That’s when the FCC will get the ball rolling in earnest in their effort to

From comedian/Tahoe Improv manager Howie Nave‘s Facebook status comes this mini appreciation of the new Matt Damon movie, “The Informant!”:

Opening wide today is a movie with genuine comedians rather than actors pretending to be comedians. “The Informant” may have Matt Damon in the lead role (and deservedly so) it’s the supporting cast that makes the movie worth viewing. W…hy? Well for starters I think every other cast member has performed up here (in Tahoe) as a stand up comic on stage. If you thought one guy in particular was out of time you were correct because that was Tom Wilson who played Biff in the Back to the Future movie trilogy. Wilson still does stand up but he was by no means the only one here. Bob Zany, Allan Havey, Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Joshua Funk, Joel McHale along with the great Tommy and Dick Smothers were just a few of the comedians I spotted immediately and even worked with at one time or another. The best part is that all of them had pivotal roles that made The Informant! one of the better releases worth seeing this year that was actually meant to be funny. Tom Papa has probably the biggest role ever since his voice occupied the screen in Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie.” Scott Bakula did a nice jobkeeping it low key here as FBI Special Agent Brian Shepard and along with comedian Allan Havey (portraying FBI Special Agent Dean Paisley) could be the next Dean and Jerry. Based on the true story by novelist Kurt Eichenwald (with a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns) The Informant! centers around Mark Whitacre (Damon) who fancies himself as an underground operative wanting to expose the price gouging that his company, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is doing to its customers. Damon is probably at his funniest too and given more screen time than he was allowed on his “Ocean” movies so he really shines. Director Steven Soderbergh (who gave us the Ocean11, 12 &13 movies by the way along with the incredible Traffic) has also delivered one of his finest projects in a long time. Go see it! 4 out of 5 bagels.

Howie also reviews movies. (We accompanied him on a sneak preview of “Almost Famous” back a few years ago in Reno, when he managed the club at the then-Reno Hilton.) The movie looks interesting and funny (and Damon’s character bears an uncanny resemblance to The Female Half’s brother, circa 1988!)

Go here to read comedian Ron Babcock‘s tweets on the San Francisco Comedy Competition. He’s in it. His tweets have links to blog posts where he elaborates on his tweets. His latest elaboration:

Remember how I got first the other night? Well it turns out I went two seconds over the time limit and they forgot to deduct that from my score. So instead of getting 1st, I actually came in 11th. Oof, that’ll take the wind out of your sails. Last night we performed for a couple of hundred students at Sonoma State. The show was great. I was really happy with my set, much much better that the night before. Weird thing is I didn’t place even though I did so much better than the night before where I did place (before I found out I didn’t place because I fucked up on time). Man, I forgot how weird competitions are.

The above post is published via Tumblr. (Which we don’t understand. Tumblr? But hit it all. It’s social media and it’s the future… or it’s now. But, very recently, it was the future.)

James Hibbert’s Live Feed has an excellent analysis of the Leno sweepstakes.

Everyone expected the numbers to be big on night one. Everyone expected the numbers to drop for night two. So far, everything looks, as the astronauts would say, “nominal.”

The percentage of droppage has some folks a bit nervous, though. The numbers fell 42% in viewers and 38% in the 18-49 demo. Ouch.

The Leno episode featured an interview with Michael Moore in the studio, along with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz via satellite. Critics gave Leno props for his lively interviews (including asking Cruise if he’s ever been to a strip club), but one opined that the second half of Leno’s show had too many “excruciating” comedy bits.

We suppose, for this critic, there’s an acceptable number of “excruciating” comedy bits. Double ouch. There’s that anti-comedy bias among the critics. NBC’s Rick Ludwin says, “Our research indicates clearly that what audiences want in these shows is laughs,” said Rick Ludwin, NBC’s late night chief. “They want comedy … so we will have more comedy, bigger comedy, more stunts. Comedy is the X factor.” He says this a lot. As did former NBC exec Ben Silverman.

Next week, the competition rolls out new episodes of their 10 PM dramas.

If I were a staffer on Leno’s show, I wouldn’t worry. He’s like one of those sergeants that grunts like to serve under because he’s seemingly indestructible. Like Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore– “I love the smell of Nielsens in the morning… smells like… victory.”

From the NBC.com site, under “About the show”:

Marking a new era in television, Jay Leno, recently named America’s Favorite TV Personality by the 2009 Harris Poll, moves from late night to primetime on September 14 when “The Jay Leno Show” becomes the first-ever entertainment program to be stripped across primetime on broadcast network television.

The website has a clip of Tig Notaro, one of a handful of standup comics who will make up the show’s Laugh Squad. They’ll fan out and make comedy five days a week, 50 or so weeks a year.

The show, says the site, “promises more comedy in the 10 o’clock hour and will showcase many of the features that have made Leno America’s late-night leader for more than a dozen years.”

We will find out in the coming weeks just which of the features NBC thinks has made the show better than Late Show. Allegedly, there will be more standup comics appearing on the show. That’s good. Bob Read and Ross Mark will choose the comedians.

No more drama at ten o’clock on the coasts. That hour has always been drama on the three majors. The television business seems rocked by the heresy. It’s been drama, drama, drama for years now.

Although that hasn’t been the case, throughout all the nets, throughout the years. We pulled one of our favorite books down from the shelf– “Watching TV” by Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik– and turned randomly to 1972. In that year, The Dean Martin Show, The Julie Andrews Hour and Love, American Style all aired at ten on various weeknights. (On NBC, ABC and ABC respectively.) In that same year, CBS premiered The New Bill Cosby Show at ten, in between a movie on NBC and Monday Night Football on ABC. In the previous three or four years, the nets variously slotted newsmagazine shows, movies, variety or comedy in the ten o’clock hour.

The “rule” hadn’t been enforced by 1980 (the last year detailed in the book), as the big three were still trying news, movies and specials.

Interesting thing about these rules in television. They remain in effect until someone breaks them and makes a profit. Which makes sense. But the way critics and other wags were talking about NBC’s move, one might get the impression that they wish NBC to fail. Is it Jeff Zucker? Is it Leno? (Word on the street is that he’s a genuinely nice, hard-working guy.) Is it a deep-seated aversion to anything new? Is it a deep-seated aversion to comedy? Has everyone “tolerated” comedy as long as it was in the 11:30PM to 1:30 AM television “ghetto?” (Remember, during the chess game surrounding Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, etc. and the possible changes proposed? Nobody gave a rat’s ass about Nightline until cold-hearted, profit-driven television executive threatened to throw it overboard in favor of… comedy.) For some reason, profit reaped from news or drama is just business as usual… until profit reaped from news or drama is swapped out for profit from… comedy! Then critics and others get out the crying towels.

