In all fairness, it is important to point out that the review cited below of Albert Brooks’ new film, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” appeared on TEN Movies, “The Movie Resource of the Middle East (Member of The Emirates Network)”. The folks who are being chided by Brooks can’t be expected to look favorably upon his tongue-in-cheek investigation into what tickles the funny bone of folks in India and Pakistan.

The method used by Albert Brooks to understand what is considered funny to these people is putting on a standup comedy show in both India and Pakistan, but this doesn’t work too well. Was it ever considered by him that perhaps it isn’t the understanding of the English language that prevents the Indian audience from finding him funny, but that all the gags are soaked in cultural references completely alien to them (Halloween, ‘The Exorcist’ etc.)?

To answer that last question, uh… yes, it probably was. He is Albert Brooks, after all.

Brooks has never been easy to get. At least not for some people. And he’s never gone the easy route. So, if Brooks finds himself on a stage in front of a bunch of people who don’t get his cultural references, the motivation behind the gag is probably that Albert Brooks is dying an agonizing comedy death in front of a bunch of people from India! Only he doesn’t know it! (Of course, he absolutely does know it. He Albert Brooks, for God’s sake! That’s also part of the gag! He’s unaware, but we all know he’s totally aware!)

It’s a two-and-a-half, double-reverse, flip of a comedy conceit. And the result will be hilarious to non-Muslims (for the most part). And for the Muslims without a sense of humor? Not so much. Therein lies the gag… we’re guessing. Check out the film’s website.

An email from XM Comedy programmer Joel Haas:

FREE XM RADIOS FROM XM COMEDY

Hello comedy fans…listen up. XM Comedy is giving away free XM Radios for a limited time for the holiday season. If you’ve been thinking about getting one, now is the time. The only catch is, you have to pay for three month’s service ($12.95 per month) and keep the service active for six months.

Get the new XT receiver free, or get the portables for $99.00

Just go to http://espromotions.xmradio.com/xm/emaillogin.aspx

And use my email address, joel.haas@xmradio.com, where it says “sponsors name” (Don’t forget the dot between “joel” and “haas”)

Read the rules and click on “I accept” (Don’t worry, it won’t cost anything until you fill out your credit card number) THEN GO SHOPPING!

(If you know someone who wants an XM radio, forward this email to them)

AND MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM XM COMEDY!

All right. What’s going on here?

A reader hipped us to the URL for a website called The Chappelle Theory which purports to tell the real story behind the abrupt shutdown of Comedy Central’s Chappelle’s Show.

He knew that at the same time he was signing his record-setting deal, there was a secret cabal of powerful African-American leaders from the business, political, and entertainment industries working together to ensure that the third season of Chappelle’s Show would never happen.

What follows is a wild tale that has secret dinner meetings between Oprah and The Cos, Al Sharpton weilding a pistol, Louis Farrakhan planting Nation of Islam members as cameramen on the set of the show and voodoo dolls.

The site is registered to a Philadelphia firm by the name of Weblinc. (Whose website says they “challenge (their) clients to justify the investment that (they) are asking them to make and establish success metrics by which the investment will be measured.” To put it otherwise, they build websites… for Calvin Klein Underwear, Crayola and Speedo.) Either somebody spent a lot of jack to create a website that spins a bizarre (and ultimately unbelievable– as in not believable) story about Chappelle’s recent troubles.

Or… the boys at Weblinc have a lot of downtime and they figured they’d try their hand at comedy writing. (Crank out the copy during your idle hours, cough up $75 to register a couple of domain names, get the boys in the design department to kick in some groovy code– Boom, a buzz website, with viral potential, is born!)

For a few pages, their chronology of Chappelle’s rise and fall makes for some entertaining reading. And it’s kinda plausible. (And, if presented as fiction, it might have even passed for a decent sketch on Chappelle’s now-defunct show.) But then it descends into outlandish parody. Kinda like a first draft of a Charlie Kaufman script. It’s Dave Chappelle meets Charlie Kaufman meets The Hamster Dance. What it might also be is an elaborate (and rather ingenious) campaign to pump up anticipation of the future release of a Chappelle’s Show DVD Boxed Set! Enjoy.

The Female Half of the Staff spotted the following in her most recent issue of Shape magazine (“It’s the holiday issue– this month’s featured shape was ’round,’ ” says she.)

Tour America’s natural beauty for free all year after investing in a National Parks Pass. About 80 percent of the Pass proceeds benefit vital Parks programs, including prarie restoration in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park and grounds maintenance of Washington, D.C.’s National Mall.

The perfect gift for the comic on your list… who has a Tribble Tour on the books. They’re $50 and they can be purchased here. Consider this our Christmas Gift Buying Guide.

The Male Half of the Staff has written “2005: The Year in Comedy,” one of those year-end wrapup articles that we always see in the MSM, usually devoted to sports or entertainment. Well, this is a magazine about standup, so this one’s devoted to standup comedy.

