Gloomy day. Windy, too. There’s a giant slab of crappy weather just south of us and oddly enough, it’s shaped like Philadelphia (but 20 times the size). It’s moving north/northeast, so we might escape it’s wrath.
Last night was typically hot and muggy. A perfect night for holding a party in a carwash.
The carwash gang just getting warmed up.
That’s Doug Stanhope down there somewhere. That’s a carwash (Lave Auto Centre-Ville!) just across Jeanne-Mance from the Hyatt. And Stanhope rented it out for a party. Round about ten last night, The Halves and designated cetacean Bonnie McFarlane swam over (through the soupy, humid Montreal air) and checked out the scene– It’s a carwash… and it’s set up like a party, with beer and vodka and a sound system and a mike in one corner. Stanhope’s idea is to jam a thumb in the eye of the Just For Laughs fest. On his Facebook status from Wednesday, he said he intended to “set up camp right outside their camp. And get drunk with the good ones.” Attendees were given a “Doug Stanhope Festival Survival Kit,” which was a small nylon zippered pouch containing mints, caffiene energy gum, adhesive bandages (popularly know by the proprietary name of “Bandaids”), Aleve, Blistex, antacid, Wet Ones, a “No Screwing” tattoo and a condom. (The Female Half says that, with the exception of the condom and the tattoo, everything’s going straight into her purse. She puts Boy Scouts to shame with her desire to be prepared. She would end up with a whopping prize were she to appear in the audience of Let’s Make A Deal.)
Stanhope is filled with more than the usual amount of rage in his most recent (July 12) journal posting– “Comedy Death Camp,” in which he savagely trashes those who profit from training others in the art of standup. People who teach the occasional comedy classes are “loathsome enough but don’t create much damage.” But he reserves particularly poisonous venom for those whose marketing skills enable them to “make a career out of it–folks like Comedy Bible author Judy Carter and JFL talent coord Jeff Singer. And he is particularly galled by Kyle Cease (he calls Cease a “fucking rotten, soul-plundering asshole”) for joining forces with Louie Anderson to create Comedy Boot Camp. Is reading Stanhope the best thing for us to do before filing one of our JFL updates? Man, can that boy pump out the bile! Even at our most vicious, our prose reads like the minutes of a romance novel book club meeting compared to Stanhope’s barbarous essays.
In the course of trashing those who teach, he also holds up Michael “Chicken” Roof as symbolizing everything that’s wrong with The Industry in general… and festivals in particular… and JFL if you want to go even further. So, his carwash show/party is a pointed response to the fest. It reminds us of the comparitively gentle counter-fest that was mounted many years ago by a gang of Boston comics who set up a mini-fest of their own one year on a boat in the St. Lawrence River near Vieux Montreal. Their attitude was congenial (and betrayed more of a desire to be included in the fest than a desire to wound the fest).
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Bonnie McFarlane and Joe List at a party honoring Jay Roach, director of "Dinner For Schmucks"
Speaking of being included/excluded: That’s Joe List (next to Bonnie McFarlane) in the picture above. Our readers will recall that List was “disapeared” from Last Comic Standing– he “got through” from NYC to the semifinals in Los Angeles, performed on night number one of those semifinals, but his likeness was expunged from the final cut of the show! We asked him how it felt to vanish like that. He reminded us that not only did he end up on the cutting room floor, but so did Tom Shillue, Stuckey and Murray, David Cope and Jeff Maurer. In our updates, we mentioned all but Mr. Maurer… so Maurer has the distinction of not only being dissed by LCS, but he was also hosed by SHECKYmagazine.com! We forgot! Honest! (Fer Chrissakes, could we JUST STOP WITH ALL THE REFERENCES TO LAST COMIC STANDING?!)
List said he “didn’t get the call.” He said that he never pursued the matter… never phoned up Hollywood and asked what, if anything, he did to deserve such an ignominious fate. He added that it wasn’t fellow comics who busted his chops about his absence on the show but… friends and relatives!