It will be interesting.

It will be clear, from early on, if this “experiment” works. Who knows, maybe Americans will stop watching the evening news at eleven, not wishing to harsh their comedy buzz, leading to better sleep and more of it. In this 24-hour news cycle/internet/Sports Center world we live in, doesn’t the news at 11 (10 Central and Mountain) seem less and less relevant? For decades now, they’ve done just the opposite– watched the news, then watched light-hearted interviews, music and comedy while drifting off– catching Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, et al. while dozing off. Perhaps the revolution won’t so much be in obliterating hourlong drama at ten, but truncating everyone’s viewing day at 11 PM. Of course, this will kill the golden late-night goose, relatively speaking… instead of making billions in the aggregate, they’ll all rake in hundreds of millions.

But maybe the American workplace will be better rested an in a better humor.

And, of course, more standup comics will gain primetime exposure in the bargain.

Larry Gelbart died today and, while he was not a comic, he wrote for Bob Hope. The last time we saw him was in the beginning of Jeffrey Ross’s excellent “Patriot Act”– he gives Ross advice on travelling a war zone, as he did many times with Hope.

The interview with Howard Lapides in the Buffalo News is interesting for its insight into the manager-client relationship.

Of course, the period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was good for comedians and their managers. Lapides’ clients included Canadians Mike Mc- Donald, Pat Bullard and Norm MacDonald.

“First client I let go,” he said of Norm McDonald. Lapides explained that Norm wanted to become a writer and didn’t want to do stand-up anymore. Lapides made a deal with Tom Arnold, then married to Roseanne Barr Arnold, who wanted to hire MacDonald for his wife’s hit show, “Roseanne.”

“Norm doesn’t drive and he wasn’t going to take a cab,” said Lapides. “He wouldn’t take the job. I said, ‘You take the job or I’m done.’ He didn’t take the job… I’m a big fan of Norm, I’m a friend of Norm, I loved watching Norm’s comedy. He was difficult.”

Read the whole thing.

Mick LaSalle, the SF Chroncle’s movie critic, says that while comedy might be universally appealing and durable, comedy films can go “from delightful to pointless within a generation.”

Watch Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx or Jackie Gleason, and the years fall away. Yet just try to sit through a Martin and Lewis movie– it’s excruciating. Even weirder is watching things that you once thought funny, say Frank Gorshin’s impressions or Freddie Prinze’s stand-up routine. The audience is laughing, and they seem to mean it, and yet what’s so funny about Prinze calling himself a “Hungarican,” just because his mother was Hungarian and his father Puerto Rican.

Right away, Mr. LaSalle is on shaky ground. He’s the movie critic, but he’s conflating movies with standup. An entire article could be written on whether or not a comedian’s performance does or doesn’t hold up (and why or why not). We recently posted on our experience watching some Dean Martin Show DVD’s. We laughed heartily at Buddy Hackett’s and Flip Wilson’s, but we found Bill Cosby‘s set to be flat and lacking in punchlines.

But standup has a better chance of holding up over the decades than does a movie built around a standup comic.

But this article is (ostensibly) about movies– comedy movies. And we’re not sure we agree with LaSalle’s theory as to why comedy movies (and the comedian who stars in them) might capture our fancy one day and seem unwatchable in reruns. He traces the arc of a handful of comics to make his point.

Comedians have their moment, seem invincible… and then the power ebbs away. Eddie Murphy was one of the biggest stars of the 1980s, and then some time around “Harlem Nights” (1989), the graph started pointing downward.

An inspection of Murphy’s IMDB filmography doesn’t detail the ebbing of Murphy’s power at all. It shows quite the opposite. Check out Murphy’s box office here. Eddie Murphy may not make Mr. LaSalle laugh, but he’s making someone laugh… how else to explain that, worldwide, his movies have grossed $6.2 BILLION? His average gross is $99 million. His average opening weekend is $22 million. (And we’re fairly certain those figures aren’t even adjusted for inflation.)

It might be argued that Murphy’s power to make LaSalle (and all the folks who yukked their way through “Delirious”) laugh, but through “Harlem Nights” and “Pluto Nash” and “Norbit,” he’s managed to make high-profile movies that amuse… someone. (Someone whose power has ebbed away is not scheduled to make the third sequel to a movie he made a quarter-century ago.) If he’s talking about the power to make a good movie– ie: quality– he’s got a point. But it isn’t the genre to blame, it’s the process. And the process fails comedians just as often as it fails heartthrobs, action dudes and beauty queens. (It’s just that when they release a “funny” motion picture, people get reeeally hostile when it doesn’t turn out… funny.)

The problem with comedy movies is that they are (mostly) headed up by hot comedy stars (Richard Pryor, for instance) and that the process of making the movie isn’t usually an organic one, like it was for, say, Woody Allen. Such “vehicles” (that word should tell you something right there about the care taken in the creation of said films) are often the most egregious examples of “movie-making” that Hollywood has to offer.

Formula plus funny often equals steaming turd.

There’s one other factor that LaSalle seems to ignore. Maturation. We all grow up. Our sense of humor matures. It’s easy to say (fill in the blank) “isn’t funny any more.” But the truth is, that person is quite often still funny… just not to you. But he/she might still be wildly funny to the golden demo.

If, on the other hand, the person isn’t funny to anyone at all and makes one bomb after another, it isn’t because the public once saw him/her as “the embodiment of some previously unknown truth about people or human nature” and is now “satiated,” rather that the comic who once amused millions is no longer concentrating on that which brung him to the dance. Or paying too much attention to formula. Or listening to too many managers, agents, studio executives or a psychic or his girlfriend or his dealer.

Murphy seems to be the man that most folks cite as having “lost it.” They compare “Norbit” to ” Delirious.” That’s a false comparison– the former is a movie, the latter is a documentary, a record of a man at or near the peak (or one of the peaks) of his standup power. But somewhere along the line, Murphy ceased being a standup comic and became a worldwide box office draw. “Norbit” unwatchable. But it wasn’t made for us.

The truth is that precious few movies have a decent shelf life.

Another truth is that humor is subjective. (And our sense of humor is not frozen in time. Our sense of humor changes, just as our sense of what’s exciting in music, food, clothing or books.)

Just got the following email:

NY comic Chris Patrick passed away Thursday August 27th in his apartment. Services were held Monday the 31st. He was a staple in the up and coming NY comic scene. He was a good guy always willing to help another comic out. He was part of the Sal’s Comedy Hole crew, and had his own comedy production company (laugh track) which did private events as well as a monthly show.

