the comic's comic

Jimmy Tingle's American Dream

Katie Johnston Chase of the Globe weighs in with a fairly positive review of Jimmy Tingle's new one-man show, "Jimmy Tingle's American Dream." We saw the same show. She got more space for her review. I think mine manages to get more perspective on Tingle for those who do or don't know him well. Then again, I'm biased. Here is what I wrote in the Herald...

Satirist Will Durst once observed that the one-man show differs from a typical stand-up comedian's act only slightly, offering more theatrical qualities and life lessons.
Jimmy Tingle, who hosted Durst in his namesake Davis Square venue earlier this year, delivers on both counts in "Jimmy Tingle's American Dream.''
Befitting his "cafeteria Catholicism,'' Tingle's show has the air of a joking confessional.
He looks back to his beginnings at the Ding Ho in 1980, reminiscing about his fellow comics and their own pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. "Where do you see yourself in 25 years, Jim? I see myself in Davis Square! In a basement! Preferably on the Red Line!'' he said. "I have a simpler dream.''
Over the course of 90 minutes, Tingle shares how he and other Americans, from the Pilgrims to the newest immigrants, pursue their dreams here.
The old pope, the new pope, gay marriage, stem cell research, the ineffectiveness of torture and the war in Iraq, the messiness of democracy and of the Red Sox - they're all targets of Tingle's wit.
Noting the irony of picking the Big Dig contractors to oversee Iraqi reconstruction is fairly easy around these parts.
The clash between Tingle's abstinence from alcohol and the economic need to win a beer-and-wine license for his theater offers more rewarding laughs.
So do tales in which the comedian reflects on his own mortality.
At 50, Tingle has spent half his life onstage.
And he has had plenty of time since his 2002-03 production, "Jimmy Tingle in the Promised Land,'' to reflect on his all-too-brief prime-time career as the closing commentator on 60 Minutes II and to come to grips with running his own theater.
Amid the storytelling in "American Dream,'' the satirical barbs, a Q-and-A session and the very topical monologue, Tingle and director Larry Arrick still manage to construct a few stand-alone pieces of commentary that remind us how and why Tingle got on CBS in the first place.

"Jimmy Tingle's American Dream,'' at Jimmy Tingle's Off-Broadway, 255 Elm St., Davis Square, Somerville. 8 p.m. Thurs-Sat, open-ended run.

Related: His official show/theater page.

Nick Park talks Wallace & Gromit

I met Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit on Monday morning for a brief chat at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.

Here is the story I wrote that appears today in the Boston Herald...

