Stephen Lynch: The Craig Machine

by Dylan P. Gadino

Since Adam Sandler put his goofy songs on tape for his 1993 debut album, it seemed the doors would open wide for singing comedians. And perhaps they did — though not wide enough for most people to actually notice. But hardcore standup fans started to pay attention seven

years later when Stephen Lynch’s Comedy Central Presents debuted and his first album, A Little Bit Special, dropped. While others thought they could get by with only an acoustic guitar and a shabby set of jokes, Lynch knew better and executed his own special formula for success.

On his third disc, The Craig Machine , Lynch continues his reign as one of the nation’s most skilled singing comedians. Armed with a voice sweeter than most all-too-earnest contemporary singer/songwriters — we’re looking at you, John Mayer — a keen sense of pop song structure and a wickedly vile sense of humor, the Michigan native keeps us guessing and, more importantly, laughing throughout the new 14-song collection.

For Lynch, the guitar clearly isn’t a novelty. It’s the vehicle for every punchline. As a result, he’s careful to construct real songs — as in the type you’d hear on traditional pop albums, the kind that people will listen to repeatedly. Of course, there are a few quick throwaways — see “Love Song” and “Not Home” — peppered throughout for cheap, hard, laughs. But largely, there are plenty of hooks on which to grab hold.

In the galloping “Vanilla Ice Cream,” a sort of love song to African-American women Lynch sings , “If you’re a honky, you’re singing the wrong key. ” He gives Jesus a hard drinking, cooler brother, Craig Christ, in the swaggering, first-person track “Craig.” Over a raucous full strum, Lynch sasses , “Because while Jesus is prayin’/ Fuckin’ Craig is layin’ every lady in the Testament / You know what I’m sayin.’ ” He satirizes the generic rock template in “Classic Rock Song,” where he goes from singing lines like, “Baby, let’s make love / Your body fits me like a glove” to, “I swear that wasn’t my goal / To put it in your butt hole.”

Part of Lynch’s draw is that he commits equally to both music and joke on each track. The most offensive song, “Baby” — wherein the song’s subject hopes his ugly newborn gets SIDS — is also the catchiest. We dare you not to sing the chorus. One of the more absurdly themed songs, “Little Tiny Moustache,” about dating a Nazi woman who “quoted Mein Kampf in our fifth anniversary card” is also the most musically delicate, beautiful song on Machine . It further proves that if Lynch ever went legit, he’d probably succeed. But that would be bad… and not really that funny.

Mike Birbiglia: Don’t Hate Him Because He’s Normal

by Punchline Magazine

The pizza-obsessed, bear-fearing boy from Massachusetts is developing his own Comedy Central series, prepping a new album and headlining a winter tour. So what’s next? Scrabble, anyone?

By Dylan P. Gadino

Though he’s the one that requested the sound guy turn up the volume, Mike Birbiglia has clearly never heard the disposable dance song now pumping through the speakers at Caroline’s. No matter. He’s determined to lip-synch every word, earnestly mouthing every verse, flailing his arms at each chorus and dropping to the stage floor for a rousing finale that leaves him breathing heavily and sweating — a lot.

This isn’t typical behavior for Birbigs. But the crowd is smallish at this weekday show at one of the country’s most famous comedy clubs, and you can tell he wanted to give the fans something special.

“I liked that show. It was fun,” Birbiglia says a month later. He’s now in a rental car, buzzing along somewhere between Indianapolis, Ind., and Columbus, Ohio, where he’ll be doing a string of shows. He has been known to play 300 of these shows a year, hitting up to 40 different cities, spreading Birbiglian — as some call it — to colleges, clubs and thousand-seat theaters.

“I’m trying to learn to navigate that kind of show,” he says of his set at Caroline’s. “I need to know if that kind of thing just amuses me or other people as well. The public has a consensus sense of humor, so I have to test out what parts of my humor translate to other people.”

