The trailer is out for GLOW, an upcoming Netflix series starring your girlfriend and mine, Alison Brie (sorry, Dave Franco). And boy, does it look good.

“GLOW” is an acronym— and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling is a real entertainment circuit that had its heyday in the 1980s, when this series takes place. Brie’s character, Ruth Wilder (please be Jewish, please be Jewish) is a struggling actor who winds up in the pro-wrestling business, where she finds an unlikely sisterhood, and empowerment and success in a way she never expected. Marc Maron also stars as Sam Sylvia, the somewhat skeezy director of the operation.

Historically, there weren’t that many Jews involved with GLOW, but two prominent performers, Chainsaw and Spike, aka the Heavy Metal Sisters (born Sharon and Donna Willinsky, respectively), were. But the new TV show is fictionalized, so here’s hoping. Regardless, the series features a diverse cast, and Brie is perfect and amazing, so we’re off to a great start.

Plus, Jenji Kohan is attached as one of the executive producers, so you really can’t go wrong. (Plus, former Jewcy and current Tablet writer Rachel Shukert is part of the production team.)

GLOW hits Netflix on June 23rd. In the meantime, check out the amazing, funny, touching trailer below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZqDO6cTYVY

Image via YouTube.

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“I was like what am I gonna get out of that guy? He isn’t fucked up!” Marc Maron says at the 20 minute mark during his new WTF podcast with funny guy/Jewish heartthrob Andy Samberg.

I find the best part about this interview is how bent of out shape Marc Maron gets from the fact that 35-year-old Samberg is so genuinely well adjusted to life. Through nervous “yeah’s” (where you feel Marc’s head spinning from Andy’s normalcy), he learns that Andy isn’t from Great Neck, Long Island, as Manon assumed from his prototypical “Jewness,” but actually born to a pair of hippies who fled Jewcity, NY for San Francisco in 1970. To Maron’s shock, Andy has a pre-school teaching mom whose fluent in sign language, and a photographer dad (with a studio and EVERYTHING).

Samberg said at the 20.45 minute mark:

“Bill Hader always talks about how we’re a well adjusted generation of comedy. It started with Jack Black and Ferrell, then trickled down into the Poehlers and the Seth Myers’.”

Marc goes on to ask Andy about what it was like being a Bay area Jew at the 21.40 minute mark, and learned that Samberg grew up identifying as a Jew but didn’t get a bar mitzvah. Nowadays he assures Maron that his family is much more observant. This I take, has a great deal to do with the fact that his sister made aliyah and married an Israeli. Now Samberg says, “my family does Shabbat every week and observes the High Holidays. I fast on Yom Kippur.” Earlier in the interview Samberg cracks a joke on how he feels about Israel:

“A friend of mine, Simon Rich, a writer on SNL said a quote I love, “I’m so relaxed in my life, and I can just take any interest I want, and care about whatever I want, because I know as a Jewish man, that as soon as I turn 50, all I’m going to care about is Israel.”

Thankfully, the older Samberg gets, the more Jewish he’s becoming. The two also go into great detail about Andy and Lonely Island (his comedy band with fellow mates Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone), loving hip-hop, and using black humor in his comedy. Samberg gets the nods and handshakes from fellow rappers, and feels he’s done whatever he’s doing, right.

“We went to high school together (Lonely Island) so we’ve known each other a long time. One of things we generally all agree on, is that doing rap’s for comedy if you’re a white person is a very slippery slope, because its not really your place. And also because most people who try it aren’t good at it; they just don’t sound good. In our opinion, we have to a make it sound legit, and have a genuine knowledge and respect for that world. We’re not from that culture, we’re fans of that culture.”

Best highlight came at the 15 minute mark:

Maron says, “When you first came on the scene, not unlike many peers in my age group, the consensus was, who the fuck is that Jewish kid? How often is there a good looking Jewish kid? When does that happen? Maybe that was just me.”

Andy replies, “I hope that it was more than just you, because it makes me feel really good about myself. You want to be the good looking Jewish kid!”

For the full interview which includes more on Lonely Island, how he got into comedy, and Andy’s fascination with the pro-wrestling, see here.

