the comic's comic

Will Durst, off-Broadway

After six years, comedians don’t even have to write jokes about President George W. Bush.
To them, Bush seems to write his own punchlines into the daily headlines.
Which makes being a satirist tougher than ever.
“You can’t parody a parody,” Will Durst tells me.
“I actually had a Republican come up to me and say I’m really disappointed in you. Bush is low-hanging fruit right now.”
Durst has brought his one-man show Off-Broadway to the New World Stages complex. It’s called “The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” but it’s really a summation of this San Franciscan satirist’s career. After all, a clips package precedes his entrance onstage, highlighting Durst’s TV appearances dating back to the 1988 campaigns.

Then Durst appears, wearing a light summer suit and seated among stacks of newspapers; a pair of boxing gloves to one side, a large Starbucks cup on the other.
“This is about me and my abandonment issues,” he says.
He claims his show is about questioning how and why politicians have gone to polarizing extremes, abandoning the political center. “We’re all purple people,” he says.
Most of his barbs come at the expense of the current Republican administration, and after a preview show, he tells me that his act is a culmination of “the last six and a half years bubbling up -- that’s what it is, because it’s fermented, and the cork is going to pop pretty soon.”
He also gets in digs at the Clintons, John Kerry, even Michael Dukakis, plus many of the 2008 presidential contenders.

What makes this new, though?
Audiences may feel they’ve heard this all before, whether they’ve seen Durst already, or just by turning on the TV.
David Letterman easily fills a segment on his late-night show with mocking clips of Bush’s public speaking debacles.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart likewise has no shortage of material.
And then there’s other satirists such as Bill Maher (who just recorded a new HBO special and has a new season of his talk show starting Aug. 24) or Lewis Black.
Here in New York City, too, you can see Lizz Winstead (co-creator of “The Daily Show”) and her crew skewering the news in her latest live venture, Shoot the Messenger, Monday nights at Ace of Clubs.
Durst acknowledges it’s not easy.
“I think the audience has reached a point of saturation,” he says. “Unless you have a unique take on it, they’ve heard the Bush-bashing before.”
In comparison to the other satirists, Durst says he likes to take his time to find a larger laugh point.
“Leno, Letterman, Maher...those guys all have 13 writers, so they can turn around and do it the next day,” he says. “Compared to them, I’d be a little boutique in Soho. I hand-stitch every joke.”
So far, he’s stitched together an 80-minute routine that wraps up with a self-described “drum solo” that also could be described as a ranting riff that combines the best elements of vintage George Carlin and Dennis Miller.

For more information about Durst's show, click here.

Rob Riggle goes to Iraq, for laughs this time

At this summer's Del Close Marathon, Rob Riggle and the Daily Show/Colbert Report improv jam received the suggestion: Iraq. Someone joked that Riggle would be heading there soon. Riggle groaned. Little did we know Riggle was heading to Iraq. He got back late Saturday from a USO tour with fellow Del Close Marathoners, UCB players (and among other TV and film credits) Horatio Sanz, Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel. Riggle's reports for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart begin airing tonight.

No green screens here. This is Rob Riggle in Iraq last week.

Rob Riggle was in combat in Afghanistan after 9/11 as a Marine Corps major during Operation Enduring Freedom. He returned to another battlefield last week, but to make laughs, not war. Their USO tour was called Operation Feel the Heat. Riggle said: "Forward Operating Base McHenry it was 140 degrees. They might have just said that, though. They pushed the show back to 8 o'clock for it, I think it got back to 125 for that."

As a Marine Corps Major, did you give the other guys advice about how to perform for troops in combat?
"We as a group talked about some of the sketches, some of the bits you wanted to do, but as always, you play for your audience. They’re all professionals and they’re all savvy and they're all established improvisers. So I had total confidence in them...even if every sketch idea we had got thrown out, I knew we’d be able to come up with something."

How'd the shows go over with the troops?
"They watch the show, they watch Saturday Night Live. They watch Comedy Central. They watch VH1. They’re hip to popular culture. They’re young people. They’d quote lines to Horatio from Saturday Night Live that he’d been in. They’d quote lines to me from an episode of The Office I'd been in."

And here is a missive from Paul Scheer with his initial thoughts...

We made it back from our week in Iraq without incident and it was truly amazing. We met amazing soldiers, rode in Blackhawk helicopters, shot tanks, and watched DVD Bootlegs of Rush Hour 3, This place had everything. Big thanks to the USO, who really made this trip unbelievable. However, my plan of picture and video blogging was severely hindered by the fact that Iraq's infrastructure doesn't really support high speed DSL. Who knew?

Even with his military rank, Riggle said he didn't get better access in Iraq than embedded journalists. "I didn't go as a Marine in any shape or form," he told me. "I went as a comedian."

They planned some comedy sketches for their "Operation Feel the Heat" but were more than ready to improvise. "If there was some little bit, we tried to grab it," Riggle said. "We left a lot to chance."

Their tour took them from Kuwait to several makeshift bases in Iraq, at times within earshot of battles. "We were on a forward operating base that was really close to Kirkuk when that bomb went off last week," Riggle said.

