the comic's comic

Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story

Docucomedy or mockumentary?

Either way, Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story is an amusing look at the people who play paintball -- and Rob Corddry is at the center of it all as the movie's comeback kid. The film starts a weeklong run at Cambridge's Brattle Theatre.

Corddry, 35, said filming Blackballed was a nice change of pace, mostly because it was a lot less work than filing his fake news dispatches for Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Corddry and the film's cast, which included several members from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre plus stand-up DJ Hazard, improvised all of the dialogue.

"I knew I had my work cut out for me," Hazard said. "This is what they do, even between takes. You think they're offering you a sandwich, and then 30 seconds later, they're on some tangent. They're two astronauts getting ready to land on Mars!"

Does that describe paintball? "It's sort of this cross between alternative and X sports and boys with guns playing war," Corddry said. "It's like skateboarding meets Civil War re-enactment." It's nothing like actual war. "You don't even hold a gun the same way. There's no Pulp Fiction aspect to it."

Ultimately, Blackballed is a redemption story. How does it compare with other comeback sports movies? "Are there other redemption stories? I thought we were the first one. Can you name one?" Corddry asked me.

How about Rocky 6? "Do you mean the upcoming one? Or the one with the robot?" Corddry countered.

Just then, business calls. "I just made my intern get dry cleaning. My ego has just reached a new level. Print that he did it humility," Corddry said. That might not be the case soon. "I will say that I just shot a pilot with Lenny Clarke. If that pilot goes, I will soon be having Lenny Clarke get my dry cleaning."

Dane Cook on the night of "Vicious Circle"

I'd interviewed Dane Cook in 2005 upon the release of his breakthrough CD/DVD "Retaliation," but hadn't really talked to him in-depth in person until April 15, 2006, the night he'd tape two sold-out shows at Boston's TD Banknorth Garden for HBO's "Vicious Circle."

Cook took some time in his dressing room about an hour before the first of two shows to chat with me.

"Tourgasm" had been filmed but hadn't yet aired on HBO, but people took notice when "Retaliation" debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, the highest ranking for a comedy disc since Steve Martin three decades earlier. And fans from across the country came calling to Boston to be part of his HBO special. Guys from Aerosmith showed up. Glenn Close brought her daughters, who were in awe of him. This was the biggest night of his career.

Are you nervous about tonight?

"I spent 15 years thinking this wouldn't happen. This is what I've always aspired to do. The ultimate plateau of comedy. So to actually be here, and be doing it, I feel very prepared. And so no, the nervous was not getting here. I just have to go out and have a blast, do the show."

Hear a portion of our interview archived here.

NYC open mics

Don't know why I thought New York City open mics would be somehow different (read: better) than open mics in every other city, but they are, if anything, worse (read: soul-suckingly worse).

I returned to the Big Apple to take part in a reunion of sorts of the "Funniest Reporters on the Planet" (a pseudo-contest held in January at the Laugh Factory in Times Square). That time, I took a bus down, performed, hung around afterward, then the bus back. This time, I figured I should at least try to catch some more comedy, if not perform more than once. That's what New York comedy is all about, right?

But first, some touristy sidetracks.

I met up with a friend of mine from high school (Mary) who I hadn't seen in forever, if you define forever as about 11 years. That was fun.

Then it was off to the races. I called Jim Gaffigan for advice. He was busy, on his way to an audition, so I did the next best thing: I walked over to the late-afternoon madness outside The Late Show with David Letterman. The studio audience had just begun to line up (or queue, as my British Commonwealth friend likes to say) outside, and Letterman's studio hands were filming a sketch on the sidewalk. I walked into the Hello Deli, and yes, Rupert Gee was behind the counter. He was friendly. I bought an energy drink ($2.50) and hung around outside for a few minutes, debating whether to stick around and get a second of TV face time or go look for some stage time. I chose the latter. It'd turn out to be the wrong decision.

