The Improv is back. In June, after an 11-year absence, the franchise opened an outlet in Schaumburg billed as the largest comedy club in America (it seats 450), and its first few months have been packed with big talent. This week offers a rare opportunity to see Bob Saget. Those familiar only with his milquetoast personas on Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos may be shocked by his stand-up act....

The Earl Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Apparently they were trying to prove the press release right: it describes The Earl as a “high-octane, rock ‘n’ roll, in-your-face, on the edge, hilarious, over the top, ass-kicking experience.” But though making Neveu’s hour-long play dude friendly may attract certain audiences, it also cheapens the experience of this surreal, profoundly unsettling one-act. The play centers on three brothers in their mid-20s who regularly play a savage ritualistic game in an abandoned office where they’ve hidden odd weapons–a cup of hot coffee, four darts....

For a while there it looked like Comets on Fire was at risk of becoming an undernourished side project: two years back cofounder Ethan Miller started another group, Howlin Rain, earlier this year drummer Utrillo Kushner released the first disc by his own group, Colossal Yes, and guitarist Ben Chasny has become something of a star playing solo as Six Organs of Admittance. But the quintet’s new full-length, Avatar (Sub Pop), explodes any such concerns, though it’s a low-key album by the anarchic space-rock standard they set on 2004’s Blue Cathedral....

On his new album, Migration (Loud House), singer-songwriter David Olney uses mythology, religion, and other broad metaphors to tackle everyday themes; “Lenora” imagines two lovers as a pair of birds, one of which gets shot down by a hunter’s rifle. The material often runs the risk of becoming insufferably precious, but Olney has a rough, low-key delivery that redeems even his most overwrought imagery. His baritone croon is appealingly muted, as if he’s telling a secret, and his voice easily conveys desperation, melancholy, fear, and sensuality....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the first years he was mayor, Richard M. Daley didn’t have much black support. He was clearly the beneficiary of the African-American split between Eugene Sawyer and Timothy Evans, and widely dismissed as disastrous evidence of a white backlash against the Harold Washington years. While he didn’t lose that often, Daley frequently had to wage bruising battles to get his plans through the City Council, with some of the fiercest criticism coming from aldermen who would later leave for higher office (Bobby Rush, Danny Davis), go to prison (Virgil Jones), or become one of his buddies (Dorothy Tillman)....

This multimedia work by CAMP (Creative Arts Melting Pot) is often visually beautiful but intellectually confusing, combining dance, monologues, short scenes, video, and music to tell a story that doesn’t hold together. Alice (played simultaneously at different ages by Colleen Murray, Heather Kroski, and Laura Chiaramonte) is a naive, lonely 30-year-old, long ago abandoned by her mother, who confuses abuse with love and so finds herself alone and drunk with an awful man in a barn miles from nowhere....

Friday 21 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HEM Dan Messe, the leader of this New York octet, has professed his admiration for countrypolitan, a sound designed in 60s Nashville to put a more urbane pop veneer on country music via heavy string parts and soft-focus background vocals. And only a few weeks ago the New York Times discussed Hem, along with Lambchop and Mike Ireland, in a piece about the new breed of countrypolitan acts....

More Parts per Million (2003), the Thermals’ debut album, seemed to shout “no future” as definitively as any punk record this decade. It wasn’t that the hyper Portland crew posed like they were signaling the apocalypse–if anything their impatient yelps conveyed a puppyish hope. But because each song treated third chords as luxuries and were only millimeters away from becoming rants, the album was a model of such efficient minimalism that only a die-hard Fall fan would expect the formula to work twice without some tinkering....

If you told me five years ago that the most compelling front man in the Chicago punk scene this decade would be a sixty-something political science professor with an anarchist ax to grind, I would’ve said, “Well sure, why not?” I’d like to think we’re above obsessing over a guy’s age just because he’s not in the usual 15-to-25 punk-draftable demographic. F.T., aka Fellow Traveler, aka Mike Weinstein of Purdue University, comes at you with a fiendish gravitas, rattling off hardcore antiauthoritarian manifestos and voicing all the bad thoughts (“I want to have my own suitcase bomb”) that regular folks are afraid to express these days....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Marriage in such societies is generally not, as today’s formulation has it, a ‘relationship between a man and a woman,’ but a relationship between extended families in which the relationship between the particular people married is secondary at best–and often simply irrelevant. Thus, in many societies (such as the Biblical Hebrews), the practice of levirate (in which a man marries his brother’s widow) or sororate (in which a woman marries her sister’s widower) allow the kinship bond between families to remain unbroken regardless of the death of a spouse–structurally equivalent siblings become interchangeable in marriage because their function is identical....

