Tonight, at 9 PM EDT, is an hourlong episode of Last Comic Standing. Last week, they showed edited sets from 16 comics. This week, we suspect they’ll do that again. We missed last week, but we’re all over this one.

The reason we missed last week, of course, is because we were in Montreal, covering the Just For Laughs Fest. We upped 8,798 words and 20 photographs depicting 39 comedy-related people. You can read all of that by scrolling down!

Thanks.

Normally, we wouldn’t be posting about just any new comedy club, but this one is significant because a comic (Rich Francese) is opening it and it’ll draw on talent from NYC.

The Manhattan Comedy Club, as Francese plans to call it, would be Orange County’s first full-blown comedy club, competing with Bananas in Poughkeepsie and the new Catch a Rising Star at the Monticello racino.

Racino? That’s not a typo, that’s a made-up word that describes a race track that’s been outfitted with slots. It will be located near Middletown, NY, which means that comics in the city can get there in about 90 minutes.

Read the entire Times Herald Record article.

Here are multiple listings on the “Dave Chappelle checks into hospital for exhaustion” story.

And a short piece on Slate by Christopher Beam on whether or not exhaustion is a legitimate medical problem.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hospitalize someone for exhaustion. For one thing, exhaustion can be a symptom of an underlying condition. Metabolic ailments like adrenal insufficiency, which develops after periods of extended physical or emotional stress, or hypothyroidism, a chronic slowing of the thyroid glands, can leave you feeling wiped.

We’ve always wondered about it ourselves. We’ve heard the tales of stars onstage collapsing from exhaustion. We thought it would be cool to be in an audience at a historical exhaustion episode. Country and western stars always seem to be running themselves ragged an flopping into the first row. We recall being sorely disappointed when we attended a show at the Grand Ole Opry a few years back and nobody took the dive. (We came close, though– Skeeter Davis was celebrating her birthday just a little too much and she was markedly lurching as she performed “End Of The World.” Oh, wouldn’t that have been ironic!)

The Comedy Festival (TCF), the consumer-oriented comedy fest in Vegas created by HBO (partnered with TBS), has hooked up with Ziddio.com (which is the online video-sharing, user-gen site launched by Comcast), to conduct The Lucky 21.

The Lucky 21 will allow comedy fans to send their favorite comedians to TCF by supporting them at their local comedy club and voting for them online.

In the first round of competition, 42 comedy clubs across the country will choose their top comedians to perform in front of a panel of judges. Two comedians from each club will be selected to advance to one of seven regional competitions. During the regionals, fans will have the opportunity to vote online for the top 20 comedians who will advance to Las Vegas and perform at TCF.

If anyone can find anything at all on the ziddio.com site about Lucky 21, please post the URL in the comments below. We tried, using two different browsers and two different desktop computers, and all we got was:

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we can’t find the page you’re looking for. You may have clicked on an outdated link, or possibly typed in the URL incorrectly. Click your BACK button or try one of the links below to see if they point you in the right direction.

They did this last year, but we’re not sure if the online component was part of the deal.

We got this, through back channels:

…I wanted to let you know the results of the first elimination challenge in Last Comic Standing that took place last night.

The competitors were:

Dante

Gina Yashere

Ralph Harris.

Basically it went like this: The producers had the audience and comics film three versions of who the winner was before the show started.

Does that make sense?

So before the show began each comic was announced and filmed as winning the competition, complete with bogus audience results, (i.e. “with 67 percent of the vote the winner is….”)

The reason they did this is so that none of the studio audience would do what I’m about to do right now, which is reveal the winner: Ralph Harris.

They didn’t announce it last night.

There’s no way we can verify this. It was sent to us anonymously. We’re not passing on nuclear secrets here. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing.

This “casting call” just came over the cyber-transom. For those of you who are electronically illiterate, “HD” stands for High-Def… or High Definition. Trust us, it’s a good thing.

Could your close-knit group use an HD makeover worth up to $40,000?

Would you like to switch your technology “has-beens” with some state-of-the-art gadgets?

If so, let us help you out!

A new reality series is seeking groups of all shapes and sizes (PREFERABLY 4-6 PEOPLE) throughout the U.S. in all their lovable and quirky glory, to shower in thousands of dollars worth of the latest electronics! Not just father/daughter or single mother/kids teams, but COMEDIANS, SURFERS, small business FIRMS, COFFEE SHOPS, FIREHOUSES, ANYTHING that feels like “family”. Be ready for a technology makeover like no other, but also be ready to show that your family can put the technology to good use.

Email us at TECHNOLOGYFAMILY@GMAIL.COM with your group members’ names, ages, location, a contact number, recent photo, and WHY YOU DESERVE TO BE CHOSEN!

Thanks so much!
Best,
Jon Unger
Casting Director
Magical Elves Productions
213.630.6530 ext 289

Damn! We here at SHECKYmagazine.com could use $40,000 worth of gadgets. Unfortunately, we fall two to four people short of their group-size requirement. Perhaps we could find two or three or four people would could pretend to like us, so that we might all compete for a truckload of home entertainment.

Paul Mooney, Warren Hutcherson, Charlie Murphy and D.L. Hughley are among the comedians who will figure heavily in the fall lineup of Black Entertainment Television (BET).

Mooney will star in Judge Mooney “as the outrageously funny judge who lays down the law with his own brand of humor.”

Hughley will host a reality show, S.O.B., that will “use hidden cameras to test the value systems of people.”

The executive producers of Somebodies are listed as Pete Aronson and Warren Hutcherson, who were executive producers on The Bernie Mac Show.

But the most eagerly anticipated debut, tomorrow night at 10:30 PM EDT, is that of Hot Ghetto Mess— we know, we know, it’s been retitled We Got To Do Better, but we like HGM better… and besides, that’s what people are going to call it anyway– a show based on the website hotghettomess.com and hosted by Charlie Murphy. Folks are backpedaling away from this like it’s a turd in a swimming pool.

Initial reports say that Home Depot and State Farm pulled their ads from the show. Then further press releases from Home Depot and State Farm said that they had never bought ads on the show, they merely pulled their ads from the BET site, so as to avoid the appearance of ever having endorsed the show in the first place! Two layers of insulation! This must really be something!

We’re popping some popcorn.

The aforementioned website, started by a 34-year-old D.C. attorney contains some jarring images, some heavy quotes and a message that is too hot to handle for many. (It needs some work, though– maybe some extra server power and better architecture as it is slow to load some things and the layout’s a bit confusing.) What isn’t confusing, however, is the mission. We’ll be interested to see if the TV show clearly reinforces the website’s message.

Check out the PR Newswire release straight from BET for details and showtimes.

Drew Carey will replace Bob Barker as host of The Price is Right. And he’s already hosting The Power of 10, another game show.

Michael Learmonth, writing on Variety.com details the zany goings on at “the Peacock” concerning the upcoming transition at 11:35 PM weeknights, from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien. It looks like whoever swung the deal in the first place screwed the pooch.

Or did they? Are these guys so devious that they cooked up this deal a couple years ago knowing that they’d hafta fork over $40 million to O’Brien just to stay put at 12:35? Even in the $urreal world of TV, forty mill is still a good chunk of money. (Heck, they say that the annual revenue from Tonight is only $160 million. That would make the “We’re sorry” check to O’Brien approximately 4 per cent of NBC’s total annual revenue.)

The network also has the option, which many outsiders believe still must be on the table, to back out of the deal, pay a reported $40 million penalty to O’Brien and sign Leno to another five-year deal, a move that would protect the “Tonight” franchise through the end of Letterman’s deal at CBS in 2010, and the possible transition at the Eye to Jon Stewart.

Musical chairs. Stay tuned.

Here’s another weird part of the deal: NBC says that they’d ask O’Brien to move (with his staff) to Los Angeles. Not everybody is happy about that prospect. And that, since they’re on an hour earlier, they’d hafta ditch some recurring characters like The Masturbating Bear.

We noticed a disturbing trend at the JFL last week. There seems to be a tendency on the part of some television execs to view the online component of their studio or their network or cable outlet as a necessary evil, a holding bin (a garbage bin?) an afterthought.

We heard suits say that certain projects were “perfect for their online presence.” Of course, in every case, it was a comedy project that they were speaking so unenthusiastically about. We sense a trend. If an exec is faced with a comedy project (especially one that sounds like a sitcom), he immediately says that it’s probably suitable for online, for the internet, for our multi-platform initiative. They say it in such a way as to imply that: 1) It’s passe, it’s dated, it’s unwanted when compared to reality programming or whatever else it is they think will save television and 2) It’s something that they’ll be able to knock off for very little money.

This devalues two things– the internet and comedy. They seem at once to wish to appear knowledgeable about the potential of the internet as a platform for comedy content, but they seem to also hold it in some sort of contempt. They’re certainly aware that the internet is the next big thing, but one might get the impression that they’re hoping it doesn’t pan out that way. They seem to be only faintly aware that the load could shift and not only would the internet become the next big thing, but that it could do so in a couple of heartbeats and simultaneously make their own little sandbox yesterday’s technology.

The fact that they’re doing this while simultaneously badmouthing comedy (particularly the sitcom– “The genre is dead!”) is doubly dangerous. They shouldn’t turn their back on the internet (or even appear to do so). The internet might actually take their outcasts and discards (ie: sitcoms, standup, wacky films) and, in the short run, dwarf them and their reality crap and their game shows. This will be a deliciously ironic catastrophe to watch.

The very qualities that make television so un-good– giant bureaucracies, huge budgets, a consensus approach to the artistic process, a reliance on demographics and market segmentation– are the very things that are blessedly absent from the creative process on the internet. The means and the methods by which interesting stuff makes it to the consumer on the internet are the polar opposite of those which result in content on the telly.

Rather than play to their strengths, the TV people seem intent on bending the new technology to their will and on transposing the old ways onto the new media. You’ll have, for example, hybrid tv/web execs “creating” organic videos. We’ll pause to let the irony of that concept sink in.

They seem to be focused mainly on re-making the new medium to conform to the old model, with superficial, cynical attention paid to the new conventions. And they seem to think that there are terrible flaws in the new model that only they can remedy. Rather like a buggy whip manufacturer who suggests that the new automobiles are missing a golden opportunity because they have not made any provisions in their new designs for a place for the driver to store his buggy whip.

We don’t think that this will all take 40 years to shake out. We predict we’ll know the outcome in four years max.

Meanwhile, there was a press conference Thursday morning in one of the salons at the Hyatt at which was announced the upcoming World Comedy Conference, “a two-day event for broadcasters, TV and film producers, studio executives, agents, writers, digital content aggregators and creators, financiers and others,” to be held at next year’s JFL. We aren’t clear on the concept, but the Fest seems to think it will pump up the number of Industry attendees. Currently, they estimate 1,000 industry badges are issued each July.

We only mention it in this posting because, if it’s done right, it will shake things up a little bit and hasten the transformation of the industry from old media to new.

DAY ONE

We decided to break with tradition. In years past, we lit out just before dawn, getting out in front of the NY Metro traffic that plagues upstate New Jersey, driving for eight hours or more, straight through to Montreal, arriving tired, soggy and irritable. And without any nap, we would bull through night number one, eventually staying up for nearly 24 hours. Not a good way to kick off four days of Fest coverage.

This time, we decided to do our trip up to Montreal in two halves. We headed out Tuesday night at 11 PM, under cover of darkness, and got as far as the appropriately named Catskill, NY, before checking into our hotel. On Wednesday AM, we cruised in a leisurely fashion up 87, arriving in Montreal just after 3 PM.

This time, we’re tan, rested and ready.

(Turns out it was a doubly good idea, since the weather from D.C. to Boston– and beyond– was craptastic. And a good chunk of I-87 between Albany and Plattsburh was torn up by small squadrons of men and machines supposedly laboring to re-pave the road.)

This year’s logistical jiggering was made necessary by the fact that the Female Half is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday. For each of the past eight years, we’ve so devastated ourselves physically that we’ve ended each tour of Fest duty as husks– physically exhausted, emotionally drained, zombie-like. It just wouldn’t due to show up for an appointment with the surgeon’s knife in that kind of condition. So the decision was made to try to give ourselves some sort of physical margin. Rather than start out our mega-weekend in a sleep deficit, we resolved to ease into things gently.

While disgorging the contents of our rental car and humping our belongings up to our room at the Royal Vic, we were assisted by the just-arrived Sharilyn Johnson (FOS and Winnipeg journo), who was also lodged at the Royal Vic.

Johnson and The Male Half strode over to the new Fest HQ– this year, it’s the Hyatt on Ste. Catherine– to pick up this year’s Media laminates. The Male Half’s is missing his name and the Female Half’s has a little too much name! (Johnson suggested that the “Traci, Traci Skene,” identification is akin to the “Bond… James Bond” signature introduction made popular by Sean Connery.) The Female Half says she’s going to insist that everyone address her as “Traci Traci.”

Terry Turner (l) and Joe Satterfield (r) of Last Laff Productions flank The Female Half of the Staff

The Hyatt is on a hot corner of Montreal– just across from the Place des Arts, at Ste. Catherine and Jeanne Mance– and the hotel is a postmodern monstrosity that incorporates shopping (lots of shopping, an entire four-floor atrium full of shopping), dining and entertainment into a confusing mess of concrete and glass and terazzo. It took us several minutes (and a whole lot of squinting and pointing at a “You Are Here” diagram) before we found our way to the elevators. The only way to get to the hotel lobby is to take elevators! Who dreamed that up? “Welcome to the Hyatt– We hope you’re not too pissed!” It’s the ideal hotel for people who like riddles. (We later found another pair of elevators that takes one directly to the lobby… sort of. But it’s a bit off to the side and they’re rather nondescript. They rather look like elevators that might take you to CONTROL Headquarters if you push the wrong button… or, worse, to the offices of SMERSH!)

The Male Half of the Staff (l) with Reno Collier at the Hyatt

Once up on the sixth floor (That’s right, the lobby is on the sixth floor!), we noticed the vast expanse that was the hotel bar. It’s huge. It’s dark. It’s got plenty of schmooze space. This place has potential!

(Side note: While taking the elevator up to the lobby, a gentleman in our car asked, “Hey, do you work for SHECKYmagazine?” To which the Male Half replied, “Work for it? I am SHECKYmagazine!” Hey, who needs a name on his media pass? Obviously not The Internationally Recognized Male Half of the Staff! The Female Half of the Staff, however, points out that, not only is she not recognized on the street, she is seldom given given any credit for the mag. “So, not only do I need a name on my tag, I need it on there twice!” says she.)

Joe Matarese(l) and Robert Kelly at the Hyatt

The Daily Schedule lists, among other things, the major American cinema release “Hairspray.” We heard a news report/review of the film on the way up in which it was said that Travolta affects a “dead-on Baltimore accent.” We concluded that he merely sounds like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. This is not the first time that Travolta has failed miserably trying to mimicked a regional accent. In “Blow Up,” the miserable turd remake by Brian DePalma, it was said that he brilliantly captured a Philly accent. Trust us, as folks who suffer through the Philly accent on a daily basis (and as two people who went to great lengths to expunge the cursed accent from our own speech), he embarassed himself on that count. The PHL and the BALTO accents are nearly identical… and equally annoying.