The audience that night clearly appreciated the impromptu musical number. It was hard not to. His catchy brand of stand-up allows him flexibility that other comics don’t have. He’s unassuming on stage. So it makes sense when he’s self-deprecating or admitting his greatest fear — bears — or when he’s chatting about his obsession with pizza. (Near the end of his Caroline’s show, he even has the waiter bring a woman a pizza from the kitchen).

But at any time, he could whip out a rape joke, albeit, a PG-13 one. It’s almost surprising. He couches even that subject matter so well that the joke ends up being slightly endearing. “People are sometimes confused by me, because they think I’m even more normal than I am,” he says.

That may be true. But still, Birbiglia is not the stereotypical bundle of neuroses, insecurities and frustration that usually makes a comic great. Nor is he overly confident or aggressive. He’s just funny.

FAILED RAPPER

Mike Birbiglia has no home. Or he has three, depending on how you look at it. At the time of this writing, he hasn’t had a place of his own for two months. He usually bounces between his parents’ home, his girlfriend’s Manhattan apartment and his office in Tribeca, which has been a busy place of late.

He’s currently writing a pilot script for his own Comedy Central series, prepping new material for his sophomore album, Author of the Month , and is workshopping his one-man play Sleepwalk with Me , the subject of which isn’t totally unrelated to why he got the office in the first place. “When I first moved to the city, I couldn’t go to sleep, because I was just thinking about jokes,” he says. “Everything had a punch line.” Now, he writes only at the office.

It makes sense for a guy like Birbiglia to show up to an office every morning. He looks like a nine-to-fiver anyway, what with his neatly kept hair — receding ever so slightly — his clean-cut cuteness and whitish-pink bound-to-a-cubicle complexion. It sort of follows that Birbiglia, even at the age of 27, is compelled to find structure in an occupation that would, without question, allow him at least 20 more years of unstructured lunacy.

“I always wanted to be a rapper or a rock star when I was a kid,” he says. “But that’s the story of my life. I always wanted to live large, but I ended up living medium. Like at night I’ll do some 2000-seat place with an amazing crowd, and instead of going out drinking, I’ll go home and play Scrabble with my girlfriend.”

This dynamic is at the center of the pilot he’s writing for Comedy Central — an adaptation of his Secret Public Journal, a few-times-a-month letter sent out to fans that is full of Mike’s faux-poignant commentary about his recent encounters with life, and his struggle to maintain a semi-normal existence while working in the most abnormal industry.

Not only did his Secret Public Journal and his regular readings of them on Indianapolis-based, syndicated radio program The Bob & Tom Show bolster Birbiglia’s fan base but it has also offered Birbigs some consistency in his otherwise mobile lifestyle.

“My journal has become the one constant in my life,” he says. “Every week I find myself in four different cities and seven different beds. My laptop is my home in a way. It’s familiar.”

FROM DOORMAN TO HEADLINER

Birbigs started doing stand-up in Washington, D.C., when he was 19 and attending Georgetown University. The Shrewsbury, Mass., native also started logging some serious hours working the door at The Improv, where he saw the likes of Brian Regan, Dave Chappelle and Margaret Cho all living the life he wanted. “It really annoyed my father because he was partly paying for college and thought that my priority was school,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Hmmm, no it isn’t.’ So it was really contentious for a while. My family (Dad, Vincent, is a neurologist; Mom, Mary Jean, is a retired nurse) is pretty pragmatic.”

So he made the most of his time in school, where he majored in dramatic writing. He was hugely successful in his major courses and equally the opposite in his others. “My goal in college was to do well enough so that my family wouldn’t disown me,” he says. So he spent much of his time prepping himself for comedy. He acted in the university’s improv group freshman year and ultimately won The Funniest Man on Campus award, which helped land him his initial gigs at The Improv.

“I remember I said to my brother that I was going to become a comedian and work the road because I had found out Brian Regan made a lot of money each week. And my brother goes, ‘Yeah… but he’s Brian Regan. I just paused and was like, ‘Yeah, but that’s what I’m going to do. That was my logic. So I moved to New York, and I became very poor for about a year.”

