We’re watching the Food Network when a promo for “The Next Food Network Star” pops up and we see among the contestants for the new season Cory Kahaney.

Is a New York City native that is no stranger to the spotlight. Cory has previously been featured on Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. When it comes to cooking though, Cory is serious about great food. She considers her style MAMMA cooking – grounded in the classics of Mediterranean, Austrian, Mexican, Middle Eastern and Asia.

The reality show puts people with various levels of experience in cooking and catering and restaurant running to the test and tries to determine which might be the best to host one of the networks 200 or so cooking shows. She is one of three contestants who has some experience in front of the camera, so she is probably a favorite to win.

Watch for stories of agents advising their clients to complete the 30-week Culinary Institute of America (Los Angeles) certificate program.

From the March 2008 issue of Men’s Health, an item in their Average Guy section provides some fascinating statistics (no source given). Most interesting among them:

Number of men who grew up in
a house where comedy reigned:
1 in 4

Number of men who believe
theirs is the funnier gender:
9 in 10

Number who say they have
serious comedic chops:
2 in 3

Number who’ve sought validation by
grabbing the mike at a comedy club:
1 in 16

It’s those last two that caught our attention. 67 per cent think they got what it takes comedy-wise, but only one tenth of those who do eventually muster the courage (or drink enough) to mount the stage. (Or, as many of those in the MSM might put it, 6.25 per cent of those who know they’re funny are so insecure and so utterly lacking in basic confidence and maturity that they feel it’s necessary to engage in an ostentatious display of their funniness by embarrassing themselves at one of those horrible open mike nights.)

A boxed item entitled “Always leave ’em laughing,” has brief advice nuggets solicited from FOS Wayne Cotter and former Boston comic (now sitcom producer) Jonathan Groff.

Both Halves of the Staff are reading Alan King’s autobio, “Name-Dropping,” (with Chris Chase). It’s good, fluffy summer reading and, as far as the title goes, it delivers.

But, since King was born the day after Christmas 1926, be prepared to catch names that belong mostly to long-dead giants of the industry.

King started performing at a very early age, during the depression, in NYC and later in the Catskills, so a lot of his stories involve Jolson, Cantor, Berle, George Burns and, in this excerpt, Joe E. Lewis:

In 1949, I was appearing at the Paramount (the last of the big New York movie houses that stilled featured vaudeville) on a bill with Billy Eckstine, when I got a call from Joe E. He needed a favor. He was stuck in Chicago and couldn’t get home in time to do a benefit that night. “Can you make an appearance for charity?” he asked me. “It’s at the Astor Hotel, you’re four steps away.”

I’d never turned Joe E. down, but it was a Saturday; we did six shows at the Paramount on Saturday, so I was not in the best frame of mind to do a benefit.

I came offstage, walked across the street to the Astor Ballroom, and said to the stage manager, “Listen, I’ve got an hour and a half between shows. If I con’t go on now, I can’t go on at all.” So the bandleader interrupts the dinner: “Ladies and gentlemen, direct from the Paramount Theater, Alan King.”

I do a half an hour and go back to my dressing room at the Paramount. The phone rings. It’s Joe E. “What the hell happened? Where were you?”

“What do you mean, where was I? I just did half an hour at the Astor Ballroom”

“Schmuck!” Joe E. yells. “It was the Astor Roof!” I’d done half an hour in the wrong room.

Speaking of Joe E. Lewis, we coincidentally were able to watch the first half of the 1957 movie made from Lewis’ autobiography, “The Joker Is Wild,” starring Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was the absolute wrong person to star in the pic because he seems to be (and quite possibly could actually be) totally, utterly humorless. This is an impairment, especially when portraying a man who was one of the most recognized comedians of the middle third of the last century. Hey, it was 1957 and Frank was hot.

King’s career started early (in the Catskills at the age of 15) and lasted 60 years. And his middle and later work was featured on network television, on HBO and in such contemporary films as “Memories of Me,” “Sunshine State” and “Night and the City.” King was a rare figure in that he was familiar to several generations of comedy fans. He straddled the old school and the new. He freely admits to having stolen most or all of his material when he was starting out– very old school. But his specials from the 70s and 80s were constructed from original material, if not always material that was warmly received by the MSM. (Click for a 1987 NYT review by John J. O’Connor with a paragraph that begins with “Like many comedians, Mr. King is fascinated with himself.”)

We still fondly recall King’s “Survived by his wife!” bit from one of his specials. It was maybe 1987.

The Male Half had the pleasure of meeting King, in rather odd circumstances. TMHOTS was among three Philly comics summoned to the studios of KYW in Philadelphia one early weekday morning, in 1985 for the purpose of appearing on that station’s “People Are Talking,” then hosted by Maury Povich. King was on the talk circuit, promoting his book, “Is Salami and Eggs Better Than Sex? Memoirs of a Happy Eater”

The premise was that, after King was done plugging his book, the three comics would each go up and do a minute or two in front of the studio audience, while King watched from the side. The master comic would then critique each performance. King was extremely gracious when it came to evaluating The Male Half’s set. Says The Male Half:

He said I was “an egghead comic,” (his exact words) who employed slightly high-brow material and that my audience had better be alert. He also pointed out, rather astutely, that I must be accustomed to working nightclubs and comedy clubs because, at the end of my set, at 7 in the morning, I said, “Thank you very much, good night.” A review of the tape proves King to be correct.

Not every old school comedian would have been as accomodating as King was that day.

One other noteworthy slice from the book:

I was so blessed to have watched him (Joe E. Lewis), to have watched the whole cast of characters who were the Friars. It was an incredible time, and though I don’t know if I was realized that I was learning, I absorbed by osmosis the lessons they taught. Each one had his own trick, a nuance, a personal way of doing things. Some of these people were even bigger than the stories about them.[…]

Today, there are a lot of wonderful young comedians who make me laugh, but the ones I like best have a sense of history and tradition. Richard Pryor, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, they don’t get into bed at night saying, “Today, I invented show business.”

The brief AP item:

LOS ANGELES – Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died. He was 86.

Family spokesman Barry Greenberg says Martin died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica.

“Heeeeeeere’s… DICKY!”

That’s how we remember which was which– Dan Rowan was the straight man who would come out with a drink and say a few words on the hot topics of the day before he’d bring out the permanently befuddled Martin. Martin was goofy, sharp, funny, confused– all at the same time. He was preceded in death by his straight man, Rowan, who died in 1987. They paired up in the 50s.

According to Wikipedia:

They returned to the nightclub circuit until 1966, when they were tapped to host the summer-replacement series for The Dean Martin Show. The exposure led to an opportunity for Rowan and Martin to team up with producers Ed Friendly and George Schlatter and create Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968-1973) on NBC.

There are other websites out there, on the internet, who employ regular citizens to hold forth on various subjects. They take the scribblings of these folks (who are not necessarily experts on their chosen subjects) and build websites– “fan sites” or “fan communities”– and, in some cases, they sell the site to giant corporations for millions of dollars (all the while failing to compensate the contributors). One such site featured a recap of Thursday night’s LCS premiere, which began like this:

Stand-up comedy is unfathomably difficult. I know this because about 99 % of all stand-up comedians are terrible. I laugh easily, and it’s hard to find a theatrical comedy that I won’t squeeze at least a few chuckles out of, but watching stand-up comedy, for me, is often painful.