It’s all over Facebook– ominous snapshots of glowing skies and flaming hillsides. Many of our friends in SoCal are a bit edgy as the wildfires blacken their backyards. It is hoped that the flames will be extinguished when we take that giant curve through the Cajon Pass. (We’ll be basing our selves in Vegas for our 17-day West Coast Swing, so we’ll be driving into “The Basin” on the 2nd of October.)

During our five years living in Burbank, we don’t recall so much as a traschcan fire in our corner of suburbia. We got lucky.

We’re scheduled to perform at the Hollywood Studio Bar & Grill on Friday, Oct. 2, and at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys on Oct. 3, as part of Bruce Fine’s Laugh Pack.

The Male Half will return to the Ice House stage on Oct. 8 (the first time either of us will have performed at that distinguished institution since 1993!) and will then switch over to the Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach for Oct. 9 & 10.

We’ve got four days/nights off between our Laugh Pack appearances and the date in Pasadena, but we’re not sure what to do with the off time– Hunker down in Los Angeles, attending the occasional show between dining and drinking with hastily assembled gaggles of friends and associates? Or rumble back through The Springs to Phoenix to chill with family in the desert?

We’re haunting the travel sites right now, crunching the numbers and trying to cobble together an itinerary. You’ll know as soon as we know.

Greg Beato wrote As Nasty As They Wanna Be; How the Friars Club roasts expanded the First Amendment for Reason.com, “the monthly print magazine of ‘free minds and free markets.’ (Reason “provides a refreshing alternative to right-wing and left-wing opinion magazines by making a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity.”)

Beato sets it up thusly:

Roasts are the Rodney Dangerfields of free expression: They don’t get any respect. When we credit the iconoclasts who believed that the freedom of speech granted by the First Amendment should be as expansive as Sasha Grey’s fun tunnel, we turn first to literary sorts, like H.L. Mencken, Henry Miller, and Larry Flynt, and second to more cerebral funnymen like Bruce and Carlin. In part, this is because the Friars Club roasts, along with similar events held at The Masquers Club and other locales, were private affairs, with no women or waiters allowed. But we also snub roasts, one suspects, because they had no greater goal than coaxing horse laughs from filthy-minded drunks. Which of course is why we should value them all the more: How free is free speech when the only way you can unleash masturbation gags upon the public is to write a masterpiece on the order of Ulysses?

Good question! (Emphasis ours.)

What follows is a rumination on the history of roasts, their evolution and their possible role of Dino and Jack Benny and George Gobel as “the slapdash forefathers of gonzo porn, Jackass, and YouTube.” Kind of a stretch, but we’re game when anyone attempts to hitch up cultural significance to a standup-related activity that is regarded as a curiosity, if it’s regarded at all.

Beato makes the case that the roasts (back in Dean Martin’s day and before) were snarky before snarky was cool. He maintains that the roasts of old and the roast on Comedy Central have blazed a trail and made safe the freewheeling atmosphere (and the unfettered speech we enjoy) on the WWW and the blogosphere and in countless chat rooms, making it “the most vital medium we’ve ever known, and the one that offers the most accurate and expansive portrait of humanity to date.”

David Cross has a book out. It’s published by Grand Central (a “small” publishing house with $500,000,000 in annual revenue and a staff of 400) and they (or Cross’s management) managed to wangle an interview with the prickly comedian in Time (a “large” magazine that is owned by a company with $43 billion in annual revenue… and a payroll that dwarfs the gross national product of some small nations). We love the opening quote:

TIME: Why did you decide to write this book?

Cross: It was simply picking up the phone and saying yes to whoever’s idea it was. Somebody from the publishing company called my literary agent, which I didn’t know existed at the time. Still haven’t met him. Although he’s welcome to 15% of whatever I earn.

There’s a bad review making the rounds, by a guy named Nigel Duara. Since AP has picked it up, it’s coursing throughout the WWW and the MSM. But, since it’s AP, it’s like a virus.

The problem with pulling a comedy act off the stage and onto the page is simple: Context gets lost. This is a problem for David Cross, whose ranting, angry invective is so successful in his standup act. His first book, “I Drink for a Reason,” doesn’t hold up nearly as well.

Well, duh! He’s a standup comic, not a writer. It doesn’t mean it might not be an enjoyable read, but it’s a book that will probably be read in the “E-Colibrary™” not in lit classes.

It’s really pretty silly that a staffer for the Des Moines register can write a review of a book and then have that review become the sole review of the book for the entire MSM (in the U.S. and Canada and God knows where else!).

It’s a sad commentary on things in media. Apparently, none of the entities that subscribe to AP have anybody on hand to write a review of a book. Otherwise, there’d be more than one review out there!

And, let’s face it, it’s not a very good review. Seriously, anyone who regards a book by a standup comic as anything other than a quick and dirty response to management capitalizing on yet another revenue stream has got to have his head examined. (Has anyone read “Side Effects” or “Without Feathers” lately? They’re mildly amusing. We didn’t buy them to– borrow them?– gain any insight into life or the author or the human condition.)

Cross’s book is most likely no different. It will be bought by rabid fans, by relatives of rabid fans, by folks who were fans of “Arrested Development.” None will set aside a weekend to dive into the insights afforded by “I Drink For A Reason.” It’s a souvenir, a fetish. The review should start with that premise.

And Time is sadly mired in the old images. (Do we expect anything better?)

Your first stand-up tour in five years kicks off next month. What should audiences expect?

I’m trying to tweak the show so that it’s not simply an hour of stand-up. And I’m trying to add some more elements to it, which I’m working on now — doing something to justify a $30-ticket price. I trust I’ll be able to rise to the occasion and put on a good show so people hopefully feel like, “Well, that was fun. I’m glad I drove out here.”

Instead of throwing rotten vegetables at you.

Well, hopefully not rotten. I mean, I will eat anything. And the rest I’ll collect and send to the food bank, so that’s fine.

The ol’ rotten vegetable toss! (Was it an ironic reference? Who know. Who cares, really.)

Time and the AP subscribers shrink in their influence and their relevance while Amazon.com Customer Reviews swamp them. Read the reviews– they’re more insightful and informative than the Duara review. And they’ll be far more influential when it comes to selling books… and they’re written by amateurs! (Nothing is perfect– might one or two may have been planted by the publisher? No matter… it’s just a new form of publicity/promotion.)

This is a review of a website (it’s currently in beta) that seeks to be a one-stop portal for musical gigs– a place where everyone involved in gigs, from the artists to the bookers to the venues to the road crews to the print shops to the legal counsel.

