We’re a little behind the curve on this, we know (internet service problems), but we couldn’t let Vince Dantona’s passing go without a mention in the pages of SHECKYmagazine.com. Here, we present a rare pic of Vince sans “his wooden buddy George.”

If we recall correctly, we took this at Mike and Karen Saccone’s apartment on Walnut St. in Philly, in the summer of 1984. We like it for many reasons, not the least of which is that it makes it appear that Vince carries a fan with him wherever he goes to cool off his genitals.

He is smiling. This is no coincidence. Vince was always happy to see us (and, we imagine, happy to see everyone else). He was a Long Island comic, but he worked so frequently in the Philadelphia area– at the Comedy Works (in both the old and the new locations), at the Comedy Factory Outlet– that many people probably thought he was a Delaware Valley native. In our early days doing standup, we shared many a bill with Vince. He will be missed.

The Male Half of the Staff is quoted in a Las Vegas Review-Journal column by Mike Weatherford entitled “No Joke: Comedians May Lack Health Coverage.” It also appears in the hard copy of the Sunday edition.

We’re talking about this because Saturday night, (John) Padon was to throw a benefit for Ron Shock, a veteran stand-up and longtime Las Vegan fighting an aggressive urethra cancer.

Shock is almost 70 and covered by basic Medicare. But co-pays on four hospital stays in six weeks already overwhelm Shock and his wife, Rhonda. In a stroke of bad timing, she quit her job a month before he got sick, and now is too busy helping him to go back.

Weatherford talks about Shock and about the American Comedy Fund, recently launched by Comedy Central and the Entertainment Industry Foundation to help comedians in just such a position as Shock. According to their stats, 31 per cent of comedians lack health insurance. As of two weeks ago, SHECKYmagazine.com HQ is 100 per cent insured.

So until two weeks ago, “our health plan was ‘Eat right, exercise and don’t skateboard.’ ” However, “we finally nailed down health insurance with a company that does business in Nevada,” with a low premium for a high deductible.

“Comedians I don’t think are any more or any less responsible than regular folks,” McKim says. But they are self-employed, so “we really do get burned by the system. We pay both sides of the payroll tax.”

Read the whole column.

According to Russ Campbell’s Blog:

The repeal of section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) seems inevitable now that MP Brian Storseth (Westlock–St. Paul) has successfully steered his private member’s Bill C-304 through its second reading.

Section 13, our readers may recall, is the odious chunk of the Canadian Constitution that enabled a band of bureaucrats to harass and take the property from Canadian citizens, particularly comedian Guy Earle.

Campbell explains:

Remember that video (that went viral) in which the distraught, weeping man/boy pleaded with viewers to “Leave Britney alone?” We’re seeing similar sentiments on our Facebook. Only this time, it’s “Leave Whitney alone.” From comedians, too.

We’re seeing it expressed, in so many ways, that making jokes about the recent death of a pop star is outside the boundaries of good taste. Well, yeah. Duh! Of course it is. That’s why we do it. We’re seeing some status updates that admonish members of the Facebook community for making cruel jokes about the fallen pop diva and threatening any offenders with “defriendization.” It is rather puzzling.

We don’t advocate anyone do such jokes onstage, in front of an audience. The “too soon?” factor kicks in. Some folks can handle that (some comedians, some audiences), but we don’t advocate it. We would never go so far as to say that a comedian can not do so. We merely advise caution.

But Facebook isn’t onstage. It’s a loose, rough-and-tumble, semi-public forum where people (comedians and civilians) race to the punchline and hope their jibes are “liked” or commented on or linked to. If we’re to further tweak the performing analogy: Facebook is not “onstage”– but more like the green room. It’s where comedians gather and brainstorm and throw things out. Where they top and get topped. Anything goes. The gallows humor is not only allowed, it’s expected.

To take the analogy further, imagine if, as you and other comedians are engaged in such dark, irreverent chatter backstage at a comedy club, someone in the group were to say, “Hey… enough of the jokes about (fill in the blank)… it demonstrates a callousness that I will not tolerate!” It’s the wettest of blankets.