(Photo by Getty)

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Actress Elizabeth Banks, most recently seen in The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect (which she produced with her husband), sat down with Marc Maron this week for his WTF Podcast, and their conversation was pretty interesting. Banks is sharp and funny and calls the Olsen twins elves. She also opens up about her working-class Catholic upbringing in Pittsfield, MA, and eventual conversion to Judaism.

“So you met a Jew at Penn,” Maron offers a little after the 30 minute (!) mark.

“Yeah, it’s real hard,” she quips. “It’s like, throw a dart.”

There were a few Jewish kids at her high school, she explains, but most of them lived on the other side of town and went to a different middle school, so she didn’t meet them until they got to high school—which meant no bar mitzvahs for her, sadly.

“So how’d you make the ship from Jesus to Jew?” Maron asks at minute 35.

The story is sweet. Banks met Max Handelman, her future husband, her first day at college. They kept running into each other, and one night she ended up at one of his AEPi frat parties. (She says the ZBT guys were douches from Long Island who all work on Wall Street now. Also I love her.) They went on a date to a jazz club in Philly—it was one of her first rides in a taxi—where they drank bourbon and didn’t get carded. She made the first move, “and then it just went from there.”

“Now was there pressure on you to be a Jew?” Maron asks, before calling Banks a “shiksa goddess Jew.” (“People love that when the shiksas come over,” she fires back.)

“No religion meant as much to me as Judaism meant to my husband,” Banks explains. There were also the in-laws. “We got married after 10 and a half years, and for the first five years I’m positive that his father did not learn my last name,” she says. “I’m positive that his dad was like, ‘This is Portnoy’s Complaint…my son will marry a Jewish girl.” (Of course, what they really cared about was the grandkids. “My kids are Jewish, so they’re happy,” she explains.)

She went through the conversion process, studying with different rabbis. “I did not have my mikveh, so technically I’m not converted,” she admits, but it’s only because she was never in L.A. long enough at one time to have done what she calls the 11-week “You’re a Jew now class.” And she’s been practicing Judaism for so long at this point, she explains, that finalizing the institutional process seems more like a needless formality than anything else.

“I’ve been essentially a Jew for like 15 years,” she says. “I haven’t had a Christmas tree in 15 years.”

“But are you like, officially a Jew?” Maron prods.

“I’m not officially stamped, but by all accounts yes,” she explains. “My kids go to Jewish pre-school, we only celebrate Jewish holidays, I love seder.”

“Frankly, because I’m already doing everything, I feel like I’m as Jewish as I’m ever going to be.”

It’s a very Jewish way of thinking, actually. Consider yourself at home, Banks.

Here are some other gems from the interview, which is really, really long, but totally worth it:

• She took Latin for six years: “I was a real nerdball,” she explains.

• She’s a TriDelt.

• She graduated Penn magna cum laude.

• She played Pontius Pilate in a high school performance of Jesus Christ Superstar.

• Her dream rom-com co-star? Channing Tatum: “I would work that.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

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If Krusty the Klown had grown up in in Kent, England and studied Classics at Oxford, he might have become Andy Zaltzman. A politically conscious Jewish comedian whose most distinctive features are his wild fringe of orange hair and an obsession with puns, Zaltzman is one half of The Bugle, a comedy podcast that he created with fellow Brit John Oliver in 2007. Bearing the tagline “Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” The Bugle is not only hilarious, it’s also a perfect antidote to the dull pablum of corporate television news. With weekly episodes running as long as 45 minutes, The Bugle is lively, weird, and fantastically droll. Often it feels like a more freewheeling, smarter version of The Daily Show, for which John Oliver is a writer and a featured correspondent.

Oliver’s profile in the United States has surged over the last couple years; besides his Daily Show work, he’s hosted standup specials for Comedy Central and appeared regularly on Community and in The Smurfs movie. Oliver’s busy schedule—and his home being in New York—makes it all the more impressive that he has stuck with Zaltzman, who continues to grind out a living doing standup, earning occasional TV credits, and writing a blog for ESPNcricinfo, a cricket website owned by ESPN.

