We got an anonymous email today, consisting of two parts. Part one was this:

1. Click on the Traci Skene link and you get a page that reads, “This video is private”. Remove or change the link.

Okay. So far so good. Kinda.

Part two went this way:

2. Clicking on other links takes you away from the Shecky magazine site. Configure your links so they open up on a separate page, leaving the Shecky site open and unchanged.

Ja wohl, mein Kommandant!

What is this all about?

We were taken aback by #2, as you might expect. But we took a deep breath and replied:

1. Be more specific: which “Traci Skene link” are you referring to?

Thanks!

To which our anonymous benefactor replied:

“Performance clips” in the left column:

LOOKING FOR:

Our MOVIES!?!
“Starting Over” (7:49)
“A Man And A Woman” (3:23)
Performance clips?
Brian McKim (5:25)
Traci Skene (6:37)
JFL ’07 Coverage?

By golly, that link took us to the Google/Youtube sign-in page. Hmmm… what the devil? Somehow, over the past few days/weeks/months (?), the “Private” radio button had been checked on the Traci Skene vid. How in blazing hell did that happen? No matter. We changed it back to “Public.”

We immediately dashed off this reply:

Thanks.

As to your second “directive” or “command” (call it what you like), we like the magazine just the way it is.

(And, even if you had phrased it in a polite manner, we’d still keep it the way it is.)

Good day.

Hours later, this was in our inbox:

Dear Brian,

I’m sorry you found my email impolite. It was merely perfunctory, and I, in all good humor, just wanted to point out two problems, albeit minor ones, on your website. The second point–one used by most webmasters in the know–was not critical of your website; quite the contrary, its purpose was to show how to keep people on your fine site without their losing the page if they followed one of the links.

THIS is the impolite email. Your arrogant attitude and inability to take a constructive comment (not even a criticism) is certainly out of line for a writer and editor and publisher, no less for a standup comic. I will continue to enjoy your website and will not email you again, but when I do visit the site, I will now know the kind of person who is behind it.

Huh? What?!

We were somewhat taken stunned by the second graf. What was up with that?

So, we replied:

Excellent!

Arrogant?

Hardly.

We’ve been keeping people on the site for ten years.

Which of my statements was arrogant?

Was it “Good day?”

Was it “We like the magazine just the way it is?”

Was it “We’d still keep it the way it is?”

Long about 2000 or so, folks discovered the Back Button.

It works like a charm and it’s easy to master. Some of the more resourceful of our readers use “Alt + <-" if they're feeling paticularly clever.

You wrote to us in a "perfunctory" manner. (Actually, it was more "domineering" or "dictatorial" or, according to Webster's "arrogant." Hey– what a coincidence!)

We wrote back in good humor– thanking you (how many arrogant people thank their oppressor… and end their missives by saying, "Good day?").

Buy a dictionary and go fuck yourself.

We’ve been at this for ten years. TEN YEARS! That’s about 50 or 60 internet years. When we started the magazine, fewer than 40 million Americans were online. The term “blog” had been coined, but was not in common use. Broadband was virtually unheard of and nearly all of us surfed on 56K modems.

We learned by doing. Trial and error. And we always told our readers if we were having any kind of internet problems– we were up front about any glitches, any calamities. We made a point of sharing some of the learning experience with others. We changed the look and feel and navigation of the site on a regular basis– and the changes always resulted in increased traffic and increased ease of navigation. And in the early, dark ages of the WWW we always gave folks all kinds of advice (IF they asked) on building a site, publicizing it, fixing problems, etc. We even built a site here or there for some folks– sometimes for money, sometimes for free. And we always kept up on the latest developments– even if we hadn’t the intent or the know-how to implement them.

So, if you think you “know what kind of person(s) who is(/are) behind it,” you are making a judgment on insufficient information.

Here’s our favorite part of our correspondence with “Anonymous”:

Your arrogant attitude and inability to take a constructive comment (not even a criticism) is certainly out of line for a writer and editor and publisher, no less for a standup comic.

The Male Half has been in journalism (in one way or another) since high school, so we here at SHECKYmagazine are familiar with what might or might not be “out of line” for a writer or editor or publisher in the traditional (or “legacy”) media. But this is not your father’s newspaper here. We are not a giant publication that has to fret about corporate image. We can politely tell a reader to fuck off and take the consequences. It’s the wild, wild Web, in case you haven’t heard.

So spare us the reprimand about our attitude.

As for our lack of decorum with regard to our standing as comics, we ask: Where did this yahoo get the idea that comics have an ability to take an (unsolicited) comment with grace and aplomb? The writer cannot be a comedian or he/she would know that the fastest way to get an icy stare would be to do this:

After the show, approach the comedian and, without introducing yourself, say the following:

1. That joke you did about the Slap Chop didn’t get a laugh.

2. You smile way too much. Especially after a punchline. Suppress the urge to smile and you will see an increase in the number and duration of your laughs.

And then scurry away.

See how that would be a disastrous and utterly rude thing to do?

