We’ll set the stage: A bunch of plucky German comics get together and, for lack of a comedy club circuit in their native land, start producing gigs at laundromats (sounds familiar!), and eventually they produce a television show based on the gigs called Nightwash.

The show is aired on regional local access television and it gets a following. We’ll let “German standup king Klaus-Jurgen ‘Knacki’ Deuser” pick up the story from there:

“It was a strange thing. We were on late and WDR kept moving us around, but the ratings were always great,” Deuser says. “We were on a regional channel, but traveling around the country, I noticed everyone knew Nightwash. We had become a brand.” A brand that seemed tailor-made for Comedy Central when it launched a German-language channel last year.

“Comedy Central was looking for something unique that would make them stand out, give them a name in Germany, and give them access to the latest new comedians,” Deuser says.

Now, instead of moving from wash salon to wash salon, Nightwash has a swanky home in Cologne’s Gloria theater. It is bigger than ever and can boast of being the launching pad for a new generation of Teutonic comics.

Emphasis ours.

Jaw-dropping!

TV execs in this country do stuff like this all the time. We recall that NBC pulled a similar move when they greenlighted the idea of broadcasting a freewheeling standup and music show that had been ongoing at L.A.’s funky, neo-Bohemian Largo then taped it at the cavernous, studio-like Knitting Factory, stripping it of its charm and transforming it into a tightly formatted standup show that was virtually indistinguishable from any that had preceded it.

They can’t help themselves… it’s what they do.

Part of the fun of Nightwash, writes Reuters’ Scott Roxborough, “was seeing the puzzled stares of night owls passing by outside. It soon became the favorite of insomniacs.” Part of the fun? It was probably as integral a part of the show’s charm as the comedians themselves. Now, with the helpful meddling of clueless German TV execs (no doubt with some tutoring from New York and L.A. suits!), Nightwash will have been laundered, dried, starched, ironed and folded– making it just like all the others that have come before it.

Regarding that ill-fated Knitting Factory show on NBC, it is helpful to check out this article (second item, scroll down), which appeared in the New York Observer on Dec. 10, 2000– just 20 months after we first launched SHECKYmagazine.com!

(The item provides valuable insight into the state of comedy affairs in late 2000. And it also might give readers who haven’t been with us since the beginning some insight into why we are like we are, and why we decided to fire up this magazine in the first place.)

The quote from NBC’s executive vice-president of casting, Marc Hirschfield is particularly galling/enlightening (depending upon your mood):

Mr. Hirschfeld said the NBC show will deviate from that tiresome mike-and-a-punch-line format, spotlighting the creative, sometimes arch alternative comics who have popped up with increasing frequency in recent years at places like the Luna Lounge in New York and Largo in Los Angeles. Mr. Hirschfeld described the kind of comedy the show is seeking as “free-form, a little less joke-telling and a little more storytelling.”

Of course, Hirschfield’s network ended up producing a standup show that was rather similar to standup shows of the past.

Mind you, we rather like the standup shows of the past– three, maybe four, standup comics doing what they do best– standup comedy! We just wonder why they feel the need to bash the format (and the performers) when they set about pitching, greenlighting and subsequently promoting the venture.

And, in the case of the Largo show and our German colleagues’ Nightwash project, why do they meddle to the point of destroying that which attracted them to the show in the first place?

Former SHECKYmagazine.com columnist Rusty Ward is now the anchor of a slickly-produced, two-minute Daily Show-style current events internet program called The Ward Room.

The show is but one small portion of the offerings of BarelyPolitical.com, an online venture created by former Philadelphian Ben Relles. (We had the pleasure of working on a couple projects with Relles while he was still obtaining his MBA from Wharton back a few years ago.)

Ward is listed as the head writer for the site, which seems to be concentrating on politically themed music videos and mp3’s. We notice that the BP site distinguishes itself from other, similar ventures by producing content with fairly high quality graphics, music and production values. Clicking around on BarelyPolitical is actually a tour of the future– quality content, virtually indistinguishable from that which is offered by major conglomerates, offered via the internet. As they used to say in the Antique Media, stay tuned.

We found a Reuters article about a study by some researchers in England that “found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”

And that, “The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.”

Emphasis ours. Has there been a study in the history of studies that found universal agreement in a sample size this large?

Comedy clubs might take this into consideration when they choose the clown motif when decorating (or re-decorating) the room. The number of comedy clubs that have– for reasons that are unfathomable– chosen to associate modern standup comics with clowns is disturbing.

We here at SHECKYmagazine HQ have never been fearful of clowns. Our attitude toward them has been a mixture of annoyed and bored from a very early age.

Perhaps the four most unashamedly maligned groups over the past 35 years have been lawyers, mimes, clowns and comedians. Probably in that order. So, you’d think we’d have a little sympathy. But, with very rare exceptions, comedians do not relate to clowns, not one bit. And it’s always baffled us as to why we are in any way associated with them. (And spare us the comments about the Auguste and the contra-Auguste and the ur-victim and the anarchist– we ain’t buyin’ it!)

The Female Half Googled her name yesterday. Coming up fifth in the list was her “JibJab video.” She was not aware that she had a JibJab video, so she clicked on it and discovered that someone using the screen name “Zattaz” had found her video somewhere and uploaded it to JibJab, where it resides (along with another two-minute chunk of her set) in the site’s Joke Box section. The Joke Box is hailed as “The largest joke-sharing community in the universe.”

This Zattaz character, if he does indeed exist and is a real, live person, is a sexagenarian from the United Kingdom who has uploaded 1,154 items to the site. Two of those are clips of the Female Half, one is a clip of the Male Half. It is difficult to determine the origin of the clips. We suspect it was poached from our YouTube clips or from one or two other sites which are authorized to run our clips. But, they seem to have been excised from longer clips.

Each of our YouTube clips have a provision for embedding– if a blog or a website (a comedy club, for instance) wants to embed the clip, they very easily can. But these clips seem to have been wrenched from their original mother clips and presented, with no context and not other information, in a shorter format, on a site that is generating traffic and revenue for the host. (In this case, JibJab.)