It’s called MyMusicCircle.

Although the site’s features run deep and wide, the premise is simple: Create a profile (focused on finding either talent or paying gigs), and search for what you need. Projects and opportunities cover the entire breadth of the music industry, from promotion to road crew to performers to print shops to venues to arrangers to legal counsel to graphic designers and beyond.

What caught our eye was comment number one after the article:

Neat – I can see the same platform being used for standup comics, too.

It was provided by Vancouver-based Rob Cottingham, who claims (in his Twitter profile) to be an “Online Strategist, Cartoonist and Comic.”

We are aware that there’s a site or two out there that seeks to do what MyMusicCircle hopes to do. But are they working? We also seem to recall that the cyberhighway is littered with the wreckage of similar projects over the past decade or so. Some were more ambitious, some less so.

Is there something about standup– The size of it (small, relative to the music biz)? The orneriness of its inhabitants (on both sides of the booking equation)? The solitary nature of comedians?– that obviates a site like this one? Or is it that comedians have never really had to do what rockers and others have to do to make a living, to get a following, to sign with the label?

Let’s face it: Comics (with some exceptions) don’t have to print up and slap posters around town. They don’t have to cajole friends into showing up at gigs. They don’t have to examine lengthy contracts. Comics have largely enjoyed a situation where they secure the gig, show up and do their thing, get a check, go onto the next gig.

It is only when they attain some level of notoriety– either locally or regionally or nationally– that they might have to consider things like contracts, door deals, promotion, legalities, etc. And when they do attain such notoriety, they have probably long had some sort of management and/or representation, so their need to muck around with such details are near zero.

Individuals use the new technology just fine (although they were kinda slow to adapt). Almost all comedians now have websites (of wildly varying quality and utility) and almost all offer their necessary promo materials via the WWW. However, there is no unifying portal that seeks to join bookers/venues with talent.

It’s not the fault of the comedians. The success of such a venture depends on filling a perceived need on the part of the major players– club owners, managers, agents, bookers… not just comedians– and apparently that need isn’t there.

We recall a failed effort to unify comedy club owners and bookers way back in the late ’80s. It was called NAACO. We can’t even recall what the initials stood for, let alone what led to its inevitable downfall. But it wasn’t anything the comedians did to kill it.

We caught comedian Matt Iseman hosting Sports Soup on Versus this past weekend. It was the first time we’d watched. He’s very good at this thing. The show is hysterical and a carbon copy, format-wise, of The Soup (produced by the same folks, Comcast). That show’s host Joel McHale (whose background was in acting and improv, but who now tours as a standup).

There’s another sibling show– Web Soup— which is hosted by yet another comedian, Chris Hardwick. (A similar show, Tosh.0, debuted last year on Comedy Central and it’s hosted by Daniel Tosh, a comic.) (When you think about it, a comic is the perfect host for such a show. And some of the writes are standup comics.)

There are also two more such shows– Celebrity Soup, a British clone of The Soup, again, hosted by a comedian, Iain Lee, and The Dish. The Dish is not hosted by a comedian. (Judging from the few, fleeting times we’ve watched it, it isn’t nearly as good as the The Soup or Sport Soup… coincidence?)

These meta shows are proliferating. They draw their inspiration from Talk Soup, which ran from 1991 to 2002 and was hosted variously by Presented by Greg Kinnear, John Henson, Hal Sparks and Aisha Tyler, who, except for Kinnear, are all standup comics.

If we were able to compare the shows, we’d probably be shocked at how The Soup has evolved since it’s early days as Talk Soup. The show seems to have been slimmed down and become more sharply focused. It’s also become more risqué, the commentary more delightfully brutal, which is understandable, as the subject matter– talk shows, reality series, etc.– has taken full advantage of relaxed standards.

We have successfully jiggered our settings!

Just click on the logo and you’ll be taken to our feed page. Hit the “Subscribe” and choose your method– Bloglines, Google, Live Bookmarks or My Yahoo!– and you’ll get notice of our postings (headline, along with a brief description) delivered to your browser.

(Our feed was interrupted when we switched to a new host back in July. After a couple of attempts to get the settings right via Blogger and via Feedburner– which are both owned by Google– we placed a call to HostGator’s tech line. We bounced a solution or two off them and came up with an idea that eventually worked. We highly recommend HostGator– they’re technical assistance is patient, domestic and usually fast… and toll-free!)

The Los Angeles Times reviews “I’m Dying Up Here:Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-Up Comedy’s Golden Era,” a book by Knoedelseder which details the early days of the migration west (from NY to LA) by a gang of young, eager comedians that ignited the boom.

For all his attention to the industry of comedy clubs, Knoedelseder frequently loses sight of the comedic art, all the stuff that makes it worthwhile and still draws Leno to the road. In the early 1990s, even Pryor turned up at the Comedy Store to perform from his wheelchair, cracking angry jokes about his multiple sclerosis.

And after nine years leading what became one of the top-rated comedies in television history, Jerry Seinfeld was back on tour, happily alone behind the microphone again, and hungry for the naked thrill that only stand-up provides.

“To actually do your creative thing right in front of an audience and have them judge it right there,” he explained wistfully to Time magazine in 2007, “that’s exciting.”

We received a couple books here at SHECKYmagazine HQ– The Ultimate Green Room by Barbara Corry and The Legacy of the Wisecrack by Eddie Tafoya.

The Tafoya book’s premise is that even though standup comedy has, since the days of vaudeville, become an entertainment industry mainstay, it “has received precious little scholarly attention.” The author “looks at the theory of stand-up comedy, its literary dimensions, and its distinctly American qualities as it provides a detailed history of the forces that shaped it.”

We enjoyed (and have heartily recommended) a similar book, Haunted Smile by Lawrence J. Epstein, which looked at the history of standup comedy through the the story of Jewish comedians in America.

Tafoya’s book is a bit more scholarly, comparing standup to literature. With such chapter titles as “Richard Pryor: American Dante” and “Steven Wright and the Post-Modern Picaresque,” the result, says the cover, “is one of the first serious treatments of stand-up comedy as a literary form.” Read it if you want to feel better about your chosen profession. (Or pick it up if you’re just starting out and you want a response to relatives who view your avocation as a waste of time!)

Corry’s book is quote-heavy– lots of nuggets of wisdom from dozens of comedians on the craft of standup. The book is broken up into four main sections. After an introductory section or two (“The Role of Natural Talent in Becoming a Stand-Up Comic” and “The Role of Family and Environment in Becoming a Stand-Up Comic”), attention is paid to the “phases”– the Amateur Phase, The Opening Act Phase, The Middle Act Phase, and Headlining.