Of course, if that happened to us, we’d (probably) respond by saying, “Thanks!” and then we’d mutter through clenched teeth, “What an asshole!”

If sticking to one’s guns in the face of unsolicited (and anonymous) advice is “arrogant,” we are guilty as charged. If refusing to take unsolicited advice while re-affirming our confidence in our methods is “arrogant,” then we must take issue.

And if ending an email with “Good day!” is arrogant, then the late Paul Harvey regularly insulted an audience of 22 million listeners by ending each broadcast that way!

Good day! (Or Fuck you! Whatever works for you!)

ADDENDUM

From an article entitled, The Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 1999 comes the following. (Of course, a lot has changed since May 30, 1999, but some things are timeless.):

1. Breaking or Slowing Down the Back Button
The Back button is the lifeline of the Web user and the second-most used navigation feature (after following hypertext links). Users happily know that they can try anything on the Web and always be saved by a click or two on Back to return them to familiar territory.

Except, of course, for those sites that break Back by committing one of these design sins:

* opening a new browser window (see mistake #2)
* using an immediate redirect: every time the user clicks Back, the browser returns to a page that bounces the user forward to the undesired location
* prevents caching such that the Back navigation requires a fresh trip to the server; all hypertext navigation should be sub-second and this goes double for backtracking

2. Opening New Browser Windows
Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on the customer’s carpet. Don’t pollute my screen with any more windows, thanks (particularly since current operating systems have miserable window management). If I want a new window, I will open it myself!

Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites. Users often don’t notice that a new window has opened, especially if they are using a small monitor where the windows are maximized to fill up the screen. So a user who tries to return to the origin will be confused by a grayed out Back button.

We only ask because Minneapolis comedian Chris Shaw, not to be confused with Indy-based (?) comic Kris Shaw, was the victim of a break-in. Local TV station website KSTP.com ran an article about how someone broke into Shaw’s place and took some items, among them was a recently-recorded set intended for his upcoming CD.

The comedian says he’s working in Stillwater this weekend and he’ll have to borrow equipment for those shows, which he now worries about publicizing.

“I took off all my dates on my Facebook page. You get kind of get paranoid. I didn’t want people to know when I was out of town,” Shaw said.

We have often wondered if ambitious and crafty thieves can put all the information together and plan such a heist. We figure, why not? Heck, they allegedly comb the local papers’ obits to find out who is going to be attending a funeral when, why wouldn’t they prey on comics who hit the road?

We’re lucky– our place has a secure entry and our neighbors keep funky hours and own large dogs. And another neighbor works for the Sheriff’s Office. (And we always make sure that someone is living here when we’re absent for any lengthy trips.) But not everyone is in such a position. Does anyone else have the desire to take their sked off the web to prevent being a victim?

Dear Montreal,

It’s never easy to tell someone this. But… you’re probably going to get dumped. It’s all over town. It’s all over North America. It’s all over the internt. The festival was dating Toronto last week. And I hear she was hanging out with France. And last month, she was doing Chicago. Ain’t it always this way? The boyfriend is the last to know.

The word on the street is that attendance by industry is off by about 70 per cent. Now, that’s just a rumor. We haven’t verified it, but it certainly sounds plausible. After all, if you were industry, and you just attended the Chicago edition of Just For Laughs (last month!) would you hump your ass all the way up to Montreal (in another country, no less, with only an eight per cent bump with the exchange rate!) to attend yet another festival?

And why ever would the folks who run the Montreal version of the fest think it’s a good idea to keep secret the identities of the comics who perform on the New Faces and Masters until just prior to the fest’s opening? We know it’s a tradition of sorts to keep that stuff under wraps, but in the age of the internet, it seems… quaint. And it seems like yet another industry-unfriendly thing to do.

And (maybe this is just us), it seems that Montreal keeps booking the same core of acts over and over again. (Perhaps they’d like a different set of industry figures to show up? Puzzling.)

We’re of the opinion that they could put on a fascinating (and wildly entertaining) slate of fest shows using people who have never once been in the Just For Laughs festival. The entire affair could be a giant New Faces showcase night after night, on stage after stage– the performers having anywhere from one year to two or more decades under their belts. It would be a might task to book such a roster, but a task made much easier these days with the use of the internet and DVD’s. (And certainly no more gruelling than holding countless New Faces auditions.)

We also heard (and read with our own eyes, via Facebook) that the fest was giving away tickets. To New Faces! (It was giving away tix to other events, too, but handing out free admission to New Faces is a sign that something is terribly awry.)

One year ago March, we said this:

(The fest organizers face the same dilemma that Canadian comics have faced for the past 25 years– If you want that American TV exposure, ya gotta relocate to L.A. or NYC! In this case, Chicago will do just fine. Or so they hope.)

Will this mean that Montreal will cease to exist? Probably not. But it will probably shift its emphasis to Canadian and international acts (U.K., Australia, France, etc.)

Aspen was abandoned by HBO in favor of Vegas. Then that Festival seems to have abandoned Vegas (and HBO) in favor of some sort of JOA with JFL (and TBS) in the Windy City. Now Montreal is being stiffed, it would appear, by the industry in favor of Chicago.

