself as youth-oriented, Regan makes frequent references to childhood, including little league baseball, grade school spelling bees, and science projects.
Raymond Neil Combs Jr. was an American stand-up comedian, actor and game show host. He began his professional career in the late 1970s. His popularity on the stand-up circuit led to him being signed as the second host of the game show Family Feud in its second run and first revival. The show aired on CBS from 1988–1993 and was in syndication from 1988–1994. From 1995 to 1996, Combs hosted another game show, Family Challenge.
Wembley Arena is an indoor arena next to Wembley Stadium in Wembley, London, England. The 12,500-seat facility is London's second-largest indoor arena after The O2 Arena, and the ninth-largest in the United Kingdom.
Cincinnati Gardens was an indoor arena located in Cincinnati, Ohio, that opened in 1949. The 25,000 square foot brick and limestone building at 2250 Seymour Avenue in Bond Hill had a entrance that was decorated with six three-dimensional carved athletic figures. When it opened, its seating capacity of 11,000+ made it the seventh largest indoor arena in the United States.
The UW–Milwaukee Panther Arena is an indoor arena located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The arena, which seats as many as 12,700 people and offers 41,700 square feet (3,874 m2) of floor space, is part of a larger downtown campus, that includes the Milwaukee Theatre and Wisconsin Center.
An open mic or open mike is a live show at a venue such as a coffeehouse, nightclub, comedy club, strip club, or pub, usually taking place at night, in which audience members may perform on stage whether they are amateurs or professionals, often for the first time or to promote an upcoming performance. As the name suggests, performers are usually provided with a microphone plugged into a PA system so that they can be heard by the audience.
Thea R. Vidale is an American stand-up comedian and actress. Vidale is perhaps best known for her role as Thea Armstrong-Turrell in the ABC sitcom Thea, which originally aired from 1993 until 1994. Vidale is noted as the first African American female comedian to have a television series named after her.
Jeffrey Douglas Dunham is an American ventriloquist, stand-up comedian and actor who has also appeared on numerous television shows, including Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central Presents, The Tonight Show and Sonny With a Chance. He has six specials that run on Comedy Central: Arguing with Myself, Spark of Insanity, Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special, Controlled Chaos, Minding the Monsters, and All Over the Map. Dunham also starred in The Jeff Dunham Show, a series on the network in 2009.
Festival Hall is a heritage listed entertainment venue located at 300 Dudley Street, West Melbourne, Victoria. It is one of Melbourne's larger concert venues and has hosted a variety of local and international acts over many years.
In sports, a card lists the matches taking place in a title match combat-sport event. Cards include a main event match and the undercard listing the rest of the matches. The undercard may be divided into a midcard and a lower card, according to the perceived importance of the matches. Promoters schedule matches to occur in ascending order of importance.
Joke Thieves is a conceptual stand-up comedy show format created and hosted by the British comedian Will Mars. It was first staged at the London comedy club Downstairs at the King's Head in June 2013. The show later debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that year, drawing capacity crowds nightly, and again at the 2014 and 2015 festivals. Joke Thieves has since toured internationally, featuring a changing line-up of established stand-up comics, character comedians and occasional sketch groups. After a couple of years of one off performances, the Sketch group version of the show enjoyed its first full run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015.
Flappers Comedy Club and Restaurant is a live comedy club with two California locations: one in Burbank, and one in Claremont. Notable celebrity comedians who have performed at Flappers have included Jerry Seinfeld, Maria Bamford, Kevin Hart, Gabriel Iglesias, Bill Burr, Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler, Christopher Titus, Jimmy Dore, Rob Schneider, Brendan Cooney and Craig Shoemaker.
The roots of modern stand-up comedy began in 1840s minstrel shows that perpetuated racist stereotypes in the United States. American vaudeville emerged around the same time and along with the later developed Chitlin' Circuit, produced the founders of this form of entertainment. Early stand-up comedians spoke directly to the audience as themselves without props or costumes, which distinguished these acts from vaudeville performances. These comics stood in front of the curtain during their shows, like early 20th century "front cloth" stand-up comics in Britain and Ireland whose numbers allowed the stage behind them to be re-set for another act.