Some folks on Facebook (some comedians!) have gone so far as to say that such jokes are “not funny.” And they go further and proclaim that not only are such gags “not funny,” but that they should be (or actually are!) prohibited.

But making jokes about the newly dead is something comedians do. You can analyze it all day long. Is it how we deal with death? Is it our way of separating ourselves from the non-comedians? Perhaps it’s our way of exercising our joke-writing muscles– after all, making light of the dark is perhaps the most difficult exercise a humorist can undertake. None of that matters.

We do it because we can. And we take offense at those folks who take offense. Especially the comedians who take offense. They have no excuse.

They demonstrate a shocking lack of how the mind of their fellow comedian works. No comedian should tell another comedian that a subject is out of bounds– especially in an environment like Facebook. Defriending is always an option. We defriend people all the time. And we’re fairly certain that we are defriended on a regular basis. (We watched “The Social Network” last night… the opting-in and opting-out of friendship is one of the devices that makes Facebook what it is.)

To go one step further and chastise the comedy community goes way over the line.

Are all the jokes good ones?  Certainly not.  Some are illogical.  Some are painfully obvious.  Some were most likely assembled in a hurry and rushed onto a status update without a bit of polishing.  None of that matters.  What matters is that comedians react this way instinctively.

Last week, we were listening to Lars Callieou‘s Kamikaze Komedy radio show (Wednesdays at midnight PST) when talk drifted into the subject of gallows humor. Callieou mentioned an incident in which comic Ron Vaudry was lustily booed for a joke that veered into “bad taste” for being too soon. Vaudry chastised the audience (and we’re paraphrasing), “Hey,  I wrote a joke about the Challenger before the shuttle hit the water.”

On a recent post (“The Total Prick and his Insignificant Wife”), we went all crazy on someone who sent us a link to a clip by a comedian, claiming that the set depicted was “one of the best sets I’ve ever seen,” and that the clip was going viral and garnering all sorts of praise.

We disagreed. We were pilloried by the sender for daring to disagree. The comments on the posting were illuminating.

It also led to some interesting conversations with some professional comics “off-blog.”

And we came to the conclusion that today’s aspiring comedians have no shame. And that shame is often a good thing to have.

Allow us to explain. When we first started out, the clubs we worked out at had video cameras in the back of the house. We were invited to watch the recording of our most recent open-mike performance. Some feedback was offered. Occasionally, we were able to bring in a tape and actually take home a copy of our most recent performance and watch it on the Reggie-Vision.

In those early days, it was instructive (if not also cringe-inducing) to watch those sets. We would be on the lookout for annoying physical quirks. Watching the video (and not just listening to an audio recording) was a tremendous way to edit jokes, break bad habits and accelerate the learning process.

Later on, when we got good enough to travel, we rented video equipment on one or two occasions and tried to capture a set– on the road, with a hot crowd. Once in a great while, we defied the odds and got lucky, actually capturing a set that was executed nearly flawlessly and that got the desired raucous response from the audience. It was a painstaking process, often frustrating. But the one, decent tape that resulted was often enough to get subsequent bookings from other bookers… or maybe even a television spot.

When the cost of the equipment came down to reasonable levels, it was commonplace for comedians to own their own video equipment. But getting a great set on tape was still difficult, and maybe even costly, for a number of reasons. Chattering near the camera’s microphone? Waitresses walking past the camera? A heckler that disrupts what would have been a perfect set?

Now comedians have easy access to relatively inexpensive and tiny video cameras, some of which are high-definition, which can be easily mounted anywhere in a showroom. For even the laziest comedian it is possible to make a decent, clear video and audio recording of practically any set, any night, anywhere. Of course, these recordings are not all going to be great or usable, but the odds are now more in the comedian’s favor than a decade ago.

And we have the means to upload them to the internet. So, you would think that every tape would on the WWW would be far and away better than recordings from the old days. But they’re not.