And, perhaps most disturbing, the clips that Zattaz has uploaded invite viewers to vote, giving the clip either a “Jib” (a positive rating) or a “Jab” (a negative rating). We have a similar option on some of our clips on YouTube, but it is by our choice on our terms and under our control.

The Male Half registered on JibJab and immediately sent an email to Mr. Zattaz, asking him to take down the clips in question. (And we’re not sure, but, since the Male Half received $5 in free JibJab credits just for signing up, we suspect that Mr. Zattaz has been receiving those same JibJab credits for scouring the web and providing content for the Spiridellis brothers. And we assume he can use same toward the purchase of JibJab mugs, stickers, t-shirts, etc.)

The Northeastern News, the Northeastern University student paper, has an article on The Naked Comedy Showcase, held the first Wednesday of every month at the ImprovBoston Theater. It’s standup comedy, featuring Boston-area comics, and they perform naked.

The creator of the show, Andy Ofiesh, has been putting on naked shows since 2002, after the idea came about during the entertainment portion of a clothing-optional retreat he attended nearly 10 years ago.

“I just tried it,” he said of performing stand-up in the nude. “It sort of came about by accident.”

We are being brave and trying not to imagine just what “it” refers to in that last sentence.

No female comics were quoted in the piece. We suspect that’s because no female comics have taken the naked challenge. If one did, says The Female Half, “it would be the only show where she wouldn’t hear ‘Show us your tits’ shouted from the back of the room.” She adds that she has had nightmares about performing naked and news of Ofiesh’s naked, on-purpose showcase brings shudders.

We’re not prudish when it comes to this latest gimmick. Far from it. (In fact, judging from the quotes that author Cynthia Retamozo has gathered, neither is the Boston public– the reaction seems to be one of tolerance, mild curiosity or, at the very most, declarations by critics that the shows might be “in poor taste.”) We can’t get all that worked up about it. We might even be inclined to declare that the concept is… dated, perhaps?

But, even in the face of tepid reactions from students, critics and others, some feel the need to defend the showcase, even dropping the A-bomb (Art!). To wit, this comment from Myq Kaplan, a regular commenter on these pages and one who took the naked standup plunge:

“…there is nudity in art, award-winning films and explicit music lyrics. If someone has a problem with their performance, he said, then they shouldn’t bother seeing it.

“Every art form pushes boundaries in certain directions,” he said.

A quote from Northeastern architecture major Nicole Fichera is telling: “I think I would maybe cover my eyes a few times, but it would probably be funny.”

To which we reply with a question or two: “Would it be funny with the eyes closed?” And, “Would it be funny if the comedians were clothed?” The answer to both questions is “Yes,” which leads us to conclude that the nudity adds nothing to the proceedings, making it neither more nor less artsy than, say, standup comedy performed by fully clothed men and women.

An article on HometownLife.com pumps the first annual Detroit International Comedy Festival.

Festival sponsor David Moroz of Aspen Talent said last summer’s four-night Comedy Idol competition held at Mark Ridley’s was a big success, drawing industry attention, crowds of comedy fans, and stand-up comics from across the United States and Canada, many of whom were motivated to come by the opportunity to work on Ridley’s stage. This month’s International Comedy Festival is not a competition, he said, but rather a showcase of talent and validation that Detroit is a centerpiece of stand-up comedy around the country.

We were as surprised as anyone to hear that this was coming up. It starts next Sunday (Jan. 20) and runs through the 25th.

In addition to hometown favorites Bill Hildebrand, Keith Ruff, Mike Green, Chrissy Burns, Bill Bushart and Dave Landau, the fest will feature Dave Coulier, Leighann Lord, Kivi Rogers and Ryan Hamilton, among many others.

We’re looking forward to our debut at Ridley’s Comedy Castle February 14-16.

An article on CanadianPress.com (with no byline?!?), loosely pegged on the WGA strike, kicks around the matter of gender in the writers’ room. There are plenty of quotes from female picketers, including this, from Sarah McLaughlin, who wrote for That 70s Show:

Sitcoms typically draw their writing talent from standup clubs, where women are scarce, but that doesn’t mean that witty women aren’t plentiful, she said.

To which we say, “Balderdash!” (Or Balderdash X 2!)

1. Women aren’t “scarce” in standup clubs.

and

2. Sitcoms typically don’t draw their writing talent from standup clubs.

We’ve commented in the past on this annoying trend among producers on more than one occasion. The trend has been to draw talent from “alternative” sources– The Ivy League or The Onion or workshops or anywhere but comedy clubs.

We suspect that somewhere along the line (probably when the fifteenth or sixteenth article about how Letterman’s staff was made up entirely of Harvard grads or the twentieth piece on The Simpsons that mentioned the Ivy League pedigree of the writers and show runners) the buzz in H-wood was that, in order to field a “fresh” and “new” creative team, they had to have marinated in the irony that is unique to Cambridge.

And, in true Hollywood fashion, a trend starts to resemble a rule after a while (think Groundlings or Second City).

We also suspect that in addition to the pull, there was a push– If you want to field a fresh and funny creative team, the last place you want to look would be among all those “jokey” and “set-up/punchline-y” wretches that ply their vile trade in the comedy clubs.

We say, if you’re going to hire a female writer, you can’t get a tougher one– who is more suited to a writers’ room– than a standup comic. A real one, not a comic who goes up onstage in L.A. because her manager told her it was a good idea. A comic who has a tough hide from a few gigs in flyover country where the audience provided a little… resistance.

And, when, as McLaughlin states, “a male writer says flat out, that women aren’t funny,” you can bet a female comic will have a rejoinder. It’s a nifty trick she picked up by doing all those hell gigs. Would a female comic run from the room? We think not. Regardless of whether that room is “more like (a) locker room, where writers cultivate a competitive atmosphere to squeeze the best jokes out of the staff.”

How’s this for a solution: Hire nothing but female writers. Problem solved. No competitive atmosphere, no locker room, no meltdowns. Throw in a token guy writer or two, just to make it look good.