The big show tonight, it seems, is The Homegrown Competition, at Cabaret Just Pour Rire. It’ll be hosted by John Dore and will feature Nick Beaton, Paul Bennett, Claire Brosseau, Casey Corbin, Ivan Decker, Sean Lecomber, Brendan McKeigan, Don Wood and Peter White. (Editors note: Sean Lecomber and Nick Beaton came in first and second respectively in Wednesday’s Homegrown Competition.)

Russell Peters (l) and Mark Saldana at the Hyatt

The sked accidentally listed the Zach Galifianakis show’s description under the heading of “Defending The Caveman,” at the Centaur Theatre (the second of twelve showings up here). Boy are those Zach fans going to be confused! Will the Caveman fans stay away? We’ll see. (The slick Horaires des Spectacle, or show schedule as us mere mortals call it, lists the Caveman show, but, mysteriously, it doesn’t say exactly who will be portraying the title character! Hmmm… perhaps they’ll merely pluck someone from the audience and run the words to the monologue on a discreetly placed monitor. It’ll be “Cave-e-oke!” If that’s it, it’s brilliant!)

We hung out on Ste. Catherine, outside the Theatre Ste. Catherine, and at about a half-hour after midnight, we were waved in to see “The Green Room,” the interview show cooked up by Paul Provenza. It was a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fest and it’s here for three nights in a row. Tonight’s guests were Jim Jeffries, three of the five Kids In The Hall (Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley) and David Cross and Bob Odenkirk.

Hugh Moore (New Faces) with The Female Half of the Staff at the Hyatt

Jeffries, readers of this mag will recall, is the comic who was assaulted onstage at the Comedy Store in Manchester. The attack was made famous via YouTube, when video was posted a few months back.

The whole idea behind The Green Room is that comics talking to comics is an entertaining thing to witness. We couldn’t agree more. WHen it was just Jeffries out there, things moved well and, by golly, it was a hoot. When The Kids emerged from backstage, and the couch was crowded with bodies– and there weren’t enough mikes to go around– things slowed quite a bit. When Odenkirk and Cross came out for the final segment, upping the body count onstage to seven (and increasing the comic to mike ratio to over 2), the wheels fell off.

To be sure, many in attendance were thrilled to be in such close proximity to their particular comedy idol(s), and it was rather interesting to see these characters in a situation significantly less contrived than that which we normally see them. But it was maddeningly inconsistent.

We may go back and try to get into a second installment on Thursday night.

The Hollywood Reporter has their special Fest editions out on the tables. And, as usual, they’re packed with quotes– from the usual suspects– that range from the ridiculous to the insulting to the incoherent.

Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada has seen many talents pass through his club and go on to show-stopping turns at Montreal’s annual Just For Laughs Comedy Festival… and he’s please about the changes he’s witnessed in the way today’s young performers command club and festival stages. “It’s a very different energy from the early ’80s, when comics stuck to a routine that went joke, joke, joke,” he says. “Now the audience wants more than that, and the best performers can do it.”

File that one under “Ridiculous.”

The author of the piece, Chuck Crisafulli, seems to have crafted a story in which the organizers of this year’s festival (and many of the folks interviewed for the piece) are all too eager to apologize for standup as it is traditionally defined. There seems to be some kind of bizarre, subconscious, accidental collective consciousness that holds that we’re all rising up as a nation and letting everyone know that we’ve had it up to here with comedians who are merely funny! We want “versatile, less-easily defined performers!” We want comics who will explore that “new and encouraging freedom in the relationship between comic and audience!” By golly, that’s what we’ve been missing all along! (Everyone– check your shoes… we smell horseshit.)

The Top Prize for Outlandish Statement, the Palm D’or for Horse Manure, must go to Greg Proops.

The biggest and best change over the years is that there are now Asians and women and gays all allowed on stage, and there are more than just a couple of black superstars,” says Gregg Proops… “Everbody plays to a general audience now, not just people like themselves. We’ve all become more egalitarian about comedy. A white boy can like Margaret Cho and Dave Chappelle and doesn’t have to sit around worrying about it.”

Saaaayyy whaat?!?!?

The above indicates an astounding ignorance of entertainment history in general and comedy history in particular. Asians and women and gays are allowed on stage? WHat planet has he inhabited for the last forty years? On this planet we have books that have all kinds of accounts of Asians and women and gays who were allowed onstage, as far back as 100 years ago. And, if you don’t dig books, there’s video, film and recordings.

We’re so thrilled that “everybody plays to a general audience now, not just people like themselves.” Is he serious? Has he ever heard of The Ed Sullivan Show? Or vaudeville? It was in all the papers. Has he heard of Bert Williams? Godfrey Cambridge? Minnie Pearl? Dick Davy? Moms Mabley? Tamayo Otsuki? Pat Morita?

In point of fact, however, with the advent of packaged tours and MySpace and Def Comedy Jam and Que Loco and computer-assisted market segmentation, and Cray computers crunching terrabytes of raw demographic data into multi-color spreadsheets, comedians are ever more willing to “play to people like themselves.” And the audiences that we’re seeing aren’t nearly as diverse as they were in 1986 or 1987. It seems that comics who seek out such arrangements– and the audiences who pay their money to see them– are exceptionally pleased with the current state of affairs. It is not an especially bad thing or an especially good thing– it is merely a thing.

It’s frustrating when someone tries to re-write (or deny) history. It’s doubly frustrating when someone seems to be in denial of the current reality.

We might remind Mr. Proops that he’s showcasing his talents at a festival that favors segregating its performers– Eve’s Tavern, The Wise Guys (Italian), The Asian Invasion, the Bar Mitzvah Show, etc. Once again, not a good thing, not a bad thing, just a thing.

Only Craig Ferguson and Tim Allen come to the defense of the merely humorous. Only those two are skeptical of this new dynamic that some insist is poised to revolutionize standup comedy as we know it. (And we sense that the author merely included the quotes a journo-speed bump, a dollop of texture before the big windup.)

DAY TWO

A cursory examination of the back of our Media laminates reveals that possession of said credentials entitles us to “Stay out of the way” and “Shut the fuck up.” And this year, unlike in past years, we weren’t asked to submit ticket requests when we filed for our credentials. Oversight? Who knows. Basically, we’re on our own. It’s up to us to somehow weasel our way into any events we fancy. Fortunately, we know damn near everyone up here with the “Artiste” designation. And we know a good chunk of the Industry folks and the “Accompaneurs.” (Which is the fancy French word for hangers-on.)

On Wednesday night, when we were hanging out on Ste. Catherine, waiting to get a seat for The Green Room, there was a rather scary incident acted out on the street in front of the theater– a babbling (a Francais!) homeless dude was being loudly and relentlessly hassled by a scarily persistent and disconcertinly focused crazy dude. (Everyone identified Dude # 2 as a “crackhead!”) It made for an edgy minute or two. This end of Ste. Catherine is… dicey? Previously, we haven’t ventured past St. Laurent, where Club Soda is. Past Ste. Laurent the cast of characters gets a bit more… exciting.

Left to right: Nikki Glaser, Sabrina Jalees, Tommy Johnagin

We heard of another incident, that took place last week, outside of Club Soda. Dave Attell was waiting to go on at the Nasty Show when he saw an altercation spill out of a neighboring bar. One of the “celebrants” was emphasizing his points with a machete! The blade-toting inebriant then chased his fellow partiers back into the bar. Attell was, understandably, fascinated. In fact, the story goes that when the cops arrived to sort things out, Attell followed closely behind. Must be all that training on Inomniac.

Has Canada or Quebec or drastically altered their mental health policies? We don’t seem to recall being anywhere near frightened on the streets of Montreal. But it seems like things have gotten a little less frivolous and just a couple of ticks more adventurous in these parts.

And we heard a rumor that yet another comic was almost sucked into a “bum fight.”

And The Male Half was harassed by a drunk guy in a small bar between Club Soda and Theatre Ste. Catherine. He was bellowing, “Hey, Drew Carey! Hey, Drew Carey!” And he yelled it with an edge, more like he was seeking not so much an autograph, but a vital organ. The Female Half had visions of riding on the back of a transvestite with a broken beer bottle in one hand in an attempt to quell any violent outbreak, rather like a postmodern version of a Canadian Mountie.

We were listening to Radio 360 on the drive up and Stephen Harper was telling a crowd on his recent trip to Chile that Canada currently has the strongest economy of all the G8 member nations. Is any of that prosperity trickling down (or over) to Quebec? The above crackhead/homeless confrontation was mentioned in a Gazette review of Wednesday night’s Green Room show, so it wasn’t our imagination. And Section A of today’s Gazette has an account of someone getting stabbed, in mid-afternoon, at the Peel Metro station on Thursday. Hmmm…Peel is only a few blocks away. What’s going on here, anyway? Perhaps the Fest will be moving to Toronto after all, despite statements to the contrary.

The newly svelte Neil Leiberman (l) and John Beuhler (Just For Pitching)

And, just up the street, amid this all is The Hyatt. We said that the Hyatt had potential. Compared to the Delta, it’s closer to some of the main venues– Club Soda, Theatre Ste. Catherine, Spectrum– so close that the Female Half can walk to them– and back!– in four-inch heels. But it only takes a 2-1/2 block walk to the north before things start to resemble a combination of “Blade Runner” and “Panic In Needle Park.” (Was that too obscure of a reference? Well, it beats “the bar scene from ‘Star Wars’,” doesn’t it? Sorry… we’ve been schooled over the past 48 hours about Hack this and Hack that, so we’re on our best behavior… NOT! Sorry. Hadda throw that in!)

And the Hyatt does have some good things going for it– it sits atop a giant mall that has a grocery story and a food court. (A “Food court” in Montreal is ten times better than any similar entity in the States. And the same goes for fast food. If for no other reason than one can purchase inexpensive and fast cuisine Libanaise on nearly every corner.)

But the bar is a disappoinment. Firstly, they stop serving food at 11:30 PM! Bad idea, since a ton of people flood in there at about 11:31! Secondly, they overcharge for booze! And the exchange rate stinks these days, so you can’t even fool yourself into thinking you’re paying less just because the fiver has a portrait of Gene Wilder on it. (Well, it’s not Gene Wilder, but it’s some old Canadian guy and the bill is a bluish-purple color.)

They’ve concocted names for the pizzas and sandwiches– specifically for the occasion! There’s the George Burns, the Benny Hill, the Charlie Chaplin. And then, there’s “Nachos and Salsa.” Unless that’s the name of an obscure comedy team from the Canadian TV Hall of Fame, we’re puzzled. Why would they give everything else a comedy-themed name and not the nachos? Couldn’t they at least have called it the “Cheech and Chong?” Or has Political Correctness so crippled the sense of playfulness up here that such a thing would be considered a hate crime?

Schmooze-wise, the bar is inferior to that of the Delta– at least in our estimation. We’re not sure why we don’t like it. Perhaps it’s some sort of feng shui/architectural/cultural mojo that makes it less than ideal for a comedy bar. Maybe it’s merely the unfamiliarity of it. It just seems like there’s too much room to spread out– and it’s not cramped enough to create that critical mass that makes for a truly great soiree. It lacks that Breakfast At Tiffany’s party scene vibe. If it doesn’t take you 20 minutes to get to the bathroom, it’s not a good party.

We attended the fourth Just For Pitching. And the room wasn’t set up the same way it had been in past years, with the pitchers on one end of a vast, empty expanse and the television execs on the other end– and the crowd on the sides, anxiously swinging their heads back and forth as if at a ferocious tennis match. It was set up this year like a presentation at a convention of insurance adjusters or a gathering of x-ray technicians, with the pitchers and execs occupying the same dais, pitching to directly to the audience, practically stiffing the execs to their left. And it had about as much excitement as a gathering of insurance adjusters. Perhaps it was the barometric pressure. Perhaps it was the much smaller turnout.

We noticed that seven out of the ten pitchers were Canadian. And one of the non-Canadian pitchers failed to show due to poor weather in NYC. And it was announced at the outset that one lucky pitcher would be the recipient of a CBC development deal. Excuse us, it was announced that “the best Canadian pitch” would receive the deal. Curiously, though, the winner wasn’t announced. Pitching honcho Pat Ferns said that the winner would be revealed by week’s end.

Every year, we’ve delighted in discovering at least one keen bit of Execu-Speak– a word or turn of phrase that captures our fancy and which we use around SHECKYmagazine HQ for the rest of the year. This year, we were taken by the twin concepts of “pre-watershed” and “post-watershed,” to designate before 9 PM on the primetime schedule and after 9 PM on the primetime TV schedule. This will be much easier to work into casual conversation than “interstitial.” Example: “Hey, honey, what’s on TV tonight post-watershed?” Use it three times and it is yours!

Left to right: Mick Dwyer, Fiona O’Loughlin, Biddy O’Loughlin

It’s time for Dumb Television Executive Quote of the Day (sponsored by Bell Canada)!

In response to the pitch of “Business Johnson,” a film short produced by Talia Raine and Casper Frank featuring an all-African American cast revolving around all-black neighborhood, U.K. Paramount studios Matt Tombs (emphasis on the “BS”) said (and we’re paraphrasing here): “Because the series has such strong African-American themes and references, audiences in the U.K. wouldn’t/couldn’t relate to it.” To which we reply, if this is so, then why was Upstairs Downstairs such a huge hit in America? And why was Dallas a huge hit in Japan? (And in Saudi Arabia, of all places?) And how do you explain that The Female Half was delighted to discover an Australian comic who had a rather extensive knowledge of her native Philadelphia from watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? We’re reminded of a quote from Jim Jeffries, who said, during Wednesday night’s Green Room presentation, “I’ll fuck anyone off the telly!” To put it another (less crude) way, people love watching weird shit on television. Love, love, love it!

And we applaud pitcher John Beuhler! He placed more emphasis on pitching himself rather than pitching his project (“That’s Just John”). (Just like we advised folks to do in a previous year’s analysis of Just For Pitching!) The panel of execs were taken by him and were enthusiastic about him. And he even got a spot that evening’s Bubbling With Laughter on the strengh of his Pitching “performance.”

Cocktails? Free cocktails? In a tent? Point us in that direction! Well-attended and sponsored by the JFL itself, it also featured plenty of fromage.