The gigglechick info was slightly correct. Stand Up NY had an open mic, but apparently not as early as reported online, because the guy there told me he couldn't give me any time before 9 -- he suggested I go down to Comedy Village (the old Boston Comedy Club?) and wrote a note to tell that guy to put me on, but when I got down there, the door was locked, and the bartender at the joint downstairs said the Comedy Village didn't open until 7. That didn't help me, since my show at the Laugh Factory was at 7:30. Little did I know that only 14 customers would show up at the Laugh Factory -- all of whom were friends with one of the other "reporters" on our show. Did everyone stay home to watch American Idol? I did find one early (before 7 p.m.) open mic at a place called HA! on West 46th, but that place was, um, horrible. Eight wannabe open mikers making each other not laugh. No customers. I passed. The Laugh Factory show itself was OK, considering the turnout. At the end of the show, Dan Allen stopped by (he's also friends with Catie Lazarus, the stand-up who freelances for the Forward). He took me down to Rififi. We got there too late for the show, just in time for the post-show mingling in the bar, where I met a couple of former Boston comics (Sean Crespo, Rob from the Rob and Mark Show) and other New York comic/creative types. Good times. Then swung up to The PIT (People's Improv Theater) where they had their first-ever open mic at 11 p.m. Tuesday, called "1 UP". No, don't know what the title means. The host, PIT improviser Chris Grace, said he wasn't publicizing it just yet because he wants to let it grow first (talk about great and secret). Anyhow. Chris did some stand-up. A guy did a bizarre Will Rogers act wearing a cowboy hat and clothes, telling political jokes while performing rope tricks. Another guy read a performance essay piece that was more theatrical than humorous. Then I did about 8-10 minutes of my stuff, which went over fairly well -- methinks because the "alternative" venue and vibe allowed me to be looser than working in a club environment. That's the short story.

Eugene Mirman, the face for radio?

When several radio stations across the country decided to adopt the "Mike," "Jack" and "Wolf" formats, they turned to comedian Eugene Mirman to be their on-air face to promote the song-shuffle concept on TV ads. The ads showed Mirman, who went to Hampshire College and began comedy in Cambridge, Mass., before moving to New York City, riffing about giant burritos or about how he has a radio in his finger.

IQTV ad agency in Atlanta contacted Mirman after seeing one of his Robot Video clips online. One Mirman quip that didn't make it on-air had him boasting that the radio station appealed to "everyone but racists." "There's even more, but I'm saving them for live shows," he told me. "They were very nice, the people who made (the ads). They had to assume that I would make the weirdest ads I could make with them. But they asked me. There's one in which I talk about a burrito, which I think is odd, but I heard some markets are playing it." In that ad, he boasts: "Our radio station plays more variety than a burrito filled with everything in a hardware store -- and also stuff from a toy store, for variety."

Mirman had his own radio show in college, sometimes DJs and has toured as opening act for rock bands.

Later in April, he'd head off to tour with Patton Oswalt and The Comedians of Comedy. After that? "I'd rather have a TV show making something funny," Mirman said. "Or a radio show. And I'm working on a book proposal."

Mirman conceded that his own playlist as a DJ doesn't compare to that of the radio stations. "I probably don't play a bigger variety, but I have access to way more songs," he told me. "Mike" FM might have 10,000 songs, he said, "but they're probably not counting all the Velvet Underground outtakes I have. Then again, I only have 4,000 songs, so I don't have as many songs as an iPod."

His weekly New York show at Rififi, Invite Them Up, regularly has lines of eager fans waiting to pack the intimate venue. Recent praise from the New York Times hasn't changed his perspective. He recalls his early days, when his Green Street Grill show got write-ups from both the Globe and the Phoenix. "I think four people came from it," he said. "Nothing's like being on Johnny Carson 20 or 30 years ago."

Then make plans to see Eugene Mirman tonight with Todd Barry and the Walsh Brothers, at the Middle East. Even funnier videos and audio clips by Mr. Mirman are available on his various online homes.

Related: Eugene Mirman's site
Related: Eugene Mirman on MySpace
Related: Eugene blogs about his radio ads -- and has some of the outtakes

Mike Birbiglia's "Medium Man On Campus" tour

Comedian Mike Birbiglia has been performing to packed college auditoriums this spring. Which made his return to Georgetown University, his alma mater, all the more triumphant. Or not.

"It was one of the smaller shows, actually," Birbiglia told me. "I don't want to downgrade their experience like they didn't have a great time, because I had a great time. It's just, what's the phrase? You can never go home again."

No wonder his Comedy Central tour got called "Medium Man On Campus."

Birbiglia laughed. "The Medium Man returns to his own school and is met with a lukewarm reception! I think I'm going to write about it in my secret public journal."

