David Alan Grier will headline the Fourth Annual Laugh Detroit Comedy Festival at the end of this month. Then Bob Saget and Lynn Koplitz will close out the fest on April 2.

In between, there’ll be a whole lot of comedy going on at Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle– including a Tuesday night showcase show hosted by the Halves of the Staff! (We’re pleased to return to the Castle, having headlined there a couple times over the past few years. It’s a spectacular venue and we look forward to this fest!)

Monday Host: Auggie Smith

Andy Beningo
Mark Colella
Homer Shadowheart
Christine Stump
Joey Rockenstein
Robert Hines
Emily Wahlund
Forrest Shaw
Kevin McCaffrey
Mike Baldwin
James P Connolly

Tuesday Hosts Brian McKim/Traci Skene

Michael Harrison
Felicia Gillespie
Trevor Smith
Jeff MacKinnon
Marc Maietta
Rob Paravonian
Jennifer Murphy
Devin C.
AJ Finney
Michael Finoia
Scott White

Wednesday Host Karen Rontowski

David Drake
Lance Weiss
Shep Slater
Rosie Tran
Pat Oates
Ben Konstantin
Matt Stanton
Kyle Ploof
Mike Bonner
Lou Santini
Lamont Ferguson

Stay tuned for updates and, when we get there, plenty of pics and musings.

Can we talk?

The first thing we watched after signing up for the Netflix free trial was “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.”

We love documentaries.  We’ve thoroughly enjoyed a wide variety of such movies over the past few years (from “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey” to “Capturing the Friedmans”) and we’re always pleasantly surprised when we’re… pleasantly surprised by some of the revelations in the stories.

We were fully prepared to be surprised by “A Piece of Work”– even though we were very familiar with Rivers’ life story and career trajectory.

Perhaps that’s why this documentary was so utterly disappointing.  There were no surprises.  Of course, a lot of other folks (inside and outside the business) were probably very surprised by the narrative.  So we can’t hold that against the movie.

But we must admit that our expectations were raised by so many positive reviews and upbeat Facebook status reports.  One person after another– many of them fellow comedians– raved about the pic.  So many of our colleagues went so nutty over it, we figured that, though it might be telling a familiar tale, it must have been insightful or packed with “inside” stuff or perhaps inspirational.

It was none of those things.

It was not “a behind the scenes look at the dark side of show-biz,” as one critic characterized it.  Rivers is depicted as living on top of a building in Manhattan, in an apartment that would make Louis XIV envious.  She has a “staff.”  She probably hasn’t flown on a commercial flight since the 90’s.  Yet, she opens the movie by bemoaning her empty calendar.

The film then purports to show us “a year in the life” of a struggling Joan Rivers.

We’re not against someone making gobs of money– or spending gobs of money.  But it’s a bit disingenuous of Rivers to:

1. Perform at a 4,000-seat theater
2. Hop on a private jet
3. Hawk her jewelry on QVC
4. Go to a book-signing (signing her book!)
5. Go on (and WIN!) Celebrity Apprentice
6. Field offers for $125,000 for a three-day cruise appearance

And then complain (while brushing back tears) that no one wants her.

Who fell for this?

And the events surrounding her Comedy Central Roast made her look rather thin-skinned. Unusual for someone who profited for much of the nineties by slagging celebrities in a most brutal fashion. She trashed Liz Taylor every chance she got– often on network television– yet she can’t handle a joke about her clit from Brad Garrett on basic cable? At her roast? Old age is no excuse. Apparently Rivers can dish it out, but she can’t take it.

Courageous? A fighter? Are we talking about the same person here? After tepid reviews of the London performance of her one-person show, she bags the idea of bringing it to New York lest she suffer a repeat of the bad reviews she garnered in the Big Apple forty (or fifty!?) years prior. She later tells her assistant (and the camera) that she’ll do anything for a dollar– including shilling for ExtenZe or Depends. Anything except, of course, hanging her ass out over the edge and risking the opprobrium of NYC theater critics. (At least she later brought it instead to L.A.’s west side– to mixed reviews.)

It’s a mystery as to why comedians love the film. Rivers wistfully recalls how she only ever wanted to be an actress (indeed, that is what she is!) and that she fell into standup accidentally, initially doing it because it provided her the cash to go out on auditions. She seems at odds with standup. Sure, she hits the dive club on a regular basis to work out material (which is laudable), but she seems to regard it as secondary to appearances on television, appearances on radio, publishing opportunities and jewelry sales. And her contempt for the Wisconsin audiences makes her appear like an insufferable elitist.

When we watched Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedian,” it made us feel good about being standup comics. When we watched “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” we wanted to do comedy well into our eighties. But when we watched the Rivers documentary, we felt little or no connection to the main subject.

Two weeks ago today, we arrived in Las Vegas. We took possession of our apartment on the following day. Four days later, our “stuff” arrived. We ate, slept and worked in a near-empty apartment– save for two chairs, two tables, a bed, two speakers and an amp– for five days. We ate a lot Thai and Mexican takeout. (Around these parts, there’s a Thai joint every 1/4-mile or so. And Vegas is the place to go for dental implants, discount tires and legal assistance, if we’re to go by what’s advertised on the billboards.)

We would like to thank three friends for helping us move our stuff out of the POD and into our cave. (We’d thank them by name, but we don’t want anyway bugging them for assistance on any future move. They will be rewarded with lavish dinners in our new kitchen.)

For six straight days, we were in bed by nine o’clock, our bodies ravaged by hauling, unpacking, assembling and writing.  Finally, on Thursday night, we emerged from our cave and trekked into the Strip zone to take in Andrew Norelli at Joe Lowers‘ Las Vegas Comedy Show.  (Made it to the strip in 15 minutes!   We’re going to like this location.)

We’re slowly adjusting to Vegas time. (Dining/hanging out until the single-digit hours with Charlie Viracola two straight nights helps with the transition.) And we’re looking forward to socializing with the comics who work in Las Vegas in the future.

Saturday night, The Male Half filled in at the 10 PM show at Brad Garrett‘s Comedy Club at the Tropicana, sharing the bill with Matt Kazam and Alonzo Bodden. (TMHOTS starts a week at BG’sCC tomorrow night, sharing the bill with Pam Matteson and Ralph Harris… and on the weekend, with Brad Garrett himself.)

We have a March 1 deadline on the book. And as soon as we fulfill our obligations with the book, we’ll be posting to the website with regularity.

We’re settled into our new pad here in the southwestern quadrant of the Vegas metro sprawl.  The kitchen is in order (we can eat something besides takeout) and the bathroom is set up (we can bathe) and the office is humming (we can surf, write, make travel arrangements and pay bills).

While The Female Half of the Staff was surfing tonight, she learned of the premature death of Steve Dacri.  He succumbed to cancer.  He was only… well, he was just too young to die, let’s put it that way.

The Male Half of the Staff is forever indebted to Dacri.  When The Halves moved to Los Angeles in 1988, they set about trying to get on the various standup comedy shows that were on the air and on cable at the time.  One of them, Into the Night starring Rick Dees, was in production at ABC.  The talent coordinator was Steve Dacri.  He viewed a videotape of The Male Half and immediately expressed an interest in having him on the show.  He set up an audition at the Laugh Factory (just a formality, to show the other producers) and a date was set.  It was The Male Half’s first network television appearance.  And it was followed up with another a short time later.

Just after that second shot, the show was canceled.  Bummer.

Maybe not.

Dacri had other plans.  He was going to try his hand at management.  He was enthusiastic and encouraging.  He even set up a meeting (and actual “lunch!”) with TMHOTS– at Jerry’s Deli on Ventura– to discuss the possibility of being his manager.  This was a startling concept, as no one had ever proposed such a thing.

TMHOTS showed up at the appointed time… but there was no Dacri.  He waited… and waited.  Bummer.  He asked the host if someone matching Dacri’s description had been in earlier.  No, was the response.  But, wait… there’s another Jerry’s Deli… on Ventura, just a mile or two further down the road.

It seems that The Male Half had gone to the wrong Jerry’s Deli.

A few weeks (months?) later, Dacri got the chance to direct a small-budget movie in Florida.  His management aspirations dissolved instantly.  (Unbeknownst to The Male Half, Dacri had studied screenwriting and directing at the American Film Institute and Conservatory.  So, when film called, he answered.) TMHOTS lost a possible manager, but film gained an enthusiastic director.

It was just one of the many things that we didn’t know about Steve Dacri.  The other was that he was a kickass magician.  We knew he did magic and that was his entree into the entertainment business… but we had no idea just how kickass he was.

We also knew that, years after the Rick Dees experience and the small-budget film and everything else, he had settled in Vegas and had gig for a time at the Hilton, doing magic. (He did magic elsewhere as well. It seems that when you’re that good, you work a lot.) When we made the decision to move to the desert, one of the first people we contacted was Steve.  We made tentative arrangements, via Facebook, to get together for a drink when we finally settled in.

We were just a week or so too late.

Stop by this tribute to him. (We’d link to Norm’s column on Steve Dacri in the LVR-J, but the pricks who own that paper are suing bloggers who link to their publications and we don’t have the time or the money to deal with litigious cockholsters at this point in time.)

Our email problems have been resolved… after five days and about two dozen phone calls to Verizon’s Billing department, tech line, etc. See below.

We woke up early (4 AM, maybe?) on Monday, the day that PODS was scheduled to come by with Podzilla and take away our possessions. About an hour later, we learned that our main email account (the one we use for everything, bmckim_at sign_verizon_dot_net) had been suspended. All the emails and contacts– GONE!

A couple hours later, our DSL cut out.

None of this was supposed to happen until the first. We tried about a dozen times to contact Verizon and rectify the situation, but we were constantly cut off, hung up on, disconnected. Kind of odd that we’d be cut off, considering Verizon is a PHONE COMPANY!

OUR bmckim_(at sign)_verizon_dot_net is BACK! Business as usual!

Podzilla took our stuff, we locked our keys into our old apartment and we pointed the SHECKYWagon southeast.

That was Monday morning.

We managed to thread the needle for the first three days of our trip. We didn’t see any of the historic blizzard and until yesterday morning, we weren’t affected by it. But the folks in Oklahoma aren’t all that savvy when it comes to clearing the highways.

We’re in Okemah, OK, right now. We ditched off of Interstate 40 yesterday because it was a teeth-rattling washboard of ice and craters and we were only able to achieve top speeds of 32 mph– and then only for a few minutes here and there.

We have opted to hole up here for another day. We don’t trust that OKDOT has its act together sufficiently to have made the route between here and OK City safe (or smooth) enough over the past 24 hours. And now it’s snowing.

It’s not like we’re on a deadline.

And we could use some down time. The weekend leading up to our departure was 96 hours of shoveling, packing, loading and carrying.

And we neglected a lot of things. Like we didn’t comment on the deaths of two of our comedy favorites from our early years– Charlie Callas and David Frye. Both spent their last days in Vegas and both died within a couple days of each other. May they rest in peace.

And here is a link to Charles Osgood’s piece on the passing of both comedians, done for CBS Sunday Morning. (There’s a commercial on the front end of it… and embedding has been disabled. Go figure.)

The folks at Cringe Humor Entertainment (which is the producing arm of the CringeHumor.com website) are behind the production of Mike DeStefano’s new one man show “Drugs, Disease and Death: A Comedy.”

DeStefano, who just finished up a gruelling tour in support of NBC’s Last Comic Standing (he was a finalist on Season 7), will debut with a preview week of shows on February 7 at the Producer’s Club Theater in New York City.

We had such a great time attending Colin Quinn’s one-man show “Long Story Short,” that you can bet we’d be attending DeStefano’s show… but we’ll probably be sleeping on the floor of a (yet-to-be-nailed-down as of this writing) apartment somewhere in Vegas, waiting for the rest of our worldly possessions to make the trek westward, eating takeout. Hey… how come SHECKYmagazine.com doesn’t have a “production arm?” I wonder… perhaps it’s because we have our hands full managing and producing our own lackluster careers.

There’s a spirited debate going on in the comments. We goofed up and forgot to approve a comment by comedian John Roy… we just corrected our error and our follow up comment now makes sense. Thanks to all who chimed in. Keep it coming.

We’re borrowing from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.  It will all make sense.

We were offered a second cruise.  It was a last-minute thing.  We phoned in to get feedback  on the first one (Dec. 12-16) and the question was posed, “What are you doing this weekend?” Did we have the time, really? We’re writing a book, we’ve got 80 to 90 per cent of our worldly belongings packed into boxes, we’re driving 2,523 miles across the country in the first week of February. Should we take it? Do another one? We’d have to massage the schedule, ratchet up the activity on the book and order the POD! Can we do this?

We’d be asked to fly to Houston, TX, limo to Galveston, TX, and board the MS Ecstasy, which would then sail across the Gulf of Mexico and visit the ports of Progreso and Cozumel. We’d be required to each do five shows– three R’s and two PG’s, plus a teaser set on the Welcome Aboard Show– and we’d be away (with limited– or expensive– phone service and internet connectivity) for six days.

We took it.

We figured that there’s a lot of downtime on a cruise. There’s that initial teaser on the first night, a flurry of shows on night number two, a flurry of shows on night number five… but in between is a lot of potential nothingness– a blank canvass– which we could occupy by working on the book, working out, visiting ports of call (should we be so inclined) and catching up on sleeping and drinking.