Left to right: Joey Kola, Tammy Pescatelli, Dom Irrera, backstage after the Wise Guys show at the Spectrum

We used our extensive connections to gain entrance to the 9:30 Wise Guys Show at the Spectrum Theatre. We know Tammy Pescatelli and Dom Irrera. And earlier in the day, we ran into Joey Kola— that’s the first time we’d seen him in nearly 20 years! So we were familiar with sixty per cent of the bill. The extremely charming and hysterical Doo Wops hosted and Mike DeStefano got the second half off to an edgy, roaring start. The Spectrum is a great, funky old former movie house converted into a funky old rock club that serves well as a funky old comedy venue! A packed house watched five veteran acts doing 12- to 20-minute sets– it was… inspiring, uplifting. It’s exactly what anyone could want in a comedy show– 1,200 people going nuts with a pro in the driver’s seat, kicking mighty comedy ass.

We swung through the Hyatt, picked up Matt Komen (whom we last hung with after seeing Brian Regan at the Scottish Rite Theater in Jersey in December) and headed on over to see the second installment of Provenza’s “The Green Room.” This time it was Phil Nicholl, Fiona O’Loughlin, Jo Koy and Andy Kindler, in that order, providing the laughs and the insight.

God’s Pottery opened up. They’re performing in their own show as part of the festival, over at the Mainline Theatre. They’re a couple of guys who parody a Christian musical act. One plays the guitar, the other brandishes a beatific smile. The song they played, “A Brand New Start With Jesus,” had such an infectious hook and was delivered with such subtly exaggerated sincerity, we wouldn’t doubt if they actually may have accidentally converted some of the people present! The verse, of course was riotous!

We forgot to mention Team Submarine, the comedy team that opened up Wednesday’s Green Room– two comics, Nate Fernald and Steve O’Brien, from Chicago who have very classic comedy team chemistry.

We’re headed over to Andy Kindler’s State of the Industry (at 2 PM), so we have to wrap this up.

Gerry Dee (Last Comic Standing) and Steve Patterson at the Hyatt

DAY THREE

The most-asked question at the festival? “What time did you leave the bar last night?”

The second-most-asked question? “What time did I leave the bar last night?”

The tightly-wound artists are starting to ease up now, as they get their first (or first few, or last!) set(s) out of the way and the weekend arrives. By the time Friday rolls around there’s a significant number of comics who are here with nothing to do but schmooze, party, vent and reflect. And Friday is also the day when Andy Kindler, who has been reflecting for the past 12 months, finally gets around to venting.

As promised, we skittered on over to the Hyatt in plenty of time to get a seat at the State of the Industry Address, which the program bills as “a charming mix of anger and jealousy” (Hmmm… That sounds like something SHECKYmagazine would concoct. We simply must look that up.) This year’s celebrity introducer was KITH Dave Foley, who asked the over-capacity crowd to welcome, “the most self-destructive man in show business.”

“The Most Self-Destructive Man In Show Business” and The Male Half of the Staff at the 80s At Midnight Party

It started 10 minutes late. No surprise there. It took him until the 29-min. mark to mention Hitler. No surprise there. What was a surprise? The tone. It was different. It was as close as he has come, in our experience, to a club set. Oh, sure, there were gags about ICM and Jamie Masada and Entertainment Weekly that provoked guttural, cathartic laughter among the folks in The Industry, but there was also reams of accessible material that would go over equally well in Uncle Fucker’s Chuckle Hut (Credit: Dana Gould, circa 1989). And, in spite of Kindler’s savaging of the comedy club business (complete with now-obscure references to Ken Muller, Dave Tribble, Tom Sobel and Brad Greenberg), this year’s address sounded less like a diatribe and more like an audition set.

“Why do real estate people have headshots?”

He told of attending a funeral where the minister asked, “How is everybody today?” When the assembled mumbled feebly in response, the minister countered with, “Oh, c’mon! You can do better than that!” Several punchlines later, he exasperatedly mused, “Does everything have to be high-energy these days?”

He managed to invoke or savage Rene Descartes, Margaret Cho, Joy Behar, Bill Bellamy, Zach Braff, Sanjay Gupta and Norman Greenbaum. And he found new ways to hammer perennial targets like Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Arliss and Lorne Michaels.

He was particularly sharp in mocking Last Comic Standing.

“They describe Ant as a ‘celebrity talent scout.’ Two of those words do not belong.”

“Ant is the only person who might be more unnecessarily gay than Bob Read.”

“Last Comic Standing makes American Idol look The Kennedy Center Honors.”

This year, the Fest insisted that Kindler host a new show on Saturday evening with the title, “State of the Fest.” Kindler worried that it might cause confusion. In fact, he said that he’d been approached on more than one occasion by folks who were confused by the show, who thought that his SOTIA was now scheduled for Midnight on Saturday.

And, as in past years, Kindler hosted the Alternative Show Friday night at the Cabaret Juste Pour Rire featuring God’s Pottery, Sean Cullen, Eugene Mirman, Zach Galafianakis, Glenn Wool and Sean Lecomber.

Murray of Stuckey & Murray (l) and Stuckey of Stuckey & Murray at the 80s At Midnight Party

Throbbing three floors above that very showcase was the 80s At Midnight party, sponsored by the Festival Just For Laughs and MySpace.com. We eventually made our way to that blast after taking in two earlier shows– Short Bytes Cinema at Monument National and Jim Jeffries’ one-man show, “The Second Coming” at Theatre Ste. Catherine.

Short Bytes is billed as “some of the funniest short films made for the web,” so you can understand why we might be interested. (We just “released” our second short film, so we were curious to see what passes for the state of the art, short-film-wise.)

We were horrified.

First, the good– The show was hosted by Stuckey & Murray, a funny guitar duo who capably handled the emceeing duties and got the show off to a rousing start. And the KickedInTheNuts.com presentation by The Family Guy‘s Mike Henry (he writes, voices and produces for the show) was amusing and Henry himself was charming.

Left to right: Al Madrigal, Kara Baker (Avalon Mgmt.), Matt Braunger and New Facer Sheng Wang at the 80s At Midnight Party

But the shorts presented by the folks from Heavy.com were mystifying. They stressed that the movies they pump through their wildly successful site– some animated, some live action– were targeted to 18-39 year old men, but to us, it appeared that they were aiming at 11-15 year old boys. Each short was loaded up with all the hallmarks of inorganic “viral videos”– irony, violence, celebrity, parody– but curiously missing was any trace of genuine humor. There was plenty of irony, but what good is irony when there’s no yuks? If this is the future of web videos, it is a bleak future indeed. Fortunately, the WWW is a vast, nearly limitless expanse where the zero-sum math no longer applies. So, soulless dreck like that offered via sites like Heavy.com can’t “crowd out” truly clever and honestly funny creations if and when they’re generated.

We strolled from the Monument National to the Theatre Ste. Catherine with J.P. Buck from HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. We arrived just in time to stake out some standing room in the balcony for the sold out Jim Jeffries set. Jeffries is funny, likeable, and confident– eliciting hoots from topics that range from filthy to deadly to profane. A minor quibble: We were always under the impression that a one-man show or a flying solo show (or whatever they call them these days) was separate and distinct from a 50-minute club set because it was produced and stage-managed and fussed over and tarted up with lights and sounds and props or stage direction, etc. Or at the very least, it had a theme that every inch of material reinforced. To be honest, we were surprised that “The Second Coming” had no geegaws or knickknacks– it was Jeffries, a stool, a chair and a stage.

Matt Harawitz (l) and Jo Koy at the 80s At Midnight Party

Up the road a piece, was New Faces at Kola Note. In all the retrospective pieces that have been cranked out on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of JFL, they note that New Faces premiered in 1996 and that it was “a showcase for unsigned talent.” We weren’t here in 1996, so it may well have been true. But it certainly isn’t true this year (and, to our recollection, hasn’t been true since 1999). Of this year’s crop of 16, only three seem to be without representation. Everyone else has the muscle and might of ICM or Gersh or Levity or Brillstein or 3Arts or what have you. We’ve heard the sentiment expressed on more than one occasion that it was pointless for a manager or agent to attend the New Faces shows, as everyone was already signed, sealed and delivered.

How difficult would it be to find 16 people who are truly unsigned? We daresay we could do so. (Hell, The Male Half and the Female Half are unsigned! There’s two right there… one-eighth of the way to the goal already!) It is not an impossible feat to find 16 (or 32… or 48!) unsigned comedians in North America, the U.K. and Australia who could “bring it,” (as Ant is so fond of saying!) in a New Faces showcase. And– BONUS!– audience members wouldn’t be paying 25 smackers to see comedians who’ve been in the game for only two or three years. No sir– it would be possible to stock a New Faces show with comics who average ten years behind the mike. We hasten to add that this diatribe is delivered with no help from The Green Monster– no “charming mix of anger and jealousy” here! We’re just observing.

There’s a quote in the HR from Greg Giraldo on his New Faces experience that is fascinating.

Giraldo, by his own admission, was fairly green to the circuit when he hit big at JFL at “the tail end of the ridiculous trend of giving young standups deals based on six minutes. That’s literally what happened. It took me from being an inexperienced, unknown comedian to an inexperienced, unknown comedian with a development deal.”

We hate to sound like a broken record (or, for the folks in New Faces, we hate to sound like a scratched CD… uh, make that, we hate to sound like a corrupted mp3 file), but we hear the same stuff year after year. We’re just sayin’ is all.

Left to right: The Female Half of the Staff and Talia Raine (Business Johnson) and Casper Frank (Business Johnson) at the 80s At Midnight Party (Editors note: In a previous posting, we mis-identifed Casner Frank as “Frank Casner!” We apologize for the error! And we attribute the mistake to the fact that, since we arrived in town, we know of at least three laminate goofups– two of which were ours! When we saw “Casner Frank,” we naturally assumed that this was yet another! Paul Ash has a laminate that reads “Ash Paul.” He shall forever be known to us as “Ash Paul!”)

We headed up the hill to the 80s At Midnight Party, arriving just after midnight (comics are noted for their timing!) and found throbbing music (from the 80s, of course!), a disco-era light show and plenty of gals in leg warmers slinging trays of hot smoked meat sandwiches and curried chicken on a stick! An hour or so later, the crowd had arrived and an 80s cover band was delighting all in attendance with a show that included costume changes! How utterly Vegas– we don’t mean that in a bad way. Rick James, Prince, Dead or Alive, DeeLite– no act too big or too small for this ensemble. What is it about 80s music that makes people ecstatic? Techno tends to put folks in a sour mood or it makes them hypersexed. 80s tunes makes them giggle and shout and hop up and down. Which would you rather have?

Sitting and relaxing at a party like this one is a luxury that only early-arrivers can enjoy. When the midnight shows empty out and the second large wave of attendees starts deploying from the giant freight elevators, the joint is SRO. And on this evening, it was blessedly transvestite-free! Not a hint of faux-hip, Euro-culture shorthand– no ripped, shirtless men wearing only tight satin pants and a bowtie; no fishnet stockinged “ladies” with prominent Adam’s apples; no Cirque du Soleil lite acrobats or mime-esque drink servers. Just catchy pop tunes, giant balloons and plenty of free liquor and edibles.

Final note today: The Female Half is no longer obligated to take extra special care of herself in anticipation of her impending surgery– we received word that her surgery has been rescheduled because her surgeon is scheduled for surgery herself! We hope that the surgeon’s surgery is not on her hands or on her eyes!

DAY FOUR

AUDUBON, NJ– We’re back in the office after a typically gruelling drive down I-87. We departed crazy early in order to avoid the jam-up at the border crossing. Didn’t work. We still had a 90-minute wait. Shoulda gone through Vermont.

Also found out that Canada doesn’t refund the GST any more. (Or the Harmonized Sales Tax, for that matter, but that doesn’t apply here.) We looked forward to hitting the Duty Free store and getting back the tax on our lodging, then blowing it on a huge bottle of Bombay Sapphire… or maybe some Knob Creek or something similar. Then we saw the sign:

As of April 1, 2007, non-resident consumers who purchase goods in Canada and remove them from the country cannot receive a VRP rebate for the GST/HST they paid on goods if the tax became payable after March 31, 2007.

Total bummer, eh? According to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, “the visitor rebate program was taken up by only 3% of visitors.” Others dispute this. What isn’t disputed is that the revocation of the rebate will probably hurt the $60 billion Canadian tourism biz.

That and the fact that the exchange rate is good for Canadians but not advantageous for us Americans. It’s the lowest we can ever recall in our two decades of heading north. We seem to recall $1.32 on our first trip to Montreal to play the Nest in the late 80s. This past weekend, it was $1.05. Which means that when we forked over eight bucks CD for a Blue, we were pretty much paying eight bucks US for a Blue!

The Male Half with Mike DeStefano (Wise Guys) Photo credit: Todd Jackson

The sun made an appearance on Saturday. Thursday and Friday were wet and miserable, but Saturday was one of those days that enable Montrealers to push those suicidal thoughts out of their heads when they’re suffering through March. Shocking blue sky, puffy clouds, slight breeze.

We posted our third report early Saturday afternoon, then headed down to the sparsely attended Artist vs. Industry hoop game. The Industry kicked ass, winning by nine points. It was the second win in a row for them. Too bad there wasn’t a larger crowd on hand to witness the spectacle. Perhaps the RBK Ball Hockey Cup game is drawing sporting enthusiasts away from it. This is Canada, after all.

Last Comic Standing’s Ty Barnett (l) and Don Friesen at the Hyatt

We swang through the Delta… er… the Hyatt later on, then decided to wade through the street portion of the Festival, on the Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The streets were packed with families and kids and twins and midgets and those big heads that are popular at Carnevale (this year’s theme was Carnevale). And there were, parked along the boulevard, large floats depicting famous comedians– Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Mr. Bean, Mike Myers and Jacques Tati. We were also half-heartedly searching for the secret Comedy Network party. Nobody seemed to know about it. We heard rumors that they only extended invites to Canadians. We heard it sucked, too. And, no, that is not a case of sour grapes.

The Male Half with Tom Papa at the Hyatt. (Note The Male Half’s glowing Shrek-like ogre ears!)

For the first time since our arrival on Wednesday, we felt that crushing fatigue that comes over nearly all Fest attendees at one time or another (“Festigue,” perhaps?), so we slipped into a light coma at six, resolving to arise in two hours time and decide which show to take in that evening.

We obtained tickets to Family Guy Live. How would they fill 90 to 120 minutes?? What exactly goes on at one of these (Fill in the blank) Live presentations?

We strolled on over to the Place des Arts, the hulking, modern jumble of buildings and sculptures and plaza that occupies a city block or two directly across from the Hyatt. The show was to take place in the Salle de Wilfrid-Pelletier, the largest multi-purpose concert hall in Canada. It seats nearly 3,000 people.

And, as the showtime neared, we approached the building and noticed clumps of two and three and four people walking, darting, around the circular, glass-enclosed mezzanine level of the building– searching. Searching for… the entrance! Here, at street level, we wandered just outside the building, clearly able to observe the folks who had somehow figured out how to gain entrance. We switched directions, we communicated our frustration to the other unfortunates who were equally stumped by the mystery portal that would– some day– enable us to… get inside.