They returned to New York over the weekend and began combing through the footage Sunday. "I feel confident that if the troops watch this themselves, they would laugh," he said. And he was "pleasantly surprised" by the morale among the troops, many of whom talked to Riggle and the other comedians late into the night after shows.

Will he get called back to rejoin them as a Marine? "I have no idea," Riggle said. "I truly don't know. I try not to think about it, to be honest. I suppose that's pretty naive."

Louis CK, on the rebound

For all the talk about Lucky Louie and how unlucky it was with HBO last year, you need to move on. Louis CK certainly has. He has a DVD out of "Shamless," his one-hour HBO special from January, but he's developed an even funnier brand-new hour of material since then, slaying the crowd at Jones Beach in June during the Opie & Anthony tour and creating a heck of a lot of buzz in Montreal in July for the Just for Laughs festival. We recently talked about that, and about his upcoming appearance back in New York City this fall for the New York Comedy Festival.

What's driven you to write an all-new hour so quickly?
“As soon as I'm sure that I'm the best comedian that has ever been...that's when I'm going to stop writing jokes. Also a lot more people have seen me now. so I have to throw my stuff away."

CK said fans will tolerate listening to his "old jokes," but if they've seen it on HBO, they don't necessarily want to hear it again. But that's more than OK by him, at least these days.

"It's really fun after 22 years of doing stand-up. It's very renewing," he said. "And it's a good way of taking stock, if I think the new special I did is better than the old one.

On performing for Opie & Anthony fans (an incident in the upper box seats distracted from his set at Jones Beach, with security throwing a fan out and people yelling and applauding from the far reaches): "I know. I got paranoid. Which is not a great state of mind for stand-up comedy. But their crowds are so fun."

On killing in Montreal with all-new material: "Well, that was a big goal for me. I decided at the beginning of the year, I wanted to be ready enough by the summer to show it in a high-pressure situation...It was being billed as my new hour of material. And the other pressure was I needed to sell out Club Soda (the venue). It was good to hit the new shows. And then I've got the New York festival, and then I'm going to shoot this thing as a special...The last special that I did (Shameless) came out, I shot it two months after we got canceled in September, and shot it in November."

Did that make it even more important to you to show the industry in Montreal that you could come back from Lucky Louie?
"I definitely want to stay alive for people. Losing Lucky Louie didn't beat me. If you go back to the fact that I got it, it was a huge asset to my life. People take it as a death. It would be like if you were Muhammad Ali, and you only counted the times when he lost his belts, not when he won them. When you achieve something, you're lucky to get something. You can't just hold onto s--- until you're dead...I've got two kids. I've got to take care of them. No show? Too bad, your kid has to go to the dentist. Life keeps moving. I was already excited about doing stand-up again. I was already on the road working on 'Shameless.'"

Will you attempt another TV show?
"I'm definitely going to do something else. I've got a bunch of stuff that I'm doing now, but definitely I'l be back."

Any lessons learned from Lucky Louie?
"I don't know. I basically learned everything. I wrote a show. Wrote a pilot. Got it greenlit. Ordered sets and ran a show for 12 episodes. That's all a huge learning curve."

"I also shot a couple of movies this year. I was in that movie with Martin Lawrence called The Better Man, and I was in a movie with Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda, called Diminished Capacity." Both roles, he said, have him as "the second or third guy" in the cast. In the movie with Lawrence, "he plays a talk-show host bigwig star, and I'm his producer and partner." In the movie with Broderick, CK plays "the same loud sweaty idiot -- that used to be my thing."

CK is touring the country this summer. He returns to the area Aug. 25 with the O&A tour at the PNC Bank Center in Holmdel, NJ, has dates in the fall in New York and New Jersey, and plays New York City's Town Hall on Nov. 8 as part of the New York Comedy Festival. "That's my first time playing a theater on my own in New York City," he said.

Catching up with Freestyle Love Supreme's reunion

Normally, the concept of rapping comedians turns my hack sensors on stun with an urge to bolt. So when a friend asked me to join her for a show with Freestyle Love Supreme, I accepted her offer with caution. I mean, they're from Wesleyan -- Gawker's choice for most annoying liberal arts school. But this isn't a post about annoying young white stand-up comedians pretending they're funny because they rap.

This is about Freestyle Love Supreme, musically gifted people who put on an improvised hip-hop celebration. Shockwave (aka Chris Sullivan) makes you laugh at Blake Lewis, while Lin-Man (Lin-Manuel Miranda) has a way with freestyle that's just jaw-droppingly smooth and awesome (as in, full of awe, not as in, 1980s slang). The show I saw last week at Ars Nova was a rarity, as co-creator Thomas Kail explained afterward that this was the first time all of the old and new cast members were onstage together. Lin-Man and some of the FLS crew had just wrapped their off-Broadway musical, In the Heights. So I saw even more MCs than the usual show. But their high-energy performance, albeit rawer than Kail would've preferred, managed to quickly riff off audience suggestions and make deliciously funny work of the day in the life of an audience member. And the audience loved it. FLS has some loyal fans -- Marina, the gal I sat next to and offered to be my girlfriend for the hour, sang along to their theme song. You don't need to sit next to Marina to enjoy the show. But it certainly doesn't hurt.