And it turns out: That’s just what we did.

We checked our email on day four at a chic coffee shop in Puerto Maya on Cozumel. (We were armed with our Acer netbooks and all we hadda do was spend $10 US. Easily done.)

One important email told us that the publisher liked chapter number one. (We bundled it up in a Word doc the Friday night before we left and sent it to London.) So we went back to ship confident that we were on the right track as far as the book was concerned.

On our first cruise, we were almost totally focused on the technical aspects of the shows, the sets, the jokes, the time, the order.

This cruise was different. While we weren’t cocky– we still allowed for the ten per cent chance that our success on Cruise Number One was a fluke– we were much more calm this time. Our serenity allowed us to dwell on other aspects of the cruise experience– more importantly, the cruise/performance experience. And we also pondered the ramifications of the cruise audience/cruise performer dynamic and the comedy community/cruise performer dynamic.

We concluded that the cruise comedy show (as it has been instituted by Carnival, at least) has certain unique quirks. For instance: There will be people observed walking out. This is to be expected and should be in no way interpreted as a judgment on one’s performance. There aren’t a ton, but there are significantly more than on land. You’ll be killing on the cruiseliner stage, but you’ll notice an occasional outward of patrons out of the room. This is easily explained. Firstly, your show is free. So, unlike on land, the cover is not a consideration. Secondly, there is much competition for the attention of the cruiser. As carefully as they might try to schedule the entertainment, there will almost always be competition for eyeballs and attention. (And if it isn’t a production show, it’s a disco or a karaoke night or a dinner seating.) Thirdly, you’re performing in a small, tight community, to a limited population. The relatively small number of people onboard (2,000 to 3,000) know that they just might have multiple opportunities to catch your shows… and they just might have already seen your show! So there is less urgency to schedule their attendance at a show and less urgency to stay put once they find themselves there. Lastly, there is a diverse population onboard, so they just might be offended… but we gotta figure that those folks are in a small minority. Whatever the reasons, walking a very small minority of the audience is nowhere near the crisis that it might be in a conventional comedy club. It may be somewhat disconcerting, but it’s not cause for a meltdown, or even cause for the mildest concern.

We were gratified that so many people on the Carnival boats were familiar with us by virtue of our 2010 appearance on Last Comic Standing. Before we had even set foot onstage, we were accosted by fans who recognized us from our American network television appearance. We have a tendency to think that people who cruise are of a certain age, or of a certain demographic that wouldn’t be aware of such pop culture benchmarks as LCS. We would, of course, be wrong. It turns out– if we are to judge by the number of folks who mentioned the show– that cruisers (at least Carnival cruisers) overlap heavily with those people who view such shows as LCS and who are regular consumers of Comedy Central. We might even go further and say that an unusually high number of Carnival customers are regular consumers of live comedy. If we consider that we filled (or came close to filling) a 200+-seat room for seven out of ten shows, then we might conclude that there are an unusually high number of comedy consumers onboard a typical Carnival cruise.

Were there difficult shows? To be sure. But, we point out that, in a typical week or weekend at a comedy show on land, there will be shows that are less than spectacular, where the audience response is less than rousing. So we were gratified that so many of our shows went so well. After all, we were told for so many years that audiences on cruise ships were terrible… and we were also told that the comics who worked on cruise ships were execrable. Why the dissonance?

Good question. It could well be that the so-called “boat acts” that dominated the high seas were chosen from among those who had “given up” or “cashed in.” It could be that, in the not too distant past, those who chose to make money on ships were folks who had given up all hope of starring in a sitcom or starring in movies. The cruise ships might have been the last resort of elder Catskillians or “variety” acts who hadn’t come up in the clubs. And that sort of act might have dominated or maybe weakly persisted into the 80s, or even the early 90s. But, somewhere along the way, the quality and nature of the talent changed (and the modus operandi of the cruise lines and the agents necessarily had to change) to the point where we’re seeing a glacial evolution take place.

And the attitude of the comics who succumb to the temptation of the high seas must (and, to an extent, has) changed.

We’re fully aware that this enlightened reassessment of the cruise/comedy thing might be viewed as self-serving. We might do a few more voyages and realize that the atmosphere is stultifying, that our reputation (and our performance) on dry land has been compromised by our experience on the closed and overwhelming culture that is performing on cruises. But rest assured that we’ll be monitoring for that nearly every step along the way.

Which is just what we did on this most recent trip. We were always assessing– during our flight to Houston, during our embarkation, during the body of the cruise, and during the disembarkation process and subsequent trip home– just what was it about the cruise experience that so many comics have felt compelled to complain about? Why was it that so many acts sought to distance themselves from the cruise comedy culture?

We were on high alert the entire week. Was it the waiting? The separation from the mainland? From agents? From managers? From loved ones? Was it the hours? Was it the people on the boat– the crew, the staff, the passengers? What made contemporary comics so determined to separate themselves from the comics who had no reservations about plunging into such a comedy subculture?

There are parallels, we suppose. We’ve heard similar, vague rumblings about comics who’ve switched gears and gone into corporate gigs or the Christian circuit and how they’ve somehow “sold out” or “given up.” The reasoning goes (as near as we can sort it out) is that such comics have forsaken the quest for the brass ring– the sitcom, the Hollywood life, the sick money– and in return, they’ve “settled” for giant gobs of money in venues and via channels that are insulated from– and invisible to– their compadres who toil in the clubs in New York or Los Angeles. It’s almost like they’ve walked away from the high-stakes table and instead chosen to work the slots. Or they’ve drifted away from the eye-popping lottery of Hollywood in favor of a day job.

Which, in a way, they have. But they haven’t done so in such a way that they deserve the enmity that they’ve been subjected to over the years. It is entirely possible to work the boats and keep a dog in the hunt in New York or Los Angeles or Melbourne or London. Being “stuck on a boat” for a week or two here or there isn’t a career death sentence. Nor should any taint accompany anyone who returns from such a gig. There is every possibility that one can do both the cruises and work the high-stakes venues of the entertainment capitals of the world– especially in this day and age of jet travel, cell phones and high-speed (if somewhat pricey) satellite internet access on the high seas.

Which makes the reaction to our impending move to Las Vegas rather puzzling. We’ve been toiling in the Philadelphia market for 17 years now. (We bellied up to the high-stakes table of Hollywood from 1988 to 1993, living in Burbank, CA, but moved back to Southern Jersey in September of 1993.) And while we’ve taken advantage of our proximity to New York City on a few occasions– and we’ve benefited from the very practical reality of the compactness of the Northeast Corridor, so non-flying gigs have been cost-effective and relatively pain-free– we have found ourselves in Los Angeles far more often than in Gotham over the past few years.) But more of that in another posting.

We leave you with the words of Shecky Shree Rajneesh:

The problem is not somewhere outside; the problem is your ego. You have to be saved from the ego. The problem is man himself; man has to be saved from man himself. The enemy is not outside, the enemy is within. In surrender you drop that enemy. In that very dropping the inner darkness disappears… When you surrender, in that very surrender something happens and your inner light starts burning, your inner light starts becoming clear. Clouds disappear.

And then, a few paragraphs later, they say that funny doesn’t equal as much money as it did in the past. John Bowe profiles Peter Principato of Principato-Young Entertainment, a hot management company formed ten years ago. The profile (available at NYTimes.com with free registration) opens with a description of Principato shepherding three young clients through a typical Hollywood meeting. The realities of the film and television biz are lamented.

Principato, a talent manager, had three clients waiting for him in the offices of Adult Swim (part of the Cartoon Network), with a meeting about to start. At 45, Principato, 70 pounds overweight, dressed in wrinkled Polo and lace-free Converse sneakers, looked less like a budding mogul than a harried soccer dad, rushing to retrieve his kids.

In today’s Hollywood, he told me, trying to find decent-paying work for even the most talented clients had become almost impossible. A few numbers told a sad and weird tale: the 1983 season finale of “MASH” drew an audience of 106 million. In 1987, “The Cosby Show” drew audiences of 30 million. A network show can still draw 15 million, but a cable show like “Children’s Hospital,” starring the comedian Rob Corddry, a client of Principato’s, which is broadcast on the Adult Swim channel, is considered a success with an audience of 1 or 2 million. Where were all the viewers? The Web? Niche programming? The question has no satisfactory answer. What is clear is that the business of getting anyone in Hollywood to pull the trigger on any decision whatsoever has frozen into a Kabuki-like pantomime.

Hasn’t it always been “kabuki-like?” (And why does the Times insist on capitalizing kabuki?) Hasn’t it been a running gag in entertainment circles that– even when rivers of cash flowed through the Los Angeles basin– Hollywood suits were very careful about when and with whom they spent their cash?

Anyway, the story tells how that river has dried up and how folks like Principato are dealing with the fact that “comedy isn’t a one-movie-star business like it used to be. It’s about putting together a team.” He calls them hyphenates– writer-producers, actor-directors. Apparently, Hollywood has become like Alaska– everyone has to have two or three skills in order to make a living. Sounds like things are desperate. How desperate?

Where in the past, a comic manager might support comedians heading out on the performance circuit, Principato supports his hyphenates by helping them to create shows for the Internet with once-unthinkably-small sums of money — $25,000, $75,000.

To which we say: Boo hoo. And we pose the question: How long would it take those comedians of yore to pull down that $25,000 to $75,000 “out on the performance circuit?” (Minus, of course, the 15 or 20 per cent in commissions to managers and agents.) And we hasten to add that these opportunities necessarily lead to other opportunities.

(The takeaway from the article for us is that managers are no longer pushing their clients out onto the nation’s comedy club stages!   Gone are the days when actors and writers– who never wanted to be comedians in the first place– took precious stage time from Los Angeles area comics who actually did aspire to be comedians!)

Anyway, in the next sentence, Rob Corddry’s “Children’s Hospital,” and Paul Scheer’s “NTSF:SD:SUV” are cited as examples of initially low-paying projects that “migrated up the content stream from Web series to popular TV shows.” So where, we ask, is the problem? Sounds a lot like what used to be called “development deals” or holding deals or pilots.  It’s just that it’s now produced in a different economic climate, using new technology and distributed on new platforms.

How long did Corddry or Scheer expect to toil for $25K? (If they indeed started out that low?)

This article might depress some. It makes it appear as though the gravy train has ground to a halt. Some folks read it as a tale of woe– Comedians can’t hit the big time any more, their opportunities to make it in Hollywood have been seriously slimmed down due to dismal cable and network numbers.

We see it differently. There seems to us to be more opportunities. Are they lower paying? Of course they are. But with the advent of the WWW and the reluctance to bet Dumpsters full of cash (or so-called “sick money”) on one or two (or a handful) of comedy stars in the hopes of one of them becoming the next Seinfeld or Romano, they’re placing smaller bets on dozens of comedians. The amount of the bet must necessarily be smaller.

Is the era of “sick money” over? Certainly not. There’s still gold in them thar Nielsens.

But the means by which one reaches the top of money hill are different.

H/T to Paul Hallasy!

What a year it’s been… for standup comedy and for us.

LENO VS. CONAN

Folks chose sides. We offered a variety of opinions. Jay’s back at 11:30, Conan’s resurfaced on TBS and Jeff Zucker is out at NBC/Uni, which is now owned by Comcast.

THE CONTINUING WAR ON COMICS

Overheard on the radio: “…we hope (Artie Lange) recovers and gets well… but not too well, because we want him to still be funny.”

* * * * *

Nathan Rabin, writing in the Wall Street Journal on the topic of the Leno/Conan donnybrook said, “Funny people drink too much. They squander their money. They use drugs. They’re prone to depression, insomnia and mental illness, to tumultuous relationships and serial divorces.” He wrote this without a hint of irony.

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal conducted a frightening and hamhanded persecution of a comedian who had the temerity to “insult” a pair of lesbians at a club in Vancouver. Guy Earle was pilloried by the press, sold out by fellow comics and ruined financially by the circus. Eventually, he retreated to Nova Scotia with his wife and new baby. His new mission: to show the Supreme Court that there exists a conflict between the HRT code and the Canadian Charter of Freedom.

At least then all this suffering (from every party) won’t be for naught and perhaps there could be a slight chance that I might be regarded as a protector and soldier for our national freedom instead of a nasty-tongued crass gay-hating sexist women-beating tyrant.

* * * * *
Zachary Adam Chesser, better known by his Dungeons & Dragons name of Abu Talhah al-Amrikee, issued a fatwa (he threatened their lives in the name of Islam) against Matt Stone and Trey Parker for depicting the prophet Mohammed wearing a bear suit in an episode of South Park. The idiot later pled guilty to three felonies: communicating threats to the Parker and Stone, soliciting violent jihadists to desensitize law enforcement, and attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. He’ll be sentenced in February. He could get as much as 30 years in prison. Fingers crossed!

* * * * *
Morley Walker in the Winnipeg Free Press: “…most of what gets spewed from the mouths of modern comedians is not funny.”

* * * * *
From a Canadian comic, we were greeted with an email that opened with, “Stay in Jersey, faggots!” (And we thought we couldn’t have pissed our readers off any more than we had in December 2009, when we were labeled “retardedly open-minded!”)

* * * * *
Of course, such invective pales in comparison to that leveled at Parker and Stone.  And another jihadi created a gas bomb, capable of killing a few hundred people in every direction, and placed it within a few yards of the building that houses the corporation that owns Parker & Stone’s employer, Comedy Central.  Viacom and Comedy Central handled the threat in a cowardly fashion.