Positioned in a town where you can trip over half-a-dozen nationally known comics in a single night of barhopping, Birbiglia wasted little time. True to his word, he set out on the road when he was 22.

Maybe just as important, he found a manager in the late Lucien Hold, the former general manager and talent coordinator at New York’s Comic Strip Live. Hold got him seen at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival, which helped him score an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman when he was 24.

“When I did Letterman, it kind of quieted my family for awhile,” he says. “But my dad still drops hints. Like he always says that this comedy thing may parlay nicely into advertising. And I say, ‘The doctor thing may parlay nicely into being a clerk at T.J. Maxx, but I wouldn’t count on it.’”

EDGY-WHOLESOME

It’s hardly past 10 a.m., and Birbiglia is hopped up on coffee — “my meds.” Sitting comfortably in his Tribeca office — a piano, fridge, computers, Sharper Image massage chair, hand-sculpted pizzeria castle and stuffed panda wearing a “porn star” t-shirt are all near by — he starts perusing his wall that is filled with bizarre fan mail.

One woman from Texas — go figure — writes the following: “I might receive a response from you, Mike within an hour, within a month, within a year, within five years or anytime after that — maybe to tell me that you reported me to the proper authorities or maybe just something about me has piqued your interest. If God draws together our paths, then great. And if not, life is still great.” Exactly. There’s others. One is more twisted and incoherent than the next.

“I free write a lot,” he says, describing his joke-creation process. “I’ll just think about something that struck me as peculiar. I don’t start with funny; I start with interesting. Then if I find funny in it, I’m psyched. But I do have a lot of crap — thousands of pages of crap.”

When asked to describe his style of comedy, he stalls. It’s suggested that’s he’s “edgy-wholesome,” that he’s not Seinfeld nor is he Chris Rock. He laughs and agrees. “I’m wholesome in the sense that I’m positive, and I want people to just laugh at the absurdity of everything,” he explains. “But in a certain way, I’m a bit edgy because I’m not willing to discount things like death and politics. Those things are in our subconscious and to pass over them would feel fraudulent.”

Regardless of labels, it’s obvious that Birbiglia’s comedy has been catching on rapidly the past couple of years. In addition to his development deal with Comedy Central, he’s also in the middle of the Friends of The Bob & Tom Show Comedy Tour and, come winter, will be headlining The New School of Comedy with Mike Birbiglia, a college tour set out to expose the nation’s up-and-coming stand-ups.

Despite the successes Birbigs has had so far, he never loses perspective — the memories of all-too-humbling shows are never far from his mind. “I did one show at a college in western Pennsylvania, where I showed up, and they had me performing at a walk-a-thon for cancer,” he says.

“I was in the middle of an indoor track, performing for the people walking. I was basically an oscillating, revolving comedian.”

“In my experience, you can never get cocky as a comedian, because the cancer walk-a-thon is always right around the corner.”

For more info on Mike, visit www.birbigs.com .

Carlos Mencia: Look Out World, Mencia’s Got Your Number

by Dylan P. Gadino

Whether taking on racial stereotypes or his ‘beaner’ heritage, Carlos Mencia is not afraid to tell you what’s on his Mind.

By Dylan P. Gadino

Spending a few days in New York City has Carlos Mencia teeming with adrenaline. The sturdy veteran comic is here promoting his Comedy Central show Mind of Mencia . In a few hours, he’ll be chatting with Conan O’Brien; yesterday, he killed on The Howard Stern Show due, in part, to a story he told about a Catholic-school teacher who once got naked and hit on him. “I love the energy here,” Mencia says. “It’s alive in ways that other places aren’t.”

But he’s also quick to point out the similarities. He does this constantly — always with the we’re-different-but-the-same thing. “New York isn’t different than any other city, it’s just sped up,” explains the Encino, CA resident. “And the people that call it chaotic just don’t understand,” explaining that the city is a barometer to measure the future of other cities. “That’s why racists hate cities like this. Because they know this reflects what’s going to happen to their own town.”

