Review: “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop”

by Brendan McLaughlin

In theaters June 24

As a Conan O’Brien fan who followed The Tonight Show ordeal as closely and obsessively as Internet access allowed, I’d describe the last two years of the host’s career as: a) hectic and b) well documented. Everybody interested in knowing what went down at NBC and in the Conan and Leno camps does; there’s even a book about it– The War For Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy. So when you hear there’s a Conan documentary coming out, it’s hard not to think, “Don’t I know this story already?” Having seen Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, the new film by Rodman Flender chronicling the late night host’s post-Tonight Show live tour, I now feel sufficiently able to answer that question: no, you don’t.

The movie picks up where author Bill Carter’s aforementioned book leaves off — with Conan, The Tonight Show a not-so-distant memory, regrouping with his circle of confidants to plan his next move. The camera follows Coco and co. as they write, rehearse and perfect the road act that will serve as their post-NBC-trauma, pre-TBS deal palette cleanser. But unlike Carter’s book and the rest of the coverage surrounding the Tonight Show debacle, the film isn’t interested in a play-by-play retelling of events. It’s about how it felt to be at the center of a giant media firestorm, and what it’s like to pick up the pieces after unexpected events and difficult choices turn your world upside down. The answer, in Conan’s case, was to throw himself into what he loves: comedy and music.

“I’m happiest when I’m with comedians or musicians working things out,” Conan says at one point during the documentary. He’s telling the truth, because one of the biggest treats about this movie is getting to see that joy in its purest form. We feel it when he’s auditioning backup singers, re-writing the lyrics to Wille Nelson’s “On The Road Again,” jamming his way through rockabilly tunes and trying on a spot-on replica of the leather onesie Eddie Murphy wore in his now-classic stand-up comedy concert film Raw. You realize that this is the stuff he desperately needed to get back to after months spent haggling with network suits and lamenting the 11:30 pm dream that wasn’t meant to be.

Flender was granted total backstage access. This isn’t sound-bite/press release Conan. It’s a frank look at an entertainer in a raw state. “Sometimes I’m so mad I can’t even breath,” Conan tells Flender. These sit-down interviews are candid and straightforward, but the truly revealing moments come when O’Brien is captured just being himself. We see it all: Conan riffing with his writers, chewing out his assistant for messing up his takeout order and belittling Jack McBrayer during a tense, pre-show hang session that he’s annoyed about having to participate in. Conan’s diva-like behavior definitely has shock value, but you’re also left sympathizing with someone who’s expected to be all things to all people at all times.

In a surreal moment, O’Brien compares his situation to that of Anne Frank. The point is. Conan isn’t always pretty, and we get to see that. A more fun moment involves Conan scoffing at a proposed meeting with TBS, making a joke about how soon he’ll be taking meetings with the Oxygen network.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is a must for die-hard fans, but it’s also a great documentary for anyone who’s ever wondered what it’s like to hit the road as a professional entertainer, to have a legion of loyal fans watching your every move or to be at the center of a media machine. When Conan announces the tour on Twitter, and then watches as each date rapidly sells out with the show’s content far from solidified, we sense the pressure he feels to deliver. But we also feel his excitement at the prospect of being in front of an audience again.

Nothing crazy or unexpected happens in the course of the film – by the time the movie starts, those plot twists are already over and done with. This movie is about what happens after the shit has already hit the fan, what a person lets go of and what that person holds on to. And it’s about a performer for whom stopping just isn’t an option.

Interview: Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric chats on DVD and more!

by Meagan Kate

Brilliant, absurdist sketch comedy freaks Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim gave us a fifth season of genius this year and their Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! DVD (out now!) brought even more tender morsels of awkward humor than I could have even imagined.

Tim and Eric are an acquired taste. Their Adult Swim staple is filled with endless jokes about child molestation, bodily fluids and physical violence – and it is not for everyone.

Each 11-minute episode makes you cringe while laughing uncontrollably. I assure you it is a glorious experience. Season five was totally on point, and took viewers on a more darker ride than usual.

They definitely pushed the limits, but I have yet to meet a fan of theirs who wasn’t totally on board.

The guys are often accompanied by awesome celebrity guests; season five included Richard Dunn, Rainn Wilson, Zack Galifianakis and Paul Rudd. Rudd’s portrayal of himself … watching, well, himself dancing, was one of my favorites sketches of the season. Steve Mahanahan and his Child Clown Outlet sketch sparked my excessive use of my favorite one-liner this season … “I touched a clown and now I’m going to jail.”

But why buy the DVD, you ask? I can see a ton of these clips on the Adult Swim website! You’re, right, reader – you can. But with the DVD you get some awesome added features like extended cuts of some of the best sketches, and delectable outtakes/gag reels that are just as odd as the real deal. As strange as it sounds – it’s nice to see them break once in a while and laugh like real humans. And karaoke. There is karaoke involved, you guys.

As if getting the DVD to look over wasn’t enough, I was told that I got to interview the guys about the DVD. And then I shit myself (See!? Totally my brand of humor!). Below is my interview with Tim (technical difficulty meant Eric and I were unable to converse).

So, why should people buy this DVD? I mean, you can find just about anything for free on the Internets.
TIM: Well the DVD is easily portable. You can bring it with you in a knapsack if you’re going somewhere. And it has extra features. Like goof-‘em-ups and all that junk where we couldn’t keep a straight face. And lots of behind the scenes stuff showing how we make the show.

So this season was obviously a lot darker than the previous one. Was that intentional or did that just happen naturally?
TIM: We got more confident over the series, in our voice and characters, and ideas or references for those who had been along for the ride – they could see some resolution to it. There was way more context there than there had been before – so with those ideas we could run with it.

Have there ever been sketches you worried about writing or had a hard time with?
TIM: Nothing’s coming to mind. We always spend a lot of time on ideas before they need to be shot. So a lot of that decision making comes out in the first stages. A lot of ideas just die on the board.

What is that writing process like?
TIM: It’s us and three other guys (editors and a show producer). There’s no money to pay anybody and keep writers on, so we keep one or two days of brainstorming and amass this big, giant document. That’s about half of it. The other half is done when we’re putting the script together– adding old ideas, and leaving space for improv.

You two have obsessed fans. Creepy ones.
TIM: Yeah, we were at a hotel the other day having a meeting by the pool. Because that’s what we do in Hollywood. And a bus boy came up to us and was kind of geeking out. It was a nice hotel in LA so you’d think they were used to that. But he was just like “fuck it” and asked us for a picture.

You two met in college and have worked together ever since. Do you ever get sick of each other?
TIM: Nope!

NEVER?!
TIM: Nope. It’s always fun.

You guys have always had such awesome guests on the show – do they come to you or do you try to hunt them down?
In the first few seasons it was always our friends, but then people started coming to us. We’re really selective with who we work with. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. Will Forte works great in our world. John (C. Reilly) obviously worked out for us.

So are there some people who have come to you and you get to tell them no?
TIM: Yes.

Did that feel fantastic?
TIM: Oh yeah. There is one, in particular … I won’t say who it is … but it was pretty awesome to say no.

What have been some of your favorite sketches?
TIM: The Cinco iTanner, Male Broach and Food Tube. Those worked together really well.

What’s next?
TIM: Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. It’s going to be a wild ride!

Snag yourself the complete season five of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! by clicking the image below!

Interview: Sandra Bernhard loves being her–and we would, too

by Carla Sosenko

Comedian, singer, writer, mom and all-around kick-ass broad Sandra Bernhard took some time out of her insanely busy schedule to talk to us about her newest album, I Love Being Me, Don’t You? (out June 7), fictional girl fights and Roseanne Barr.

Pre-order the album on iTunes.

I listened to your album.
Oh good.

It’s so fun. I’m curious how much of that is prepared and how much is just you having a good time in a room full of people who obviously adore you.
That night [October 2010 at the Castro in San Francisco], which was this concert of kismet, they just happened to be professionally recording it. And I just happened to be on and plugging into my improvisational goddesses and just went on a tear. So, so much of that night is really a one-off that I could never re-create again.

There’s that moment where you’re like, “They’re obviously not recording me tonight, because they never record me when I’m doing well.”
Exactly. I had no idea that they were recording it. I guess that made it even better, because I felt like I was free to say whatever I wanted. And therefore it was being recorded, and you want to capture those nights, because those are the best nights.

Do you go in with…you said you probably couldn’t replicate it, and there are lots of different reasons. Crowds obviously change the way a performance can go—but is there a lot that you go in prepared with?
Oh sure. It’s always important for any performer to have an actual act, you know what I mean? I don’t know anybody that could improvise an entire show every night. If you’re just a little bit off or the crowd’s not with you, you freeze. So, of course. I have a lot of different acts. I have some acts that are with a full band, so they’re more prepared and big pieces and big musical numbers. Then there are the nights that are like the night I did in San Francisco where I have my guitar player and it’s more casual. But even on those nights I have fall-back material, and a point A to point B. You’ve got to have that outline as an artist to get through the night, because as I said, if you freeze up, you’re done.

I’m curious how much over the years the way that you go into these things has changed. You’ve become one of these iconic figures, so you’ve got to assume that most of the time the people who are coming to see you are the people who already love you, so you know you’re going to have support there.
Right. That’s true. That makes me feel more responsible. Because if somebody comes back to see me year after year, I don’t want to cheat them. I don’t want to phone it in and be like, “You’ve heard this a hundred times.” I’m constantly pushing myself and challenging myself to write new material and try to be on the cutting edge, because there’s a lot of new performers, there’s a lot of people out there. You’ve got to stay in the game and be prepared and willing to do the work. I always try to do that. It’s really important to me.

I know the covers on the album [Melanie’s “Beautiful People” and a hybrid of Pink’s “Just Like a Pill” and Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly”] are beloved covers that you’ve done before. Will those change as well when you start touring with this?
Oh yeah. I’m always looking for new songs that I’ve always enjoyed over the years, and then some of my original tunes. I’m constantly churning up the musical aspect as well. But I do come back to some of the ones that people like, because if you go to see Stevie Nicks, you want to hear “Rhiannon.” You’ve got to walk that fine line, except when you’re doing more comedic monologues, you’ve got to keep that a little bit fresher.

How did you ever decide on Lita Ford for a cover?
I just love that song. Even though when you look at it for the surface value, you think, Oh, this is a tacky song, there’s just something about the Runaways and the early days of women in rock and roll, and they continued to be out there doing their thing…there’s something heartbreaking about it on a certain level and emotional. I don’t know, I just always manage to find the underpinnings to a song like that and relate it to all the kids that listened to it and all the kids that made out to it. There are so many layers to a great rock song, so I always tap into that.

And I feel like she was sort of rare. She was this one chick among all these rocker guys when that song came out.
Exactly. There she was in her leather and her bustier. She was kind of groovy and weird and I don’t know, she’s cool. I like to pay homage.

I have to ask if your girlfriend has heard the album.
Um, no. But she kind of knows all my material. She knows that I can go off on tangents.