(We never considered the “friends and relatives” angle. Perhaps because we have few friends and our relatives have the rude habit of dying a lot.)
That's Adrienne, Adrian and Adrian (Iapalucci, Mesa and Cunningham, respectively) at the Hyatt
Patrice O’Neal was supposed to be here this week. We heard the tix were selling like hotcakes. But the shows were canceled and the tickets were refunded. (He’s been a fixture up here for a few years.) We heard that O’Neal was turned away at the border. We found out that he attempted a second time to fly into Montreal but was again “red-flagged.” It seems that an old legal matter, stemming from a 1987 charge when O’Neal was a callow youth of 17, somehow has resurfaced and is making things like crossing borders devilishly difficult. (Initially, we were reluctant to report on the matter, but we were encouraged to do so by O’Neal’s management– it’s better that O’Neal’s absence be revealed as beyond his control, than have his fans think that he merely stiffed them, goes the logic.)
Angelo Tsarouchas greets Godfrey in the lobby of the Hyatt
Check out the above candid shot: Zoom in on the hands in the center of the pic… it’s the moment of “shake!”
Shaking hands with comedian Godfrey is Angelo Tsarouchas— the Canadian comedian/actor who stars in a film we’re keenly interested in seeing. It’s called “Fred and Vinnie,” and it tells the tale of the relationship between comedian Freddie Stoller and the late Vinnie D’Angelo. D’Angelo was a founding father of Philadelphia comedy who passed away after moving from his native New Jersey to Los Angeles. We knew D’Angelo from our days in Philly comedy. He is missed. Tsarouchas approximates D’Angelo physically (especially with the matching facial hair which is absent here).
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The single most satisfying moment of the festival so far? That would have to be catching the last fifteen minutes of Lewis Black’s Keynote Address. (We were working on yesterday’s update… we blew off the first 30 minutes.)
Black’s speech was part of the Comedy Conference, an amorphous program if there ever was one. But, from what we saw, Black’s tirade was well-formed.
You know that vein that sometimes throbs on someone’s forehead when they’re outraged? Well, put a jacket on one of them and that’s what Lewis Black is. He spent the last third of his talk dealt with his frustrating (and numerous) encounters with television executives. It’s delicious to watch/hear Black eviscerate TV suits– while a bunch of them are present!
And the climax was when Black told a story about when he was younger– in his late 30s– and a friend of his scored a deal for a television show with MTV. The friend wanted to use his buddies on the show… on a regular basis. Black was among the people he wanted to use. The exec told Black’s friend that the friends “skewed too old” for the intended audience. The friend countered that, when he was little, his comedy idol was Groucho Marx and that Marx was not only old… he was DEAD! (Imagine the line barked out in the patented Lewis Black manner! It was priceless! It was inspirational! It had all the satisfying emotions and implications! It was logical! It was insightful! It was satisfying in that it laid bare the TV executives and their blinkered, Philistine pig-ignorance! And, of course, it’s something we’ve been bleating about for 11 years!)
Michael Kosta (Host, New Faces) and Ryan Hamilton (Last Comic Standing)
How about that Twitter? And that Google? And all that internet stuff that enables people to find information? We’re in awe of the technology. Ever more so when we hear stories like that told to us by Michael Kosta (above left). We posted yesterday that we were greatly amused by Kosta’s command of the two-leveled Cabaret venue as he hosted the 7:30 New Faces show Wednesday night. Hours after we hit “Publish,” we encounter Mr. Kosta in the lobby bar last night and he tells us that he was working out earlier in the day when he received a .txt message from his sister who lives in Ann Arbor. Turns out sister keeps tabs on brother’s comings and goings by means of a tailored Google search which pushes new Google citations of “Michael Kosta” to her desktop. And whaddya know, she gets word that the nice people at SHECKYmagazine (which she spelled wrong in her message!) said something nice about her brother! Just hours it takes for word to ricochet from Montreal to Ann Arbor back to the gym at the Hyatt Regency!!
