Strike or no strike, the late-night TV shows go on, and here are the comedic talents already booked on WGA-approved Letterman and Ferguson shows...
David Letterman: Monday, Jason Sudeikis; Wednesday, Martin Short; Friday, Bill Burr.
Craig Ferguson: Friday, Bobby Miyamoto.
Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the YouTube video of Bill Burr telling off a booing crowd in Philadelphia during last summer's Opie and Anthony comedy tour. It's certainly a sight to behold. But you really should make time to catch Burr onstage in a regular stand-up gig.
He has come a long way since Emotionally Unavailable, his CD of material that dates back to 2002 and only recently became available last month in stores via What Are Records.
Last weekend, he taped his first DVD special at the Skirball center at NYU and tore the roof off the place. I saw him steal the show last fall in Boston at an Emerson College gala that included performances by Steven Wright, Denis Leary, Tom Shillue, Anthony Clark and Eddie Brill. Here, alone, he proved that there are few working stand-ups who can steal the show from him. Why? Burr, like Louis CK, has reached a level of honesty and depth that makes his punchlines so much more potent than most observational comics. Take his opening bit on pedophiles, for instance. You can find plenty of stand-ups in any city right now making a "To Catch a Predator" reference. Burr, however, cuts to the emotional core and reveals how much differently we all relate to children because of it. He similarly takes a joke about the relentlessness of women and turns it around on himself. And he's one of very few comedians, black or white, to honestly dissect racial relations without falling into that trap of "white people do this, while black people do that." About 45 minutes into his act, Burr tripped over his words on a bit about Hitler and broke into a hilarious tangent about a guy in my row who kept nodding off. "Any other show, I'd say something right off the bat, but tonight, I just kept thinking, 'I'm taping! I'm taping!'" Burr told the audience, then addressed the guy for the next several minutes before getting back to his regularly scheduled routine. He had everyone howling. In fact, the hourlong set will be interesting to see and hear on DVD, because in person, the audience's applause and laughter was so loud so often that at times, at least from the front rows, you couldn't hear Burr's next punchline. And if that's his biggest concern, then Burr shouldn't have to worry about finding a network to air his special.
As they say in France, que sera sera, je ne sais quoi -- which translates into not one but two cliches. As for French Canada and Montreal, what better way to close out the 25th anniversary of Just For Laughs than with a gala hosted by native son William Shatner. What's that? You didn't know the Shatner came from Montreal? Neither did I, my dear readers. Neither did I. The fest's grand finale (though the festival continues with a couple of shows on Sunday, Saturday night represented the blow-out of blow-out spectacular shows across the board) had the city's streets teeming with comedy fans, and other people, too. Let me share a few salient points and thoughts from Saturday night...
Is there a stage past post-ironic to describe the public persona of William Shatner, especially when he "sings" Canada's rock hits? Or is that simply called ironic? Where is Alanis when you need her?
Zach Galifianakis doesn't need a piano to be funny, although it certainly adds a little something something (perhaps that je ne sais quoi?) to observations such as: "At what age do you tell a highway it was adopted?"
I now have very mixed feelings about Canadian stand-up Gerry Dee. Why? Dee rocked the televised gala audience with his set Saturday night, but I had the strange sense that I had seen and heard it all before -- mostly because I had seen and heard it all before, as his 6-7 minute set virtually echoed the televised sets he had performed this year for both Comedy Central's "Live at Gotham" and NBC's "Last Comic Standing." Most stand-ups understand that any set they've done on national TV gets "burned" (aka retired), so what does this say (or what should I take it to mean) about the rest of Dee's material? Like I wrote, mixed feelings.
Bill Burr deserves a development deal, or a big break. I saw him crush both at the Shatner gala and much much later, past 2 a.m. Sunday, as the final comic in the "state of the fest" showcase, devoted to (as the program says) "this year's breakout acts and must-see talent." He actually closed both shows, for good reason. He literally is sincerely funny and brutally honest onstage.
What are the odds that out of several hundred patrons, the most drunken and annoying one gets seated front and center? Most comedy club customers will say they may fear sitting there for fear of getting picked on by the comedian. But the same is true for the performers, as the New Faces 2 showcase demonstrated Saturday night at Kola Note, with a guy talking to (and sometimes blurting out and yelling at) each of the comedians, publicly apologizing each time until he got kicked out of the show. As host Tom Papa discovered, every square inch of that customer's table was occupied by empty beer bottles. "Two hundred beers and a sailor with low self-esteem equals chaos!" Papa said.
The name "LaQuisha" always seems to get a laugh (New Face comedian Geoff Keith proved that again). Must be the "qu" sound. At least that's what the comedy textbooks say.
New York stand-up Kurt Metzger politely informed the Canadians "why America is like, the best country": We own the moon. "Where is the weird Quebec separatist flag on the moon?" Eh? Metzger also made a somewhat compelling case for why God could be a woman. I shan't dare repeat it here and now.
