Last night I attended an event entitled "Great Speeches and Other Outbursts" at the Symphony Space uptown put together by author and NPR favorite Sarah Vowell to benefit 826NYC. The event had a host of well know comedians and actors reading famous and infamous speeches throughout history ranging from Vowell's own version of Chief Seattle's 1854 speech addressing concession of land to Daily Show comic John Oliver's version of John Cleese's eulogy for fellow Monty Python actor Graham Chapman to This American Life host Ira Glass's rendition of a speech from Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The event also featured performers such as: Eric Bogosian, Amy Sedaris, Bobby Cannavale (The Mutherf***er with the Hat), and The Daily Show's John Hodgman (The PC guy) & Wyatt Cenac.
The pinnacle of the evening was the re-interpretation of the famous interview Woody Allen did with the Reverend Billy Grahm on his television show in the 60's which I posted below and featured Cannavale as Allen and Bogosian as Grahm as well as the rest of the crew acting as audience members. In all it was a pretty amazing evening which aided a great charity with a number of highlights such as a very emotional performance from Eric Bogosian, an awesome interpretation of Teddy Roosevelt by John Hodgman which featured push up and jumping jack breaks, and as Philip J. Fry said, a whole lot of "smart-making".
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