Labor Day weekend in Seattle means the biggest music and arts fest of the year there, aka Bumbershoot. A decade ago, the weekend attracted names both big and small in music to come together in celebration of culture and all things good and fun, with one show or maybe two devoted on the side to comedy. Well, one look at the 2008 Bumbershoot comedy schedule shows how far we've come, with three full days and nights of funny in multiple venues this weekend. Human Giant will be there. So, too, will Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, Tom Rhodes, Doug Benson, Hannibal Buress, Jessi Klein, TJ Miller, Nick Thune, Michelle Buteau, the People's Republic of Komedy, Vince Averill, Tig Notaro, Greg Behrendt, The Sound of Young America Live!, UCB-LA's MySpace show, and many more.
It's also a time for sad and glad news. Sad? Final weekend for the Mainstage Comedy crew on Queen Anne (as reported by the Seattle Comedy Blog). Waiting for the full story on that development. On the other hand: Glad? The Comedy Underground finally gets to reopen in its new location a couple of blocks over in Pioneer Square at 109 S. Washington St., with a grand reopening debut UPDATED: The Comedy Underground's people report they're moving the Sept. 9 for the Mitch Hedberg CD release/tribute show over to Laughs in Kirkland because it's possible the new Underground won't be ready in time and they don't want to miss the chance to celebrate the CD release in "Mitch's comedy home."
My friends at The Apiary provide a clever defense today of Carlos Mencia (really? really) by whipping out this handy "Universal Comedy Flowchart" and suggesting that instead of stealing jokes (wink-a-wink-a), Mencia merely is raking his mind over the handy dandy chart that unlocks the secrets of comedy. The chart comes from none other than Doogie Horner, and before you say Doogie Who?, he's a comedian and graphic designer from Philadelphia, and here is his original contribution earlier this month to the grand Comic Vs. Audience blog. Horner also drew up a chart of things people say during sex, which not only comes in handy when you're having sex and at a loss for words, but also if that topic comes up when you're playing The $25,000 Pyramid.
(click to enlarge)
But take a good look at this chart. Don't mind the typos, but look to see if you agree with the chart itself. Is there anything missing? Ventriloquists get overlooked. Drugs are way off in the corner, which seems to underplay their use by stand-up comedians. Also how stand-ups talk about drugs. Hey-o. The inclusion of Dom DeLuise under impersonations/impressions is an amusing, odd touch. How would you change this chart?
Brian Regan taped his 20th appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman on Monday afternoon, and it'll air tonight, with Regan hilariously describing how he fakes his massive amount of expertise about art. His appearance helps promote his upcoming hour special on Comedy Central, "The Epitome of Hyperbole," that debuts 10 p.m. Sept. 6 (and available as a DVD with extra footage on Sept. 9). I chatted with Regan after his Letterman taping in the green room, and despite my amazingly artistic camera angles, you'll still be able to hear Regan explain the peculiarities of performing stand-up for a TV audience, including how the cameras and applause meters all make a difference in telling jokes. Watch our chat:
It appears Super Deluxe wants us to see what happens to Todd Barry's prostitute character in the cliff-hanger comedy series that is Sexus. In addition to this week's new episode, the site implores us to come back Sept. 3 for the next NSFW episode. Such range, Mr. Barry. Such range! So you can watch this installment knowing the storyline will not die just yet. Is it Sex Sigma, or Sex Stigma, though? Hmmm...ma Cache amour, indeed:
Listening to Mitch Hedberg's posthumous CD, Do You Believe in Gosh? (available Sept. 9 on Comedy Central Records), it's difficult for me to maintain objectivity.
After all, I knew Mitch Hedberg. I interviewed Mitch Hedberg. I performed alongside Mitch Hedberg. And no comedian is, or will ever be, Mitch Hedberg. The world lost this comedian much, much too soon in 2005. In fact, when Hedberg died in March 2005, he was just starting to develop a new hour of material that he would have recorded that October. Instead, we get treated to an even earlier version of his last new jokes, recorded at one of the Improv clubs two months before his death.
NBC announced on Wednesday that Olympic gold medal swimmer of swimmers Michael Phelps will host the premiere of Saturday Night Live when it returns for a 34th season on Sept. 13. Called. It. Last. Week. The musical guest? Lil Wayne.