Tonight, they kick off Comedy Central Presents at 10 PM EST with Dan Cummins and Stephen Lynch.

The press release mentions some of the rest of the acts that will be featured on this season’s CCP, but then they just use “and many more” instead of listing all of the comedians. Would it have killed them to list all of them?

And forget about trying to find the names on the broadband headache that is comedycentral.com! (We get the Comedy Central press releases in our inbox, but we confess that we usually delete them immediately. Perhaps we have learned our lesson… or perhaps they wouldn’t have listed all the comedians on the press release, either!)

From our posting in August on the taping of the series in NYC, comes the following list. Perhaps it is indicative of who ends up on this season’s …Presents.

Billy Gardell
Jo Koy
Jay Oakerson
Chad Daniels
Robert Kelly
Leo Allen
Eugene Mirman
Dan Mintz
Jordan Rubin
Brian Posehn
Nick Thune
Lavell Crawford
Hard ‘N Phirm
Bonnie McFarlane
Joe Matarese
Rich Vos
Sebastian Maniscalco
Juston McKinney
Kirk Fox
Zack Galifiniakis
Mike Birbiglia
Michael Showalter
Shaun Majumder
Nick Griffin

We took the liberty of extracting Cummins and Lynch.

The Columbus Dispatch interviewed Kathleen Madigan in anticipation of her first theater gig in Columbus tonight.

Naturally, she talks about her experience as a “talent scout” for the most reason season of Last Comic Standing. Madigan claims she “had a tough time tolerating the inexperienced.”

“Stand-up comedy is not like singing,” she said. “Some people who work at the post office, let’s say, actually can really sing. It’s astonishing.

“Yet even if you’re funny, if you’ve never done stand-up the way you do stand-up, you can’t go on national television for 15 weeks and wing it.

“I’m not saying you have to be a headliner, but at least you have to have done it for a couple years.”

Brilliant move on Madigan’s part to invite the local DJ’s to open! That should assure a packed house at the Vern Riffe Center.

The frigid weather is here, so that means that Last Comic Standing is holding auditions. Check out the casting information on the nbc.com site.

Then come back to this site when the degradation begins!

Rick Overton is listed as one of the hosts of Comedy Walk, as is SNL-er Garrett Morris. We also notice that Early SHECKYmagazine Columnist (He was the first Big Move writer) Rich Williams will be among the dozens of performers.

Comedy Walk is held in cooperation with the Los Angeles Downtown Art Walk, a monthly event that draws a crowd of 3,000 people to the streets of Los Angeles. Art Walk is from noon to 9pm at thirty participating downtown Los Angeles art galleries. Comedy Walk is from 8pm to 9:30pm at six participating downtown venues. Art Walk and Comedy Walk are on the second Thursday of each month. Both events are FREE, part of an effort to revitalize downtown Los Angeles.

The article in Hollywood Today says Comedy Walk is, “six simultaneous 90-minute variety comedy shows. With breaks at the half-hour, audience members can stretch their legs to walk to see a show at another nearby venue or stay where they are.” It’s tonight.

It’s a statement of fact and it’s the title of Dan Bialek‘s latest MySpace profile! We’ll let him tell the story (from DBHMS):

My name is Dan Bialek. I was the number one ranked comedian on the Myspace Top Comedian rankings from October 27, 2007 to January 8, 2008 when Myspace deleted my account after I made fun of two of their most famous comedians in a blog article on an unrelated site.

To become number one I used a process called “viewjacking.” A lot of comedians on Myspace use it to inflate their video counts and place themselves higher on the Myspace Top Comedian charts than they should be. Myspace knew about it for weeks (probably months) before they deleted my profile. A lot of their “top” comedians still featured on their site still use it today to bolster their positions on the site.

He goes on in some detail about his contempt for MySpace Comedy and how their system is, to put it mildly, corrupt.

He also includes a video that “will show you and anyone else who has a high speed internet connection and a spare computer lying around how to become 1 on Myspace Comedy and how to get millions of video views for free.”

Although the blog entry he references is rather dour, his YouTube video is simlutaneously subversive and cheerful! Bialek is delightfully upbeat while urging the potential destruction of a slice of MySpace! (And, if we get our profiles bumped off of MySpace for driving people to it, we’ll find him on his tour and kick his ass!)

But seriously, Bialek has pointed out what everyone has known all along: The internet is wondrous, but it is also so susceptible to manipulation– by the artist, the fan and the conglomerate– that such fantasies as “Comedian of the Month” or online comedy contests are about as credible as 1950s-era “nationwide talent searches” or swooning bobbysoxers or brawls at a heavyweight fight weigh-in.

Dave Mosher, writing for Live Science, reports on a study out of Haifa:

New research conducted by brain researcher Avi Karni of the University of Haifa in Israel explores the possibility that naps help lock in sometimes fleeting long-term memories. A 90-minute daytime snooze might help the most, the study finds.

It’s all about what the eggheads call memory consolidation– “the results of this research suggest the possibility that it is possible to speed up memory consolidation.”

Let’s just say that the labcoats discovered that 90-minutes naps are a quick and easy way to lock in certain kinds of memory and make them “immune to interference and forgetting.”

Next time someone busts your balls for napping in the middle of the day, just tell them that it’s important for your memory consolidation and that without it, tonight’s set might be vulnerable to intereference and forgetting.

Or just tell them to stick it.

Hollywood Reporter says that Barry Katz has successfully pitched a sports-themed standup comedy show to be shown on the 4-million subscriber New England Sports Network.

Each week, All-Stars will feature three comedians from Boston and nationwide performing stand-up routines with sports-only topics. Gulman and the other top comics also will participate in remote pieces focusing on Boston teams and in sports-themed comedy sketches.

The show is set to go into production Sunday through Thursday at the Comedy Connection located inside Boston’s Faneuil Hall and at other locations throughout New England.

Gary Gulman will host and the show will also feature taped segments.

They must find (have already found?) 30 comics who can do sets entirely revolving around sports. A tall order. If they can do it anywhere, they can do it in Boston.

St. Charles (MO) city councilman Richard Veit has proposed a ban on swearing in that city’s bars.