Kosta nearly didn’t make it to the show, he says. He commandeered a shuttle from the Hyatt lobby in plenty of time to make it to the 7:30 show. But, since Rue Ste. Catherine is all chewed up due to a beautification project, a trip which would normally only take five minutes now takes double that. No matter, there was still plenty of time. His driver, a young lady whose French was way better than her English got a little… lost. Minutes later, Kosta says, he finds himself headed over the Pont Champlain, headed for Brossard, Quebec, with the city of Montreal getting smaller and smaller out the back window. Panic city!!
Kosta was patient. They eventually made it, but it was touch and go– and the venue had someone lined up to replace the missing Kosta in the event he never arrived! (We consider the driver to be one lucky gal, as we have seen some rather ugly, narcissistic flare-ups during past festivals– managers or agents or talent screaming (literally screaming!) into the face of a hapless driver whose only offense may have been to arrive a minute late to a pick-up or show up without enough room for a client.)
Stiltwalker, from our window at the Hyatt Regency
Holy Crapping Jesus! Who could predict that the acoustics in a tent would be so awful? We entered the 2010 Variety’s Ten Comics To Watch Cocktail Reception and slammed into a cacophonous wall of music and chatter and yelling. It was like a thousand vuvuzelas pumped through a CB radio and re-pumped through a Marshall amp. We grabbed some red wine and a Blue and headed back out into the sunshiney terrace. We watched as, one by one, the Comics To Watch exited the tent, dazed and clutching their framed Variety citations. The Male Half jokes (in Kindler-esque fashion) that on one or two occasions, he hasn’t been a Comic To Watch even when he’s onstage. In no particular order, they are/were:
Hannibal Buress
Deon Cole
Lucas Cruikshank
Brett Gelman
Chris Gethard
The Imponderables
Kyle Kinane
Kate Micucci & Riki Lindhome
Chelsea Peretti
Jack Whitehall
We have a lot to say about this article… but not enough time to say it right now. (Perhaps when we return to Jersey, decompress and unpack… then re-pack for our upcoming trip to Los Angeles… we’ll read some Stanhope and spin out some white-hot blog napalm about it. For now… a cleansing breath or two and we move on.)
We encounter a wide variety of Industry and Media people. We marvel at McFarlane’s ability to say a wildly inappropriate thing with a smile… and we marvel at the reactions and we are particularly fascinated by the (sometimes) excruciatingly long pauses that take place before the recipient of said thing puts it all together and realizes that… it’s a joke! Example: We encounter Al Parinello. Al introduces himself and tells us he’s the Executive Director of the Andy Kaufman Award. McFarlane smiles and says (totally innocent and totally believably!), “Oh… How is Andy these days?” The Excruciatingly Long Pause ensues. The Realization occurs. The Female Half pipes up, “You know… you really should have an answer for that question.” Which is true. He should. On this day, he does not. (For anyone who thinks that’s cruel, we counter that Kaufman– and anyone looking after his legacy– has only Kaufman to blame. The man– and his fans– perpetuated the notion that he faked his death and gleefully went along with the gag when Kaufman played very elaborate and very public tricks with his identity and his existence… indeed, some believe that the man lives on to this day.) Eventually guffawing ensues.
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The above photo is what we see out our window today. The JFL people have shifted some of the street performance from its old home on Rue St. Denis to the plaza just outside our hotel, in front of the Place des Arts. We’re not sure, but we think it will crank up to full throttle starting tonight. But, during the day, we look out and we see only the occasional oddity– giant papier mache heads (Carnival-style) of the Marx Brothers or ghostly, floating characters lit from within and filled (we assume) with helium. And, as pictured above, the occasional stilt walker. The Female Half says that, were she to walk through a crowd on stilts, she would bark out, “Please! NO PICTURES!” She might even go all Marlon Brando on them and hiss, “Get that f***ing camera out of my ankles!”