* * * * *
St. Petersburg Times TV listings nutshells Last Comic Standing thusly: “Craig Robinson is the new host of this show, which tries to pick the least unfunny comedian out of a group of stand-uppers who can’t cut it in the clubs.”

* * * * *
And, from the mean and dumb Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star:

Last Comic Standing: Now here’s a show that has its priorities straight. First and foremost, it’s funny. The comedians and their so-called careers? Not so important. Hey, it’s harsh, but people don’t tune in to see a bunch of already embittered people lashing out at the judges for not seeing their special talent.

LAST COMIC STANDING RETURNS

The NBC reality series announced a limited schedule of auditions in February– in New York and Los Angeles– and vowed to put the emphasis on the funny. No house, no jester costumes, no contrived challenges. They stayed true to their word and the show regained some of its lost street cred. (And the Halves of the Staff got an inside look at the proceedings!) Will it return in 2011? We don’t know. But we do know that, one year ago tomorrow, NBC announced that the show would return for Season 7. So stay tuned.

And, of course, we auditioned for the show at Gotham, touching off a crazy chain of events that took us to Glendale, CA, and primetime network television appearances.

JOKE THEFT FEVER REFUSES TO DIE

There were several instances of Joke Theft Fever this past year.

Gawker.com acted as fight promoter by staging a row between The Daily Show and comedian James Urbaniak. Urbaniak tweeted a joke… which later turned up on TDS, emanating from the mouth of host Jon Stewart. Gawker tried mightily to turn it into a major crime. They failed.

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In a pair of rare cases of a comedian actually, blatantly being ripped off, Patton Oswalt vented on his MySpace blog about getting ripped off– first, by a wannabe comedian at a theater in Iowa and second, by a PoliSci major delivering a commencement speech at Columbia.

The Columbia story is carried by the New York Times. What does Oswalt get for his trouble? Well, the NYT readers who digest the story proceed to take a giant shit on Oswalt in the Times’ comments section. And MovieLine.com’s Christopher Rosen tries to depict Oswalt as some sort of pathetic, self-Googling shut-in who is washed up and has nothing better to do than to defend his intellectual property. (Cross-file this under “The Continuing War On Comics.”)

VIDEO MADNESS

In the waning days of the summer, a video, created anonymously, went mini-viral. Using the online software from xtranormal, someone (who later turned out to be comic Will Lopez) wrote and directed a hilarious animated video that depicted a hapless and desperate comedian attempting to cajole a club owner into booking him at his club. It spawned answer videos. And Lopez cranked out sequels to his original vid, including one that blasted…

KYLE CEASE

The comedian caused quite a stir when he created a traveling workshop that purported to teach aspiring comedians the proper way to write and perform material… for a hefty fee. Enlisting the help of some A- and B-list comedy buddies, Cease presented his seminar in a number of cities and promoted it via an unctuous and rambling 26-minute video interview. We had the gall to take apart the video. A good quantity of shit rained down upon us. But we found out that Cease has nearly as many detractors as he has faithful, cult-like followers. We can certainly relate to that.

IN MEMORIAM

A number of comedians and club owners passed away. Here’s a partial list:

Jean Carroll, Jay Sierra, Ross Rumberg, Ray Garvey, Jus Jay, Irwin Barker, Mike Veneman, Greg Giraldo, Robert Schimmel, Chrissy Burns, Paul Lane, Jocko Alston and Steve Landesberg.

Many of the things that happened this year spawned a lot of great debate. It was quite and interesting year for analyzing standup comedy and some of the issues within the business and the craft and some of the larger issues that comedy is peripheral to.

On a personal/professional level, The Halves of the Staff were even more introspective than usual. We did our best to try and share the whole experience, the whole loopy roller coaster ride, with everyone. We hope that folks derived some benefit from our maundering. From our angle, it was therapeutic.

And, barring any disasters or other unforeseen developments, we’re going to be relocating SHECKYmagazine HQ from So. Jersey to Las Vegas. This will no doubt have an effect on the magazine. For the past few days, we’ve been digging through the magazine’s archives (for a project we’re working on) and one thing we’ve noticed is that we have changed the magazine regularly over the past nearly 12 years. So… a change will once again occur… and we’re confident that it’ll be good for us and, we hope it will be interesting for our readers.

And, if you’re in Las Vegas after Feb. 1, look us up!

Here’s wishing all our readers a happy new year!

AP is reporting that Steve Landesberg died at age 65.

A lot of folks knew him as Det. Arthur Dietrich, a character on the long-running sitcom Barney Miller.

We thought of him primarily as a standup comic. A quirky, inventive, risk-taking comedian who incorporated characters and accents and dialects into his act and who did all the talk shows.

Check out this appearance on The Mike Douglas Show.

A comment, from 11 minutes ago, says, “After watching this clip, it’s clear that Landesberg was only funny on Miller because of his writers. This bit is beyond lame.” Of course, the commenter has no idea of context or how the passage of time might blunt the impact of a bit. The clip has gotta be 40 years old! Landesberg was always interesting. He was among a cadre of comedians (like David Brenner who sits to his left in the above clip) who were the bridge between the old guard and the new.

Landesberg’s character was, according to Wikipedia, “An intellectual detective, with a calm unflappable nature, and a seemingly endless supply of knowledge on a wide array of subjects.”

We’re back. We’ve been… pre-occupied. The reason has been alluded to here and there– our attempt to prep for and successfully execute a five-night, five-show engagement aboard Carnival’s MS Fascination– and we got back late Thursday night. We cranked out the bulk of this in two sessions– one, in our cabin on the ship, the other in the airport in Jacksonville. 3,353 words later, we’ve summed up the craziness of the past four months. Enjoy!

That's the MS Imagination, docked in Nassau. We're pulling out of the harbor, Tuesday evening.

Four months ago was it? Five? Way back in the middle of the summer, we agreed to give this Carnival cruise thing a whirl. A while back, Carnival, it seems, had instituted a program whereby the performance space at the rear of one of their ships (or “aft,” as they like to call it) would be transformed into a Punchliner Comedy Club. And, the story goes, it was so popular among the passengers (and, no doubt, among the folks who call the shots at the cruise line) that they decide to make the transformation across the fleet– to each and every one of their 23 “Fun Ships.”

This necessarily means that they’ll need 23 X 2 (or 46) comedians per week… every week… for as long as the suits at Carnival believe that their customers are digging the funny.

Which means that every time we turned around in 2010, we heard of yet another comedian who was either departing for a cruise, returning from a cruise or asking us what we thought about the idea of giving it a go.

(We had prior knowledge of the entire scheme, as we had run into a comedian who was instrumental in pitching the idea, making a pilot program work, demonstrating the efficacy of the program fleet-wide and suggesting comedians for intake into the program. He insisted (to us) that we would be perfect for the Punchliners. We were skeptical.)

The Female Half had never done a cruise. The Male Half had done a grand total of two– for Royal Caribbean, both Christmas week excursions, in 2007 and 2008. Neither of us considered our acts ideal for cruise crowds. And the Male Half, in spite of his experience shoehorning his act into two generally positive seagoing weeks, didn’t think he was particularly well-suited to the gig… although he allowed that, with some tweaking, he might consider it at a later date.

We corresponded, via email, with a Carnival executive and drove her to our online promotional material. Initially, we heard nothing. Which is just as well, since we hadn’t done anything to prepare, outside of pumping this comedian or that for details about just what the Carnival experience might require.

We set about doing technical preparation– gathering up every scrap of paper, every Post-It Note, every cocktail napkin that had a joke, an idea, a funny phrase, and crashing it into a giant notepad file. Along the way, we re-wrote some bits, augmented others and tried to “clump” bits with others, hoping to find some sort of organizational framework amid the chaos.

We had a heads-up that a cruise engagement would typically be four or five days in length and would require a number of clean or “PG-rated” shows and a number of dirty or “R-rated” shows, each 30 minutes in length. And none of the material could overlap. To put it another way, comics would be require to present with two totally 30-minute different sets, one dirty, one clean.

Okay. An hour of material seems like not a lot to ask for a “Comic from the 80s.”

Finding the volume of material seemed like a formidable task. But, as we found out later, what confounded us was this idea that our material be split (evenly down the middle for practical purposes) into clean and dirty. Certain bits were half and half. The premise and the setup might be squeaky clean, but the punchline might be dirty… but not so dirty as to make it impossible to “clean up.” Others might have the opposite problem. Still other “chunks” might have elements that were mildly offensive and other elements that were perfectly acceptable for a crowd of youngsters.

Some chunks were half-dirty/half-clean. Do we clean up the dirty half? Or dirty up the clean half? Or– and this is the real mind-bender– do we whack it in half and do the clean half in the clean set and the dirty half in the dirty set? It bends the mind because, in some cases, the bit had been written and performed in such a way– and for such a long time– that splitting it up might make it devilishly hard to remember… or lessen the impact. It turns out that some jokes benefit from proximity to their neighbors. Chopping them loose from their siblings does harm… sometimes irreparable harm.

The net result was not unlike starting over… not from scratch, but from pretty close. Or so it seemed.

After some technical tinkering and organization and sweating over structure and subject matter and topics, we decided to get into the practical aspect of the project. This would mean trying out new material, new orders, new sets… at open mikes? We had nothing on the books for August, so we determined that we would try to get onstage as often as possible in non-paid spots in Philadelphia and surrounding area.

We had forgotten just how deflating, demoralizing and frustrating open mikes could be.

So our plunge back into the open mikes was awkward, painful and, at least initially, it bore little fruit.

We decided instead to do five- and ten-minute guest spots at local clubs. Occasionally, we’d arrange to do sets in the thirty-minute range.

The idea of doing two thirty-minute sets was initially overwhelming. It wasn’t until we started viewing thirty-minute sets as six five-minute sets (or three ten-minute sets) that it became imaginable… or do-able.

Armed with the knowledge gleaned from the open mikes and the guest sets, and each carrying a ring binder containing the master material notepad file mentioned above, we then set about analyzing the material while doing our regular sets at various paid engagements. All along, we used a Sony ICD PX-720 digital recorder to digitally record our sets. The PX-720 is ideal because, in addition to the great fidelity, it also has a USB port on it.

During a gig in Hilton Head, we took the recordings from our sets and offloaded them onto a laptop. Sony provides versatile editing software that allowed us to review the sets, to easily stop and start them and rewind them. We then fired up a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and created a simple grid that contained one column for the title of the bit, a column for the beginning time and a column for the ending time. We then created a column which would automatically calculate the elapsed time of each bit. We also “spreadsheeted” a couple of sets that we had on the recorder from a date at the Comedy Castle in Detroit, back in September.

Knowing the exact length of each bit was invaluable. And it was fascinating to see just how consistent (or inconsistent!) our times were across several sets or across a few weeks. We were then able to construct sets (or “sub-sets”) knowing, with a fair amount of accuracy, just how long they might be. This use of technology saved us untold hours of sweating. Knowing– in the course of just a long weekend– eliminated the need to repeat the sets, reducing the number of times we had to do each set by perhaps a factor of four or five.

Once we thought we were close to identifying thirty minutes of clean material and thirty minutes of R-rated material, we then set about creating an order for each half-hour set. And we attempted to find a logical order for each.

That's the Imagination on the left and the Royal Caribbean Empress of the Seas on the right.

In a comedy club, one can start out slow and build. On a cruise, however, a comedian only has thirty minutes and a crowd that hasn’t paid to get in. And, at least in the case of the Carnival Punchliner scenario, a one-comic format. (The person who runs the room– usually an assistant cruise director or someone else in the entertainment department– will do some time, but often very little over and above welcoming the crowd and then bringing on the comedian.) So it’s a “cold” opening.

In such a situation, it’s important to start strong and end strong. Then the task is to find a place for material that’s new or not yet completely broken in.

In the weeks leading up to the cruise, we followed a familiar format when the situation would allow it: The Female Half would alternate doing thirty minute clean sets and thirty minute R-rated sets in the feature position. The Male Half, while doing headline sets, would open with thirty clean, then finish the rest of the set with portions of the prospective R-rated set.

At this point, it might be a fair question to ask, “Why don’t two comics who have been doing standup for more than 20 years have reams of material at their disposal?” Shouldn’t it be a fairly simple proposition to go over one’s notes and fashion two perfectly good and appropriate sets from the hours and hours of material they no doubt have created since they started?

To which we reply: “No.”

As we found out, by going over the notes and by watching old video tapes, we had in fact written gobs of material over the years… and the vast majority of it was effective. However, sizable chunks of it were topical and therefore no longer relevant. And other swaths of it had what we like to call a short cultural shelf life– we would no sooner do some of that material in the videos than wear some of the clothing we wore! It just wouldn’t work! Both Halves also soaked up good hunks of their acts (for a time, at least) using props. Props that are no longer around or available. And each Half began doing standup dressed in costume! (The Male Half was a giant, eight-foot crayon, the Female Half was a cheerleader!)

So when the Male Half embarked on a plot to digitize and subsequently review hours of early tapings of sets from 1984 through 1993 or so, the results were less than was hoped. It turned out to be more of a perservation project than a mining project. (One positive result, however, was that we were able to chuck boxes and boxes of the bulky VHS cassettes. As we’re now plotting a move cross-country and culling our belongings, this was a boon.)