Whichever lunkhead had designed and built this modern marvel in 1963 probably thought he was being clever. However, he neglected to make clear just how us common folk might actually enter the edifice. (The Male Half was “architecturally livid.”) And no one milling about outside seemed to know how to get in, either! We solved the mystery eventually– one must go underground to get in, through a rather dank, unappealing tunnel. Here you have a splendid hall, dedicated to the presentation of the great works, and the poor shmucks who wish to see those great works must march down a futuristic shaft in the ground, like the Morlocks in “Time Machine.”

Montreals comic Asaf Gerchak (l) and Peter J. Radomski (Bubbling With Laughter) at the Hyatt

Eventually, we took our seats inside. It is quite impressive– it is akin to being inside of a large spaceship (with much better acoustics). And, fittingly, the motif seemed Star Wars-y– many of the fixtures seemed to be assembled from the spare parts of Stormtroopers.

By the time we scrambled into our seats in Section Q, series creator Seth MacFarlane was well into the introductions. As each cast member was brought out to thunderous applause, he/she took a director’s chair behind a microphone. What followed was a table read of an episode called “Airport ’07.”

After the table read, some cast members took turns singing songs (to musical accompaniment) in the voices of the characters from the show. Including a duet between Peter Griffin and Lois (Alex Boorstein) called “You Don’t Eat My Pussy,” sung to the tune of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” After that, they took questions from the audience.

It is worth noting that this was the 10 PM show. And it also worth noting that earlier in the evening, there was a 7 PM show. And it is worth further noting that the cast was, quite openly and with much fanfare, drinking onstage during the entire performance. Seth Green, who voices Chris, was pulling directly from a large bottle of red wine, from what we could tell. The crowd loved every minute of it. They exploded the first time MacFarlane did Stewie. The fans went ape over most of what MacFarlane did/said. Perhaps their second fave was Mike Henry, who voices Cleveland and the perverted Herbert.

Afterward, the Hyatt was packed, of course. Final night drinking is a tradition for many. On this particular Saturday evening, among the revelers were Lewis Black, Louis CK, Susie Essman, Kathleen Madigan, Jessica Kirson, Greg Fitzsimmons, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr and many, many more. (And if the abovementioned weren’t there Saturday, we can be forgiven for imagining that they were, as they had been there all week!)

Of the gala hosts, we spotted only Howie Mandel. Once. And that was during the day, for a photo shoot. The other hosts– George Lopez, John Pinette, William Shatner– avoided the throngs. At least while we were in the house.

Buzz? Jo Koy, Joey Kola and Bill Burr. They all either were the recipient of heavy ink in the Gazette or wild word of mouth or both.

Any common themes or threads? We saw four teams. Fancy that. Are comedy teams making a comeback? It is hard to do, and, on a personal level, it’s hard to keep a team together. God’s Pottery, Stuckey & Murray and The Doo Wops use music. Team Submarine do not. We were entertained by all four. (The Male Half had a discussion with Team Submarine on the history of comedy teams while waiting for Thursday night’s installment of the Green Room. He told them that he had read in the excellent book, “No Applause, Just Throw Money,” that quite often comedy teams split apart because the straight man would essentially drink himself to death. Good luck to all of you, gentlemen!)

Other trends or threads? We were assaulted at nearly every turn by presentations that were, in part or in whole, telling us what to do/what not to do, what’s funny/what’s not funny, who’s funny/who’s not. What is that all about? Why all this urgency to beat us (comedians nearly all) over the head with this pedantry? And where, we ask, is the entertainment value? After the last four days, we’re thoroughly convinced that comedians are never less funny than when they’re making fun of other comedians. If you’re going to deconstruct comedy, you had better make it funny… or go the serious route and make it damned interesting. Much of it falls awkwardly between funny and interesting, landing somewhere between petty and pathetic. For the most part, this kind of stuff falls flat.

And, some of those same folks who were crying hack at every turn were quite possibly guilty of it themselves on more than a handful of occasions, at least according to what we saw, and according to what we heard secondhand.

Case in point: How is travelling to another country (in this case, Canada) and making lame “Bush is stupid” jokes any different than going to Cleveland or Phoenix and inserting the name of the local gay bar into an opening joke for a cheap laugh? It’s not, really. It’s Hack 2.0 And, it seems, a startling number of comics did it. To paraphrase Seinfeld– We’re not offended as Americans, we’re offended as comedians. And in every case, the “joke,” such as it was, contained nothing more than the words “Bush” followed by “dumb” (or its equivalent) modified by “fuck” (or its equivalent). To put it another way, there was no artfullness, not even an attempt to be subtle or clever. Even Seth MacFarlane, the creator of one of the more clever and cutting television shows in existence, could only come up with “the president is a flop-eared fuckface.” (And in his own voice.) Not exactly the height of sharp wit. It doesn’t even rise to the level of Will Rogers (and believe us, Rogers was pretty lame– go back and read some of his stuff.) Here’s the really weird part: With the exception of MacFarlane’s hamhanded slam, precious few of the attempts at getting a cheap laugh by bashing Bush got so much as a weak, oftimes uncomfortable, laugh. Perhaps even folks who might be predisposed to laugh at a W gag might be sensing that it’s played out.

Finally: We were thrilled to meet several of our “fans!” By “fans,” we mean regular readers of SHECKYmagazine who seemed to be thrilled to meet us. Indeed, some even seemed, for lack of a better word, “starstruck.” As we always say, there is no need to be intimidated. It’s just us! We do not bite. We are eminently approachable. If you see us at a function, come up and say, Hey!

Tune into the blog of Sean McCarthy (formerly of the Boston Herald, now of the New York Daily News) and tune into Dead Frog by Todd Jackson for other perspectives.

ADDENDUM

A Hollywood Reporter wrapup article tapped out by George Szalai says that a number of comedians were singled out for their performances over the past two weeks in Montreal. Tom Segura, Tommy Johnagin, Geoff Keith, Matt Braunger and Mike Winfield were the New Facers mentioned. Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, Jeremy Hotz, Jo Koy and Louis CK were among the Old Faces cited, tactfully referred to as “established talent.

Although we never did find out who officially won that development deal prize from Just For Pitching, we did learn from the HR that two pitches earned deals from the CBC’s Anton Leo.

Foss’ comedy idea Four Minutes Apart, about an anti-establishment female stand-up who moves in with her upwardly mobile brother and his family, and Glinski’s Sibling Rivalry, about a young woman’s changing relationship with her younger brother, convinced CBC head of comedy Anton Leo at the annual Just For Pitching panel.

Interesting to note that, despite all their highfalutin’ talk of establishing new conventions and offering shows that break the mold, the two shows that secured deals were about as traditional as you can get, about as close to traditional sitcoms as anyone pitched.

AUDUBON, NJ– We’re back in the office after a typically gruelling drive down I-87. We departed crazy early in order to avoid the jam-up at the border crossing. Didn’t work. We still had a 90-minute wait. Shoulda gone through Vermont.

Also found out that Canada doesn’t refund the GST any more. (Or the Harmonized Sales Tax, for that matter, but that doesn’t apply here.) We looked forward to hitting the Duty Free store and getting back the tax on our lodging, then blowing it on a huge bottle of Bombay Sapphire… or maybe some Knob Creek or something similar. Then we saw the sign:

As of April 1, 2007, non-resident consumers who purchase goods in Canada and remove them from the country cannot receive a VRP rebate for the GST/HST they paid on goods if the tax became payable after March 31, 2007.

Total bummer, eh? According to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, “the visitor rebate program was taken up by only 3% of visitors.” Others dispute this. What isn’t disputed is that the revocation of the rebate will probably hurt the $60 billion Canadian tourism biz.

That and the fact that the exchange rate is good for Canadians but not advantageous for us Americans. It’s the lowest we can ever recall in our two decades of heading north. We seem to recall $1.32 on our first trip to Montreal to play the Nest in the late 80s. This past weekend, it was $1.05. Which means that when we forked over eight bucks CD for a Blue, we were pretty much paying eight bucks US for a Blue!

The Male Half with Mike DeStefano (Wise Guys) Photo credit: Todd Jackson

The sun made an appearance on Saturday. Thursday and Friday were wet and miserable, but Saturday was one of those days that enable Montrealers to push those suicidal thoughts out of their heads when they’re suffering through March. Shocking blue sky, puffy clouds, slight breeze.

We posted our third report early Saturday afternoon, then headed down to the sparsely attended Artist vs. Industry hoop game. The Industry kicked ass, winning by nine points. It was the second win in a row for them. Too bad there wasn’t a larger crowd on hand to witness the spectacle. Perhaps the RBK Ball Hockey Cup game is drawing sporting enthusiasts away from it. This is Canada, after all.

Last Comic Standing’s Ty Barnett (l) and Don Friesen at the Hyatt

We swang through the Delta… er… the Hyatt later on, then decided to wade through the street portion of the Festival, on the Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The streets were packed with families and kids and twins and midgets and those big heads that are popular at Carnevale (this year’s theme was Carnevale). And there were, parked along the boulevard, large floats depicting famous comedians– Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Mr. Bean, Mike Myers and Jacques Tati. We were also half-heartedly searching for the secret Comedy Network party. Nobody seemed to know about it. We heard rumors that they only extended invites to Canadians. We heard it sucked, too. And, no, that is not a case of sour grapes.

The Male Half with Tom Papa at the Hyatt. (Note The Male Half’s glowing Shrek-like ogre ears!)

For the first time since our arrival on Wednesday, we felt that crushing fatigue that comes over nearly all Fest attendees at one time or another (“Festigue,” perhaps?), so we slipped into a light coma at six, resolving to arise in two hours time and decide which show to take in that evening.

We obtained tickets to Family Guy Live. How would they fill 90 to 120 minutes?? What exactly goes on at one of these (Fill in the blank) Live presentations?

We strolled on over to the Place des Arts, the hulking, modern jumble of buildings and sculptures and plaza that occupies a city block or two directly across from the Hyatt. The show was to take place in the Salle de Wilfrid-Pelletier, the largest multi-purpose concert hall in Canada. It seats nearly 3,000 people.

And, as the showtime neared, we approached the building and noticed clumps of two and three and four people walking, darting, around the circular, glass-enclosed mezzanine level of the building– searching. Searching for… the entrance! Here, at street level, we wandered just outside the building, clearly able to observe the folks who had somehow figured out how to gain entrance. We switched directions, we communicated our frustration to the other unfortunates who were equally stumped by the mystery portal that would– some day– enable us to… get inside.

Whichever lunkhead had designed and built this modern marvel in 1963 probably thought he was being clever. However, he neglected to make clear just how us common folk might actually enter the edifice. (The Male Half was “architecturally livid.”) And no one milling about outside seemed to know how to get in, either! We solved the mystery eventually– one must go underground to get in, through a rather dank, unappealing tunnel. Here you have a splendid hall, dedicated to the presentation of the great works, and the poor shmucks who wish to see those great works must march down a futuristic shaft in the ground, like the Morlocks in “Time Machine.”

Montreals comic Asaf Gerchak (l) and Peter J. Radomski (Bubbling With Laughter) at the Hyatt

Eventually, we took our seats inside. It is quite impressive– it is akin to being inside of a large spaceship (with much better acoustics). And, fittingly, the motif seemed Star Wars-y– many of the fixtures seemed to be assembled from the spare parts of Stormtroopers.

By the time we scrambled into our seats in Section Q, series creator Seth MacFarlane was well into the introductions. As each cast member was brought out to thunderous applause, he/she took a director’s chair behind a microphone. What followed was a table read of an episode called “Airport ’07.”

After the table read, some cast members took turns singing songs (to musical accompaniment) in the voices of the characters from the show. Including a duet between Peter Griffin and Lois (Alex Boorstein) called “You Don’t Eat My Pussy,” sung to the tune of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” After that, they took questions from the audience.

It is worth noting that this was the 10 PM show. And it also worth noting that earlier in the evening, there was a 7 PM show. And it is worth further noting that the cast was, quite openly and with much fanfare, drinking onstage during the entire performance. Seth Green, who voices Chris, was pulling directly from a large bottle of red wine, from what we could tell. The crowd loved every minute of it. They exploded the first time MacFarlane did Stewie. The fans went ape over most of what MacFarlane did/said. Perhaps their second fave was Mike Henry, who voices Cleveland and the perverted Herbert.

Afterward, the Hyatt was packed, of course. Final night drinking is a tradition for many. On this particular Saturday evening, among the revelers were Lewis Black, Louis CK, Susie Essman, Kathleen Madigan, Jessica Kirson, Greg Fitzsimmons, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr and many, many more. (And if the abovementioned weren’t there Saturday, we can be forgiven for imagining that they were, as they had been there all week!)

Of the gala hosts, we spotted only Howie Mandel. Once. And that was during the day, for a photo shoot. The other hosts– George Lopez, John Pinette, William Shatner– avoided the throngs. At least while we were in the house.

Buzz? Jo Koy, Joey Kola and Bill Burr. They all either were the recipient of heavy ink in the Gazette or wild word of mouth or both.

Any common themes or threads? We saw four teams. Fancy that. Are comedy teams making a comeback? It is hard to do, and, on a personal level, it’s hard to keep a team together. God’s Pottery, Stuckey & Murray and The Doo Wops use music. Team Submarine do not. We were entertained by all four. (The Male Half had a discussion with Team Submarine on the history of comedy teams while waiting for Thursday night’s installment of the Green Room. He told them that he had read in the excellent book, “No Applause, Just Throw Money,” that quite often comedy teams split apart because the straight man would essentially drink himself to death. Good luck to all of you, gentlemen!)

Other trends or threads? We were assaulted at nearly every turn by presentations that were, in part or in whole, telling us what to do/what not to do, what’s funny/what’s not funny, who’s funny/who’s not. What is that all about? Why all this urgency to beat us (comedians nearly all) over the head with this pedantry? And where, we ask, is the entertainment value? After the last four days, we’re thoroughly convinced that comedians are never less funny than when they’re making fun of other comedians. If you’re going to deconstruct comedy, you had better make it funny… or go the serious route and make it damned interesting. Much of it falls awkwardly between funny and interesting, landing somewhere between petty and pathetic. For the most part, this kind of stuff falls flat.

And, some of those same folks who were crying hack at every turn were quite possibly guilty of it themselves on more than a handful of occasions, at least according to what we saw, and according to what we heard secondhand.

Case in point: How is travelling to another country (in this case, Canada) and making lame “Bush is stupid” jokes any different than going to Cleveland or Phoenix and inserting the name of the local gay bar into an opening joke for a cheap laugh? It’s not, really. It’s Hack 2.0 And, it seems, a startling number of comics did it. To paraphrase Seinfeld– We’re not offended as Americans, we’re offended as comedians. And in every case, the “joke,” such as it was, contained nothing more than the words “Bush” followed by “dumb” (or its equivalent) modified by “fuck” (or its equivalent). To put it another way, there was no artfullness, not even an attempt to be subtle or clever. Even Seth MacFarlane, the creator of one of the more clever and cutting television shows in existence, could only come up with “the president is a flop-eared fuckface.” (And in his own voice.) Not exactly the height of sharp wit. It doesn’t even rise to the level of Will Rogers (and believe us, Rogers was pretty lame– go back and read some of his stuff.) Here’s the really weird part: With the exception of MacFarlane’s hamhanded slam, precious few of the attempts at getting a cheap laugh by bashing Bush got so much as a weak, oftimes uncomfortable, laugh. Perhaps even folks who might be predisposed to laugh at a W gag might be sensing that it’s played out.