Bill Burr has a new CD out this summer, Why Do I Do This?, and the live video recording of Burr's performance gets its broadcast debut Aug. 31 on Comedy Central, with the DVD available Sept. 16.
On the DVD, loaded with more than 80 minutes of extras, we see Burr engage in a drumming battle with his XM Radio co-host on Uninformed, Joe DeRosa. Burr also gives us a tour of the Skirball Center for Performing Arts at NYU where he taped the special, with backstage asides, and then a walkabout of the city and some of his past haunts, because, as he says on the DVD: "I don't know how to tap-dance." So he sits down at Gotham Comedy Club, stands outside the old Boston Comedy Club (then Comedy Village before it closed), a club "that kicked my ass" when he first moved down from Boston. He exorcises demons at Dangerfield's.He recalls the first time he sold out at Carolines. The DVD also includes the fan recording of his 2006 performance in Philadelphia on the Opie & Anthony Traveling Virus tour. But back to the actual show.
I saw this special live and loved it. You can read about Bill Burr's DVD taping here. Before we get to our most recent chat, here is a clip from his June 2007 apperance on The Late Show with David Letterman, which includes a medley of bits you'll see in a much longer, different form on the new special:
First, Bill Burr wants you to know he has new jokes for you after watching this DVD.
"I already have a new hour of stuff," Burr told me. "I want to do that. See, when Carlin passed away, I knew he had an incredible volume of work, but when they did the retrospective and showed he had 14 HBO specials, and it was all 'A' material...He never burned out. That was really inspiring." Burr mentions Chris Rock and Louis CK as contemporaries who also inspire him with their ability to write new material year after year. "That's the road I want to go. So I've got my next hour," he said.
And that means planning for the next special, which he learned especially from this past experience. "How far ahead you have to plan," he said. "Theaters get booked up. Theaters are union, some are non-union. All of this stuff, you have to plan."
One thing he doesn't have to plan or worry about is having his jokes remain timely.
"I don't do too much topical stuff," Burr said. "I still listen to old Pryors and when he talks about Ali, I
don't think, oh, he was champion 30 years ago?! No, if it's a funny joke it's
funny."
I meant to tell him before the taping that his joke about Hollywood's fascination with movies on African-Americans overcoming all types of racism had extended to school debate teams. Not that it changes the joke. "It's literally a genre now!" Burr said. "The funny thing about the swimming movie is I never even saw it. I just saw the trailer. It's already bad enough to know that people wanted to go swimming and they got s@&# for it. But then to make it cartoonish. There's no sense of reality...it's just done from a very, this is right, and this is wrong and every character is either 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong...Eddie Murphy did something about AIDS, and 25 years later, some group got pissed about it and was talking about it and came after him, and I thought that was unbelievably unfair. If he said something and someone didn't like it...to play Monday morning quarterback 25 years later is pretty ridiculous." Burr said the same holds true for those critics who brought up old footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger "grabbing ass in Brazil in the 1970s" after he ran for governor of California some three decades later.
Burr tends to talk about race in America in a really honest and funny way that few other comedians seem to even try it. Why is that? "It's not like it scares them," he said. "There are a lot of comics who say, well 'I can't get away with that.' I hate that expression. Because it implies that
you mean something malicious and the crowd is too stupid to realize it."
"You can talk about what you want to talk about as long as
it's funny. It all comes down to your intent. The funny thing is,…comedians in
general are pretty stubborn people...It's more like white people don't hang out
with other kinds of people, so they haven't had any sort of interaction. Once
you're dealing with a demographic like that that's isolated in that way, they
start thinking in columns. This group is like that. And that group is like
this. I remember one time I was in a barbershop." He said a woman wanted Burr to talk to one man from a group of three. Two of the guys were white. One was black. But the woman didn't want to identify the guy by race. "She whispered black as if she meant something bad. You're dealing with a herd mentality. If you're doing stand-up and a group is dealing with herd mentality,
you tell a joke and it causes them to relax. For the most part, people are
decent people."
"A lot of the jokes I do, I deliberately am walking along a
path…Is he going to say something f&*@ed up? It's a way of keeping peoples
attention."
And yet, there was a guy in my row (almost front and center) who managed to fall asleep during the taping. You waited until you had taped enough for the special to lay into him, and it was hysterical. But it's not on the rough cut of my DVD. Why not?