Standup comedy has become a large component of the entertainment industry and the practitioners of standup have unprecedented influence on our popular culture. Many of the stories that have standup as a component also connect with larger issues such as censorship, race, crime, life, death, success, commerce and art. With this in mind, we present “2005, The Year In Standup!”

This list is not necessarily a list of the most important events in standup as much as it is a list of things that happened in standup that had an impact on society at large. A subtle difference, but one that readers of this magazine can easily grasp.

NOTE TO MSM: Feel free to excerpt this column, edit it, re-print it, augment it with quotes, etc. It might make a nice, fluffy piece for your entertainment section near the end of the year (easily augmented with photos of Carson, Pryor, Rock, Hedberg, etc.) and we will gladly take the bump in traffic that would naturally follow. Just make sure you include the URL– and spell it right! Thanks!

Ya think we’d figure these things out, now wouldn’tcha?

We’d been listening to our XMRadio for some time and they were pumping their XM Nation Awards, where they give out awards for this and that. But the promos weren’t mentioning comedy. We hopped onto the site, but we didn’t see any categories for comedy. We figured, oh well, standup is screwed again.

But what’s this? Waaay down at the bottom of the (first) page of nominees for various music categories was a tiny drop down menu that enabled visitors to “Select another neighborhood.” These kids and their web design! What the bloody hell does “select another neighborhood” mean?!?!

Oh, well. Had we known, we mighta been able to hip our readers to the fact that Dane Cook, Lewis Black and Mitch Hedberg were slugging it out for XM Comic of the Year and Mitch Fatel, Gary Gulman and Tom Hester were vying for Best New Comic.

Oh… Gulman won for Best New and Dane Cook is the Comic of the Year.

Ghost Whisperer, the CBS drama starring Jennifer Love Hewitt (recently ranked the sixth sexiest woman in HDTV), will feature a plot on this Friday night’s episode based on a dead comedian, entitled “Dead Comedian.” Says the synopsis:

Melinda, out for an evening of comedy and to support Andrea at open mike night, encounters a dead comic who makes it clear: nothing is spookier than the twisted humor of ghosts who refuse to cross over. If you love comedy and terror this is the night of your life!

Indeed! The Female Half of the Staff speculates that the ghost comic terrifies his victims by muttering “I normally headline!” We may have to set the VCR.

An AP story tells of a Mustafa Abeulhija who claims that nine months ago, Chappelle told him that he could be his manager. Only trouble is, gee whiz, he hasn’t paid him a cent. Mr. Abuelhija says that Chappelle even “spread the word” to his “financial aides.” (Hint: The dudes who cut the checks know about me… so… WHERE’S MY CHECK?)

There’s nothing in writing. That doesn’t mean that Mr. A doesn’t have a fat check coming to him. This will probably be settled out of court. There’s a big chunk of change at stake– according to the AP account, Chappelle “had earned $2.2 million from personal appearances and about $6 million in entertainment deals including the contract for his show” during the period in question.

Mark Gauvreau Judge, writing in Spectator.org, compares his recent viewing of “Margaret Cho: Assassin” to Robert Klein’s special and the book upon which it was based.

Klein, who has a new HBO special (his 8th) coming up, is no conservative, but he’s a vanished breed: the common sense liberal. His recent memoir “The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue” proves this. While in his early 20s he dated a German woman, and describes one night in the late 1960s where his leftist pals were touting the glories of socialism in front of her. Klein was proud as she demurred: “I felt a certain pride as she charmed them and parried their ideology at the same time. It so happened that she lived in a country that was divided by electronic fences and machine guns. These middle-class City College Trotskyites seemed oblivious to the pragmatic side of the issue, the fact that this woman risked death to visit relatives in the eastern sector of her country.”

It kicks off with a devastating indictment of Cho’s methods and segues into an analysis of what might or might not make for satisfying political humor. Read the rest here.

From “Pryor’s Flawed Legacy” by Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News:

What is so unfortunate is that the heaviest of Pryor’s gifts was largely ignored by so many of those who praised the man when he was alive and are now in the middle of deifying him.

The pathos and the frailty of the human soul alone in the world or insecure or looking for something of meaning in a chaotic environment was a bit too deep for all of the simpleminded clowns like Andrew Dice Clay or those who thought that mere ethnicity was enough to define one as funny, like the painfully square work of Paul Rodriguez.

Ouch! One of the more nuanced “appreciations” of Pryor we’ve read. Crouch’s NYDN bio says he is “co-founder of the department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 1993, he received both the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a MacArthur Foundation grant. He is now working on a biography of Charlie Parker.” Read the rest here.

From Jamy Ian Swiss, magician and comedy fan, comes this essay on the impact of Richard Pryor:

Richard Pryor is gone.

Some fool might say he’s been gone for years, due to his failing health and the progression of the multiple sclerosis he was diagnosed with in 1986. But most– and this fan, for one– would say he has always been present, and indeed will always be present, thanks to his pervasive and profound influence as an artist.

