We get a great amount of pleasure announcing giveaways. Why? Because, listen, sometimes giving is better than receiving, right? Today, dear Punchline Magazine readers, we’re giving away three copies of the newly-released soundtrack album to Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. It’s called From Our Rears to Your Ears, and it could be yours, for free, from us. This thing is a 99-track epic with songs from all three seasons of the show as well as the audio from some of the more memorable moments of the series. You can check out a few clips here.

So, how do you win? All you have to do is take a photo of yourself somehow enjoying or otherwise interacting with this here site. We’ll post our three favorites — the winners — and mail out your prizes.

Send your photos and full address to punchlinemagazine@gmail.com with the subject SARAH. If you’ve won anything from us in the last 30 days, you are not eligible. Otherwise, good luck, friends!

Jason Jones, one of Comedy Central’s favorite correspondents from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, inked a deal to star as the lead in a new ABC comedy pilot called How To Be A Better American. The Hollywood Reporter explains the show’s premise: “[It] centers on a father (Jones) who embarks on a journey to be a better person and drags his family along kicking and screaming.”

If the series gets picked up by the network, its likely Jones will no longer be filing incredibly incisive reports like this one below.

The incredibly talented and underused Maria Bamford will guest star on Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program tomorrow at 10:30 pm. She’ll play Mayor Kadoody, a politician Sarah gets behind and somehow convinces her friends and family to do the same. Affable on the surface, Kadoody has a sinister streak. Check out a preview below.

We love this character already, especially since the Bammer is bringing to the small screen a variation of a bit she recorded live for her latest album Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome. We dropped that album clip below. Check it out and compare it to her Kadoody character. Fun!

JB Smoove

Russell Simmons, you sly old dog, you’ve done it again. But this time, what he’s done isn’t some hot, edgy rap beat; instead, the end product of Simmons’ tireless effort to bring hip-hop to the ‘burbs is an urban-themed stand-up show, slated to debut on Comedy Central at some point this year.

The show, to be produced by Simmons and Stan Lathan, will feature JB Smoove of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame as the host and will spotlight a wide range of multicultural, diverse comedians.

“We’ve been trying to get into business with Russell and Stan for a while now and this new stand-up series is an exciting first venture for us to partner with them,” said Elizabeth Porter, senior vice president, specials and talent at Comedy Central. “As someone who was a huge fan of ‘Def Comedy Jam,’ working alongside these two incredible visionaries on this series has been nothing short of amazing. With JB Smoove as our front man and all the fresh faces that Russell and Stan have discovered for the show, we’ll be giving our viewers something really awesome each week.”

Comedy Central and one of the world’s largest live entertainment comedy Live Nation have combined efforts to create Comedy Central’s House of Comedy.

The new enterprise will find the comedy network producing stand-up comedy showcase shows at House of Blues venues across the country. Two of the shows — including one in Boston on April 16 — will be taped as one-hour specials for the network. There’s no word yet on which comedians will appear on the live shows or the television versions.

“Since Comedy Central’s launch 19 years ago, we have been approached dozens of times to partner in a comedy venue. The House of Blues venues encapsulate the Comedy Central sensibility and further extends our relationship with Live Nation,” said Mitch Fried, SVP, of the network’s Live Entertainment division. “With Live Nation and its House of Blues venues, we have found the perfect companions to expand our thriving touring business and grow the Comedy Central brand outwards and off channel.”

If you’re reading this post, it’s probable you haven’t heard a lot of Internet buzz about the new hot totally earnest special series on PBS, Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It’s a show that will find Gates, a Harvard professor and incredibly respected writer and critic in all things African American, sitting down with 11 famous Americans to chat about their families from generations ago and to establish the official genealogy of their bloodline.