We’ve always been annoyed at the poor quality of some of the tapes that make it onto the web. If every show can be taped, there’s no real reason to put up a tape where the comedian’s voice can’t be heard… or the comedian’s voice is obscured by chatter from the audience or servers… or the camera is regularly jolted by nearby foot traffic. Those recordings are useful for private critiquing or for note-taking, but they certainly aren’t suitable for consumption by the public.

Further, we’ve noticed a disturbing trend in which new comics (aspiring comics? newbie comics? open mikers?) are uploading recordings of crappy sets. Sets that are not just coincidentally bad, but sets that quite clearly demonstrate that the person doing the set doesn’t know how to do standup yet.

Where is the shame? Don’t these folks know that they suck? Mind you, sucking, in itself, is not a crime– we all sucked in the early going. But we sucked in obscurity… in a vacuum… like we were supposed to. Like today’s comics are supposed to. Not plastered all over the WWW for the W to see!

Is it ego? Exhibitionism? Is it an eagerness to demonstrate– to themselves or to co-workers or to doubting relatives– that “Yes! I AM a standup comic!” (Is there some sort of sentiment out there that– as many times as a comic has done an open mike, as many times as a comic as told his friends that he does standup– it isn’t real or legitimate if it isn’t on Youtube?)

If the ego is involved, why doesn’t embarrassment keep the ego in check? Why not wait until you have something excellent to upload? Of course, we all convinced ourselves that we were “good” before we were actually good. But it seems odd to convince yourself that your set is worthy of torturing the entire world when, in some cases, there isn’t even any laughter on the tape!

This isn’t some sort of “these kids today think they’re so damn funny” rant. We’re honestly baffled.

We often wonder: Would we have uploaded– to the WWW– some of our absolutely gut-wrenchingly bad sets from our early days were we able to do so? We have to answer: No. We had trouble convincing ourselves that we were actually comedians, that we actually had the right to call ourselves comics. And that was a good thing. It made us work hard. It still makes us work hard.

Are we imagining this humility? Are we viewing our early days and our bygone colleagues through some sort of nostalgic prism? We don’t think so. And we think we have proof of that.

We have been trying to put together a show here locally where we invite veteran comedians (at least 15-years+) to bring a videotape of the earliest performance of theirs that they can get their hands on. The idea is that we would all gather and watch the tapes, then watch each comedian do a live set. Hilarity would ensue. As would mocking of the old set. A multi-media self-roast.

We say “trying” because NOT ONE comedian has said that they would do it. Not only that, but they say that it is a horrible idea! And they say that there is no way that anybody they know would ever consent to doing it. The prospect of unspooling an early, amateurish set fills them with dread.

They are shamed decades later.

“We’re in the Golden Age of comedy, but it’s definitely not the Golden Age of audiences.”

–Dave Attell

Jules Riley passed away Friday, Jan. 29.  She was known to Philadelphia comics.  The Halves of the Staff were privileged to have worked with Riley a few times, mainly at the Comedy Works in Bristol, PA.   Read her obit and leave memories here. Services are tomorrow.

If comedians are expected to say something meaningful, eventually they’ll be required to say something meaningful.

That’s the impression we get from this article on cnn.com which profiles a comedy duo from South Africa, Nik Rabinowitz and Tats Nkonzo.

We were struck by many things. Here’s a quote from Rabinowitz:

“I spent time in Kenya as well — they do an interesting thing there where they mix up their ‘L’s’ and their ‘R’s’ in Kenya, so they would say things like, ‘we know all about Mr Zuma, your plesident’ and we’d say, ‘What do you know about him?’ ‘And they’d say, ‘We know he’s got a big erection coming up this year’…

We don’t highlight the joke to ridicule Rabinowitz or to point out just how dated it is. We do so because we find it fascinating that such a bit is still considered current or maybe even cutting edge in South Africa. Not only that, but CNN.com repeats the gag and says things like, “From race and religion jokes to polygamy gags and political spoofs, Rabinowitz and Nkonzo are using satire to help South Africans accept uncomfortable truths– and the jokes go a long way.”

Are audiences that far behind in South Africa? Perhaps Jessica Ellis, the author of the piece is out of touch when it comes to standup.