I believe Richard Pryor was the greatest comedian of my lifetime. I say this on due consideration– decades of consideration– and without hyperbole. I am a passionate fan of George Carlin– I saw him on the original Seven Dirty Words tour when I was 19 years old, I saw him at the live HBO broadcast a few weeks ago, and I’ve seen him on other occasions in between– I think he is now far and way our greatest living comic– but I can’t help but suspect that even Carlin himself would be quick to rate Pryor ahead of himself on the scale of impact, influence, and profound originality.

I say this not to take anything away from Carlin, but I cannot seem to discuss Pryor without thinking of Carlin as well. These were the great comic models I grew up with– along with a man who helped make them all famous, Johnny Carson, a king of a different breed, but comic royalty just the same. I learned about comedy by watching Carson’s show, learned from him about a generation of comics that had influenced him, learned from him by dissecting his monologues the morning after with fellow comedy students. And I learned from him by his open-hearted embrace of new comics– as when I saw Albert Brooks pour a glass of water down the mouth of a vent dummy and eventually kick the crap out of it– including the likes of George Carlin and Richard Pryor.

(Read the rest here, continued in the “Comments” to this post).

An email from author/comedian Larry Getlen:

One aspect of Pryor’s influence that seems less frequently mentioned, in general, is his eventual influence on what has, over the past decade, been called “alternative” comedy. Pryor amazed for many reasons, the honesty of his portrayal of black life primary among them. But it also seems you could draw a straight line from Pryor’s story-telling to the jokeless style of many alternative comedic performers, as well as the increasingly popular trend of storytelling (including one-person shows) as an comedic event.

It’s also interesting to note the amazing similarities between the life stories of Pryor and George Carlin from about 1959-1971. Both served in the military with horrid results (Pryor stabbed a guy; Carlin was court-martialed three times). Both went to New York to try to make it in comedy, and performed in the clubs in the Village (sometimes together, improv-ing on stage) and within a few years found their way to TV via the shows of Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan and others. Both wore suits and performed mainstream, middle-of-the-road material despite natural inclinations the other way based on their blue collar backgrounds, anti-establishment views, and sympathies with the downtrodden aspects of society. Both evolved from TV to Vegas around the same time, both did quite well there but felt out of place, and both wound up hating Vegas audiences so much that they wound up cursing them out from the stage. Both finally quit Vegas in frustration– taking incredible risks in doing so, as they were both turning their backs on the kind of success most comics would kill for– took about a year off at the end of the decade, grew their hair, ditched the suits, and returned with material that suited who they were in real life, making them the two most popular and influential comedians of the seventies. (And that’s without even going into the similarities later on with rising popularity and album successes, then drugs, career downturns and heart attacks, leading to Carlin’s classic joke– slight paraphrasing here– “Here’s the latest score in the Carlin-Pryor sweepstakes– I lead Richard in heart attacks by a score of 3-2, but he leads 1-0 in setting yourself on fire!”)

Pryor died today of a heart attack at a Los Angeles hospital. He had been suffering from multiple sclerosis for nearly two decades.

Readers of this publication, in a 2000 poll, named him to be “The Comic of the Millennium,” by a wide margin.

He is cited by many of today’s professional standup comics as an influence.

Read the AP obit.

TVLand is premiering December 14 a new show hosted by David Steinberg, in which he interviews comics. Some of the featured guests will be Bob Newhart, Jon Lovitz and George Lopez. Other guests, not exactly standup comics, will be Mike Meyers and Martin Short. (In all fairness, the show is merely called Sit Down Comedy, so there should be no expectation that the show will exclusively feature pure standup comics.)

If you go to the TVLand site, be prepared for browser freeze-ups and rough sledding. Too many bells and whistles! You can also download a preview and download podcasts of upcoming shows.

On the occasion of his guest shot on ER, Jack Carter is interviewed by TVGuide.com. In it, the comedian explains, among other things, how his feud with Woody Allen started:

He was one of the top writers on The Gary Moore Show, where I was a regular. One day I was on a panel with Mickey Rooney and some other people, and Woody was picking on Mickey unmercifully. I came to Mickey’s defense and attacked Woody Allen, and when we got back to Gary Moore he wrote me out of it quickly. We’ve been enemies ever since. He’s never thought of me for a role in any picture.

Mickey Rooney? Beverly Sills? Houdini’s dog bit his sister? How old is Jack Carter? Read the whole thing.

Anyone notice that last night’s episode of My Name Is Earl was stocked with standup comics? Brett Butler, Blake Clarke played Earl’s ex’s parents and Harland Williams also guested.

Earl will anchor the NBC’s new Thursday night comedy lineup when they switch it and The Office to the new night at the first opportunity next month. NBC suits are hoping to usher in a new era of Must-See TV. Of course, it might just kill any buzz that either show managed to gather. Programming executives are a lot like mad scientists in that regard– “When I flip this switch, cancer will disappear, hurricanes will no longer plague us and peace will reign forever more… or… the entire world will be reduced to fine dust. Here goes…”

The Female Half witnessed an interesting episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which a mobster forces Dick, Buddy and Sally to write a routine for his nephew Kenny Dexter who wants to be a comedian. The guy is a real life-of-the-party type who does a lot of impressions. He makes his debut at a fancy nightclub and bombs. Everyone concludes that he just doesn’t have any talent so he decides to go to college.

