We’ve set up a new poll! Who among the choices we’ve listed would you like to see do standup comedy again? We’ve listed six comics who don’t do standup any more: Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor and Phyllis Diller. Each has pretty much “retired” from live performance. (Doing TV monologues doesn’t count. We’re talking standup comedy, with a live audience, in a club or a casino showroom.)

You need not have already seen him/her do standup to respond, just check the one that you’d like to see do it now. The poll’s over there—–> So, take a moment or two and check one off. We’ll publish the results soon. Thanks!

We have results from our “How Long Have You Been Doing Standup?” poll. And we don’t quite know exactly what to make of them. Of course, the poll was wildly unscientific. But we can derive something of value from the numbers.

This much we can say about the respondents:

Half have never done it or, if they have, they’ve only been at it less than a year.

One quarter have done it between 1 and 5 years.

One quarter have done it 5 years or more.

Is there anything further that we can speculate? Perhaps ask a few questions? What do the figures say about our readership? What do the numbers say about the magazine and what it offers/doesn’t offer?

What is with the 3- to 5-year people?

Why don’t we attract them? (Maybe we do– they just don’t like answering polls!)

Should we care?

We’re not statisticians. We’re comedians. And we’ve tried all along to produce a magazine with somewhat broad appeal (within the universe of standup comics/standup fans/standup business). We’re of the opinion that we’ve done just that. If the numbers seem a tad lopsided (More fans than vets, more >1-year people than 3- to 5-year people, etc.) that’s only because it might just reflect reality: There will always be more people watching it than doing it! And, let’s be honest, there aren’t going to be a whole lot of people continuing on with this crazy standup thing for longer than 10 years. Who do you think there’ll be more of: People who do it for a few years and then quit– A writing gig? A family? Hit the lottery? Or people who continue doing it for 20 years? We think the numbers are just about right.

We have a sub-theory about the 3- to 5-year people: While it may appear that we’re not appealing to them, or that we’re not doing enough to attract them, we have a different opinion. People who’ve been doing it for 3 to 5 are a curious lot–having been among their number at one time,, we know firsthand! They’re making the transition between Newbie and Pro. As such, they’ve finally gotten “good” at this comedy thing, but they’re nowhere near as good as they probably will be in the future. They’re an ornery lot. They’re at the point wheere they must make a serious commitment. This requires a certain amount of cockiness, bitterness, negativity. It’s nothing personal, it’s survival. As a result, nobody can tell them anything! Least of all some dopey internet magazine about standup. How do we know this? We were there once. Had we produced an internet magazine about standup when we were at the five-year mark (and had there actually been an internet back then!), it would have been the most vile, the most vicious, the most depressing mag ever. We got over it. They’ll get over it, too.

In an item entitled “One Funny Workout” comes this, from the October 2004 Shape magazine:

Laughing hard for just 20 seconds doubles your heart rate for about a minute afterward, research at Stanford University in California shows. That’s the same result you’d get from 15 minutes on a stationary bicycle or 10 minutes of strenuous rowing (though you won’t burn as many calories.) Laughter can be an effective “mini-workout,” says psychiatrist William F. Fry, M.D., a leading researcher on laughter’s health benefits. Laughing exercises not just your heart and lungs, Fry says, but the muscles in your chest, abdomen, shoulders, neck, face and scalp as well.

We find it disturbing that we have muscles in our scalp.

Hey, SHECKYmagazine.com readers, associates, all others:

If you’ve sent us an email sometime in the last two weeks and you received no response, (And you deserved a response), the email probably never reached us! ALSO: If the email you sent us “bounced” back to you, let us know. There seems to be something fishy going on with the mail server… or something… Let’s put it this way: We usually make every effort to reply to any/all email. If you didn’t get a response, something happened to it… something beyond our control. So send it again. (I know, I know, some of you have emailed us and our response might have been less than prompt. Sometimes we get behind in our correspondence. But this recent bit of email confusion is different. We’re experiencing the ol’ “I sent it! Didn’t you get it?” and we’re experiencing some of the ol’ “We replied… and now you’re telling me it never got there?”)

To recap: If you think that some or all of the email you’ve sent to SHECKYmagazine hasn’t gotten through, send again!

NO! We did a little surfing and found that, in spite of album titles like “Rejoice, Dear Hearts” and “Kick Thy Own Self,” Brother Dave Gardner was not a Christian comic in any way, shape or form. And we even listened to the album itself! (Yeah, yeah, why didn’t you do that in the first place? Well, often the albums we buy aren’t in the best condition. This one was near excellent, however.) Turns out Dave was a hipster and he addressed his audience in quirky ways like “Dear Hearts” and “Beloved” but he does political material, observational stuff, he plays with the language, it’s surprisingly modern for a comic from 1961.