Ellis is up to her ears in “international journalism,” having been at CNN as a producer and writer for nearly a decade, so it’s not likely that she has no idea just how far standup has progressed over the past 30 years. She more likely knows her audience and perhaps understands more than anyone just how unsophisticated South African comedy fans are.

Or perhaps her choice of Rabinowitz and Nkonzo was a poor one– maybe they don’t represent the best and the brightest of the South African comedy scene. But they’re presented as an important part of a process in “a nation striving to come to terms with its racist past.”

How long before South Africa acquires its own set of busybody bureaucrats, stuffy journalists and academics who see such material as “racist” or “xenophobic” and brings the hammer down on Rabinowitz and Nkonzo and as many other comics as they can.

Let’s see… judging from the material, they’re stuck in about 1982 or therabouts. So… we calculate that they have another decade before the P.C. shit hits the fan. Message to South African comedians: Enjoy the innocence and the freedom to address the issues of race and polygamy and religion the way you see fit. It’s only a matter of time before certain topics (and certain methods for dealing with them) are declared off-limits!

That’s what we’ve taken to calling ourselves around here. It’s a pride thing.

We get some odd emails here at SHECKYmagazine.com HQ. When we launched 12 years and 307 days ago, we called our Letters To The Editor page “Like We Care.” We thought it captured our attitude rather well. (Of course, we cared… but we thought it sent a subtle, ironic warning to folks that, hey, we just might not care! In the nearly thirteen years we’ve published, the vast majority of folks have “gotten the joke.”)

Mind you, we are passionate about certain things. (In fact, we’ve been mocked for being a little too passionate about certain topics.) But, we pick and choose carefully. And woe to the goofball who tries to light a fire under us for this or that cause or crusade. We will drink a gallon or two of water just to piss on that fire. That’s when the “Like We Care” motto– and the irony– really comes into play. And most folks fundamentally, instantly understand that.

Once in a while, though, we hear from someone who doesn’t.

A recent missive sought to get us all stirred up and excited. It was an email about a bit… being done by a comedian… somewhere. There was a link attached, which led to a video clip of said comic doing said bit.

Hi there, I thought you might have an interest in this video clip of [NAME OF CITY REDACTED] stand-up comedian [NAME REDACTED] doing a fresh bit called [NAME OF BIT, YOUTUBE URL REDACTED].

To be sure, it is hilarious, but also raw and truthful. It’s a riff on a real thing that happened [DESCRIPTION OF BIT REDACTED].

Full disclosure, the show is mine, and I also filmed and edited the clip. Irrespective of that, [NAME OF COMIC REDACTED] is a brilliant young comic. And this clip is making the rounds among our friends online and getting a fantastically positive response.

Don’t know if this is something you would want to write about but thought I’d reach out.

Thanks!

We’re reminded of a quote from Firesign Theatre’s “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus”:

A: Why did the shorthair cross the road?
B: I don’t know.
A: Because somebody told him to. Why did the longhair cross the road?
B: Because somebody told him not to?
A: Aw– you’ve heard it already!

Well… we suppose we’re longhairs at heart. And the above email was urging us in so many words to “cross the road.”

More often than not, when we get an email that is obviously trying to prod us into doing something, we are amused. We send back a polite email (if we bother to respond at all) and curtly thank the sender and inform them that he/she is barking up the wrong blog tree.

In this case, though, we sent back an email dripping with sarcasm and condescension:

Dear [NAME REDACTED]:
We were just talking about this last week.

You do yourself and your client a disservice by referring to a rape joke as “fresh.” It’s “the new hack,” about four or five “new hacks” ago. Just how isolated is [CITY REDACTED]? We figured with the internet and all, even folks in the [REGION OF COUNTRY REDACTED] would know that folks in New York and Los Angeles (and London and Sydney and probably even Vancouver and Toronto) have done rape jokes to the point where the audiences are inured to the shock value… along with abortion… and molestation… and a handful of other jokes that our colleagues have trotted out (sometimes out of obligation) in an effort to appear “raw and truthful.” (Mind you, we’re not for a minute labeling [COMIC'S NAME REDACTED] a hack. But we grow weary of the premise police who tell us that we’re not trying hard enough to explore new territory while they turn a blind eye toward the most egregious examples of tired and hackneyed repetition. Thus, our coining of the term, “The New Hack.”)