The phases are a convenient way to organize the mountains of information (Get a standup comic talking about his craft and it’s tough to get him to stop!) and they are no doubt helpful for a beginner to envision his climb “up the ladder.”

It’s packed with minutiae– Good crowds, bad crowds, learning to emcee, what makes a good middle, dealing with club owners, why comics drop out, booze and alcohol, etc.

We are going to re-schedule the Record Collector date for January. Stay tuned!

The Record Collector is a non-traditional venue in the Delaware River community of Bordentown, NJ, just south of Trenton. We’ll be appearing there this Friday night, August 28. Doors open at 7:30. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. You can also purchase via PayPal.

Proprietor and empresario DJ Randy Now produces the Living Room Concert Series (“Powerful artists… in an intimate setting”) and has brought in such acts as Peter Tork, Jana Peri, Uncle Floyd, Raymond The Amish Comic and Jackie Martling. Upcoming acts include Jeffrey Gaines, Hugh Cornwell (from the Stranglers), Dionne Farris, The Red Elvises and Chris Smither.

It will be our first time performing at a record shop. (No surprise there.) We’ve witnessed a performance at a record shop– G. Love at the Tower Records on Chestnut St. in Philly.

We’re hoping Tropical Storm Danny will pose such a threat to the Jersey Shore that we’ll have some folks in the audience! Round these parts, folks are headed for the Jersey Shore for one last shot of sand and surf. Stay tuned.

The series ran from 1965 to 1974. It’s available on DVD (the infomercials run constantly on DirecTV). We had the pleasure of watching a couple of those DVD’s while visiting with family out west last week.

Martin is a charming host, immensely likable. And he welcomed a lot of comedians onto the show.

In just two episodes, we saw sets by Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett and Flip Wilson.

Allen’s set was filled with funny stuff, delivered in his quirky style. There was even a drug reference or two. The set went over well (we’re pretty sure there was a live audience) and it didn’t appear to be sweetened.

Cosby’s set opened with the Gold Diggers dance troupe dancing and dressed as “spies.” Cosby entered wearing a trench coat. All to the tune of the theme song from the series he starred in (also on NBC), “I Spy.”

He did a bit from his 1967 album “Revenge” all about getting back at Junior Barnes for hitting him in the head with a slush ball. Cosby is undeniably charming in the performance, but it was pretty rough sledding for most of it. And it didn’t go over very well. And, we daresay it doesn’t hold up well. There were few jokes in the bit… very little actual humor in it.

Rickles did what Rickles always does. He was installed into the middle of a skit (a western parody) between the show’s host and Roy Rogers. The freewheeling atmosphere of the show (it is said that Martin showed up only for taping, never for rehearsal) is perfectly fertile ground for Rickles.

Hackett came out and sat down and did material. He was a hoot. (Among other things, he told the old “Hark! I hear the cannon’s roar!” joke.)

Flip Wilson’s set was surprisingly strong. It was a lengthy story, similar to Cosby’s set in that regard, but it was funnier and delivered with more energy. Wilson might have been even more charming than Cosby. It was obvious he was on a roll. (He was awarded his own NBC show in 1970.)

We’re not sure what year the episodes we watched were from. The best guess would be somewhere around 1968 or so. But it’s clear that Martin and producer Greg Garrison were interested in having a lot of comedians on the show– both those who were signed to NBC deals and those who were not. The variety show format was a good one for comedians– regular appearances in prime time were tremendous exposure and often led to deals or high salaries in nightclubs and in Vegas.

Steve Roye is a comedian and “The Professor of Funny for Money” (his description, not ours).

He is the developer of that most odious bit of pseudoscience called the PAR Score (PAR standing for Positive Audience Response). It was some sort of software that would calculate a comedian’s ratio of yapping to clapping and come up with a sturdy number that club owners could use to determine who comes back and who doesn’t.

We suspect that Roye also envisioned The Home Version– a means by which comics would evaluate their tapes and then wave their PAR Score in the face of recalcitrant club owners!

“Uh… this is Joel… the comic from Toledo… I sent my press kit to you two weeks ago, so you should have it… I just want to remind you that I have a PAR Score of 64. I think that’s good enough to headline your room… at least from what I’ve heard.”

(Our dramatization– Not to be construed as a representation of anything that any Steve Roye disciples have either actually done or have been urged to do.)

Roye also gave birth to The Killer Standup Comedy System and is “a globally recognized expert in the field of stand-up comedy material development and presentation strategies.”

Anyway, Roye recently dreamed up a reality series.

I have registered a new reality TV show concept focused on stand-up comedians with WGA (Writers Guild of America). And this concept actually has a significant measure of real credibility attached to it, as opposed to many of the reality TV offerings you may have seen on the boob tube.

While I can’t give all the specific details about the concept, I can tell you this…

Most every comedian who has been performing any amount of time has been involved in some sort of stand-up comedy competition. And the person who ultimately wins one of those comedy competitions is many times NOT the funniest comedian.

…Needless to say, I would recommend that this accessment(sic) be determined using my patent pending Comedy Evaluator Pro software.

But of course!

Someone ostensibly named “Chuck” has the temerity to actually question Roye’s reality TV concept. Roye has registered a concept with the WGA for a reality TV show that utilizes his software. The rigidity of the concept didn’t go over well with Chuck.

…I will not say your educational material is not great, as it very well may be. But let’s not try to upsell it to a point where it will be the new standard to judge comedians.

The only way to judge a comedian is to be there live and see how they perform and if they are funny or not to you the individual. Any other form of measurement is just false data and should be disregarded.

Poor Chuck (if he is indeed real). His comments are prefaced by this:

I knew it would only a matter of time before I would be visited by the representatives of ignorance.

So… ol’ Chuck is a “representative of ignorance.” Mr. Roye has certainly mastered The Seven Principles of Sales Success!

The full response to Chuck is worth a read for the exquisite combination of restraint and contempt! We suspect it would get a PAR of about 72… if the PAR software can pick up on eye-rolling, jaw-dropping and snickering!

The best laugh was one of relief– when Conan says, “None of this will air.” (Amateur body linguists can just ignore Maher and focus on O’Brien.)

Good panel etiquette says you’re not supposed to make the host that uncomfortable. Or the audience. They seem a bit taken aback at being called stupid. They tried to hang in there with him… the gave him a laugh at some statements that were obviously supposed to illicit laughs. The other stuff is just Awkward City.