I’m always curious…you are obviously not someone who I would describe as afraid to express her opinion—you talk about your girlfriend, you talk about your friend Iman, you talk about the people at the Kaballah Center…. You’re still a real person. When you go home, is it like, “Oh, that’s just Sandra doing her thing,” or is there hell to pay when you go home and your girlfriend knows you’ve talked about you guys being in therapy or her being uptight and reading over your shoulder?
(laughing) Well, you know, I’m sure there’s always consequences to everything, but we’re all on the same page, and I don’t think I ever cross that line with my family. Hopefully people understand. But that’s a very fair question.

Well, I’m wondering also—and this may be a question of just age, too—if your daughter ever listens to your stuff.
She does, but not really. She’s not that interested. She kind of goes like, “Uh, Mom, whatever.” She’s in a different headspace—she’s a preteen. I think she’s just preoccupied with other stuff. We’re very close, and she loves me, and we talk about stuff, but I don’t think she’s that interested completely in what I do at this point. She comes to my shows and she likes to be backstage and run around, but she’s so like…whatever. And it’s a much healthier way to be.

Do you think she has any leanings toward showbiz herself?
I think she’s starting to express some interest in singing and acting. We’ll see how far that goes. We’re just sort of letting her do her thing.

One thing I noticed about this album, and I’m curious if it’s intentional or not—it’s not that political. There’s the stuff that you say about Obama, which I have to say, personally, I completely appreciated, because I don’t think that’s a very popular view right now.
Right. Well, you know, I’ve been political. During the last election I was very political. I think during the Bush administration there was a lot more to talk about for people like me because I felt very threatened by what he was doing. I think I needed a major psychic break from talking about it. The cards are on the table. Any thinking, sentient person knows, you have one way of looking at things or you have another, and I think my way of looking at it is a much more rational way.

I just can’t fight that fight every day, and onstage, especially if people are coming to see me, people are coming to see me. It’s not like I’m in Vegas and people are wandering in from the casino and I have to watch what I’m saying. I feel like it’s just not really worth the exhaustion to talk about things that drive me crazy about the Republicans at this point.

There was some stuff that you said about Sarah Palin a couple of years ago, there was some backlash to that—and again, like I said, I think of you as a pretty fearless person, but you’re also a person, so I wonder if that has any impact on you.
Yeah, it did, it did have an impact, only because the people that are out there are very threatening, and they threaten violence, and they’re just scary people, so it’s like, I want to put myself on the line? The outcome was the outcome that I wanted. She kind of faded into the mist—maybe she’s resurfacing now. I mean, it’s obvious what she’s about, and I don’t feel like I need to put myself out there. It’s not like I’m on Bill Maher where we’re having a political conversation. When you’re onstage by yourself, you have to make things funny, you’re up there by yourself. I am a woman, I mean, there are different levels…sometimes it’s just not worth it.

If she ran again, do you think she’d become something you talked about again?
Well, I would certainly…I would have to sit back and watch how far it all went. In terms of Sarah Palin, I feel like she’s been talked about, and she’s exposed herself and exploited her family and, I mean, there’s really nothing left to say that’s really in the realm of humor. It’s this weird personal thing that she’s played out, and I think it’s very narcissistic. I don’t want to contribute to celebrating her negatively or positively. She has a film coming out apparently that she’s producing where she shows people trashing her. If that doesn’t say it all about somebody, I don’t know what does. I don’t want to be involved in that particular weird scene at this point or any point in the near future.

You talk about being on Twitter, and you obviously tweet a lot. You make a funny comment about it—it is this weird kind of, “Yeah, we don’t want to see people in real life, we just kind of want to tweet at them from afar a little bit.”
Right.

I’m wondering if you ever hear from people that you talk about onstage, whether it’s on Twitter or otherwise…like, you’ve made some comments about Kathy Griffin, and you were talking about Arnold Schwarzengger, and I wonder if you ever hear…like, is Kathy Griffin tweeting at you?
I never Twitter about people. You can’t fully…once again, it’s not like you’re onstage or in a conversation on a talk show where people see you going back and forth with someone. You’re doing it from a void. And if you just say in 140 letters “This person’s an idiot,” of course that’s going to stir up a hornet’s nest, which I’m not interested in doing.

And PS, by the way, I don’t have any battle with Kathy Griffin at all. I simply said she has borrowed from me along the way and she’d be the first to admit it. And what she does has taken it in a whole different direction, but I know that did influence her. And sometimes it’s like, hey, you know, I don’t want to cheapen what I do. Sometimes people take it in a direction I don’t agree with, but I do a more sophisticated kind of performing, and that’s how I like to do it. But there’s definitely no battle.

Well here’s the thing: If you look online at that video you did with Rob Shuter, it doesn’t look like there is. I feel like what happens is, people love battles.
They’re so desperate to find people who are sniping with each other like the Housewives of New York, New Jersey, Orange County, that that’s what they always want to see and they forget that there’s social criticism, that there’s a way of saying things that’s not about starting World War III, it’s about saying, I know this person. I feel like this is the influence and this is how I approach it. I’m not taking the piss out of Kathy Griffin, because I don’t want to. I don’t have the need to do that.

She’s very successful, she’s a woman, she’s out there, God bless her. Good, yay, another funny woman who’s got the temerity to stick it out and become a success. So on that level, I support her. She’s not doing anything, y’know, really bad or disruptive. It’s just a difference in style, and that’s all I was commenting on.

You mention on the album that Arts and Crafts [Bernhard’s play with Justin Vivian Bond] didn’t have a home yet, and obviously it played here in New York City at Joe’s Pub, so congratulations on that.
That was more or a less a night of bringing in producers and stuff. We still don’t have a home. We’re still working on that. We’re looking to meet with a director/producer or a theater company or somebody who will develop it to the next level and put it up at a theater. It’s a long process. I’m super busy, and Justin Bond is very busy, so we’re trying to merge our schedules around meeting with people and making it all happen. That’s a work in progress.

And when you’re trying to get something to happen, you still have to make money, so you can’t put the brakes on the rest of your career because if something isn’t generating money, it’s sort of a weird double-edged sword. And anyway we’re working on something I want to see happen for sure.

I typically think of you as a one-woman thing—when I think of your albums and shows and all that you’ve written. Is the process of collaborating with another person, especially a friend, something you particularly enjoy?
Oh yeah, and I’ve done it in the past. I’ve written with my girlfriend, I’ve written with friends, yeah, it’s really important to have that break of just not constantly having to do your own work. It’s exhausting. I write my own material, so you need those breaks in between and it’s great to collaborate with people that you’re friends with and projects that don’t always see the light of day, but there’s something very fulfilling about continuing to push it in new directions.

Speaking of being exhausted, you’re about to start an international tour of this album?
Well, you know, it’s not all just going to happen at once. We’re rolling it out during the year. June is very busy, because I have a couple of dates before Town Hall on June 8, and Town Hall’s a big, big show, I have special guests coming in. And then I’m going to the West Coast, I’m going to Napa, and then I’m doing the entire Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco. I’m doing two nights of my show, but then like two other nights of stuff that’s just associated with Gay Pride, so that’ll be a busy time.

It’ll roll out during the summer and out through the year, yeah, we’re tying it in with the album because that’s a great platform when you perform live to sell things. So, I mean, that can kind of go on for at least the next year if not more, because it’s not like you’re trying to push a single of an album, so it makes the shelf life a little bit longer.

Is that harder to do now? You have a 12-year-old daughter, you’ve been doing this for a long time—is it something you still enjoy?
Oh yeah, I do. I really do enjoy going to new markets, going back to cities I’ve been to. We always try to stay in a nice hotel, we always try to eat great food, so even though it’s work and it’s pressure and it takes a lot of focus, some of the stuff around it—you get to see friends you haven’t seen in awhile—I always enjoy it. And it always ends up being an enriching experience. You meet fans, people who’ve come back again, it’s like this great thing.

Did you read Roseanne Barr’s recent piece in New York magazine?.
I have read it and loved it and really think she is as always on the cutting edge and so smart and so daring and really has continued to tell it like it is. She did it for 10 seasons on her show. And having been a part of that and having seen how she worked and how much energy and effort went into that along with the emotional sidebar of it all—no pun intended—um, yeah, I loved that piece. I thought it was right on.

So it was accurate to your experience on the show?
Well, my experience on the show was very different. I would come and go. I got to come in and have a great time. It was all on her shoulders. She was the one where the buck stopped and she created it and it was her life that she put it on the line every week. That’s a big responsibility. I guess I could do it, but I don’t think anybody could do it again because I don’t think they’d let a woman do it again.

And that’s kind of what she said, too. That Roseanne was a first and a last.
I think she got in under the wire. She happened to hit at a certain time with a certain opening in the universe and she made shit work. I honestly don’t think it could happen again.

For more info on Sandra, check out sandrabernhard.com. You can pre-order the new album on iTunes.

Star-A-Scopes: Like horoscopes, but more accurate

by Dan Cummins

It’s time Punchline Magazine provides a valuable service to its readers– beyond, of course, offering you the latest in comedy news and interviews.

So, obviously, that means we’re going to give you a weekly dose of astrology. And by “we,” I mean comedian Dan Cummins.

Dan has been studying the stars for years and is finally sharing his gift with the world. Below you will find the only horoscopes you’ll need this week. -dylan

Aries: Tomorrow, you will murder one hipster. Your lucky letter is Q.




Taurus: In two weeks, you will wake up in a cocoon, and then, after a 24-hour incubation period, you will emerge as an elderly black woman who has to take the bus to work for a white family she despises. Unless, of course, you already are an elderly black woman who hates her white family/boss. In that case, you will emerge from your cocoon looking much the same as before, except older, angrier and blacker. Steer clear of seafood.

Gemini: People have a hard time liking you. This trend will continue indefinitely. You have no lucky numbers this week.




Cancer: Tomorrow you will stumble across two corpses and a bag of cash in an alley. Don’t ask any questions. Throw away your cell phone and passport, sneak across a border – any border – and start a new life. Your kids won’t miss you. Your lucky time is 4:44 pm.




Leo: No one wants to say anything, but, you’ve been drinking too much. It used to be funny, but now it’s just sloppy and sad. Time to grow up and snort coke like an adult.




Virgo: Two strange dogs have been lurking around my shed. This week, it’s your job to figure out what the fuck they want with me. Oh, and ease up on the garlic. It’s obnoxious.




Libra: Lately, you’ve been thinking about a lot of things and whatnot. That needs to stop. Just be. No more thinking. About anything. Just be. Just be a robot. Just… be… a… robot.




Scorpio: You are about to come to an important realization. A moment of clarity. You will soon know for a fact that cats are not, in fact, tiny, furry humans, and it’s silly and annoying to make them wear clothes and ask them questions as if you expect them to answer you. Knock it off. Your lucky year is 1876.




Sagittarius: I know you may not be prepared for this, but, in three days, at midnight, you are going to become pregnant. Even if you’re a man. Get ready to break the laws of nature. You’re giving birth to an abomination!




