Gastor Almonte is an East New York comedian. In Immigrant Made, his debut standup album, he tells stories about what it was like growing up in Brooklyn as the son of Dominican immigrants, how gentrification is affecting his neighbourhood, and how parenthood has changed him. (On having to see Avengers on a Sunday at 8:30 in the morning, he deadpans: “People were having Raisinets for breakfast. This shit is disturbing.”) You can find the album on iTunes, Spotify or watch the video version on Amazon Prime Video.

Here’s how he parents.

Mission to Zyxx might be the best podcast. This science fiction comedy -- a mix of Star Trek, Star Wars, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- that leans on original jokes instead of references, is definitely the best of the current wave of fictional podcasts, partly because of its unique process. The cast improvises each episode with just a loose premise to guide them.

Then a three-person team edits and sound designs the show, cutting it down by over half and adding sound effects, voice effects, music, transitions, and ambience. The end result is as fresh as any improv show, but as slick as anything scripted. In a detailed instalment of How I Work, all seven of the show's cast and crew broke down their creative and technical process for each episode. There's lots to learn in here for comedians, actors, writers, editors, and sound professionals.

This week we chatted with Samantha Irby, comedian, writer, mastermind behind the blog Bitches Gotta Eat, and author of the collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, as well as the collection Meaty. We crowned her as the voice of her generation, talked marriage and The Bachelorette, and found out why she dedicated her book to Klonopin.

For years, there was one good satirical news site on the internet. The Onion (now a sister blog of Lifehacker) had many imitators, none of them successful. Then the field opened up: Reductress parodied women’s media; Babylon Bee and Landover Baptist made fun of Christian culture; the Onion launched a weirder site called Clickhole. And The Hard Times, a seemingly niche site satirizing punk culture, blew up. The Hard Times and its gamer spinoff The Hard Drive recently attracted 2.3 million monthly readers.

“Why did the sandwich get out of the bathtub?” my son once asked me when he was five years old.

Netflix continues its transformation from streaming platform to glorified HBO competitor, adding dozens of original titles in April while losing lots of its licensed catalogue. If you’re underwhelmed by Netflix’s own work and you were in this for the classic film library, it might be time to unsubscribe.

Hey, I love a teleprompter. I wrote about how good teleprompters are already. But SNL doesn’t use them; they use cue cards, as they love to point out now and then in meta sketches. And they show their cue card process in the video above, which is way more fun than the thumbnail implies.

This March on US Netflix, we’re getting Doubt, The Notebook, A Clockwork Orange, Apollo 13, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and the original Wet Hot American Summer. There’s a long list of original shows and films, including the second half of Arrested Development season 5. Hoo boy. Any fans of the new season here?

There's some great stuff coming to Netflix this month: About a Boy, Billy Elliot, Jaws, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, more Chef’s Table, and the Mexican edition of Nailed It! Great stuff to watch before it leaves: Children of Men, Clerks, The Big Lebowski, The Bourne Ultimatum, and Shaun of the Dead. I think I watched all of these on a laptop in my dorm. Here’s everything that’s coming and going on US Netflix in February.

It’s the weekend! Time to wind down, watch some videos, and hide from the heat indoors. We’ve been watching a classic series of deadpan fake instructional videos, Infinite Solutions. These fakes were so good, they fooled Gizmodo back in 2007.

It’s our first live recording of the Upgrade, performed in front of an audience at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. Joining us are comedians Chris Gethard (Lose Well, “The Chris Gethard Show”) and Akilah Hughes (“It’s Akilah, Obviously”), as well as Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings of Gimlet Media’s podcast “The Nod.” We talk about how you can’t succeed without failure, and how to move past even the most embarrassing of screw-ups.

Plus: we play a few rounds of Never Have I Ever (Upgrade-style) and a new game we’re calling “Lifehacker Saves Your Life.” It was a lot of fun.

I have 470 podcast episodes in my queue right now, after some paring down. There’s just too much good stuff to listen to: fiction, chat shows, history lessons, interviews, reported documentaries, weird semi-fiction. Of the hundreds of podcast episodes I listened to this year, these are the 15 that taught or entertained me the most.

Here’s a cool phenomenon: the Netflix Christmas special. This month, in addition to way too many original shows and films, Netflix is releasing Christmas episodes for existing shows, including Nailed It!, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Ezra Koenig’s Neo Yokio, and awards-bait Prince of Peoria: A Christmas Moose Miracle.

November is a solid month for Netflix. You’ve got the new She-Ra, a new season of MST3K, a previously unfinished Orson Welles film, and classics like The English Patient, Good Will Hunting, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And the site is only losing a few hit films. Here’s everything coming and going from Netflix in October.

Netflix is going all-in on Halloween this month, with a new set of original horror and horror-ish films and shows every Friday. There’s also new non-scary stuff, like Samin Nosrat’s cooking show Salt Fat Acid Heat. Here’s everything coming and going on Netflix in October.

This is a damn good month for Netflix. We’re getting a lot of promising new shows, plus some classic movies. Sadly, we must bid adieu to some old favourites.

Video: Comedian, author and Last Week Tonight writer Josh Gondelman knows how to be funny in any context. Like any comedian, Josh’s second (or third or fourth) job is being good at Twitter. In 2012 he co-created the novelty account Modern Seinfeld, and he tweets regularly on his own account. In this video he explains how — or how not — to tweet.

August is a big month for Netflix originals, with the premiere of Matt Groening's fantasy cartoon Disenchantment, season 2 of Ozark, and a new comedy special from Demetri Martin. Here are the highlights, and the full list of shows, movies, and comedy specials coming and going from Netflix next month.

Not all comedy podcasts are just people doing bits with Scott Aukerman or helping Marc Maron process his failed SNL audition. Some of them study comedy and how it works, intentionally enough that you can learn from them. Here are four great podcasts that can make you funnier.