We hope that Maher’s agent digs peace and quiet… the phone ain’t gonna be ringin’ off the hook.

What a muddled mess is the article in Variety that is headlined “Thesps on eponymous shows actually act.” Miami television critic Glenn Garvin, quoted in the article, says:

“There has been a tradition of comedians playing themselves on television because, let’s face it, a lot of these people can’t necessarily act,” says Miami Herald television critic Glenn Garvin. “So what better than to give them a show where all they have to do is stand up and be themselves.”

Huh?

We’re not quite clear on the concept.

Further attempts at clearing up the matter by the author Glenn Whipp result in such quotes (again, from Garvin) as, “We’ve gone from a more traditional format to one in which all the characters are self-aware, not to mention self-absorbed.”

Again… Huh?

We’re not sure who comes off dumber in the article– Garvin or “Emmy voters.”

We let Whipp off the hook because we suspect it was a boneheaded editor who saddled him with this moronic story assignment in the first place.

All the parties involved try to blame the viewer for being such an idiot. But, hey– that’s no excuse. “The Viewer” is the one who encounters soap stars on the street and raps them with an umbrella and says things like, “I was so mad at you when you left your fourth wife to sleep with Erica!” They’re the people who actually buy WWE storylines.

Aren’t editors and reporters from Variety (and TV crits for the Miami Herald) supposed to know a bit more about the product than the couch potatoes who consume the product spewed out by Hollywood?

Joy Little has passed away after a brief illness. (Philadelphia Inquirer obituary.)

Little was the proprietor of the Comedy Works comedy club at Georgine’s Restaurant in Bristol, PA. The club was an offshoot of the original Comedy Works in Olde City Philadelphia. She was preparing to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the club this fall.

The family has finalized arrangements and the funeral will be Friday, August 21. Services start promptly at 11:30 AM, at the Goldstein Funeral Home, 310 Second Street Pike, Southampton, PA 18966. (We add that the services will be short, so if you intend on being there, you should arrive at or before the announced start time.)

Burial will be at the King David Cemetery in Bensalem, PA.

Happier times here.

The article in Women’s Health Magazine is entitled “Find Your Stress Sweet Spot” and it says that “certain pressure-filled situations… can be good for your health.” One of the examples they cite is an “occasional public speaking gig.”

Hmmm…

“There are good and bad types of stress. The bad kind is chronic and uncontrollable, like the tension caused by an unhappy marriage or a sick relative,” says Edward Calabrese, Ph. D., a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “But there are a lot of positives associated with short bursts of stress that ease up quickly,” such as being stuck in a snarl of traffic or sweating through a presentation at work.

What is standup but “short bursts of stress that ease up quickly?”

Could this explain why so many comics live happy, healthy lives, sometimes into their nineties?

They cite studies by researchers who study aging, some of whom “even go so far as to conclude that low-intensity stress could actually help extend your life.”

So… when you’re dying up there, you’re actually extending your life. Seems paradoxical, but perhaps not.

There’s an interesting (and short!) article about “Why Neoconservative Pundits Love Jon Stewart” in New York magazine.

It includes thumbs-up quotes from Cliff May, Bill Kristol and– GASP!– John Bolton!

“Maybe he’s discovered that interesting discussion attracts viewers,” suggested Bolton. But it’s more than that. At the end of the day, the spirited debate on The Daily Show doesn’t leave people feeling queasy or upset — and that includes the guests with whom Stewart spars.

We suspect that the vast majority of Stewart’s viewers are only passingly familiar with New York magazine (and fewer still are familiar with the implications of what has become the pejorative that is “neocon”), so the damage to his ratings will be minimal.

Perhaps this most recent hit is the beginning of a long, slow takedown of Stewart. In 2004, he was the second coming of H.L. Mencken. Perhaps they’ve had enough and they’re not building a slow-motion case against him. What better way to start off than to portray him as a fair and balanced guy who gets raves from neocons.

We were winding down in our hotel room last night, here in Vegas. Round about 2 AM or so, a show came on one of the local stations. It was called Bananas Comedy. It was a standup show and, from what we could tell (we missed the beginning), it was taped at a Funny Bone. The comedian onstage was a female caucasian, perhaps in her 30s.

We didn’t see the beginning of the show, so we didn’t hear her intro. We watched through maybe six segments and we never saw or heard her name. When they’d go to commercial, there’d be a plug for the show and the show’s website, complete with quick clips of past comics and upcoming acts. The standup segments were interpersed with video shot in the field, illustrating a bit that we’d just heard and interviews with the week’s featured comedian.

We did however hear the name of one comedian– Thor Ramsey— who, apparently was the host (and possibly the brains behind) the show.

Would it have killed the producers to flash the name of the comedian on the screen once in a while? We watched for nearly an hour and didn’t see her name once. And Ramsey never addressed her by name (nor did her name appear on the screen).

We had to scan the credits quickly at the end of the show to find out that the comic we’d just watched was Sara Shea. She’d burned through a heck of a lot of material and, while the segements were well-produced and showcased her well, her name was a mystery for any viewer who didn’t have access to the internet (or was not inclined to get up and look it up on the internet).

We’re in Vegas this week. We heard, through three different sources, that Adam Leslie is dead. Here’s his bio, from the Comedy Stop website:

A second-generation comedian, Adam Leslie began his stand-up career at the age of eight, performing alongside his father. Adam became one of the youngest National headliners on the comedy club circuit. Then during his ‘leave’ from stand-up, Adam was nominated for an Emmy for a script on the television series “Fame.” He appeared on Seinfeld and was the voice of the animated television series “Dilbert.” Adam has appeared on “Evening at the Improv,” “Comic Strip Live,” Showtime’s “Comedy Club Network” and “Comedy on the Road.”

Anyone who came up on the east coast in the 1980s probably knew and/or worked with Adam. (The Male Half did one of his first road gigs– the Comic Strip in Lauderdale– with him, back in 1984.) He was a regular headliner at the Comedy Factory Outlet as well.

He lived in Las Vegas until his death. As details become available, we’ll post them. (Feel free to post any details in the comments section.)

Or so claims the AP article by John Rogers.

There’s just something about a recession that makes people want to do funny things.

Like wannabe comics who are out of a job and hoping amateur hour at comedy clubs could be the ticket to a paycheck—and maybe stardom. Because, really, how hard could that be?

At New York City’s Gotham Comedy Club, co-owner Chris Mazzilli says he saw more than 1,000 such hopefuls recently as they tried to win a spot on a program being broadcast on Comedy Central’s “Live at Gotham.”

“We’ve had financial people, attorneys, garbage men, right down the line,” he said.