What do Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Gumby have in common with King Kong?
They all made their screen debuts through the intricate art of stop-motion animation.
Most of today's animated projects rely on computer graphics, so to see not one but two new films based on stop-motion marks a happy coincidence for those who still practice the old-school, handmade techniques.
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, directed by Burton and Mike Johnson, opened yesterday. Nick Park and Steve Box bring Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, to theaters Oct. 7.
"It's a small club,'' said Joey Kolbe, who teaches animation at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. "It really is. It's a whole different breed of animator. Sort of a hermit, to be exact, whereas the computer animator is more of a politician, if you will.''
Park, who created Wallace and Gromit as part of a student film project more than 20 years ago, acts like a proud parent while discussing his plasticine characters.
"The strength of Wallace and Gromit is that they are clay,'' Park said during a visit to Boston earlier this week. "Everybody's played with clay. They know how it's made. They admire it now because they could see how it's done. They can see the fingerprints.''
But making a movie through stop-animation requires patience.
Park took on a co-director to help oversee 30 simultaneous sets for his latest Wallace & Gromit film. "Each animator was getting through three seconds a day, so if were doing well, we would get about two minutes,'' he said.
Kolbe and Alex Hart, who teaches computer animation at the Art Institute of Boston, said technology has driven the medium more toward CGI and programs such as Flash or Maya. Disney recently announced it would drop its traditional 2-D cel animation division to focus on CGI, too.
That makes stop-motion "such a niche medium,'' Hart said. "You need all sorts of specialized drawing skills that are a little more scarce than are the computer skills or the drawing skills.''
When Hart worked with Kolbe at Olive Jar Productions, a Boston-based animation house that shut down about five years ago, he remembered one guy who worked only on ball-and-socket armatures. "He sat back in the shop on his lathe, making tiny little metal parts,'' Hart said.
Kolbe said the fact that "everything is tangible'' keeps stop-motion animators from defecting to more modern technologies. "Honestly, you can't do that with computer animation,'' he said. "You're limited to a pen, a board and a keyboard, or a mouse, if you work that way.''
Kolbe's clay and puppetry classes are popular, with waiting lists of 10 or more students per class. "These are courses I've never had any dropouts in,'' he said.
But he acknowledged that many more young animators turn to computers rather than clay, puppets and other forms of stop-motion.
"To breed a pureblood for the stop-motion animator, it'd be really difficult,'' he said. "I've seen it in a few of my students over the years, but they've been exceptional cases.''
Those who want to learn outside of class can turn to local outfits such as Handcranked Films in Waltham or the Gabriel Polonsky Studio in Belmont.
Anthony Scott, animation supervisor on Corpse Bride, runs the stopmotionanimation.com Web site, with dozens of links to other studios and practitioners of the art form and a message board with almost 4,000 registered members.
The Ottawa International Animation Festival, which ends tomorrow, also keeps the spirit of stop-motion alive.
Most stop-motion animators cite childhood inspirations for getting them so deeply involved in the process.
Willis H. O'Brien, who created King Kong in 1933, served as a mentor for Ray Harryhausen.
Harryhausen's work on several movies, most notably Jason and the Argonauts (1963), inspired both Park and Burton. And the Rankin/Bass holiday specials of the 1960s and 1970s - from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to The Year Without a Santa Claus - continue to delight TV audiences each winter, despite the dated technology.
Park couldn't dream of handing Wallace and Gromit over to a computer.
"There's something wonderful about getting a blob of clay and seeing what you can get out of it,'' he said.

DJ Hazard records a new CD

Don't expect jokes about the Emmys, hurricanes, politics or anything current when DJ Hazard records his new stand-up comedy CD this weekend at The Comedy Studio in Cambridge.
"I tend not to have anything topical, anyway,'' Hazard said. "It takes me a long time to figure out what to say about something or somebody, and then when I do figure out what to say, they're dead.''
Or out of the public eye.
"Even the current administration, you'd think you have eight years to write something. Not me. I'd shy away from writing jokes about George W. Bush because he's a lame-duck president, and three years from now, these jokes won't work. Why bother?''
Truth be told . . .
"I'm lazy,'' Hazard confessed. "I write a bit, and it's like, OK, this is good for 10 years.''
Hazard has been making New Englanders laugh for longer than that, as a founding member of the Ding Ho Club. Louis CK cited Hazard as an influential mentor.
"Somebody said to me, 'Wow, you're like a raw naked nerve on stage. You perform like it's your last show ever.' I do. I always hope that it is my last show, that I'll get offstage, some wall will open up and aliens will say, 'You've done well. You've passed the test.' There'll be gobs of money, showgirls, a big throne, turkey. There's got to be turkey.''
Turkey?
"The nice thing about turkey is tryptophan,'' he said, referring to the protein chemical that puts people to sleep. Hazard calls it "God's gift,'' but wonders, "Why don't turkeys just fall asleep standing up? They're made of turkey!''

DJ Hazard, the official site.

DJ Hazard records a new comedy CD this weekend at the Comedy Studio, above the Hong Kong restaurant, 1236 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m. Tickets: $9. Call 617-661-6507.

Jill Soloway has a reading and a show

Arrived late to the reading/performance by author Jill Soloway and her sister, Faith, at the Cambridge YMCA theater space Thursday night, but not too late to see the Soloway sisters sing and banter, not too late to hear Jill Soloway read from her collection of essays, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants. Afterward, I introduced myself to the Soloways. Faith's exact words methinks were these: "Oh my, an actual man showed up!" Yet another reminder that for much of my life, I've either felt like (or sometimes even sought out an identity as) the other. Conservative guy at the liberal college paper. Liberal guy at the conservative daily paper. Poor guy at the rich man's party. Rich guy in the poor man's town. White guy in the majority-minorty party. Actual man at the all-female party, surrounded by feminists, lesbians, feminist lesbians, feminists and their whipped men. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I actually enjoy being "the other" more than being around people like me. Hmmmm. OK. That's enough self-reflection for one post.