This particular site gets about a million unique visitors per month, and this article is merely one among many. So it’s not like this opinion will reach all that many readers. But, it’s still rather unsettling when someone burbles out such a dumb and wicked opinion in such a matter-of-fact way.

So, we’re in Kansas City, and we’re on Central Daylight Time. And we’ve got an 8 PM show. So, there’s no way we’re going to be able to watch the show in real time.

So… we go to the Goodwill on Shawnee Mission Parkway and buy a big old clunky JVC VCR and hook it up to our hotel TV.

We call that dedication, people.

We come home after our show and we watch the entire, bizarre, revolting, emotional roller coaster. There are maybe eight entertaining minutes out of the ninety that were broadcast. If a comedy club presented that kind of ratio of entertaining to gut-churning, folks would be walking out.

Let’s remind folks of who made it into the final ten:

God’s Pottery
Adam Hunter
Jeff Dye
Ron G
Paul Foot
Iliza Shlesinger
Marcus
Jim Tavaré
Esther Ku
Louis Ramey
Sean Cullen
Papa C.J.

We remind you because some of our compadres out there– some other websites who are purportedly looking out for your comedy interests– are acting like they don’t know who makes it “into the house,” even though we posted the info on March 31. That’s seven weeks ago. Do they not trust our sources?

Last Comic Driving? Just when you thought they couldn’t come up with something more uncomfortable, something more demeaning, something more horribly contrived than Comics Unleashed— Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Last Comic Driving!

Why is it called Last Comic Driving? The comic… isn’t… DRIVING!

We gotta figure Andrew Norelli is accustomed to headlining. Elsewise, how could he be so comfortable being driven around while some hot babe is ignoring everything he says. (A feature act would be more comfortable actually driving around and delivering material… and having his every word ignored.)

New York. The “celebrity talent scouts” were Richard Belzer and Steven Schirripa. (Full disclosure: We’re working for Schirripa July 7-13 at the Riviera Comedy Club in Vegas, so we thought his work in this episode was absolutely spectacular! He might be the most insightful, compassionate and thought-provoking celebrity talent scout this show has ever had! Belzer? Not so much.)

Where was the footage of the “secret auditions” that we know were conducted around the country, in comedy clubs like the Atlanta Punchline? (We know that Josh Sneed won that particular showcase, but he was only shown in the background, for a fleeting second or two, over Bellamy’s shoulder, during the Gotham segment.) What gives? Why were we (The Male Half included) forced to fill out that voluminous release form if we weren’t going to at least be part of a snappily-produced package that showed Bellamy jetting all over North America, seeking the best and the brightest? Hell, it took some of us longer to sign the release than it did to do our sets!

What became of Aparna Nancherla? We reported back on February 8 that she earned red envelope. Come May 22 and we don’t even see her face in the background. Perhaps we didn’t scour the video tape well enough. Hey, she got a red envelope– we shouldn’t have to analyze the video like a CIA operative inspecting satellite images in order to see her. If she was good enough back in February, she should be good enough in May.

Why? So many WHY’s!

For instance: Why was so much emphasis placed on some gal who wears a whole lot of different outfits (Whoo!) when there were so many comics (Josh Sneed, Costaki Economopoulos, Jon Fisch) who– we guarantee— were perfectly capable of delivering solid, funny sets?

Why give all this play, shoot all this footage, lash together all these packages on people who just can’t possibly deliver when there are four or five or six comics who can? (We know they were there– we saw them standing in the background at the end of the evening set at Gotham!) It’s called Last Comic Standing and we’re mystified as to why costume changes and banana suits and Sith lords and strippers are given priority over comics who can make people convulse with a well-turned phrase, a punchline, a joke.

Esther Ku. She may well be a fine comedian. Some day. For now, she’s capable of delivering a four- or five-minute set at a showcase. It’s rather depressing. She is an amateur. If she wins– And, let’s face it, she’s made it to Vegas and to the Final Twelve, so there is every possibility that she might win– she will be perfectly capable of doing absolutely nothing in the way of standup comedy. Four minutes of material is hardly adequate for doing battle with a crowd of 40 or 400 or 4,000. What can come of her elevation to Last… Comic… Standing?

Tempe. We reported that Marcus, Phil Palisoul and Adam Hunter got the red envelope. We also reported that Alycia Cooper and Bryan Kellen got one, too. Cooper was unceremoniously “disappeared.” Perhaps she refused to sign the release. Kellen got a good amount of face time. But he was not depicted as victorious.

Marcus. We have nothing against impressionists. Impressionists are perfect cogs in the wheels of many a sketch TV show. They often carry those shows. But this is a standup show. We do have a beef with impressionists who have no jokes to go along with the mimicry. Perhaps his jokes were stripped out by the producers. If so, they have played a cruel joke on the man.

Fearne Cotton. The fabric of our lives? We don’t think so. She is a waste. An unnecessary bauble. A British accent and little more.

If we re-run the video tape and catch anything else, we’ll let you know. The show was so bad, we are actually considering taking the VCR back to the Goodwill and getting $7.98 store credit back. But that would get us very bad thrift store karma. And you don’t want that.

We’re on the road. In Kansas City, at Famous Johnnys. Tonight, we have one show at 8 PM, but we’ve rigged up a VCR in our hotel room to tape the show (which will start just about the same time the Male Half hits the stage, since we’re on Central Daylight Time).

Fear not! We will scurry back to our room, view the video and spin out some of our now-famous analysis! It’ll probably upload sometime around midnight EDT.

We understand that some of Bill Bellamy’s “secret” audition shows will be sliced and diced and presented in tonight’s 90-minute episode. Which means that the Atlanta audition show might be featured. Which means that the Male Half’s mug might actually make it onto the screen for a fleeting second or two. We shall see!

Actually, there were a handful of sitcoms announced at the upfronts, but one in particular stands out as far as we’re concerned. It’s entitled Project Gary, and it will star a standup comic, Jay Mohr, and is co-created by a standup comic, Ed Yeager.

Before gathering multiple credits as a writer, consulting producer and supervising producer, Yeager was a comedian and, says the Male Half, a damn fine one. (The Male Half shared a bill with Yeager and then-unknown emcee Steve Harvey at the Hilarities in Cuyahoga Falls, circa 1985. Shortly thereafter, Yeager took off for Hollywood, where he caught on as a staffer with Roseanne.

A sharp-eyed MPLS reader sent us a link to a story in the Star-Turbine by Neal Justin. No shock that we find out that the “reality” series is rigged.

Following the Minneapolis auditions, judges Brian Baumgartner and Kate Flannery, stars of “The Office,” went behind closed doors, presumably to come to a consensus.

When they returned after more than a half-hour of deliberation, I was stunned by their choices. So was Acme comedy club owner Louis Lee, who has some of the sharpest ears in the business.

Turns out they weren’t working alone. The two admitted afterward that producers played a significant role in making the final call and that they were frustrated that some of their favorites were passed over.

In an earlier season, when Drew Carey and Brett Butler went apeshit for the cameras after their choices were bulldozed, we weren’t sure if it was theater or genuine controversy. Either choice looked bad for the show and the show’s producers. (It was bad theater or it was fairly contrived controversy.)