Marc Rousseau, who owns bar R.T. Weilers, said he thinks the bill needs revision.

“We’re dealing with adults here once again and I don’t think it’s the city’s job or the government’s job to determine what we can and cannot play in our restaurant,” Rousseau said.

The proposal would ban indecent, profane or obscene language, songs, entertainment and literature at bars.

A meeting to discuss the proposal is set for Jan. 14.

A ludicrous proposition, of course. Veit will be a laughingstock for suggesting such a law. The bar owner quoted has more of a feel for the Constitution than the elected official. No surprise there.

The implications for standup are obvious. But, while stories like this one brighten the day for AP editors, the followup stories, where the councilman is shunned and his proposal is held up to brief public ridicule, never make the wires.

Here is one of those New York Times “Vow”articles where they talk about some famous or near-famous people getting married. They talk about the ceremony, but they also talk about the romance that led up to the blessed day.

In this case, the victims/subjects are Ardin Myrin (MadTV) and her comedy writer, groom Dan Martin.

What struck us (in addition to the oddly detailed and personal romance story, of course) was the caption under the pic at the top. The photo depicts Myrin at her wedding, clutching a microphone at her Dec. 30 wedding at Round Barn Farm in Waitsfield, VT. It’s the happiest day of her life and the 140 in attendance are most likely joined in that delirium. The caption reads:

The bride, a comedian, takes advantage of a captive audience.

We wish it were an ironic cap.

Here’s a heartwarming slice of an Orlando Sun-Sentinel account of a recent audition at the Improv in West Palm to compete for a spot in the South Beach Comedy Festival.

Comedians were asked to prepare 3 minutes worth of clean material in front of Comedy Central executives and festival organizers.

Laer walked on stage and improvised for a few minutes before poking fun of stand-up comedian Dane Cook.

He said Cook had originally inspired him to do standup but after watching him live in Los Angeles, Laer said “I can do this, I’m funnier than this guy.”

So, of course, they bump the kid to the next level.

Which is the more important question:

“Why does a comic think he can get away with trashing a fellow comic at such a high-profile event?”

or

“Why would Comedy Central reward such rude, stupid behavior?”

The latter question is especially pertinent, considering how much money Cook makes for the cable outlet and how heavily he is identified with them.

As for the first question, comics (and, for the sake of argument, we’ll allow that Laer is a comic) feel that not only can they get away with such trash talk, they are encouraged to do so— by other comics, by some particularly rude fans and, astonishingly, by small and petty cable television suits.

An email with the ungainly subject line, “Boise Funny Bone Employees all RESIGN, fed up with bad business practices and bouncing paychecks” was floating around on the internet. It contained a list of grievances (“missed payroll,” “reduced earning potential” and “anxiety”) and was signed by “the Boise Funny Bone Staff.”

It’s dated January 1, 2008, and it looks like a permanent end to the Great Boise Funny Bone saga. We’re told that the club officially closed with the end of the New Year’s Eve show, with Bengt Washburn onstage.

But it’s not the end of standup in Boise. We’ve been assured by former BFB manager Pat Mac that he and a partner have a plan in place to resume with a new venue in Boise– leaving Idaho’s capital without a comedy club for only about six weeks.

We’ve been scheduled to appear in Boise for some time now– March 5-9 is the date– so we’re looking forward to the new club.

According to an E!Online article, Dane Cook has set the new endurance record– seven hours.

“I never sat down or left the stage. The show started with a small mighty crowd of around 60, and 35 of us were together this morning still laughing and recapping 2007 with laughs galore. It felt fantastic,” says Cook.

And Chappelle has allegedly threatened to reclaim his title. This is just too horrible to contemplate. Any comic, not just Cook or Chappelle. It’s macho posturing gone horribly wrong.

Pudgy, the Chicago comedian who was a fixture in Las Vegas casinos, has died.

We met Pudgy once, in March of 1995. We were in Las Vegas, as the creative team for The John DeBella Show, broadcasting a week of shows from the Hard Rock Casino Hotel. It fell to us to find out which comedians were in town and try to book them as guests on the show.

Pudgy was the comedian on the Crazy Girls show at the Riviera at the time. She appeared as a guest on the radio show and her interview was one of the highlights of the week. She graciously invited us to catch one of her Crazy Girls performances. We took her up on the invite.

It was her job to open the show and play off that embarrassment the permeated the room as 300 or so mostly males waited in the dark for “Las Vegas’ Sexiest Topless Revue” to begin.

Pudgy dealt with it by further embarrassing those males. And she did it well. She was the female authority figure, constantly re-appearing amid the pulchritude, to shame the boys for being the pigs they were. It’s an odd dynamic, but it worked.

The “Queen of Tease,” variously described as an insult comic or “the female Don Rickles,” Beverly Wines Cardella started out in Chicago and ended in Vegas. She was the emcee on the X Burlesque show at the Flamingo when she died at her home of a heart attack on Christmas eve, according to LVR-J columnist Norm Clarke. Read his obit here.

Jay did a lengthy monologue, as has been his custom, at one point saying, “This is what I do,” referring to his three decades as a comic, implying that he was the author of the monologue. It was no more or no less funny than other such sets we’ve seen him do over the years.

We missed Dave’s opening. But we caught some of his Q & A with the audience. The Female Half says the beard’s got to go, likening it to General Lee.

We found it somewhat odd that Dave’s first guest upon returning is a comedian with a stubborn reputation for adapting/stealing/absorbing material from fellow comedians over the years?

In the run-up to this showdown, the media said that folks would choose to watch Letterman over Leno, because the former had writers, while the latter had none. We think the exact opposite will happen– viewers will tune in to see if they can detect any drop in quality in Leno’s writer-less presentation. It should be interesting to see the ratings.

Dave is coming back tonight, with a beard and with a deal cut with the WGA. So is Ferguson. Leno’s also coming back tonight, with no beard and no deal. And Conan, as he announced earlier, will return as well.

Hollywood blowhard Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily has all the news you need to know about the current state of affairs re the Writers’ Strike.