We speak of Brother Dave because he died in 1983 at the age of 57. And he had quite a story. There’s a fellow in Burlington, NC, who’s doing a one-man show based on Brother Dave, read about it here.

Brother Dave Gardner
Ain’t That Weird?
(RCA Victor LSP-2335)

It’s the return of The Vinyl Word! One of our favorite features of the old Like We Care Page was The Vinyl Word, where we would run a vivid color image of a smashing LP cover and, through the liner notes and other info, we’d offer a glimpse into the life of a comedy performer from days gone by or maybe get a slice of standup history!

RCA LSP-2335 is “Ain’t That Weird?” by Brother Dave Gardner, recorded live at Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium in Ft. Worth, TX. The album is Copyright 1961 and I dig Brother Dave’s threads! He kinda reminds me of Lord Carrett just a bit. Apparently, this is Brother Dave’s third LP and we just love the liner notes by Joe R. Mills, identified as “Television Editor, The Columbus Post Dispatch.”

In my humble opinion Brother Dave is unique among contemporary entertainers. In an era of comedy when practitioners of the art stand up, stand still and complain, Brother Dave’s spirit is glad.

Brother Dave is a contradiction to the eye as well as to the spirit. He comes on with a High Society front of dazzling and special flair. He is a diamond stickpin in the drab cravat of modern entertainment. Standing before his followers he is a picture of an elegant yesterday. Yet when he talks he talks out beyond tomorrow.

Hmmm… Perhaps Mr. Mills coulda used a couple more commas here or there, but you get the idea!

In spite of the fact that Brother Dave is smoking a cigarette in the pics on the front cover, we gather that he’s a Christian comic. (Tobacco was only demonized by the hardest of hard core Christians back then, well-funded mainstream HealthNazis and the Surgeon General were just waking up to the dangers!) A little further down in the liner notes, Brother Dave himself gushes about college crowds:

When I’m doing a concert to the young, fresh, alert minds of our future leaders, I find it difficult to end a show. I don’t have to stop, slow down or explain. Wherever I go in the regions of the mind, I find that they are right with me, and this confirms my opinion that the mind is beautiful, and when we meet on that plane we all swing.

Hmmm… maybe that’s not just a cigarette! (We hope that Joe Mills won’t mind if we borrow that “diamond stickpin in the drab cravat of modern entertainment” for our own press release!)

In her latest column (uploaded minutes ago), Traci Skene manages to drop such names as Daryl Dragon, Mother Teresa and Pee Wee Herman while relating her experience in a Topock, AZ, truck stop rest room.

As I was exiting the ladies’ room stall, I slipped on the way to the sink. After regaining my balance, I looked down to see what had caused this near-fatal accident. There it was… in all it’s shining, iconic, archetypal glory… a banana peel. I had slipped on a banana peel. After 39 years of stumbling around this planet, I had finally been part of a cliche come to life.

Read the rest of her birthday recollection here.

Becasue the guarantee of trial by jury extends to a broader range of cases than in any other nation, the extensive use of trial by jury is unique to the United States.

So states the Educational Guide for Trial Jurors (Second Edition), published by the New Jersey State Bar Foundation. Some of our more astute (and regular… or obsessed) readers may have noticed a paucity of postings over the last 48 hours or so. It was because Brian had jury duty. Because New Jersey has a One Day/One Trial system, and because Brian lucked out by getting on a jury of a civil trial that lasted only one day, his service was limited to… one day. It wasn’t anything worthy of a column. “The definitive column on jury duty was written by Traci,” says he. Read that one here.

Looks like Dave Attell has signed a deal with Fox, according to Hollywood Reporter. Here’s our favorite part:

Given his writing background on Insomniac and NBC’s Saturday Night Live, it is possible that Attell would be involved in the development/writing of his starring vehicle.

It is possible?! Possible? In the paragraph before this one, they said they were hiring Attell because he’s “…really funny, very edgy, has a huge following that cuts across all age groups…” and that he has a “specific point of view.” Why, after having acknowledged all of that (and we must say that we concur), wouldn’t you hand him the keys to a sitcom and tell anyone with ears that he is going to have nearly total creative control of anything he dreams up? (Of course, they might actually not really give him that control but wouldn’t you at least create that illusion? What sense does it make to say that it’s merely possible?

THANK YOU ALL!
We have our winners! Five lucky SHECKYmagazine.com winners will receive a copy of Mitch Fatel‘s Miniskirts & Muffins. Thank you all for participating! Stay tuned for more CD giveaways in the not-too-distant future!! (And the name on the refrigerator is “Douglas!”) Congratulations to our winners!

And don’t forget to visit Mitch Fatel‘s website!