As the cruise drew near, and as details of the engagement were obtained, we were thrown a curve– we would each be called upon to do a “Welcome Aboard” show consisting of five PG-rated minutes, none of which could be repeated in either of the other sets. So, for those of you keeping score, we were now on a quest to gather 35 minutes of material that was suitable for kids and old people. Some comics we polled told us that it would be sufficient to do maybe two jokes, pump the upcoming shows and wave bye-bye. But, as this week was our first one for this line, we thought it was better to be fully prepared.

Just prior to the cruise, which was to start in mid-December, we had a weekend booked at a club in which we were very comfortable, one that we had worked in several times before. But, in the last two weeks of November, we had nothing booked– a dead spot. We worried that such a period of inactivity would kill our momentum.

So… we flew to Vegas!

Our ten-day trip to Las Vegas, it was hoped, would afford us the opportunity to get valuable stage time at night while enabling us to investigate prospective neighborhoods and apartments by day.

Between Joe Lowers’ Las Vegas Comedy Show at the Alexis Park, Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at the Tropicana and a two-day gig at the Casablanca Resort in Mesquite, NV, we managed to get onstage every night of our trip, including Thanksgiving!

Yet, even with all this preparation, we felt only about 80 per cent ready when we flew to Jacksonville to meet the MS Fascination and sail to Key West on Saturday afternoon.

Part of that feeling stemmed from the conflicting information that is circulating out there. At times we were told that certain cruise directors were demanding and additional R-rated show (making the total of material required 90 minutes… 95 if you’re counting the Welcome Aboard Show). We had heard from one comic that a wise tactic would be to befriend the cruise director… another advised us to be polite, but avoid the cruise director at all costs. One comic told us to complain as little as possible, as even the slightest bit of whining might be sufficient to disqualify us from further bookings. (“If you check into your cabin and there’s a turd in the middle of your bunk,” we were told, “Clean it up and don’t say a word.”)

Yikes!

Of course, some of this is hyteria, but there are elements of truth to all of it.

Cruises are fickle. Each cruise could be your last. And any comic who uses the cruise circuit as his sole source of income might be a fool. There are many cruise horror stories out there. We’ve heard many tales of comics who were “one and done.” We heard an equal number of stories of comics who subsisted quite well for years on nothing but cruise gigs, seemingly immune to the capricious nature of cruise directors or audience comment cards. But if you navigate the waters carefully, it can be a good way to augment the income. And the augmentation can be significant… which is one reason why we chose to work so hard on this project.

Aside from any potential bump in income, however, the benefits from this adventure are already evident. Regardless of how these shows might go (and regardless of how they’re evaluated by the Carnival personnel), we now have sixty-plus solid minutes of material, half of it clean and much of it new, and all of which we’re pretty familiar with in an order that works. And we’ve also developed a method for creating and developing new material that works for us. Along with that, we seem to have stumbled upon a decent system for organizing and concocting sets for use in a variety of venues or scenarios. We haven’t had this much confidence in our ability to take an idea from concept to an effective, stageworthy joke since our early years in standup.

Is there a downside? The isolation is a negative. Communication– by phone and internet– is expensive onboard the ship. To give you an idea of how isolated: We sailed from Jacksonville on Saturday afternoon and didn’t check our email again until Tuesday afternoon (at a Dunkin donuts in Nassau). We were scheduled to be in Key West the day before, but were turned away due to high seas. In a best case scenario, we would have been incommunicado only for about 48 hours or so– and we could have purchased minutes that would have enabled us to access the internet via the ship’s satellite web hookup– but we opted not to. The satellite internet is pokey and costly. Phone cards enable voice communication at a rate of $2.49 per minute. So, being on a ship is not for folks who are nervous about being out of touch for any length of time. (Conversely, some folks may actually like being out of the country, off the grid and unreachable!)

Other negatives? The cabins are less than deluxe. They are in the crew area (performers are considered part of, and treated as, crew), so they are nowhere near as civilized as those of the passengers’ accomodations. They’re adequate, but they’re spartan. (The Male Half had a porthole both times he sailed on Royal Caribbean. The Halves shared a cabin on this most recent Carnival excursion. It had bunk beds (!) and no porthole.

Seasickness is something to consider. The Male Half was unaffected. The Female Half felt queasy here and there, saved only by a pair of seasickness wristbands that ostensibly use principles of accupressure to head off the effects of the rolling ocean.

Performing in front of a crowd that might just be more ethnically and demographically diverse than any seen at a comedy club (ie., kids, oldsters, “foreigners,” etc.) might be daunting (and initially tricky) for some comedians.

Then there’s another drawback (which is largely imagined): People might think of a comedian who performs on a cruise as a “boat act.” That’s the pejorative term used to described a comic who plies his trade predominantly on the cruise lines and who (so the stereotype goes) gets by mainly by telling street jokes, “stock” cruise jokes and/or stolen material. There might have been some truth to this characterization in the past. However, we hasten to point out that it’s now 2010, and there are a lot more comics floating around (literally!) with original material and gobs of experience who can handle cruises and who do so quite well. The old version of events was that the so-called boat acts were pushed out of the clubs and sought a sort of refuge on the seas. The new version of events is that comedians on cruise ships are merely viewing their work on the ocean-going venues as a means of securing a supplemental revenue stream.

There are positives. The compensation is good to excellent, depending on the cruise line. The perks are numerous. There’s travel (to exotic and semi-exotic locales). Meals are taken care of. Booze is inexpensive (if you drink in the crew lounge), reasonable topside, if you’re given a crew discount.

Travel expenses are picked up. Air, ground transportation, parking– it’s nearly all expensible. Some meals in transit are taken care of as well. When was the last time a comedy club picked up any of that?

Our experience over the five-day gig taught us that everyone’s experience varies. We did a lot of asking around in the weeks/months prior to boarding, trying to figure out just how the week might shake out. We braced ourselves for a lot of things that didn’t happen. All that proves is that one comedian will experience things differently from another. Our experience over the past three or four years– performing in country clubs and casinos– seems to have prepared us for the conventions and quirks of the cruise ship gig. It was far less jarring than we had anticipated.

Someone coming directly from comedy clubs might find the cruise a bit intimidating or confounding.

We were told to expect at least one “bad” show– a show where the response would be less than sparkling, a show that might make us slink back to our cabin while avoiding eye contact. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

We were conditioned to believe that cruise audiences are uptight, stuffy oldsters who flee at the mere hint of an off-color joke or a naughty allusion. Our experience was that the response to both the PG- and R-rated shows was great– moreover, the audience response to the R-rated shows rivaled that of any full-time, land-based comedy club.

Some folks told us that we were over-preparing– that we were putting far too much effort into thinking about it, writing and re-writing, breaking sets down and building them in different configurations. But midway through the process, we realized that, as stated earlier, even if we were to fail at the cruise ship thing, we would end up having gobs of new (or repurposed or “re-conditioned”) material and a new method for pushing further. And at that point, we also realized that we wouldn’t merely stop at the goal of being seaworthy, but continue on a path to puffing out the amount of both family- or corporate-friendly material (PG) and club-friendly (R) material. And that doing so might open up opportunities in corporates, casinos, television sets, etc.

We’ve never minded working for our money. Our goal these past few years has been, as the old saying goes, to “work smarter, not harder.” If doing a few corporates or cruises every year allows us to stay home and work on other projects– or gives us the flexibility to only do the comedy clubs that we really enjoy– that would be tremendous. It’s all about flexibility and autonomy.

Last week’s appearance by Steve Martin at New York’s 92nd St. Y was a “disaster,” according to the New York Times.

a conversation between Steve Martin, the writer and actor, and Deborah Solomon, who writes a weekly interview column for The New York Times Magazine, resulted in the Y’s sending out a next-day apology, along with a promise of a refund.

Ouch!

The audience that watched on close-circuit television complained, via email, that “the evening was not going the way they wished.” Organizers of the event even went so far as to hand Solomon a note telling her that they were bombing… and to pep it up a little. (“Midway through the conversation, a Y representative handed Ms. Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Mr. Martin’s career and, implicitly, less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, ‘An Object of Beauty.’ ”

Double ouch!

The Y’s exec director sniffed in an email that the Martin interview, “did not meet the standard of excellence that you have come to expect from 92nd St. Y.” This, from a man who has presented “The Letters of Saul Bellow With Benjamin Taylor” or ” ‘Discovery’ / Boston Review Poetry Contest Winners’ Reading” or “Joe Edley: Scrabble Play by Play,” (… this workshop is ideal for those who have already taken Joe Edley’s Scrabble Master Class.”)?!?

Why did they single out Martin for this embarrassment?

We’ve seen Martin interviewed in the recent past. We know it can be eye-glazingly dull. Martin, perhaps making up for his white-suited, arrow-through-the-head days, can be achingly earnest and jaw-droppingly pretentious. But isn’t that what 92nd St. Y people want? In spades? What did they expect? Haven’t they been paying attention to Martin’s career over the past decade and a half? The only reason he was there that night was to push his book– a novel about the art world. (We dare anyone to read the description of the book on amazon.com and not doze off halfway through it! About the only person on the planet who can make an account of the world of modern art exciting is Tom Wolfe.)

Did they expect a wild and crazy guy to show up? Who are these neanderthals ponying up $50 per ticket, then sending heckling emails? They’d be better off watching Inside The Actors Studio or Charlie Rose. At least those are free of charge. (No one slipped Charlie Rose a text and told him he was bombing!)

Why would they want to curry favor with the people who were disappointed? It doesn’t make sense to refund the money to people because the star (who sold 900 tickets at $50 a pop!) didn’t talk about what they wanted him to talk about! It’s a dangerous precedent! (Or… they figure that, since it was a case of a funny guy… who wasn’t funny… that the complaining vulgarians have a legitimate case. Only a comedian would be dissed like this.) People get mighty pissed when they expect to laugh and then get only seriousness. Mature people, however, go with the flow and appreciate the conversation.

We are still in the desert. We’ve had an interesting year. An, as we anticipate a move, our future is uncertain. (But so is nearly everyone’s future.)

We are thankful for lots of things– our readers, our health, our friends.

Now, we are off to celebrate.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This afternoon, we’ll be moving from HCH (that’s Hooter Casino Hotel, for all you rubes) to the Alexis Park Hotel, just a half-mile away, just around the corner. This here HCH is the right lodging at the right time– we’re staying in one of their “bungalows” at the low, low (pre-Resort Tax) rate of $12.50! At that price, the wings cost more than our room! (Act now… The Male Half’s neice inquired about a rate for an upcoming Vegas trip and was quoted a rate that was ten times that… hmmm, this must be the “off-off-season.”)

This is Day Seven of our Las Vegas Reconnaissance mission. We touched down Wednesday, just after noon, and since then, we’ve lunched with Kevin Kearney (Sin City Comedy Club) at P.F. Chang’s (which, btw, has an extensive gluten-free menu!), scoured forty per cent of the valley looking for an apartment, gigged at the Casablanca Resort and Casino in Mesquite, checked out FOS Nancy Ryan at her X Burlesque gig at the Flamingo, did guest sets at Brad Garrett‘s Comedy Club at the Tropicana, hopped on over to check out the aforementioned Sin City Comedy Club at Planet Hollywood (where we caught portions of sets by John Bizarre and Michael Pace). In the process, we’ve hung out with Ryan, John Padon, Steve White (2X!), Marc Yaffee, Kenny Bob Davis, Tim Haldeman, Diane Nichols, Mitchell Walters, Steve Lazarus, Jay Reed, Charles Viracola, Scott Thompson (watch for Thompson on the Thanksgiving edition of Tonight… he goes by the name of “Carrot Top.”) and Tony Camacho.

We’re switching over to the Alexis Park because tonight (through Saturday), we’ll be working on our damnable Cruise Sets at Joe Lowers‘ Comedy Club. (And Lowers and Family has graciously welcomed us to their home for Thanksgiving dinner!)

We’ve gathered quite a bit of data about the Valley. And we’re figuring out how to get around while avoiding traffic… and avoiding the strip. Not sure when we’re making the move, but the decision’s been made to head west. New Jersey (specifically Philly-area New Jersey) holds little for us professionally. The idea of re-locating in the desert appeals to us. It might seem counterintuitive to head to a market that suffers from 15 per cent unemployment and where 1 of 5 homes is in foreclosure. Or not.

Stay tuned.

We’re in Las Vegas right now.  It’s chilly!  We landed just after noon on Wednesday.

Just 20 hours earlier, we were settling into our seats at the Helen Hayes Theater in NYC, awaiting the start of Colin Quinn’s one-man show, “Long Story Short.”   It’s a history of the world in 75 minutes, written and, of course, performed by Quinn and directed by Jerry Seinfeld.

Normally, when you tell a comic that you just saw something– a play, a movie, a whatever– they follow it up with, “Is it any good?”  We can’t help it.  That’s just the way we phrase things.  However, when we tell someone we saw “Long Story Short,” the reaction is “I heard it’s great.”  Quinn has concocted an evening of theater (an evening of standup, really, with a sparse set, some audio-visual ornamentation and frequent blackouts) that pierces the skeptical hides of comedians.