Justin wonders aloud, “These tweaks are nothing compared with the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. But I do think it’s time to reserve the title of “reality” for only the purest of documentary shows. The rest belong in a new category: Tainted TV.”

But we wonder just why they feel compelled to frame the entire show in the way they do– in the now-hackneyed “reality” format. Why not just bill the show as a contest (ala Star Search), cast the show with whomever you’d like to see compete (with input from agents, managers, suits, etc.– all behind closed doors) and then have a damn contest.

Cutforth and Lipsitz are capable of producing quality reality television (Top Chef), so it’s a mystery as to why this one is so hamhanded and obviously rigged. (Perhaps it’s the meddling from NBC.)

Mike Weatherford writes, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Yet another comedy club arrives, but this one is downtown at Fitzgerald’s. Comedy After Hours is an expansion of an Austin, Texas, club and opens May 22. There will be two “road” comedians and a local host for a $29 ticket. “Country Superstars Tribute” will share the room and keep its 7 p.m. time slot, but won’t have shows on Fridays or Saturdays.

Fitzgerald’s spokesman Gene Sagas says the real carrot is the club’s plan to film each Tuesday show and distribute it for late-night cable TV viewing around the country; a free plug for the casino each time the show comes back from a commercial.

The “real carrot?!” Whatever.

The Austin room referred to is located in the Dave & Buster’s on Research Blvd. in Austin and has comedy on Friday nights only.

We wonder if the comedians are receiving any compensation for their appearance on “late-night cable TV viewing around the country?” And we wonder which cable outlet will be carrying the show? (We suspect the answers are “none” and “none,” otherwise Sagas would have provided Weatherford with the information.

At $29 per ticket in a downtown venue, we probably won’t have to wonder long.

In the space of just a few weeks, the New York Times has run two interesting profiles of comedians– one, an article on Mort Sahl on the occasion of Sahl’s birthday:

It was Mr. Sahl’s 81st birthday the next day, this past Sunday, so after Saturday night’s show he was given a birthday cake in the dressing room, and everyone sang to him. He blew out the candle and quoted Adlai Stevenson. Mr. Cavett laughed and said it had to be one of the greatest things ever said over a birthday cake.

And another, this one also by the same author, Corey Kilgannon, is a tribute to 93-year-old Prof. Irwin Corey, which contains priceless Corey-ese:

Waiting for his coffee, Mr. Corey explained the meaning of life, at least as he and probably no one else understood it.

“One of the things that you’ve got to understand is that we’ve got to develop a continuity in order to relate to exacerbate those whose curiosity has not been defended, yet the information given can no longer be used as allegoric because the defendant does not use the evidence which can be substantiated by,” he said before finally asking, “What was the question?”

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Thanks a lot for any assistance!

We got married in Honolulu in 1988. We had just moved to Burbank in September and we immediately planned a trip Hawaii. It would be our first trip to the islands and we’d be leaving in late November and staying for 10 days.

Just after arriving, the Male Half popped into the Honolulu Comedy Club (at the time, atop the Ilikai) and, in a conversation with proprietor Eddie Sax, let it be known that he and the Female Half were interested in getting hitched while in town. Sax recommended Rev. Richard B. Elsner. That’s him in the photo, between Bob Hope and KGMB radio DJ Hal Lewis, aka “Akuhead Pupule.” He’s playing bass. He played bass and some horns for a lot of the shows that came through Hawaii for 35 years.

We contacted the Reverend and he married us on December 2, in the shadow of Diamond Head, at a park on the ocean. Rev. Elsner’s living in Vegas now, marrying people at the Monte Carlo and at the Stratosphere. We’re hoping to get together with him when we perform at the Riv July 7-13.

We dig that crazy long-sleeve Hawaiian shirt tha Hope’s wearing!

The Female Half is reading “Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West” by Hampton Sides. In it there’s a story, one of many revolving around the struggle to dominate the continent’s southwest region, in which the Mexicans invite a bunch of Indian leaders to “talk.” They gather them in a room, feed them, give stuff to smoke, etc. Then they clong them over the head and kill them all.

She was reminded of the story when we received an email from Annie O’Rourke from Rooftop Comedy:

I am happy to let you know that Shecky Magazine has been nominated for a Rooftop Award for best Online Industry Publication for 2008.

The Rooftop Academy (Rooftop clubs, nominees, staff and other industry “types”) will be voting on this in the coming weeks, with the winners announced during the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival on May 31, 2008.

That’s right– we’re among four “Online Industry Publications” in the running for an award for “best coverage of the world of comedy.”

Something’s up. We just know it. Earlier this week, we received an invite to attend Rooftop’s shindig at the end of this month in Aspen. Several factors mitigate against us attending– Short notice, Aspen is far away and expensive to get to and expensive to stay in once one gets there.

And then there’s the matter of what we’ve said in the pages of this magazine. Specifically about Rooftop. “Read those releases carefully”, from October of last year raises some… interesting questions… about Rooftop and their modus operandi.

And another posting, “Standup fest to continue in Aspen?”, says some less than complimentary things about eternal grousebucket David Brenner. Brenner is playing ball with Rooftop, or so the legend goes. He scoured the Rooftop site to choose the talent for a series of shows at Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House. We received a scathing email or two from the Wheeler’s Executive Director (go read his comment on the above posting– OUCH!) We suspect that Wheeler and/or Brenner will be part of Rooftop’s festival. So, we doubt we’d be comfortable floating around the Rockies May 30 and 31.

We don’t mean to sound ungrateful. We’re flattered that, after nine years of cranking out this publication, someone saw fit to recognize our work and our contribution to the industry. And we congratulate our fellow nominees. (Or shall we call them “honorees,” since merely being nominated is quite an honor?)

And it’s actually a very smart idea– they’re also giving awards to talent. Something that hasn’t been done since George Schlatter did it back in the 80s and 90s. And Schlatter did it so poorly toward the end, it’s a wonder that anyone would try again!

But considering what we’ve written– and considering the logistical/fiscal nightmare represented by arranging travel to Aspen on two week’s notice– and haunted by the images of Indians being clonged on the head by seemingly well-meaning Mexicans back in the 1840s, we’ll be back in Jersey, anxiously awaiting the results of the balloting. May the best online industry publication win.

We hear through our extensive network of operatives that Chuck Johnson (Summit) is opening a room at Fitzgerald’s in downtown Vegas. We haven’t been downtown in a while. We have warm and fuzzies for the neighborhood– when we held our SHECKYmagazine Comics Only Reunion in 2001, we based it out of the Union Plaza– the vibe was perfect as far as we were concerned– compact, lots of cheap rooms, plenty of cheap booze and food, all within walking distance. And it all hearkens back to old Vegas (except for the computerized light show canopy above), without a trace of (modern-era) Steve Wynn or Celine Dion or the Super-Mega-Five-Star themed fantasy resorts that dominate The Strip. (Which is also one of the reasons we dig the Riv. BTW: We’ll be appearing at the Comedy Club at the Riviera July 7-13. Stop on by!)

We’re unclear on the aim of NBC’s ad blitz which touts their “All-American Summer” and co-promotes LCS along with American Gladiator, Celebrity Circus and Nashville Star and other reality/competition shows.

