the comic's comic

Fans saddened but hardly surprised that Comedy Central has cancelled Sarah Silverman Program

As you may have heard/read, Comedy Central (LOGO or no LOGO) will not renew the Sarah Silverman Program for a fourth season. It hardly comes as surprise to anyone who was a fan of the show, as Silverman herself and her co-stars had gone to Twitter and other forums asking fans to demonstrate their love and support for the show as the third season wound to a close last month. Comedy Central's gay Viacom sister station, LOGO, needed to step in last year just to make the third season possible.

Here's what co-star Brian Posehn told me last month while promoting his new CD:

What happened with the show's time shift? Comedy Central never really explained why you guys got moved to midnights all of a sudden. Yeah, our ratings were bad. So were Demetri's. They really love our show, though. The execs I know over at Comedy Central, yeah, are really big fans of it...but it's been happening for a couple of years. People aren't watching TV the same way they used to. I know I'm not the first person to say that, but it hurts shows, even if they're watching it later. Or on your Xbox. If you're not watching it when it happens that hurts success, because that's when it matters. They don't know how to count the other stuff yet. Even South Park I think is down, yeah, because Colbert and Daily Show are the only things that still work for them.

Today, fellow co-star Steve Agee wrote: "thanks to everyone who ever watched and supported us, and especially the amazing crew and my fellow castmembers. The biggest thanks of all goes out to Sarah Silverman who has single-handedly given me a career. It was a fun ride!"

And this is how it ends...sort of. There was another scene after this climactic confrontation with Ed Asner as a Nazi at a dueling Holocaust memorial competition. Roll the clip:

Brian Posehn gets animated in music video for his song, "More Metal Than You"

How metal are you? If you didn't realize that it's a competition, then you've already likely lost it. Brian Posehn released a new stand-up comedy CD with another metal track -- read my interview with Posehn about "Farts and Weiner Jokes" -- and now he has released the animated music video he told me about for his track, "More Metal Than You." The language is slightly Not Safe For Work, but the animation is slightly more so. Warning delivered. Watch on your own time:

Brian Posehn on "Farts and Weiner Jokes," singing, parenting, the Sarah Silverman Program and more

Brian Posehn's new CD, Farts and Weiner Jokes, comes out later this month, but Posehn will be signing and selling copies early to fans who show up April 17 at Tampa's Vinyl Fever as part of "Record Store Day." Posehn spoke with me recently about the record and more, and the probable series finale of The Sarah Silverman Program, on which he co-stars, airs this week on Comedy Central. So let's jump right into it!

Your Obama joke on the CD makes it sounds like it was recorded in January 2009. What took so long? "Part of it came from just a bunch of different projects, Sarah being in production during the summer, me, I decided to do two more songs, so maybe it wasn't ready until right around the holidays."

Also, you mentioned having a child last year, which sounds like it must have been right around the same time as your longtime comedy friend Patton Oswalt. Did you guys have a bet as to who could become a father first? No. Hahaha. We're just at sort of the same pace, ready to settle down. I know. We didn't have to try very hard. It took the first thing! It timed out to where myself, and Patton and four others, we all have babies within four months of each other. We all play D&D together. It killed our D&D game...you laugh. But it's serious. It's probably the first D&D game that got killed beacuse of men getting laid."

How is parenting a kid different from an evil robot? It's super different. I don't have to worry about my baby having to kill a mailman. In that episode (of SSP), I had to do the crying thing....we had to play that scene seriously, even though the whole show is ridiculous. He wanted us to play it super-real. I'm not a real actor. I've been in a lot of stuff, but I've always come at it from being a comedian. I had to look at pictures of my kid as a baby before doing it. Which is weird, because we had a little kid in a robot costume the whole time."

Has being on the Sarah Silverman Program changed your audiences or influenced your stand-up material? I had been building an audience before that for a while and then Comedians of Comedy got my name out to comedy audiences. Patton, he was the biggest draw on the show always. Yeah, Sarah has definitely helped, but it's always been different things. I had a viral video a couple of years ago that really helped, "Metal by Numbers." That brought metalheads to me.

What happened with the show's time shift? Comedy Central never really explained why you guys got moved to midnights all of a sudden. Yeah, our ratings were bad. So were Demetri's. They really love our show, though. The execs I know over at Comedy Central, yeah, are really big fans of it...but it's been happening for a couple of years. People aren't watching TV the same way they used to. I know I'm not the first person to say that, but it hurts shows, even if they're watching it later. Or on your Xbox. If you're not watching it when it happens that hurts success, because that's when it matters. They don't know how to count the other stuff yet. Even South Park I think is down, yeah, because Colbert and Daily Show are the only things that still work for them.