It is great.  It takes the audience through several centuries of the development of civilization– from ancient Greece, through Rome and right up through the found of America.  Hitting other hot spots like India, Africa, England, etc.  During  a recent appearance on Joy Behar’s HLN show, he said that he worked it all out on Wednesday nights at Governors, the venerable Long Island comedy club.  From Levittown to Broadway.  Makes sense to us.

Fifteen producers are listed in the playbill.  Is that normal?  One of them, Sheldon Fireman, is opening up a Brooklyn Diner in Dubai.  Makes sense to us.   What’s that old saying?  Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.

This isn’t Quinn’s first time on Broadway– His “Sanctifying Grace” also ran at the very same theater.

Quinn didn’t have to change his style to suit the venue.  He still uses the rapid-fire delivery, the sarcasm, the throwaway lines, the swearing (strategically placed F-words)– it’s standup comedy and lots of it, and not some sort of actorly exercise.  Quinn doesn’t work up any tears or try to evoke any kind of moments fraught with meaning or try to deliver any heavy messages.  At one point, he even busted a couple for coming in late!  It’s an hour and fifteen of standup in a fancy setting.  Which is why comics like it.  (Sarah Silverman was in attendance Tuesday evening.)

He teaches world history using analogies to modern life, modern culture– depicting England as a mopey, spurned lover, constantly pining for France, equating the Catholic Church after the fall of Rome to rap producers or comparing the buildup to the Iraq war to a late-night bar brawl.  At about the midway point, he savages the cinematic convention (cliche?) of the fish-out-of-water teacher who tames and eventually reforms the uncouth inner-city youths.  (We’re not sure if the audience picked up on the fact that the same methods used by Michelle Pfeiffer, Sydney Poitier, et al, are the exact same methods Quinn is using on this night.)

It’s also faintly reminiscent of Lenny Bruce.  Bruce dealt with substantive issues (sometimes historical, sometimes topical) by couching those issues in terms that a nightclub audience could easily grasp.  In Bruce’s case, he used the hipster or beat lingo and outrageous exaggeration and apt analogies.  Quinn uses his Brooklyn-ese, his unique attitude, a plethora of accents to do the exact same thing.  It’s a history lecture disguised as a freewheeling rant.  It’s deciptively well-written and exquisitely constructed.

Are we denigrating this production by calling it “an evening of standup?”  No.  If you read it that way, you’re bringing your own prejudices to the table.  We are doing quite the opposite.  We are saying that standup, when does this well, is as good and as rewarding as anything else presented in a theater– on Broadway or off.  Bad theater has never pulled down the art form of theater.  But for some damn reason, bad standup has, to the estimation of too many, pulled down the art form of standup.  Quinn elicited some of the biggest laughs from this roomful of New Yorkers using riotous, well-crafted stuff that one might easily hear at a comedy club.  Sadly, though, we suspect that most of the evening’s attendees wouldn’t be caught dead in a comedy club.  And most of the theater critics who rave about “Long Story Short” wouldn’t dream of giving the same respect to a comedian onstage on a Wednesday night at Governors.

Do you have a great opener?

Not an opening act… but a great opening line.

It seems to loom large when you first start out.

“I need a great opening line. A joke that will establish what I am, what I am capable of… what is my essence!”

And, let’s face it– opening lines are important– especially early on. But, after a while, some of us lose sight of just how important an opening line might be.

The Halves of the Staff were discussing the very subject of opening lines over a recently-opened bottle of George Dickel Cascade Hollow Red Label.  We concluded that the Male Half hadn’t been using/depending upon an opener for some time now… or only intermittently, when the situation called for it (a short set, a TV set maybe), and that the Female Half had been using an opening line that was only usable for a longer club set.  So… she was at a loss as to what to how to forcefully open when doing a shorty.  Two different dilemmas, but both centering upon the all-important opening line.

Which got us to thinking about the importance of, and the utility, of the opening line.

As did the particular situation we find ourselves in lately.  We’re prepping for a gig where we’ll be called upon to do a 30-minute set that’s clean, a 30- minute set that’s R-rated and, possibly, another five-minute clean set… and no material may be repeated over the three sets.  (It’s a cruise.)

As such, our attention has been focused on maximizing the impact of our acts in each of those three scenarios… so our brains have been split.  We began to view the three situations as wholly contained, individual sets.  And that each of those sets should have a strong opening.  Which got us to thinking about the nature of the opening line and how we regard it.

After you’ve graduated from the open mikes,  you find yourself with a dense 20 minutes.  And, because you can hold our own for 20 or 30, that opening doesn’t seem so vitally important.  So, quite naturally, the attention you pay to the opening, the priority you place on that first 30 seconds or so, is diminished.

After a little while,  you’re headlining shows, you’re paying an inordinate amount of attention to the closing material.  And it is very likely you haven’t paid nearly as much attention to that opening as you should have.

But now, in this particular pickle, the Male Half has written two openings.  So far, so good.  The Female Half is pretty sure she’s come up with something that’s appropriate for the R-rated set.  But, she’s still up in the air as to how to open the clean show.

Having said all that, what exactly is your opener? Have you put any extraordinary thought into it? Have you changed it regularly? Have you found it advantageous to keep it just the way it is for a long time?

After all, it is a great comfort to have the opening taken care of. Think back to your open mike days. That moment– the second when the echo of your intro fades and the applause (should there be any) dies down and you are faced with the prospect of making something out of nothing– is the moment that you fixate on in the months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds prior. And rightfully so.

And, years down the line, you may be forced to re-examine the importance of that moment… for a variety of reasons. And we are reminded of exactly why it’s important– to you and to them, out there, in the crowd.

Have you kept your opening the way it is for a long time, but with an eye toward changing it should the exact, right, beautiful, shining, pulsating replacement come along?   Have you given up finding that corker?  That devastating, in-your-face introduction that sets a tone and maybe carries you through the first five or ten minutes?

Or have you found a way around it?  Is it just not that important in the grand scheme of things?  We’re torn.

If you want a great illustration of  a gutsy opening, check out Jon Dore’s opening for his Conan set. It’s a meta-approach to the opening, but it’s wildly funny and satisfying.

The WWW is crackling with reports of abuses by the TSA.

A pilot for ExpressJet, Michael Roberts, was singled out for a full-body scan at the airport in Memphis. Roberts, in full uniform and in possession of his FAA and EJA credentials, chose not to have one. What followed, which was detailed on Salon.com, should give any air traveler pause:

At a TSA checkpoint at Memphis International Airport, Roberts was asked to remove his shoes in order to pass before one of the checkpoint’s Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) body scanners. He chose not to receive the scan — in TSA parlance he “opted out.”

Crewmembers are usually offered the standard metal detector walk-through, but opting out of a body scan automatically subjects the traveler, be it passenger or pilot, to a hands-on frisking, which TSA refers to as “secondary screening.” As Roberts saw it, a pat-down would be just as unnecessary and intrusive as the scan, and so he refused this as well.

At which point he was told he would not be allowed to proceed.

Roberts denies being abusive or confrontational, but he did ask for a clarification. Unfortunately, TSA staff don’t always appreciate having to be held accountable or explain their actions, and in Roberts’ case their clarification involved calling in the airport police.

The police saw no reason to detain Roberts, but TSA went ahead and, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, phoned his supervisor’s office in Houston. He describes his employment status as “on hold.”

Were this an isolated case, we would be concerned, but not overly so. But it seems as though it’s happening with alarming frequency, as recounted in this CNET article. And, while we’re aware that security is of paramount concern– and that the TSA must weigh privacy concerns while paying close attention to ensuring the safety of those in the air– these stories seem to indicate that something has gone horribly wrong with the folks on the ground, the TSA agents.

We’ve been flying a lot– especially in the last 18 months or so– but we’ve never complained about airport security. And we’ve taken a dim view of those who do. Our main complaint, if we have any, is that the airports show a maddening inconsistency– some airports request hat removal, some not… some ask us to put our shoes in the bin, some say put them on the belt. And we’ve been yelled at by surly TSA people. Not fun. And nothing an adult should have to put up with.

And, up until recently, with a few minor exceptions, the inconveniences presented by airport security have been minor– no liquids, no clippers, etc.

Now, however, the TSA has introduced the full body scan into the mix. We’re not comfortable with the FBS, for a handful of reasons, all of them, we assure you, legitimate. And it seems as though the TSA employees are taking offense to the folks who “opt out” of the x-ray machine. And the pushback from travelers is being greeted with thuggish behavior.

A young lady by the name of Meg McLain, when singled out for a full body scan at an airport in Florida, took the option of not having a full body scan. Listen to the interview below.

There’s even a website, WeWontFly.com, that seeks to unite those who object to “strip searches, virtual or otherwise.” They’re even suggesting a national Opt-Out Day, a bit of civil disobedience calculated to clog the checkpoints nationwide and register Travel Nation’s displeasure with the new procedures. They’re urging the use of blogs, Twitter and other social media to get the point across.

We’re paying close attention to this matter because we’re fliers. As are many comedians. Some of us fly on a weekly or at least monthly basis. And if one of us were to be singled out for a full-body scan– and we were to refuse, for reasons of privacy or health– we should be aware that we might be detained for a while. If we’re on our way home from a gig, there wouldn’t be much of a problem (outside of an egregious waste of our time and possible infringement on our rights). But if we’re on our way to a gig, we have a difficult decision to make.

In the case of Ms. McLain, she was detained, her possessions were taken away from her, she was handcuffed and her airplane ticket was torn up by an overreaching TSA goon. (And we’re not even going into the physical indignities she suffered.) And, from all accounts, she still hasn’t been able to get out of Gainesville, FL! This, after USAir promised to credit her for her flight.

How would a comedian’s employer react were he or she to be detained in such a manner? Suppose you’re on your way to a comedy club or on your way to a port to embark on a week or three of cruise performances and a TSA thug confiscates your ticket? And an hour or so later, you find yourself, as Ms. McLain did, escorted from the airport property by a phalanx of policemen? Do you suppose you’d find a sympathetic ear on the other end of your phone call to the cruise line or your cruise agent, or the club owner? Do you think you’d see any of the revenue you were planning to earn on that trip?

And all because you won’t (or can’t!) sustain another dose of radiation… or you simply don’t want to submit to a full body scan.

Something doesn’t seem right.

There’s a book that’s been selling briskly for a decade or so called “Letters from a Nut”. It’s authored by “Ted L. Nancy,” a nom de plume long thought to be Jerry Seinfeld in disguise. (The Seinfeld rumor was fed by the fact that the multi-millionaire comedian, actor and TV and movie producer wrote the introduction to the book.)

Here’s a description of LFAN, from the book’s Amazon.com page:

What if you wrote to the Baseball Hall of Fame offering to donate a full set of Mickey Mantle’s toenail clippings? Why, they’d be glad to have ’em–even if you are “a Level 4 bed-wetter.” Cooperstown is only one of many institutions terrorized in Letters from a Nut, a collection of crazed correspondence by Ted L. Nancy. The name is a pseudonym, perhaps for Jerry Seinfeld, who wrote the introduction. Seinfeld never comes clean…

But Seinfeld does come clean… sort of.

He’s been making the rounds lately, promoting the book on shows like Larry King Live, And he’s towing the “real author” of the book along with him for the dramatic, on-the-air “reveal.” Ted L. Nancy, we learn, is none other than Barry Marder. (Seinfeld also revealed Marder as the author on NBC’s TODAY.)

There’s only one problem: There’s a co-author to the series of best-selling books– comedian Bruce Baum.

Baum is understandably perplexed by the omission of his name from any talk of the book. He’s taken to YouTube to plead his case, to take it to the court of public opinion.

In his video, Baum delivers his plea to the camera while showing the viewer copies of the original book and its sequels, “More Letters from a Nut” and “Even More Letters from a Nut.” He’s far more calm than we would be! He sets up the controversy by showing clips of Seinfeld and Marder on King’s show and on the NBC morning show, then bolsters his argument by displaying copies of contracts– signed contracts– from Avon Books and signed documents from the U.S. Patent Office!

Back in 2007 or so, according to Ted L. Nancy’s Wikipedia entry, the book was optioned by one television production company then sold to another (Lionsgate, then Fox TV), but the book was never made into a television show. We suspect that Seinfeld is looking to jumpstart interest in making a TV show out of the books again, thus the press tour.

What we don’t quite understand is just how Seinfeld and Marder expect to get away with representing Marder as the sole author.

(And we’re doubly puzzled that Baum hasn’t retained an attorney to take this fight where it belongs– to the courts. Perhaps he has… we have a query or two into Baum– Do you have an attorney on this? Did you see any of the development money? Are you on good terms with Marder? We’ll run his answers in the comments if/when they come in.)

Mike Veneman was attending Kent State nearly a quarter century ago, heading toward a Ph.D with the intent of becoming a professor, when he quit school to do standup comedy. Eventually, he realized his dream of becoming a teacher when he established Comedy 101, a comedy workshop through which Veneman taught standup for nearly a decade.  He was diagnosed with amyotrphic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which eventually forced him to quit performing about a year ago. He posted about his increasingly dire health situation on Thursday:

Well, lungs too weak for trach

Coming off Saturdaypp
Loved each and every moment with you

I see The light LOL. Remember the laughter and the joke

That’s my tlme. Mike V

It appears Veneman has died.