Capricorn: A small band of nefarious lizards has been watching you for weeks. Even I don’t know what they’re up to. Be very afraid. They probably mean you harm.




Aquarius: This week, eight plus eight will equal seventeen. Next week, things will go back to normal. Invest in pork barrels.




Pisces: Good news: On Friday, you’re going to get a promotion. Bad news: On Saturday, you will be fired for money laundering. Don’t worry, on Sunday, you will discover the powers of both levitation and remote thought control. Take over a small island and show the locals no mercy. The time for action is Monday.




Dan Cummins is a nationally headlining comedian with many network television appearances to his credit. His debut album Revenge is Near was released in 2009. Crazy With A Capital F, his Comedy Central hour special, DVD and album, was released in 2010. You can get more info at dancummins.tv.

Interview with Lynn Shawcroft, Mitch Hedberg’s wife

by Jake Kroeger

With his unfortunate passing in 2005, Mitch Hedberg has gained almost a legendary status in the comedy world. His jokes are quoted constantly and the influence of his writing and delivery are undeniably stamped on the current landscape of stand up comics today. His widow, who is also a comic, Lynn Shawcroft wants to keeps Mitch’s legend alive and spread it to even more comedy lovers through re-launching MitchHedberg.net with unseen footage, notes, and more.

Preparing for a live re-launch show in LA, Shawcroft took some time to give some more details on the site as well a few other Mitch Hedberg developments including the fate of the cult movie that Hedberg wrote and directed Los Enchiladas.

In doing research for this interview, one small detail that was very interesting to me: On Wikipedia, when you type in ‘Lynn Shawcroft,’ it goes right to Mitch’s page.
I think I had a minimal Wikipedia page, but I haven’t done a lot. So, this is funny, on Twitter last year, I got a tweet from wiki-something like, “Are you Lynn Shawcroft, Mitch Hedberg’s widow?” and I said, “Yeah, why?” “Well we’re getting rid of a lot of Wikipedia pages and yours isn’t relevant, so we’re going to hook yours up to Mitch’s.”

Wow.
There weren’t being nasty. I’m sure that’s just what they do, but, yeah, I know it’s a weird thing; it just goes right to his [Mitch's page]. ‘Would Mitch be mad at me?’ is the question. I think they were just trying to link to a better comedian, I guess.

You don’t really think Mitch would be mad at you, would he?
Not at all. No, no. I was only joking. I’m going to tell Wikipedia that, “If he knew, it would be serious.” He wouldn’t care at all.

What’s your fondest memory of Mitch?
I think, from a person who loves comedy, first, seeing him do a headlining set and going, “Oh my God, he’s amazing!” You know, there’s different levels of that.

Falling in love is always great. We met and sort of fell in love; He was in Toronto. We met, then he went back to New York and I thought, “I like him.” Then, he came back and visited me and he said, “Why don’t you meet me in LA at this date in the terminal in LAX and you can come on the road for me for a bit?”

I did and we just stayed together right after that. That was a fond memory. We did a lot of things. We bought a home together, traveled together. One thing I think is amazing about stand-up, one of the gifts it gives, is you get to travel the country. I’m from Canada, but I’ve seen the [United] States so comprehensively and it’s because I was married and I worked a lot and we got to work together.

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Interview: Nick Cannon returns to stand-up comedy in style

by Dylan P. Gadino

Coming on the heels of the television premiere of his first-ever stand-up comedy special Mr. Showbiz this past weekend on Showtime, Nick Cannon goes wide with the digital release of the album version today (Buy here).

You’ll be able to snag the album from New Wave Dynamics in all retail stores by May 31.

And this is all while the dude is hosting his own daily morning radio show, Rollin’ with Nick Cannon on New York’s 92.3 NOW FM as well as executive producing and starring in MTV’s new reality series Son of a Gun.

We got the chance to chat with the multi-talented performer about returning to his roots in stand-up comedy, balancing his craft with being married to one of the most famous women in the world (not to mention, just becoming a father to twins) and why he’s not concerned with what the critics may think of him. Check it out!

A lot of people don’t know that you started doing stand-up comedy when you were just 15 years old. Did you feel like you wanted to do this album now, or that you had to do it make sure people knew about your history?
I’m a comic. I’ve always been a comic. And that’s what I’ve always aspired to be. So, I mean, I’ve had some successful sidetracks, you know– the acting career, music, hosting, even all of the entrepreneur efforts that have been really successful for me. So a lot of people know me for those things. And you know, even my personal life is kind of overshadowed by what my real craft is.

So, I felt like I needed to actually show people that this is what I do. And actually once you get that and grasp that, then all my other efforts and anything that I do in entertainment will probably even make more sense. At the end of the day, I’m just a comedian.

Yeah, and we get to see and hear some of your early stand-up footage on the album and special.
That was actually an audition for the Apollo I did in North Carolina. Like, the winner of that got to go to the Apollo in New York. And that was one of the first times I was on stage in front of people that wasn’t a church audience. The way I got on stage first, is you know, in front of – I was opening up for my dad, who was a preacher. So, then front that point, you know, I was probably professionally doing my thing, like you know, getting paid seven dollars a set at the Improv in Hollywood and actually traveling a little bit on the road at like fifteen years old.

When you started out, you performed with guys like Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, right?
Yeah, man. And Chris Tucker. All those guys started really young, and I would see these guys and they would be like ‘Yo, why’s this kid in the comedy club?’ And then they would kinda take a minute out of their time because they were like wow, he’s fifteen and trying to do this. And they when they started, they were fifteen and trying to do it. So they would always give me little words and wisdom and stuff.

I remember I was right there on the brink when Chris Tucker just started to take off— just right when Friday popped, right after that time, and seeing him and people like know, and even Eddie Griffin and like you said Chappelle and Rock, they were always just there. Like watching their success and watching their work ethic kind of inspired me at a young age.

Was there one guy in particular that kind of took you under his wing?
Chappelle was really like that. I opened up for Chapelle when he went on the road in 2005. I mean obviously he put me on his show. I mean, he made that famous phrase “Fuck Nick Cannon. Nick Cannon’s ‘ilarious.” He kind of looked out for me on many different levels. He showing me and helped me embrace the craft of being a stand-up.

Are are you still in touch with any of these guys?
Oh, absolutely. I’m definitely in touch. You know how comedians are. They kind of live in their own world and then when you see each other at the club or at an event, that’s when you kind of catch up. Probably not every day on the phone with these guys, but they definitely still are people I admire, look up to, and every now and then will call for advice and those types of things.

Are you concerned at all with what the comedy community is going to think of your first stand-up album?
Not really, ‘cause I know I’m funny. I’ve been funny. However they take it they take it. I’ve been successful being funny for a long time. Comedy has always been therapeutic for me. And I feel like that’s the beauty of being a stand-up— is that it’s raw and uncut and you get to say whatever you want to say and once you say it, who cares? It’s like, who cares how the people, or the critics or all those type of people may see it because the proof is in the pudding.

If there’s laughter there, then you know who was funny. And that’s the beauty of comedy. It could be as subjective as you want it to be and have your opinion, but as long as you get a laugh, that’s what it’s all about. And the laughter is there, so, I welcome any kind of criticism because we all get criticized. We’ll be criticizing till we die but what’s really the point?

I like that you don’t shy away from talking about your wife, Maria, on the album.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely didn’t want it to be the Mr. Mariah Carey show, but I definitely knew that I had to talk about it. I mean, it’s my life. And that’s what my comedy is about. So, there’s going to be some things about me growing up, there’s going to be some thing about me being a husband, becoming a father, but then it’s going to also be my perspective, and my point of view on what’s going on in the world. I think it’s the same thing with every comic. Some people do their comedy about how much they hate their wife. You know? And that’s their act. I mean, mine is about how much I love my wife and that she’s my dream girl, you know? So, it’s no different from anyone else doing stand-up. You have to be real and authentic to who you are.

Does Mariah have any input as to what you say about her onstage?
My wife has the greatest sense of humor in the world. And some of the times I write my best material around her. She’s very funny, and knows how to not take life and you know all of this entertainment stuff seriously. So, she’s the coolest when it comes to that.

Yeah, it seems like she has a good sense of humor.
Right, absolutely. Yeah, she’s all into it.

Let’s talk, if you don’t mind, a little bit about you becoming a dad. I mean, obviously your life has changed drastically…
Yeah, in the last few days…

So how are your days spent now? Are you changing diapers? What are you spending the most time doing right now?
Yeah, my week’s just diaper changing and trying to get as much sleep as possible. Trying to get on their schedule. I mean, I already don’t sleep but I’ll get up in the middle of the night changing diapers and all that stuff. A lot of feeding. I really don’t take part in that part of it, I just oversee that whole thing. I can’t really do much there. I don’t have any milk.

So Mariah is breast feeding?
Yeah, absolutely.

I saw a picture of you online. You’re obviously squeezing in some time to work out.
A little bit, little bit. I gotta be able to protect my kids, man.

You talk a bit on your album about your verbal fight with Eminem. Are you guys ok now or what?
Yeah, man. I mean, to me, at this point, even when you see I talk about it in my stand-up, it’s like I don’t really take it seriously anymore. If that dude ever did have any ill will towards me or my wife, it’s like, you know, I forgive him, I love him for it. I’m supposed to love my enemies, so I can’t even be worried about that. I’m enjoying my life too much to be mad at anybody, really.

We talked about how you got started in very early. And you talk a little bit about your upbringing on the special. It sounds like you came from a pretty supportive, pretty close family. So many times, stand-up comedians get their start because they come from a dark background. But it doesn’t seem that was the case for you.
Yeah, I was reading this comedy book and they were talking about all the things you have to be like to be a good stand-up— and you could tell it was written by, I think it was written by a white female. She was like you have to have some type of hardship, you have to have an opinion, and all this stuff, and then at the last second, she says unless you’re black because – and the entire statement was all of those things come with being black.

I mean, at the end of the day, no matter how you believe my upbringing was, or how it was perceived in the media, I’m still a black man in America. There’s still that natural chip that we have on our shoulders, or whether it’s truly validated because of the way society is.

I mean, I grew up in a typical low income African American household. So, if you see my comedy, that’s where it comes from. And I think that the majority of, you know, comedians, of my generation kind of experience that. So, I mean cats like Katt Williams and Kevin Hart— we kind of all have a lot of same similar experiences.

That makes sense. So what, after the special airs and after the album comes out, what are your stand-up plans?
I’m getting back on the road. I’m ready to do another one.

So you’re not joking around. This wasn’t like a one-off thing. You’re going to start doing this again.
Yeah, once I got back in it, I was in it for the long haul so I’m ready. I’ve already got my new set together. I’m already an hour strong. So I’m ready to get back on the road and start perfecting that, get it to two hours, and, you know, do what I gotta do to get ready to film my next special.