Tracy Morgan, at Carolines

Anyone who went to see Tracy Morgan this past weekend at Carolines had to notice the sign by the ticket podium that warned of extremely adult and potentially offensive material. The sign for the 30 Rock star should've read: Warning! Crazy funny comedy ahead. No, really. He's crazy. Not sure how much his sobriety plays into this (more on that soon enough), but it seems as though Morgan has tapped into a completely uninhibited part of himself that, while getting him into trouble offstage, has given his TV career new life.

After about 50 minutes of graphic sex talk that had audience members blushing and laughing, he took a drink from his Evian bottle and the tone shifted.

"I can't drink alcohol no more, but I can still guzzle!" he said. Morgan then showed off his ankle bracelet to roaring crowd approval. "Yeah, they got me on the Lindsay Lohan program!" He then apologized to the audience, saying he knew his second DUI would land him in serious trouble. "Thanks for coming out...because I've been f---ing up this year." After some jokes about his arrest -- the cop "gave me the line test and I kept stepping on his shoe" -- he confessed that his arrest came just two nights before he was supposed to light the tree at Rockefeller Center. But his "drinking and speedballing" did him in. "I was coping" with success, he said. "Now I feel good. I've been clean three months -- I apologize for f---ing up...It feels good, now, I wake up, I don't got the runs!"

Later Sunday night, Morgan popped into the Comedy Cellar and showed off his ankle bracelet to fellow comedians, including Chris Rock (who happened to see Morgan's show at Carolines, too). This time, Morgan added a tag to his Lohan quip, exclaiming, "They've got me like Kunta Kinte!"

Chris Rock's wit and wisdom, in development

I managed to catch Chris Rock during one of his impromptu unannounced club appearances at the Comedy Cellar this summer as he prepared for his first stand-up concert tour in almost four years. A lot of this stuff already was hitting very well, and here are some notes from a 90-minute set delivered late Sunday night (11:45 p.m. start) and early Monday morning (ending at 1:15 a.m.) at the Comedy Cellar, the latest jokes in development from Chris Rock...who opened with a Michael Vick reference..."I was just at home killing some dogs this week."

On how much white people love animals: "You know how much better Seabiscuit's life was than my grandfather's?!"

On Barry Bonds: "Who wouldn't take a pill to do better at their jobs?...If you pay me Will Smith money, I'll take needles in my anus right now!"
"If Mickey Mantle had Advil, he would've hit more home runs."
"Babe Ruth had 714 affirmative action home runs."
"It's not a sport without black people. It's just a game. It'd be like, 'I won the marathon, but no Kenyans were running.'"

On trying to wipe your slate clean with one good deed, as they say of baseball by letting Jackie Robinson play: "If OJ saves a cat from a tree, he's still a murderer."

On the real-life history of the people on American money: "Next time you're getting change, why don't you ask for three murderers and a rapist."

On how Bush's war in Iraq has killed more Americans than 9/11, speaking as Bush: "You think you can kill Americans? I can kill Americans!"

On how people are stupidly in debt. Example: Ringtones. "The phone used to ring for free! Never have so many people been stupid at the same time." Rock speculated that the government would figure out a way to sell us phones that don't ring, forcing us to buy ringtones. Other examples: Sony's PlayStation, which now comes with just one controller. The KitKat, which comes with four bars instead of five. "What happened to my other bar!"

On being a black celebrity in the suburbs, living in Alpine, NJ. Rock noted the only other black people in his neighborhood are Gary Sheffield, Patrick Ewing and Mary J. Blige, all hall-of-fame caliber artists at what they do. "You know what the white guy who lives next to me does? He's a dentist. Not the best dentist in the world...He didn't invent bonding...He just yanks people's teeth out...It's a true story. I live next to a dentist."

On reality TV and the success of Flavor Flav. Rock admits the show is funny, "but as an educated black man, he has to die. You can't have Barack (Obama) running for president and this n----- running around. One of them has got to go....We went from 'The Cosby Show' to a b---- taking a s--- on the floor...No wonder Bill Cosby has gone out of his f---ing mind. Not only did they show it, but they turned it into a plot point!"

On Who's Your Caddy? (which I reviewed for the Daily News): "It was so bad I don't think they should let black people make movies anymore...They didn't even get the good guy from OutKast...It's so bad, I recommend it!...And it's not like I've made the greatest movies of all time, but God damn!"

On Australia: "Black people there are the Aborigines. Did you know it was legal in Australia to hunt the Aborigines until the 1920s?!...As a black man, you have to know where you're traveling. I'm a high-school dropout, but I know all these little things."

On Walmart: "Walmart is the AIDS of stores."

On how debt isn't like cancer: "Debt doesn't go into remission. I just ate right and prayed every night..."