The 27-year-old Shrewsbury, Mass., native turned his journal entries into a CD, and now an online series for Comedy Central, which also put out his latest CD/DVD, "Two-Drink Mike," in February.

Birbiglia won a comedy contest at Georgetown when he was a sophomore. "But I was never the class clown in school," he said. "The class clown was always a jerk who walked into the room and said, 'You're fat! You're gay! I'm outta here!' I was always a little fat and a little gay, so I never got along with that guy." That said, he noticed a lot of childhood friends in the audience the last time he performed in Boston.

Birbiglia has other talents, too. He took the photograph of him that appears on his CD/DVD cover. His advice for self-portraits? "For starters, camera phones are total garbage. Nobody should take pictures with those," he said. "I use a Canon Elph." He gets a lot of mileage out of his camera. "One, it's interesting to have a lot of photos. And as a road comic, you tend to forget what you did in your daily life. You don't even know sometimes. But now, if somebody says, 'Hey, what'd you do last week?' I can pull out my laptop and say, 'Look, I went to San Francisco, and I saw Alcatraz, and I visited Berkeley.'"

UPDATED! More from my conversation follows...

The cover photo for "Two Drink Mike" that he obviously took (note his arm and camera in the reflection) not os obviously got snapped in Reno. "I was in Reno, I was doing NACA...I was so bored out of my mind in Reno because I don't really gamble," Birbiglia told me. "I went for a long walk and I found a trailer park. I took a lot of photos there. I went to the laundromat there and took a lot of photos at the laundromat. It was one of a million photos...someone, I think it was my girlfriend, who said, that photo is really good. It's a decent photo."

Birbiglia grew up outside of Boston but really got his start while in college at Georgetown, working the door at the D.C. Improv. "And then, eventually, I developed an act where I felt like I had a half-hour, 45 minutes of material, and moved to New York," he told me. Lucien at The Comic Strip kind of adopted him. "He took me under his wing, gave me a lot of stage time," Birbiglia said. All of that stage time eventually helped him land New Faces at Montreal's Just For Laughs festival, and that helped him get his first spot on Letterman. He would perform in Boston, though, while home from college breaks. "My brother Joe, who I'm very close with, collaborates with me on a lot of writing," he said. Joe used to go to the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square and introduced Mike to that scene. And when he learned how quickly one can go broke in New York City, Mike moved back with his family on Cape Cod and would perform at the Studio for a summer, entered the Comedy Central Laugh Riots contest, "where I met Eugene Mirman."

Greg Behrendt moves to daytime TV

A couple of years ago, Greg Behrendt found himself telling jokes to a few dozen people at a Baltimore comedy club. Now he's a household name. Give credit to (or blame) him for co-authoring the best-selling relationship book, "He's Just Not That Into You," which came out of his consulting work for Sex And The City and catapulted him, via Oprah, from stand-up comic to daytime TV host himself.

I spoke with him as he was making the transition.

Has everything changed? "It hasn't. It's just put more people in the room," he told me. "I had never talked a lot about relationships onstage."

I first saw Behrendt at Seattle's Bumbershoot several years ago (1998, maybe?) introduced as one of David Cross' friends. A few years later, I got to open for him at the Tempe Improv on a weekend that saw him also appear on The Tonight Show -- which resulted in Behrendt flying to L.A. early Friday, taping the show, flying back to Arizona for two shows, then watching the Improv's big screen drop to broadcast his Tonight Show routine. Back then, he liked to joke about people getting his name wrong all the time. Is it better now that he's got a TV show coming out? "Nah. It's still the same. People get it wrong. It's not a national brand yet," he said.

"It'll be like a punk-rock Dr. Phil," he told me. What if Dr. Phil were punk, though? "No. If he was in a punk band, he would've gone full-on Minor Threat. We would've found out years later that he smoked pot but didn't inhale."

More about his show: "My slogan is: Your life doesn't have to suck...If your job sucks, you should quit, because you're not here to do penance. I won't always have answers for people. A lot of times, I will have questions. I will run in the aisles. I will throw things. And coffee will be made. I don't know if this will pan out. I'm not sure, but I would like to have a musician as a sidekick, as a co-host. Maybe somebody like Grant Lee Phillips."