Finally: We were thrilled to meet several of our “fans!” By “fans,” we mean regular readers of SHECKYmagazine who seemed to be thrilled to meet us. Indeed, some even seemed, for lack of a better word, “starstruck.” As we always say, there is no need to be intimidated. It’s just us! We do not bite. We are eminently approachable. If you see us at a function, come up and say, Hey!

Tune into the blog of Sean McCarthy (formerly of the Boston Herald, now of the New York Daily News) and tune into Dead Frog by Todd Jackson for other perspectives.

The most-asked question at the festival? “What time did you leave the bar last night?”

The second-most-asked question? “What time did I leave the bar last night?”

The tightly-wound artists are starting to ease up now, as they get their first (or first few, or last!) set(s) out of the way and the weekend arrives. By the time Friday rolls around there’s a significant number of comics who are here with nothing to do but schmooze, party, vent and reflect. And Friday is also the day when Andy Kindler, who has been reflecting for the past 12 months, finally gets around to venting.

As promised, we skittered on over to the Hyatt in plenty of time to get a seat at the State of the Industry Address, which the program bills as “a charming mix of anger and jealousy” (Hmmm… That sounds like something SHECKYmagazine would concoct. We simply must look that up.) This year’s celebrity introducer was KITH Dave Foley, who asked the over-capacity crowd to welcome, “the most self-destructive man in show business.”

“The Most Self-Destructive Man In Show Business” and The Male Half of the Staff at the 80s At Midnight Party

It started 10 minutes late. No surprise there. It took him until the 29-min. mark to mention Hitler. No surprise there. What was a surprise? The tone. It was different. It was as close as he has come, in our experience, to a club set. Oh, sure, there were gags about ICM and Jamie Masada and Entertainment Weekly that provoked guttural, cathartic laughter among the folks in The Industry, but there was also reams of accessible material that would go over equally well in Uncle Fucker’s Chuckle Hut (Credit: Dana Gould, circa 1989). And, in spite of Kindler’s savaging of the comedy club business (complete with now-obscure references to Ken Muller, Dave Tribble, Tom Sobel and Brad Greenberg), this year’s address sounded less like a diatribe and more like an audition set.

“Why do real estate people have headshots?”

He told of attending a funeral where the minister asked, “How is everybody today?” When the assembled mumbled feebly in response, the minister countered with, “Oh, c’mon! You can do better than that!” Several punchlines later, he exasperatedly mused, “Does everything have to be high-energy these days?”

He managed to invoke or savage Rene Descartes, Margaret Cho, Joy Behar, Bill Bellamy, Zach Braff, Sanjay Gupta and Norman Greenbaum. And he found new ways to hammer perennial targets like Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Arliss and Lorne Michaels.

He was particularly sharp in mocking Last Comic Standing.

“They describe Ant as a ‘celebrity talent scout.’ Two of those words do not belong.”

“Ant is the only person who might be more unnecessarily gay than Bob Read.”

“Last Comic Standing makes American Idol look The Kennedy Center Honors.”

This year, the Fest insisted that Kindler host a new show on Saturday evening with the title, “State of the Fest.” Kindler worried that it might cause confusion. In fact, he said that he’d been approached on more than one occasion by folks who were confused by the show, who thought that his SOTIA was now scheduled for Midnight on Saturday.

And, as in past years, Kindler hosted the Alternative Show Friday night at the Cabaret Juste Pour Rire featuring God’s Pottery, Sean Cullen, Eugene Mirman, Zach Galafianakis, Glenn Wool and Sean Lecomber.

Murray of Stuckey & Murray (l) and Stuckey of Stuckey & Murray at the 80s At Midnight Party

Throbbing three floors above that very showcase was the 80s At Midnight party, sponsored by the Festival Just For Laughs and MySpace.com. We eventually made our way to that blast after taking in two earlier shows– Short Bytes Cinema at Monument National and Jim Jeffries’ one-man show, “The Second Coming” at Theatre Ste. Catherine.

Short Bytes is billed as “some of the funniest short films made for the web,” so you can understand why we might be interested. (We just “released” our second short film, so we were curious to see what passes for the state of the art, short-film-wise.)

We were horrified.

First, the good– The show was hosted by Stuckey & Murray, a funny guitar duo who capably handled the emceeing duties and got the show off to a rousing start. And the KickedInTheNuts.com presentation by The Family Guy‘s Mike Henry (he writes, voices and produces for the show) was amusing and Henry himself was charming.

Left to right: Al Madrigal, Kara Baker (Avalon Mgmt.), Matt Braunger and New Facer Sheng Wang at the 80s At Midnight Party

But the shorts presented by the folks from Heavy.com were mystifying. They stressed that the movies they pump through their wildly successful site– some animated, some live action– were targeted to 18-39 year old men, but to us, it appeared that they were aiming at 11-15 year old boys. Each short was loaded up with all the hallmarks of inorganic “viral videos”– irony, violence, celebrity, parody– but curiously missing was any trace of genuine humor. There was plenty of irony, but what good is irony when there’s no yuks? If this is the future of web videos, it is a bleak future indeed. Fortunately, the WWW is a vast, nearly limitless expanse where the zero-sum math no longer applies. So, soulless dreck like that offered via sites like Heavy.com can’t “crowd out” truly clever and honestly funny creations if and when they’re generated.

We strolled from the Monument National to the Theatre Ste. Catherine with J.P. Buck from HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. We arrived just in time to stake out some standing room in the balcony for the sold out Jim Jeffries set. Jeffries is funny, likeable, and confident– eliciting hoots from topics that range from filthy to deadly to profane. A minor quibble: We were always under the impression that a one-man show or a flying solo show (or whatever they call them these days) was separate and distinct from a 50-minute club set because it was produced and stage-managed and fussed over and tarted up with lights and sounds and props or stage direction, etc. Or at the very least, it had a theme that every inch of material reinforced. To be honest, we were surprised that “The Second Coming” had no geegaws or knickknacks– it was Jeffries, a stool, a chair and a stage.

Matt Harawitz (l) and Jo Koy at the 80s At Midnight Party

Up the road a piece, was New Faces at Kola Note. In all the retrospective pieces that have been cranked out on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of JFL, they note that New Faces premiered in 1996 and that it was “a showcase for unsigned talent.” We weren’t here in 1996, so it may well have been true. But it certainly isn’t true this year (and, to our recollection, hasn’t been true since 1999). Of this year’s crop of 16, only three seem to be without representation. Everyone else has the muscle and might of ICM or Gersh or Levity or Brillstein or 3Arts or what have you. We’ve heard the sentiment expressed on more than one occasion that it was pointless for a manager or agent to attend the New Faces shows, as everyone was already signed, sealed and delivered.

How difficult would it be to find 16 people who are truly unsigned? We daresay we could do so. (Hell, The Male Half and the Female Half are unsigned! There’s two right there… one-eighth of the way to the goal already!) It is not an impossible feat to find 16 (or 32… or 48!) unsigned comedians in North America, the U.K. and Australia who could “bring it,” (as Ant is so fond of saying!) in a New Faces showcase. And– BONUS!– audience members wouldn’t be paying 25 smackers to see comedians who’ve been in the game for only two or three years. No sir– it would be possible to stock a New Faces show with comics who average ten years behind the mike. We hasten to add that this diatribe is delivered with no help from The Green Monster– no “charming mix of anger and jealousy” here! We’re just observing.

There’s a quote in the HR from Greg Giraldo on his New Faces experience that is fascinating.

Giraldo, by his own admission, was fairly green to the circuit when he hit big at JFL at “the tail end of the ridiculous trend of giving young standups deals based on six minutes. That’s literally what happened. It took me from being an inexperienced, unknown comedian to an inexperienced, unknown comedian with a development deal.”

We hate to sound like a broken record (or, for the folks in New Faces, we hate to sound like a scratched CD… uh, make that, we hate to sound like a corrupted mp3 file), but we hear the same stuff year after year. We’re just sayin’ is all.

Left to right: The Female Half of the Staff and Talia Raine (Business Johnson) and Casper Frank (Business Johnson) at the 80s At Midnight Party (Editors note: In a previous posting, we mis-identifed Casner Frank as “Frank Casner!” We apologize for the error! And we attribute the mistake to the fact that, since we arrived in town, we know of at least three laminate goofups– two of which were ours! When we saw “Casner Frank,” we naturally assumed that this was yet another! Paul Ash has a laminate that reads “Ash Paul.” He shall forever be known to us as “Ash Paul!”)

We headed up the hill to the 80s At Midnight Party, arriving just after midnight (comics are noted for their timing!) and found throbbing music (from the 80s, of course!), a disco-era light show and plenty of gals in leg warmers slinging trays of hot smoked meat sandwiches and curried chicken on a stick! An hour or so later, the crowd had arrived and an 80s cover band was delighting all in attendance with a show that included costume changes! How utterly Vegas– we don’t mean that in a bad way. Rick James, Prince, Dead or Alive, DeeLite– no act too big or too small for this ensemble. What is it about 80s music that makes people ecstatic? Techno tends to put folks in a sour mood or it makes them hypersexed. 80s tunes makes them giggle and shout and hop up and down. Which would you rather have?

Sitting and relaxing at a party like this one is a luxury that only early-arrivers can enjoy. When the midnight shows empty out and the second large wave of attendees starts deploying from the giant freight elevators, the joint is SRO. And on this evening, it was blessedly transvestite-free! Not a hint of faux-hip, Euro-culture shorthand– no ripped, shirtless men wearing only tight satin pants and a bowtie; no fishnet stockinged “ladies” with prominent Adam’s apples; no Cirque du Soleil lite acrobats or mime-esque drink servers. Just catchy pop tunes, giant balloons and plenty of free liquor and edibles.

Final note today: The Female Half is no longer obligated to take extra special care of herself in anticipation of her impending surgery– we received word that her surgery has been rescheduled because her surgeon is scheduled for surgery herself! We hope that the surgeon’s surgery is not on her hands or on her eyes!

A cursory examination of the back of our Media laminates reveals that possession of said credentials entitles us to “Stay out of the way” and “Shut the fuck up.” And this year, unlike in past years, we weren’t asked to submit ticket requests when we filed for our credentials. Oversight? Who knows. Basically, we’re on our own. It’s up to us to somehow weasel our way into any events we fancy. Fortunately, we know damn near everyone up here with the “Artiste” designation. And we know a good chunk of the Industry folks and the “Accompaneurs.” (Which is the fancy French word for hangers-on.)

On Wednesday night, when we were hanging out on Ste. Catherine, waiting to get a seat for The Green Room, there was a rather scary incident acted out on the street in front of the theater– a babbling (a Francais!) homeless dude was being loudly and relentlessly hassled by a scarily persistent and disconcertinly focused crazy dude. (Everyone identified Dude # 2 as a “crackhead!”) It made for an edgy minute or two. This end of Ste. Catherine is… dicey? Previously, we haven’t ventured past St. Laurent, where Club Soda is. Past Ste. Laurent the cast of characters gets a bit more… exciting.

Left to right: Nikki Glaser, Sabrina Jalees, Tommy Johnagin

We heard of another incident, that took place last week, outside of Club Soda. Dave Attell was waiting to go on at the Nasty Show when he saw an altercation spill out of a neighboring bar. One of the “celebrants” was emphasizing his points with a machete! The blade-toting inebriant then chased his fellow partiers back into the bar. Attell was, understandably, fascinated. In fact, the story goes that when the cops arrived to sort things out, Attell followed closely behind. Must be all that training on Inomniac.

Has Canada or Quebec or drastically altered their mental health policies? We don’t seem to recall being anywhere near frightened on the streets of Montreal. But it seems like things have gotten a little less frivolous and just a couple of ticks more adventurous in these parts.

And we heard a rumor that yet another comic was almost sucked into a “bum fight.”

And The Male Half was harassed by a drunk guy in a small bar between Club Soda and Theatre Ste. Catherine. He was bellowing, “Hey, Drew Carey! Hey, Drew Carey!” And he yelled it with an edge, more like he was seeking not so much an autograph, but a vital organ. The Female Half had visions of riding on the back of a transvestite with a broken beer bottle in one hand in an attempt to quell any violent outbreak, rather like a postmodern version of a Canadian Mountie.

We were listening to Radio 360 on the drive up and Stephen Harper was telling a crowd on his recent trip to Chile that Canada currently has the strongest economy of all the G8 member nations. Is any of that prosperity trickling down (or over) to Quebec? The above crackhead/homeless confrontation was mentioned in a Gazette review of Wednesday night’s Green Room show, so it wasn’t our imagination. And Section A of today’s Gazette has an account of someone getting stabbed, in mid-afternoon, at the Peel Metro station on Thursday. Hmmm…Peel is only a few blocks away. What’s going on here, anyway? Perhaps the Fest will be moving to Toronto after all, despite statements to the contrary.

The newly svelte Neil Leiberman (l) and John Beuhler (Just For Pitching)

And, just up the street, amid this all is The Hyatt. We said that the Hyatt had potential. Compared to the Delta, it’s closer to some of the main venues– Club Soda, Theatre Ste. Catherine, Spectrum– so close that the Female Half can walk to them– and back!– in four-inch heels. But it only takes a 2-1/2 block walk to the north before things start to resemble a combination of “Blade Runner” and “Panic In Needle Park.” (Was that too obscure of a reference? Well, it beats “the bar scene from ‘Star Wars’,” doesn’t it? Sorry… we’ve been schooled over the past 48 hours about Hack this and Hack that, so we’re on our best behavior… NOT! Sorry. Hadda throw that in!)

And the Hyatt does have some good things going for it– it sits atop a giant mall that has a grocery story and a food court. (A “Food court” in Montreal is ten times better than any similar entity in the States. And the same goes for fast food. If for no other reason than one can purchase inexpensive and fast cuisine Libanaise on nearly every corner.)

But the bar is a disappoinment. Firstly, they stop serving food at 11:30 PM! Bad idea, since a ton of people flood in there at about 11:31! Secondly, they overcharge for booze! And the exchange rate stinks these days, so you can’t even fool yourself into thinking you’re paying less just because the fiver has a portrait of Gene Wilder on it. (Well, it’s not Gene Wilder, but it’s some old Canadian guy and the bill is a bluish-purple color.)