What was it that finally got you either motivated to start doing stand-up again?
I have been doing it. It wasn’t a secret. I would always go to the Improv, or whatever comedy spot and just go up and do it. I hadn’t been on the road. I wasn’t going out booking dates. And a lot of that has to do with my schedule. This was the first time I was able to really go and rock theaters and colleges. I had to get myself in the mindset to be prepared for that and you know, just to go out and live like a regular comic lives on the road.

And at the same time, I’m married and having several other jobs, running a television network, you know, my morning radio show, all that stuff I have to do. So I had to strategically say ‘alright, I can go out you know, every other weekend. I could go do this. If I happen to be in this city, is there a club that I could go and be at?’ So, it was a lot of that. It took a while to wrap my head around that. And I had to get in that comic space; you gotta be in a certain type of headspace as a comic, and write jokes every day. I had to make sure I allotted enough time for that.

I would wish you luck, but honestly don’t think you need it.
Thank you, man. I appreciate it anyway. There’s nothing wrong with getting luck.

For more info on Nick’s comedy, check out nickcannonmrshowbiz.com. To buy a copy of Mr. Showbiz, click the image below!

Interview with Doug Stanhope: ‘If I could, I’d quit comedy’

by Dylan P. Gadino

The scene opens: There’s a man impaled… “on a spinning dildo. He’s in a straight jacket, hanging upside down. The only way he can keep the dildo lubricated is to drink Castor oil out of a large rat feeder, so he shits himself greasy to keep that dildo lubricated. Because if the dildo ever goes unlubricated, his asshole will start to stick to it and then his whole guts will spit out of him like cotton candy.”

End of scene.

That’s when Doug Stanhope is jarred out of his latest murder fantasy—this time the victim is an audience member at one of the comedian’s shows who has decided to film the performance with his cellphone camera, instead of just enjoying the experience of being there live and in person. Stanhope can’t stand “tourists of life.”

And on his new album and DVD Oslo—Burning The Bridge To Nowhere, he’s all too happy to tell us about some of the things that go through his head while he’s onstage; the bit above can he heard on the delightfully titled track, “Spinning Dildo.”

I got to chat with Stanhope recently about his new project and thankfully I got to delve deeper into his mind. We talked about his mother, who he says offed herself after years of debilitating disease; we chatted about the concept of love and romance and why, despite him being such a celebrated figure in stand-up comedy, he’d be thrilled to never stand onstage again.

You’ve said more than a few times during your shows that your personal life is pretty good now and you barely know why you’re even doing comedy anymore.
Yeah, the more you say that, the more people show up. In my head I’m careening toward the bottom but in reality I’m doing bigger shows all the time. I’d rather do nothing. If I could retire I would. A lot of comics will say, ‘I can’t go two weeks without being onstage.’ I can go the rest of my life without being onstage.

On the new album, you tell the audience how much you hate recording CDs and filming DVDs, but compared to most comedians, you have a huge body of recorded work.
That’s just it. I’m writing out of a sense of fear. People will say, ‘Oh I heard that shit,’ so I need to make a new DVD, people heard it. I can’t go back to London without a new hour. So, it’s not joyous at all. I got the whole Dave Attell thing –not the self hatred, but the insecurity and the judgment you think is being passed that probably isn’t even there. People probably don’t spend too much time thinking about it. But in your head they are. In your head they’re all fucking critics and they know every fucking word you’ve said before and how you’ve said it.

That’s always the worst part about putting out any kind of recording. There’s always bits that are way better now. And then there’s the old bits you were doing so long that you have to get rid of them on tape, so that you’re now re-learning them so you can put them on tape, but you’re bored of them. Then you forget half the punch lines because you haven’t done them in eight months and you’re like ‘damn, everything sucks now!’ You don’t worry about that with a regular gig. You don’t sweat the gig. But this gig we did for the album we did it on 36 hours notice so I didn’t have any time to sweat it.

Yeah, I feel although all of your albums are pretty raw, this one is even more raw.
Yeah, it’s even more raw because it’s fucking Oslo and you’re just weeding through the material that will even work there. Half the shit you do doesn’t work in Europe even though they speak the language. In the States, if I’m going into a hole I could pull my head out of the ground. You can’t do that over there, because you get three minutes into a bit and you realize the payoff is something that’s completely American-centric and it’s going to fucking die and its three more minutes to you get to that part. And people are like, ‘no just do your material. We understand it. We have Friends.’ Yeah, just watching an episode of Friends really isn’t going to clue you into what I’m talking about. ‘We get everything American over here’ they say. Not at all.

It is what it is. I’ve never liked anything I put out. By the time you put it out you’re so fucking tired of doing it. Inherent in getting it polished is getting sick of it. It gets to the point where it doesn’t make sense anymore, you don’t know why its funny or why people are laughing and then you start hating the audience; you become like Glenn Beck, you’re hating them for liking you.

You do a long bit on the new album where you basically deconstruct the traditional idea of what romance is…
Yeah, romance and love isn’t predicated on fucking. They’re two different things. You can be romantic, but it has nothing to do with buying diamonds and fucking one person for the rest of your life and all this fucking madness.

You’re in a longterm relationship. So, what is romance to you?
I don’t know. We have a great relationship. We’re very juvenile. I lure her into the bathroom after I’ve taken an horrific dump under the guise that one of the dogs is bleeding from one of his paws or something. I buy cap guns and shoot them in her face. We’re fucking silly and ridiculous. We get along great.

How long have you been together?
Almost six years. There’s no jealousy problems. We actually like each other. There are so many people who are with someone they never fucking hang out with; most relationships are so fucking duplicitous. Most people live in them rather than admitting that their relationship is going nowhere. And they end up like your fucking parents, staring at each other in a cold gloom—‘Well, I have to go to work… well, I have to clean the house.’

My mother married my father because it was what you were supposed to do. And then later in life when we were kids he told us, ‘I think your mother married me because it was the thing to do. He was a very simple and sweet guy. It was the early ’70s and I asked her about that. And she said, ‘yeah, that’s it. It was the thing to do.’ It’s incredible to me, the things that people do, just because its what people before them did. We’re the only people alive right now. We can make up our own rules. This entire world could be different by just deciding its different.

Like, hey we’re alive. Why do these rules apply? Those people are dead, they had a reason for this. Even the Founding Fathers shit. Well, that might have worked at the time but it’s a different world. We’re alive so let’s fucking start from scratch. It would be great if generations started by themselves— like when the last guy dies, that’s when the first kids are born and everyone starts from scratch.

I know you read about that teen from Oregon who killed himself onstage after an open mic performance. As soon as I heard about it, I thought of you.
Yeah, I just wanted to repeatedly post it online for people who missed it. And the song he sang too… “Sorry About The Mess” is the name of the song he played. It’s fantastic. It’s horrific and sad. But Jesus, if there’s a way to go… it’s everything you want to do to an audience.

You mean horrify them?
Yeah! People say to me, ‘oh you speak truths onstage.’ Bullshit, I’m not changing anybody’s mind onstage. But to horrify someone like that; that could change someone’s life. I think it’s fucking beautiful.

Yeah, I thought it was very “Stanhope.”
Too late now. It’s already been done. There’s really no ballsier move. My mother killed herself, and that was the single bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone ever do. And it came from a scared woman. I’m doing a bit about it. She had emphysema and was dying and drowning in her own fluids so she ate a shitload of morphine and said goodbye. I have to make a bit out of it. Make it funny. I’ll leave it at that. I’ll save the details.

You were close to your mom, right?
Yeah, but I really didn’t like her much towards the end. She became a horrible, horrible person– for whatever reasons; they might have been good. She wasn’t evil. But when she said it’s time for me to go, there was no one saying, ‘but you have so much to live for!’ She couldn’t even leave the house to continue her hoarding. She was a hoarder but she didn’t have the fucking lungs to go to the dollar store. Between back pain and that, she was just physically a fucking wreck and that lasted for like a decade.

But she was the one person who was talking me into doing comedy before I even tried. I’d call her on the phone being all goofy and shit and she would say, ‘you should do this onstage. You’re funnier than these fucking people on TV.’ She was always behind me. But how you could die at 63 and not have a single friend in the world? When she died, there was no one for me to call– other than my brother, who she called before to tell him, ‘this is it.’ How do you not have anyone in your life? There’s a reason for that. I was the only person she liked, to my detriment. She thought everyone else was an asshole. She would complain about the way my brother was raising his kids. I was like, ‘hey mom, you really shouldn’t be talking about how to raise kids.’ In hindsight we turned out well in spite of a lot of it. But, I don’t want to Margaret Cho-up your interview.

How do you mean, by talking about your mom so much?
Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about it. I hate when people onstage talk about ‘my family is so crazy, my mother is so this’….no one wants to hear that. But may be it’s ok if we kill her at the end of the bit.

I have a feeling you’ll figure out a way to talk about your mom in a way no comedian has before.
Fortunately, I’ve never had a child. Because that always destroys a comic. Louis C.K. is probably the only comic I could name off the top of my head that’s had any material about being a parent that I’ve laughed at. Where it doesn’t seem like it’s ruined him. Almost every comic, once they have kid, you used to like them and now you don’t. It’s like friends; once they have a kid, you can pretty much count on a card at Christmas. Why is he sending me cards? I used to get my coke from that guy and now he’s sending me cards?

Talking about your crazy family is like airline material. There’s no way you can do airline jokes. I’ve done a couple. But as soon as you say ‘airline,’ you’re hack. It sucks when there’s something that’s eating your soul but you can’t do it because it’s hack.

That’s one of the problems living out here [small town in Arizona] in the middle of nowhere and playing rock clubs. I don’t see comics on a daily basis. I don’t know what’s being done. I’m not involved in comedy so it fucks with your head. You’d see that in Carlin in later years. He’d have some fucking fantastic bits but then it would be like, ‘is he doing a Crocodile Hunter bit?’ And of course, he’s the king so we’ll let it slide; you didn’t hear that from Carlin. Let’s just hear the good part again. Because you know Carlin wasn’t hanging around the Improv drinking cocktails saying, ‘oh yeah I’m working on a bit like that, too.’ I’m out of the loop like that.

Which is good in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I mean I don’t really have my finger on the pulse. Jo Koy is a good reference for unfunny comedy these days even though I’m not sure what he does. I saw 30 seconds of him on a commercial once. That’s the only Comedy Central I watch—whatever commercials you get as you’re going back into South Park, because I’ll fast forward through most of them on DVR. And I see a commercial: ‘hey next week on Comedy Central, it’s Jo Koy’… and you’re like, well there’s a new reference for who sucks.

It was like that for Frank Caliendo for me, too. I used to tape the Fox football pregame show when he was part of that just so I could watch him so I can hate him. So I could feel the comedy bitterness. It’s always fun to have someone to hate. I don’t mean any of it. I never did call Kyle Cease back. He sent ingratiating emails, and I know that I would fall for it. So I just ignored it and let the whole thing die. I’m not a guy who’s thinking this whole fucking business makes any difference.