Yes, yes, The Daily Show has its own irreverent cable TV "news" spin on the political conventions, but in this groovy new media world, it's all about online video and blogs and vlogs and going low-budget, low-key, low-tech. At the first convention I covered as a reporter (Democrats, New York City, 1992), we didn't have no Internet. Al Gore was just a vice presidential candidate, remember? Memories. Anyhow. Back to the future present. Here are two different takes from the start of this week's Democratic National Convention in Denver. First up is Eugene Mirman, on the scene with the big online kahuna Huffington Post's 23/6 (236.com) team, and his first report is, well, NSFW but safe for fun-time viewing:
Will Durst, on the other hand, takes his political comedy quite seriously. So he attempts to sum up Mama Obama's speech and spin in 60 seconds. Take a deep breath, and click!
Look for more from both Mirman and Durst over the course of the next week in Denver, then with the Republicans next week in St. Paul/Minneapolis.
Gossip Girl's second season starts Sept. 1, so everybody get your xoxo's ready! Of course, if you live in New York City, you cannot go anywhere without knowing that -- and in fact, they filmed another upcoming scene in my Brooklyn neighborhood earlier this month, so really, you cannot escape it. But the show already got a wee bit crazy near the end of its first season with the big reveal that Serena...killed....someone. And then, it turned out to be all OK, somehow. Spoiler? Here's something better: NYC comedians such as Heather Fink, Sara Benincasa, Rick Shapiro and VH1 contributor Brian Faas as Chuck Bass filmed their own, more realistic version of what happened last spring. Also note Sara Copeland and Adam Good, for the record. Slightly NSFW. Enjoy:
Some clips have surfaced promoting the new animated comedy, The Life & Times of Tim, created by former ad man Steve Dildarian and debuting Sept. 28 on HBO. It's set in New York City, and Tim, well, sounds a little bit like a calmer, low-key, perhaps easier to take Larry David, as the show describes him as a man who, "No matter the situation, life's little challenges always manage to demand the most offensive solutions, which wouldn't be such a problem if he weren't continually caught red-handed." Let's watch a couple of clips...first, here Tim is getting awkward with a homeless guy over spare change:
Straightforward enough. Here is a "bonus awkward moment" when Tim goes to get a physical.
But did she stay in a Holiday Inn Express? And here is a more official HBO promo clip:
So, what do you think, peoples? Nick Kroll supplies the voice of Tim's co-worker, Stu, and Whitest Kid ringleader Trevor Moore also is listed among the voice cast. Does that change your opinion? Cheri Oteri and Edie McClurg also lend their voices, too. How about now?
Fun fact cut-and-pasted from HBO's pages about the show: "Steve's debut animated short film, "Angry Unpaid Hooker," was given Best Animated Short at the 2006 Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and became the basis for the The Life & Times of Tim." Only this reminds me how much I miss Aspen. Thanks, HBO.
Whether you want to see David Letterman or tell jokes on his TV show, your gatekeeper remains the same. Paging Eddie Brill!
That's because Brill has two jobs on The Late Show with David Letterman,
warming up the live audiences at Letterman's Broadway "Ed Sullivan" theater each weeknight, then also booking the comedians who perform on the late-night TV show. The first part is easy, Brill says. "We've got it down to a science," he says. "It's like hosting. You're an emcee. Our whole job is to take an audience that is not cohesive and cohese them. That's the best way to describe it."
How much of a science is it? Watching it unfold is, well, literally, clockwork. Eighteen minutes before the hour, Brill bounds onstage with the microphone, says hello and introduces a hilarious classic clip of Letterman working the Taco Bell drive-thru to get the crowd in the right frame of mind, and remind them about just who they're here to see. Then Brill gets a few minutes to warm up the crowd, joking about New York City and how much Times Square has changed in recent years. Examples: We now have an Applebee's, we no longer get to play the Adam's Apple or Not game. "That game's gone," Brill tells the audience. Within a few minutes, it's time for announcer Alan Kalter to take the stage and Brill introduces the band members one by one. The band plays. Here comes Paul Shaffer. Then Letterman himself leaps into the picture, riffs on whatever is on his mind, takes a question, and away we go. Whiz, bang, boom. Time to start the show."The whole thing about it is being positive and letting them know exactly what they're going to see and let them know they're a very important part of the show," Brill says. "We want them to be involved. They're our soundtrack."
