By: Patrick Cates

If you were to approach STEPHEN MERCHANT (born 1974) and berate him for looking like a myopic ostrich, he would stare vacantly back at you and, after a pause suffused with the awkward comedic tension […]

By: Mark Kingwell

ARTHUR ADOLPH “HARPO” MARX (1888-1964) was a philosopher of silence. Though it started as a way to distinguish him from his voluble brothers, especially front man Groucho, his assumed muteness became a career-long existential conundrum […]

By: HILOBROW

“The above illustration speaks volumes for itself. Destructiveness is the center of all the characteristics named here.” *** According to Louis Allen Vaught, the purpose of Vaught’s Practical Character Reader (1902) is to acquaint readers […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Perhaps the most prolific cartoonist ever for the high-middlebrow/nobrow New Yorker, and creator of the story that inspired the quatsch film Shrek, WILLIAM STEIG (1907-2003) might not seem an obvious hero for HiLobrow.com. Ladies and […]

By: Patrick Cates

If you grew up glued to a television set in England in the ’80s, as I did, nothing irritated you more than local and general election broadcasts, which your parents insisted on watching while you […]

By: Matthew Battles

Kindle, iPhone: both are cool/irksome. But which device is the harbinger of Things to Come? Pointing out that “the Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book,” Jason Kottke urges us to think of […]

By: David Smay

She lacerated the enemies of pleasure.

By: Matthew Battles

A new Levi’s advertisement uses a wax-cylinder recording of what is believed to be Walt Whitman reciting his own poem.   Of course, it’s by no means Whitman’s first trousers ad — O soul in […]

By: James Parker

The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark […]

By: Sarah Weinman

To call “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC (born 1959) a parodist is to understate his technical proficiency and artistic skill. Anyone can satirize a song or a movie and upload it to YouTube, but Weird Al is […]

By: James Parker

As the trickster-philosopher Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People STEVE COOGAN (born 1965) was jaunty, vulnerable, inspired, and frequently full of shit. It was a part only he could have played. When […]

By: David Smay

The world’s foremost contemporary comic theorist led a teenage breakdance crew, and wrote his Cambridge thesis on the American Civil Rights movement before he planted his ass in Eminem’s face. After university SACHA BARON COHEN […]

By: David Smay

Buster Keaton begat two great cinematic heirs, both of whom embraced the elaborately set-up visual gag: Jackie Chan and JACQUES TATI (1907-82). Like so many French icons of the 1950s and ’60s (Serge Gainsbourg, Anna […]

By: Matthew Battles

I asked you to describe the ideal book, one that would save the publishing world and the public sphere in one stroke. And with responses pouring in — nearly three dozen of them — it's […]

By: James Parker

The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of […]