It’s fun to snipe about stuff. It’s fun to have a rivalry with Dane Cook, if you can call it a rivalry. For me it was a fun Yankees vs Red Sox kind of thing. We met at the San Francisco comedy competition in 1995. I had that garage band attitude, like, ‘I knew he sucked even before you knew who he was. You guys don’t even know, jumping on the band wagaon saying Dane Cook sucks. I was saying that even before anyone knew who I was talking about.’ But he was always there. From the competition, then to Variety’s Top 10 Comics to Watch, it was me and Dane Cook. At the Man Show auditions, it was down to me and Dane Cook and another guy before Joe Rogan got the ok to get out of his contract and do it.

Dane Cook was always kinda right there. It was fun to hate Dane Cook. It’s not my style of comedy. It just boiled down to that. ‘Oh, You don’t like zucchini?’ No, I don’t. ‘Well fuck you, what vegetable to do you like? You don’t know vegetables!” It’s not really personal. But it’s fun to make it personal. And I hope I didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings too bad by saying Kyle Cease’s mother should die or whatever.

It’s so ridiculous. We’re just fat girls singing karaoke. That’s all we are. Everyone. We’re just fat girls trying to get attention singing karaoke. Who gives a shit? It’s so dumb. I want it to be fun again. It’s no fun once you take it seriously.

I’m having fun when I’m not doing comedy. I can quit this. That’s the only thought that keeps me going. It’s that thought that makes me happy— just walking away from it. Just quitting.

For more info on Doug, check out dougstanhope.com. To order the new CD/DVD, just click the image below.

Interview with Rob Riggle, ultimate Renaissance comedy machine

by Jake Kroeger

Comedian Rob Riggle is everywhere. He’s on the big screen, the small screen, and stages across America, and now, on a webseries produced by AXE Shower Gel and Comedy Central Digital, hosting the AXE Dirtcathalon. Punchline Magazine got a chance to catch up with Riggle and his amazing story of how he came to do almost everything (sketch, stand-up, acting, improv, etc.) all at the same time.

You have three separate bios on your site. Do you ever just look back at everything you’ve done and just feel amazed at how far you’ve come?
That’s very nice of you to say, but I don’t look back. You gotta keep going forward.

Really, it’s amazing. You come from the Midwest. You grew up in Kentucky and you went to the University of Kansas. Do you ever think you’re like one of those Horatio Alger “rags to riches” American dreams stories?
I like this. You really romanticized it. I do love this country for many reasons. I had a dream to be a comedic actor and I grew up watching Caddyshack and Stripes and all these wonderful movies and I just thought those guys were so funny and so amazing and I was like, “That’s what I want to do.”

You wanted to be “one of those guys”?
Yeah, you know, that’s a wonderful thing. You put a little hard work into it. In life, you get what you put in. That’s it’s. There’s no silver bullet. There’s no magic combination. It’s just hard work and maybe a little talent and you catch a break here and there, you get an opportunity here and there, make the most of it, and you hope it works out.

I’m still curious, as cheesy at this might sound with everything else I’ve asked you this far, but why was comedy always your dream?
Yeah, I don’t know exactly. It just called to me. I did remember when I saw Trading Places and I remember when I saw Caddyshack or Meatballs or any of these great comedy movies. I remember being just so entertained and so mesmerized by some of the performances and thinking that that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I enjoyed it and I think that’s what drove me to, one day, try to be that.

I remember the joy that Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy and people like that brought me. I can remember quoting them for days and weeks and months and years. Quoting them and quoting them and thinking how awesome that was. Given that opportunity, I wanted to be that guy too. I wanted to do stuff that was funny and hopefully memorable. I get a real big kick out of when people come up to me and quote lines back to me from movies that I’ve done.

That has to be a great feeling.
It’s like if I saw Bill Murray, I’d go up and quote lines to him, you know? It’s very flattering and I’m very grateful.

I do have to take a moment here. You were in the military for almost 20 years. Thank you for your service to our country.
Thanks. I’m still in the Reserves, actually. Twenty-one years.

How then do you manage your time? You’ve come all this way with comedy and you’ve had a very illustrious military career as well. How do you balance something like that?
Right now, I’m in the Reserves, so provided I get in my proper amount of drill days per year, then I have a “good year” is what it’s called. So long as I get in my days, I’m good. I’m getting very close to getting out. So, I should be out probably sometime around this time next year.

You’re going to retire a Lt. Colonel after being in several movies and all these Funny or Die videos.
It’s going to be one hell of a party.

So, you got a degree in film and theater from the University of Kansas, why did you decide to go in the military if you knew comedy is what you wanted to do?
Well, I also had my pilot’s license when I was in college and, at the time, I took a test called the AQTFAR, an aerial aptitude type test. I took this test and the Marines said I scored high enough on it that they’ll give me a guaranteed flight contract. When you’re a young man and about to graduate college and you’re a theater and film major, it means you’re going to be a waiter upon graduation, or, if you’re lucky, a bartender upon graduation cause no one just graduates from college then walks across the street and go, “I’d like to be in movies now.” You have to have a day job, usually for a long period of time.

So I was looking at being a waiter or a bartender upon graduation or I could join the Marine Corps with a guaranteed flight contract and be the next Top Gun. So I thought that sounded a little sexier at the time, but then, as it turned out, as I went through Basic Training, Officer Candidate School, went through all that boot camp, and got to flight school down in Pensacola, FL and eventually continued on in Corpus Christi, as I worked my way through the flight school pipeline, I realized that once I pin my wings on, they got me for eight years and that seemed like a lot back then. That’s my whole life and I wanted to try acting and try comedy, you know, I gotta try it. If I don’t try it, I’d always regret it.

Right.
If I try and I fail, it’ll suck, but, at least, I’ll know. So, I told them I didn’t want to fly anymore and I became a ground officer, which reduced my commitment time, but it was better than right years. I fulfilled my contract as a ground officer and then went and pursued comedy and I’m glad I did.

Even in being a ground officer, how would you allocate your time?
After I left flight school, I was sent to North Carolina and I served there for two and a half years and then I was getting out. My contract was up. I was done and I was actually going to move to Chicago and I was going to study at Improv Olympic or Second City, I didn’t know which one, I just knew I was going to Chicago to do long form improv like all my heroes: Belushi, Akroyd, all those guys. That’s where I was going.

The Marines said, “What would it take for you to stay in?” and I had just been promoted to Captain at that point and I said, “If you can get me to New York or Los Angeles (cause we have a little public affairs office in those places), I would extend on active duty.” They called my bluff. The next day, I had orders to New York City. So, I moved to New York City and I was a Marine seven to five during the day, then, at night, I would leave straight from the Marine office and go downtown to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and I would take classes, do lights and sound for people’s shows, anything I could do to be around the theatre. I would hang around with guys from my improv classes and we would write sketches. We would perform on any empty stage that would have us. Eventually, I started to teach down at the UCB and all that stuff was in the evenings and that was seven nights a week.

All my weekends, I was at the UCB constantly trying to learn, trying to absorb, just take in as much as I could, meeting other comedians, meeting other writers who turned out to be life long friends and I still play with them and perform with them to this very day. As a matter of fact, Paul Scheer, Rob Heubel who are from Human Giant, the three of us were on the same improv troupe at the UCB for 7 years. Tonight, I’m going to the UCB Theatre here in Los Angeles and we’re doing a show that we did back in New York called “Facebook”

That’s where you take an audience member’s Facebook profile and improv off that, right?
Exactly. Back in New York, way back in the day, the original name of the show was “MySpace”. I mean, I still do improv whenever I get a chance. I don’t get paid for it, but we do it because we love it.

Absolutely.
We love each other and we love doing improv.

I always held this belief about comedy that if you’re going to perform it, you can’t be in it for the money. You have to be in it for the love of it because you’re not going to make any money at it for a long time.
That is a cold hard fact. You gotta love so much that if you wouldn’t do it for free, it’s probably not what you should be doing.

As I’m a stand-up comic as well, here in LA, performing for free kind of goes without saying.
Yeah, exactly. But, if you work at it long enough and hard enough and get where you want to be, the money will come.

You were a Marine from seven to five, then you were at the UCB seven nights a week. How do you have the energy for that?
You know, you do a lot of things when you’re a young man, right? If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it.

Did you feel coming up through the UCB prepared you for things later in your comedy career like the Daily Show, SNL, the Office?
Absolutely, 100 percent. I believe the UCB is hands down one of the best training grounds for whatever you want to do. If you want to be a writer, if you want to be an actor, if you want to be a stand-up even, believe it or not, it’s just a wonderful place to go learn because you get stage time, which is crucial. You learn what works in front of an audience and what doesn’t and why. You start surrounding yourself with a community of comedians and writers and it’s also just a great place to be seen. There’s managers and agents and casting directors are all over the UCB Theatre in New York and in LA. It’s a real good community and it’s a good place to start.

Do you think it’s almost like a movement at this point? UCB, alternative comedy?
I don’t know. That’s a good question. I don’t know how I’d frame it like that. I just think a great training ground and a great proving ground. A great place to grow your roots and also grow your wings. Oh, I sound like my dad, right?

They’re there for a reason.
I have nothing but positive things to say about the UCB because I feel like I grew up there comedically. I got to get up and do shows. I had shows that were very successful and shows that tanked. You know, you have great days and you have bad days, but it’s all learning. Again, I still have people I met there that I still work with to this very day and I can see myself working with them for the rest of my life because they’re wildly talented and we enjoy each other’s comedy.

The reason I ask about UCB being a movement is that a lot of people that aren’t aware that the UCB even exists, that there’s such a thing as alternative comedy. Here in LA, there are people that only know, as far as comedy goes, about the Hollywood Improv, Laugh Factory, the Comedy Store, and that’s it.
They deny themselves. I’m a stand-up too and I love stand-up and I enjoy it a lot, but improv is something special and when it’s done well, it’s really fun to watch people who know what they’re doing. It’s a really a good time. It also feels a little safer than going out on the stage all by yourself, especially when you’re starting out.

There’s almost very little difference between some booked shows and some of the open mics here in LA because you’re still performing for comics and it’s rough. It can be great sometimes, but, either way, you, as a performer, have to go through it. A working stand up comic friend of mine was telling me recently that bad shows never stop. You’ll always keep having bad shows. It’s just the frequency of it will go down if you keep going up and keep working at it.
That’s a fact. Sometimes, it’s out of your control. I’ve done stand-up shows that have gone average and you think to yourself, “What was the deal with tonight?” Sometimes, it’s you. Sometimes, it’s them [the audience]. There’s a lot of factors that go into a good show that you kind of just take for granted. That’s accurate though; the bad shows get fewer and far between.

Jokes.com
Exclusive – Rob Riggle – Should Be Dead
comedians.comedycentral.com

You did sketch and improv for so long, how did you get into doing stand-up?
I was on the Daily Show and I shared an office with John Oliver for almost three years and John Oliver is an amazing stand-up comedian. And, he was always on my case, telling me that I gotta do it and I finally said OK, you’re right, I’m gonna do it. So he kind of pushed me into getting out there and, you know, I would go around New York to the Slipper Room, the Piano Room, UCB, any place that had stage time and I would get up and do five minutes here and five minutes there and eventually I was able to build a set.