In the intervening three or four days, dozens of friends and colleagues posted their goodbyes on Veneman’s Facebook page. It’s quite a sight to see. Reading the posts, one gets a sense of just how profound and far-reaching Veneman’s influence was and how much he touched the lives of comedians in Northeast Ohio, the midwestern U.S. and well beyond.

We posted about his predicament on our Facebook page and tried to drive as many folks to befriend him (and wife Cris Veneman) as we could, as it seemed the end was near.

It must be nice for Mike to have seen just how much he was loved.

The Male Half trash-picked an old football program from the Saturday, October 12, 1968, game between University of New Hampshire and University of Maine. (It was in a neighbor’s effects, left on the curb for pickup.) It’s a fascinating look into America in 1968– ads for the Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale (“The Bold and the Beautiful”) and Army ROTC (“What’s so great about ROTC?”) and lots of pictures of burly, stern-looking, crewcut boys/men, some of whom no doubt ended up in the jungle in Southeast Asia not a few months after sitting for their portraits.

Coke bought the 4-page, inside insert (and paid for the color printing, probably!) and one of the color pages was this full-pager for Chrysler. The automaker sponsored all of Bob Hope’s specials on television (NBC?) and Hope was famous for his connection to college football– he highlighted the All-America Team every year on one of his specials. Apparently Hope and Chrysler found it advantageous to connect the automobiles with excellence in college ball.

Christine “Chrissy” Burns, was born in Cleveland, OH, and based in Ypsilant, MI. She died of a heart attack at 46 on Friday. Here’s the obituary. The AnnArbor.com page also contains a guestbook.

We were in Hilton Head up until Sunday night (working at the Hilton Head Comedy Club), but our minds were somewhere else– specifically, we were already thinking about the next seven or eight weeks and what we’d need to do to get in fighting shape for a rather unusual gig in December.

Part of that training would involve reviewing old video tapes from past performances. Well, we have no shortage of them. We’ve got three of those faux-wood VHS tape drawers filled with cassettes and we’ve got a box or two more of tapes… and a good number of those are recordings of performances from about 1985 to about 2000.

So we plotted to purchase a honkin’ external hard drive and digitize them… thereby making them easier to zip through and review.

We finally managed to cop an Iomega 1 TB external hard drive at a Best Buy in Bluffton, SC, for about $50. That’s nearly one thousand gigabytes! That’s a lot of real estate for a little bit of dough! (931 GB, to be exact.)

The project is going smoothly. We hooked one of the Acer laptops up to the Happauge WinTV tuner and we piped the ol’ Panasonic VCR through it and now we’re draining one after another onto the external HD. So far, we’ve pulled about 15 shows off of the Mylar and it’s only soaked up about 20 gigs.

Since we’re going from analog to digital, we’ve got to do it in real time. Which means that it takes 30 minutes or so to convert a 30-minute set. Add on a minute or two for cueing up the tape, and you see it’s a time-consuming process.

But it’s alternately cringe-inducing and fascinating. Sets from the Comedy Factory Outlet, the Charlotte Punchline, Rochester’s Red Creek Inn and some place called “The Uptown Comedy Club” (?), along with early television appearances (including a very young Louis CK opening up an episode of VH-1’s “Fools For Love” from 1993– what a lot of thick, red hair he had!), are quite interesting for a variety of reasons.

For the last couple months, we’ve worked very hard on our acts– corralling material, arranging it in .txt files, re-writing it, writing new stuff and honing it– and we’ve dredged up a lot of stuff that we haven’t done since… well, since we did it on these very sets that are unspooling before our eyes on the laptop screen!

It’s a crazy trip down memory lane. And, we hope it will lead to a certain kind of confidence, an unprecedented tightness and competence that we’re shooting for.

It takes a special person to get past the mid-80s fashion choices. Once you whip that, everything is easy.

… so maybe it doesn’t apply to Yanks.

Scientists at the University of Glamorgan found that men and women begin to suffer a sharp decline in their sense of humor and get increasingly grumpy after the age of 52.

While teenagers are the age group most likely to laugh at other people’s misfortunes, they laugh on average just six times a day.

Things get even bleaker in what should be the relatively carefree twenties, when we laugh four times a day.

Maybe that’s why college gigs suck so much.

We find the conclusions of the scientists to be unbelievable. Perhaps Brits are as glum and reserved as the stereotype indicates. And we Americans are positively giddy by comparison.

Our own experience is that, at least as far as comedy club audiences go, the over 50 gang laugh as heartily, if not more so, than any other group.

The airport in Walla Walla offers free internet access. As does the airport in Yuma. Other major airports that are holding out are Greensboro-High Point, St. Louis, both Washington airports, Raleigh-Durham, San Francisco and Providence. And, contrary to what we said in a recent posting, Philadelphia International is still gouging their customers– they charge their customers exorbitant rates via AT&T and Boingo, but offer it free to college students… at least they offer it free to all on weekends.

Hit this link for an exhaustive list of airports that offer free wireless internet access. Bookmark it!

Or, if you have the right kind of smart phone (and you’ve downloaded the free PDANet software on your phone and your laptop), you can access the internet anywhere via the 3G network. We did that in our hotel Detroit and in our hotel in Vegas. The speed isn’t always good, and we were often forced to ditch off and hop back on to renew the connection, but it beats paying $11.99 a day!

We’ve been getting a lot of compliments on our cartoonified likenesses (see above) since we started using them as our Facebook profile pics. They were created by Ambrose Quintanilla IV, a cartoonist and illustrator who is also a huge standup fan. He recently saw The Male Half perform at Comedy & Magic in Hermosa Beach, CA, and created the caricature soon after. He subsequently created The Female Half’s caricature to complete the pair.

In addition to churning out a conventional strip or two (including one based on a gopher named “Digger Davis”), Quintanilla also creates one-off strips (with permission) based on the occasional standup bit. (Go here for a selection of strips based on a one-liners from The Male Half and other comedians at Quintanilla’s Gopher-It Productions Facebook profile.)

We’re seeing a lot creative use of old and new art forms to promote standup comedians or sort through issues surrounding the business of standup. And we’re seeing some new technology applied to old forms. Darren Carter has enlisted the creativity of cousin Brian Carter to animate his Orange Armenian Baby-Man bit. Audio of Carter (from Carter’s CD) is brought to life in the three-minute clip, complete with audience response. It’s a commercial for the CD, a commercial for Carter and an interesting cartoon on top of it all.

The Quintanilla caricatures are appealing because they’re simple (hearkening back to Jay Ward?) and they seem fresher than the caricatures of old from artists at street fairs or on the boardwalks in Jersey. (The Female Half says she looks like “the “Hot Mom” in a Ren & Stimpy cartoon.” Hmmm… comparisons to Jay Ward and John Kricfalusi. It doesn’t get better than that.)

Miserable weather didn’t keep us (or a healthy crowd) from showing up at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre to hang out with the Last Comic Standing (and the four next-to-last comics standing).

Myq Kaplan hosted, brought on Roy Wood, Jr., then Mike DeStefano. Then there was an intermission (to let folks buy merchandise!) and then Tommy Johnagin, and Felipe Esparza finished out the evening. (They tinker with the order, switch off hosting duties, but Esparza always closes.)

Upon our arrival in the lobby of the theater, we were intercepted by Wood, who then escorted us downstairs into the greenroom, where we remained until the show was over. (After, we retired to the hotel for a few cocktails with Johnagin, Wood and friends… and luxury motor coach pilot Dale.)

They’re only three weeks into the monster tour, which ends February 20. Next stop: Cleveland, OH!

We had a splendid time hanging out last night. (Thanks to Wood for setting aside our tix… although we never used them!)

When we were in Vegas last week, we ran into David Drozen, the head of Uproar Entertainment. He told us that he had recently acquired the rights to distribute Shecky Greene’s “A Day At The Races,” and that it was available via iTunes.

Go here for a (kinda) recent interview with Greene on lasvegazine.com.

By now everyone knows that Rick Sanchez has been canned by CNN.  Sanchez is the real-life Ted Baxter-ish anchor who, among other things, called Barack Obama “our cotton-picking president,” and who didn’t know how long nine meters was and thought that volcanoes only happened in warm places.

He is a classic, blow-dry, airhead, newsreader masquerading as a “serious newsperson.” It was to CNN’s shame that they put him in the position of anchor and to their everlasting shame that they kept him there for even a day.

But now he’s been canned for saying he’s held back because he’s Latino. That and calling Jon Stewart a bigot. And for scoffing at the idea that Jews are a “powerless minority.” And for referring to “white folks.” And for generally being a whiny bitch. (And for being so stunningly dumb as to not realize that he’s stunningly dumb… and that’s the reason Stewart goes after him– and not because of his last name or where he was born.) The more Sanchez talks, the more he reveals himself to be paranoid, bitter and not much of a big thinker.

Why talk about it here? Because he targeted a standup comic (Stewart) and because he made the remarks that led to his dismissal on a show hosted by a comedian– Pete Dominick host of the XMSirius show, “Stand Up! with Pete Dominick.”

Listen to the interview. (Part 1 is embedded below… Part 2 is right at the top of the righthand column on Youtube. The comments are particularly entertaining.) Even Dominick knows that he’s got a bombshell on his hands– he even alludes to the fact in mid-interview. He handles the interview very well. Dominick, you’ll recall, got a red envelope on Last Comic Standing a few years back but passed on going to the semifinals rather than give up his radio gig– or at least that was the word on the street at the time. The Sanchez interview will, no doubt, make Dominick more visible.

Dominick’s reaction to Sanchez’ giggling dismissal of the idea of Jews being an oppressed minority is priceless. And it’s jaw-dropping to listen as “Trainwreck” Sanchez finds himself in a hole… and keeps digging.

It’s 20:33 total, but it’s worth listening to the whole thing.  Dominick lays on the “I’m glad I got to know you” stuff a little thick at the end, but I think part of that might be his appreciation that Sanchez might have boosted his career by saying outrageous stuff on his show.  (Sanchez might have said the stuff because he’s so utterly unaware that, in this age of social media and viral video and audio clips, even remarks made on a satellite radio show can quickly surface and tank your career. Duh!

You’d think that, after Allan Burns and James L. Brooks so effectively skewered news anchors that no network would dare hire someone as obviously pompous and boneheaded as Sanchez. You’d be wrong.

Pete Dominick and Pete Lee, on the Terasse de la Jardin, at the 2006 Just For Laughs Festival, as photographed by SHECKYmagazine.com!

In a post entitled simply “Giraldo,” Doug Stanhope recalls the last time he encountered Greg Giraldo.

My story about being ejected from the venue came out of the corner of my mouth like stammering drool and that’s when Greg made his rehab remark. I was a bit insulted as drunks tend to be when their point is over-looked because of their staggering.

And I was quite relieved when someone emailed not long afterwards that they’d seen Greg perform so shit-faced that he barely made sentences. It’s nice to know that you aren’t the only comedian left with a cocktail in your hand.

Chilling stuff. Read the whole thing.

We hear that Paul Lane died yesterday of a heart attack.

The Des Moines Register has an obit, with a quote from comedian Willie Farrell:

I met Paul back 20 years ago at the old Funny Bone when another guy owned it. He became a good friend of mine. He just really loved comedy. He was always looking out for me and he was always an upbeat guy. He had a thing he used to do in the back of the room when the shows were going slow, he would do a phony laugh …

Mike Veneman is professional comedian who is based in Cleveland. He’s been around for over two decades and is also the creator of Comedy 101, a course in standup. He is extremely ill, however, and is battling ALS, more commonly known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”

His recent Facebook status is a cause for concern:

I am going into the hospital to have a feeding and breathing tube installed. Hopefully this will keep me going a little while longer. I or Cris will keep you posted. Love ya all.

He and his wife, Cris, could use some positive thoughts, some well-wishing. Click on the Facebook links above if you have a spare moment, maybe hit the friend request if you aren’t a friend already, and let them know we’re thinking of them.

It seems that, this time, it’s real. It is a tremendous loss for the comedy world.

The Wikipedia entry hasn’t been updated. But it was edited last week when the rumor of Giraldo’s demise swept through the comedy community. Giraldo had been hospitalized early Sunday morning. There was speculation that it was from an overdose.

Now, however, we hear that, after four days in the critical care unit of a north Jersey hospital, he has passed. There are many Tweets. It’s like a digital memorial service.

December 10 would have been his 45th birthday.

He was extremely nice to us whenever we had contact with him. Of the two of us, only the Male Half worked with him– once, back in 1994 or so, at Catch in Philly. But we both were the recipient of his kind words when he judged us on Last Comic Standing. And he seemed genuinely pleased to see us backstage at the Nasty Show in Montreal this past July.

We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

A pic we snapped at the Vos/McFarlane reception at Caroline’s a few years back. Jessica Kirson is on the right.

We decided to chill out around one of the three Alexis Park pools yesterday reading. (The Female Half is reading “The Path Between the Seas” by David McCullough, an account of the building of the Panama Canal. The Male Half is nearly finished with “Live From New York” by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, a history of Saturday Night Live.)

There were still some comics haunting the tropical courtyard complex. (It’s so hard to get out of Vegas on a Sunday!) So, we had some quality time with some of the WSOC combatants. It’s generally agreed that coming out to the contest was one of the better decisions they’d ever made. In addition to participating in the contest, they clumped together and surveyed the Vegas nightlife. Some of them even jiggled various connections and managed a guest set on one of the many comedy stages in town. (Hell, some of them had never even been to Vegas before this trip. Or, if they had, it was in a previous life or it was for a honeymoon or for a long ago family trip.)