I can hear why some folks write off the Willowz as White Stripes clones. Without a dominating guitarist or coherent lyrical persona, the defining figure in this young Anaheim quartet is Richie James Follin, whose vocals aren’t unfamiliar-sounding. But his squeaky wail sounds less cribbed from Jack than arrived at by draining any residual melanin from 60s garage, and originality (or lack of it) isn’t the point here anyhow. All garage rockers rip off their predecessors–that’s what makes them garage rockers....

Chicago’s first-ever festival focusing on work created by and about artists with disabilities includes performances, visual art, film and video, lectures, and workshops presented throughout the city and in some suburban locations through Sunday, April 30, with several visual art exhibits running beyond that date. More than 50 cultural institutions and community groups are participating; all venues are wheelchair-accessible and have accessible restrooms. Many performances include audio description, word-for-word captioning, or sign-language interpretation....

Possibly the most famous choral work of the 20th century, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, will be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at Ravinia tonight for the first time in 15 years. Unquestionably Orff’s greatest composition, it’s also one of the most frequently paraphrased pieces of music, turning up in everything from commercials to horror films. The explosive opening, the hypnotic, chantlike singing, and the percussion-driven accompaniment work together to create an atmosphere of riveting suspense; with the sudden fortissimos the effect is overwhelming....

Few female country singers from the 60s were as good or as consistent as CONNIE SMITH, who was a steady presence on the top-ten charts through the end of the decade. She scored her first (and biggest) hit in 1964 with Bill Anderson’s “Once a Day,” and the run that followed was nothing less than phenomenal. Though most acts on RCA’s roster were subjected to the urbane, overdone Nashville Sound that label head Chet Atkins helped develop, Smith benefited from Bob Ferguson’s twangier, more straight-ahead production style....

Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, set in a contemporary office, could easily have been obvious, labored, or self-important. In this world premiere production, sharply directed by Brandon Bruce, it’s a delightful comedy with heart–if not quite The Divine Comedy, a warm and thoroughly satisfying evening. As the eponymous Denise struggles to rectify an innocent mistake but finds herself in ever deeper trouble, she and her few allies become more than stereotypes, and we begin rooting for them to escape their corporate hell....

Dubious Conclusions Kaplan had seen Million Dollar Baby and written Ebert at the urging of a Chicago-based group of disability rights activists, Not Dead Yet. That was Not Dead Yet picketing outside the Union League Club on January 19 when the Chicago Film Critics Association gathered to honor Robert Altman. Not Dead Yet was angry that Ebert and company hadn’t protested the film’s shocking ending. Paralyzed in the ring, Maggie, the boxer played by Hilary Swank, would rather die than live as a quadriplegic, even with a devoted Frankie Dunn at her beck and call....

Thank you for the recent cover story “Growing Old in Gitmo” [by Tori Marlan, October 4] chronicling how the U.S. government has detained hundreds of men in the U.S.-controlled detention facility at Guantanamo Bay without charge and without the opportunity to challenge their detention in U.S. courts–violations of fundamental due process and basic human rights. The past five years since January 11, 2002, have been a degrading experience, both for the detainees and for the United States....

“I’m a Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy from New Jersey,” says Maysoon Zayid. It’s all true, but don’t worry, she expects you to laugh. Now based in New York, she headlines a city-sponsored evening of ethnic jokes and political humor, “Global Giggles.” Hosted by Chicagoan Mickey O, it also includes four members of his Cultural Madness comedy team: south-siders Frank Townsend (Barbershop, BET’s Comicview) and Joey Villagomez; Kumail, a Pakistani-American from Uptown; and Wrigleyville Irish-American Sean Flannery....

Kitchen Chicago That’s what Alexis Frankfort discovered about a year ago. She’d left her job as a portfolio analyst at Merrill Lynch for frosting. “I loved buttercream, so I went to pastry school,” she says. “Buttercream just keeps me going.” After training at the City Colleges of Chicago’s French Pastry School, she landed at Bittersweet for a year (“great buttercream,” she notes). It was only after she started craving her own business that she realized “you couldn’t do it out of your house....

During much of the 90s it was common–and not entirely unfair–to knock John Wesley Harding as a B-grade Elvis Costello. Their voices sounded uncannily alike, they had a similar taste for wordplay-laden folk pop, and, perhaps most damning of all, they shared band members–a pair of Attractions made up the backing band on Harding’s first studio album. But in recent years the crown of B-grade Costello has been transferred onto the pate of Mr....