Is that set what you do now or do you still write new material?
I’m always developing material. Not enough, lately. I’ve been writing screenplays and stuff. You know what it’s like being a stand-up (ed. note: writer Jake Kroeger performs stand-up in LA), you have your notebook, jotting down premises and then you’ll flesh that out later and then you come back and think, “Why did I think that was funny?” Though, sometimes you look back and see that there was something funny there, “I can work with that.”

Then, you’re doing it six months later and then you find what was funny actually worked. You just found that little detail that needed to be there for it to work.
Absolutely.

You’re doing the road now, correct?
Yes.

Do you think being in the military has mitigated how lonesome and grueling that can be?
Yeah, definitely. It was absolutely a good training ground.

Road stories with comedians are always a big deal and how depressing it can get, but you must have a pretty high tolerance for it.
Well, I’ve been deployed before and I know what it’s like and also, I’m kind of a square because I’m married and I didn’t get into stand-up until after I was married, a little later in life. Most of those comics when there out there on the road, they’re in their 20’s. They’re single and they’re getting loaded, meeting girls, you know, and it’s a good time. For me, I go to my hotel room. I go to bed. I go to the clubs and do my gigs. Then, I go home and that’s it. So it’s not quite the wild ride that everyone else is having.

You’ve done the Daily Show, SNL, stand up, viral videos. Take us, if you would, through the trajectory of where you want to go comedy wise and how it’s been?
Well, I would love to be the lead in a movie. Eventually, someday, I would love to have that opportunity and other than that, I want to keep doing what I’m doing, which is comedic acting. It’s so much fun when you get to work with really funny, talented people. If I keep doing that, that’s all I need and I’m a very happy man.

How do you “switch hats” between all of these things: sketch, stand up, improv, acting? At the end of the day, it’s still comedy and you’re making people laugh, but it’s a different skill set.
It’s like being a baseball player. When you’re in the field, you have situation awareness. If they hit a “pop-up,” you know how to handle it. If they hit a ground ball, you know where you’re going to throw it, and when you’re at the plate and it’s time to bat, it’s a totally different thing. It’s still in the same genre of baseball, but it’s a different skill set and you gotta know how to hit the high ones and how to hit the low ones. You got to have all those skills down, but it is all under the umbrella of baseball. I think the same thing goes for comedy.

You’ve got the big umbrella of comedy, but then, underneath that umbrella, you have stand-up, sketch, comedic acting, story-telling, writing. you know, there’s all kinds of things that fall under that. It’s just different skill sets and I think, as a comedian, you need to have as many of them as possible.

You’re doing so many projects right now, building the Rob Riggle brand?
I don’t look at it as building the Rob Riggle brand, but I definitely look at it as an opportunity to work. That’s all that I can ask for, but I hear that too, “You gotta come up with your own thing, your own brand, da da da…” So it’s yes and no. If it’s something good, people buy into it, gets traction, gets you recognized, then that’s great, but it doesn’t mean that it works for everybody. Generally, what I’ve found and what I believe to be true is that if you just go out and do good work, the best you can, things tend to follow. Things take shape the way they’re supposed to. There’s no magic formula. There’s no silver bullet answer to the combination of success. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no such thing as an overnight success. There’s a ten year overnight success. That’s pretty common.

I love how with comedic performers when they break out, people think they’re just brand new, but have been working at it for 15 years.
I think people watch American Idol too much these days and think it’s going to happen overnight like you can just walk off a playground and be a superstar. If it happens, it’s one in a million. It’s the exception and not the norm. The norm is: you work your balls off, you don’t get paid much, you don’t get appreciated much, as a matter of fact, you get fucking out right abused. If you have enough tenacity, you might catch enough breaks that you actually get what you want.

You said that there is no answer to making it in comedy. I think that you have a little bit of an answer. You do all these different things we’ve mentioned throughout, do you think that’s what it takes to make it?
No, I don’t necessarily that is what it takes. I think hard work is what it takes. Generally, people want it to come to them, but it’s never going to come to you. Unless you are one of maybe 10 people in this world that are on a very small A-list, people actually write movies and produce movies for you, everything else you have to go get yourself.

Like your most recent project, The AXE Dirtcathalon. What exactly is it?
The good people over at AXE Shower Gel are relaunching their brand and they wanted to do it in a fun, unique way. So, they created this series called the AXE Dirtcathlon. It’s basically a game show meets a reality show on the web. We have four, hot, young, sexy couples competing against each other in these bizarre challenges that we’ve created for them, so that they get very dirty in the process and whoever wins out of this challenge gets a trip to Spain to be a part of that festival where they throw tomatoes at each other so they can get dirty all over again and if you go to Axe.Atom.com, you can watch these webisodes and you can even win prizes yourself.

How did you get approached for this project?
They just called. They called and asked if I’d be willing to host and I said, “yeah.”

You can catch more of Rob at the AXE Dirtcathalon here and find out where he’s performing next or what big blockbuster comedy he’s in at RobRiggle.com.

Interview: Demetri Martin’s ever-growing comedy portfolio

by Carrie Andersen

Delving into a stand-up comedian’s creative process is often a mixed bag at best. Creating, tweaking, and performing a joke is an incredibly subjective experience, so communicating what that experience is like usually leaves something to be desired. Sometimes, though, we get lucky, and we catch a vivid glimpse into how comedy is born.

Enter Demetri Martin. He’s worn many hats in the comedy world, from working as a correspondent on The Daily Show to performing stand-up comedy to writing for Late Night with Conan O’Brien. His latest project is a newly released book of short stories, drawings, essays, and quips called This Is a Book.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to take a peek into Demetri’s world of comedy in talking to him about his book and writing process. We chatted about how he comes up with his ideas, how he decides what form a joke will take, and what he finds particularly funny.

So this was your first book. How was the process for you?
It was surprisingly enjoyable. I was excited to do a book. After I got the deal and I was facing the reality of writing a whole book, I was a little worried about how I would get through it. Once I started writing, I tried to just approach it incrementally, and it ended up being pretty fun. It came together pretty quickly, and I wrote a lot more pieces than ended up in the book.

I think that’s the nature of this kind of a book, because you kind of have different structures: there are some stories, some essays, drawings, you know, all different kinds of content. I tried to write as much as I could; I procrastinated for quite a while, so it pretty much came down to last summer and I really had to get it done. So I wrote most of it last summer.

You have quite a bit of writing experience under your belt in comedy and outside of it. Did you draw on any of that prior experience writing for Conan or on other projects?
The good thing about writing for Conan was that was the first time I had a job where I had to deliver written comedy for a specific deadline. They’d say, “Alright, we’re writing ‘The Year 2000’ today, everybody go to your office for the next 45 minutes and write as many as you can.” So that was different from stand-up; stand-up is kind of more open-ended and I was adding to my act, but it wasn’t like I needed so many jokes by tomorrow. So that was my first experience writing comedy with specific deadlines. In that sense, it helped, because once they gave me a deadline, you have to deliver, or they’d say, “we’ll have to restructure your book deal.”

And then writing longer pieces – I didn’t have much to pull from, so that took me back to college. It was, in a way, like writing a paper for college, where I had to be aware of the structure of each paragraph, and sentences, and what words I used or hadn’t used. Those don’t usually come into play when I write stand-up, because they’re shorter bits, so it was interesting. It took me back.

Your work has been called “cerebral comedy” and “nerd comedy” and there’s definitely a lot of that in the book too, which I guess makes sense if you’re drawing on a more collegiate writing philosophy. Was that a balance you were thinking about when writing this book? And how do you find the balance between more esoteric comedy and jokes that’ll reach more people?
That was my first attempt at putting my sensibility into the written word. I was thinking a lot about how somebody might move through the book, from when they pick it up, they’re flipping through it, looking at it, and then later when they take time to read it, hopefully. I thought about breaking it up so that there was some sort of alternation between shorter, simpler bits, and then the longer ones that are more about having a narrative. I hope I get, after this, to write different books, maybe a book of just short stories or a book of just drawings.

This first one, I wanted to see how each of those forms might work together. And in there, hopefully, there’s kind of a natural give and take with some of the more esoteric stuff and the shorter stuff.

It seems to parallel your live act, in a structural way. Was it at all difficult to translate any aspects of your comedy and your sensibility into the written word, especially since you do a lot of visual and multi-sensory comedy?
It was a funny process for me. The idea often dictates the medium or the form. If I get an idea that I think might be funny, I pay attention to what it would work best as. I might think I want it to be a stand-up joke, but it really might be better as just a drawing. So what I usually do is generate ideas and put them in my notebooks. When I walk around, I daydream, I go to a café. I try not to worry about form or the medium for it. I kind of think about a holder for the idea, and then later when I have an assignment or a job, I can go through my notebooks.

It’s like having a library of resources and I can look at the ideas and say, “Oh, cool, here’s a good piece of dialogue” or something, or, “That’s a good character,” or maybe, “That’s a list piece.” That’s what I try to do. Those help me get things moving whether I’m trying to write a screenplay or a book or just a sketch or something. And then once I’m in it, and I’m committed to the form, I just try to come up with stuff specifically. I don’t usually have so much trouble translating stuff, it’s more sifting through stuff I’ve been trying to generate all along the way.

Are there particular criteria you look for in deciding, “This bit would work well for stand-up, but maybe not so much written down?” How do you decide?
I think a few ways, probably. One, is I like things to be economical in their structure – if they don’t require too many words or too many lines or too many colors to draw, it’s more pleasing to me if they’re simple. It’s probably why I like short jokes, because they don’t require that many words and it doesn’t require that long commitment from the listener or anybody. Set-up, few words, sentence, punch line. Then cool, you’re done, you move on to the next thing. You get another chance, it’s like a reset.

I guess similarly for something that would be written, I’m trying to find a similar kind of game where I don’t want to be too long-winded in a story. If something takes too long to explain, or it’s too clunky, it doesn’t have enough jokes within it, along the way, I probably scrap it, and it might be better as something I shoot or film. Stuff starts to present itself or lend itself to really sparse presentation. Some of them do seem to be more suited for one or the other, certain drawings – I want to get the joke to work without having to put any words or to say anything. I just want the person to look at it, and quietly in their brain, they can just put it together and say, “Cool, that one works,” as opposed to saying, “Yeah, there’s a guy, and he’s falling down a hill, and there’s a sign,” it seems like too much work to get to that punch line.

And then the other way I think I am learning to tell is just from experience, looking backward, saying, “Oh yeah, that audience responded to that, this audience didn’t like that.” I even put myself as an audience member or a consumer, and look at certain drawings or read stories that I remember liking, and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah, I see, I see what I liked about this. It’s really visual, it’s very evocative, but it works well with the words, because I get to put it together in my head. I don’t have to rely on a specific drawing of a bit; it’s more the description of it.” Certain things just seem better that way.