Brill recalls a recent weekend in Atlanta at the Punchline in which he and the other comedians on the bill had varying degrees of success with the audience. "First show on Friday, everybody felt out of sorts, none of us felt like we'd connected," he said. "But the second show was magical. Everything was clicking."
On the weekends or when Letterman is in reruns, Brill is on the road, traveling the globe performing in comedy clubs and scouting new talent. "I probably do 20 to 25 showcases a year," Brill says. "Clubs will let me do a showcase of comics when I come in to work the club. I work all over the world, and I'll be able to see comics from that country. That's very helpful to me."
A veteran stand-up comedian himself, Brill has worked with the Late Show for more than 11 years, booking comedians for the show since March 2001. How has his job impacted his relationship with his fellow comics? "I had already booked a comedy club in New York in the 1980s," he says. "Knowing what it's like and being a comedian whose dream was to do the Letterman show, I was aware of that, so I made myself very approachable. And I'm also very honest with the comedians." He can see the difference in how comedians treat him publicly. "The good thing is, people respect my stand-up, and that kind of helps," he says. "The weird thing is, I have to say 'No' 99 percent of the time."
Thousands of comics ask and beg to get on the show, but Brill only had 15 slots to hand out each of the past two years. His best advice for comedians looking to get on the show? First of all, you'll need poise to make it on TV. Be smart. Be clever. Comics also need to know that while profanity might get them laughs in the club, it's never going to fly on network television. "All I know is that it's not the Eddie Brill show, it's David Letterman's. So I have to book comedians that make David laugh, the style he wants on the show. He wants material-based comedians. The real one-of-a-kind, one-of-an-art comics," he says. "Not the most popular comics. If a comic is very popular
that's a bonus, but most times, that doesn't match."
What common mistakes do comics make when trying to impress you?
Congratulations go to Reid Faylor, who won the Funniest Person in Cincinnati contest held throughout the month at Go Bananas. Here is some video from Faylor's winning performance, courtesy of my friends at RooftopComedy. Enjoy!
Word came in today from multiple sources in the New York comedy community, and I'm passing it along to you:
Comedian Joe Powers survived a serious accident this
weekend and is currently at Bellevue Hospital in stable but very
serious condition in the intensive care unit. While the injuries he sustained are serious, he is doing well. if anyone wants to pay a visit many comedians will be there this Tuesday ( any other day is fine as well). His
family has greatly appreciated the outpouring of support and his
doctors think that continued stimulation will only speed his recovery. He
is at Bellevue Hospital (27th and 1st Ave) -H building - 10th floor
-Surgical ICU . Visiting hours are pretty much unlimited.
Where did the summer go? One minute, I look up from my computer monitor and find out that several Wainy Days have passed us by, and here it is, episode #26, and David Wain himself is saying, "If my life was a webseries, I would say there is enough episodes and it's time to stop!" The Hollywood sets really did give the series a different feel from Brooklyn, wouldn't you agree? Well, that, and having Elizabeth Banks make out with Alicia Witt. That always helps. Not a spoiler alert, but a major tease! So, with yet another NSFW warning, enjoy. Oh, and a brief glimpse at Wain's upcoming motion picture, Role Models, due out in November. To catch up with all of the third season of Wainy Days, start here on My Damn Channel.
The ninth annual Boston Comedy Festival starts next month, and, as in past years, the centerpiece of the weeklong fest is its stand-up comedy contest. Having served as a judge for part of this contest in 2005 and 2006, and having witnessed other parts of it, I'm still struck by how random it can be. The competition's structure dictates this, as you have one chance in your prelim to finish in the top two of 11 or 12 that night and move on to the semifinal, then again, one chance to move on to the finals. Makes your initial placement that much more vital, as well as knowing who your judges are. Are they old? Are they industry? Are they local? This year, the odds are a little better, as apparently four comics will advance from each prelim to the semis.
This year's prelims (posted after the jump!) includes more than a fair share of Boston-area comedians, but also plenty of folks from around the country with TV credits and experience headlining clubs.
I got to see Jeffrey Ross gear up for his new one-hour special with a couple of run-throughs during the Comic Strip Live 50-hour marathon, which happened a few days before the taping in June. So you can click on that madness on my site to relive my first thoughts about this special, which now gets its Comedy Central debut tonight at 11:30 p.m. It's Jeffrey Ross: No Offense, Live from New Jersey. Here's a clip before the clips!