Your SSP life-partner, Steve Agee is big on Twitter and comedy nerd boards. What about you? He doesn't have a lady or responsibility. I don't have enough time. I have a presence on all of the networking sites. I still have to maintain my MySpace, which I barely do. Yeah, I'm there but not as much as that guy is. But he became a huge deal on Twitter, essentially just by reading the names of his early Twitter followers! Yeah, I know!  But then you read people saying, why do I follow you? One of the things I don't get about Twitter and Twitter celebrity. Half of the people I follow are my friends, but now I know boring things about them.

What's in store for season 3 of The Sarah Silverman Program? @sarahksilverman dishes, + a new trailer

Like I said, Sarah Silverman took part in a conference call this afternoon to talk about season three of The Sarah Silverman Program, which debuts Feb. 4 on Comedy Central -- and also on Logo, the gay and lesbian cable channel that helped fund production costs for the third season.

The first episode, "The Proof is in the Penis," has a more cinematic sweep and tone to it, even if it may set a new record for the number of times the word "penis" is said in 22 minutes -- including one scene in which Silverman screams "I swallowed my penis!" over and over. You'll also find out that Silverman's donning of a mustache at the Emmys might not have been a prank as much as it was a tease. But the look and feel of the third-season debut definitely feels like a movie, and with a sisterly duet thrown in, reminded me of Silverman's movie, Jesus is Magic. The second episode, "The Silverman and the Pillows," written by comedian Chelsea Peretti, also opens with a musical number, and might have some people mistakenly trying to draw a parallel to the Leno/Conan debacle at NBC. That'd be silly, although Silverman said she's on Team Conan.

"I think the first one, 'Proof is in the Penis,' feels really cinematic to me," Silverman told me today. "We haven't been on the air in 14 months." With such a long wait for new episodes, she wanted to return to the air with something big and "special" for the fans. "We weren't on the air in 2009 at all," she said. "You'd think we were The Sopranos or Lost with all of the gaps in production, and not a 21-and-a-half-minute show about fart jokes."

As for the added musical element, Silverman said there's no hard and fast rules about it this season. "It's very uneven," she said. "I think the second episode has three songs. It's just however it works with the story and however we were moved...Usually in the (writers) room, someone will get a snag in their brain. There's an episode where Steve writes a song that becomes famous called 'I'm Glad You Hurt Your Hand.' That just came from me, and Rob Schrab hurt his hand, and I just started singing, (singing) 'I'm glad you hurt your hand. I'm glad you hurt your hand.'"

Comedy Central adds John Oliver & Friends to its 2009-2010 TV stand-up slate

We're about to see a bunch of new live stand-up comedy on our basic cable TV sets thanks to Comedy Central. The fourth season of Live at Gotham debuts this weekend, and in the first week of November, 24 stand-ups get to tape their very own half-hour Comedy Central Presents specials to air in early 2010. In between those two things, the network has given the go-ahead to John Oliver to present his very own stand-up showcase. If John Oliver & Friends sounds like something as fun and magical as the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, well, then you can pretty well guess the lineup. It's going to be good.

There will be three tapings (Oct. 23-25) at NYU's Skirball Center, which will produce six half-hours of stand-up comedy, featuring Oliver and his friends. A few names appear multiple times, which is curious and suggests the format could spin a bit. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we!

SHOW 1 ~ Friday - Oct. 23 - 6:45 p.m., with Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Maria Bamford, Hannibal Buress, Wyatt Cenac and Pete Holmes

SHOW 2 ~ Saturday - Oct. 24 - 7:45 p.m., with Paul F. Tompkins, Maria Bamford, Greg Fitzsimmons, Nick Kroll and Eugene Mirman

SHOW 3 ~ Sunday - Oct. 25 - 5:45 p.m., with Brian Posehn, Kristen Schaal, Wyatt Cenac, Greg Fitzsimmons, Eugene Mirman, Pete Holmes and Mary Lynn Rajskub

If you're going to be in NYC and are at least 18 years old, go to The Black List's John Oliver page and follow the instructions to request tickets.

Judd Apatow, Comedy Central team up for great behind-the-scenes looks inside "Funny People"

If the initial trailers for Funny People, the third film written and directed by Judd Apatow, looked a little bit too melodramatic to be a comedy, then, well, that's because it is just that. As Apatow explains in the hourlong documentary, Inside Funny People (which debuted at midnight on Comedy Central, with repeats planned for noon Tuesday and 3 a.m. Thursday): “It's hard to make a comedy that’s really more a drama than a comedy. I don’t know if I can do it.” But do it he did.