Sounds cool. Even if Behrendt's most recent CD/DVD was titled Uncool. Should Tony Danza be worried? "Tony's got a nice life," Behrendt said. "If I'm uncool, then Tony Danza must be cool. When I was on his show, he started singing showtunes with me. I was in the middle of something and he started going, 'Da-da-dadada.' I didn't know what was happening. I thought, 'Dude, could you sing 'Lamb of God'?"

"It's not like I'm on Arrested Development. I'm still of a mind that I'm not cool."

He mentions his daughter just had a birthday and how he's not feeling much like ranting. "I'm not angry at things," he said. "I love all the iTunes. iPodding. I've got the video iPod. I like to watch me an Office on the airplane. I'll watch an Oscar-nominated short film and watch it in my head. I think comedy's in a really good state right now."

How's the state of your comedy these days? "I wanted the dudes, but they went and saw (Dave) Attell. My rooms are filled with women, and I love it. They're like, 'Dude.' I'm like, I know. They're like, 'Dude.' I'm like, I know. Get yourself on Oprah. This is what your comedy career could be like," he said. "I'm actually revisiting some old things that I did when I started and couldn't get off the ground."

"I've also tried to show the flip side of (He's Just Not That Into You), where a guy gets crushed. Late-night drunk dialing. Mix tapes. They (women) just have more faith and trust in us. They have a time clock."

It's almost April Fool's Day. Do you get into that? "I don't like pranks. I don't like people pretending they're dead. I don't like people pulling pranks on me. I don't mind watching it happen to people I don't know. Oh, that (George) Clooney. He loves to pull pranks on set. I don't want to sit on the toilet and sh-t on cellophane. No. It's just sad that my wife does that to me all the time."

What are you listening to on the iPod? "Here's what I'm not listening to: Fall Out Boy. What am I not reading? I'm not reading 'The Game,' by Neil Strauss. It's sitting by my bed, waiting for me to start it. My wife is so cool. I actually know Neil, when I did Sex and the City, my job was to go into a room and talk to women about masturbating. That set the stage right there. So my wife was cool about everything." He says she is co-writing his next book. "My wife's like the uber-wife. She's almost too good to be true some days. They say, you're making that up. She hates Valentine's Day. I don't have to do anything. She'll say, this is what I want. And then I'll go and buy it for her on the Internet."

"When I met my wife, I was doing open mics. To be able to have gone through this whole journey with her, and because of her, has been awesome. None of this would've happened without her."

What about his own rock ambitions? "There's been talk of making the Black Rattle record this summer," he said. "We do a song on my DVD. We do the Itsy Bitsy Spider...We're going to go into the studio and make the record, The Tyranny of Recess. At some point, I'd love to take the band out. But that's just a lot of people, blah blah blah, and it's a lot of hard work. In stand-up, it' s just you. When everything goes wrong, it's just you. The audience sucked? Well, they wouldn't have sucked if they liked you."

"As comedians, we'll take gigs anywhere. We have such low self-esteem. People will want to do comedy in the strangest places. I did it in the hallway of a school once. Not even a high school. It was just horrible. Everytime I get one of those gigs, I get a stomach-ache. I just want to do comedy clubs. That's where it's meant to be." What was that school gig? "At lunch, they set up a mike. In front of the kids. They said, 'Don't go blue.' I opened for an air-band contest once in Fresno, and got, 'Get off!' You've got to want it if you keep having those experiences and come back for more. I think we're destined to do things. Who would pick stand-up? This might not go well in front of 200 people and they might rebel. I really think it's a calling. I think there are people who are supposed to do it. What the f--k would Attell do? What would (Mitch) Hedberg have done? Brian Regan, same thing. They have to go in front of a room full of people and grab a mike. It's just what I have to do, until I feel like I don't, and then I'll quit. If you feel like it's what you should do, but a full room of people consistently think you shouldn't, maybe then you shouldn't. Maybe you should write about comedy, maybe you should be going to see comedy. You were close."

"I dig writing the books. It's fun. The TV stuff is fun. When I was on Oprah, it was fun. There's nothing like the rush of doing stand-up," he said. "And since I failed so miserably in rock bands, this is the closest I'll come to being a rock star."

Just for fun, what other jobs could you see comedians doing? How about Dave Attell? "He would be an excellent and really fun men's room attendant?" David Cross? "He would be, if there is a move toward anarchy in the United States, he would be our leader. Which is weird. Because anarchists aren't supposed to have leaders. Dave would be a really interesting therapist, too. Kid's got skills. Can't knock him."