We’re especially mystified by the two-page ad in last week’s Us Weekly (See the right half of the ad above), which depicts host Bill Bellamy ankle-deep in an inflatable wading pool while sneering children look on disapprovingly. We’re unnerved by the fact that Bellamy seems more interested in entertaining the array of lawn gnomes and pink flamingos.

In the left half of the spread, is depicted a clown holding a bunch of balloons, a fat kid on a seesaw with a girl wearing a bikini and a line of comedic hopefuls which stretches on seemingly to infinity.

So many questions! Who is the Kevin Smith-looking dude checking his watch? What’s with attitude? Everyone seems to be impatient– folded arms, hans on the hips, watch-checking– one doesn’t need a degree in Body Language Analysis to know that Bellamy is the object of much ire and annoyance. Are the kids pissy because Bellamy is cutting into their wading time? Or do they just hate comedians? Or do they just despise Bellamy? The whole scene is painted in a photorealism style, but it has an eerie, surreal quality to it.

And lawn gnomes? Aren’t we about a decade past the peak of lawn gnomes being shorthand for “We’re so clever, so above it all?” (And maybe two decades over our obsession with the flamingos.) We understand the banana peel icon… sorta.

The whole thing is odd. We’re not sure what message it is sending to Us Weekly readers. We look forward to the premiere on May 22. Mark your calendars. And, if you just can’t wait, you can hop onto LCS’s official site and check out the videos– “Can Miss USA and Miss Universe impress the scouts at Last Comic Standing?” is the tease for one of the vids. We sense danger.

While away the hours by reading “Where are they now?” interviews with Dat Phan and Jay London. Meet Fearne Cotton! And get to know the celebrity judges! We note that NBC has mis-identified celeb talent scout Richard Kind as “Richard King!” That’s gotta sting!

In this article in Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf handicaps the upcoming race among late night television talk show hosts. Over the next few months, Leno leaves, Conan moves to 11:30, Letterman’s contract is up and/or due for renewal and today, at the upfronts, network suits will formally announce that Jimmy Fallon is supposedly slated to take Conan’s place.

When the dust settles from this multi-million dollar musical chairs, the landscape will be significantly different. As the investors are bound by law to tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So Windolf’s speculation has about a five-minute shelf life (as does ours).

It is especially puzzling that the author seems to have a blind spot when it comes to two of the players– Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson. Paragraph three:

Out of all the late-night hosts, with the possible exception of the sleepy Jimmy Kimmel, Ferguson seems the least ambitious. Unlike O’Brien, Letterman, Leno, and Jon Stewart—all of whom seethe to be the best in their field—Ferguson seems content to put on a nice little show. A former film director and sitcom second banana, he has the relaxed manner of someone who has already proved himself, at least to his own satisfaction. He’s warm, non-neurotic. He would probably make a great dinner-party guest. But his show, which is friendly, civil, and homey, is more about keeping a time slot warm than creating something new or setting the ratings on fire.

We note that this is the only reference to Kimmel. It may be significant that he refers to him as “sleepy.” Don’t let the heavy eyelids fool you. Kimmel may be the man who smokes everyone in the long run– a sleeper who comes from way back in the pack to finish first.

And Ferguson may be his biggest rival. That description of Ferguson’s Late, Late Show— “friendly, civil, and homey… more about keeping a time slot warm than creating something new or setting the ratings on fire”– is a perfect description of Carson’s version of Tonight.

And Windolf’s scenario that sees Jon Stewart goes to 11:30 or later would be a disaster. A late-night Stewart would go the way of Dennis Miller, Rick Dees, Joan Rivers, David Brenner and the handful of others (including Stewart himself!) who tried and failed to catch on after the local news.

Hey, Chucky Baby! Dig this from a Comedy Central press release:

COMEDY CENTRAL and Sony Pictures Television are bringing back a classic series with a twist. Lauren Corrao, president, original programming and development, announced the network has greenlit, The Gong Show with Dave Attell. The new series is scheduled to premiere on July 17.

Executive Produced by Happy Madison Productions and Andrew Golder (Identity and Win Ben Stein’s Money) in association with Sony Pictures Television, The Gong Show with Dave Attell will consist of eight to ten off-beat and hilarious acts that will be judged by a panel of three revolving celebrity judges. The search for talent has already begun and submissions are being accepted at gongshowcasting@aol.com.

Creator and reluctant host Chuck Barris will be a hard act to follow. And now that we’re hard-bitten, cynical adults, we’ll have a hard time believing that any of the wacky acts aren’t just some agents idea of how to get his client exposure on a cable television show (possibly leading to a reality series or guest spots on other Comedy Central productions). Of course, that’s not what they were the first time around… but we weren’t hard-bitten, cynical adults back then. And quite a few of us were high.

Check out the A.V. Club’s tremendous interview with Murray Langston. An excerpt:

Yeah. Gallagher came from Florida with Jim Stafford. Remember Jim Stafford? “My Girl Bill” and “Spiders And Snakes?” He was a hit back then. He had his own summer show and a bunch of hit records. Gallagher was one of his best friends, and was writing his act. He walked into my club one day, and I’m going, “Jim Stafford!” Like I said, he was a big hit at this time. He says, “I’ll get up and do a couple songs if you put my buddy on.” I said, “Sure, who’s your buddy?” The guy’s name was Gallagher. He did the watermelon thing the first time he was there and floored the place. But he had done it before. That wasn’t the first place he did it; him and Stafford, apparently, worked at a little place in Florida, where they were originally from. Stafford is making about $20 million a year now in Branson, Missouri. He’s very, very successful.Anyway, so those couple years I had the club, I lost everything, and I was busted, broke. I had no money, and The Gong Show has been on the air maybe six months. And if you were in the union, which I was, and you appeared on The Gong Show, you got a few hundred dollars. I heard that everybody was going on who needed money—actors were making up these little bits—so I said, “Well, I could use the money.” So I said, “Well, if I put a bag on my head and tell a couple jokes, nobody will know it’s me.” I didn’t want anybody to know it was me, because I’d just been on The Sonny And Cher Show. So I was embarrassed having to do…

Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine Spirit found a way to promote Brad Garrett‘s May 9-10 gig at the Mirage in their destination city Las Vegas by running an article by him (or ghost-written for him by his publicist) that lists “four works worth a laugh.”

Woody Allen, The Night Club Years 1964-1968

Don Rickles, Hello Dummy!

Bill Cosby, Why Is There Air?

Jimmy Walker, Dyn-O-Mite

Go here for Spirit’s online component to the article, which lists a couple more albums and includes a link or two.

We posted in November about mental health counselor David Granirer, who teaches standup to the mentally ill (“The pot calling the kettle crazy”). We’re okay with someone gathering mentally ill people up and coaching them in the ways of standup comedy, but we grow weary of folks like Granirer (and his enablers in the media) who peddle this “all comics are crazy” meme.

Yet another media outlet has fallen for it. This time, it’s Doug Williamson, writing for the Windsor (Ontario) Star who has spun a virtually identical tale to November’s Vancouver piece, complete with the insulting roundhouse at the end:

Granirer said coaching people with mental illness can be challenging.

“The subject matter is very serious,” he said, adding that some people are on medication or have cognitive impairments which can make preparation more difficult.

But then again, many professional comedians probably suffer from some form of mental illness without realizing it, he said.