How could downtown Boston not have a regular working comedy club?* That was the question I had when the Comedy Connection closed down at the beginning of the summer (yes, it has moved to the Wilbur Theatre, but as you can see from the schedule, it's not so much of a comedy club as it is a mostly music and sometimes comedy theater venue).
Enter Mottley's Comedy Club. It opens Sept. 15 (Grand Opening night's show is Sept. 19) in the basement of Trinity bar near Faneuil Hall and has a capacity of 100. The opening week's schedule neatly coincides and partners up with the annual Boston Comedy Festival. The owner/operators are Jon Lincoln, Jeff Fairbanks and Tim McIntire. McIntire is a working veteran stand-up from the Boston area. Lincoln and Fairbanks, both Northeastern grads, previously opened and ran the Comedy Lounge in Hyannis for three years before selling off that operation to comic Mary Beth Cowan.
Who is this Mottley character? Lincoln explains: "Back in the 1700s, there was a comedic actor named Joe Miller (died in 1739). He wrote tons of jokes and after he died a writer (by the name
of John Mottley) compiled his jokes and wrote a book called Joe Miller's Jests. The book became wildly popular and John Mottley continued to add more jokes to it until it had over 1,300. Mottley never
claimed to be the writer and always credited the book to Miller. Mottley continued to add other comedians' jokes to the book under Miller's name and as time went by the book and jokes were so overused by people that into the 19th century people started using the term 'A Joe Miller' when a joke was stale or overused. So that's the story of John Mottley and why we liked the name for our club."
Mottley may not have exact ties to Boston, but the lineage ties in to comedy history, and with Boston being old and all, it seems fitting to go old old-school with the naming of the club. Plus, as the new owners have noted, the very similar word "motley" also has a longstanding comedy connection, so to speak.
Their initial booking philosophy includes all sorts of comedians, from the most popular mainstream stand-ups to so-called "alternative" comics, sketch groups, short film filmmakers. "Our goal is to mix different mediums of comedy so that anyone who attends our show will enjoy it," Lincoln says. They also are planning on offering some form of door deal to all of the professional acts.
I'll have much more to report on the opening of Mottley's, as well as the changing landscape of the Boston comedy scene, in the days and weeks to come.
Seeing Craig Robinson in Montreal this summer at the keyboard, something about it looked very familiar, even though I couldn't place it at the time. This was the guy from The Office and Judd Apatow productions Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, on the keyboards? I knew it made sense somehow. So, thanks to my friends in comedy at The Sound of Young America for reminding me of this: Craig Robinson was Chucky in this hilarious very very NSFW musical sketch with Jerry Minor as L. Witherspoon in HBO's Sketch Pad 2, a collection of live sketch comedy acts from 2003 that I have seen a few times over the years and laughed every time. Enjoy!
NBC finally confirmed this afternoon what more than a few of us already had heard through the grapevine...Saturday Night Live has hired UCB's Bobby Moynihan to join the cast this fall. The 34th season debuts Sept. 13. Congrats!
If you follow the comings and goings of Human Giant (and since it's the best sketch comedy show on TV these days, you really should be), then you may have noticed this week that the guys went crazy blogging about their attendance at the after-party Monday night for the latest season premiere of MTV faux-reality melodrama, The Hills. In fact, they even used their photos to create a tabloid romance shomance for their own director, Jason Woliner, via their Tumblrs. You can relive the magic moments on the blogs of Paul Scheer, Aziz Ansari and Rob Huebel, that includes this photo:
So I had to ask Paul Scheer more about this odd pairing. I mean, yes, they're both on the MTV, but why were they at this afterparty together, exactly? Scheer not only replies, but offers up a great cameotastic teaser for Season 3 of Human Giant on MTV:
It was really funny because we totally didn't belong at that party. The
only people that were there, was the cast of THE HILLS, their immediate
family, the executives that worked on the show and of course Joe
Francis. So I'm sure most of the cast, were like who are these guys but
assumed we must have been important enough to get to hang in their
makeshift green room. Heidi and Spencer did however know who we were
and they only would take a picture if we guaranteed them cameos on the
show, which personally was a win/win for us.
Indeed. Win, win! And of course, why wouldn't Joe Francis be there?!
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