Jack Larson played “Kenny Dexter” in the episode, which was titled “Big Max Calvada” (Episode # 3.9), which aired November 20, 1963, just two days before the assassination of President Kennedy!

If anyone has the deluxe boxed set of the D.V.D.S. DVD’s, dub us a copy of Episode #3,9 will ya? It would be good to have for the archives!

This just in: AP is reporting that the first four episodes of Chappelle’s Show, shot before the host flaked out, will air “in April, May or June.” (That’s quite a wide window of opportunity. Perhaps Doug Herzog hasn’t purchased his 2006 calendar yet! You know, Doug, you can get ’em for a buck at those dollar stores. Sure, they have puppies and kitties on the cover, but they function fine as calendars!)

(Note: An earlier version of this post identified the publication in question as NY Monthly, instead of NJ Monthly. We apologize for any confusion!)

In yet another incident that might lead one to believe that standup comedy is back on the cultural radar, New Jersey Monthly has put out a Comedy Issue. While we appreciate that a publication of NJM’s stature went to the trouble, we found the issue to be an series of uninspired articles on standup comedy. Oh, sure, we’re mildly annoyed that they never contacted us, but we chalk that up to their North Jersey bias. (If you’re not from Jersey, it’s a given that North Jersey and South Jersey are two different states. In fact, SoJo threatens to “secede” every once in a while and make Vineland the capitol of the new state. Secessionists ultimately lose interest and just go down the shore until the urge goes away.)

Perhaps most distressing was the main piece, by Peter Golden that profiles Rascals partner Ed Rodriguez. Leaving aside the fact that the main article in a Comedy Issue is on someone who toils not on the stage but in the boardroom, it was mainly about the publicly-traded company’s success, not in actual live comedy, but in the peddling through cyberspace of their hours and hours of the Rascals Good Time Comedy Hour.” The show aired on cable up north back in the first golden period of standup and is now being offered to the public via number of platforms.

The grand prize for the most annoying quote was from one Gary DeLena in an article called “Tough Crowd,” a brief (modern) history of the standup comedy as it relates to the Garden State.

Gary DeLena, a Point Pleasant comedian who has performed stand-up for 22 years, says that many clubs didn’t last because they were mismanaged or they cut corners by booking weak acts. “Once it caught on, everybody and their brother wanted to try comedy,” DeLena says. “Did you ever hear the expression, ‘Dying is easy but comedy is hard?’ A lot of the comics sucked.”

While there is a nugget of truth in DeLena’s statement, it utterly fails to convey any of the subtlety of the collapse. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, that the reporter seized upon this particularly negative, vicious and ultimately unenlightening quote. The MSM gets a woody any time they get anyone to say that comedy (or comedians) are somehow inept or boorish. All the better if they get one of our own to utter the remark.

Buried in a recent email from the organizers of an upcoming comedy festival:

I am looking for everyone to come out and give their best performance on stage. More importantly, I’m watching how everyone is off stage as well. What you do while you’re here reflects directly on the festival, and our sponsors.

Everyone brush up on your etiquette! It would be so sad to have a killer showcase set then blow a sitcom deal because you’re an insufferable boor offstage! (“I don’t get it! I killed but I got nothing! Maybe I went too far when I belched loudly in front of Budd Friedman on the elevator!”)

For our part, we’ll be doing features on how to distinguish that pesky salad fork, from the… other… fork.

Just got this terse announcement over the cyber-transom:

The Laugh Factory NY is proud to announce George Sarris has come on board to help run the number one comedy clubs in the country (“USA Today”). Mr. Sarris is the Executive Producer of The NYC Underground Comedy Festival

Hmmm… Sarris will “help run” the Factory. Stay tuned.

And one more thing: The Factory persists in saying that USAToday proclaimed the Factory in Hollywood “the number one comedy club in the country.” This is, of course, a reference to the April 1 article in which the editors of this publication supplied USAToday with ten suggestions for “Ten great places to sit down and watch standup comedy.” Which we did. The Factory was listed first randomly. (There is some hope, though: The release refers to “the number one comedy clubs” with an “s” on the end of club… perhaps they had a twinge of honesty mid-sentence and almost typed the sentence using a far more honest qualifier “one of the…” We can only hope.)

The best kept secret of the recent HBO comedy festival in Vegas was who won that Wendy’s Comedy Challenge. That was the contest that our own Bill Bunker was in the running for. (Mr. Bunker failed to scare up the necessary cyber-hysteria to make it to the Vegas leg of the competition.)

Buried on the website of the Warner Bros.-produced Ellen Degeneres Show is the answer: Dean Lewis (website), a standup comic from Dallas.

From today’s Washington Times comes an article (“Now, there’s proof: Men, women different” free reg. req.) that recaps the results of a Canadian brain study and a few other stateside studies on the differences between male and female brain function. Our favorite quote:

“The comedians are right. The science proves it. A man’s brain and a woman’s brain really do work differently,” a research team from the University of Alberta in Canada announced yesterday.