But besides showing loyalty to an old friend, perhaps Oliver simply understands that Zaltzman is a brilliant comedian, one who distinguishes himself by his ability to mix low-brow, groaning humor with scabrous political satire. It also doesn’t hurt that despite the transatlantic divide between the hosts, the show remains incredibly popular, with listeners in 145-odd countries and, in 2011, an average of two million downloads per month.

Although The Bugle takes on world news—Oliver and Zaltzman take particular delight in going after the bloated pageantry of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—it’s often at its best when skewering Anglo-American pieties. During the Olympics, Zaltzman filed near daily “micro-Bugles,” which formed a kind of alternative history to the host country’s displays of Queen-and-country empire-lite pride (“A grand effort all round by London. Just 346 years after it burned to the ground, this city has truly bounced back”)

But the pair are as well versed in American politics as those of their native England, and their episode on the LIBOR banking scandal is essential listening for its explanatory value alone. Zaltzman published a book of satire early in the 2008 financial crisis, called Does Anything Eat Bankers? which fielded financial questions from dogs and used a parable of Jesus feeding the hungry with fish fingers to explain the concept of credit. The comedian’s politics are of the left but he’s contemptuous towards any sort of party politics. He’s said that officials have been engaged in “elongated game of economic pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey” and called the US presidential election a “multi-billion-dollar squawking contest.”

But Zaltzman is a far more entertaining figure on radio (he also appears on the BBC Radio show “Tonight With Rory Bremmer”), where he’s better served by his relentless streams of cheap puns (five solid minutes is his record) and his swift back-and-forth with Oliver. The two bring out the best in one another—when together, Oliver moderates his Daily Show persona’s short temper, which has always mistaken loudness for cleverness; and Zaltzman can lean on a partner who gets his policy references and shares his gleefully self-hating attitude towards all things British.

The Bugle recently marked its two hundredth episode—“one of the greatest moments in the history of human civilization,” Zaltzman called it—and it seems unlikely to slow down. The show has survived being dropped by its former sponsor, the Times of London, and may start a membership program to recoup costs. For now it remains a highlight in what is an increasingly crowded world of comedy podcasts, radio sketch shows, and interview programs like Marc Maron’s WTF. A whole constellation of audio comedy has emerged in recent years, drawing as much on the tradition of old stage shows as on the latest sitcoms. Few of them, however, can make jokes about tax policy funny; Andy Zaltzman somehow manages.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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• The best part of Jewish Congressman Barney Frank’s weekend wedding to his partner Jim Ready? The couple vowed to love each other “on MSNBC or on Fox.”

• Yowza: meet the ‘Merica, an all-bacon burger.

• These days, Aaron Sorkin plays “Salieri to David Chase’s or Matthew Weiner’s Mozart.”

• How comedian Marc Maron turned spite into spotlight.

• Who says Bar Refaeli can’t swim with her glasses on, physics be damned?

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• A 75-year-old Yiddish bookstore reopens in Long Island City.

• Jewcy favorite Alison Brie is reportedly dating James Franco’s younger brother, Dave.

• Describing comedian Marc Maron’s WTF podcast: “Every problem on WTF can be explained by a mother, a father, a cultural weirdness, Judaism, or addiction.”

• Today’s Bar Refaeli news comes in video form, from her appearance on Conan where she discussed the things she knows best, like underwear:

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• Johnny Knoxville and Andy Samberg as 3 Stooges?

• Michael Hearst of One Ring Zero interviews Mary Roach at Largehearted Boy.

• A story about a German dog who learned to salute Hitler, and pissed off the Nazis.

• The New York Times profiles Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.   Of course if you read Jewcy, you already saw him profiled almost six months ago.

• Baseball great Hank Greenberg would have turned 100 this week.

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• Samuel Elias, aka “Dutch Sam,” “The Terrible Jew” and “Star of the East,” and six other people have been inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

• Howard Stern is staying put.

• The National and Marc Maron closed out the annual Yo La Tengo Hanukkah shows.

• Frylock and the rest of Aqua Teen Hunger Force give sex advice at Nerve.

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