Jokes.com
Demetri Martin – Findings
comedians.comedycentral.com

You were mentioning the short punch line, the short stories, one-liners, and images too – I feel like that’s driving a lot of comics to use Twitter a lot more, too. Can you talk a bit about how that’s affected your act, or how you’ve used that medium to spread your comedy to new audiences and communicate with more people?
It seems that no matter how much of anything there is, the best things will hopefully find their place near the top or close to the top. So there are more one-liners out there, and I guess you see in the ecosystem if you have good ones that work or stand out. I think with Twitter, that’s a good example of certain things being better as jokes that are read, and others might be better as jokes that are told. If I put something on Twitter, it’s usually something that I don’t feel like telling to people, but maybe I’d want them to read it.

They’re usually things that are not going to be part of a larger work, they’re just asides. At the same time, I figured out a way to put drawings onto the internet in a way that’s pretty easy, so I post them through a service called WhoSay.com. I can do drawings and they get posted to Twitter and Facebook, it’ll send them to both. So, using Twitter as a place to showcase really simple line-drawing has been enjoyable for me.

But, I don’t know, generally I’d say YouTube, Twitter, camera phones, and whatever the other latest technologies are that allow people to record comedy at a very quick pace, those things for me dictate different rules for being a live performer. The clearest one is that I think you have to refill your material quickly. I don’t think you can do the same thing all the time, because people know your jokes. I do a joke for the first or second time, and then somebody records it with their phone, and suddenly they can put it on the Internet.

It’s definitely frustrating if you’re trying to build a new act or a new special, and you want to hone your stuff. You want to figure out the whole act. But, to me, what that does, it makes me improvise more. It makes me try to find ways to diversify my act, my presentation, so that I’m not relying on the same thing over and over again. I’m not fighting the technology, I’m learning how to work with it so that I can still be viable and do good shows and surprise people without fighting it so much. I improvise a lot more, and one-liners – I still love one-liners, and I do a lot of them, but I do bits and I tell stories. I mix it up. I think the one-liners are just the easiest to disseminate because they’re very short, and like you said, they fit into tweets. But I try to avoid putting my act on Twitter. That’s just a dumb thing.

Twitter and YouTube and those things you mentioned seem like the go-to place for comics to make a new name for themselves beyond where they would traditionally be seen on TV or in clubs.
Yeah.

But it seems like the default now, rather than a more traditional comedy book. That’s not to say that books are passé, because they’re still really popular, but is there something in particular that made you want to do a project like this maybe instead of one of those other forms?

I like books. I like having something that I can flip through and dog-ear pages and look back at something, jump around in it, more than I think I’d be able to do even with a Kindle or an e-Reader. Maybe I’ll get one of those eventually. But right now, I still like having an actual physical book. And I like reading stories and things like that. That’s different than a lot of social media. It’s nice, when you read a book, you don’t have to worry about pop-ups. I don’t have to have the book suggesting to me other things I might like, or trying to sell me shit in the middle of a paragraph.

When I go on an airplane, I don’t have to turn the book off because we’re taxiing. I still get to keep reading. Those kind of things, you know, I enjoy especially because I travel around a lot to do my work. I think it’s cool to get to make one of those things. I hope I get to make a bunch more. And social media, YouTube, all that stuff, that’s cool too. But they’re not mutually exclusive, they’re just different ways to think about comedy. I don’t know how much doing a book is going to help me make a name for myself. I just wanted to see if I could work in that form.

Important Things with Demetri Martin
Nature – The Naturalist
www.comedycentral.com

I read it all this week – I enjoyed it a lot, it’s great! Do any of these stories draw on real life experiences or conflicts or values?
I don’t think so directly. But I’m often not as in touch with my own emotions as I think I am. Then later, I realize, “Oh, that’s what that was about.” It’s like a weird feeling. But when I’m writing stories, even if they tend to have more absurd situations in them, or scenarios, and this goes for screenwriting too, I try to write things that are at least emotionally real.

So I had a long-distance relationship once, so maybe one of those stories, the Sheila story, that’s not really directly autobiographical, but I certainly know what it feels like being in a long-distance relationship where one person feels like they’re compromising more than the other person, and the resentment and difficulty of that. I’m trying to learn how to tap into real things and turn it into more fantastic situations that are emotionally resonant, but still can be surprising and absurd.

There was an underlying common thread of insecurity or a need to apologize in the longer pieces, like with the awkward and lonely hotline, the better-than-sex email apology, the inadequate Spanish student.
Yeah. [laughs]

Is that something that was intentional, or was that one of those moments where you’re sharing something that was beyond the joke?
I don’t think that’s intentional. I think lately that’s just something I’m finding funny. At the same time, I’ve talked to a lot of friends about this – when I look at some of my favorite performances, when I look at actors, comedians, musicians, there’s a certain interesting mix of vulnerability and confidence, or porousness and toughness. I don’t know if you know what I mean.

But really good performances are in control, they command the stage, but at the same time, they’re not completely invulnerable or emotionless. It’s not just about being tough. I think there’s something more interesting, more honest, and easier to connect with when there’s a little bit of that admission of loneliness sometimes, or insecurity, or self-doubt, or any of that kind of stuff. I think sometimes that relates to feeling alienated. So I think some of that trickled through in the book, even though I wasn’t really conscious of that.

With all the different activities you do and props you use on stage, is there a mode of performance that you’d like to do or try that you haven’t had the opportunity to do yet?
I try to mix it up. When I’m on the road, I often end up doing about ninety minutes, so most of it is just me talking, because that’s how I started in stand-up. It’s the simplest and most direct way to communicate. Along the way, I like to try different things. There might be drawings for seven or ten minutes, I might play guitar for the last ten minutes of the show. It’s in those pockets that I try new stuff. So I don’t know, there might be more stuff. I haven’t figured that out.

I’m always open to new forms, new ways to present ideas. Maybe someday I’ll write a play or something. Right now I’m starting to work on my next book and I’m writing a movie that I’m going to direct, I hope. I haven’t figured out what the movie is yet. But once I do, I’ll be that much closer to directing it.

For more info, check out demetrimartin.com. To snag yourself a copy of the book, just click the image below. Do it. You won’t be sorry.

Comedy Matters with Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock and more!

by Jeffrey Gurian

Comic Strip Action

Chris Rock, who got his start at The Comic Strip, made his Broadway debut in a hard-hitting and fantastic new show with one of the strangest names ever to hit Broadway, The Motherf**ker With The Hat.

What’s particularly funny to me as a comedy writer and something I’ve thought about since The Vagina Monologues came out, is that as a writer you can call your work anything you want, and people HAVE to say it if they want to see it.

Before The Vagina Monologues, no one used the word “vagina” in regular conversation. It felt too weird. As a matter of fact, when I saw it, the next day my mother asked me what play I saw the night before, and I felt so uncomfortable I told her I didn’t remember. She said ” How can’t you remember? You just saw it last night!”

And that’s when I realized I would rather my mother thought I had brain damage than that I knew the word “vagina.”

Anyway, this play was superb. It’s only in previews so by the time it opens officially it will supposedly be even better although I don’t see how that can happen. Now I’m not a critic, so I look at a performance as to whether I enjoyed it or not.

I don’t notice things that critics tend to notice. When I use a camera, I leave it on “Auto”. If I can see the picture I think it’s a good camera. When people rave about audio systems, it means nothing to me. If I turn on my CD player, and I can hear the song, and it sounds good to me, that’s all I need to know.

That being said, this cast is superb. Every one of them is a shining star, Chris Rock, Annnnbella Sciorra, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Yul Vazquez, and Bobby Cannavale.

Chris Rock plays a guy named Ralph who’s the A.A. sponsor of a career criminal named Jackie, fresh out of jail, and trying to stay sober and do the right thing, played by the incredible Bobby Cannavale.

I know Bobby from my old friends Ethan Hawke and Peter Dinklage and I didn’t even recognize him. He changed himself physically for this role. Even standing next to him, I had to struggle to visualize that it was actually him.

Chris Rock acts like he’s been on a Broadway stage all his life. It’s his first show but he’s been on stages all over the world, so he says it didn’t intimidate him at all.

I went to the show with Richie Tienken, the owner and co-founder of The Strip. Richie discovered Eddie Murphy and went on to manage him for 11 years and in 1986 they jointly discovered Chris Rock, so Chris is always happy to see Richie.

Watch the little interview I did with Chris backstage after the show. Richie is in it as is Chris’ friend, hilarious comic Ardie Fuqua, who happened to sit right near us in the audience.

On the way up the 6 flights of stairs to Chris’ dressing room, ( and I’m not kidding about that!) we ran into the rest of the cast and brought them with us to take the photos you’re seeing here.

Annabella Sciorra has been a favorite of mine since The Sopranos. She’s so talented and plays the long suffering wife of Ralph, Chris Rock’s character, in this, her Broadway debut as well.

She was running home to take care of her kids but was kind enough to come upstairs for a group photo for Comedy Matters, and that’s why she was wearing her hat and coat!

Chris plays a guy so cold he actually tells a guy in detail how he’s been with his girlfriend and when I say in detail, I mean “IN DETAIL”! It was COLD, bro’!

Elizabeth Rodriguez plays Jackie’s girlfriend Veronica, a “Boricua Taino Princess” in Jackie’s words. She’s done lots of theatre and television, with recurring roles on NY Undercover, The Shield, and All My Children, besides numerous roles on other shows. She’s also been in films like “Miami Vice”, “Jack Goes Boating”, and “Acts of Worship”.

Even more amazing to me, a day or two after I met her I found out she’s the next door neighbor of my dear friend Mary Elizabeth, who just happened to call and excitedly ask me if I heard about this play, telling me her friend and neighbor Elizabeth is in it. I’m like ” Elizabeth Rodriguez?” That can’t even happen!

She plays a girl who’s tough as nails on the surface, but really just wants to be loved like everyone else. All in all this is a play not to be missed!

Fundraising At The Strip

The Comic Strip hosts a lot of fundraisers. I’m doing one for Diabetes on Thursday April 14th at 8 P.M. featuring the great Elayne Boosler, Goumba Johnny the afternoon host of WKTU, Cipha Sounds the morning host from Hot 97, plus comics from late night TV shows like Eddie Brill from Letterman, Jon Fisch from Comedy Central and VH1, Sherrod Small from VH1’s Best Week Ever, Jeff Pirrami from The Friars Club, Macio from The Chapelle Show, national headliners like Jim Mendrinos and Louis Ramey and many more.

They recently did one for the Red Cross, in which Colin Quinn and Louis CK both dropped by to do spots, and the evening was a great success. Louis CK will also be honored this summer in Montreal at the Just For Laughs Festival, as “Comedy Person Of The Year.” Last year he hosted one of the galas.

Everybody loves Louis and everyone at The Comic Strip is glad he’s planning on coming by to work out.