Already, the blood is pumping.

Truth be told, it doesn’t take much to get Mencia’s blood moving. Sometimes, he just has to wake up. A Stern caller the previous day said Mencia was talking so much and so fast that he accused Mencia of being on coke. Not likely. This self-described “beaner” — he’s half German, half Honduran — just has a lot to say.

Some are quick to paint Mencia as a race comedian, a guy who unapologetically reminds us that racial stereotypes exist because there’s truth to them. No doubt, race is on his mind a lot.

But really, he’s more like George Carlin, expounding on the stupidity of human beings, than George Lopez, who, many times, weighs his stand-up material down with anecdote after anecdote about growing up Mexican. And since Mencia has very few limits or subjects he considers taboo — race, fake tits, Attention Deficit Disorder, education, his wife’s oral skills, America, pampered NBA players — he gets in trouble every now and then. Lucky for him, he’s hilarious.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Carlos Mencia was one credit shy of making his parents proud. Up until then, he was doing a good job of it. He was 20 years old, working full time at Farmers Insurance and carrying a full course load at California State University, Los Angeles. Always an excellent student — “Half the students didn’t know who I was, and the other half hated me for ruining the grading curve,” he has said — he could’ve went to a better school, but Cal State was conveniently located just a few exits from his East LA home.

With a degree in electronic engineering nearly in his hands, he was on track for financial success. Sure, he kept his co-workers entertained at work. But it’s not like he tried. He was just being Carlos. “I would just see stuff on the news that I thought was ridiculous or, like, the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, and I would come to work and talk to the guys about it,” he explains. “But I wasn’t trying to be funny. It was more like, ‘Can you believe this stupid shit?’ Little by little they started to laugh. Then it became something the guys looked forward to.”

Enter crusty white guy named Joe. “He was the bitter guy that had the crappy life, crappy wife, kids he hated. He never smiled — that kind of guy,” says Mencia. “He came up to me, and in the most serious nature said, ‘You’re very funny. I know you don’t know it, but you really need to do stand-up comedy, because you’re gifted. When he said that to me, I was like, ‘You know, I think I need to do stand-up comedy. If he’s saying that, it truly means something.”

And so with some gentle prodding from a cousin, he signed himself up for an amateur-night slot at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood. Carlos walked off stage after two and a half minutes, having gotten some laughs. “The minute I got off, I was like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do with my life. I get it,’” he says. “I quit my job, and I stopped going to school. I didn’t even go to the next class. I just kept going to amateur nights.”

His parents, however, were pretty sure this was not how it was supposed to work. When he was 3 months old, Magdelena Mencia and Roberto Holness brought Ned (that’s his birth name) over from San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Just east of the Guatemalan border, San Pedro Sula is known for its gang violence but also for Honduran tourism, soccer stadiums, museums and lush parks.

Settling in East LA, where Carlos, in his younger days, made money by selling cocaine, proved to be a different but not-so-different experience for his family. Mencia, the second youngest of 18 children — his mom started having kids at 15 and stopped at 44 — grew up having been shot at 15 times and stabbed three. Early on in his life, his parents sent him to live next door with his aunt and uncle Consuelo and Pablo Mencia. He was the only one of his clan that was sent away.

“When I quit everything, my parents were like, ‘You’re a dumbass,” says Mencia. “They were like, ‘Are you telling us that we sacrificed everything and left family behind so that you can be a fucking clown?’ Then I started making money, and they were like, ‘You’re a genius. We always knew you would be special.’”

“But I understand where they were coming from,” the 37-year-old admits. “It also lead me to understand the kind of pressures and responsibilities that I had, not only as a person but as someone who cares about his family and wants to take care of them. Now, when I get e-mails from Hispanics saying, ‘We love what you’re doing, keep doing it, you’re representing us well’ it doesn’t feel overbearing. It’s like I had that my whole life in one shape or form. It has always been like that. I’ve always had the responsibility.”