Maybe the Chicago fest will morph into a “consumer-oriented” festival and the Montreal fest will emphasize new talent. Nothing but starstruck comedy fans show up in the midwest every June, while the industry heads north. Just one scenario to keep both alive, if that is indeed the intention.

In any event, it’s a damn shame that Montreal seems to be in such shape. It’s been around for 27 years now. Perhaps the economics of the entertainment biz (read: the lure of television revenue) was too much for it.

A reader very nicely informed us that our RSS feed stopped working just about the time we migrated to our new server.

So, it’s probably just a matter of tweaking this or that to conform our settings to deal with the quirks of our HostGator server.

Should be fixed before the weekend’s out.

When it is, we’ll let you all know.

Thanks!

Peter Keepnews, writing in the New York Times, offers a preview to the review of Judd Apatow‘s “Funny People.” Keepnews surveys the modern history of comedy films. And seems optimistic that Apatow, of all directors, might make one that rings true. (NOTE: Keepnews also wrote the copy in the list of comedy films, although it’s not immediately apparent from the way it’s presented!)

This paragraph is particularly noteworthy:

Rarely do these films suggest that making people laugh can be a satisfying way to make a living, or that a successful comedian can be likable, hard-working or well adjusted. And rarely do they give much sense of what the business of comedy is like.

Normally, we’d be surprised and delighted to see such a sentiment expressed in a major newspaper, especially one so (for now, at least) influential as the NYT. But we’re merely delighted. You see, we are familiar with Keepnews’ work– indeed, we are familiar with the man himself, having met him at the 2007 Just For Laughs Festival– and he is that rare journo who knows his comedy and who– get this– actually likes and understands comedians. So, we’re not surprised at all.

We hear that some folks have already seen Apatow’s latest movie. We intend to see it first day when it hits So. Jersey next Friday. Stay tuned for our appraisal.

The article links to a table that gives a rundown of six films from “the golden age of standup movies.”

Talk about your versatility! Talk about your lucrative hobby!

Mayor Carlos Alvarez has hired a former professional comedian– who was forced to resign as San Francisco’s housing director last year– to lead the county’s embattled public housing agency.

Greg Fortner, who has said he began his public-housing career to make ends meet while he did stand-up in Los Angeles, will have to dig deep to find something to laugh about at Miami-Dade’s Public Housing Agency, the most troubled department in county government.

He was pulling down $210,000 a year in a similar position in SF. He got canned there and moved across the bay to Oakland. Now he’s flying to Miami to gig there.

He was still performing as a comedian up to six times a year as recently as 2006 while running the San Francisco housing agency. He’s scheduled to emcee a comedy night next month at a Los Angeles club, according to the club’s website.

He took that gig after his predecessor was canned in 2000. Lasted a good five or six years.

Despite the grumblings of the folks in Miami-Dade politics, we suspect that Fortner’s dismissal from the San Francisco job was motivated by politics and not for incompetence. Mayor Gavin Newsome’s office said, “The mayor thinks very highly of Gregg Fortner and wishes him well in this new post.” First Joey Novick as Flemington Borough councilman, then Al Franken goes to Washington. Now this!

Read the whole thing. (Thanks to FOS Aaron Ward for the tip!)

The short, round one from “Superbad” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” says he’s not cut out for standup.

I never done stand-up comedy before… When they recognize you from a movie or something you get a free five minutes when they’re excited to see you. And then after that if you suck, you just suck, which I did. I would go with Seth a lot, who was really good because he did stand up a lot when he was younger. And I don’t think anything gives Seth Rogen more joy in the entire world – not the idea of love, or birds in the sky, or eternal happiness– more than him watching me tank on stage. He was the only laugh in the room at the time.

The two hit the stages of comedy clubs to prepare for their roles in “Funny People.”

That’s awfully nice of the Minneapolis City Council, isn’t it? An article in the University of Minnesota’s MNDaily.com has the details:

The Minneapolis City Council changed its licensing practices Friday to allow establishments with a class A, B, C and D liquor license to feature solo comedians. Prior to the change, only venues with a class A license– the most expensive and difficult to obtain– were allowed to feature live comedians.

We had heard about this battle back when we performed in Minneapolis is February. We were appalled that the Liquor Police had shut down some comedy venues. We were prepared to rant about it here, but we backed off at the request of some of the folks who were leading the charge to change the laws.

Local comedian Bob Edwards spent more than five years doing stand up in a dark basement room in the Corner Bar on the West Bank as part of the Comedy Corner Underground. However, a routine inspection by the city of Minneapolis shut the show down last November in compliance with the licensing law.

Three days later, the city shut down another comedy room at the Spring Street Tavern. Edwards, along with a coalition of other comedians, decided it was time to change the city’s laws that they felt were antiquated.