Hardly a week goes by that comedians aren’t proven to be sage observers of human nature.

Considering that the subtitle of the Nuvo website is “Arts, Entertainment & Social Justice,” we should expect ridiculous drivel in a review of Robert Klein‘s latest HBO special. Observe the review’s lede:

Robert Klein is one of the funniest people alive, and he achieved that status without trying terribly hard.

Say what? It’s gets better:

Look at his career choices– his movies (try to name a good one), his TV shows (The Stones and Bob Patterson, most recently) and even his standup– and it’s obvious he doesn’t put forth that much effort.

Perhaps the byline, Marc D. Allan, is a nom de plume for Klein’s mother. Allan heaps on more abuse in his big finish paragraph:

And he absolutely should have expended more effort honing his jokes and writing transitions between subjects.

Absolutely.

We haven’t seen the new special, but we doubt very much that Klein is guilty of all the above charges. He’s Robert Klein, after all. Nobody works (or worked) harder at standup than Robert Klein. His voice, his writing style, his approach has shaped generations of standup comics. His influence is so pervasive as to be inivisible to even the folks who’ve been influenced.

Klein has achieved what so many comics strive for– he’s made it look easy. This only becomes a problem when your work is reviewed by dullards. Good news for Mr. Allan: he has made it just under the wire and is in the running for the SHECKYmagazine Dumbass of the Year award.

From the P-I:

San Diego comedian Lamont Ferguson won the 26th annual Seattle International Stand-up Comedy Competition. In a five-night runoff at area clubs, Ferguson narrowly defeated Seattle comic Heneghen to win the $5,000 first prize.

Ferguson won over the crowd with his smooth, conversational style. Heneghen, in second place, won $2,200. Third place went to Vancouver, B.C., comic Graham Clark.

The fourth-place winner was Sadiki Fuller of Houston. And fifth place went to Andy Peters of Seattle. Ferguson performs Thursday-Saturday at the Comedy Underground. Tickets: $12-$15.

From “Reconciling Artist’s Moral Rights with Economic Principles and the Problem of Parody: Some Modest Proposals,” on the Journal of Law & Communications website, comes this nugget from Paul Nicholas Boylan’s treatise on parody:

The problem, in relation to moral rights, however, is that parody-– an older and better established concept than the comparatively newer concept of artist’s moral rights– directly violates the artist’s right to protect his or her reputation by preventing the alteration of his or her art. Parody depends on copying a work of art and altering that art in order to poke fun at the art and/or artist, thereby casting ridicule upon the art and/or artist.

When this happens, parody invariably takes precedent over the artist’s moral rights. For example, our hypothetical artist, Noirin, discovers that a comedian– let’s call him Shecky– has painted a curly moustache on her painting, “the Mona Lisa Marie Presley,” and placed the altered painting in a humorous magazine edited by Shecky. American copyright law expressly subordinates Noirin’s moral rights to the fair use defense which, under American law, includes parody. Noirin cannot, therefore, claim her moral rights in the United States. Neither will she have a remedy in France– the single jurisdiction where her moral rights are best protected– unless she can prove that Shecky altered her art for malicious, as opposed to comedic, reasons.

I wonder if Shecky (Greene) can bring suit against Mr. Boylan for unitentionally impugning him in a dry, academic treatise on parody? After all, there really is a comedian, named Shecky! Boylan, however, treats him as a hypothetical entity or a fictional character.

(We suspect that we have stumbled upon an extraordinary situation: Greene’s first name (his nickname, actually) has become a generic term for a comedian. Boylan is familiar with this development. He seems not, however, to be familiar with the antecedent, Greene himself. Nor, of course, does Boylan seem to be aware that the antecedent is still alive and, occasionally at least, still plying his trade as a comedian!)

Plod through the whole thing if you wanna kick around the issue of fair use and parody.

Phil Porter, of Denver, CO, is the lucky winner of our SHECKYmagazine.com Sweatshirt Giveaway! Congratulations to Mr. Porter! And we thank all of you for participating!

Dane Cook (website) will host the Dec. 3 Saturday Night Live.

The dream that I had in 7th grade is about to become a reality. I’ve been asked to host Saturday Night Live! December 3rd! I did this with my stand up comedy. Not a tv career or a film career. I did it because I was a good guy with great intentions. I never got caught up in anything beyond the simple idea of bettering myself at this craft that I love and respect. More than anything I am doing it because my fans are some of the sharpest, coolest comedy fans on this planet and you got behind me and never left.

Mr. Cook is on a roll. He may not have snagged his SNL hosting gig via the movies, but he has been in one or two. And he’s about to be in yet another– There’s this from Softpedia:

Jessica Simpson is in negotiations to star opposite stand-up comedian Dane Cook in “Employee of the Month” for Lions Gate Films, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The Dukes of Hazard star will portray a sexy cashier that makes the employees at a discount superstore go ga-ga, while Cook plays one of two dorky workers who are vying for her attention by competing for the Employee of the Month honor. Lions Gate is eyeing a spring start date.