Luckily, it didn’t take too long for Carlos to get noticed. He started regularly showcasing at The Comedy Store on Sunset Strip; his other duties for the next five years there included parking cars, seating people and running errands. “I ended up going to comedy college,” he says. He worked an average of 10 sets a week and did up to six performances a night throughout Los Angeles.

In 1994, Carlos got his first high-profile gig, hosting HBO’s Loco Slam , a Latino-flavored Def Jam-esque comedy show; that same year, his first half-hour comedy special aired on the network

Then began the gradual climb. In 2000, he released his first album, Take a Joke America . Two years later, he was headlining the Three Amigos Tour with Pablo Francisco and the late Freddy Soto.

He did another HBO special in 2003, released a slew of CDs, toured constantly and popped up on TV and movies here and there. Despite the constant hustle, Carlos managed to steadily date his future wife, Amy - a six-foot, blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner from Oregon. “Ironic, isn’t it,” he laughs. “I’m kind of like Tiger Woods that way.”

THE TAO OF MENCIA

Carlos is the kind of guy who, after hearing him talk for five minutes on stage or off, you want to give him a hug. Not because he needs it, but because you need it — not because you’re sad but because you’ve connected and, for some reason, a strong hug — the kind that guys are allowed to give their best friends — is the only way to express your appreciation. Which is why, despite Mencia releasing what some industry folks might say are, for a comic, too many CDs and DVDs, people are still drawn to see the real thing, to feel that energy and positivism in real life.

You can feel a lot of that energy on Mind of Mencia , where Carlos excels at handing viewers honest opinions on everything from politics to television to fashion. For having 22 minutes of actual airtime, Carlos proves to be a master of comic economics. He manages to regale us with field pieces — see his “Desperate Gardeners” segment, where he introduces us to real gardeners and their shabby female bosses with not one Jesse Metcalfe or Eva Longoria in sight.

He uses his LA set for sketches with the “ghost of Johnnie Cochran” and puts on a “street-wear fashion show” featuring slightly flabby models showing off ass-crack-exposing jeans for men. Then there’s the stand-up. Dave Chappelle dabbles with it on his show, but Mencia makes a concerted effort to do enough so that the studio audience feels a connection. As a result, the show was the third highest rated Comedy Central premiere ever.

“When I saw the pilot, I was blown away by how clear his voice was,” says Zoe Friedman, vice president, current programming at Comedy Central. “He’s an equal-opportunity offender, but he has a sweetness that brings people in. Whether he’s in front of 300 Hispanics or 300 middle-aged white women, he kills.”

Mencia’s live shows don’t change based on his audience. He doesn’t care what color you are, though he’s happy to point you out and the differences between you and the differently colored guy next to you. Face it, it’s funny. “I was an outsider and an insider at the same time my entire life,” he says. “I was born in Honduras and grew up in East LA, where everyone is Mexican. The whole thing has given me a very interesting perspective.”

It’s that insider-outsider mentality that has made Blue Collar Comedy Tour and its founding comedians so successful. Surely many of its fans have different politics than Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall and Ron White. But those comics are brilliant. They disarm their audience by playing into traditional, self-deprecating southern stereotypes. Then, slowly, we get that they’re not that different, and we’re really laughing at ourselves. Mencia does the same thing, albeit, in an R-rated fashion.

“For me with my show, it’s more important that I have the opportunity to fail than the opportunity to succeed,” says Mencia. “If there’s a white show that doesn’t succeed, whatever network it’s on is not going to say, ‘our white show didn’t work, so let’s go to a black show.’ But that shit might happen if a black show or a Hispanic show failed.”

Though it seems Mencia has seen very little of it throughout his career, he knows that failure is always lurking. He’s not scared, though. “If I died right now, I’d be completely happy and satisfied,” he says. “I’ve done the best that I could with every opportunity presented to me. So yeah, I would be unbelievably happy. I’ve done good by me, by my standards.”

Carlos Mencia’s new DVD, Not for the Easily Offended is now available. For more information, visit carlosmencia.com.