the comic's comic

Meet Brian Kiley

Comedy Central had Brian Kiley guest blogging on its site the week before his half-hour stand-up special aired on the cable network that spring. It wasn't Kiley's idea. "They made us do it. There are certain things you fantasize about before you start your career...but there are other things that you're like, 'Oh, I hadn't thought of that.'"

The same goes for his animated appearance years ago on Dr. Katz, sort of. "The idea of being a cartoon had never occurred to me. It's just a weird thing having someone sending you a picture (of yourself)," he said. Did you like your cartoon self? "Nah, I was smaller. I wish in the cartoon, they could've made me more formidable. They could've at least made me a superhero. It is a cartoon."

As for the guest blogging? "Sometimes you get an assignment and can't think of anything you want to do...that was actually fun to do. I don't know if I'll do any more blogs."

Kiley hails from Newton, Mass., a place that's produced more than a few stand-ups. Why is that? "Louis CK is from Newton, and Fran Solomita, and Jon Fisch. Jon Katz has lived in Newton for a while now..I don't know...I can remember in the fourth grade, standing up on the radiator of our classroom and telling St. Patrick's Day jokes for my class. But I don't know what it is, if it's just, yeah, I don't know. It's a statistical anomaly or something."

Kiley writes for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. How does that affect your stand-up? "Before I got my job at Conan, I used to do a lot of topical stuff," he said. "But now that I give that to him, I don't do any of that in my act. I actually lost 25 minutes of material in my act...but I don't want any conflict of interest. Oooh, do I give that to Conan or keep it for myself? So my act is all about my personal stuff, and I give Conan all of the political stuff."

You've also gotten to perform stand-up on Conan. How does that work? "They let me do a set on the show maybe once a year." He also tries to do three live shows a week in New York City. "But the problem in New York, there's a tendency to do a lot of short sets in places. There's 12 comics on the bill and everyone is doing six minutes."

Still, Kiley feels like he has to keep fresh by getting onstage. "It gets scary if you haven't done it for a while. If you do it all the time, it's not scary...(if not)...but what, I have to go there? In front of those people? Are you crazy? I had a show one time where I had a friend of mine who was going to come to the show to watch. I asked Tony V if he could put him on the guest list, but Tony thought he meant the comic list, so he said 'Sure' and put him on the list! Tony came over and told me friend, 'OK, you're up next.' He was almost suddenly thrown into the spotlight."

Gilbert Gottfried in his real voice

Some comics really try heard to stay in character. Dan Whitney does all of his interviews as "Larry the Cable Guy" with the Larry accent and persona. Same goes for Sacha Baron Cohen as "Borat." Bobcat Goldthwait, on the other hand, rose to fame with a unique vocal delivery but in recent years has dropped the squeaky squeal and talked in his regular speaking voice. Gottfried amuses me because he's got his stage voice that even got employed to make a duck shout "AFLAC!" but is more than eager to tone it down over the telephone. Affleck?

That said, he still says plenty of NSFW things. And he doesn't seem to mind toying with the crowd, or the inteviewer. Actually, we got along quite well. At one point, he suggested that I accompany him on all future interviews. But what about this one?

Gottfried showed up in 2006 on Last Comic Standing's comedy roast, fitting since Gottfried's routine on the roast of Hugh Hefner just after 9/11 helped prompt The Aristocrats documentary.

"I didn't want to be one of the comics trying out. And uh, yeah, a lot of people seemed to see that, watched that show."

Did you give any of the comedians roasting tips?

"No, I didn't give anyone advice. I just figured like most stuff I do, I'd hang around long enough and get my check and go home."

Gottfried is one of several comedians who blogs.

"I'm always wondering if anyone actually reads them. A couple of times, I'd actually try to write stuff, and then other times, I'd fill it with knock-knock jokes and riddles for little kids."

Don't comedy fans really want to know what you're thinking, though?

"Most of the time, you realize it's not much. This is the problem. When they do reality show and they'll find someone...all of a sudden they're taking the celebrity bull-fighting and parachute jumping! If they really had a reality show, it'd be people sitting around watching TV, looking to see what's in their refrigerator."

So what's in your refrigerator?

"Nothing you can eat. Stuff to grow. Like a science experiment."

Did you know that HBO was making a big deal about you when it debuted The Aristocrats?

"It was an obscene, sudden credibility. That was the one time I was treated with respect by the critics. Hopefully they'll show this 57 times a day (on HBO) and I'll lose every children's job. With AFLAC, I think they'll wake up and realize, 'Hey, we can get an actual duck to do this!' And I do a kiddie show. Cyberchase, that's on PBS. And so it's like, basically my career walking a tightrope between early morning children's programming and late-night porn!"

Gottfried is a frequent guest both with Howard Stern's radio show and Jay Leno's TV show. So does that make him the magical link between Stern and his former sidekick, the no longer stuttering John Melendez?

"Which is something the public has been asking about for sometime now! I guess I am the magic link there. Last time I was on The Tonight Show was recently as Kim Jong-il. It was very odd. It was the second time I was Kim Jong-il. The last time they put me on, all they put me in was a military jacket...we got complaints from the anti-Asian defamation league!"

Gary Gulman on watching Tourgasm vs. LCS

Gary Gulman told me that watching Dane Cook's Tourgasm has been an interesting contrast to his prolonged exposure on NBC's Last Comic Standing two years earlier. "Some of it has been relevatory, and some of it has been fun, like watching a home movie. Luckily, I was not the focal point of conflict like Robert (Kelly) and Jay (Davis). They continue to have their flare-ups."

"I think that with Last Comic Standing, I was on my best behavior the whole time because I knew everything I said would be on camera. (With this), there was no concrete, 'Hey, this is going to be on NBC in November.' This was done on spec."