“There’s the diagnosed and the undiagnosed,” he laughed.

“I think you’ve got to be a little bit nuts to do standup comedy.”

The only difference between this article and the November article is that this time Granirer has added the “probably” qualifier. But, of course, he also throws in the diagnosed/undiagnosed switcheroo– a great comfort to those who want to believe that all comics are indeed on the crazy bubble. Thanks, Dave.

(We’re a bit confused: When Granirer speaks of his students, he does so in hyper-serious mode, so as to “confront and fight public prejudice” and bravely dispel the myths. Yet, when he plants the ridiculous notion about undiagnosed comedians, he does so– at least according to Williamson– with a laugh.)

We’re still wincing over this article on Dane101.com (which is a website devoted to the happenings in Dane County and Madison, WI… Not Dane Cook… didn’t the Bucks usta play at Dane County Colliseum? And they had that horn to signal the end of the periods that sounded, appropriately enough, like one of those alpine horns in the Ricola commercial? We digress).

Anyway, it’s by John Mendelssohn who, according to him, has “gone on stage as an actor, an orator, a musician, and a solo comedian.”

He went to an open mike, then he wrote a review of it. And it’s an unrelentingly negative review. He mercifully leaves the performers anonymous in this graf:

But curb your enthusiasm. Mostly their jokes go thud, thud, and thud. One comic points out that a lot of rock singers sound as though they’re being anally raped. Ta-da-DUM! Another observes that New York’s new governor, David Paterson, who’s legally blind, could have truthfully told his wife that he wasn’t seeing any other women.

Seeing. Legally blind. Get it?

Ouch, we say! Isn’t open mike night all about potential? Isn’t it unfair to review the performances as if they’re all fully-formed artists? Isn’t it more reasonable to regard the entire evening as an experiment? Shouldn’t Mendelssohn be cutting all the comics a break, rather than holding them up to an unreasonably high standard? It’s kinda like sitting on a folding chair at the finish line at the Special Olympics with a stopwatch and slowly shaking your head as each pack finishes. Sure, you could measure things in hundredths or tenths of a second, but why bother? Zoom out, look at the big picture. (Did we just compare a bunch of budding standup comics to mentally handicapped children? Perhaps. But, more importantly, we just analogized a ham-handed writer to a supercilious prick.)

We could understand a review like this from someone who doesn’t quite understand what an open mike is, or who has never actually gone up onstage before, but Mendelssohn fancies himself an artist. He even mentions that he was part of a sketch comedy troupe. He’s written for Rolling Stone, for crying out loud. So why the unnecessary roughness?

Less annoyingly, the next generation of Madison Standup Comics is also relentlessly self-referential, forever commenting on our reactions to them. Well, that’s the last time I’ll tell that one, I guess. (Promises, promises!) When they forget where they are in their routine, they are likely to muse into the microphone, “What the fuck else I got?” Charming!

At times, he sounds more like an ancient, prissy NYC theater reviewer than a bi-coastal, hipster blogger. Actually, we seem to be dealing with an accomplished author– one who wrote rock reviews for RS as far back as 1969. Which makes this scenario all the more puzzling– A veteran rock journo, sitting in on an open mike in Madison, WI, on a Wednesday night, then penning a savage review… and all for free.

Local comedians are no less slavishly imitative of one another than their counterparts in Madison’s countless dozens of indistinguishable T-shirts-‘n’-guitars bands; nearly all come on stage dressed as though fresh from changing their own oil. Nearly all, as noted above, are potty-mouthed; nowhere else in life would anyone but a sociopath speak like this in front of strangers. At the Klinic, though, Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, cock, dick, pussy, menstrual period, fuck, shit, fuck seems as de rigueur as using the microphone.

Notwitstanding the sprinkling of French into his prose, the writer seems to be channeling Peter Griffin rather than Lester Bangs. Did he actually use the term “potty-mouthed?”

We hate to go all Freud on this guy’s ass, but, in paragraph three of this piece, when he lays out his what’s funny/what’s not matrix (funniest being 10 and not funny be a 1), the 1 is “the irrepressible loudmouth kid back in high school who regarded himself as the class clown, (though everyone else regarded him the class asshole).” Mr. Mendelssohn, it seems, has “issues.” Sometimes, it’s just too easy!

Sure, last Tuesday we wrote about related matters, but we like to think that we did so with some restraint and that in the process, we made some observations about the business and the craft at large. (And the discussion it has set off continues to this day and is, we hope, enlightening and entertaining.)

That’s a Thursday. Rather inconvenient for working comics, no? But, it’s not for us, now is it? No it’s for all those standup comedy fans. Speaking of which: If you’re a comedy fan and you want to get tickets to tapings, click on this image:

It’s from NBC’s Last Comic Standing page and it’ll take you to the site of one of those companies that rustle audiences for television shows. We figure if enough of our readers show up, they won’t have anyone in the audience that will HECKLE!

They also have a “Where are they now” feature which allows us to catch up with Dat Phan, Matt Kirshen and other past contestants. And “ANT is back with his signature wit starting this May,” teases one of the links. Signature wit? Did they say “signature wit?”

The premiere episode is a 90-minute extravaganza at 9:30 EDT. Then it will revert to its regular 8:30 PM time slot in subsequent weeks. Still inconvenient. But we will figure out a way to comment/analyze the proceedings. We’ll be in Kansas City the first week. Nowhere (so far) on week two.

If you’re headed to Montreal this July for Just For Laughs, check out their hahaha.com website to see who’s performing and what they’ll be doing.

The most interesting item is that Larry Miller will be hosting the Masters shows. We think that would be a thrill to share a bill with Miller.

Another notable presence will be that of Judd Apatow, who’ll be honored for his recent film work. Many of the standup comics who appear in Apatow’s movies will also be along, performing on showcases and galas and whatnot.

We also hear that South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker will be in attendance.

More comics will be announced as they’re added.

The Daily Northwestern, the student paper of Northwestern University, had this article, about senior Ajay Singhvi who “wanted to leave his mark on Northwestern by putting on a stand-up comedy show.”

The result was caNUstandUP.

The show was run in an Apollo-style format, allowing the audience members to boo performers they didn’t like off stage.

“We want audience interaction; they’re the main factor,” Singhvi said. “They decide if the show goes on.”

Audience interaction? How about laughter? Applause? Whooping? Silence is also a good way of “interacting” with the performer.

Encouraging booing is moronic. And, predictably, it was a shitty experience for many of the performers. “I think the Apollo style was harsh on the comedians,” Reichert said. “The booing really discouraged people from continuing. Jory didn’t get through his material because of it.”

Of course, not everyone was unhappy with the rude behavior. The winner thought it was tremendous. “The way that it’s set up, you can’t blame the audience,” he said. “Booing is what they were encouraged to do.”

Allowing or encouraging booing at a comedy show changes the dynamic in such a fundamental way as to stunt the potential growth of any performer. Turning a set around is a crucial skill, but it’s impossible when the audience starts caterwauling. Silence is enough of a rebuke. Booing is rude, plain and simple.

The Female Half, while researching an upcoming trip to Hawaii, endeavored to befriend a MySpace entity by the name of Waikiki Beach, which represented an outfit called Waikiki Beach Services.