What the…?!? How creepy is that? Two comedy shows shut down in the space of four days? You gotta hand it to Edwards and the others for staying cool in the midst of such a bizarre set of circumstances. They not only managed to get those two venues back up and running…

…they doubled the number of venues that could perform comedy in the city, a move that has some University of Minnesota students and venues thinking about how it will impact them.

It’s an inspiring story. (And, despite the happy ending, just a bit disconcerting that a major city like Minneapolis would behave the way they did initially.)

It reminds us of the old days when even New York City would intimidate and manipulate venues and artists– Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Lenny Bruce, Lord Buckley, to name a few– by revoking (or refusing to grant) “cabaret licenses” for one offense or another.

It’s cruel and unusual punishment to take a guy’s livelihood away from him.

— Lenny Bruce
“All Hail Lord Buckley!”
by Douglas Cruickshank

HERE is an index page that contains links to each and every year of our updates from Just For Laughs. We figured that since JFL’s going on this week, some of our readers might want to wallow in our coverage from past years. (We made the trek north for nine straight years, from 1999 to 2007.) A hundred pics, maybe. Approximately 50,000 words, perhaps.

Enjoy!

This weekend, The Masters showcases at the Festival Just For Laughs will feature:

Ed Byrne
Godfrey
Kevin Brennan
Christian Finnegan
David Feldman
Rich Vos
Mike MacRae

We’re not there this year, as you may have guessed. We didn’t go last year either. We went for nine years straight and developed a case of Fest-igue. (We spent a good chunk of our discretionary funds on a nine-day adventure vacation to The Big Island… plus we’re going to BlogWorldExpo in October.)

And Just For Laughs will present New Faces tonight, tomorrow and Thursday night.

Eleanor Tiernan
Andrew Lawrence
Alex Koll
Andy Ritchie
Chris D’Elia
Dan Adhoot
Duncan Trussell
Erik Krug
Kumail Nanjiani
Mary Mack
Matt Knudsen
Myq Kaplan
Mike Bridentstein
Moshe Kasher
Pete Holmes
Renee Gaulthier
Rory Scovel

Tuesday? Has the New Faces showcase lost its luster? Who’s in town on Tuesday? Perhaps it’s a warmup. A way to head off any of the meltdowns that have plagued the festival rookies in the past.

Our advice: Drink plenty of water and don’t forget to eat.

It’s called “Is Everybody Hacky?” and it deals with what one comic called “the comics’ ‘N-word'”– Hack! (It’s exactly 10:00!)

It’s the second episode of our series. (Some readers may have missed the first episode, entitled “Is It Too Soon?” We uploaded it and posted about it while the site was still being maligned as an attack site!) Check it out if you haven’t already.

We used new bumper music for this one. (We’ve decided to use different bumper music for each one… to stay one step ahead of the copyright police!) But we still haven’t figured out a catchy name for it. (FOS Bonnie McFarlane suggested we call it a Recline-O-Cast®)

So says Festival Just For Laughs boss Bruce Hills. It’s the kind of quote that reporters just love!

It’s the capper on a Montreal Gazette story by Jeff Heinrich about how the recession is affecting standup. (The Fest is kicking into high gear this week, so the Gazette is turning its attention toward comedy.)

Louie Anderson is in town to do a couple nights of Bubbling With Laughter and a gala. This passage gave us pause:

In the U.S., stand-up has had some trouble. To draw the recession-weary crowds, Las Vegas hotels and nightclubs like the Excalibur, where Anderson plays 40 weeks of the year, have cut room and ticket prices in half and now even offer free tickets for local residents– something unheard of before.

“As soon as the recession hit, all of show business – in the sense of live shows – took a dip,” Anderson said. Attendance for his shows dropped 10 per cent, so the promoter brought the ticket price down to $40 from $79 before the recession.

In order to make up for a ten per cent drop in attendance, you cut prices by fifty per cent? That sounds… un-mathematically sound.

From Hills:

“If a tour or a show is overpriced, you’re dead in the water… But if your price point is right, if the artist is great, you’re not hurt at all. That’s what I’m hearing from most promoters. If you’re a mediocre draw and you’re putting on a mediocre show, you’re dead– there’s no patience for that anymore.

Hills also says that standup is doing very well in Canada. And Heinrich reports that the entertainment biz (and, we assume, standup) is also doing well in England.

In the U.S., though, Louie Anderson was seeing a ten per cent falloff, selling tickets at $79 a pop.

He just turned 87 in March. He’s got three dates scheduled for this coast. (See Catch A Rising Star’s website for dates, places.)

We’re just 45 minutes down the road from their Princeton location. He’ll be there on July 31, not this Friday, but the next. That might just be worth checking out!

Allen was in the audience for Shecky Greene’s final show of his recent weekend at the Suncoast in Vegas (we were there… Allen did a “stand and wave”), and he didn’t look to be 87 years old!

Check out Allen’s website for an extensive bio and some interesting art. (Judging from the one photo, Allen– like other comics of his generation– sheds clothing, loosens the tie and appears drained at the end of a performance… so old school! Older audiences like to think the performer is up there giving it his all!)