Mr. Cook’s price just went up. And, with the breakup of her marriage, Ms. Simpson’s price probably went down. Might there be equal billing when it’s eventually released? We shall see.

So read the subject line on an email we got this morning.

Now, normally, we get hundreds of emails with similar subject lines. There must be some sort of program out there that enables spammers to create enticing (and plausible) subject lines that randomly incorporate first names and combine them with superlatives such as “Amazing” or “Spectacular.”

We always hit the delete button– we turf them by the dozens, knowing that they’re come-ons. This one time, though, they got lucky. They sent the editors of a magazine about standup comedy an email about erectile disfunction with the above subject line.

The spam gods are smiling upon someone out there.

Jerry Fink’s Las Vegas Sun review of a recent Monday night at Kathleen Dunbar‘s Divas of Comedy in the Casbar Lounge at the Sahara (entitled “No joke: Vegas audiences can be tough on comedians”) was notable for two reasons: 1) It described, in excruciating detail, an evening where nothing went right for the comedians and 2) It was, overall, a fair and accurate accounting that displayed tremendous empathy for the performers and was, on balance, a positive review!

From my perspective, I enjoyed watching Dunbar and fellow comedian Carla Rae sweat — not out of some perverse pleasure, but only because I had the opportunity to watch a couple of pros working under the severest of circumstances.

They didn’t quit. They gave it their best shot.

They may have been squirming as they fired blanks all night, but they didn’t back down.

It was like a battleground, and the comedians were determined to win — although in this case the victory may have just been getting through the entire performance.

The battle was brutal.

Fink perfectly captures the slow-motion disaster of a bad crowd, using nice details. At the same time, he manages to pay the highest compliments.

Having seen the comedians perform before, I know they are excellent at their craft. Their material, probably R rated, is funny. They can be hilarious. I have been sitting in audiences who were in tears as they performed.

But not this crowd.

Everyone’s nightmare– someone from the press in the house on a bad night– results in a review that is alternately painful, uproariously funny and, ultimately, positive.

The Female Half of the Staff has played the room and found it to be most challenging, a real test of a comic’s mettle. “But it can be a great room,” she says. She adds that she is stunned at how well regulars Dunbar and Rae handle the room and the audiences week after week.

“You Are Where You Work– Comedy Across the Country” is the name of one of the articles written by Vince Martin, who is, according to his Suite101.com bio, a standup comic “based out of North Carolina; I work regularly throughout the Southeast as a feature or middle act. I grew up in New Jersey, spent five years in New York City, and now live in the sticks, so I have a good grasp of a wide section of American life.” The abovementioned article endeavors to give a comic an idea of which city or region might be ideal for re-location.

Suite101.com is, near as we can tell, a Wikipedia without a high-powered publicist. (And, it seems, they actually pay for content!) Vince Martin arrived on the scene and is handling standup comedy. We don’t do how-to’s here at SHECKYmagazine, but we’re more than willing to link to the occasional instructional article or two out there in cyberspace.

The Boston Herald is reporting that Sarah Silverman is getting some flack because of a joke in her performance video, er, movie.

Silverman’s joke…

…pokes fun at the day of terror, calling the day tragic “because it happened to be the exact same day I found out that a soy chai latte was, like, 900 calories.”

It’s not the first time we’ve heard the gag– it’s the marquee joke that the producers of the movie have been using to promote it. We figure they chose it for two reasons: It sums up her sense of humor and it’s controversial. Well, it worked.

“It made me sick to my stomach when I read it,” said Christie Coombs of Abington, a mother of three whose husband, Jeffrey, perished on Flight 11. Coombs is also the spokeswoman for the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund. “She should spend five minutes alone in a room with anyone who has lost a family member or any of the kids who have lost a father or mother.”

Well, maybe she really shouldn’t. Coombs is understandably upset, but obviously fails to grasp that the humor that is central to the bit hinges entirely on a grotesque self-absorption that is at the heart of everything that Sarah Silverman is/does. That’s the uh… joke.

Mary Griffin, 42, of Walpole, sister of Everett Martin Proctor, who was on the 101st floor of Tower One, was equally disgusted. “I think it’s horrible,” she said. “Anyone that can try to make money off such a tragedy . . . it certainly isn’t a joke.”

To say that Silverman is “making money off such a tragedy,” is stretching things. And it clearly is a joke. Which is why it’s got everyone in an uproar. But to say that joking about a tragedy is prohibited would be wrong. (In the hours immediately following the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, we here at SHECKYmagazine.com advised all who had shows that night or in the ensuing days to lay off any gags about the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. However, more than enough time has passed that we can at the very least reference the day, the tragedy, the horror. In the case of Silverman’s joke, it is, like we say, more about Silverman than about anyone who lost a life or a loved one.)

One Herald reader wrote the following:

“I think Silverman’s point is not simply to be crass and insensitive, but to push us to dig a little deeper, and examine things a bit more closely, even when it is uncomfortable or unfashionable to do so.”

