Comedian Alex Koll, a performer in the prestigious “New Faces” showcase at last year’s Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, is now the host of the weekly comedy show, named one of iTunes’ top 20 podcasts in 2009
“No one delivers the quality and breadth of great comedy that ROFL does each week,” says Colin Decker, vice president and head of programming for Rooftop Media, which collaborates with Revision3 to present the show.
ROFL relaunches with jokes from, among others, Pete Lee, Justin Morgan, Bryson Turner, Chris Hardwick and Kerri Lendo. Check out an episode below!
Rooftop Comedy, everybody’s favorite comedy juggernaut (well, next to Punchline Magazine, of course), announced that it would be teaming up with Country Music TV to search for America’s next comic superstar. Through the website comic.cmt.com, the two media powerhouses have chosen 12 rising comedic voices to compete against each other for a chance to rock the mic at this year’s Aspen Rooftop Comedy fest, kicking off in June.
Needless to say, we can’t wait to see the final four contestants duke it out for comic supremacy in the final round on Feb. 22. Should make the mountains of Aspen a lot more volcanic this year. Check out Chad Daniels below; he’s just one of the dozen comedians in the running.
Happy, comedy hump day, everyone. Thought I’d roll out my never-before-seen on Punchline Magazine video interview with the one and only Will Durst. You may know Durst from his many political entries on Huffington Postor maybe from your finer comedy clubs across the country. Or maybe you don’t know him at all. The point is, below, embedded for your pleasure is a video of me interviewing him, Will Durst. This saves you from having to track Will Durst down and interviewing him yourself. You. Are. Welcome.
This year, Punchline Magazine is celebrating its four years online with an incredible show at Comix in New York City on Oct. 13. Lewis Black, Janeane Garofalo, Todd Barry, Christian Finnegan, Ted Alexandro, Pete Dominick and Robert Hawkins will all perform at the show, a one-night only event.
To help celebrate the anniversary, the first 75 people in the showroom will get Punchline Magazine sport bags filled with CDs from Co-sponsor Stand Up! Records, t-shirts from Rooftop Comedy and more. Tickets to this event are only $15 in advance and $20 the day of. Go here to get your tickets before they’re gone.
Rooftop Media just announced a distribution deal with digEcor, a major in-flight entertainment provider, to bring the Rooftop Comedy Channel to commercial flights.
Rooftop Comedy, which tapes live stand-up comedy shows every night, will have their content available on Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines, KLM Royal Dutch, and others that feature the digEplayer.
“While flying, passengers often don’t have enough time to invest in a movie or television show, so short content such as great stand-up comedy provides an enjoyable and desirable way to pass the time on flights,” said Jed Thompson, Content Administrator of digEcor.
“This deal with digEcor takes Rooftop Media to new heights,” said Will C. Rogers, founder and CEO of Rooftop Media. “Deals like this one allow us to take the performance out of the comedy club and deliver it directly to the fans no matter where they are.”
Rooftop also has partnerships with companies such as iTunes, Hulu, and TiVO.
If you find yourself on Punchline Magazine rather often, you’re probably familiar with our video interview series A Tight Five, wherein, Punchline Magazine editor and founder Dylan Gadino interviews well known comedians at Comix in New York. To get each episode done, a 15-20 minute raw interview is shot and then our friends at Rooftop Comedy edit it down to an entertaining five minutes.
But we’ve gotten a good amount of emails asking about the unedited versions of these interviews, if they’d ever be available to view. So we figured we’d start rolling some of those out. To begin, we thought we’d start out with our interview with Eugene Mirman.
Remember, these are uncut and done in one take. They aren’t perfect. So if they suck, it’s all Dylan’s fault. These versions are what it looks like before Rooftop Comedy lends their magic hands to make these the perfect interviews they usually are. Enjoy!
While in Aspen covering the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival last week, I had the pleasure of accepting the award for Best Online Comedy Industry Publication. It was the second year in a row Punchline Magazine has won that honor. The award is voted on by the more than 3,000 comedians Rooftop Comedy has in their network as well as insiders from Rooftop’s 20 partner clubs from around the world. For a full list of award categories, nominees and winners, check out Rooftop’s awards page.
Me accepting the award at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen from comedian Will Durst, who hosted the awards show.
ASPEN, CO — The second night of the Aspen Rooftop Comedy festival found us at the Wheeler Opera House for three shows, the first of which was Rooftop’s Best and Brightest, featuring Cameron Esposito, Moshe Kasher, Jessi Campbell, Ty Barnett and Matt Braunger. Of this lineup, I was only unfamiliar with the work of Esposito, and Kasher, save for a few quick glances online at their Rooftop Comedy clips. So let’s start there, shall we?