We’re thinking of road-tripping up 295 two Fridays from now. Part of our policy to see the old school comics before they… retire!

We were alerted to a press release, that appeared on VegasNews.com, that trumpets the resurrection of (“producer”) Bob Kephart’s Comedy Stop at the Sahara, starting Monday.

“The Las Vegas Strip is a natural home for great comedy,” raves Comedy Stop creator and producer Bob Kephart. “Nationally-recognized comedians such as our opening week’s lineup, is what people can expect to find on the Congo Room stage.”

That lineup will include Louis Ramey and Rick Crom. The opening week will be emceed by Jimmie Walker.

The show will be at 9 PM, seven days a week, in the casino’s storied Congo Room. (We saw Gallagher perform in that same room, back in 1997 or so. (We were in town on a business-related trip and we were thrilled to see the room where Louis Prima made his name!)

The Sahara is at the extreme northern end of The Strip (only one major casino– The Stratosphere– is further north,) so Kephart’s got his work cut out for him. One thing in his favor: the monorail stop. Once the construction on the projects just south of the Sahara are complete, foot traffic may resume, putting it in competition with the Comedy Club At The Riviera. It’ll be nothing like the hot corner he shared with the Excalibur, the MGM and New York, New York.

(Thanks to Clay Heery for the tip!)

Word on the street is that he has died. We got it in an email.

The same person who emailed us just emailed us back to say that it’s not true and that he was bored.

This same douchebag also cc’ed about 200 or 300 comedians with the news that Walsh had died. (We haven’t seen that many email addresses since people learned how to bcc.)

CORRECTION: The person who emailed us the second time (see above) has contacted us (yet again) and clarified that it was not he who sent out the initial email that started the rumor. So… if we understand correctly, he (the person identified as the original emailer) is not the douchebag. It is, instead, a mysterious person who momentarily had access to the email account of the person who emailed us the second time. Got it? The first person who sent the email is the douchebag (the “bored one” who sent out the email). The person who followed up was merely trying to clear things up (and is not the douchebag, but the owner of the email account and mailing list upon which the douchebag sent out the first email). For further clarification, (or, for some, to be thoroughly confused) see the comments on this posting.

It’s a new ailment and it refers to people who have problems interpreting humor correctly. Susan Gaidos, writing in Science News, describes it:

By most accounts, laughter is good medicine, the best even. But for some… a good-natured chuckle isn’t funny at all. Morbidly averse to being the butt of a joke, these folks will go out of their way to avoid certain people or situations for fear of being ridiculed. For them, merely being around others who are talking and laughing can cause tension and apprehension.

Until recently, such people might have been written off as spoilsports. But in the mid-1990s, an astute German psychologist recognized the problem for what it is: a debilitating fear of being laughed at. Over the past decade, psychologists, sociologists, linguists and humor experts have examined this trait, technically known as gelotophobia. Though it sounds like an ailment involving Italian ice cream, scientists worldwide now recognize it as a distinct social phobia. Studies of causes and consequences of gelotophobia were among the topics presented in June in Long Beach, Calif., at a meeting of the International Society for Humor Studies.

Further, the gelotophobes “do not understand the positive side of humor, and cannot experience it in a warm way but rather as a means to put others down.” Hmmm… sounds like a good number of folks in the MSM!

Or the reviewer who watches a Larry The Cable Guy special and hisses through clenched teeth about the audience filled with “racist frat boys.”

(The University of Zurich researcher Willibald) Ruch says that recognizing that humor is not necessarily contagious is especially important for teachers and others who work with groups of people. “We need to know why is it that something so human, which brings enjoyment to most everyone, is actually experienced so negatively by a few.”

Indeed, we do!

Tip of the hat to BrotherJuddBlog!

A standup comic?

We left off a comedian– Louis CK was nominated for his special, “Chewed Up.” We left him off the list just to make sure that he’s still reading the magazine. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.

Jemaine Clement (one-half of Flight of the Conchords) is up for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Comedy Series and Sarah Silverman is up for Outstanding Lead Actress In A Comedy Series. (Clement’s up for two, owing to his nomination for co-writing an episode of his series.) Tracy Morgan is also up for Outstanding Supporting Actor. Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Kathy Griffin are all being considered for their specials.

Good news, of course, for standup comedy.

And it’s encouraging that some conventional (and not so conventional) sitcoms are racking up some nominations, getting some recognition. There seems to be a wide variety of sitcoms– How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory are side-by-side with The Office and 30 Rock. (And Family Guy, an animated series with a thin veneer of conventionality over a mountain of quirkiness, is also among those nominated for Outstanding Comedy!)

Could this signal a comeback for sitcoms? For sitcoms with comedians at the top?

And, while not a standup comic, Jim Parsons (Big Bang’s Sheldon Cooper) has our endorsement for the Outstanding Actor award. His is one of the best performances on television.

Here’s the complete list of nominees.

And, in a side note, ABC has ordered 13 more episodes of Better Off Ted! (Sure, it’ll be buried in the “late fall” schedule, but at least there’ll be more!)

