3175 N. Broadway 773-327-3175 laughfactory.com Runner-Up Up Comedy Club

Seed Local synth artist Brett Naucke (who we interviewed back in February in anticipation of his Synth-Chili Cook-Off) released his new LP, Seed, on experimental imprint Spectrum Spools last week, and he’s spent the entire month of April playing nonstop in support of it. Tonight Naucke plays two shows, and between his work with art-rock collective Ono (who he recently joined) and his solo sets, these will be his 12th and 13th shows of the month....

In his potent new play for Colectivo el Pozo, Chicago playwright Raúl Dorantes shows a knack for extracting a kind of ironic mythic resonance from thorny cultural narratives about immigration, creating a destabilizing, impish, mystifying 70 minutes. In this magical, menacing world, the gods of nearly every immigrant group die on their journey to America. The lone exception is the ancient Mesoamerican bat god Camazotz—a blood-feeding, cave-dwelling creature who plays a particularly frightening role in the Kiche creation saga Popol Vuh—who’s arrived in Chicago undocumented....

Carl Socolow Alarm Will Sound Today the city began announcing the lineups for its summer music programming in Millennium Park, releasing information about Loops & Variations, their series of somewhat awkwardly paired double bills of electronic music artists and contemporary classical groups. Lineups for Downtown Sound and Made in Chicago: World Class Jazz are reportedly coming later this week. The series, which runs at Pritzker Pavilion on Thursdays at 6:30 PM between May 29 and July 3, presents some of the city’s finest and most interesting new music ensembles and a motley array of touring acts, some of which sound more like indie-rock bands (Ghost Beach, Yacht) than cutting-edge electronica....

Since 2010, Brooklyn-via-Toronto label Orchid Tapes has been releasing albums by young songwriters whose delightfully warm material exudes an intimacy I usually associate with bedroom acts. I don’t entirely endorse the use of “bedroom pop” to describe Orchid Tapes’ catalog, as the term doesn’t speak to some of the musicians’ flair for experimentation—take Three Love Songs, the proper full-length debut by Ricky Eat Acid (aka Sam Ray), on which Ray samples a cover of Drake’s “Take Care” and drops it on a house track that’s sandwiched between a couple lovely ambient numbers....

Judging from the memorial to fallen cyclist Louis Ray Smith at the East Garfield Park crash site, the 56-year-old was beloved. On Homan Avenue about 200 feet south of the roaring Lake Street elevated train, relatives and friends planted red-white-and-blue artificial flowers in the grass and burned memorial candles on the curb. A colorful lei and a stuffed beagle with “Snoop” and “Smooth,” the nicknames of friends, written in marker on its fur, are tied to a tree....

When I met her, Edna Pardo was the person at the League of Women Voters who knew absolutely everything you had to know about property taxes and municipal finances in Chicago. “OK, Edna, one more time—how do they calculate the EAV?” After World War II she married Lou Pardo, a party leader in Indianapolis, with whom she had three children. This was, of course, at the height of the red scare....

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Not Normal Tapes’ logo Back in March Gossip Wolf reported on the five-year anniversary festival for local hardcore label Not Normal Tapes, and the celebration finally begins this weekend! The blowout starts tomorrow afternoon and punk groups are flying in from all around the US (Texas, Oklahoma, Rhode Island) to help a mess of local bands honor Not Normal. The lineup is killer, and I’m particularly interested in the Saturday night show: it features demented, acid-fried Indiana hardcore group Big Zit and Wisconsin’s Tenement, a three-piece Luca Cimarusti hails for their perfect take on fuzzy midwestern pop punk....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, August 23, 2017. Data shows the financial challenges facing Chicago Public Schools Crain’s Chicago Business has compiled 11 years of data from Chicago Public Schools financial reports, including “total revenues and expenditures by year, debt service and total debt, student enrollment, the number of employees, pension payments and pension debt,” with help from the Civic Federation and the Center for Budget and Tax Accountability....