They’ve concocted names for the pizzas and sandwiches– specifically for the occasion! There’s the George Burns, the Benny Hill, the Charlie Chaplin. And then, there’s “Nachos and Salsa.” Unless that’s the name of an obscure comedy team from the Canadian TV Hall of Fame, we’re puzzled. Why would they give everything else a comedy-themed name and not the nachos? Couldn’t they at least have called it the “Cheech and Chong?” Or has Political Correctness so crippled the sense of playfulness up here that such a thing would be considered a hate crime?

Schmooze-wise, the bar is inferior to that of the Delta– at least in our estimation. We’re not sure why we don’t like it. Perhaps it’s some sort of feng shui/architectural/cultural mojo that makes it less than ideal for a comedy bar. Maybe it’s merely the unfamiliarity of it. It just seems like there’s too much room to spread out– and it’s not cramped enough to create that critical mass that makes for a truly great soiree. It lacks that Breakfast At Tiffany’s party scene vibe. If it doesn’t take you 20 minutes to get to the bathroom, it’s not a good party.

We attended the fourth Just For Pitching. And the room wasn’t set up the same way it had been in past years, with the pitchers on one end of a vast, empty expanse and the television execs on the other end– and the crowd on the sides, anxiously swinging their heads back and forth as if at a ferocious tennis match. It was set up this year like a presentation at a convention of insurance adjusters or a gathering of x-ray technicians, with the pitchers and execs occupying the same dais, pitching to directly to the audience, practically stiffing the execs to their left. And it had about as much excitement as a gathering of insurance adjusters. Perhaps it was the barometric pressure. Perhaps it was the much smaller turnout.

We noticed that seven out of the ten pitchers were Canadian. And one of the non-Canadian pitchers failed to show due to poor weather in NYC. And it was announced at the outset that one lucky pitcher would be the recipient of a CBC development deal. Excuse us, it was announced that “the best Canadian pitch” would receive the deal. Curiously, though, the winner wasn’t announced. Pitching honcho Pat Ferns said that the winner would be revealed by week’s end.

Every year, we’ve delighted in discovering at least one keen bit of Execu-Speak– a word or turn of phrase that captures our fancy and which we use around SHECKYmagazine HQ for the rest of the year. This year, we were taken by the twin concepts of “pre-watershed” and “post-watershed,” to designate before 9 PM on the primetime schedule and after 9 PM on the primetime TV schedule. This will be much easier to work into casual conversation than “interstitial.” Example: “Hey, honey, what’s on TV tonight post-watershed?” Use it three times and it is yours!

Left to right: Mick Dwyer, Fiona O’Loughlin, Biddy O’Loughlin

It’s time for Dumb Television Executive Quote of the Day (sponsored by Bell Canada)!

In response to the pitch of “Business Johnson,” a film short produced by Talia Raine and Casper Frank featuring an all-African American cast revolving around all-black neighborhood, U.K. Paramount studios Matt Tombs (emphasis on the “BS”) said (and we’re paraphrasing here): “Because the series has such strong African-American themes and references, audiences in the U.K. wouldn’t/couldn’t relate to it.” To which we reply, if this is so, then why was Upstairs Downstairs such a huge hit in America? And why was Dallas a huge hit in Japan? (And in Saudi Arabia, of all places?) And how do you explain that The Female Half was delighted to discover an Australian comic who had a rather extensive knowledge of her native Philadelphia from watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? We’re reminded of a quote from Jim Jeffries, who said, during Wednesday night’s Green Room presentation, “I’ll fuck anyone off the telly!” To put it another (less crude) way, people love watching weird shit on television. Love, love, love it!

And we applaud pitcher John Beuhler! He placed more emphasis on pitching himself rather than pitching his project (“That’s Just John”). (Just like we advised folks to do in a previous year’s analysis of Just For Pitching!) The panel of execs were taken by him and were enthusiastic about him. And he even got a spot that evening’s Bubbling With Laughter on the strengh of his Pitching “performance.”

Cocktails? Free cocktails? In a tent? Point us in that direction! Well-attended and sponsored by the JFL itself, it also featured plenty of fromage.

Left to right: Joey Kola, Tammy Pescatelli, Dom Irrera, backstage after the Wise Guys show at the Spectrum

We used our extensive connections to gain entrance to the 9:30 Wise Guys Show at the Spectrum Theatre. We know Tammy Pescatelli and Dom Irrera. And earlier in the day, we ran into Joey Kola— that’s the first time we’d seen him in nearly 20 years! So we were familiar with sixty per cent of the bill. The extremely charming and hysterical Doo Wops hosted and Mike DeStefano got the second half off to an edgy, roaring start. The Spectrum is a great, funky old former movie house converted into a funky old rock club that serves well as a funky old comedy venue! A packed house watched five veteran acts doing 12- to 20-minute sets– it was… inspiring, uplifting. It’s exactly what anyone could want in a comedy show– 1,200 people going nuts with a pro in the driver’s seat, kicking mighty comedy ass.

We swung through the Hyatt, picked up Matt Komen (whom we last hung with after seeing Brian Regan at the Scottish Rite Theater in Jersey in December) and headed on over to see the second installment of Provenza’s “The Green Room.” This time it was Phil Nicholl, Fiona O’Loughlin, Jo Koy and Andy Kindler, in that order, providing the laughs and the insight.

God’s Pottery opened up. They’re performing in their own show as part of the festival, over at the Mainline Theatre. They’re a couple of guys who parody a Christian musical act. One plays the guitar, the other brandishes a beatific smile. The song they played, “A Brand New Start With Jesus,” had such an infectious hook and was delivered with such subtly exaggerated sincerity, we wouldn’t doubt if they actually may have accidentally converted some of the people present! The verse, of course was riotous!

We forgot to mention Team Submarine, the comedy team that opened up Wednesday’s Green Room– two comics, Nate Fernald and Steve O’Brien, from Chicago who have very classic comedy team chemistry.

We’re headed over to Andy Kindler’s State of the Industry (at 2 PM), so we have to wrap this up.

Gerry Dee (Last Comic Standing) and Steve Patterson at the Hyatt

Sorry. We couldn’t watch. We were in Montreal, at the Just For Laughs Festival. So, we figured, why take a break from the biggest comedy festival in the world to watch a reality series about standup on American television when we’re surrounded by live standup here? (We totally forgot to even videotape it!)

There were plenty of LCS alums here: Alonzon Bodden, Kathleen Madigan, Ty Barnett, etc. We even ran into Montreal auditioner DeAnne Smith. The place is crawling with LCSers.

We’ll be in New Jersey next Wednesday night, and we will definitely sit down in front of the television… facing it… when LCS next airs. And we’ll crank out our analysis of the episode, we promise.

We decided to break with tradition. In years past, we lit out just before dawn, getting out in front of the NY Metro traffic that plagues upstate New Jersey, driving for eight hours or more, straight through to Montreal, arriving tired, soggy and irritable. And without any nap, we would bull through night number one, eventually staying up for nearly 24 hours. Not a good way to kick off four days of Fest coverage.

This time, we decided to do our trip up to Montreal in two halves. We headed out Tuesday night at 11 PM, under cover of darkness, and got as far as the appropriately named Catskill, NY, before checking into our hotel. On Wednesday AM, we cruised in a leisurely fashion up 87, arriving in Montreal just after 3 PM.

This time, we’re tan, rested and ready.

(Turns out it was a doubly good idea, since the weather from D.C. to Boston– and beyond– was craptastic. And a good chunk of I-87 between Albany and Plattsburh was torn up by small squadrons of men and machines supposedly laboring to re-pave the road.)

This year’s logistical jiggering was made necessary by the fact that the Female Half is scheduled for surgery on Tuesday. For each of the past eight years, we’ve so devastated ourselves physically that we’ve ended each tour of Fest duty as husks– physically exhausted, emotionally drained, zombie-like. It just wouldn’t due to show up for an appointment with the surgeon’s knife in that kind of condition. So the decision was made to try to give ourselves some sort of physical margin. Rather than start out our mega-weekend in a sleep deficit, we resolved to ease into things gently.

While disgorging the contents of our rental car and humping our belongings up to our room at the Royal Vic, we were assisted by the just-arrived Sharilyn Johnson (FOS and Winnipeg journo), who was also lodged at the Royal Vic.

Johnson and The Male Half strode over to the new Fest HQ– this year, it’s the Hyatt on Ste. Catherine– to pick up this year’s Media laminates. The Male Half’s is missing his name and the Female Half’s has a little too much name! (Johnson suggested that the “Traci, Traci Skene,” identification is akin to the “Bond… James Bond” signature introduction made popular by Sean Connery.) The Female Half says she’s going to insist that everyone address her as “Traci Traci.”

Terry Turner (l) and Joe Satterfield (r) of Last Laff Productions flank The Female Half of the Staff

The Hyatt is on a hot corner of Montreal– just across from the Place des Arts, at Ste. Catherine and Jeanne Mance– and the hotel is a postmodern monstrosity that incorporates shopping (lots of shopping, an entire four-floor atrium full of shopping), dining and entertainment into a confusing mess of concrete and glass and terazzo. It took us several minutes (and a whole lot of squinting and pointing at a “You Are Here” diagram) before we found our way to the elevators. The only way to get to the hotel lobby is to take elevators! Who dreamed that up? “Welcome to the Hyatt– We hope you’re not too pissed!” It’s the ideal hotel for people who like riddles. (We later found another pair of elevators that takes one directly to the lobby… sort of. But it’s a bit off to the side and they’re rather nondescript. They rather look like elevators that might take you to CONTROL Headquarters if you push the wrong button… or, worse, to the offices of SMERSH!)

The Male Half of the Staff (l) with Reno Collier at the Hyatt

Once up on the sixth floor (That’s right, the lobby is on the sixth floor!), we noticed the vast expanse that was the hotel bar. It’s huge. It’s dark. It’s got plenty of schmooze space. This place has potential!

(Side note: While taking the elevator up to the lobby, a gentleman in our car asked, “Hey, do you work for SHECKYmagazine?” To which the Male Half replied, “Work for it? I am SHECKYmagazine!” Hey, who needs a name on his media pass? Obviously not The Internationally Recognized Male Half of the Staff! The Female Half of the Staff, however, points out that, not only is she not recognized on the street, she is seldom given given any credit for the mag. “So, not only do I need a name on my tag, I need it on there twice!” says she.)

Joe Matarese(l) and Robert Kelly at the Hyatt

The Daily Schedule lists, among other things, the major American cinema release “Hairspray.” We heard a news report/review of the film on the way up in which it was said that Travolta affects a “dead-on Baltimore accent.” We concluded that he merely sounds like Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. This is not the first time that Travolta has failed miserably trying to mimicked a regional accent. In “Blow Up,” the miserable turd remake by Brian DePalma, it was said that he brilliantly captured a Philly accent. Trust us, as folks who suffer through the Philly accent on a daily basis (and as two people who went to great lengths to expunge the cursed accent from our own speech), he embarassed himself on that count. The PHL and the BALTO accents are nearly identical… and equally annoying.

The big show tonight, it seems, is The Homegrown Competition, at Cabaret Just Pour Rire. It’ll be hosted by John Dore and will feature Nick Beaton, Paul Bennett, Claire Brosseau, Casey Corbin, Ivan Decker, Sean Lecomber, Brendan McKeigan, Don Wood and Peter White. (Editors note: Sean Lecomber and Nick Beaton came in first and second respectively in Wednesday’s Homegrown Competition.)

Russell Peters (l) and Mark Saldana at the Hyatt

The sked accidentally listed the Zach Galifianakis show’s description under the heading of “Defending The Caveman,” at the Centaur Theatre (the second of twelve showings up here). Boy are those Zach fans going to be confused! Will the Caveman fans stay away? We’ll see. (The slick Horaires des Spectacle, or show schedule as us mere mortals call it, lists the Caveman show, but, mysteriously, it doesn’t say exactly who will be portraying the title character! Hmmm… perhaps they’ll merely pluck someone from the audience and run the words to the monologue on a discreetly placed monitor. It’ll be “Cave-e-oke!” If that’s it, it’s brilliant!)

We hung out on Ste. Catherine, outside the Theatre Ste. Catherine, and at about a half-hour after midnight, we were waved in to see “The Green Room,” the interview show cooked up by Paul Provenza. It was a hit at last year’s Edinburgh Fest and it’s here for three nights in a row. Tonight’s guests were Jim Jeffries, three of the five Kids In The Hall (Scott Thompson, Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley) and David Cross and Bob Odenkirk.

Hugh Moore (New Faces) with The Female Half of the Staff at the Hyatt

Jeffries, readers of this mag will recall, is the comic who was assaulted onstage at the Comedy Store in Manchester. The attack was made famous via YouTube, when video was posted a few months back.

The whole idea behind The Green Room is that comics talking to comics is an entertaining thing to witness. We couldn’t agree more. WHen it was just Jeffries out there, things moved well and, by golly, it was a hoot. When The Kids emerged from backstage, and the couch was crowded with bodies– and there weren’t enough mikes to go around– things slowed quite a bit. When Odenkirk and Cross came out for the final segment, upping the body count onstage to seven (and increasing the comic to mike ratio to over 2), the wheels fell off.

To be sure, many in attendance were thrilled to be in such close proximity to their particular comedy idol(s), and it was rather interesting to see these characters in a situation significantly less contrived than that which we normally see them. But it was maddeningly inconsistent.

We may go back and try to get into a second installment on Thursday night.

The Hollywood Reporter has their special Fest editions out on the tables. And, as usual, they’re packed with quotes– from the usual suspects– that range from the ridiculous to the insulting to the incoherent.

Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada has seen many talents pass through his club and go on to show-stopping turns at Montreal’s annual Just For Laughs Comedy Festival… and he’s please about the changes he’s witnessed in the way today’s young performers command club and festival stages. “It’s a very different energy from the early ’80s, when comics stuck to a routine that went joke, joke, joke,” he says. “Now the audience wants more than that, and the best performers can do it.”

File that one under “Ridiculous.”

The author of the piece, Chuck Crisafulli, seems to have crafted a story in which the organizers of this year’s festival (and many of the folks interviewed for the piece) are all too eager to apologize for standup as it is traditionally defined. There seems to be some kind of bizarre, subconscious, accidental collective consciousness that holds that we’re all rising up as a nation and letting everyone know that we’ve had it up to here with comedians who are merely funny! We want “versatile, less-easily defined performers!” We want comics who will explore that “new and encouraging freedom in the relationship between comic and audience!” By golly, that’s what we’ve been missing all along! (Everyone– check your shoes… we smell horseshit.)

The Top Prize for Outlandish Statement, the Palm D’or for Horse Manure, must go to Greg Proops.

The biggest and best change over the years is that there are now Asians and women and gays all allowed on stage, and there are more than just a couple of black superstars,” says Gregg Proops… “Everbody plays to a general audience now, not just people like themselves. We’ve all become more egalitarian about comedy. A white boy can like Margaret Cho and Dave Chappelle and doesn’t have to sit around worrying about it.”

Saaaayyy whaat?!?!?