Forbes published the list of the top ten earners among standup comics.

Jerry Seinfeld
Chris Rock
Jeff Dunham
Dane Cook
George Lopez
Howie Mandel
Larry The Cable Guy
Jeff Foxworthy
Terry Fator
Russell Peters

What’s Terry Fator doing on that list? And where’s Ellen DeGeneres? Drew Carey? Brian Regan? Bill Engvall?

We were kinda shocked that Dunham made the list. (But, he was the sole focus of a Forbes piece in June, so great is his earning power.)

The author of the Top Ten article, Lacey Rose, knew folks would be suprised– she said Dunham’s $30 million payday was “hardly a shock” when you consider his touring schedule. We like this quote:

The one thing I’m proud of most is that my show has no social redeeming value whatsoever,” jokes Dunham. “I’m not here to teach anybody anything. You come and leave your brain at the door.” And that’s just what today’s audience is after.

Emphasis ours. Those are Rose’s words, not ours, BTW.

And Russell Peters seems to have been flying under the radar. Our fault, we suppose– he sold out MSG. In fairness, a lot of his dough was made outside the USA– England and Canada. (Rose says he Peters “frequently focuses on race,” but wouldn’t that technically be ethnicity? A minor quibble.)

And readers will recall that we threatened to kick Howie Mandel’s ass for trying to spread that ridiculous notion that hosting a network game show would be career suicide. We quite accurately predicted that it would be a career booster and not a career ender.

One thing is for sure: The boys with the puppets– er, figures— are having the last laugh.

The security people at our new host– HostGator– have given the site a clean bill of health. The folks at Google are reviewing the site. (It takes a behemoth like Google forever to do anything.) We trust the folks at HostGator– so far, their customer service and tech advice has been above and beyond tremendous. We highly recommend them.

If you’re still getting that “attack site” warning, just change your browser settings to ignore it. That’s what we did, early on.

In Firefox, it’s easy:

tools > options >security > uncheck “tell me if the site im visiting is a suspected attack site”

We didn’t advise anyone else to do it until we were absolutely sure that no harm could come of it.

We never did find out what, if any “badware” was on our site. (In fact, we’re of the opinion that it was on a different site that our old host had on their server… but Google’s robots are very sensitive. But, browse with confidence, as we have long ditched our old host.) Badware, from what we could learn, is a annoying (but not fatal) script that tracks folks’ browsing.

We fully intend to ramp up our posting now and we should be in full SHECKYmagazine mode shortly after The Male Half’s birthday.

Thanks to all for your patience! We missed you!

ADDENDUM: We just received the following from StopBadware.org:

We have processed your request for review of your website, http://sheckymagazine.com/. At this time, none of our data partners are reporting badware activity related to the site. Any warnings displayed by our partners about your site have either already been removed or should be removed shortly.

ADDENDUM II: FOS Paul Ogata just emailed us to say that Google has dropped the Attack Site warning. So it looks like we’re good to go and no jiggling of any browsers is necessary!

We’ve snagged all the files from the old host, we’re going to upload to the new host, we’re about to monkey with the domain name servers (DNS) at the new host… after that, it’ll just be a matter of what the techies call “propagation,” and the the internet will know where to find the magazine in its new location.

Of course, after that, it’s just a matter of telling Google that we’re bug-free. Hmmm… Google, being the fortress that they are, are very difficult to contact/persuade. If we fail to convince the mighty Google that our site, at its new location, is clean as a whistle, we’ll just purchase a new domain and rename the magazine. (Drastic, we know, but it’s been rather frustrating– our site has actually been clean for some time now, but the folks at Google– rather, the robots that crawl all over the WWW from Google– are so slow to act that we grew tired of waiting for them.)

In any event, enjoy the summer, check back in a day or two. Once the new site is up and functioning, we’ll Tweet, email, post and generally let the WWW know that we’re back.

From the Feb. 5 edition of Las Vegas Weekly, comes this description of Grandma Lee on the occasion of her appearance at that city’s Bonkerz Comedy Club:

Grandma Lee is a sassy senior citizen who isn’t ready for the retirement home just yet. She will entertain the crowd with her hilarious and unorthodox views on family, television and life in general. She’ll be taking the stage along with Lisa Corrao.

Well, it looks like Lee will be heading back to Vegas, as she has just charmed the socks off of Piers, Sharon and The Hoff on America’s Got Talent.

We were wondering which, if any, comedians made it onto this season’s AGT, but we’ve been too busy to catch any episodes.

America has always had a “sassy senior citizen” or two making the talk show rounds. Way back when, it was Cliff Arquette’s “Charlie Weaver” and Moms Mabley who filled the role.

(Where have our sassy seniors been lately? Oh, yeah… the kids don’t like ’em. Jokes about growing old don’t test well with the younger demographic.)

Best of luck to Lee. Perhaps she’ll get her own showroom built for her like Terry Fator!

Cain Lopez has died, at the age of 30, from lung cancer.