However, when she attempted to add Waikiki Beach to our list of MySpace Friends, she was greeted with the following:

Initially, she was outraged. But, since this is America (even on cyberspace), and since folks have the right to associate (or, last time we looked, not associate) with whom they wish, her outrage turned to simply feeling hurt, rejected and confused.

She recalls that she’s gotten the same message on a few occasions in the past– like when she’s tried to befriend one of MySpace’s “Featured Comedians.” If there is anyone who should be forced to accept a comedian as a friend, it should be a comedian who is blessed with the Featured Comedian designation. What gives? How does one even configure one’s MySpace profile to automatically reject comedians? And why would anyone do such a thing?

She now wants to configure her MySpace profile to return this:

Comics based in the Northeastern U.S. in the 80s and 90s were certainly familiar with Wise Guys. The Syracuse, NY, comedy club regularly sold out five nights a week and proprietors Bruno and Jeannine Schirripa ran and booked a club that was the envy of many larger-market venues. (We worked there twice a year and regularly cited it as one of the top ten clubs in the country.)

After a change or two in location and other difficulties, Wise Guys closed and Syracusans found themselves without an A-room.

We recently received word from Bruno Schirripa that, on October 18 of last year, he re-opened Wise Guys at a “fantastic location in the heart of downtown Syracuse,” and that the room is offering eight shows over five nights each week.

Along with news of the re-birth came sad news: Jeannine passed away suddenly on March 1 of last year, after a brief illness. Jeannine was very hands-on at the old club(s) and anyone who worked Wise Guys knew her well and regarded her as a friend.

Last month, we posted about Variety’s Brian Lowry and his insipid theory as to why there are no more sitcoms starring comedians (“It’s a big pile of dumb!”), best summed up by this sentence:

Ultimately, the lure of TV proved too intoxicating, and the talent pool wasn’t equal to the demand.

Huh? Whatever.

The Toronto Sun’s Jim Slotek has a different, slightly more optimistic take on the current epoch in his article in this past Sunday’s paper with the rather ungainly title, “Anybody who thinks that Canadian comedy has run out of gas should check out the brilliant standups at the local yuk-fests.” In it, Slotek recounts the glory years when Canadian comics populated the airwaves of North America (particularly late-night U.S. airwaves) and sacks of cash were thrown around the Delta every July.

Then he fast-forwards to today when things have… slowed down a bit.

But all is not gloom and doom. He cites Russell Peters and Seth Rogen as two comics who could become, or who currently are, major forces in Hollywood. The skeptical among you might say that two comics does not a trend or industry turnaround make. Ah, but you must realize that all it takes is one success and the herd mentality of Hollywood takes control. One hit sitcom starring Peters accidentally makes it onto the primetime schedule and (despite the inept meddling of the boys in marketing or the bloated ego of a programming guru or two), BLAMMO– the stampede to sign up and pilotize comedians begins. Before long, Time and Newsweek run cover stories with titles like “New generation of laugh-getters are bringing the funny to the tube!” and “Yukmeisters slay the reality dragon!”

Slotek turns the corner to optimism:

For a while, I thought the problem was us. Maybe we had stopped being funny. Maybe it was like that Clive Owen movie Children of Men, where, for reasons unexplained, the last Canadian with a sense of irony was born decades ago, and we’ve just been drifting along in a state of cowlike unquestioning consumerism ever since, watching Adam Sandler punch people.

But in the last year, I’ve actually gone out to see twentysomething comics — as a judge for the Tim Sims Encouragement Fund and at Yuk Yuk’s $25,000 Laugh Off (where for the third year in a row, a Canadian standup comic won the grand prize over competition from around the world). Many of them are actually funny, and weird, and worth hearing. And you can hear them at open mikes at places like the Eton House and Spirits and the Rivoli.

Maybe we’re still effin’ funny after all– even without a U.S. development deal and a laughtrack.

Names? Not this time around. Perhaps next Sunday. And, we suspect there are a lot of thirtysomething and perhaps fortysomething comics in Canada who are “actually funny, and weird, and worth hearing,” but Mr. Slotek has become– dare we say it?– jaded. (Hey, if it can happen to an entire generation of network executives, it can happen to entertainment reporters. Perhaps we’ll take it up with him in Montreal in July!)

As a companion piece to Slotek’s column, we refer readers to an article from Reuters which is burning up the RSS feeds. It’s all about the recent ratings week and, although the information is hard to extract, the folks at Reuters have headlined it, “Fox wins week as viewers abandon talent shows.” Viewers are abandoning talent shows? Who could have predicted that?

Well… we could have. In fact, we have done so on more than one occasion. Scroll up. We just did it again!

John Wenzel writes for the Denver Post. He pays a lot of attention to standup comedy, particularly alternative comedy. In fact, Wenzel says he’s got a book coming out about that branch of comedy typified by/led by David Cross, Demetri Martin, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, et al.

He calls the movement “indie comedy.” (In fact, there’s every possibility that Wenzel actually coined that term.) Indie (short for independent) more aptly describes that genre of comedy that has developed fairly recently. It’s the kind of standup that was depicted in Oswalt’s Comedians of Comedy Tour (and subsequent movie about the tour).

It’s actually a better way to characterize the scene– at least from a PR standpoint. Rather than just conveying the Us Against Them implications of the “alternative” label, “Indie” implies a certain level of take-charge entrepreneurialism, an autonomy, an admirable DIY attitude that the former term lacked.

And, whereas alternative acts came about in an era when studios, agents, suits, managers and networks were calling the shots, Indie acts are all about vertical integration– locating the venue, marketing the shows, micromanaging the audience demo, creating the vibe, booking the acts and, of course, putting yourself and your Indie buddies on the bill. Indie comics seem also to have abandoned much of the bitterness and the self-pity that inevitably made its way into the articles written about the scene and into the quotes that those articles were framed by.

It’s a natural progression, a maturation of the business. Much of this maturation has been brought about by modern technology– the WWW, MySpace, cheap printing, etc. (And it is this very same technology that has so severely eroded the power of those aforementioned studio executives and captains of the entertainment industry.)

Alts took their cues from the Entertainment Industry at large. Indies seem unbound by such restrictions. Just as some independent musical artists have thrown off the chains of major record labels and have bucked the traditional channels of distribution, so too have Indie comics sought to avoid chain clubs and people who, in Wenzel’s words, “settle at candlelit tables to hear jokes from a random stand-up.”

Our ruminations here on Indie/Alt comedy were spurred initially by a Wenzel article in yesterday’s Denver Post on the Denver comedy collective known as Wrist Deep Productions, in which Wenzel once again makes the case for Indie comedy.

In other words, smart, aggressive stand-up that shatters expectations without spinning off into abstractions. The result is an injection of the punk-rock ethos into an art form that suffered an image crisis at the hands of the ’80s comedy boom and bust — one from which Wrist Deep is helping it recover.

We can forgive the bombast. Wenzel has a book to sell. But at least he’s enthusiastic and, for the most part, positive when he describes his favorite brand of standup. (And he is suprisingly restrained when he disses the non-Indie brand.)

It’s very instructive and informative to go back and read Wenzel’s other pieces on the subject. This article, in November of 2006, is, Wenzel admits, pretty much the book proposal, for his upcoming tome. And the opening 81 words is the elevator pitch:

Overpriced two-drink minimums. A tacky comb-over in a blazer. Sickly potato skins and drunken bachelorette parties.