David Campigotto seemed unnerved that I was taking my cassoulet to go. “If you cover the beans while they’re hot it can make them pass out,” he told me, insisting I leave the lids ajar on the two 32-ounce plastic deli cups he had carefully packed with sausage, pork rib and duck leg confit, creamy white haricots lingots, and a heart-stopping amount of fat. “You can make a cassoulet out of whatever you want,” he said....

Anamanaguchi’s 2013 album, Endless Fantasy—which was funded by an impressive Kickstarter campaign—is a little over 76 minutes long. Seventy-six minutes is a lot of chiptune to endure. But while the hyper-eight-bit album of video game-ready music might not lend itself to a single, continuous listen, it’s still fun in pockets—if for no other reason than to just listen to how spazzy it gets. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “John Hughes,” which is as Nintendo-generation a name as there ever was, is a rock song at heart, simple and upbeat....

Name two great tastes that taste great together. Uhhhhh . . . But what’s most curious about the pizza at PyPP’Ya is the crust, which is a very thin, dense, crunchy, well-done cracker style that bears no resemblance to Chicago’s own cracker crusts. You can top it with more orthodox ingredients to your taste, or you can order any combination of the above on a deep-dish crust. But despite the prominence of the pizza, what has most people swinging through the doors is the broad array of Colombian pastries, breads, and sweets crafted each morning in an adjoining kitchen whose doings you can observe from the sidewalk outside if, like me, you tend to freeze and gape in the presence of steady, confident dough handling....

More than 100 years ago, a Life magazine cartoon satirizing New York City real estate ads didn’t mock overpriced apartment leases. Instead, artist A.B. Walker’s Manhattan skyscraper was roofless and without exterior walls and soared into the stratosphere amid clouds and Wright Flyer-style airplanes. It proposed a unique open-air “country house” experience on every floor, each fitted with grandiose cottages, trees, and fountains. After unearthing a history of taverns, clubs, and more that were once home to Chicago’s LGBT community, Fake set out to visually re-create those spaces in Memory Palaces, an elaborate, almost LP-size art book of psychedelic-quillike graphic design....

I say “less than 30 years old” so I won’t have to choose between Dead Rider and Cheer-Accident, but there isn’t the brightest line between the two bands. Guitarist and front man Todd Rittman, who launched Dead Rider in 2009, used to play in Cheer-Accident himself; Thymme Jones and Andrea Faught, who sing backup and play varying combinations of synth, bass, and trumpet, are founding and part-time members of Cheer-Accident, respectively....

It’s the middle of the night near Cermak and Canal, and the police lieutenant is angry. That’s Crime Story, the spectacular police drama that ran on NBC from September 1986 to May 1988, long before Dick Wolf settled on our shores. From the locations to the dialogue, nothing quite as quintessentially Chicago—save, perhaps, 1993’s The Fugitive—has been filmed here since. “Well,” the detective says before walking off, “he’s got a sick mind....

24 A quick look at the temperatures recorded and predicted for this week makes it hard to tell which season we’re in: fall, spring, or summer. A quick look at the movie premiere schedule, however, indicates we are already in blockbuster season. So it makes sense that Fox would roll out 24: Live Another Day, the latest “worst day ever” in the life of Jack Bauer, a CIA agent-cum-fugitive. The new miniseries (at 12 episodes, it’s half the length of a regular season) has all the blustering action and great cinematography of its previous iterations, as well as a (possibly) controversial take on a hot-button issue....

Christophe Pallot/Agence Zoom/Gerry Images Europe Mikaela Shiffrin competed in Flachau, Austria, earlier this month Four years ago, almost to the day, my back went out and I spent two weeks in bed. Those happened to be the two weeks of the winter Olympics. I’ve been grateful to my subconscious ever since. Here’s what I’m wondering: NBC will undoubtedly milk Mikaela Shiffrin for every ounce of heart-warming drama in her and a few ounces more they concoct out of thin air....