Multiple tributes are popping up on status reports on Facebook, from friends of Lopez.

He had been recently hospitalized, but recently released.

If anyone has further details on a funeral or a memorial service, please leave it in the comments.

Thanks.

From the McAfee Site Advisor site:

sheckymagazine.com

We tested this site and didn’t find any significant problems.

We suspect that it’s only a matter of time before our domain transfer goes through and Google agrees with McAfee. (They are, after all, only the most recognized publisher of antivirus software.)

Bruce Fine is the comic who is behind (and in front of) The Laugh Pack!– the new show/venue in two locations in Southern California. One, in Van Nuys at the Airtel Plaza Hotel, opens July 25. The second, at the Hollywood Studio Bar & Grill, opens August 7. From the website:

Bruce will produce and host THE LAUGH PACK!, a star-studded Stand-up show every Saturday night in the beautiful Lounge of the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys, CA. The first Friday of the month THE LAUGH PACK! will be live in Hollywood at the Hollywood Studio Bar & Grill at the historical Gower Gulch on Sunset Blvd.

We believe Fine when he says that his venues will hearken back to the days when the talent was treated like stars. He chose the name (obviously evoking the Rat Pack era) because he wanted to convey– for both comics and audience alike– an atmosphere that combines class and convenience. “A little bit of Vegas right there in Van Nuys,” is how the website phrases it. (And, at least for the grand opening, the tix are ten bucks!) The other venue, boasts “A little bit of Vegas right here in Hollywood.”

We were just talking about such matters recently here at SHECKYmagazine HQ– Gone are the days when the casinos in Vegas treated the talent like special guests. These days, more often than not, they’re regarded with a modicum of courtesy, but not exactly exalted like olden days, the period represented by the so-called Rat Pack. (Perhaps we’re re-writing history here, but we seem to recall– in the many biographies we’ve read– that acts of the Rat Pack era, who played the desert, hadn’t a care in the world and were, in a lot of ways, made to feel… special. In stark contrast, today’s talent feels much more like a commodity or yet another opportunity for a bean-counter to shave costs/expenses down to the minimum. This is not a disease peculiar to Vegas– this is rampant. But, the difference between the old way and the new way is nowhere more obvious than in Sin City.)

Fine will be bringing in a wide variety of heavy-hitters: Wendy Liebman, Alonzo Bodden, Elon Gold, Suli McCullough, Jason Stuart. And a venue in Hollywood and the Valley– that pays and has free parking!– is no doubt certain to cause a mini-revolution in the Los Angeles metro area. (We recall that paid gigs were rare– relative to the amount of indigenous talent– when we lived there 1988-1993. From what we hear, that situation hasn’t much improved since.)

Full disclosure: We’ll be appearing at the Laugh Pack (both venues) the first weekend of October. We look forward to it.

Hit the site, check out the sked and befriend them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter– you know, all the cool, social networking stuff that Frank and Sammy and Joey Bishop usta do!

That’s Online Comedy Initiative. In this case, it’s another “multi-platform-themed stand-up video challenge.” Last time we checked, there weren’t very many takers. The most viewed video caught 634 views. Is that good? Is that good for a contest sponsored by a website owned by a cable outlet owned by a company ranked 191st on the most recent Fortune 500 (right behind Pepsi and ToyRUs!), with annual revenue of about $15 billion?

Perhaps everyone’s caught on. Perhaps everyone clicks through and actually reads the fine print and realizes that giving up your rights to your material in perpetuity (for use on/in media that hasn’t been invented yet– and not being compensated for it!) isn’t worth the exposure.

We suppose it’s necessary for companies like Viacom to do stuff like this. Kinda like building a rocket ship that will allow you to leave behind a dying planet– Viacom probably has projections that mark quite clearly the month, day and time of death of their cable television platform and, as such, they are doing all they can to develop the other platforms. So, holding contests like this will enable them to own the rights to every joke that’s ever been written… and every street joke, too… and even jokes that belong to other artists! Watch the fun begin when they (and about a dozen other online comedy initiatives) sell the same gags over and over again to this telecom or that.

We picture a scenario in the not-too-distant future where a comedian, who has secured a special on Comedy Central will be told that he owes Comedy Central money because he’s using material that they own the rights to!

If you have 9:49, check out our very first episode of “Lying About: Standup,” entitled, “Is It Too Soon?” in which we discuss, among other things, whether it’s too soon for comics to make jokes about the death of Michael Jackson.

The title of our venture is pretty obvious– It’s two people… talking about standup… while… lying about— plus, it’s got that vague, cool, double-meaning thing going; the one that people who listen to too much Minnesota Public Radio seem to really dig.

It’s a video serial in several installments. We haven’t figured out a catchy name like “Vlog” or “Vee-Log” or “Vlod-cast” yet.

There aren’t many impressionists around. When we were growing up, there seemed to be enough to have one on Merv’s show at least once a month. And once a month on Tonight. And an occasional appearance on Steve Allen’s show or on Ed Sullivan. Now, our impressionists are almost limited to weak, makeup-dependent turns on Saturday Night Live by sketch comics who often barely approximate the celebrity they’re impersonating and yell out catchphrases.