And we’d like to thank the Alexis Park cats– dozens of them!– who came out at dusk and made the experience that much more surreal! (We have a suggestion for the WSOC next year– Bag a cat, win a week!– the person who can snag one of the AP cats gets a week at Goodnights! Great fun! Caution: Eligible cats must be turned in alive!)

We were jabbering with Kevin Kearney the other night, over the din of the jabbering comics at the Fryers Club gathering, when Kearney says that he had gotten a few emails (or phone calls?) from friends who spotted our posting on the World Series Of Comedy. (In it, we ran a pic of The Male Half holding up a sign bearing Kearney’s name– a reminder that Kearney was a no-show at the festival’s “Meet & Greet” session.)

The tenor of the messages that Kearney was getting was along the lines of “You shouldn’t let those Shecky people besmirch your good name like that.” Puh-leeze! We’ve known Kearney for about 20 years. And we’ve been busting his balls for about 19 years and six months. So… ease the fuck up, people– sometimes we aren’t engaging in any scorched-earth policy. Sometimes, it’s just a joke!

In fact, when The Female Half spotted him at the Fryers Club, she immediately told him that she sat behind his nameplate at the Meet & Greet and booked up his Sin City Comedy Club through all of 2011! Kearney replied, “Through March?” To which she replied, “NO! Through the whole year… Hey! Waitaminute– why would booking it through March be any different than booking it through all of 2011?”

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank WSOC organizer (and our host) Joe Lowers— he put on a sprawling contest and it went off with seemingly few hitches. And it was swell to have so much quality interaction with so many fans of the magazine. The WSOC afforded us the opportunity to meet some fine, upstanding comedians over the past six or seven days and re-connected with some that we’d known (but had not hung out with for some time).

A very special thanks to Charles Viracola, Scott Thompson, Geechy Guy, Todd Paul, Kathleen Dunbar and Brad Reeder for enabling us to have a blast outside the confines of the “sanctioned” WSOC events.

We were awakened this morning (we’re in Vegas, on PDT) with a text asking if we knew what was going on with Greg Giraldo. Rumors ricocheted around the internet. It seems like the worst hasn’t happened, according to most news outlets. Giraldo remains hospitalized, and he’s in a bad way. We are hopeful that he pulls through.

So, our attention was diverted from our main task– to nutshell our experience here over the past six days at the World Series of Comedy. So we forgot to relate one story. And, as it is a heartwarming tale, we figured everyone could use a bit of uplift.

We were hanging at the Fryers Club meeting here in Vegas on Friday night when we encounterd Jay Mandyam. He was in town to participate in the WSOC. He went up Tuesday night and lost to Brandt Tobler, but, like many of the contestants, he stuck around to take advantage of whatever the WSOC and Las Vegas might have to offer.

So, he finds himself at the Fryers and he tells us that the thing that inspired him to try comedy was a family trip onboard a cruise to Alaska the summer before he entered eighth grade. And the entertainment on that ship was Geechy Guy. Mandyam purchased Geechy’s CD and beat the hell out of it for months afterward. Sometime after that, he tries (and likes) doing standup comedy. And now, several years later, here he is, a standup comic, in Las Vegas, hanging out at a gathering that is hosted by… Geechy Guy.

He was thrilled. We were thrilled to hear the story. We are happy to relay it to you.

We never know who might be inspired by our performance.

Ladies and gentlemen: Your World Series of Comedy winner, Andrew Norelli (Pictured above). The winner gets 37 weeks of feature work at clubs from Providence to Pittsburgh, from Moorhead to Marco Island, from Sioux Falls to Sunnyvale. (Says the Female Half: “The loser gets 38 weeks!” We kid, because we love!)

That’s Matt Falk on the left and Matt Markman on the right, who came in second and third, respectively.

It’s generally agreed that the whole WSOC was a success and a lot of folks– talent and bookers alike– are hoping it repeats again next year. There’s some tweaking that needs to be done, but nothing major needs to change. There was surprisingly little bitching or strife when you consider that 101 comics went up, in a contest, over six days. No controversy– to our knowledge– and few if any regrets on the part of those who participated but did not win. This might be because, after elimination, the contestants found themselves in Las Vegas! It’s the ultimate place to grieve, to assess, to drown any sorrows. And– big bonus– eliminated contestants were still able to avail themselves of the other offerings– headshot session for thirty bucks, meet and greet with industry bookers/club owners, poker tourney, golf outing, etc. Though the main attraction may have been the contest, the overall feel was that of a convention. And many of the comics took full advantage of the gathering to network, to party, and to bond. It might be argued that upping the convention-type features might be a wise idea.

Tony Camacho, General Manager of Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at the Trop, with Traci Skene, The Female Half of the Staff at SHECKYmagazine.com, at the Fryers Club on Friday night.

What might need to be changed, you might ask? Little things. Like the dynamics of the Meet & Greet. The ballroom was lined with long, cafeteria tables, behind which sat the bookers, one to a table. However, there was no chair for the comedian. Hmmm… so, in some cases, you had a comedian or two kneeling during his conference. Not good “optics” as the political consultants like to say. (Especially bad for the female conferees!) So… either the bookers might stand, or the comics might be given a place to sit. (One comedian, Jeff Bodart, suggested a “speed-dating” format, complete with those little hotel desk bells! Ding! Switch! Perfect! The same mechanism that eliminates a lot of the awkwardness in the speed-dating process would eliminate it in the speed-schmoozing process! Both comic and booker would be virtually axiety-free! Speaking of Meet & Greet: Why was a comedy club manager– Cindy Nelson of Zanies– handing out brochures for Comedy Boot Camp? Instead of letting hopeful comics in on how best to get booked at her club, she was shilling for an expensive seminar? That fails the sniff test, if you ask us.

The Male Half with Boston’s Dave Russo, at the Fryers Club on Friday night.

The Male Half participated in the poker tourney across Harmon Ave. in the Hard Rock’s poker lounge on Friday afternoon. He hung in there for a little over an hour! He went all-in with Clayton Fletcher on a hand and it was lights out! (We hear Fletcher is a pro poker player, so the Male Half’s pride is intact! And we also hear that Fletcher was subsequently eliminated shortly thereafter, so the Male Half’s taste for vengeance has been satisfied!) It was a festive affair, well-attended by comics and bookers alike. Lowers– no slouch when it comes to poker playing– obviously had a blast, as it was an opportunity to get out from under what must have been several weeks of pressure leading up to the WSOC. Rocky Whatule, who emceed the Registered Comics shows (and who handled the “tallying up the votes” spots) was the winner. Congratulations, Rock.

The Male Half with comedian and Vegas resident Kenny Thomas.  Thomas is from Pennsauken, NJ, the hometown of The Male Half!  What a strange coincidence!  Thomas grew up over on the other side of Rte. 130, near St. Pete’s.  The Male Half grew upon a block and a half up from Friendly’s on Westfield Ave.  (Of course, this only means something to someone who grew up in Pennsauken!)

On Friday night, we took off to hang at the “Fryers Club”– an informal gathering of standup comics. The idea is that they converge on a super-secret location every Friday night to blow off steam after getting off of the various stages throughout Vegas. Geechy Guy and Todd Paul are the brains behind the party. (They are also two thirds of “The Dirty Joke Show,” which takes place every night but Friday at 10 PM in the Iowa Theater for the Performing Arts at Hooters! The premise: Paul, Geechy and Mickey Joseph sit around “in an alley behind a comedy club” and tell dirty jokes, ostensibly offering audience members a peek into the world of three comics after a show. It sounds intriguing. It’s getting tremendous reviews!) We had a blast hanging at the Fryers Club! We saw some folks we hadn’t seen in years and we saw some folks we hadn’t seen in hours!

Toronto’s Martha O’Neill, left, bonding with Boston’s Dan Crohn, in the bar at the Alexis Park, Friday night.

And we had a blast hanging out at the WSOC. We met a lot of new comics. And we reconnected with a few that we had worked with previously. (Out of all those dozens of comics, only two were complete dicks! Pretty good batting average! Hmmm… this is not imply that some were partial dicks… it just that “complete dicks” sounds better.)

Left to right: That’s Dwayne Perkins, Darren Carter and Geechy Guy!  They were all hanging at the Fryers Club Friday night.

We had the immense pleasure (“We” being the Halves of the Staff and Goodnight’s proprietor Brad Reeder) of being guests at Thursday’s Carrot Top show in the Luxor’s Atrium Showroom.  FOS Charlie Viracola opened and Carrot Top did an hour and twenty.  We will say this:  The comedy world owes somebody an apology.  It was rollicking!  Later on, we recounted our experience to another comic who replied that Carrot Top does the prop thing better than anybody out there.  To which we had to reply that Carrot Top also does straight standup as well as anybody out there– a good chunk of his show was pure, propless standup– solid as a rock and alternately goofy, energetic, clever and self-effacing.  Some of  it was augmented by audio and visual snippets– a large screen behind him show brief video clips and a well-oiled crew punched the buttons on sound effects and other audio clips.  The effect was hilarious. The presentation was exciting.  It flew by.   (Favorite line of the night: “If you’re gonna do the anal beads joke, ya gotta follow it up with a cock ring joke… it’s in the book!”  We missed the next joke or two, so hard were we guffawing.)  Those bitter comics who seek to tear down The Top had better find someone else to denigrate… it’s obviously not working.  He’s continuing to sell out consistently in Vegas– even during these hard economic times.  A fellow comic opined that dumping on Carrot Top is officially hack.  We agree.
We hung out with Carrot Top and crew afterward and, though the man may be a big star/cultural icon, the atmosphere was relaxed and the night turned into just a bunch of comics sitting around telling road stories.  Great fun!

…or does it?

We fled the Alexis Park last night. (Yes, we know… an entire day– Tuesday– is missing. We’ll recover it and post on it… eventually.) We wanted to check out Brad Garrett‘s Comedy Club, which occupies the room that usta be the Comedy Stop. Garrett opened the club this past summer. A few weeks ago, former ELR star Ray Romano “dropped in,” much to the delight of the unsuspecting crowds. It’s a beautiful Vegas comedy showroom! FOS Kathleen Dunbar was there, too. (We spent a pleasant afternoon as guests of Dunbar, along with Richie Minervini— who’s at the Comedy Club at the Riv– and Wisconsin-based WSOC combatant William Krolowitz.)

Krolowitz did a five-minute guest set at Garrett’s club and we were joined at the back of the room by Wendell Duppert and Jason Dudey, WSOCers who were determined to survey the Vegas comedy scene while in town to compete. There’s a lot of that going on– many of the 100+ comedians in Vegas for the WSOC are clumping together and fanning out, seeing the sights, visiting their colleagues (who have the great fortune of actually working Vegas) and maybe even talking their way onto the many stages in the town.

We ended up eating at Baja Fresh at the Excalibur while our dining companion Brad Reeder (proprietor of Goodnights in Raleigh) made arrangements, via txt, to hang out with FOS Charlie Viracola (who’s in town opening for Carrot Top) and Rob Sherwood (who often opens for Carrot Top) and Carrot Top. Before too long, we were in the secret backstage lair/bar/lounge of “The Top,” drinking Jack Daniels (straight, no ice) and having a generally swell time! (See illustration above.) That Carrot Top (real name Scott Thompson) is a funny fellow and a genuinely swell guy!

We’re going back tonight to see the show– the entire Carrot Top spectacle– from a seat in the Atrium Showroom. Stay tuned.

That’s A.J. Finney and J. Chris Newberg, at the Meet and Greet in the ballroom at the Alexis Park Thursday afternoon.  Newberg is in town to perform at the Playboy Comedy Club at the Palms Casino.   He stopped by to say hello!

Meanwhile, we climb out of bed this morning and head over to the Hard Rock for the Huevos Rancheros (it’s a ritual now) but not before checking our email. We’re not paying the exorbitant fees that the Alexis Park is charging… we’re tethering our Droid to the laptop and using PDANet to connect to the WWW via the 3G network! Ha! What a revelation! We exhort our comedy brothers and sisters to investigate a smartphone and download the (free) software and throw off the shackles of the hotel chains who are mired in the 20th century and charging their captives for use of the wireless internet! (And, in another tech note, WSOC contestant Ray Wagner— who arrived this afternoon, in plenty of time for his slot in tomorrow night’s early show– said that, on his layover at PHL, there was plenty of free WiFi available, courtesy of AT&T. We apologize to the folks who run PHL… we had ranted about their reluctance to provide travelers with free access to the internet!)

A no-show at the Meet and Greet– Kevin Kearney, not the Male Half.  (We didn’t meet or greet… we merely milled about and had some quality contact with some fans of the magazine.  Always a thrill to meet the readers!!!)  We stole Kearney’s name plate.

A good number of the WSOC participants assembled in the lobby of the Alexis Park to jockey for position for the Meet and Greet– another of the very practical features of this festival– which is a chance for these feature acts to get in the face (in a good way) of the dozen or so bookers/club owners who are here.  A large ballroom is lined with tables, behind which are seated the influential aforementioned bookers.  A conga line of comedians queues up and takes turns… meeting and greeting.  It’s basically a job fair for comedians.  Civilians do this sort of thing all the time.  It’s another reason why we like this whole WSOC thing.  It’s so… practical!

