Let’s crack open a bottle of Gnarly Head Cab and upload a couple of posts!

Have you seen Comedy Shop? It’s hosted by Norm Crosby. It pops up on Sunday nights on TWO stations around here! KGNG (or “King Kong Broadcasting!”) is Channel 47 here in Las Vegas. They spray EIGHT subchannels of quirky television from a transmitter high atop Black Mountain, over in Henderson.

KGNG runs back-to-back half-hour episodes of Comedy Shop on channel 47.4 (RTVNET) and 47.6 (MYFAMILY) every Sunday night from 6 to 7 PM. Our sorry-ass antenna picks them both up.

We don’t have cable. We don’t have time to watch that much television. (Honest! We are usually skeptical of anti-TV types… their excuses for not having/watching a television usually ring hollow or are calculated to somehow get across the message that they are superior and those who wallow in the glow of the “idiot box” are giving into baser instincts. We don’t play that. We’ve considered subscribing to cable or satellite or some other sort of paid television service. For a while, we had Netflix– but we weren’t even able to consume enough of their service to make it worth even that paltry fee! We analogize our decision thusly: It would be like buying ten loaves of bread per month and only eating two or three slices out of each loaf.)

Comedy Shop is variously described, depending on which website you go to, as having started in 1978 or 1979. They all agree that it died in 1981. Just in time for the explosion of comedy! (Perhaps Comedy Shop was some sort of cultural blasting cap.)

We each have our various excuses for missing the show on its first go-round. But we must say that it’s fascinating viewing this time around!

Last night, while preparing to go see Don Rickles at the Orleans Showroom, we ping-ponged back and forth between 47.4 and 47.6 to catch a wild variety of comedians and sample a slice of late-70s, pre-boom comedy.

Slappy White, Lenny Schultz, Shelley Berman, Dave Tyree, Murray Langston, Jimmy Aleck, Ed Bluestone, Bowser… and that was only in the space of about 20 minutes. We note that Buddy Hackett also made an appearance. And, of course, the proceedings were hosted by Crosby.

At times, on certain episodes, it seems as though the show is taped in an empty studio with bizarre, grainy 70s-style audience pan-shots shoehorned in to make it look good. (Lots of flamboyant hair, lots of plaid, some vests, some really horrendous Italian designer-framed glasses.) Some episodes clearly were taped in front of a studio audience– as evidenced by some folks yelling, “Go crazy, Lenny!” to Lenny Schultz during his set.

of all the comedians we watched last night, we would have to say that Ed Bluestone’s set was the funniest and the set that would hold up today, some 31 years later. Slappy White’s set was pretty solid, too. And he lit up a cigarette! Hey, FCC: KGNG just called and said, “Come get me, bitches!” We’re not sure where Bluestone is these days, as there is scant evidence of him online. He seems to have contributed to National Lampoon a lot in their glory days, but past that, he’s not showing up.

We’ve seen Freddy Roman, Wil Shriner and others on previous episodes. It will be appointment television around here for a while. Or we might just check them all out, serially, on Amazon.com! (It’s available on Netflix and on Amazon.com. We assume that our newly-purchased Amazon Prime membership will entitle us to call them up and watch them for free whenever we have the time and inclination. Right now, though, we’re in the middle of watching all eight seasons of Red Dwarf! Amazon Prime, BTW, is a delightful alternative to Netflix. And you get free Amazon shipping for a year!)

Watching Comedy Shop is like cracking open a time capsule. It’s a fascinating look into the American Standup Comedy World just seconds before the BOOM. You can see just who were the go-to comics in the standup cosmosphere in the waning days of the 70s, just before cable and other cultural forces combined to make standup a phenomenon. The old-school guys from the 50s and 50s and 60s appeared alongside some of the up-and-comers who were slugging it out in the newer showcase clubs in NYC and LA at the time. It’s like scanning the Billboard Hot 100 just before the Beatles toured America for the first time.

Seek it out!