This would be drivel. The only thing being examined a bit more closely would be– you guessed it– Sarah Silverman. Move along… nothing culturally or societally significant to see here. Just narcissism squared, in much the same vein as say, Richard Lewis or maybe a post-modern Phyllis Diller. To put it another way, it’s a joke.

A comic and a faithful reader, T. Reilly, hipped us to a fluffy piece by in Saturday’s WSJ in which a reporter (read frustrated comic) seeks out standup instruction as a means to knock ’em dead at her family’s Thanksgiving Day gathering. (Can anyone think of a worse reason to learn standup?)

The article, by Katherine Rosman, may be significant for no other reason than, as T. Reilly points out, the WSJ seems to be spilling an inordinate amount of ink on comedy these days. And this passage caught our attention:

Comedy is getting a boost from everything from satellite radio shows to popular programs like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and its spin-off The Colbert Report. It’s also increasingly considered a vital skill in the workplace, with managers paying up to $350 to learn how to craft funnier emails to lawyers trying to lighten up their closing statements. At ExecuProv, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based company that gives workshops on humor, 5,000 people have taken a “Humor in the Workplace” seminar in the past three years.

Hmmm… Perhaps ExecuProv and similar operations will supplant the Improv Driving Schools as a place where competent, experienced comics can trade their extensive knowledge for a decent paycheck while scrambling for stage time in major markets. Better to spend an afternoon with a bunch of middle managers than a roomful of people who were caught doing 50 in a school zone.

Blowhard alert:

These days, risqué humor reigns, and that’s especially true for the novice comedian who thinks that’s the easy route to laughs, says Ms. Smith: “Beginners always go below the belt.”

That’s Linda Smith, Ms. Rosman’s Manhattan Comedy School instructor “who was nominated for three Emmys during her stint as a writer for Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show.” Sorry, Linda, can’t agree less! (Hey, is that Boston Linda Smith? We haven’t laid eyes on her in years.)

Read the whole thing.

Brendan “Dan” McKown was among those shot by the jackass who shot up the Tacoma Mall a few days ago. Turns out that McKown has done standup and that some of his standup buddies from the area and beyond will gather tonight (Monday) for a benefit to pay some of his medical bills.

At least 29 comedians are expected to perform at the comedy benefit Monday at the Area 151 club in Tacoma. McKown has done stand-up comedy, and his friends in the comedy community are pitching in to help him.

They will be asking for a $10 donation at the door, or whatever can be given. All the door money goes to help McKown, who has himself done fundraising for a local food bank. Thirty percent of bar sales are going to McKown, too. The comics are not being paid.

The headliner is a friend of McKown, Ty Barnett, who performed recently on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and who is taping a half-hour show for Comedy Central in December.

Barnett lives in Tacoma, but is flying back from Los Angeles, where he currently works.

McKown “is a really, really nice guy,” Barnett said. “He thinks of other people before he thinks of himself. You can’t say one bad thing about him.”

“When comedians need help, comedians come out to help,” said the host of the show, Seattle comic Travis Simmons, another friend of McKown.

Read this for details on the benefit show. Read this for details on the shooting.

Thanksgiving is over. We’re back in the office. There are three new posts below…AND a SHECKYmagazine.com GIVEAWAY! Scroll down, comedy fans!

The article (Reg. req.) in today’s New York Times, written on the occasion of Chappelle/Chapelle’s appearance a the recent HBO fest in Vegas, recaps the careerus interruptus of Comedy Central’s erstwhile cash cow on its first cyberpage. Then reporter Dave Itzkoff can’t help himself, only waiting until paragraph 11 to drop the cliche of all cliches:

But another confidant, the rapper David Banner, wondered if Mr. Chappelle might still be struggling with the consequences of his drastic professional choices. “He looked better than he ever looked to me,” said Mr. Banner, who appeared with Mr. Chappelle in a series of Hurricane Katrina benefits. “But he’s the one who decides whether he can look at himself in the daytime. The one thing you have to understand about comedians is, the more they make people smile, the more pain that they usually feel inside.”

At this point, we stopped reading. (The glass on the front of the credibility meter shatters; the needle dips way below zero, then falls off, hitting the floor with a faint tinkle.)

Note to Messrs. Banner and Itzkoff: It’s when the crowd is not smiling that we feel pain. How many times do we have to repeat this? Check your hackneyed faux Freudian nonsense at the door and throw away the ticket!

But then, we couldn’t resist. What other nuggets might the NYT’s intrepid reporter uncover, wittingly or unwittingly? We click further:

At the Mesa Grill restaurant in Caesars Palace, at least one veteran comedian was still skeptical that the concert would happen at all. “I think the greatest thing he could do is not show up,” said George Wallace, a former writer for The Redd Foxx Show. “Wouldn’t that be something? It’d be the greatest press he ever got.”

Well, at least George Wallace gets it. Chappelle/Chapelle knew damn well that bugging out of his TV show would be rough for a news cycle or two, but that, eventually, he’d be bigger than anyone out there; bigger than Comedy Central itself. (Of course Wallace gets it– he’s got a degree in marketing. If Chappelle/Chapelle doesn’t have his own degree in marketing, he could now obtain one from any of the finest schools in the land– an honorary one for pulling off what might be the greatest marketing stunt of all time, disappearing on April 28 and sending the media into a frenzy.)