Of course, [COMIC'S NAME REDACTED] shouldn’t drop the joke. Nor should she avoid the topic in the future. But she should be under no illusion that she’s breaking new ground or setting herself that far apart from the rest.

Good luck to both of you.

We suppose the reaction was predictable.

Dear Mr. McKim,
Thanks for your response. With all due respect, did you watch the clip and actually listen to her tell her story and hear the audience’s supportive reaction? Or did you just see the title of the clip and decide it was hack?

It’s not a “rape joke,” and it’s not for shock value. It’s the transforming of a crappy (universal) personal incident and a reversal of a power dynamic through creativity. She’s describing a real-life incident and her own internal reaction to it. By “fresh” I meant this incident happened to her a few days ago and here she is onstage working it out for the first time, not “wow, here’s a subject no one’s ever broached onstage before.”

The truth is, this sort of crap happens to women all the time, and it’s terrifying. So listening to someone like Ever grab ahold of something like this and transform it into something wonderful is an example of comedy transcending mere jokes and laughs.

Incidentally, every single response we’ve gotten to this set, from feminist blogs, gay blogs, comedy blogs – not to mention real live people – have all been overwhelmingly positive. As in “wow, I never thought someone could make a subject like this funny, and her bravery and honesty are amazing, thanks for sharing, I’m going to post this, too.”

She’s truthfully discussing a universally painful and terrible subject, and a room full of people are laughing. She wins. Comedy wins. We all win. If you can’t see that (and/or didn’t actually watch the clip), then no sweat. But don’t judge before seeing for yourself.

And, to be clear, she’s not my “client.” [NAME OF COMIC REDACTED] is a fellow castmember at a $5 stand-up showcase. This is the first time in five years I’ve ever promoted a clip like this online, because I thought it was worth the effort. We were all very proud of this show and this particular set, and wanted to share it with a broader audience. That’s all.

Also, thanks for the extra unnecessary dose of condescension in your “isolated [NAME OF CITY REDACTED]” comments.

[REST OF EMAIL REDACTED]

To which we replied:

You missed our point entirely.

The reaction to our reaction was, we suppose, entirely predictable. Seconds later, The Female Half of the Staff hops onto Facebook– not even knowing that she was a friend of the email author– to find this:

Wow! According to one – and only one – comedy blog, a joke that uses the word rape is hack, and I’d know that if I didn’t live in the backward, isolated Midwest! Also, I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually watch the clip, and is a total prick.

That’s us! We are soooo proud!

What follows is the Facebook equivalent of showing up outside our blog with glowing torches, pitchforks and bloodhounds.

I am SO PISSED right now, sorry guys. This asshole didn’t even watch the clip.

But one more thing: this guy is SUCH A GREAT COMEDIAN HIMSELF, he’s performed in all 50 states – and yet you’ve never fucking heard of him. Dickwad.

Thank you, James. It’s really fine, I just need to cool off. I guess you risk being misunderstood when you’re pushing the envelope like this.

Of course, the asshole(s) watched the clip. What kind of asshole(s) would we be if we passed judgement without even watching the clip? Jesus H. Christ! What kind of asshole(s) are these people accustomed to dealing with if they assume that we didn’t even watch the clip?! What kind of delusions are these folks operating under? (See DSM-IV-TR)

The Female Half of the Staff was understandably hurt. After all, the email we sent back, snark and all, was co-authored. As is all the output of SHECKYmagazine.com. For someone to reply to just The Male Half was a blow to her delicate sensibilities. She was momentarily unable to function. The inability of [NAME REDACTED] to appreciate The Female Half of the Staff’s personhood, to appreciate her co-authorship of SHECKYmagazine.com (and any/all correspondence originating therefrom), was a blow. Her identity– both as a person and as a woman– was rocked. She eventually gathered herself and responded.