We’re only telling you all this because in the show’s second episode — airing Feb. 17 at 8 pm EST, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert will sit face to face with Gates. There, you will see a Colbert you’ve never seen before. In the 11 minutes and 20 seconds of previews we’ve seen of his interview, the host of the The Colbert Report barely cracks a joke and instead, is amazingly serious throughout. Want the disturbing proof? Check out the clip below, where Stephen describes his father’s side of the family as holly rollers, ferry operators and horse thieves.

Other celebrity guests throughout the series will include Eva Longoria Parker, Mario Batali and Meryl Streep. The show premieres on Feb. 10 at 8 pm on PBS. There’s three more preview videos of Stephen’s interview after the jump. Click, sit back and enjoy.

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For the last few years, soft-spoken, guitar-wielding comedian Nick Thune has been slowly building a reputation as a respected artist in the alt-comedy scene, especially in Los Angeles, where he’s based.

But in 2009, he became part of Jay Leno’s posse of seemingly not primetime-friendly — not because of lack of talent but because of their non mainstream approach to joke writing — comedian correspondents. We get that Leno is the devil, but before the whole late night debacle of 2010, we were, admittedly praising Leno for exposing the likes of Thune, Jim Norton, Marina Franklin and more to the average television viewer. We won’t stop praising that behavior now.

So now, Thune, with the Leno exposure under his belt and his already strong comedy pedigree, is set to release his debut album on Comedy Central Records. Thick Noon comes out on Feb. 23. But you can check out a pair of tracks here. Let us know what you think. And after the jump, check out Nick’s appearance on last night’s Jay Leno Show, his final piece of screen time for the show.

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The second season of Demetri Martin’s Comedy Central sketch show, Important Things with Demetri Martin premieres tonight at 10 pm. EST. Last year, the series debut broke network records as it became the highest rated premiere since Chapelle’s Show came on the scene in 2003. Get primed by checking out a few minutes of the new season below. And feel free to come back to this space after the show tonight to let us know what your impressions were. Enjoy.

Want to know where Demetri was in 2005? Check out our interview with him from the Punchline Magazine archives.

A month of comedy fans furiously voting for their favorite stand-up comedians to place in the Top 20 of Comedy Central’s Stand-up Showdown has come to an end. The highest ranked comics had their Comedy Central Presents specials aired throughout Sunday as a prize. But only one person came out on top. This year, it was 16-year comedy veteran Tammy Pescatelli.

We caught up with the Cleveland native after her big victory and chatted abut her campaign strategy, her future plans and more. Check it out.

What does winning the Comedy Central Stand-up Showdown mean to you?
It will be nice credit for the MC to say about me. Really nobody cares but my family, friends and fans.

How much of the Showdown did you watch?
TiVo is the best invention ever! I was coming home from a gig. I became a Big Jay Oakerson fan!

A lot of comedians campaign for votes pretty hard. What was your method of campaigning this year?
Truth be told, I actually did embark on a marketing campaign. I wanted to see if I gave it any effort, if it would pay off. I have an e-mail list of 600,000+ names (The years I was on Last Comic Standing, 6.8 million people watched weekly; Internet friend sites were not popular yet, so they signed into my website), I sent out a mass email to one million people-twice!

I did 37 radio station interviews-including Bob and Tom, Todd N Tyler, Dwyer n Michaels and a call in to Opie & Anthony, inadvertently. There were a few newspapers that mentioned me– Cleveland supports its own loyally; ask Browns fans. Allegeheny Productions voted like crazy. I have 16 years in clubs, so several-like The Funny Stop and the Cleveland Improv had their MC’s mention to vote for me everyday. A military base commander in Kuwait had the base “adopt” me.

My brother is a college football coach, so the team got behind me (wait, that doesn’t sound right). And then, of course, my fans, friends and family. No one believed in me more than my husband-he kept saying, “Why not you?” It was like Apollo Creed when he was coaching Rocky- “You can win, Rock. You can Win!!”