Esposito has carved out a solid following in Chicago from which she hails – having been nominated for best female comic in 2007 and winning Rooftop Comedy’s Snubfest competition – filtering her down-to-earth charm through odd-colored glasses and an animated presence that – I would think – most hip comedy audiences couldn’t help but get drawn into.
When she wasn’t convincing the Aspen crowd that she has great hair – and she does have great hair – and toned arms (which were covered by long sleeves), she was telling jokes about her personal life: during a UK tour, an audience member asked if she was related to the Espositos who trained racing birds for the queen (she told the audience member “yes”); her South African girlfriend’s favorite native food is a dish wherein you dip cheese into a paste made of meat—that was enough for Cameron to ask her to marry her. Hers is a dry wit for sure, a challenging taste of stand-up for a mainstream comedy crowd. Check out a clip of Esposito below.
As for Kasher, I was immediately drawn in. His appearance, no doubt, helps; he’s a slight, pale guy with jet-black hair (he calls the style the Gitler, “the gay Hitler”) and sports large-framed glasses and a less-than-masculine interpretation of what a dude is. The Los Angeles-based performer has a powerful comedic voice and amazingly wide range. He seamlessly shifts from traditional blue humor to heady material that finds Dante’s Inferno the subject of a joke; he also does moderate physical humor, poking fun at himself for owning a thicket of hair on his forearm and none on his bicep, not to mention an oddly bendable wrist that, he jokes, he sometimes tucks in his shirt, exposing what looks like a nub, to make strangers feel bad for him. Watching Kasher try to tie his shows with said nub makes for a cheap laugh, but it’s funny nonetheless. Check out Kasher’s take on his hairy arm below.
When Campbell took the stage, it had felt like I’d seen her perform live many times before, having watched and re-watched her vast collection of clips on Rooftop Comedy. It didn’t take long to see why Rooftop viewers voted Campbell into the Aspen fest. She’s plain fun. She tells a joke based around an apparent real-life event wherein a woman is eaten by a bear after feeding the monster trail mix from her hand. Turns out, when the trail mix was gone the bear was still hungry. That’s like bear food (the woman) feeding the bear more food, Campbell explained. “I don’t blame the bear,” she says. “If a piece of pizza walked up to me and handed me a donut, and I finished that donut, I’m eating some fucking pizza!” Check out the clip below; Campbell also did a version of this last night.
Barnett and Braunger represented the bigger names of the show, the former making tons of late-night appearances as well winning the runner-up title on the fourth season of Last Comic Standing, the latter scoring a cast member gig at MadTV, shortly before it’s demise, winning last year’s Rooftop Best of the Fest title and steadily gaining a massive following in the alt comedy scene.
It’s no mystery why Barnett advanced so far on a stand-up comedy contest show on network television; the man’s got mass appeal. He’s incredibly affable onstage and knows just how far to push the envelope and still maintain the interest of a middle-American crowd. His take on the word “nigga” as opposed to the real n-word: popularized by 2Pac’s song that creates the positive acronym “Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished,” Barnett explains you can’t just dress a word up like that and change its vile original meaning. “That’s like coming home and finding a pile of shit on the floor and then putting candles and whipped cream on it,” he says. Check out the clip below of a bit Barnett did last night in Aspen.
And speaking of poop, don’t let anyone tell you that poop jokes are simply juvenile and never funny. They may always be juvenile, but that doesn’t mean a good comedian can’t craft well-written jokes and add insight into feces-inspired bits. Enter Braunger, a man that has the charisma and smarts to turn a typical Taco Bell joke into an extended and wholly entertaining joke about incredibly painful pooping and bad decisions— getting drunk and heading to the Bell to ingest a “big greasy sack of Mexican wrong.” In his set last night, Braunger also related to the crowd what he feels is one the worst things on Earth: when he’s watching porn and the guy, mid-stroke, looks into the camera and addresses a dick-in-hand Braunger. Not cool. Check out the clip below of what has arguably become Braunger’s most well known bit. It was filmed at last year’s Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival.
Starting today and going through Sunday, I’ll be in Aspen, CO attending the second annual Rooftop Comedy Festival, produced by our good friends at Rooftop Comedy. In addition to attending a mess of shows — the likes of Ted Alexandro, Will Durst, Finesse Mitchell, Lisa Landry, Josh Sneed, and more are performing — I’ll be speaking on a panel about new media and how it relates to stand-up comedy. I’ll also be doing some video and audio interviews with comics: you’ll be able to listen to the latter right on this page ot Punchline Magazine’s front page on the Punchline Podcast player we just installed. That’s all for now. Keep it tuned here as well as our Twitter page at twitter.com/punchlinemag.
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