In Finke’s Letterman item is the following:

I’m told that, at the end of their first day back, The Late Show writers decided to donate a percentage of their salaries every month until the strike ends to the WGA Strike Fund and the Actors Fund. “The Strike Fund for obvious reasons, and the Actors Fund because it is need-based for all of those collaterally damaged, including below-the-liners,” Letterman writer Bill Schreft (sic) just told me.

(Did Scheft also tell you how to spell his last name?)

Finke also “reviews” the monologues, but, as readers of this magazine know, Finke should just stick to the deadlines and stay away from punchlines.

She tosses this into the Conan review:

The main guest was even lamer than the monologue: the no-talent Bob Saget. No, I’m not kidding. (And, yes, he’s still alive though thankfully not on primetime anymore.)

Nice! No-talent? Sure glad Finke’s keeping all this professional!

Aaaaahhh! That’s better!

This is the view from the Male Half’s porthole. That’s not a euphemism. The Male Half embarked on his first cruise last week. He jetted into a balmy San Juan, sailed to St. Thomas (pictured above), then chugged out across the Caribbean for Aruba, doing one show on evening number one (The Welcome Aboard Show!) and another on Christmas night (The 11:15 Adult Comedy Show!).

That’s the Adventure of the Seas, on the right, resting in Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St. Thomas. It’s parked next to a Celebrity cruiseliner, and, out of the frame, to the extreme left, is yet another liner from the MSC line. It’s quite impressive to see all three lined up end to end.

Since it was his first ever cruise, (and first time ever performing on a cruise), and since the specs for such a show are so specific and narrow (and rather different from what a regular club comic is accustomed to), TMHOTS admits to some nervousness leading up to that first set.

“I only had to do fifteen. But it had to be freakishly clean, at least according to what the agency told me and according to all the advice I had gotten,” says he. “So, you can imagine my relief when, after being onstage for only about two minutes, I discovered that my high school history teacher was in the second row.”

On the ocean somewhere between San Juan, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas, in the second row of the Lyric Theater, onboard the Adventure of the Seas (capacity 3,840), during the Welcome Aboard Show, was Arlene Rubin, aka “Ms. Rubin,” The Male Half’s tenth grade American History and homeroom teacher at Pennsauken High School.

The audience, predictably, absolutely flipped out– “They saw that I was astounded. Who wouldn’t be? And they were thrilled to have been in on the coincidence. It went a long way toward making my first cruise set an interesting and entertaining one– over and above the material– and they really went goofy when I asked her what she’s doing these days, she said, ‘I’m the principal!'””

They caught up on the past three decades with a round of Manhattans in the Schooner Bar afterwards. Life is strange.

We’re slightly delirious and, while not in the full throes of influenza madness, we’re still quite sick. Nasty little antigenic brute, that flu bug.

We were upright for several hours yesterday. Upright and speaking in near-complete sentences and actually taking the occasional interest in things outside of the four-foot bubble of malaise that typically surrounds the recovering influenza patient.

We’re not curled up in that pathetic moaning fetal ball, but we’re not actually capable of much more than channel surfing or lying about and blinking, wondering when the heavy blanket of post-fluvial fatigue will lift and we’ll be able to focus on matters relating to comedy.

It might come sooner than we think– who would have dreamed, 36 hours ago, that we’d be typing this 36 hours later? And making sense? We are making sense, right? It’s hard to tell right now.

Stay tuned.

We know– we were stunned, too.

CNN.com is running an article in their “mental_floss” section entitled “Long line of Jewish comedians ahead of Seinfeld.”

Handed down since Moses was kvetching about having to cross the desert in his bare feet, Jewish humor emanated from Eastern Europe where the Hebrews overcame some seriously hellacious circumstances on the way to the Promised Land. “Laughter through tears,” they called it.

They go on to profile ten “groundbreaking Jewish comedians.”

Of course, this comes as no surprise to anyone even passingly familiar with the art or the history of standup comedy. And early readers of this magazine are especially aware of the role that Jews played in standup– we have cited on more than one occasion what we believe to be the definitive work on the subject, Lawrence J. Epstein’s “The Haunted Smile,” which contains the following:

The embarrassingly rich crop of American Jewish comedians defies common sense. In 1979, for example, Time estimated that whereas Jews made up only 3 percent of the American population, fully 80 percent of professional comedians were Jewish.

The real story is the startling transformation of the business of standup since the Time estimate– the business underwent a swift and thorough diversification in the ensuing ten years. Yet the influence of the legion of Jewish comedians lives on– it could be argued that we’re all Jewish comedians. Nearly all modern comics, be they Irish-American or African-American, impressionist or monologist, male or female, can trace their comedy roots back to early Jewish performers. They are nearly all, wittingly or unwittingly, influenced by the likes of Al Jolson, Henny Youngman, Myron Cohen, Milton Berle or Weber and Fields.

Another fascinating observation on the subject comes from Gary Giddins’ excellent collection of articles from 1992, “Faces In The Crowd.” In his 1985 essay on Jack Benny, he writes:

Before 1900, Jewish grotesquerie was a familiar ingredient in the entertainment world, but Jewish humor that wasn’t self-deflating simply didn’t exist on the American stage. “There were plenty of excellent Jewish performers,” according to vaudeville’s chronicler Douglas Gilbert, “but they were doing Dutch, blackface, or singing and dancing acts. Some of them were good Irish comedians. Indeed, Weber and Fields at one time did a neat Irish act.”

In just over a century, the situation is reversed– in the past, we had Jewish performers imitating Dutch and Irish comics. Now we have comics of every ethnicity and nationality doing essentially Jewish schtick.

XM comedy honcho Joel Haas forwarded the following, which was submitted via their website’s listener feedback mechanism from an XM subscriber whom we shall call Andy:

I listened to Brian McKim‘s bit about Turkey sex this AM, perhaps 11:00 CST or thereabouts. Damned near crashed my truck. If I had been drinking or eating I would have been hospitalized for ruptured sinuses. Anyway, how can I get a copy of that cut. I need to play it for a few very deserving folks, preferably while they are eating or drinking.