The above indicates an astounding ignorance of entertainment history in general and comedy history in particular. Asians and women and gays are allowed on stage? WHat planet has he inhabited for the last forty years? On this planet we have books that have all kinds of accounts of Asians and women and gays who were allowed onstage, as far back as 100 years ago. And, if you don’t dig books, there’s video, film and recordings.

We’re so thrilled that “everybody plays to a general audience now, not just people like themselves.” Is he serious? Has he ever heard of The Ed Sullivan Show? Or vaudeville? It was in all the papers. Has he heard of Bert Williams? Godfrey Cambridge? Minnie Pearl? Dick Davy? Moms Mabley? Tamayo Otsuki? Pat Morita?

In point of fact, however, with the advent of packaged tours and MySpace and Def Comedy Jam and Que Loco and computer-assisted market segmentation, and Cray computers crunching terrabytes of raw demographic data into multi-color spreadsheets, comedians are ever more willing to “play to people like themselves.” And the audiences that we’re seeing aren’t nearly as diverse as they were in 1986 or 1987. It seems that comics who seek out such arrangements– and the audiences who pay their money to see them– are exceptionally pleased with the current state of affairs. It is not an especially bad thing or an especially good thing– it is merely a thing.

It’s frustrating when someone tries to re-write (or deny) history. It’s doubly frustrating when someone seems to be in denial of the current reality.

We might remind Mr. Proops that he’s showcasing his talents at a festival that favors segregating its performers– Eve’s Tavern, The Wise Guys (Italian), The Asian Invasion, the Bar Mitzvah Show, etc. Once again, not a good thing, not a bad thing, just a thing.

Only Craig Ferguson and Tim Allen come to the defense of the merely humorous. Only those two are skeptical of this new dynamic that some insist is poised to revolutionize standup comedy as we know it. (And we sense that the author merely included the quotes a journo-speed bump, a dollop of texture before the big windup.)

The NYPost story on the Lovitz/Dick feud has captured the fancy of the standup public. There seems to be precious little information out there other than that which was reported in the Post.

Comedian Suzy Soro has posted an item (entitled “The Dick and the Jon”) to her blog which makes the characters in the whole sorry mess seem a bit more human.

Phil tried to help me with my career more times than I can count. I knew so many standups who never lifted a finger to help me in L.A., outside of Larry David and Michael Patrick King, but Phil was constantly trying to hook me up. He once made Dennis Miller come to my gig at the L.A. Improv to see if I was right for his show. Dennis had a sick child at home outside of L.A. but made the trip anyway. He figured if Phil thought I was funny, it was worth his time. I got a second audition but Dennis’s show got cancelled. But I never forgot what Phil and Dennis did for me.

Click the embedded Flash player below to see the latest short film by those kooky kids who run SHECKYmagazine.com! We uploaded it to Youtube Saturday night, solicited some early feedback and now we’re unleashing it on the general population.

Don’t be scared by the still. It’ll all make sense when it “unspools,” as the folks at Variety say. Enjoy! (Note: It’s only 7:49 out of your life. Also: It’s mildly NSFW. And: Watch it with the sound ON!)

Here.

“Purgatory Gig” is the title of the latest essay by Chicago-based Bill Bunker. It has been quite some time since Bunker was moved to send along another of his semi-regular “Wells St. Journal” columns in which he documents the “curious mix of emotions (elation, dread, hope), the inexplicable drive that keeps us pursuing the comedy thing even through the bad experiences.”

In his fifth piece for SHECKYmagazine, a private party falls into his lap.

But I pressed on, weirdly euphoric, driven by that “nothing left to lose” freedom that Janis Joplin used to sing about before she overdosed on heroin. Amazingly, I was now surrounded by a group of people who seemed focused solely on me, trying to figure out what I was saying. True, they were not laughing, but it was a start. A hand shot up. Unusual, but I was ready to roll with anything.

“Yes, you have a question?” I inquired of a not-so-young woman with metal studs in her face.

“Can you move? You’re blocking the buffalo wings.”

Read the whole thing.

(Bunker’s previous columns for SHECKYmagazine.com were obliterated back in August of 04, when that curious worm took out a good chunk of our archived files. Many of his columns live on through the courtesy of Google’s Wayback Machine. Check out his early columns here, here, here and his original column here.)

Very little is known about the death of Chicago standup comic Pat Brice. Time Out Chicago has a short piece (scroll down), with a pic and links to videos and other sites.

Henry Scott sends along the following info:

Visitation/Wake – Thursday, July 19th from 1pm – 6pm
Nativity of Our Lord
37th & Lowe Ave.
Chicago

Funeral Mass – Thursday, July 19th at 6pm
Nativity of Our Lord
37th & Lowe Ave.
Chicago

Burial at Cemetery – Friday, July 20th at 10:30am
St. Mary’s Cemetery
87th & Hamlin (between Kedzie & Pulaski)

Please be sure to check Wed. & Thurs. Obituaries in Times and Trib.

The DVD series, “Playboy After Dark” is currently flooding the culture. “Every show has been remastered to bring back the glorious quality of its original flavor,” dontcha know.

We accidentally ran into a clip of the Grateful Dead performing “St. Stephen” in the penthouse for all the sharkskinned and sequinned hipsters. It was ridiculous, even for 1969. The psychedelic, rock and roll equivalent of a hell gig. Perhaps only made bearable by the ingestion of copious amounts of lysergic acid and an AFTRA scale check which, when cashed, would finance the purchase of copious amounts of lysergic acid, with maybe a little bit of scratch left over for the purchase of an itchy serappe on the next trip to Tijuana.

One of our favorite bloggers, James Lileks of Minneapolis, got hold of a Playboy disc via Netflix and wrote a scathing review of Phyllis Diller‘s performance on the show. We feel for her. It was probably “Playboy’s Penthouse,” an earlier 1959 prototype that would pave the way for the later “After Dark” show.

You can tell she’s used to working for inebriates, because she keeps pausing and waiting for the laughter to subside, even though no actual laughter of sustainable quantity has arisen. Between jokes-– most of which are lame japes about airline travel, the comic’s equivalent of the break-glass-pull-handle emergency alarm, she mugs. This probably worked when she was on stage before a large audience, working in broad strokes. With the camera 12 feet away, the effect is different. She looks absolutely insane.

Ouch! We feel for Diller.

The Male Half can relate all too well. He can imagine a time, 30 years in the future, when a similarly snarky blogger gets hold of an installment of “Rascals Good Time Comedy Hour” on Ether Plasma Chip (or whatever recordable medium is all the rage in 2037) and delivers a devastating assessment of this curious creature with his jacket sleeves rolled up, delivering his now-quaint material to the packed, now-defunct comedy club somewhere in Northern New Jersey.

The Female Half perhaps will have more reason to cringe, as her turn on the Rascals show features a 22-year-old Skene delivering her material while clad in a cheerleading uniform!

The Long Tail has whipsawed back and stung Diller. Apparently, though, she didn’t suffer from her brief shot on the contrived cocktail party– she soldiered on to have a career for another 45 years or so. Not bad. Lileks concludes the piece by saying that Diller “fractured her back last week, and had to cancel a Tonight Show appearance to celebrate her birthday. Her 90th birthday. I don’t watch the Tonight Show. But I’d have tuned in for that.”

A NYPost gossip item tells of an ongoing feud between Jon Lovitz and Andy Dick, culminating in a recent whupping at the Laugh Factory. Factory owner Masada picks up the narrative:

“Jon picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into the bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of his nose.” Lovitz told Page Six, “All the comedians are glad I did it because this guy is a [bleep]hole.”

That’s the ticket! The bad blood stems from Dick’s alleged involvement in the death of Lovitz pal fellow SNL castmember Phil Hartman. Thanks to FOS John Kensil for the tip.

We were mentioned in TheStar.com, the online version of the Toronto Star. Their “My Name is URL” feature drove folks to a recent posting of ours. “Shecky, an online comedy magazine, begs Robin Williams to stop,” says the brief mention in a gaggle of other URL’s related to entertainment.

We aren’t sure if we were also included in the hard copy. Anyone up there in Toronto see the Sunday Star? Anyone have a copy? Can anyone scan it and send it to us? Or bring it to Montreal? (If you’re coming, that is– there should be a sizable contingent of comics and others in Montreal from T-Zero this week!)

Thanks!

We’re encountering email trouble. Again. Seems like we have some sort of email trouble on a regular basis these days.

To try and solve it, once and for all, we’re going to insist that folks who wish to contact the magazine on matters relating to advertising, editorial or other business should use:

sheckymagazine(at sign)verizon.net

from now on. (We know you’re all smart enough to substitute that little “@” for the words in the parentheses. And we know you’re all smart enough to know what parentheses are. We gotta do it that way in this posting because those smart and tireless little robots are scouring millions of websites seeking out anything that’s an email address and sending MB of junk email to those addresses.)

No more Like_We-Care(at sign)sheckymagazine.com and no more Editors(at sign)sheckymagazine.com from this day forward.

So, IF YOU SENT SOMETHING TO US and WE DIDN’T REPLY, please, we beg you– SEND IT AGAIN.

Keep this in mind: We can always (ALWAYS!) be contacted rather directly through our MySpace site.

The magazine‘s MySpace Site
The Female Half‘s MySpace Site
The Male Half‘s MySpace Site

We know, it adds a few extra keystrokes here and there, but it’s a guarantee that you’ll get through to us.

Thanks!

In the past, the folks at Just For Laughs would keep this stuff a secret until the last minute. Now they just blurt it out the Monday beforehand on their MySpace site.

Masters:

Ian Edwards
Jim Short
Pete Correale
Robert Rothstein
Megan Mooney
Maria Bamford
Joe Matarese

New Faces:

Matt Braunger
Lucas Molandes
Sheng Wang
Nikki Glaser
Geoff Keith
Hugh Moore
Mike E. Winfield
Tom Segura
Julia Lillis
Pat Candaras
Amy Schumer
Julian McCullough
Kurt Metzger
James Patterson
Matt McCarthy
Tommy Johnagin

The high temps in Montreal are hovering in the mid-70s this week. And it’ll go up to 79 on Wednesday, the day we arrive. Typical July weather for that city.

Our 2004 coverage.

Our 2005 coverage.

And our 2006 coverage was “inline,” meaning that we merely dropped it into the center column and it can be accessed by clicking on the July 2006 archive file and scrolling down to about midway on the page.

And for folks who want to dig deeper into the Fest coverage, there’s an index page that contains links (rather clumsily and unattractively laid out, we hasten to add) to all of our coverage between 1999 and 2003.

That’s eight years of coverage. Several thousand words, several dozen photographs (some missing, some grainy– in ’99, we were using a Polaroid instant camera!). A coupla broken links, for which we apologize. But a lot of good info for those who plan on attending or for those who find themselves on a show or two for the first time. And it is hoped that you’ll find it entertaining.

Read the Montreal Mirror article on Paul Provenza‘s latest project, The Green Room.

The idea behind the show is to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the comedy world. The comedians I know are really fascinating people. There’s a lot more to their work than just being funny. People should see what they’re like when they’re not in front of audiences, when they don’t have to care about their “image.”

Provenza did it at the Edinburgh Fest last year and he’ll be doing it three nights in Montreal. We’re going to try to get in night number one.

The cable outlet, not the colorless, odorless, tasteless gas. Oxygen is holding the Create-A-Series Comedy Competition, which challenges entrants to produce “a bold, clever comedy series geared toward the 18-39 female demographic,” says the Reuters item, written directly from the Oxygen press release.

The winner will land a 10- to 13-episode run on Oxygen’s broadband channel, SheDidWhat.tv, and “a $75,000 production budget and an experienced producer to help develop the series.” Five finalists will be flown to New York where they’ll pitch their ideas to Molly Shannon.

They’re calling that 10- to 13-episode run “a six-month series run,” so your series will call for a new episode every 13 to 18 days. Welcome to the brave new world of televsion delivered via “online comedy intitiatives” and “free-standing video destinations.” Production budgets of $5,700 to $7,500 per show and that extra wonderful “experienced producer to help develop the series!” (A low budget AND a meddlesome cable/network suit to tell you how to spend your meager stipend! Where do we sign up?!?)

FOS Guy MacPherson, writing for the Comedy Couch, interviewed Alonzo Bodden back in April, before this whole LCS thing aired.

We told NBC and we told the producers of the show that we’re going to know a lot of the comics who are trying out and we’re not going to pretend we don’t. That would be ridiculous. And the vast majority, and I mean like 98 percent of them, they understand. They know it’s our job and if they don’t get picked they’re not taking it personal. They’re not saying, “Gee, you’re my friend, you’re supposed to automatically put me on the show” or anything like that. As a matter of fact, I had one guy do that. I don’t know him really well, but he’s opened for me and I’ve hosted stuff he’s on. I was surprised. I didn’t expect him to be that type but he turned into it and he trashed the whole show and the whole process. But I found out later he was one of those people that had already planned to do that. He had already planned to trash the show. So there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes it’s weird. It’s definitely weird judging your peers and your friends. But they’ve been cool about it. And we’re as fair as possible.

The Seattle Times’ Mark Rahner does the interview with Gabe Kaplan that we wanted to do back in 2003.

Kaplan is flogging his book, “Kotter’s Back — E-mails from a Faded Celebrity to a Bewildered World,” and he seems to be giving quite honest and quite detailed answers.

…So I said, “Look, let’s have Kotter get a job at a junior college and then the first day look who shows up. And we have the show move on and we try. It might not work but at least we take a shot at it.” And they were so scared of it not working and they said, “No, no, we can still do it.” And I said basically, “Look, I can’t be a major part of this anymore. It’s starting to look really strange.” And they said, “Well, that’s the way we’re going to go.” So I was only on a few episodes of the fourth year and John Travolta was only a few episodes of the fourth year, so the show sort of was like Kotter in the Twilight Zone.

The premise for the book is simple: Kotter wrote a series of emails to various folks, eliciting bizarre and humorous reactions. “Checking my inbox in the morning was an adventure, just seeing how people reacted to me. I would never write these e-mails now. It was just something I got into for that period of like a year where I enjoyed doing it.”

We wonder if we’re in the book. We received an email from him in April of 2005 in which he urged us to run a retraction of a story that we ran on a matter wholly unrelated to him. In the email, he gently chastised us, said the posting was beneath us and urged us to take back the story. At the time, it didn’t make sense. It does now!

In a NYPost article Shia Laboeuf (the kid who starred in the movie on the second season of Project Greenlight and who is currently flogging “Transformers”) tells how he launched his showbiz career, getting “big laughs at age 10 doing X-rated stand-up at L.A. comedy clubs.”

“It was just really disgusting, dirty jokes. I had to win over drunks so I couldn’t get up there and talk about 10-year-old stuff like my first kiss. So I got up there and talked about” his first sexual climax, LaBeouf tells Hollywood Life.