Here was my interview with Jill beforehand...

You wouldn't peg me as the kind of guy who'd read a collection of 21st-century-feminist essays, but then again, why are you trying to peg me? You don't know me. And you probably don't know Jill Soloway. Tonight is your chance to correct at least one of those situations. Soloway comes to Cambridge tonight to read from her first book, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants.

I talked to Jill earlier this week.

A reader at Jill Soloway's first book tour stop in New York City asked the author a simple question: "Do you hate men?''
Short answer: No.
But Soloway, whose first collection of essays is called Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, does refer to the man she lives with as either her husfriend or partner, not her husband ("We do feel married,'' she said). And she would like to create an all-female haven, which she'd call Feather Crest.
"I'm totally ready to start a new land,'' she said. "I feel like it's a geographical representation of a burka. If we all hide in a land where men cannot have access to us, then we can make our own rules. No more Brazilian waxes!''
Then she walks past a Manhattan intersection to see that someone called the Naked Cowgirl has taken up residence.
"This is not good,'' Soloway said.
Her essays blend personal memoir and professional experience to explore broader themes in feminism, touching on everything from the porno-ization of America to the Lolita complex, comparing her own sexual past to that of Monica Lewinsky and Chandra Levy, casting new light on the likes of Kobe Bryant and lesbianism.
It's sexual, yes.
"But it's not dirty,'' Soloway said. "It's political. It's about making the object the subject.''
And it's also something she has become used to doing through the "Sit 'N' Spin'' comedy shows she hosts monthly in Los Angeles. On other stops of her book tour, comedians such as Sarah Silverman and Amy Poehler join Soloway onstage, as do actresses from Six Feet Under.
Soloway began writing episodes during the HBO show's second season and had become a co-executive producer by the series finale this summer.
Soloway got her big break in show business in the early 1990s when she and her older sister, Faith, produced "The Real Live Brady Bunch'' in Chicago, faithfully re-enacting episodes of the classic TV sitcom. Faith Soloway now lives in the Hub and will join her sister at tonight's Cambridge reading.
"We'd like to think we're the newfangled Smothers Brothers. The Soloway Sisters,'' Jill Soloway said. "So we'll have some sisterly banter.''
They'll also have readings by Lisa Carver and Merle Perkins, who appeared in a fifth-season episode of Six Feet Under, "The Rainbow of Her Reasons,'' as well as in local Faith Soloway productions including "Jesus Has Two Mommies.''
Jill Soloway also will show some bizarre press footage from when they launched the national tour of "The Real Brady Bunch'' here in Boston.
"We were deadly serious,'' she said. "It was as if they asked us to talk about the Holocaust. Except it was the Brady Bunch.''

The Center for New Words presents Jill Soloway and her book, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, tonight at 8 at the Cambridge Family YMCA, 820 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge. Call 617-876-5310.

Related: Jill Soloway's home page
Related: Boston Herald interview

Lewis Black in the wake of Katrina

Lewis Black, flustered? What else is new? But when Black phoned me from Atlanta, merely two days after Hurricane Katrina had flooded and ravaged New Orleans and southern Mississippi, he had plenty of new rants to direct toward the president.

"My favorite is this: He flew over it and said there's a long recovery. What a, what a -- brilliant!" Black told me. "He cut his vacation short. I'm surprised he even got up to look! But he had to -- it was right next door. It's chaos down there. There's bodies floating. What do you expect people to do? That's not normal. This is the kind of happy snappy stuff I'll be doing onstage."

Fans of Black know that happy and snappy aren't quite his forte. The 57-year-old has risen to national prominence through his Comedy Central appearances, foremost among them his "Back in Black" segments for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Black rants. A tragedy such as Katrina only fuels the fire that makes up his mad-as-hell, ain't-gonna-take-it-anymore persona onstage. Cities such as New York, where he lives, and Boston tend to take to his attitude with a more welcoming attitude of their own. "There's a bottom line of bitter in Boston comedy. I consider Boston the spiritual home of my comedy career," he said.