That’s either Kenney Josephs (Thursday night, early show) and Ray Wagner (Friday night, early show) at the Meet and Greet… or it’s the worst pre-heavyweight boxing championship weigh-in photograph ever taken!

Long lines to chat with Bobby Jewell– proprietor of Sidesplitters in Tampa– as he strikes a pose reminiscent of a toddler at a Sears Portrait Center.

A lot more of the booker/owner types descended on the Alexis Park today (and, we suppose, last night). It made for a more spirited Meet and Greet, but it’ll probably make for a more tense contest. We suspect they’ll all be in the house when the contest resumes. They’re here, after all, because they’ve committed a week or two (or three) at their club (or clubs) to the grand prize pot for the winner.

That’s Murv Seymour!  He’s a Wild Card contestant who is in the running for the big prize.  He’ll be slugging it out for a slot in the finals on the early show Saturday.  He’s pictured with The Female Half in the lobby of the Alexis Park, just before the Meet and Greet… or, as we like to call it, The Running of the Bull.

We neither greeted nor meeted. Nor did we stand in any lines. We stood in approximately the center of the ballroom and occasionally buttonholed a comedian to shoot the breeze, chew the fat… talk idly in an informal way! We didn’t dare take away any valuable M & G time from the hopefuls. (After all, we’ve met or worked for or generally annoyed nearly all the owners/bookers over the past 25 years or so. And there’ll plenty of opportunity to engage them in pleasant conversation over the next 72 hours or so!)

There are two more shows tonight, two more tomorrow night. Then, the winners from all these contests will slug it out for those precious three spots on the last Saturday night show. They’ll each get to do 25 minutes in that final show! So far, Matt Markman, Brandt Tobler, Tommy Thompson and Chris Williamson have secured spots in that important semifinal.

Landry is on the left.  Rahn Hortman is on the right.  They take time out from lining up for a meet and greet to point fingers at each other!

Whilst strolling through the Alexis Park courtyard, we encountered these gentlemen.  From left to right, they are Reginald Ferguson, Kelechi Jaavaid and Frank Genzano.  (Fred Sanford struggles mightily to insinuate himself into the photo!)  We struck up a conversation about the cats.  There are dozens of cats inhabiting the courtyard here.  They come out at night.  They keep the property mouse-free.  They provide a conversation starter!

That’s Rob O’Reilly (Last Comic Standing) and Dobie Maxwell, on Tuesday night, at the Alexis Park.  (Rob left his comedy notebook behind… we grabbed it and phoned him up and told him it was down at the front desk!  We also gave him pizza!  The karma juggernaut rolls on!)  Lesson learned:  The first thing a smart comic does is put, on the front page of his comedy notebook: “If found, please return to (insert name here) or call (insert phone number here)!”

And we’re sure it’s Gallagher I! (He’s among the many who were milling about this afternoon!)

We flew in last night… got to the Alexis Park at about the end of the second of three Wildcard Shows. The AP is the host hotel for the World Series of Comedy. (And it is where the brains behind the WSOC, Joe Lowers, regularly produces “The Las Vegas Comedy Show featuring Joe Lowers.”)

The “intimate” room was packed for Wildcard # 2. We hung at the bar outside and got acquainted with some of the folks who were on Wildcard #1 or were waiting around for Wildcard #3. Las Vegas-based comics Kathleen Dunbar and Tanyalee Davis stopped by to lend support.

If Lowers does nothing else, he will have the undying gratitude of those who competed because he has managed to make sure that they perform in front of… a CROWD! (Unlike those folks who put together the Las Vegas Comedy Fest back in October of 2003! We had a rather unpleasant experience with that trainwreck. Click the link to read about it, if you need some negativity!)

Lowers has attracted about 130 comics to the desert, along with assorted comedy club owners and bookers and other exalted industry whoozits and whatzits, so the WSOC has taken on the feel of a mini-festival or a convention.

We got up early and scampered across the street to the Hard Rock (no doubt in violation of local jaywalking laws) to shovel in their Huevos Rancheros. Then, after a deserved nap, we strolled on over to the showroom to watch Dobie Maxwell conduct a truncated version of his seminar in front of a healthy crowd of contestants. (Maxwell has written a couple of items here and there for SHECKYmagazine.com over the years. We first encountered him at the Chicago Fest back in ’01 or so. We disagreed with about 60 per cent of his presentation, but it was interesting to see someone else’s opinions on things. His speech is both practical and philosophical and peppered with anecdotes, aphorisms and axioms which will no doubt spur many a conversation during multiple long car rides from one hell gig to another. It was equal parts pep talk, business seminar and wake-up call.)

As we’ve stated in the past, we like the practical aspect of this WSOC– the winner comes away with several weeks of feature work at clubs throughout the country, folks can get a new headshot take for $30 (courtesy of Joe Dunckel)– but there’s also the intangibles, like listening to the grizzled comedy veteran hold forth on his career or watching a screening of Jordan Brady’s “I Am Comic” or chilling with colleagues on the golf course or around the poker table. (And, it may seem like a minor thing, but we like that the entire WSOC schedule is printed on the back of each laminate! What time is the Poker Tournament? Boom! Here it is, on the back of the thing hanging around my neck. Very smart.)

And then there’s the various Bonus Moments… like when Gallagher shows up! Hey! It’s Gallagher! What’s he doing here?

We have the feeling there’s going to be a lot of that going on as the week progresses.

We performed at the Comedy Castle in Detroit (Royal Oak, to be specific) and, as always, it was a superb experience. (Mark Ridley is a tremendous club owner. Did we mention that we actually admire club owners? Especially the ones who do it right? More on that in another post.)

The Male Half’s cousin and her husband visited the club and watched Thursday night’s show. (The first time she’d seen him perform since about 1989 or so, at the Comedy Corporation in Arlington, TX!)

She snapped the above photo of the Male Half’s giant likeness up on the wall in the lobby of the club. See the inset for the full picture. It’s difficult to tell from the photo, but the other upcoming acts are Jackie Flynn, Ralph Harris, John Heffron and Kathleen Madigan. On Thursday night, some of us were talking comedy business and the topic of Last Comic Standing came up. And, naturally, the question of whether the credit was relevant or noteworthy or useful was batted around. Of course, we believe it to be. (Of course!) As some proof, however, we directed everyone’s attention to The Wall of Who’s Coming (See photo above) and noted that, with the exception of Flynn, all were LCS alums who had achieved some level of success on the show– Semifinalist, Finalist, Winner, Finalist/Judge, in that order.

When you’re teaching comedy and you’re invoking Nelson Mandela, something has gone horribly wrong.

From what we can piece together, Louie Anderson and Kyle Cease started this thing called Comedy Boot Camp (We mentioned it, in passing, in one of our recent Montreal updates), and here’s a screencap is an interview with Cease to find out what all the fuss is about. (Click it to be taken to the interview itself… if you dare.)

Cease wants to change standup comedy. We’re not sure exactly what it is about standup that needs changing at the moment. But Cease is determined to “re-boom the scene” fifty or sixty comics at a time. He’s determined to do so by means of his Boot Camp. (So… at $299 per comic, Cease and Co. will be paid $14,950 every time he “re-booms a scene.” Nice hustle!)

If the interview (posted online by MSU Telecasters, whatever that is… God bless you if you can ascertain what MSU stands for) is designed to generate enthusiasm for the Boot Camp, it is, as the kids say, a major FAIL. Clad in the Generation Y Zippered Hoodie/Backward Baseball Cap uniform (that even Generation Y has stopped wearing!) Cease is seated at Zanies comedy club (we see the familiar logo in the background… along with caricatures of… Yakov Smirnoff?) as he holds forth on such topics as Tony Robbins, addiction, fear, creativity and “your core self.” It’s a warmed over hodgepodge of motivational buzzwords, spiritual uplift, Freudian psychology and New Age doublespeak that causes the eyes to not just roll back into the head but maybe even dropped down into the lower intestines.

We’re reminded of that insufferable bore who has just found Jesus, or has recently discovered macrobiotics, and who badgers strangers into accepting the Lord or who never misses a chance to tell unsuspecting diners in the next booth that bacon will kill them slowly.

We will save you the trouble of watching Cease’s ramblefest: Go to Home Depot and buy a hammer and a four-inch, spiral-shank nail. Then drive it slowly into your skull, with tiny, measured taps. If you hit brain matter before the 26:05 mark, you’ll be better off than us. And you will probably have experienced far less pain.

While watching, we were horrified at the prospect of all the open-mikers who might have the misfortune of listening to this claptrap. Being told, “If you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, you won’t have stage fright,” might be one of the dumbest things anyone has ever told an aspiring comic. And that leads us to imagine another horror: The audience who has to sit through an open mike that features a parade of open mikers who have been told, “If you’re passionate about what you’re talking about, you won’t have stage fright.” (Compare this to what we tell comedians who’ve attended our seminars: “You’re probably going to bomb the first time. If you don’t bomb the first time, you’ll probably bomb the second time. Everybody bombs.” Simple. To the point. Useful. Heavy on the practical experience. Light on references to Nelson Mandela.)

It’s all over the map.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Cease Method is that he cautions aspiring comics to re-prioritize and not go for the laugh. The most important thing, Cease says, is “You need to be authentic, you need to be real, you need to break down barriers. Stop doing things based on crowd approval.” We’ve seen this seeping into the language of so many comics and critics and hucksters– It’s gauche to go for the laugh. Actually caring about a response is the mark of a hack, is a sign that you’re shameless, a loser. It’s a strange sort of math that is popping up from time to time that says that someone who consciously, intentionally goes for a laugh is automatically pandering. And its corollary: The performer who doesn’t go for the laugh, and who doesn’t particularly care if the audience likes him– who is “in the moment,” or “authentic” or is finding his “real voice”– is the comedian who serves as the gold standard, the role model for all to follow.

But it’s all very muddled. The interview sounds like someone who was emerging from a Tony Robbins lecture and was asked to recap what he’d just heard– it’s Whisper Down The Motivational Lane. It’s a disjointed speech that seeks to outline the Brave New World of Standup as envisioned by Anderson and Cease.

Anderson is held up as a prime example of someone who uses the pain onstage– abuse by an alcoholic dad– to achieve comedy enlightenment free of suffering, desire and ignorance (our apologies to The Buddha). There’s only one problem: Anderson didn’t mine the heartache until well after he had made a small fortune telling fat jokes. (Well-written fat jokes, mind you, and told well. But his formula for success was a very traditional one– setup/punchline, relying on honed material, on subjects with a wide appeal, no pun attended.)

If this is the formula, the method, the means that they’re teaching aspiring comics (or stalled comics, or comics wishing to “push it to the next level), then they’re giving them way too much information. We tell comics how to survive their first five minutes onstage. Get used to the sound, the lights. Don’t worry about “being your authentic self.” That will come eventually, in some form or another (if we understand the phrase correctly). And don’t listen to anyone who tells you how to go about crafting an identity or an approach.

He talks about “success,” in the same breath as “money” and selling out Madison Square Garden… but we’re not clear on how he defines success… but we’re pretty sure he equates success with money. (He mentions selling out MSG, so we’re pretty sure he means money… Who sells out MSG without coming out with a bucket of cash?)

Let’s examine the top-earning comedians for the last year, as compiled by Forbes:

1. Jeff Dunham
2. Dane Cook
3. Terry Fator
4. Chelsea Handler
5. George Lopez
6. Larry the Cable Guy
7. Russel Peters
8. Jeff Foxworthy (tie)
8. Howie Mandel
10. Bill Engvall

Most motivational speakers will tell their audience to identify successful people, analyze their methods and emulate those methods as closely as possible. In this case, Cease identifies the successful people (not by name but by the fact that they’re playing MSG) and prescribes a method that seems at odds with theirs.

And out of the top ten on this list, we’d say that there might be nine different approaches. (And one could argue that even the ventriloquists take starkly different approaches to their particular craft.)

Is anyone on this list trying to change the hearts and minds of their audience? Is anyone delivering their material with this passion that Cease jabbers on about? How many of them are drawing on pain to arrive at their material, their presentation?

They’ve become wildly successful (as have, no doubt, the next ten or twenty people on a Forbes list that would go further) by writing great material and presenting it to the audience with the intention of making them bust a gut.

If you’re going to push a method for success, you would do well to cite an example or two. It’s not Cease. When he achieved his mainstream success– an hourlong Comedy Central special two years ago– he claims to have been suicidal. It’s certainly not Anderson (see above). So, we’re not quite sure who has achieved wild success through his recommended methods. And we’re somewhat skeptical as to who might achieve it in the future using these methods.

And if it’s standup comedy in general that he wants to fix, we’re convinced that it doesn’t need fixing.

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” –Nelson Mandela

Comedy Is NOT Pretty, or CINP is the author of the xtranormal video series Standup Comedy Is NOT Pretty, Parts 1 through 4.

Turns out it’s South Florida comedian Will Lopez who is behind the vids. Everyone knew that, right?

And interview with CINP appears on Pam Bruno’s blog. Who is Pam Bruno? Another creation of Lopez? (There’s only one post on “Pam Bruno’s Blog” and it’s the interview with Comedy Is NOT Pretty. Hmmm…)

The lastest video (the one above) stars Roy Wood, Jr., and is co-written by him. Its subtitle is “The Talk Show.”