We don’t buy that more people come to open mike because there’s a recession. We do, however, buy that some folks who are out of a job, between jobs or seeking to transition from one career to another might see this “node” as an ideal time to finally give that comedy thing a try. (It’s a subtle difference– it’s not so much the recession, but the “opportunity” afforded by the recession.)

The Male Half did his first open mike the second Wednesday of October of 1981. About three weeks later, he was let go by the typesetting company where he’d been employed the previous 10 months. (According to most reports, a recession had started the previous July and ended in November of 1982.) Over the next eight months, TMHOTS hit the bricks during the day, searching for a new job… and used his free time to work out, write material and psych himself up for whatever open mike or bar gig might be upcoming. (And he collected unemployment. He frequently joked that he was a “state-subsidized comedian.”)

Viewed in this manner, the choice to pursue standup seems less like an affliction and more like a protracted informational interview with countless audiences, club managers and fellow comedians.

Pursuing standup comedy, especially in the early stages, is all-consuming. It’s not the kind of thing that’s recommended for someone with a day job. Pursuing it “between jobs” is somewhat easier because it makes it easier to focus on and prepare for upcoming gigs… and easier to concentrate on (and deal with possible fallout from) any after affects.

An article in the Journal-Star of Lincoln, NE, says that Dan and Cara Whitney (aka, Larry The Cable Guy and Mrs. Larry The Cable Guy) cut a check for $1 million for the new Child Advocacy Center to be built in Nebraska’s capital city.

The donation puts the center within $250,000 of its $2.5 million goal for a new building at 51st and Garland streets.

Another $1.25 million was previously pledged in corporate and private donations and charitable foundation gifts.[…]

Larry and his wife grew serious when they talked about the Child Advocacy Center, which provides a child-friendly location for forensic investigations and medical examinations of sexually and physically abused children

The Whitneys also took the opportunity to announce the start of their own charitable group, the Git-R-Done Foundation.

Someone named Gwen Davis wrote this on Huffington Post:

To my surprise, I actually liked Seth Rogen, whom I have hitherto loathed, wondering what he was doing in movies. The easy answer to that is that movies have changed, and so have audiences, so the ordinary schmuck, which Rogen appears clearly to be, perhaps gives an audience filled with ordinary schmucks the temporary license to believe that they could become comedy stars, as in olden days we could bathe ourselves in the comforting, non-combative darkness and believe that we, too, could become involved with that devastatingly attractive man (they seemed to be) on the screen, or, in the case of the boys who had pin-ups, the woman. The basis for fandom. In Rogen’s case, slimmed down, he still has the aura of everyschlub. So it could happen to you, as was titled the Judy Holliday comedy when there were still unbelievably appealing cinema comedians, who could actually speak dialogue that was not punctuated with genitalia and excreta, which Funny People is. I stopped marking down the number of cock and penis references when I came to the end of the paper on my pad. But it is beyond excessive, extraneous, and as far as I could see, added nothing to either the humor or the potential pathos of the piece, which it clearly had, though by the wishy-washy finish of the movie Apatow blew it, or as he might want to put it, gave it a blow job.

“Hi. I’m the English Language… I just read the above paragraph… and I give the fuck up.”

Mashable, the Social Media Guide, compiled a list of 85 Comedians to Follow on Twitter.

They say “laughter is the best medicine,” so it’s probably wise to do it as much possible. What better way to get a steady stream of laugh-inducing content than via Twitter? We can’t think of one.

Which is why we’ve compiled this list of more than 90 comedians on Twitter that are all worth a follow. Included are some very famous comics and generally funny people, a bunch of stand-up performers, some comedy and humor writers, and plenty of comedic actors. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re definitely LOL-worthy. If you know of any other comedians we should be following, post them in the comments section.

And, right there in the S’s, is SHECKYmagazine editor and co-founder Traci Skene.

@traciskene Traci Skene has been a stand-up comedian since 1985, and is the editor and co-founder of online comedy magazine SheckyMagazine.com. A sample tweet:

Saw a chihuahua standing in the driver’s seat of a large pick-up truck . Said to him, “You are overcompensating for something.”
9:41 AM May 12th from TweetDeck

Other notables among the 85 are Stephen Fry, Dave Attell and Penn Jillette.

Fellow Twitterers can also follow the tweets of @sheckymagazine or @brianmckim!

Christina Davidson, writing in The Atlantic, provides a primer on the how and why of papering the house.

In this case, she talks to Craig Glazer, owner of Stanford and Sons in Kansas City. Glazer and Davidson imply that the current economic downturn may have profound and long-lasting effects on the comedy business.

Revenue generated from a minority with $30 to spend on admission would not keep the club going, but if the room fills with people grateful and excited they got a free ticket, the kitchen and bar stays busy. That revenue would not be sufficient to sustain status quo operations, and that is why this evolution of the typical comedy club business model, which does not appear particularly unique to Stanford and Sons, may be having a far-reaching impact on the comedy profession itself.

Under the current circumstances, Craig says, “Big-name comedians are almost unemployable. I can’t afford to book someone who charges $20,000 or more a week. This has forced club owners like me to try and discover the next big star.”

Of course, any prudent club owner should have been trying to discover the “next big star” all along. What club books $20,000 headliners week in and week out? Which club owner doesn’t prepare for the inevitable– the $20,000 headliner who asks for $25,000 the next time in? It would be a sound business model to have several Josh Sneeds in the pipeline for when that day comes. Or when a recession comes. Or 9/11. Or competition from another club. If you have a Rolodex filled with comedians who can deliver– and who don’t cost a bloody fortune– you can tell Mr. I Want More Money to take a hike.

Which is finally what appears to be happening.

We’ve been predicting (publicly and privately) for some time now that the business would morph away from All Stars All The Time– the economics of which are not only impractical but impossible, as there’s only so much money in a club and only so many stars to go around.

Of course, this will all change once the economy shows even the slightest signs of an upturn and the recovery in employment numbers follows.

As for “training” your customer base to expect free tickets, we’re skeptical that this happens. Folks have a short memory. And, when payday comes around, and they have disposable income, they dispose of it. Or… the clubs who “discover” the method that Glazer describes will find out that they can do very well by continuing to paper the house, even in the best of times.

“Funny People” topped the box office this past weekend. In a review by Roger Ebert in the Sun Times, he kicks off with the following:

Stand-up comics feel compelled to make you laugh. They’re like an obnoxious uncle, with better material. The competition is so fierce these days that most of them are pretty good. I laugh a lot. But unlike my feelings for Catherine Keener, for example, I don’t find myself wishing they were my friends. I suspect they’re laughing on the outside but gnashing their teeth on the inside.