Were you paying attention enough to the standings on jokes.com prior to Sunday night that you knew you had won before it aired? Or was it a surprise last night?
I wasn’t paying attention, but my husband was. I thought I might have won, but you never know when it comes to contests. Been there done that.

What’s next on your agenda? Any projects, events we should look out for?
We’re selling a show. I’m working like crazy, and hopefully I’ll have a new special soon. My old one was from 2005! I don’t even do any of those jokes anymore! You can all breathe a collective sigh of relief- there is not one Italian joke in my new hour!

Each year, a handful of comics, who don’t have nearly as big a following, as say, Lewis Black, Jeff Dunham, Dane Cook, et al end up ranking high on the list. It’s a good time for well-respected, veteran comedians to get prime exposure. How do you explain the phenomena—“less popular” comics crushing the widely known comics in the contest?
The Internet changes things, but hard work actually can pay off. Jeff Dunham, Lewis Black and Dane don’t need this as much as I do! I just want to sell more tickets for shows when I perform. Who doesn’t want to do well?

We’ve had a decent amount of readers email or comment on the site that they feel the contest is either rigged or just plain unfair. Some claim Comedy Central try to push “their” comedians. Are people taking it too seriously? And how well do you feel the contest is run?
As someone on your site said, this contest was not “the Funniest,” it was vote for your for “your favorite.” Either way, it was a good time for me because I have a lot of unemployed fans and friends, so they voted for me like it was a job.

Look, I am certainly not in the click. Contests are what they are- Mitzi Shore once said that comedy should not be a contest; you shouldn’t put artist’s up against each other. There were times when I went to vote for the first time and it told me I had exceeded my limit. I did not cheat. I did not have robots. I have been a WORKING comedian for 16 years. Being first is nice, but the real winner is Comedy Central with all the free advertising.

For more on Tammy, check out her official site at tammypescatelli.com.

We’re obviously not surprised that our pick to win the Grammy for best comedy album, Patton Oswalt, didn’t win the award tonight, seeing as mainstream names like Kathy Griffin and George Lopez were on the nominee list.

And we’re happy (kind of) that Stephen Colbert snagged it instead (instead of one of the other nominees), for his A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All (released in November of 2008, making it eligible for the 2009 entries).

But, there is this: as far as we can tell, Colbert’s release, nominated in the Best Comedy Album category, is a DVD; so it’s not an album. A scan of Comedy Central’s online shop and Amazon.com shows no audio version of Colbert Christmas. Other media outlets explain it by calling it the soundtrack of his DVD special? So you can just take out the musical parts of a DVD, not release it commercially but get it nominated for an album Grammy? Seems like a lot of shoe-horning for no reason. It’s not like there weren’t dozens of proper audio comedy albums put out in 2009.

Don’t get us wrong. We love Stephen a great deal. But we think it’s high time the Grammy committee started taking the Best Comedy Album category seriously and start incorporating the many stand-up albums that are put out each year into its nomination process. Only half of the nominated albums this year were actual stand-up albums.

UPDATE 11 pm EST:

So, thanks to our astute, speedy readers, we’ve been informed that the Colbert “soundtrack” was released on iTunes. However, we still have a moral issue with it. We’re sure releasing audio from a television special on iTunes fits in with the Grammy’s definition of what an “album” is. But in the end, what we’re talking about is under 26 minutes of audio taken from a project that was produced to be on television and sold as a DVD for consumers to watch.

That it was released quietly on iTunes — like we said, you can’t even buy it from the Comedy Central site, the people that put it out — and that was enough to get it nominated for a Best Album Grammy, shows a lot of indifference to the stand-up comedians who worked to put together an hour of original material meant for a true comedy album. And yes, Oswalt and Lopez both released DVD versions of their albums– Oswalt’s was just a bonus to his album. But both albums are widely and commercially available– they’re not just parts of larger projects with no tangible life of their own.

Anyway, it seems most people could care less, instead, turning their attention to the fact that Colbert whipped out an iPad onstage. See below.