These used to be the hallmarks of live comedy, an art relegated to the controlled environs of smoky, mainstream comedy clubs.

Lucky for us, a new breed of comedians has rejected the stale format. The alternative comedy movement of the 1990s has morphed into something unpredictable and cerebral. Something more akin to the visceral, anti-establishment ethos of punk and indie rock.

Call it indie comedy.

We’ll overlook the “tacky comb-over in a blazer” reference (that’s rather jarring in its inauthenticity!), but, once again, Wenzel manages to be upbeat when advocating for Indie. And the entire article is worth reading for its information and for his success in eliciting thoughtful, insightful quotes from Indie gods such as Cross, Martin and Brian Posehn.

We found yet another Wenzel piece, this time from his DP blog, on the occasion of his fourth visit to the South By Southwest festival in Austin last month. SXSW has, like so many other formerly strictly music festivals, incorporated standup into the program. A natural progression for indie music and, Wenzel notes, a natural progression for Indie comedy. But the evolution of Indie is not without its problems.

To be sure, indie comedy is not the largest or most diverse scene out there. Comedy nerds like myself that weekly devour Adult Swim and SuperDeluxe offerings tend to notice the same several dozen people (mostly white dudes) popping up at these fests. And if you live in L.A., New York, Chicago or Seattle you’re also likely to see the same handful of comedians at shows like Comedy Death Ray, or touring indie music venues in general, or releasing albums on indie music labels like Sub Pop, Drag City and Matador. In other words, overlapping with the indie rock sphere in a way that implies an inexorable, blessed blend of the two.

Which brings us to the piece in yesterday’s Post. If you read the three pieces in order, you can follow along as the genre (the movement?) grows and evolves. And, if we were to handicap it, if we were to try and guess at which point the movement is in its history (its epoch, if you will allow us to take the evolution analogy further), we would say that it is just about to succumb to its own success. Name us a genre that hasn’t. (In fact, if we’re to take Wenzel’s constant comparison of Indie comedy to punk rock to its logical extreme, we might be, not quite, but just about, at that point where Blondie released “Rapture.”)

Out there, on the road, over the past year or two, we’ve seen two tracks forming among open mikers and upandcomers: Your typical open mike comic will either emulate Dane Cook or he’ll present himself as an amalgam of a handful of Alt/Indie stars. There are exceptions to be sure. But the exceptions are rare.

Neither trend bodes well for the future. (In the former example, it takes an awful lot of personality and energy and cunning to pull off the Cook thing. But that’s an entire post for another day.) In the latter example, it is evidenced by an army of comedians (“mostly white dudes,” as Wenzel says) who dress alike and who affect similar grooming, delivery and quirks. And they reference an alarmingly similar array of words, phrases and subjects– AIDS, rape, abortion, genocide are specifically mentioned in yesterday’s DP article, with abortion being cited twice. It’s what Wenzel calls “hipster catnip.”

And they slather their presentations generously with Alt/Indy buzzwords and terms– “nutsack,” (and its variant, “ballsack”), “Satan’s spawn,” “soul-crushing,” “anal rape,” “fist fucking” and “Stephen Hawking.” Extra points are awarded if you manage to work in the name of any mid-20th century philosopher (Sartre is okay, Nietzsche is much better. Work in Jacques Derrida and they throw you a party). And if you manage to work in one or more reference into a single joke– i.e., Stephen Hawking getting fistfucked– you take home the blue ribbon.

For all its talk about innovation and breathing new life into the artform, for all of its huffery and puffery about moving the boundaries and challenging old expectations, there seems to be an awful lot of regimentation and replication– some of it self-imposed, some of it accidental. And this tendency toward imitation rather than innovation might destroy any of the good that emerges from the movement. See indie films– they’ve become self-parodying, bloated, high-budget, cliche-packed havens for the same old artists, directors, producers and distributors, virtually indistinguishable from the studio product. The same might happen to Indie comedy if folks aren’t careful.

(Check out MileHiComedy.com, a website curated by Denver comic Donna Ayers. She’s quoted in the April 21 DP article and her site pays strict attention to the comics and comedy venues of Denver and surrounding area. Every market, big or small, needs a site like this one.)

We’d like to thank all the people who emailed or phoned or wrote or personally expressed their condolences regarding the death of the Male Half’s mother. Now that we’re back in the office for a few days, it’ll give us a chance to personally respond to all those who sent along the kind words. It is truly appreciated.

We’re back in Jersey. We spent the last 72 hours in Florida, working in Ocala at Jokeboys and then heading back down to West Palm for a show at the West Palm Improv (which was, for a number of reasons, cancelled). We headed on down to Lauderdale with our hostess, comedian Lisa Carrao (see pic below), to the Lauderdale Improv, and caught the last few minutes of the “4/20-Friendly Comedy Show” starring all the folks in the pic below. That show, held on this auspicious pot-smoking date, was to have included a screening of Doug Benson’s “Super High Me,” which, for a number of reasons, did not occur).

Left to right: Oni Perez, Forrest Shaw, Ricky Cruz, John Vargas, Greg DeTullio, and Adrian Mesa

The two Improvs we saw were spectacular comedy showcases– each in relatively new, bustling entertainment/retail complexes and each state-of-the-art. An enthusiastic and near-capacity crowd enjoyed the pot-themed show at the Lauderdale club.

Lisa Corrao (l) and The Female Half at the Ft. Lauderdale Improv immediately following the 4/20 show.

Says the Male Half:

The above was shot in 1978, during my black and white phase. (And, in case you’re wondering, a feeble attempt was made at hand-tinting, back when that kind of thing was all the rage.) I hung it in my swinging bachelor pad in Audubon, NJ. The story was told in the pages of this magazine that comic Dan Wilson was visiting the pad and he asked, with a straight face, why I had a photo of Roy Orbison on my wall. After ascertaining that he was serious, I told him it was my mom. Explosive laughter was the only option.

My mother appreciated the story. Or would have, if I had told her… I’m not sure if I did. She laughed at herself more readily than anyone I will know. Which made busting her chops very easy. And made for good training in the art of busting chops.

We took her and my father to Hawaii back in 1990 or so. It was the lifelong dream of many of her generation to travel to that exotic locale– a dream no doubt stoked by seeing countless trips to Hawaii given away on game shows in the five decades following WW II.

She watched a lot of game shows. I concluded this was because, many years ago, she actually appeared on one– a local production called “Cinderella Weekend,” described by one website as “one of television’s first question panel game shows.” This probably occurred sometime in the 50s. Family lore had it that, though she didn’t win the grand prize of a trip to NYC for a weekend of sightseeing and entertainment, she did come away with plenty of “consolation prizes”– among which, the story goes, was an intercom system for the home, which was never installed and probably sold through a prize broker. When I heard this I was sorely disappointed. I thought that it would be coolest thing in the world to have an intercom system. Of course, our house was so small that an intercom system would have been about as useful as an elevator or a system of pneumatic mail tubes.

