Elliott Kalan

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Elliot Kalan (born 1981, New York City) is an American comedian, and a writer for the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Kalan grew up in New Jersey and attended New York University, majoring in screenwriting. Today, Kalan lives in New York City where he began at The Daily Show as a production assistant, before moving up to producer and, ultimately, writer.

Before writing for The Daily Show, Kalan was co-founder of the comedy group the Hypocrites with fellow TV writer Brock Mahan ([1]). He also hosted a live talk/variety stage show, The Primetime Kalan, (originally the The Midnight Kalan and later The New Kalan Show) It was created by Kalan, producer Erik Marcisak, and director Joe Guercio, and written and performed by Kalan, Marcisak, and Dan McCoy. Many of Kalan's Daily Show co-workers appeared on his show, including Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Rob Corddry.

Kalan occasionally appears in bit parts on The Daily Show and provided voice-over narration for "The Decider" comic-book segments. He was instrumental in putting together the "gay cowboy" montage (a comedic series of clips from classic westerns, illustrating that the gay content in Brokeback Mountain is nothing new), when Jon Stewart hosted the 78th Academy Awards.

Currently Kalan writes a weekly column for the free morning NYC-area daily Metro. Following a column he wrote in the August 3, 2007 issue of the Metro, Kalan was fired for writing a self-deprecating joke about the increasing obsolescence of the newspaper industry. This was followed by a brief article in New York Magazine on August 20, 2007 about the incident, which was heavily publicized on internet blogs including Media Bistro, Huffington Post, and Gawker. Many blog postings about the incident imply that the Metro violated basic principles of journalism and freedom of expression in firing Kalan. Perhaps as a result of this publicity, he was later re-hired.

He also performs as a stand-up comic, and co-hosts a bad movie podcast with Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington, named "The Flop House." One supplemental episode of the Flop House, in which Kalan improvised a rapid-fire pitch for a film based on the comic Ziggy became a minor viral Internet success, after being posted on Gawker.

[edit] External links

• The Hypocrites
• Biography of Kalan
• The Apiary - article on Kalan's show
• Ziggy pitch on Gawker
• Elliott Kalan at the IMDB

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