We find this odd, considering that Ebert has written an entire book, entitled, “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary: A Compendium of Movie Cliches, Stereotypes, Obligatory Scenes, Hackneyed Formulas, Shopworn Conventions, and Outdated Archetypes”, yet he manages to peddle one of the most tired clichés in all of popular culture in his review of a movie of that, while it was about standup comics, managed to avoid the vast majority of clichés about standup comics. Let’s get real: There were no squirting flowers, joy buzzers, rubber chickens, lockers in the green room for the comics, etc. that seem to plague any script about comedians. This films could have been an wince-inducing embarassment. Instead, comedians were portrayed about as realistically as one could hope.

In an April 11, 2009 Roger Ebert’s Journal, He says the following:

I wanted to perform stand-up. I idolized Henny Youngman, and later Rodney Dangerfield. They practiced the humor of paradox, based in ancient Jewish tradition. The world conceals its traps from us. In a crazy situation, strict logic must be applied. Things are the opposite of what they seem. This world view was distilled into jokes by generations of Catskills comics, who reached an eerie perfection. Irony is a weapon against the inevitable, but don’t depend on it. You’ll probably lose anyway, but not in the way you think you will. Audiences had already heard half of the jokes, but the humor was in the delivery.

We only point this out because we suspect that, as much as Ebert seems to appreciate the art of standup, he also seems to have some sort of unresolved “issues” (as the armchair psychiatrists like to say).

Aside from that, though, Ebert gives the film respect:

The thing about “Funny People” is that it’s a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances — and it’s about something. It could have easily been a formula film, and the trailer shamelessly tries to misrepresent it as one, but George Simmons learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize.

The film presents a new Seth Rogen, much thinner, dialed down, with more dimensions. Rogen was showing signs of forever playing the same buddy-movie co-star, but here we find that he, too, has another actor inside. So does Jason Schwartzman, who often plays vulnerable but here presents his character as the kind of successful rival you love to hate.

And he ends the review with, “Of (Apatow) it can be said: He is a real director. He’s still only 41. So here we go.”

(For the record, Roger, Leslie Mann’s Australian accent was nowhere near “spot-on!” At times, she veered into an Irish accent… it was a mess!)

Some folks were dropping this in its entirety into their websites and forum posts (a violation of WWW ethics, credited or not), so we decided to bring it up topside. It’s a comment from Louis CK on our post entitled “Tear up the Hack List.” In it, Mr. Szekely makes some good points.

Very interesting conversation. Being a self-googling whore, I stumbled upon it this evening.

First of all let me say that the whole idea of a hacklist is offensive to me. But where are these lists? From my perspective it’s been many years since anyone has bothered to talk about hack comedy or hack subjects. I too have read many articles that refference airplane jokes as hack but to me those articles have themselves become hack. Those shitty articles that start with “comedy is serious business’ or whatever, written by a shitty HACK journalist who is no student of comedy and not even curious about comedy as an artform.

anyway I think it’s crazy to suggest that a subject is hack. That there would be something inherently hacky about an entire topic. It’s true a lot of really boring and repetitive jokes have been made about airplanes and travelling. But to suggest that brands the subject itself is so narrow minded that it makes me mad. Just like the idea that guitar comedians are hacks just for having a guitar. There are far more hacks standing there with no guitar than there are guys with one. DJ Hazard, one of my favorite comics of all time, did beautiful stuff with a guitar. i still sing his songs to myself when I’m walking my kids to school.

I find it so boring when people talk about purity in comedy. About how doing standup without cursing is somehow better or more couragous. People who measure the strength of a comedian by these metrics just don’t really get what is great about comedy so they are trying to find a simple way to quanify it. Did that make any sense? Sorry. Nobody cares what I think about any of this.

But here’s something I can tell you that you might find interesting. The origin of that particular material I did on that Conan appearance. It actually came from watching comedians talk about airplanes. This is actually material that I wrote many years ago, did for a short while and dropped. The very first time I did it, I actually refferenced comedians that talk about airplanes and how tired I was of hearing that kind of material. Not because it was “hack” but because of the nature of the material. I kept hearing these smarmy comix nitpicking at every little facet of air travel and acting all cunty and it occured to me one night that they are totally ignoring the beauty of flight and that there was lots of comedy in general that kind of bummed me out. The sort of goods and services griping that got really big in the 80s. I felt like comics, as a community, were getting to be a cheap and boring bunch. It frustrated me (and still does) because I love comedy. I am not a purist or a snob. I like every kind of comedy. I can appreciate any comic who shows some energy, some uniqueness some great craftsmanship, some strange courage, balls, hilarious lack of balls, weirdness, or just a really solid comic with a terrific fastball. I’m a fan of all of it. From Carlin to Pryor to Ron White to Don Gavin to Steve Sweeney to Todd Glass to Norm Macdonald to JB Smoove to George Lopez to Bernie Mack, Moms mabley, Father Guido Sarducci, Emo Phillips, Todd Barry, Marc Maron, Andy Kindler and Andrew Dice Clay at the Comedy store in front of eight people for an hour. I eat it up as long as they’re trying.

But in the eighties we hit a rut. We were a boring ass bitching about a sales lady with an additude or the awkwardly worded instructions on a shampoo bottle or the minutia of air travel. Understand I never thought of this as hack. It just started to feel… weak. And there was a lot of it.

But I NEVER thought of the subjects as bad to talk about. If you think any subject is hack, go to youtube and watch Jay leno’s appearances on the old LEtterman show. There are a ton of them and they’re amazing. He was SO Fucking good and everything he talked about was “hack”. he did airplane humor in at least five different segments on the same show. he never let it go. Just kept hammering and hammering at it, but with such beautiful percision, such energy, gorgeously worded bits. To frown on them because of the subject matter is to be a self-serving idiot.

Anyway, so the first time I did the bit that’s in that conan clip, I was talking about comedians who talk about airplanes. But nobody wants to hear a comedian making fun of comedians so I turned it into talking about people in general complaining about flying.

After a while I dropped the bit. But then after the market crashed in october I started exploring this stuff about how good things are and how little happiness it’s bringing people and I stumbled back into the airplane stuff. I used a little of what I had in the earlier material and built on it, coming from a completely different angle and energy this time.

So to read this debate or discussion sparked by that material made me want to bring that up. But now I wrote far too long a comment and it made very little sense. Sorry. My best to all you fellow comics.

regards,

Louis C.K.

# posted by Blogger Louis : 2:51 AM, March 01, 2009