People like David Frye and Frank Gorshin and Will Jordan did amazing impressions with little more than a comb or a shift of the suit jacket.

Have American audiences outgrown the art of impersonation? Has it gone the way of doubletalk as something that automatically elicits hearty laughter, applause and admiration?

Comedian and impersonator Fred Travalena died Sunday afternoon after a seven-year battle with cancer. He was 66.

He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2002 and prostate cancer in 2003. Following five years’ remission, the lymphoma returned in 2008.

During Travalena’s 40-year career, he entertained audiences with impressions of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bob Hope. He was a regular on the “Tonight Show,” with Johnny Carson.

It’s fashionable among today’s comedians to deride impressionists. But they certainly do get a response. And, in the case of Travalena (and others), they had long, successful careers.

We tried to think of comedians working today who are primarily impressionists and we could only come up with Jim Morris and Steve Bridges, two brilliant mimics who mainly are noted for their tremendous impressions of political figures.

Google has very tight security. Understandable, we suppose. So, when some sort of suspicious software is inserted into a website (with or without the knowledge of the site’s owner), the Google alarms and whistles go off and, before you know it, your site is being labeled as some sort of internet pariah.

About 36 hours ago, we made a “reconsideration request” to Google, asking them to rummage around under the hood and make sure no demons were present. A company the size of Google isn’t exactly light on its feet, so the request may take another few hours.

Until then, if you notice anything suspicious, let us know via email (drop one to The Female Half using tmskene(at sign)hotmail(dot)com) or via our MySpace site.

None of this “badware” is to be feared– it’s more a nuisance than anything (the name derives from a elision (?) of the terms “bad” and “adware.” Cnet says badware “is not designed to purposefully destroy data or compromise a system as is a virus or Trojan.”

In fact, some software from such giants as Sears, Kmart and AOL has been labeled as badware by a consortium of companies (including Google and Microsoft) that pay attention to such things.

Where did it come from? Russia or China is a good bet. (They’ve been implicated in a lot of spamming and adware schemes lately.)

We look forward to posting regularly again.

And, during our forced vacation, we’ve been working on other projects that needed our attention.

We had Saturday off, so we motored up 295 to hang out with Bonnie McFarlane (who was headlining Princeton Catch A Rising Star). We brought along former Rascals Cherry Hill GM Jason Pollock. And we were joined by comedian Rabbi Bob Alper— a longtime reader/supporter of SHECKYmagazine.com– we had never met the Alper, but we’ve corresponded with him for what seems like forever; it was great to finally meet him after all these years. (He was in a Philly suburb for a full weekend– officiating at a wedding Saturday, then gigging at a synogogue on Sunday.)

(Thanks to Catch manager Steve Trevelise for his hospitality.)

From left: Rabbi Bob Alper, Bonnie McFarlane, The Female Half, Jason Pollock (Not pictured: The weekend’s featured comedian Joe Pontillo)

We’re in the middle of transferring SHECKYmagazine.com from our old server to a new one. In the meantime, Google is essentially blocking the site with a “This site may harm your computer” message. Google, we suspect, is being overly cautious. Apparently, there are a lot of servers out there with so-called “badware.” (It might be part of this botnet thing we’ve been reading about over the past few months.) There are a great number of sites out there affected– some large, some small– and administrators throughout the WWW are executing plans similar to ours.

Anyway, we’ll be back up and running in no time, without any gremlins.

Check back occasionally and we’ll update our progress.

Thanks.

The Jerusalem Post interviewed “Loud Fast Jews,” the super group formed by four punk rock legends Handsome Dick Manitoba of The Dictators, Tommy Ramone of the Ramones, Blondie’s Chris Stein and Patti Smith Group member Lenny Kaye, on the occasion of their appearance at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research last week.

The four talked about their Jewish heritage and their influences:

Indeed, all four said the New York scene– their Brooklyn and Bronx neighborhoods, CBGB’s– influenced them personally and artistically. But yes, they were influenced by other Jewish entertainers of the day– from Ed Sullivan to Broadway composers to performers in the Catskills. “All that shtick was Jewish,” said Ramone, “and to me that was very important.”

“I’m sure what I spit back has a little Shecky Greene in it,” said Manitoba.

Who knew that Handsome Dick Manitoba was influenced by Shecky Greene?

The PWTorch website (that stands for Pro Wrestling), says that WWE legend King Kong Bundy is working on a career in standup comedy. They cite a story in the Poughkeepsie paper.

Bundy says he’s doing stand-up comedy across the Northeast U.S., including New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. “I’m laying pretty low. I’m starting my standup comedy. I’m getting back into that now,” Bundy told Phil Strum of the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal.

The figure above is a Bundy action figure that’s getting $49 on amazon.com. Bundy debuted (in wrestling) in 1981 and wrestled for nearly two decades.

At his peak, he weighed a quarter of a ton. We suppose heckling won’t be a problem.