As for this season of LCS? "I watched it until April Macie got knocked off, and I've been boycotting it since then," he said. April Macie? Oh, right. His girlfriend at the time. She made it onto the Queen Mary docked cruise ship, but lost out in the first head-to-head-to-head challenge -- this year the comics performed in threes, perhaps to speed the eimination process along? "April is featuring at the shows. As an added bonus!" he said. "After Tourgasm ends, I have a one-hour Comedy Central special coming out. They never gave me a half-hour, so I ended up holding out for a whole hour."

Gulman grew up in Peabody, Mass., and went to Boston College, so performing in Boston always changes his set list.

"It was strange, because when I was living in Boston, I wasn't doing local stuff," he told me. But now the silly things get inside his head. "So when I hear the Giant Glass commercial 16 times an hour on (W)EEI, I think the people have become immune to it. Like it's background noise, it's on so much. But I hear it. Or I hear everyone is doing their own furniture commercials, so it's easier to notice it. People appreciate the local jokes. They think I'm making it up on the fly, but I've put a little bit of thought into it...a lot of it in the observation is the punchline. The Bob-o-pedic speaks for itself!" Really? "Oh, my god. Mrs. Bob with her mime routine?"

Since it was summer, we talked about handling the heat. Gulman said he preferred Good Harbor in Gloucester over the closer-to-home Revere Beach. "I can remember in high school, that's where the IROC-Z parade would start and finish. They'd just go around and around. It was terrific...I don't know why we would go up there...we weren't what they'd call Guidos. We weren't, maybe part of it was anthropology, part of it was potluck, thinking we could meet a girl. How were we supposed to think we'd meet a girl, driving around? Sometimes guys could do that, but when you're leaning against a 1979 Cutlass Supreme, there's not a big draw there."

Bill Burr, ready for a break

Bill Burr recently had his own HBO half-hour special, and I wanted to know what he meant in a MySpace blog posting about moving 20 minutes from the end of his set to the front.

"Early in my career, joke order was really important, because you had no idea what you were doing...I knew you had to get 'em quick. You wanted to start off, Vinny Favorito told me this, you want to start with your second-best joke and end with your best joke...(in between)...I feel there has to be a flow to your ideas where you go from one to the other and it becomes this seemless thing. I know what I'm talking about upfront and I know what I'm ending with. If I do an hour, from 12 minutes in to 40 minutes is up in the air with what I'm going to talk about...if it's even going to be prepared, if I'm going to be screwing around...that's what made the HBO special so much fun...I 70 percent knew what I was going to talk about in the middle."

"I've written a whole new hour since I did the HBO thing last year. That's something I'm really proud of. always want to stay ahead of people who saw me on TV. They think they want to see what you said on TV, but there's always something about a joke, the second time you hear it -- there's a surprise in it, but if you always know where it's going...even if it's live, I think it's a lot better to hit people on the head with new stuff."

Burr was part of an explosion of Boston comedians who all came up and seemed to move to New York and onto bigger and better things at the same time.

"My guys, we were all so prolific. I came up with Dane Cook, Patrice Oneal, Bob Marley and Robert Kelly, and we all pushed each other along. It was a nice healthy competitiveness when we came along. I'm real thankful that I started out with them...these are a real motivated group of guys that I started out with."

He left Boston for NYC in 1995 (and recently moved to L.A. in 2007). Going back home was odd.

"I knew I did the Kowloon one time in the late '90s. I went in there and expected to see Dane, Patrice and all the guys in the back and there was nobody...there's always that feeling of going back to your high school or going to your elementary school and thinking, 'I used to fit in that chair?'"

Mike Birbiglia, Sleepwalk With Me

Mike Birbiglia spent most of the past week at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge, Mass., workshopping a new one-man show that he's calling "Sleepwalk With Me." On Saturday, he even took an hour before the club opened to meet with any and all local comedians who had questions for him about comedy and show business. It was a nice gesture on his part. Closing out the lineup on Saturday, Birbiglia brought out 34 minutes of material, noted his time was up, then skipped ahead to a 12-minute section of material dealing with his real-life odysseys in sleepwalking. A lot of this falls under the category of strange but true. Even stranger, yet just as interesting to me, was seeing how Birbiglia took his closing bit from his Comedy Central Presents and made it the opening routine for his one-man show -- it's his childhood Valentine's Day bear card he drew up for his parents. Consider this as evidence how moving material around in your setlist can open completely different avenues for humorous storytelling.

He'd show off his efforts the following month in Montreal at Just For Laughs, and told me he expected to have the full show ready for viewing in a few months.

Joe Rogan in transition

I think I know why Joe Rogan's publicist wanted me to see his stand-up last weekend at the Comedy Connection. For those of you who haven't seen Rogan perform before, know that he has a reputation for being one of the bluest of blue comics, coming out of the gate with raunchy material and never letting up. But on Friday night, at least, that wasn't the Joe Rogan I saw and heard. This time, he opened with a bit about how much shock and awe he felt as the host of NBC's Fear Factor. Sure, there is some profane language. But for close to an hour, Rogan's act really was much more about the rise of stupid people -- which reflects our interview from the year before -- with his own takes on Noah's Ark and the Egyptian Pyramids. Rogan also gave a shoutout to Newton South High School and showed off a hilarious impersonation of his longtime opening act, Joey Diaz. On this weekend, Diaz and Ari Shaffir (who'd show up in Rogan's infamous video accusing Carlos Mencia of joke theft later), traded opening and middle slots. Diaz told the audience he'd gotten stoned right before his first-show set, and well, it showed. Ari, aka "The Amazing Racist," turned in some OK stuff for someone who bills himself as "The Amazing Racist."