Is there any context within which a 10 year-old boy talking about his first orgasm is anything less than majorly creepy? (Perhaps… maybe two– in a physician’s examination room, or in a courtroom, testifying via video.) We pity the comics who had to follow that.

Labeouf’s Wikipedia bio says he’s…

…the only child of Jeffrey Craig LaBeouf, a Vietnam War veteran, former mime at a circus and rodeo clown who “drifted” from job to job, and Shayna (Saide), a dancer and ballerina turned visual artist and jewelry designer; his maternal grandfather, who shared his first name, was a comedian who worked in the Borscht Belt of the Catskill Mountains, and his paternal grandmother was a Beatnik poet.

This is his early life and he hadda talk about nocturnal emissions?

Sing it with us!

Hey, Bellamy Bill!
Where did you kill?
Bellamy Bill!

Hey! Did you hear? Tempe was “the funniest and the most competitive city” of all they visited! How could you not hear that? They stated and re-stated it at least three times! We think they were trying to cover up something… maybe the fact that Tempe was the least funniest and least competitive city of all they visited!

(Why are we using all these exclamation points?!?! Because! That’s how Bellamy Bill talks! He’s merely carrying on the tradition started by the Original Screamer himself– Jay Mohr!)

And just where was Bellamy Bill this week? He sure wasn’t in Tempe. Cushy gig!

The crop of comics, if they were truly the funniest crop so far, were done wrong by the producers and the editors of this episode. We are sorely disappointed that Rocky Laporte didn’t make it to Los Angeles. He’s always been a favorite here.

Did you notice that the hat that John Caparulo was wearing bore a piece of electrical tape over the front in the later parts of the show? What were they hiding? Was it a product that the producers didn’t wanna give free advertising to? Why didn’t they pixelate it like MTV Cribs does? Electrical tape? Kinda goofy. (Why didn’t Caparulo just surrender the hat? Strange! Perhaps that’s his style. Perhaps it’s some sort of fashion statement we’re unaware of. We saw him in the teaser for the next episode and he was hatless! However are we going to identify him if he isn’t wearing his hat?)

Who got through?

Greg Warren
Chuck Roy
Lavell Crawford
Ryan Hamilton
John Caparulo (Cap One Audience Favorite)

Major face time on this episode?

Andrew Orvedahl
Kivi Rogers
Chris Voth
Suli McCullough
Cristela Alonzo
Robin Reiser
Rocky Laporte
Dave Landau
Jay Larson
Brandon Vestal

How about those judges?! The inconsistency is maddening– one comic will get yawns, rim shots and annoying snarls, then the next comic (or two comics later) will do pretty much the same kind of material (or the same basic joke!) and he’ll get applause, howls of laughter and table-pounding approval! This has got to be vexing for anyone who has just a tiny bit more than a superficial understanding of standup comedy.

They practically stopped one comic in mid-sentence for his “I’m the bastard child of (fill in names of celebrities)” joke, then were awestruck by the splendor and the genius of Ryan Hamilton, who said he was the illegitimate child of Jerry and Elaine. What gives? (Perhaps we shouldn’t dump on Ryan Hamilton so much. We dumped on him enough in our coverage of last year’s Boston Comedy Fest Comedy Competition. Link here.)

What happened to the Joke of the Day? Those commercials were driving lots of traffic to our site! Dozens of people (or should we say, cheap bastards) who so desperately wanted to know what one gives to a pig with a sprained ankle or where a general keeps his armies! (For the record, we still don’t know what one gives to a pig with a sprained ankle. As for the general, you’ll have to read our other post!)

Speaking of the joke of the day– Next week’s Celebrity Judge will be Tom Arnold! Apparently unhappy with their current low level of credibility, the producers of Last Comic Standing thought long and hard and wondered, “Who is quite possibly the least respected standup comic of the least decade and a half?” Apparently, Dustin Diamond was too busy dealing with all the fallout from his tumultuous appearance on Celebrity Fat Club!

Tom Arnold was stupendous in The Jackie Thomas Show. And he gives great panel. But a judge? For a standup comedy competition?

We predicted two weeks ago that they wouldn’t be able to stretch Tempe into a full hour, but they damn near did. They teased the upcoming upcoming competition by once again naming all the contestants and throwing in a couple interview snippets. (One of which was a particularly hysterical Joe Devito quote!)

If you ever get frustrated with what transpires on Last Comic Standing, just tune into the handjob that’s going on over at America’s Got Talent! If The Three Redneck Tenors file suit, we’ll gladly act as character witnesses. They were jobbed!! They stay home while Boy Shakira goes to the finals! An abomination!

Note to Joe Lowers: If you’re willing to wear a lot of makeup and dress up like a belly dancer, you could probably score a dozen free dinners in Vegas over the next few weeks. (Boy Shakira bears a striking resemblance to Lowers when he/she smiles. That’s Lowers, below left, and Boy Shakira, below right.)

Also, whilst wallowing in even more reality television earlier this evening, we caught some of Next Best Thing. Standup comic (and celebrity impersonator) Anne Kissel failed to advance to the finals, in spite of a dead-on impression of Roseanne Barr!

And the real Tom Arnold gets face time on Last Comic Standing!

From a MySpace bulletin, posted by Carole Montgomery:

Thea is recovering from emergency surgery in LA. I am flying out tomorrow to make sure she is okay. If you want to contact her please reply to this email and I will give you the info. Please keep her in your thoughts.

Stay tuned.

That’s right. Jake Coyle, writing for AP, says that, “…comedians are increasingly feeling the need to have an online presence.” Check the calendar, dude– it’s 2007!

Coyle also says that:

There was once a stigma attached to having a Web site as a comedian. Standups have often felt that a following can only be respectably gained at the mike.

Say what?! We’ve never– ever– heard this sentiment expressed by any comedian. There has never been a stigma attached to having a website as a comedian. If there was, we were never aware of it.

We put one up in late 1996. And we thought we were behind the curve!

We’re not bragging, mind you, we’re merely saying that we’ve been aware of the WWW’s potential for promoting comedians, for communicating and sharing information between comedians and for gathering information about the comedy business. We were out of the gate rather early and we encouraged others to hop onboard the internet.

In March of 1999, we began work on the first issue of SHECKYmagazine.com and eventually launched the mag on April 1. And we worried that maybe we were late to the party. We were well aware, however, of a website’s potential to disseminate information to fans and comedians and others in the industry. And we were fascinated by the possibilities for self-expression via the website. In our early days, we had as many as nine columnists writing for the magazine. As it turns out, they were early “bloggers.”

After the preposterous “stigma” statement, the article goes on to provide a rather thin list of comics’ sites, with capsule descriptions of some. Of course, the comics are fairly well-known. Perhaps there’s a longer, more detailed version of the story floating around out there. This one is so anemic as to be a waste.

Occasionally, early on, when the cost of a site was much higher than it was now, some comics dismissed the website idea. They downplayed the value of a site. This was a classic example of “sour grapes,” of course. Once the cost plummeted, the stampede started.

Now it is fairly standard for a comedian to have a website, parked at a domain that he owns (affording him personalized email addresses) with a MySpace presence as well. Some also regularly post to a weblog. Not everyone is using their site, their MySpace, their blog to the maximum potential, but, compared to how things were in 1996, we’re all better connected and we’re all much more capable of promoting our standup comedy and other projects to most of the inhabitants of the planet.

Betsy Taylor, writing for AP, says that “Joke comprehension may decrease with age.”

A new psychology study at Washington University… suggested that because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humor comprehension.

It’s nothing that a few stiff drinks won’t cure. (Thanks to reader Stuart McCallister!)

While we were on vacation, we missed this gem from the Post-Chronicle (at the end of their rip-and-read posting on the L.A. Coroner’s report on the death of Rich Jeni):

Side note: The Post Chronicle was the first news outlet to report the death of Jeni. Although a clown known as Brian McKim of SHECKY Magazine has gone to great lengths to dispute our claim.

Our publisher – who didn’t even write the disputed piece – attempted to appease McKim, a struggling philly comic who obviously needs the publicity, by giving him and his site credit. Mr. Centanni’s reward was to be slandered by McKim on the Shecky site as well as a myspace site later on.

It’s truly a shame that Mr. Mckim felt if necessary to attempt to exploit the death of Mr. Jeni for his lame site’s selfish benefit.

Priceless!

The above “article” was penned by someone calling himself “Jack Ryan.”

We’re especially tickled by that bit about “publicity” garnered from a mention in the Post-Chronicle.

We gotta end this post now. The phone’s ringing and it’s Spielberg. He’s been phoning us ever since he read about us in the Post-Chronicle!

(Read about the entire pathetic episode on our MySpace blog by clicking here. It’s the posting entitled “Blog Wars.” And, if you want to judge for yourself whether or not we “exploited” Jeni’s death or if we provided our readers with some of most thoughtful, sensitive and knowledgeable coverage available anywhere, just click on our March archive and scroll through it.)

Paul Krassner, writing for the HuffPo, provides even more detail on the Sahl tribute, including the transcript of Albert Brooks‘ screamingly funny “eulogy.”

That’s our fantasy headline. It hasn’t popped up on our MyYahoo yet.

What have been popping up on the internet with alarming frequency, however, are articles that quote Robin Williams as saying that he’s going to go back to live standup comedy and that he loves it and that he needs it. It’s as if he’s trolling for a giant groundswell of public opinion that will sweep him into the clubs, a grass roots effort that’ll result in wheel barrows full of phone-book sized petitions imploring him to bring his live show to each and every town, large and small, throughout North America.

Or he’s daring someone to beg him to reconsider.

We don’t like to say anything bad about any standup comic. One of our background mottoes is the old grandmotherly, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

In the case of Robin Williams, however, we are prepared to depart with that policy.

Have you seen any of his recent appearances on late night talk shows? Have you seen the material and the behavior trotted out during his panel chats? When we happen across such an appearance, we have bets here at SHECKYmagazine HQ as to how long it will take him to either do the Applause Meter impression or the Southern Preacher voice or the decidedly un-P.C. “Fag” Impression. What’s the over/under on how long it will take him to say, “You’re pants are so tight, I can see what religion you are!” (A criminally lame joke, considering that 85 per cent of American males are circumcised, regardless of religious affiliation.)

All of this would be a minor annoyance if not for one very big thing: He is held up regularly– by the media, by some of his peers and others– as one of the greatest living comedians. And when he is introduced on this show or that, his introduction contains some form of that description. Which probably means that his management (or Williams himself) insists that he be so introduced. And, while it is true that a certain segment of the population may actually view him as such, it is probably also true that a significant chunk of the population hear this and subsequently conclude that standup comedy must be in a very dire situation if Williams represents the pinnacle of standup excellence.

We go to great lengths to smack the MSM on the wrist when they make gross generalizations about standup comic, when they perpetuate negative and baseless stereotypes about comedians and when they are simply mean to comics for no apparent reason. In this rare case, however, we are forced to reluctantly admit that it is one of our own who, with the help of the media, is perpetuating some of the worst stereotypes about comics– hyperactive, always “on,” recycling dated material, oblivious to the audience reaction, possible thievery.

Robin Williams is a fine actor.

And, at one time, he may have represented the best that standup comedy had to offer. But that time is long gone. As we reported in this publication, Andy Kindler, in his 2002 State of the Industry address at the Just For Laughs festival, addressed this very topic.

Kindler spent less time on each victim, hit more targets and tightened up his remarks, saving his most vicious beating for Robin Williams. His nearly line-by-line deconstruction of Williams’ recent HBO “special” was tremendous and met with an equal amount of groaning and laughter (groaning at Williams, laughing at Kindler).

So we’re not breaking any ground here. What we’re alarmed at is the hype and the posturing and the possible harm it might do to the public’s perception of standup comedy.

If he wants to get back into standup, he should acknowledge that he’s lost it. He should hire writers and cultivate a standup act that lives up to the hyperbole. Or stop insisting that everyone regard him one of the great standup comics of all time.

Folks don’t think any less of a comedian who hires writers. It’s a time-honored tradition. We’re all right with it. What we want to see is the famous comedian, regardless of who wrote his material (providing, of course, it’s paid for), performing at his best, reminding us of why we liked him/her in the first place.

What we can’t take is the famous comedian embarassing himself and all of us along with him.

Readers of this magazine know we take a dim view of people who encourage kids to take up standup comedy. This time it’s U.K. comedian James Campbell who’s doing it with his Comedy Club 4 Kids.

Founded by comedian James Campbell in 2004, the usually London-based operation decamps to Edinburgh for the Fringe, offering child-friendly performances with a host of guests throughout August. On July 20, a day-long comedy “academy” will teach children aged seven to 13 how to develop a five-minute stand-up routine, using physical and observational techniques, storytelling and sketch-writing skills. Each child who takes part then gets to perform their new act for one night only at the Comedy Club alongside the adult performers.

Where are all the 30-year-old comedians out there with 20 years experience at making people laugh? There are none. They do it for a few minutes, get their clips and then move on to modeling kids and teens clothes for Kmart and Spiegel. It’s a cynical use of the standup stage and craft by their “handlers.”

Like Josh Peck, one of the stars of Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh whose bio says he “started his acting career at age 7 and launched a stand-up comedy career at 9 by appearing in New York clubs including Catch a Rising Star and Stand Up, New York.”

Can we stop putting children on legitimate comedy club stages? Please?

You’re setting the kid up with unrealistic expectations. Kids have too much self-esteem these days as it is without putting them into a situation where they’re going to get charity laughs (and nobody would dare heckle them). And it’s embarassing for the real, adult comics who have to mount the stage after them.

From a website called FemaleFirst.co.uk, which pushes “ultra-sexy lingerie” alongside gossip items about Lilly Allen and giveaways of Dirk Bogarde DVD boxed sets, comes this bit of (unattributed) nonsense:

Comedians Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock want to star in their own buddy cop film, after becoming friends at Live Earth.

The pair were both at the London leg of the event introducing other acts, and hatched the plan backstage.

Gervais explains, “It’s going to be called Badge Buddies. I play a guy. My partner’s retired and he takes over. I’ve never played a homosexual before.”

Rock adds, “It’s going to be Rush Hour meets Shakespeare In Love.”

The pitch and the title sound so hackneyed we wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a hoax.

Assuming that it’s real, we’d have to believe that Rock and Gervais travel with their agents, managers, studio execs and two dozen attorneys as they are able to “hatch a plan backstage” for a major motion picture. And then publicize it less than 36 hours later.

When we saw video of Rock sauntering onstage at Wembley Stadium, we wondered, “What the hell is Chris Rock doing in London? Why isn’t he introducing someone at Giants Stadium?” We now figure that he was across the pond to promote the upcoming project– if one does indeed exist– featuring himself and Gervais.

We’re still puzzled as to why the studio(s) involved would concoct this fairy tale about a meeting backstage and a subsequent deal. Perhaps if the producers of this film and others like it would put more effort into the actual scripts– rather than into the goofy fantasies pertaining to the genesis of the project– we’d all have better movies.