A nice Christmas present, says the Male Half.

We always wonder what’s going on out there when our material sprays out of the satellite. It’s nice to know that there are folks listening… and quite possibly sustaining injuries in fiery crashes!

Haas was nice enough to refer the fan to our website, where he can purchase the CD that contains that very Turkey Sex bit!

Daniel B. Smith, writing for the Boston Globe, has spun out a four-page article about the work of one Christopher Sprigman, a legal scholar who maintains that our recent approach to intellectual-property law has been “wrongheaded.”

The article caught our eye because Sprigman cites the example of Joe Rogan’s public flogging of Carlos Mencia (and the subsequent dissemination of the clip of the incident via YouTube)as an example of “a comedian enforcing respect for originality without resorting to legislation, lawyers, or the courts.”

“People usually talk about how the Internet destroys intellectual property,” says Sprigman. “But here the Internet enforces intellectual property. It helps to protect creativity by shaming pirates.”

We read the entire article. We advise our readers to do the same. It’s a nutshelling of the multiple sides of the ongoing debate about intellectual property (IP), copyright protection and the role of government in the creation and enforcement of legislation governing same.

Smith says that Sprigman, who, with UCLA prof Kal Raustiala co-authored the groundbreaking 2006 paper “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” are members of the “free culture movement” and the “Copy Left”– “a diverse group of professors, lawyers, and activists that believes the expansion of intellectual-property rights is restricting the free flow of ideas, diminishing the nation’s creativity, and flouting the explicit intentions of the Founding Fathers.” (Notice anyone missing from the diverse group? If you answered “artists,” you win a prize!)

Sprigman, Raustalia and other like-minded folks have come up with the interesting concept of “negative spaces.” These are “industries that receive little to no legal protection for their ideas or products, yet that continue to innovate, often at a rapid clip.” To bolster their argument, they cite professional magicians, creators of haute cuisine and high fashion as such negative space industries. And they most recently have advanced the argument that standup comedy is one such negative space.

And, in the above example, they cite the Rogan-Mencia brawl as proof that standup comedy continues to thrive without legal protection. We are, to say the least, skeptical of Sprigman and Raustalia’s claims.

Did Rogan in fact enforce respect for originality? Did he really use the internet to enforce intellectual property? Can it honestly be said that Rogan protected creativity or shamed any pirates by doing what he did? We contend that he failed on all counts.

Does this mean that we think the courts should intervene? Certainly not. We think Rogan did exactly what a comic should do. (And he did what comics have often done– direct confrontation with the offending party, one-to-one policing– a time-honored tradition among standup comics.)

What we take issue with is the contention that standup is the perfect business to use as an example in their quest to provide proof of their negative space concept.

The article contains a few more rather tenuous (if not outright erroneous) conclusions or assumptions about standup comedy too numerous to mention here.

Perhaps the actual paper that Sprigman published clarifies matters, but, from what we’ve read in the Globe article, he might pick a better industry with which to effect a loosening of copyright control or the thwarting of further copyright extensions by lawmakers.

At one point, the authors come dangerously close to offering what we call around here the “Doritos Defense” when they excuse the rampant copying of designer dresses– Don’t worry, we’ll make more! (How many times have we heard joke thievery minimized with the advice, “Let it go! Just write more material!” Indeed, often we’ve heard the victim say, “I don’t let it bother me… I can always write more material!”)

What is their game exactly? A clue might be provided by the title of a “manifesto” written by Stanford law prof Lawrence Lessig: “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”

It would appear that Lessig and other Copy Leftists are using magicians, fashion designers, chefs and standup comics as pawns in their game. Their ham-handed (and wildly inaccurate) depictions of the inner workings of these various milieux are being used as ammunition as they make their case against Big Media (Time Warner, UMG, Fox, Comcast, Verizon, Disney, etc.).

Their past attempts at turfing copyright legislation have been failures. We don’t see this newest tack as having any more success than previous ones.

Standup comic K.P. Anderson, head writer for E! Channel’s The Soup, is sending out a MySpace bulletin touting the upcoming standup dates featuring himself and Soup host Joel McHale and Chris Hardwick at the Irvine Improv Jan. 4-6 and at the San Francisco Punchline Feb. 1 and 2.

We initially figured that Anderson and McHale were hitting the boards because the writers’ strike had forced them to earn their rent the old fashioned way. Turns out fresh batches of The Soup are still being cooked up though, at least according to the Seattle Times.

Happy New Year from SHECKYmagazine.com!

Our postings have been on the light side. We’ve been paying attention to other matters– the holidays, entertaining, the Male Half’s First Cruise (which is now history)– and it’s been a vacation within a vacation.

In prepping for Christmas, we determined that our playlist here at SHECKYmagazine HQ would be strictly drawn from our carefully selected collection of mostly mid-century Christmas recordings. We gleaned them from carefully digitized vinyl and scrupulously transcribed audio cassettes then pumped the resulting files through the stereo system using our mp3 player.

These holiday recordings by Dean Martin, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Jimmy Sturr, Les Brown, Bing Crosby raised the bar to very high level. Most of the recordings since– the overwrought Phil Specter stuff, the novelty songs using chipmunks and grandmas and injurious reindeer and the ubiquitous bleatings of Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey and (gulp!) Natalie Cole– are crass, calculated and cheap by comparison.

We incorporated a new album into the mix this year. We happened across a pristine copy of a cassette of Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Songs” and immediately pumped it through Sound Forge, converting it into mp3’s. It is a delight.

In the world of holiday music, Tormé is famous for having penned one of the more popular modern Christmas songs, “The Christmas Song.” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”) So, you’d think that an entire album featuring his treatments of Xmas standards would be as prominent on department store playlists as the wretched “Motown Christmas Album.”

But, no!

Tormé’s collection (recorded in 1992 for the Telarc label), with the Cincinnati Sinfoneitta, is tasteful, understated, and swingin’! It belongs right up there with the greats, perhaps even knocking off Andy Williams’ aptly titled “Andy Williams Christmas Album” at the number one spot. (We have a near-mint vinyl copy of Williams’ 1963 classic, recorded for Columbia, which is curiously lacking any information on its cover, other than a listing of the song titles! Is that even legal?)