Helen (I addressed her and referred to her as such after I became an adult.) also was taken by the idea of celebrity and fame. In the era way before Extra! and Access Hollywood, she knew a lot about Hollywood and the people that manned the movie and television dream machine. Obscure facts, trivia, stuff that enhanced her viewing experience– who was formerly married to whom or the real name of this actor or that. Much of it was gleaned from TV Guide, some of it was no doubt acquired via her near-obsessive crossword habit.

I think she would have been quite pleased to have been famous and would have been quite comfortable being so. As it was, she achieved a sort of fame, on a local level, in her hometown of Pennsauken– through her church, the organizations she joined, the volunteer work she engaged in. And I, by being the youngest of her five children, shared in that fame. No matter what level of fame I may achieve/may have achieved by virtue of being a comedian, to many of the residents of Helen’s hometown, that recognition will be dwarfed by my status as “Helen McKim’s son.”

Steven Wright, Barry Crimmins, Lenny Clarke, Steve Sweeney, Mike McDonald, Tony V, Ken Rogerson, Chance Langton, Bill Braudis and Jimmy Tingle will perform Sunday, May 4, in a benefit for Bob Lazarus at the Regents Theater in Arlington, MA .

Says the Regent site, “Lazarus was diagnosed with leukemia last summer, and has been in remission since his hospital stay in August, however he still has more outpatient treatments for the next ten months, which makes consistent work very difficult.”

Last Sunday, at Gotham in NYC, many of the members of the cast of the Sopranos showed up for a benefit for Borgata proprietor (and former owner of Pip’s in Brooklyn) Ray Garvey. Garvey is also undergoing treatment for cancer. Since the show was sold out (we heard a rumor that Woody Allen was supposed to show up… which is logical, since Garvey has appeared in more than one of Allen’s films), details were scant. Go here to see pics from the event.

And in another benefit show (also at Gotham) on Tuesday night, Rich Francese, Colin Quinn, Dave Attell, Jim Norton, Rich Vos, Artie Lange and Goumba Johnny performed to raise money for medical bills incurred by Chris Murphy, veteran comedian, comedy coach and writer. Murphy was also recently diagnosed with cancer.

And coming up, there will be a benefit for Mike Sullivan-Irwin. Sullivan-Irwin was recently diagnosed with cancer in his jaw. If we get any details, we’ll publish them here.

According to wife, Esther:

Cards and flowers can be sent to
Mike Irwin c/o
St. Mary’s Hospital
427 Guy Park Ave
room 4111.

Amsterdam, NY 12010

The Ithaca Times ran an interview with Jerry Stiller after his solo performance at Statler Auditorium

Tonight, I did what I wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to stand up in front of a crowd of people who were willing to listen to me and tell me whether my life was worth anything as an actor. I’ve been in plays, movies and all that, but this is something that’s always been in my mind, that I wanted to be up there as a stand up comedian, which I was never able to do. And when I stopped working on these television shows, I had the opportunity to start to put my life together for people. I started to craft the stories in such a way that they became more than just little sound bytes. And people liked it!

AP TV reporter David Bauder reports that Craig Ferguson’s CBS talk show beat his NBC rival last week for the first time since he started hosting the show in January 2005.

It caps a slow and steady climb for Ferguson and raises a red flag for future Tonight show host O’Brien, although NBC says it is still happy with O’Brien’s audience.

NBC suits were quick with the excuses and mitigating circumstances and the “key demo” sound bites. But all anyone hears is that Ferguson beat Conan.

The implications for Conan and for NBC are big. It is especially interesting since Jay Leno has been making noise about not exiting quietly when it comes time for his younger replacement to get behind the desk in Burbank. As those cards usta say before the commercial break on Johnny: “More to come.”

We have a report that Rochester-based comedian Tiny Glover passed away. His website is here. The Rochester Democrat-Chronicle reports that Glover died Sunday. Read the whole thing.

“Unbelievable,” said his fellow comic, Dan Liberto.””I’ve had comics calling from all over the country the last couple of days. He taught classes, he set up comedy coaching, he helped so many comics launch their careers. He toured the country, but his devotion to church and family was overwhelming.”

RadarOnline.com (“Pop, Politics, Scandal, Style” says their subtitle) has an article, “The Internet Is for Scorn, Meet the Web’s 10 most hated people.”

The Internet may provide endless hours of productivity-killing diversion and free-ish pornography, but that’s not all it offers. The Web also gives us a cloak of anonymity, allowing every man, woman, and child to expel anonymous bile on strangers—be they the real-life TV celebrities we can’t stand, or infamous figures brought to the nation’s attention via YouTube. Below, Radar’s list of the 10 people the Web really, really loves to hate.

It merits our attention here because Number 8 (click on over to the top of page 2 of the article) is David Cross.

…when the Boston-born comedian… was offered a big paycheck in exchange for a few weeks of work on the disposable kiddie flick Alvin and the Chipmunks, he put aside his artistic integrity and took the cash. To his Internet faithful, he might as well have been the Fox executive who pulled the plug on Arrested Development. Cross was immediately branded a “smug, condescending asshole,” and “a huge prick” on The Onion AV Club’s blog for taking the role (more than 300 commenters chimed in, most in agreement).

Readers of SHECKYmagazine will recall that we defended Cross’ decision to make the movie. (Well, we tried to pre-emptively head off any goofball talk of “selling out.” Our opinion is that the whole concept is weak.)

In response to a reader’s comment, who weakly defended Cross, we said the following:

We never said that Cross sold out. We said that pondering the very concept is a waste of time. That even trying to define it is a waste of time. Because those non-artists who concern themselves with such things have a tenuous grip on reality and those artists who bother to publicly contemplate the notion of selling out are either 1) Pandering to the non-artists who have a tenuous grip on reality or 2) Trying to fool themselves into believing that their art is somehow separate from commerce.

In either event, time is wasted.

It is nothing more than posturing, a New Age approach to marketing. Many amateurs who brandish the anti-selling out attitude do so as a matter of necessity. It is just as much a part of their marketing strategy as the zippered hoodie and the faux retro track shoes.

And, for some, it works.

And for some, it bites them in the ass. Hard. Witness the stinging criticism that Cross received at the hands of his “fans.”

Considering that the worldwide gross for the Chipmunk flick was $356,453,805, we figure that the paycheck for the sequel (and the paycheck for the sequel to the sequel) might soothe some of that sting. (Unless his character was killed… Perhaps there’ll be a prequel.)

The very funny quote on the myspace profile of the Stand Uppity Tour, headlining Andy Kindler, Eugene Mirman and Marc Maron reads:

“COMEDY THAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER ABOUT YOURSELF AND SUPERIOR TO OTHERS.”

Now that’s funny! The trio is coming to Newport, Chicago, St Paul, Fargo, Boise, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and “George, WA.” The tour is sponsored by Onion-meets-HuffPo comedy site 23/6.com.

And could there be a more polar opposite of the Stand Uppity Tour than the Night of 1,000 Guidos Tour? In terms of the sensibilities of the performers, the target demo, the approach taken to promotion and the choice of venues? The brainchild of Jim Labriola, the Guidos Tour is hyped through a slick, Flash-driven website with all the bells and whistles, including a short promo film (with a cameo by Borgata proprietor Ray Garvey). The show plays to mostly casino crowds and features the comedy of Labriola, Johnny Rizzo, Al Romero and Vic DiBitetto.