My husband isn’t a prick. For your information, we wrote the response together after watching the clip. You missed our point. We were trying to save you from embarrassing yourself. There have been plenty of funny rape jokes in the past. Sarah Silverman is known for her “being raped by a doctor” bit, for example. If you can’t handle criticism then don’t send out the clip.

We would add that, before she hit “Send,” she deleted the line where she called the email sender a “cunt.”

We expect this kind of sexism from men. (Well, not the kind of men we hang out with, anyway.) But when it comes from a woman… it is HILARIOUS!

We wonder how all the feminist blogs who favorited her clip would feel about such a gaffe.

And then there’s the hack tactic of attacking the editors of SHECKYmagazine.com by calling into question their relative notoriety– “….you’ve never fucking heard of him!” Yeesh! That’s the new, new, new hack! Some publication fails to give you the proper love and you diss that publication by dissing the editor(s)?

Hello, sweetheart (and that comes from The Female Half, not The Male Half): There are a lot of people in this business who know who we are– from open mikers who have bought our book, to veterans who have worked with us over the past 30 years or so, to comedy superstars, to a scared little rabbit who beseeches a behemoth comedy website to say glowing things about her comedy crush.

Grow the fuck up. Is this the first adversity you’ve ever encountered in your life? Did you get shiny, towering trophies for just participating in every activity in your young existence? You are unwittingly enrolled in a Special Olympics life. We’re sorry we didn’t give you a hug at your imagined finish line. We hope you can recover.

You may be wondering why we redacted all names, place, links, identity. It’s because we wanted to spare any embarrassment to the comedian that [NAME REDACTED] so clumsily represented.

We’re told that [COMEDIAN'S NAME REDACTED] was trying out that material for the first time (or one of the first times). And it shows. Perhaps, in six months or so, with some editing and some tweaking here or there, the bit will cook down to a decent 2-1/2 minutes. But worthy of some sort of viral buzz campaign that seeks to establish a beachhead in the war against humdrum comedy? We’re not convinced.

For now, however, the spectacle of a shaky bit, being guffawed at by her friends/sycophants/shills/fellow open-mikers isn’t worthy of internet viralism. As it is, in its current form, the clip is just eight minutes of beating a (not-so-daring) premise (with just a touch of daring racism? What say you, alts?) into the ground. To be sure, the clip, according to its champion, has garnered some buzz– the clip is getting a “fantastically positive response”– but we’re not convinced that the WWW response is anything more than some sort of Pavlovian response to certain prescribed topics and methods. We don’t even buy the genuineness of the laughter picked up by the camera’s microphone. (Believe us– between the two of us, we’ve done/attended hundreds of open mikes in dozens of cities… so we know forced laughter when we hear it.)

[NAME REDACTED] says that the clip depicts “One of the best sets I’ve ever seen. Words cannot describe it, so I’ll let this clip speak for itself.” There is more there to repulse us than just simple bombast. There is a certain sort of stupidity and cluelessness and arrogance that doesn’t just seek to elevate the performer in the clip, but seeks to unfairly downgrade those who don’t live up to the performance standards supposedly set by the clip.

Perhaps we suffer from some sort of paranoia/persecution complex (the same sort that our emailer suffers from!), perhaps we don’t. But this whole exercise seems sort of embarrassing (and redundant) since there are countless comedians out there– Laurie Kilmartin? Sarah Silverman? Nikki Glaser? Bonnie McFarlane? Patrice Oneal? Doug Stanhope?– who, in the space of 15 seconds, have said something more meaningful and pithy than [NAME REDACTED] can do in 8:05.

So… in summary… don’t give us shit when we disagree with you.

For now, the author the original email is our mortal enemy. In six month’s time, however, we will not remember her name. We will only be able to vaguely recall the details of this dustup. And that is perhaps the biggest diss of all! Booyah! (Yeah… upon further reflection… maybe we are total prick(s).)

THIS JUST IN– The emailer’s latest Facebook status as of four minutes ago:

I’m sorry, I don’t have time to care about your negative opinion, I’m too busy being awesome at what I do.

Somebody give this chick (the Female Half’s characterization) a trophy!!