Click here for a clip of Mel singing/swinging “Good King Wenceslaus”! Mel, backed by a standup bass and then a tinkling jazz piano with brushes on a snare, is at his best. He even sings the more obscure verses where most vocalists dare not go:

Bring me flesh and bring me wine
Bring me pine logs hither
Thou and I will see him dine
When we bear him thither.

Page and monarch forth they went
Forth they went together
Through the rude wind’s wild lament
And the bitter weather

Anyone who can sing a song and use the word “thither” and still maintain credibility is a master!

Sharp-eyed FOS Jouni Kallio (from Finland!) sent us a link to a Time magazine article that says that researchers have concluded that the baby of the family is more likely to find a wacky job… like comedian:

Younger siblings, by contrast, are looser cannons, less educated and less strapping, perhaps, but statistically likelier to live the exhilarating life of an artist or a comedian, an adventurer, entrepreneur, GI or firefighter.

“If you’re bigger than your siblings, you punch ’em,” Sulloway says.
But there are low-power strategies too, and one of the most effective ones is humor. It’s awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood, able to get their way simply by being funny or outrageous. Birth-order scholars often observe that some of history’s great satirists– Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain– were among the youngest members of large families, a pattern that continues today. Faux bloviator Stephen Colbert– who yields to no one in his ability to get a laugh-often points out that he’s the last of 11 children.

The staff here at SHECKYmagazine is 100 per cent Baby of the Family. It may well be that a lot of you out there are last-born as well. We aren’t sold on the reasons that the scientist above has cooked up.

The Female Half theorizes that it’s a function of just how close the parents are to “giving up” by the time the baby rolls around. Siblings 1 and2? They’ve got New Mom and New Dad– very serious about their roles, determined to raise a child (or two or three or more) and turn him/her/them into a responsible adult. All that grit and seriousness tends to ebb by the time the last child arrives. The other siblings may well be funny. They may have the ability to be artists or GI, but they’ve been charged with “making the family proud.” The pressure is on to get into a legitimate line of work. For the baby? Not particularly.

An AP story written by Eric Carvin asks the question, “With talk shows returning to late night without their writers, is it time to dust off your favorite gags and submit them to the networks? In a word, no”

Amateur jokesters might wonder if this means the window is opening– if just a crack– for their 15 seconds of fame.

NBC’s Web site makes it abundantly clear: You might as well keep your jokes to yourself.

The article wonders why, then solicits the expert opinion of Gordon Firemark, “an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles,” who says “it’s all about avoiding lawsuits.”

“Someone submits their joke to Jay Leno’s people and two weeks later– or two years later– Jay does a joke that’s a variation, or maybe it’s exactly the same joke,” Firemark said, offering an example. “Maybe they did see the material that was submitted, and they should have contacted the person. But as often as not, the joke wasn’t really that original to start with.”

“The problem is that, because they made that submission, now the company has had access to that material,” the lawyer said. “And that’s the first threshold step in making a claim for copyright infringement.”

This is, of course, total nonsense.

A far as we know, the talk shows have always solicited (and used and paid for) jokes submitted by non-staff, non-union writers. (We’ve submitted jokes in the past to Fox’s Comic Strip Live, Tonight and Politically Incorrect. And we had invites from a head writer or two to submit. And the process was always the same: The jokes are submitted via fax (at least they were in the past… it is quite possible they’re submitted by email now), and each and every writer is asked to sign a waiver before submitting his first joke, if he is to be accepted as a faxer. The waiver explains exactly how the process works and spells out the terms of payment. (In the past, it was $50 per joke. It probably still is.) Many a faxer has evetnually graduated to staffer via this route. If anyone else knows any different, we’re all ears.

It is perplexing to see this. Are they trying to keep the backdoor faxing method of joke submission a secret? Is it no longer used?

First of all, you may be asking, who is Britt Ekland?

She’s a Swedish actress mainly famous for being a Bond girl (Man With The Golden Gun) and for nearly banging Peter Sellers to death (he had a heart attack, in bed, on their wedding night).

Well, apparently, Ekland had such a wonderful time appearing in a stage version of Grumpy Old Women, her publicist is circulating the rumor that she is now ready, at the age of 65, to tackle standup comedy.

Recalling her part in the comedy, Britt reportedly mused: “There’s a lot of one-liners there and it has opened up my vistas. I’ve done comedy before but perhaps I could do stand-up.”

IMDB says the Bond flick role was the high point of her career. That was 1974. If someone thinks that doing standup can revive a career that’s been moribund for 33 years, there is something totally weird going on out there. This can only end badly.

The Aspen Times has a story on the Wheeler Opera House and their plans to book a standup series– or maybe a festival– now that HBO has blown town.

Last week, the Wheeler unveiled a plan to keep the town in good humor this winter even without the HBO-sponsored U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (USCAF), which had become a marquis event over its 13 years in Aspen. The Wheeler will present a new four-part stand-up comedy series, “What’s So Funny?,” over February and March.

(We’re fairly certain they mean “marquee” event… although there are so many wealthy people in Aspen, there might be a nobleman or two in attendance.)

Also: We’re told that, “Each event will conclude with Brenner doing a 20-to 30-minute set of new material, with a fresh routine planned for each show.” How many times will the public be expected to fall for this scam? Brenner tells the media that he’ll be doing “material taken directly from today’s headlines,” then he ends up doing a set cobbled together with material from his last 12 appearances on The Mike Douglas Show.

(And we add the usual disclaimer: We got no problem with old material. We do have a problem with telling the media– and the public– that you’re going to do one thing, then doing the exact opposite.)

The article descends into that special brand of weirdness that only the presence of David Brenner brings about:

“David said to me, ‘Do you realize you’re going to have me working harder than I ever have in my career?” said Gram Slaton, the executive director of the Wheeler Opera House.