Talent manager Jason Steinberg summed up the comedian’s current predicament thusly: “He could say, ‘All right, I’m going to play tonight in San Francisco,’ and it will sell out that moment. To decide that and know the place will be full of fans coming to see you, it’s such a powerful thing.” Powerful indeed.

What Chappelle did was akin to dying and coming back to life. He will enjoy a status that very few living comics enjoy because of it. He assumes a “largeness” among contemporary comics that is normally only reserved for the likes of Kinison, Hicks, Lenny Bruce or Hedberg– comics who die, accidentally or otherwise– only he’ll be around to enjoy it. Cynical? Maybe. But he no doubt did some calculation and figured that, not only would he survive blowing off Comedy Central and Big Television, but that he’d thrive. None of the coverage of Chappelle’s maneuvers ever gave him any credit for perhaps knowing exactly what he was doing. And, it seems, some still prefer to view the whole affair in mythical terms. We prefer to look at it like George Wallace undoubtedly does.

After recently plugging Laugh Tracks in a Nov. 2 posting, we received an email from Guy MacPherson, plugging his radio show!

Well, as long as you’re on the subject of Canadian radio, let me plug my own show. It’s called What’s So Funny? on CFRO 102.7 FM in Vancouver on Sunday nights from 11 to midnight (PST), and at
http://www.coopradio.org/listen/ on your fancy computers. It’s a comedy discussion show. Each week we have a guest from the world of comedy (mostly standup, but also sketch, improv, screenwriters, etc.) and talk for an hour commercial-free. We usually play two or three comedy cuts in the hour. Our November lineup featured Jay Brown, John Beuhler, Sarah Silverman and Rachael DesLauriers. In December, we’ve got the king of Canadian comedy, Brent Butt (date TBA).

Fortunate are those Canadian comics and those Canadian comedy fans– There’s no shortage of media types willing to treat the art of standup seriously enough to stake out perfectly good radio airtime for the purpose of interviewing comedians!

We’re familiar with Mr. MacPherson from many meetings in Montreal at the JFL fest. (And from sweating alongside him during that festival’s Industry/Artists basketball scrim, adds the Male Half!) Mr. McPherson even managed to record an interview with the Male Half of the Staff at the most recent JFL, a brief encounter at the exhausted, boozy end of an evening late in the week. See the transcript of that here.

If you aren’t depicted on Kamikaze, well, you probably can’t call yourself a Swedish comedian. We exaggerate, but probably not by much.

There are 11 ståuppares or ståuppare/konferenciers– For those of you who don’t do Swedish, that’s standup comic or standup comic/emcee– listed on the front page of Kamikaze.se, which seems to be a Swedish standup portal. We figure for a country that size, they can’t have too many more ståuppares than that. Unless, of course, Sweden has a disproportionately large standup scene.

Note: Before you start the snickering, we’re fairly certain that konferencier (literally translated as Master of Ceremonies) has a somewhat higher status in Sweden than it does in most of the U.S. If not, “du var lämplig, även” is a phrase heard often by self-proclaimed konferenciers.

We found them while rooting around in our stats. We figured that we’d give them a blog-holler back. (Blog holler? Sounds like something from West Virginia! You heard the term here first!)

Enter to win a lovely (and toasty!) SHECKYmagazine.com sweatshirt! Just send an email with your name and mailing address to tmskene@hotmail.com and put the words “SWEATSHIRT GIVEAWAY!” in the subject line!

We’ll gather up all the entries (one per reader, please!), fire up the old random number generator and give one of these fine sweatshirts to a lucky reader! Deadline for entry is 11:59 PM EST, Monday, November 28, 2005. We’ll announce the winner on Tuesday, November 29 at NOON!

The sweatshirt is emblazoned with a 4-1/2-inch by 1-1/8-inch version of the familiar SHECKYmagazine.com “Thumbs Up” logo, letting everyone know that you’re a loyal (and knowledgeable) reader of the WWW’s most beloved magazine about standup comedy!

It’s a Hanes 50/50 ComfortBlend XL sweatshirt in a light “Sport Grey” with the logo in black. Tasteful, comfortable, classsic and rare! Enter now!

AP is reporting that Pat Morita is dead at the age of 73. Morita was a standup comic before he was Mr. Miyagi. It was 1962– a simpler time– so Morita billed himself as “The Hip Nip” and nobody batted an eye.

After the war, Morita’s family tried to repair their finances by operating a Sacramento restaurant. It was there that Morita first tried his comedy on patrons.

Because prospects for a Japanese-American standup comic seemed poor, Morita found steady work in computers at Aerojet General. But at age 30 he entered show business full time.

“Only in America could you get away with the kind of comedy I did,” he commented. “If I tried it in Japan before the war, it would have been considered blasphemy, and I would have ended in leg irons.”