The wealth of background material on the "funny people" who inhabit the film already has proven to be quite remarkable in promoting the movie and showing that it is about comedians. Apatow's documentary featurettes also reveal just how much of himself he poured into the film, as well as how much of a comedy nerd he was and still is. Case in point: Apatow says the following early in his Comedy Central documentary about the need to get all of his actors back onstage in comedy clubs...

“There’s a feeling you get when you do stand-up, that you just need to experience to know what it’s about. It’s the terror of revealing yourself, and the feeling that if I don’t get a laugh this time, I must get it next time or I will not be able to sleep at night.”

In the special (sure to be on the DVD, which at this point may have to be a box set!), Apatow shows us how he incorporated video he shot of Sandler back when the two shared an apartment in Los Angeles right after both had left college, and used it as a plot device in the film (with Sandler's character making actual prank phone calls, just as he had as a 21-year-old). It's a meta move, but seeing it documented on film is also very endearing. Apatow also shows clips of Sandler performing at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, Calif., 18 years ago, and then again last year as Sandler shook off the stand-up rust to get into character. You see clips of both Sandler and Apatow on A&E's at the Improv with Budd Friedman, then also Sandler at a lunch roundtable in the Improv last year with Friedman, Paul Reiser, George Wallace, Carol Leifer, Monty Hoffman and Mark Schiff (comics Apatow said he and Sandler looked up to when they were trying to get stage time). There's footage of Seth Rogen performing stand-up at the tender age of 13 (different from the clip of 13-year-old Seth Rogen I posted back in April), as well as joke-writing sessions that included help from Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn and Allen Covert, and footage from several of the stand-up performances -- much of which I'm sure will also pop up in a separate Comedy Central special this Friday, Funny People: Live.

Sarah Silverman Program will return for third season on Comedy Central

It's official. Via The Hollywood Reporter comes news that Comedy Central has agreed to a third season of The Sarah Silverman Program, a 10-episode order that had come into doubt over the weekend when Silverman and her fellow executive producers threatened to quit unless they could retain an adequate production budget for said third season.

"Things were tough on Friday and over the weekend," said Comedy Central's president of original programming Lauren Corrao, who headed the network's efforts to keep "Sarah Silverman" on the air. "We very much wanted the show, we just couldn't come to an agreement for a budget that was acceptable and uncompromising to the producers and that we could afford."

"We're happy," Silverman said. "All we ever wanted was just to make our show. Nothing fancy -- just our show."

At issue: The second season had ended Dec. 11, 2008, and previously, Comedy Central was quick to renew the series. This time, however, Comedy Central had suggested Silverman's crew produce the third-season episodes for $850,000 an episode, down from $1.1 million. The E.P.'s all said no thanks and threatened to walk on Friday. By Monday, Comedy Central was talking to sister network Logo on a financial and content sharing agreement, and the deal was struck. It's not that much of a stretch. Silverman appeals to gay audiences, and has two main characters (comedians Brian Posehn and Steve Agee) portray a gay stoner couple. Writing should begin shortly with new episodes airing most likely in 2010.

Human Giant: Reenactment

Remember that "Crimetime" sketch that Human Giant has screened for a year now but had trouble getting on the air? You can remember them talking about it at the UCB in December 2007. Well, here it is, as seen in the second season currently airing on MTV.

Coincidentally, the guys from Human Giant talk shop at 6 p.m. today at the Paley Center for Media. A new episode airs at 11 p.m. tonight, and you can see all of their sketches here.

If you've read one Brian Posehn interview...

Brian Posehn gets his second Comedy Central Presents on the air tonight, and coincidentally, he'll be headlining Comix in New York City this weekend. When I saw him at the tapings in August, Posehn was very nice, and even watched the comedians the night before him perform. In his set (which has a heavy metal themed backdrop, in case you couldn't guess that), he swore a lot, so expect several bleeps.

When Posehn works the road, though, he must get a little weary of reading his own press. Because it all reads, well, so familiar...

The opening lines from recent Posehn interviews:
March 6, Peoria Journal Star: "You might not know Brian Posehn's name, but you probably recognize his face."

March 21, Tallahassee Democrat: "You may not immediately know his name, but it's hard to forget his face."

From back in the day, via Kittenpants: "You may not recognize the name, but you'll never forget the face of Brian Posehn, comedy's tallest, deepest-voiced, dearest nerd."

So apparently, all you need to know about Brian Posehn is his face. Got it? Good. Now forget it. And watch these videos from Posehn's Comedy Central Presents and his recent SXSW appearance.

More videos with Posehn after the jump.