Gotham Happenings

Aside from having star-studded shows, Gotham runs one of the best sources of new comedians in the biz, and comic Yonah Ward Grossman, as well as Jessica Kirson, can be thanked for running many of the New Faces shows as well as the open mic evening on Thursdays. Yonah runs the Friday and Saturday night New Faces Shows at 7:30 P.M., in the downstairs lounge.

Yonah is a one man crew, and runs the event, during which comics are even offered feedback from other comics, ( oftentimes whether they want it or not! LOL) They even have comics who are willing to follow you home, insisting that you take their advice!

I’ve performed there many times and Yonah is a nurturing presence. You can hear his laughter from the back of the room, and that is very important to a new entertainer. He works the sound, the DVD taping, and even sets up the bar for the performers to have a coke while they’re waiting to go on.

I checked out the All Star show on a Sunday night and came across Angel Lozada who was MC’ing and did a great job. Ryan Hamilton who for some reason always reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld, or maybe a caricature of Jerry Seinfeld, (and I mean that in a good way!)

Ryan talked about hot air ballooning not being a reliable mode of travel. No one’s ever said, “ I gotta go to the store. I think I’ll take the balloon.”

He stayed in a hotel, and asked for a wake-up call. The operator said, “ You make 16 thousand a year and haven’t had a decent date in months. How’s that for a wake-up call?”

Harrison Greenbaum, winner of The Andy Kaufman Award and one of Comedy Central’s choices for Comics To Watch, and who will be appearing at my Diabetes fundraiser, talks about how people think he’s gay. I thought he was gay too. He’s also hilarious, and very likeable on stage!

Rodney Laney was the headliner, and in talking about crime said he was so afraid of the police, he practices “freezing” in the mirror. He wonders about mounted policemen on horseback functioning in the hood. What do they do it they do if they arrest a brother, say “ Hop on? ” Great visual of the perp having to hold onto the cop around his waist! (LOL)

Rodney’s girlfriend moved out on him, and even took his window sills. (Great line!)

One girl he went out with talked so much, she used up his unlimited minutes! Rodney Laney is a funny dude!

At Michael Loftus’s show, Helen Hong stood out talking about her name being the third most un-f**kable name, behind Ethel and Gertrude. I’m sure that somewhere there are well meaning Chinese parents who called their daughters Ethel and Gertrude. At least they didn’t call their sons Ethel and Gertrude. That would have been much worse!

Helen says, “I’m Asian. We’re very flat people.” Maybe she should hang out with Flat Stanley, who I heard may actually be Asian!

She says that white people think all Asian people can tell where other Asian people are from, like we have some kind of “squint-o-meter!” That’s hysterical! Helen is one of those comics who has gotten really funny from working so hard.

Speaking of Asian comics, Sheng Wang is a new favorite of mine. He killed as part of Anthony Anderson’s monthly Mixtape Show, which I try never to miss.

In speaking of his name he admits it’s a great name for pursuing comedy, but wasn’t that great for pursuing childhood!

He says he lives in Chinatown cause that’s where he got assigned. I have a feeling he fits in well there!

Royale Watkins, Anthony’s partner hosted this month, and had his middle son Royce open the show for him. What a well poised and talented kid. He really had stage presence and knew how to handle himself. Royale’s youngest son Ross also came out and did a cute bit translating the show into Spanish.

He’s got a whole family of talented entertainers!

And then Capone came on and destroyed the room. He started out by saying he didn’t know what to say cause he was asked to work “clean”, but he proved he could be just as funny being clean as he is with his usual non-G-rated stuff.

Sarah Silverman Visits The Friars Club

So I went to The Friars Club to see the new film “Peep World” starring Sarah Silverman, Michael C. Hall, Rainn Wilson, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Ann Warren, Ron Rivkin, and Ben Schwartz.

It was presented as part of the new film program created by Charlie Prince who also produces the very successful Friars Club Film Festival. Assistant Executive Director of The Friars, Michael Caputo made sure things ran smoothly as he always does.

Sarah attended with co-star Ben Schwartz to do the Q&A and was accompanied by her close friend comic Todd Barry, one of the few who makes me laugh out loud! I don’t even make ME laugh out loud, but he does!

Anyway, the movie was very funny. It’s actually a family comedy that stars the great Ron Rivkin as the head of the highly dysfunctional Meyerowitz family. Sarah plays Cheri, the only sister to three brothers, pursued for 8 years by a funny Orthodox Jewish character played by Stephen Tobolofsky.

Ben Schwartz plays Nathan the youngest brother who destroyed the family by writing a tell-all about their lives. Cheri is suing Nathan for ruining her life. They all get together once a year for their father’s birthday and they all seem to hate each other.

The film screened at the Toronto and Austin film fests last fall, and IFC Films released it March 25. So Ben and Sarah showed up at The Friars to do a Q&A after the film. Sarah never seems comfortable with that kind of stuff.

But while they were in front of the room answering questions, and people were snapping photos of her, she took out her camera and said, ” I’m gonna take a picture of Jeffrey Gurian”, and snapped a photo of me sitting up front. It was very unexpected, and very funny. I hope somebody was shooting video so I can get a copy! Michael Caputo, I’m calling you about this!!! (LOL)

Then I decided to ask my own question for the Q&A, so I asked Ben how he prepared for the erection scene, and he said he was very proud of his erection work, and tried to stay hard for a few weeks in order to prepare.

It was a fun evening and I look forward to attending the next film that Charlie has coming up.

Trump Gets Roasted (Again!!!)

Comedy Central had a couple of incredible events this month and one of them was the Roast of Donald Trump. It was held at the Manhattan Center on West 34th Street , and Comedy Central went all out. Even The Donald himself said they paid him a lot of money to encourage him to subject himself to another Roast, after he survived the one from The Friars Club.

He’s donating all the money to charity. I happened to see him just before the Friars Roast and he asked me,” Do you think I’ll be able to handle it?” And I said to him, “Donald, if anyone can it’s YOU!”

So it was candy-filled gold coins, gold balloons on the ceiling, gold lame (pronounced Lamay not lame!!! ) pillow cushions wherever you sat. It was all about money, and rightfully so when you’re talking about The Donald, one of the most well known billionaires on the planet.

As you might imagine it drew a star studded audience, starting with Doug Herzog, President of MTV Networks Entertainment Group, and a friend of Richie Tienken and Bob Wachs.

Seth MacFarlane, the super successful creator of Family Guy, was the Roast master. On the dais were Whitney Cummings, Snoop Dogg, Anthony Jeselnik, Larry King, Lisa Lampanelli, Marlee Matlin, Mike ” The Situation” Sorrentino, and Jeffrey Ross. Also in attendance were Ivanka Trump, Russell Simmons, John Legend, Donald’s beautiful wife Melania, and Comedy Central executive, V.P. JoAnn Grigioni.

Aileen Budow, the head of press, was in charge of running the red carpet which she did so well, (as always!) and was helped by Eve Kenny.

Mike ‘The Situation” Sorrentino found himself in a very difficult situation to say the least. Having to compete with hardened, experienced comics is basically impossible, but he kept laughing through the whole, painful thing, which is how I am characterizing his set. You have to give the guy credit for even attempting something so difficult.

It’s always great to see Lisa Lampanelli. When she saw me and went to introduce me to her husband Jimmy, she actually remembered he and I had already met, which was very interesting to me.

She said, ” you guys met at my book party at Carolines.” It was for her book,”Chocolate Please!- My Adventures In Food, Fat, and Freaks” which I think came out in 2009. She remembered that I came out to support her, which I think is very important to do for your friends. You need to get out and support people in their efforts.

And it shows how people remember those things, even successful, busy people like Lisa, because I didn’t think she would. And she was right. I did meet Jimmy that day and they weren’t married yet, just engaged, but we all took pictures together, so we could prove she was dating someone white! (LOL).

It really shows how some people appreciate and remember those who come out to support them. And hopefully she’ll drop by my fundraiser to fight Diabetes on April 14th ay 8 P.M. at The Comic Strip. She said if she was in town she’d be glad to come.

Some of the highlights:

Seth on Trump – Now there’s a Donald Trump cologne that never fails with women. You pour it on a cloth and hold it over her face until she stops struggling.

Seth on Lisa Lampanelli – Lisa recently appeared on The View, and blocked it!

Seth on Larry King – Seth referred to Larry as ” a chattering pirate skeleton, on loan from Disneyland.”

Lisa led off the Roast which is a hard spot to fill, but she killed it as always. She referrred to Anthony Jeselnek as Anthony Jism-neck, and Seth said that Anthony was only there because Greg Giraldo was dead.

Lisa on Jeff Ross – Jeff is in as much demand as the treadmill in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house.

Lisa on Trump – You’ve ruined more women’s lives than Bulimia.

Lisa on The Situation – The Situation wrote a book which is being sold on Amazon. When you bring up the book it says, ” People who have bought this book have also bought a rope and a stool.”

Snoop referred to Lisa as Notorious P.I.G. which was hysterical, and referred to Anthony Jeselnik as “Anthony Jizzleneck”.

Snoop on Anthony – The last time I saw him on the mic he forgot to order my Chicken McNuggets.

Snoop on Donald – He’s rich but very cheap. The last check ( Czech) he ever picked up was Ivana!

Anthony Jeselnik is a great joke writer. He said, “Look at this dais. You got a pimp, a drug dealer, a pornographer, a murderer, and 8 white people.”

Anthony on Larry King – Larry’s so old, he’s actually one of the Jews that killed Christ.

Anthony on The Sitch – Mike Sorrentino, sometimes known as The Situation. Never known as The Education. He has a book, a video, a tanning salon, … he has his name on everything but a high school diploma.

Jeffrey Ross closed the show and came out wearing a signature jacket befitting the Roastmaster General, with medals and epaulets, and something about it reminded me of something that Georgie Jessel might have worn.

I’m concerned that no one will know who Georgie Jessel was. He was a comedian during The Civil War. I think his original name was Georgie Jeselnik, but he changed it to Jessel for show business reasons.

Jeffrey on Whitney – (Whitney by the way is the brunt of a lot of sex jokes in which she plays “the slut”! She’s a sexy girl who seems to act that way naturally!) Whitney is working on three pilots at the same time, and that was just on the flight in!

And finally The Donald got his turn and had some really funny things to say. Btw, I hope he runs for President. I think he’d be amazing, and would put the country back on track. That being said, …

Trump – What a great honor it must be for you to honor me tonight!

Trump about the dais – Look at this dais. None of these people can even get arrested, .. except for Snoop Dogg.

I did a little video on the red carpet with Roasters Jeffrey Ross, Lisa Lampanelli, Anthony Jeselnik, Whitney Cummings, Snoop Dogg, Marlee Matlin,and guests like comic/TV host Amy Schumer, Actor Ice-T and his wife Coco, Russell Simmons, and even MTV President Doug Herzog. And Gilbert Gottfried was the surprise guest! You can see it here!

Want more Jeffrey Gurian? Check out his official site here.

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