Does everyone have this straight by now? No one works harder than David Brenner! There are ways of getting this message out and not sounding ridiculous. Brenner has not mastered it. Nor has the Wheeler’s Slaton.

Slaton manages to wedge in a bunch of the classic Brenner-isms– the odd and slightly cranky medley of complaints, pretense and surliness that oozes from Brenner whenever he gets near a reporter’s tape recorder:

“David’s at the point where he’s seriously considering what his legacy will be,” Slaton said. “What we found is, he’s passionate about stand-up as its own art form, not as a way to get a TV series.”

Slaton was likewise concerned about Brenner’s legacy. He observed that Brenner, though he has remained busy as a performer, was little-known to younger audiences.
“George Carlin was cool, but he went through a period of being unhip before he became cool again,” Slaton said. “David’s the same way– he’s so funny, but there’s a generation that missed out on him.

“I was thinking, what can I do to introduce him to a younger audience? What to do about David and about the Comedy Festival?”

You better believe when we hear “younger audience,” we automatically think “Aspen, CO!”

This fairy tale has it all– A 19th century opera house, a 20th century comedian and… a 21st century Online Comedy Initiative!

A third partner in the series is Rooftop Comedy. The San Francisco entity began as a web-based comedy clearing house, a sort-of MySpace of comedy, where performers could post clips of their act. Rooftop has broken into working as an agency, and was looking for venues in which to place its comedians. While trolling the Rooftop website to look for talent, Slaton and Brenner struck up a relationship with the organization.

A splendid touch– “While trolling the Rooftop website to look for talent…” Yeah… we’re sure that’s how the whole thing went down.

Read the entire thing here.

It’s FOS Paul F. Tompkins singing a duet with Aimee Mann. Tompkins, you’ll note, is doing his best Dean Martin impression.

The Female Half’s analysis of what might be the most bizarre Christmas tune of the twentieth century invokes Tom Jones, Ricardo Montalban, Dolly Parton and many more….

In fact, that’s the other great mystery of this song. Why does it attract such strange pairings? Over the years, it has been recorded by such odd couples as Alan Cumming and Liza Minnelli, Ann Margaret and Brian Setzer and, my personal bad-favorite, Bette Midler and James Caan.

Read the rest at Road Atlas Shrugged.

The Scotsman, in the obligatory “what to get for that hard-to-shop-for man” article, suggests… comedy DVD’s!

Amuse him with Omid Djalili‘s No Agenda stand-up comedy DVD (£11.99, HMV). Billy Connolly‘s Was It Something I Said? (£12.99, HMV) and Peter Kay‘s Stand Up Ukay (£12.99, HMV) will also have him laughing.

It’s a no-brainer. The guy’s hafta keep the sense of humor sharp, as countless surveys have told them that the chicks rank that attribute above all others when hunting for a man.

(You’ll thank us for not referring to them as “wee gifties.” Oops… we just did.)

UPDATE: Cringehumor.com is sending out MySpace bulletins blaming the cancellation on the weather.

If you like a little a bit of rudeness with your standup, this year’s Cringe Humor Awards will be this Sunday, December 16, at 8 PM at Comix.

Appearances by Jim Norton, Patrice Oneal, Joe Matarese, Rick Shapiro, Big Jay Oakerson, Mike Vecchione and more!

Come down and celebrate the best & worst of stand up comedy in 2007, as the annual Cringe Humor Awards debuts at its fantastic new venue, Comix. Many of New York City’s top comedians are set to perform, and we will also honor a standup comedy icon as the 2007 Cringe Humor Legend.

Go here for further details. (The website says that “Many more acts will be added soon!” And it also says that Oneal and Norton are “not scheduled to perform but will be in attendance.”)

FOS Rich Vos will host.

(We made extra sure that neither one of us was nominated as “Hack of the Year” before we hit “POST.”)

We were wondering who was going to save standup comedy, who was going to “bring it back.” We have been waiting for someone to restore comedy to its rightful place among the performing arts.

Tony Hinchcliffe is such a performer. Just ask him.

There were so many juicy quotes to choose from in the recent interview in the Youngstown Vindicator, it was hard pick just one. We may have settled on our fave:

“They liked me, even though it was my first night,” Hinchcliffe said. “They said I’m better than some people who have been doing this for 10 years. And I’ve never seen it since or before. They have 15 [open-mic-night performers] every Sunday and Monday, and I’ve never seen it done.”

Perhaps it’s a tie. While the above quote is certainly interesting, this one is good, too:

I did a show in May when I was only a month into my career and I killed the joint for an hour and 10 minutes.

Then, of course, there’s the title of this very posting (see above).

That is an actual quote from the interview. We’re not making this up.

Perhaps it was Hinchcliffe who was making it up. We can only hope.

Maybe the reporter for the Vindicator was an unwitting accomplice to this bombast gone horribly out of control. That’s the only thing that can make this less than nauseating.

You’ve seen the commercials that have been airing. They’re part of the “Together We Can Prevail” series produced by Bristol Myers Squibb touting their various drugs for rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, AIDS, etc. You may have noticed the one of them featuring Lynn Redgrave that is in particularly heavy rotation.

We saw one featuring comedian Lou DiMaggio. The copy on the screen says that Lou had a heart attack in 2005 at the age of 46. The copy on the BMS website says that he’s now “(taking) care of his heart with diet, exercise and medication.”

We were in our hotel room, not paying attention to the TV, when, “Hey! There’s Lou DiMaggio!” We remember him from the 80s on the east coast. He moved to L.A. pretty early on in the game.

Jacinta Nandi (aka “Candi Girl”) is a regular in Berlin’s spoken word venues. She’ll be talking about that milieu in a series of monthly columns for Expatica.com, “an invaluable resource for English-speaking internationals in 5 European countries.”

The Berlin English-language comedy and Spoken Word scenes are inextricably entwined, slightly incestuous even. Now, we do get criticized for this a bit — but is that always a bad thing? In any case, we would like to thank our Spoken Word/comedy family – and invite everyone out to join us.

Scroll down to the bottom of the column for a listing of comedy nights and other, related spoken word venues in Berlin and environs.