As New York stand-up Matt McCarthy (no relation, well, not to me, anyhow) and I decided, Montreal is like the French Texas of Canada. Just a little bit different. Acts like it's its own country. And as the other McCarthy said during his New Face showcase, "I have never seen so many churches and strip clubs in my life. Make up your minds!"
Speaking of Texas, New Face stand-up Lucas Molandes showed yet again that Austin breeds very smart and clever comedians. His closing bit on the war in Iraq involved a sexual conundrum between a raccoon and a cat, but he apologized by saying, "Sorry folks, I just read 'Animal Farm.'" A couple of his other touchy observations: Native Americans made the dreamcatcher, "but the one dream they couldn't catch was the American Dream." And reading Anne Frank's diary "taught me you can't hide from your problems." Yikes! Still quite funny, though.
Also quite funny: Tommy Johnagin. His performance could be used as evidence that "Last Comic Standing" does indeed find and put promising comedians on TV.
Andy Kindler really is the comedian's comedian.
Joey Kola's and Bobby Kelly's impersonations of a female voice sound oddly similar to an impersonation of Joe Pesci. I don't mean that as a funny like a clown way, either. Just funny. And that's a wrap for now. Time to catch a plane back to JFK.
Opie & Anthony prepared to return from yet another radio exile, right on the eve of launching their second annual summer comedy tour. Good timing, eh? XM satellite radio's month-long suspension ended this morning, and the K-Rock jocks get to celebrate tomorrow when the second annual "Opie & Anthony's Traveling Virus" tour kicks off at Jones Beach.
"The timing is interesting," Gregg (Opie) Hughes told me. "So yeah, they might be excited to see us."
Fans will hear plenty of free speech, too, from comedians Louis CK, Frank Caliendo, Robert Kelly, Stephen Lynch, Otto & George, Patrice Oneal, Bob Saget, Rich Vos and O&A sidekick Jim Norton (7 p.m. tomorrow, $26-$70 via Ticketmaster). The seven-city tour visits Mohegan Sun later this month and Holmdel, N.J., in August.
"I think they're going to be very festive because they can see everyone in a free atmosphere," Oneal said. "Plus, it's the first live thing after all the bull-, so people can just take a breath and enjoy themselves."
The showcase also features an Ozzfest-style village of merchants, artists and crazies to go along with the comedy.
"And that doesn't count the tailgating that happens before," Hughes said.
Last year, the jocks weren't sure what to expect on tour. "We didn't know if fans would have the patience to sit through eight to nine comics," Hughes said. "But there were times when you could hear a pin drop because the audience was waiting to hear the next joke."
Some crowds, though, got a little too into the act. In Philadelphia, the audience booed Bill Burr so relentlessly that he turned on the crowd with a hilarious rant against that city's heroes, a performance which became a YouTube hit in comedy circles. Burr, who appears on "Letterman" tonight, is passing up this tour, saying, "I earned my Purple Heart" the last go-round.
"There's nothing better than killing in front of that audience and nothing more frightening than bombing in front of them," Norton said. "They're loyal fans, but they're barbarians."
Kelly said the fans may be rowdy,
but they do know comedy. "They're familiar with all of us, too, from the
show, which helps."
The lineup has longstanding relationships with the Opie and Anthony program - something the jocks have fostered over the years, by inviting comics on a regular basis to hang out, share their lives and join the airtime shenanigans.
"It's not just a radio show putting on a comedy show," Cumia said. "The audience has a vested interest in every comic who is part of the show. Their crises, their addictions, their vices - the audience knows these people."
Note: Parts of this report originally appeared in the New York Daily News. More from Patrice Oneal, Robert Kelly and Jim Norton after the jump.
Continue reading "Comedians tour with Opie & Anthony, take two" »
Bill Burr deserves to break big. He absolutely destroyed last night at the “30 Years of Emerson Comedy” show at the Cutler Majestic. Several times during his 11-minute set, audience members around me were saying things like, “This guy is AMAZING!” Tore the roof off the joint. Anyhow. Like I said, more on the show as a whole later.
Got to talk to Burr briefly after the show. Two young fans already were asking him something about the Opie & Anthony Traveling Virus comedy tour, and the Philadelphia fans who booed Burr and many others. Burr told the fans to look it up on YouTube. Here is a 10-minute clip from that set, which includes lots of cursing, which makes it NSFW:
“It was great,” he told me last night. Burr said he’d always wanted to have an opportunity like that to completely tear apart an audience, and last night, said Denis Leary (fellow Emerson alum on the bill last night) recalled the time Lenny Clarke found a crowd so hostile and unworthy that he actually decided to clip his toenails onstage, giving play-by-play of the clipping instead of his usual jokes. As for the O&A tour, Burr said Philly was the only tough crowd he encountered, but he figured that one of the cities on the tour would go screwy. Why? “They’re animals,” he said of O&A fans.
So I posed the question: Should stand-up comedy even make a tour of arenas for O&A fans? Burr paused. “I don’t know.” But then he talked about how Opie comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas and tries to make them work, regardless of how crazy the idea is.
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?'"
Recent Comments