Yesterday, Patton Oswalt tweeted that he’ll have his first book published “in exactly 5 months.” Stop! Don’t even try to do the addition. We’ve already gathered in a room with our cat calendars and iPads — the only piece of technology flat and shiny enough to do that kind of work — and figured it out for you. The book is coming out Jan. 4.

The book is titled Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. It’s 256 pages. It will be released in hardcover, eAudio, eBook and CD, according to the Simon & Schuster site.

No description for the book was given on either Amazon or Simon & Schuster’s site. So why don’t you make up one. Leave some in the comments section. Oh, and you can buy the book before it has a description or cover, for that matter. Just click the image below!

The Seattle music and arts festival Bumbershoot recently announced its jam-packed comedy lineup for the September event. Boasting both national acts and up and coming comedians, Bumbershoot will have a comedy stage South, West, and North in addition to its main music stage and other creative arts performances.

Who’s going to be there? Among the comedians are Patton Oswalt, Greg Behrendt, Donald Glover, Joe Mande, Morgan Murphy, Chelsea Peretti, Nick Kroll, and Marc Maron. You can check out the full lineup here.

Patton Oswalt has been ripped off— again!

On April 30 – not even a month ago – Oswalt blogged on his MySpace page about a “comedian” named Nick Madson who stole a large portion of his material, including the bit “Physics For Poets.” The online comedy community went ape shit.

After Oswalt’s second exhaustive post about the incident on May 1 you’d think people would heed Oswalt’s words. It seems Brian Corman, the valedictorian of Columbia University, didn’t get the message.

In Corman’s speech to his graduating class he recited Oswalt’s “Physics For Poets” — which appears on Oswalt’s 2007 album Werewolves and Lollipops — bit verbatim without giving any credit to the real writer. (You can watch the ass clown’s rendition here). So, today, Patton took to his Twitter feed saying, “Congrats to Columbia University valedictorian Brian Corman! Great speech” and added a link to the YouTube video of the Columbia University graduation.

The online comedy community went ape shit—again. And for good reason.

The video mysteriously became “private” so that the general public could no longer view it. A few hours later the video was back up, only this time with this statement posted by Columbia University across the screen. It looked like this; note Patton’s last name spelled wrong on second reference (The school has since corrected their error).

Later in the day, Patton updated his MySpace blog, saying: “Brian Corman apologized to me. Flat-out admitted his thievery, his stupidity. Owned it all. Good man. Still makes me wonder what he might have done to become valedictorian — I mean, if he’s willing to steal material for something as inconsequential as a speech, how rubbery did his boundaries become when his GPA and future career were on the line? Oh well.”

In an early afternoon New York Times post, Oswalt summed up the problem of joke thievery perfectly: “In people’s heads they think that comedians can’t possibly make up their own material,” he said. “They must get it out of joke books.”

So on behalf of all of us at Punchline Magazine: Fuck you, Brian Corman, and your severe lack of respect for stand-up comedy as an art form. We hope this massive error in judgment follows you to your first job interview and far beyond.

UPDATE: 5/26/10, 12:15 pm EST

Columbia University has issued a slightly updated statement. They’ve asked us to include it in this post. It’s after the jump. Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »

Patton Oswalt, Adam Corolla, Rob Corddry, and George Wendt are just a few of the new names announced this week who will be added to the already-impressive lineup at TBS’s Just For Laughs comedy festival, going down June 15-19 in Chicago.

Joining the likes of already confirmed performers Ellen DeGeneres, Denis Leary, Russell Peters, and Cedric the Entertainer, among others, the festival will feature a preview of Corddry’s upcoming Adult Swim TV show, Childrens Hospital, as well as an alumni reunion of Chicago’s Second City class of ‘79.

Tickets for newly announced festival shows go on sale May 1. For more information, please visit justforlaughschicago.com.

Two days ago we reported that fast-rising comedian Nick Thune was in the running — along with two other actors — to replace a role in the NBC pilot, Beach Lane that had been vacated by Patton Oswalt. It looks like Thune got the gig, according to Deadline Hollywood, who, we have found, is rarely wrong about breaking casting news.

Thune will play slacker James who inherits a Hamptons, NY newspaper and hires Broderick’s character to turn it around. True Blood’s Michael McMillan and actor John Forest were also reportedly in the running for the part. For more on Thune, check out our recent interview with the man himself.

Late yesterday, it was reported that Patton Oswalt, newly signed on to co-star opposite Matthew Broderick in the NBC pilot Beach Lane, had been cut from the role and offered a smaller part. Now it seems the rumor is turning to fact, as Deadline Hollywood is reporting comedian Nick Thune is vying to replace Oswalt in the role of slacker James who inherits a Hamptons, NY newspaper and hires Broderick’s character to turn it around.

True Blood’s Michael McMillan and actor John Forest are also reportedly in the running for the part, which went up for grabs after a table read for the pilot this week. Thune’s profile has grown a lot this year thanks to his recurring appearances on the former Jay Leno Show as well as the release of his album Thick Noon on Comedy Central Records.

Patton Oswalt has inked a deal with NBC to star, along with Matthew Broderick, in the comedy pilot Beach Lane. Not surprisingly, the well-respected comedian who has recently written a comic book and is starring in a Broadway play, will play a “slacker” named James, who has “inherited wealth and given the job of running a small Hamptons newspaper. James hires a renowned journalist (Broderick) to help turn the paper around,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The pilot is being produced by Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels and Marci Klein and was created by Paul Simms who was behind the Larry Sanders Show.

Back in December, we told you that Patton Oswalt, on the heels of his critically acclaimed role in the movie Big Fan, would make his Broadway debut in a play called Lips Together, Teeth Apart. This morning, reports have surfaced that imply maybe things aren’t going so well at rehearsals.

One of the stars of the play, Megan Mullally, a trained stage actor and former co-star of Will and Grace abruptly quit the show in breach of her contract, because of the director’s refusal to replace Oswalt, whom Megan thinks is not getting the hang of stage acting quickly enough, according to Deadline Hollywood.

Statements from the play’s production team have been issued. But they only address Mullally’s departure. The Roundabout Theatre’s artistic director Todd Haimes said this: “We were surprised and disappointed that Megan Mullally had to withdraw from the production immediately in breach of her contract. With the loss of Megan in a four-person ensemble, work has been delayed after only two weeks of rehearsal.”

Whatever the case may be, hang in there, Patton! We love you. And we’ll be there once the play opens.

Everyone knows Patton Oswalt is one of the original, self-proclaimed nerds of comedy, so you might not be too surprised to learn he’s just written a comic book. And it’ll be out June 2. The interesting part is that it’s an episode of Firefly, the short-lived Joss Whedon series that was axed by Fox despite garnering a devoted cult following.

Apparently, Oswalt was one of those cult members. He talked about his love of Firefly and working with Joss Whedon in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly.

“How did this Firefly comic come together? Did you approach them or did they come to you with it?

I was on an episode of Dollhouse. Joss and I could not have more interests in common. I was talking to him like an annoying fanboy about Firefly and I think he was being very tolerant of me. I was like, ‘Do you remember in that one episode when…’ I had read the Firefly comics that they did for Dark Horse. It’s like being a Wire fan. Any extras that are out there, you want them because there’s such a finite amount of the thing that you love. The fact that he was expanding on the story about the man with the blue hands in the comics, it just made you go, ‘Oh, hey, what about…?’ He said, ‘If you have an idea for a story, pitch me some stories.’ I pitched him three stories and he really liked the Wash one, so that’s the one we did.”

Check out the full interview here.

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.