Christian Finnegan: Two For Flinching

by Christian Finnegan

By Christian Finnegan

(that is, Christian Finnegan — the comedian pictured to the left — wrote the below review about his own album)

I recently had the supreme misfortune of receiving an advance copy of Two For Flinching, the debut CD by purported humorist Christian Finnegan. You may recognize Finnegan as the least funny person on VH1’s Best Week Ever. Or you might recognize him as the white guy from the “Mad Real World” on Chappelle’s Show, a credit I’m guessing Mr. Finnegan will try to coast on until there are no longer any frat boys left who think shouting “You stabbed my dad!” is hilarious.

If you still have no idea who I’m talking about, give yourself a gold star— you’ve managed to avoid America’s worst “comedian.” I use quotation marks because Mr. Finnegan does not fulfill any of the criteria associated with his title. In fact, it appears that Christian Finnegan’s only real talent is in coating the hapless listener’s ears in pure audio doo-doo; unfortunately, there’s no title for someone who does that for a living.

Calling Two For Flinching unfunny is like calling Hurricane Katrina a light mist. This album is the comedic equivalent of bone cancer. Remember Ryan White, that kid who died of AIDS? His life was a rollicking laugh-fest compared to even one track of this 52 minute spiritual dickpunch.

From topics that run the gamut from drinking to farting to drinking while farting, Finnegan displays not only an inability to construct a recognizable punch line, but also a single-minded determination to use the word “like” at least twice per sentence. It’s, like, really lame (and more than a little gay).

While it’s indisputable that Finnegan is a terrible comedian, it should not be forgotten that there are also plenty of other reasons not to like this guy.

For starters, there’s his aging-indie-rocker-meets-Gap-salesdouche appearance. Hey Finnegan, wearing distressed jeans and an oversized watch isn’t fooling anyone. You’re firmly in your 30s, dude. Accept it.

Oh and by the way— all of that hair product is calling attention to your freakishly large head. Nice look, Heatmiser. How you ever got laid, much less convinced a woman to marry you is beyond comprehension. I give you nine months until she’s blowing one of the Tourgasm guys.

Even more damning than Finnegan’s faux-hispter persona is the content of his character, or shall I say lack thereof. Remember that tragic news story recently about that woman who critically injured her baby by using it to strike her husband?

Well, Christian Finnegan’s first instinct upon hearing this story was to laugh his ass off. What kind of person does such a thing? Probably the same kind of person who talks politics all the time and yet didn’t bother to vote in the last presidential election. Right, right— your “voting registration got all screwed up.” Whatever, dude. Maybe if you’d dealt with the situation before election week, they’d have been able to clear things up.

Honestly, I could go on all day revealing Christian Finnegan for the complete asshole that he is. He laughs at racist jokes, he’s rude to waiters, he monopolizes conversations, he drinks way too much, he fails to empty the dishwasher even when he promises to do so, he sneaks potential comedy bits into everyday conversation and – rumor has it – he didn’t bother to call home on his Dad’s birthday this year. Nice, pal. Real nice.

Someday, the 14 people out there who care what Christian Finnegan has to say will wake up and realize what a complete an utter fraud he is. One can only hope that Two For Flinching is the first step in that awakening.

To buy Christian Finnegan’s album, Two For Flinching, visit www.christianfinnegan.com or your favorite online or real-life CD store.

Tim Slagle: Europa

by Noah Gardenswartz

Beyond providing affirmation that he’s extremely funny, stand-up comedian Tim Slagle’s newest CD, Europa proves he’s mighty bright. Those listening may not always agree with his views on politics or social mores, but you have to respect the fact that he’s willing to say what he does— and in such an unapologetic way.

Slagle’s comedy has edge. He rants about prostitution, abortion and a woman’s right to choose with utter confidence. He also has a particularly scathing, yet honest review of European culture that will leave you rolling with laughter while you think to yourself, “did he actually just say that?”

He displays a knack for dry sarcasm and social awareness, especially on “Cartoons” when he complains about political correctness and oversensitivity in our culture: “Cartoon Network is holding back Speedy Gonzalez episodes,” he says, “because they don’t want to offend the Mexican American community. Because, you know…it reinforces that fast Mexican stereotype.”

Clearly, astute social observation is Slagle’s strength. So it makes sense that Slagle struggles a bit when he takes aim on hackneyed topics like Viagra and smoking weed. Armed with a unique mind, he’s wasting his own time as well as the audience’s by discussing things that every other comedian seems to talk about.

But even at his weakest, Slagle deftly turns it around. After a not-particularly-funny bit on marijuana, he segues into a routine about gateway drugs, saying that he can prove that milk is a gateway drug for heroin users. By using humor to call junk science and bogus statistics into question, Slagle injects life into commonplace subject matter.

But the entire album is not laced with heavy topics. Slagle lightly quips that a “hangover is just the body’s way of saying you shouldn’t have stopped drinking.” He also doesn’t mind going long on trailer parks and the “C” word.

The bottom line is that Europa is partly educational, primarily humorous and undoubtedly brave— like most good comedy should be.

Greg Giraldo: Good Day to Cross a River

by Dylan P. Gadino

There’s a subtle streak of vulnerability running through Greg Giraldo’s quick-fire succession of tirades on Good Day to Cross a River. It’s not that he isn’t sincerely angry or frustrated; he’s both of those things. But it comes from someplace entirely human, a place that most “angry” comics don’t dare stray.

While he’s clearly racked by the poor judgment of this country’s more colorful characters – a mother who throws her baby in a river, a guy who burns his genitals in the shower and then sues his landlord, penguins – the veteran comic is not afraid to expose himself as a barely middle-aged dude who’s obsessed with aging and is still not always able to make the right choices.

Turning the “What Would Jesus Do”-solution-to-moral-dilemmas approach on its ear, in his trademark spouty style, Giraldo argues that at this point in his life, it’s not that easy: “If Jesus had just turned 40 and he felt fat and old and he was on the road and he was lonely and miserable and his wife was being a total bitch at home and he felt old and unattractive ‘cause his balls had started dipping in the [toilet] water… would he make out with that stripper in Vegas just to make himself feel better? I don’t know.”

Like a good punk or metal song, many of Giraldo’s bits (no doubt, the one above) are forceful, powerful and often times run the listener through a myriad of emotions. They’re the type of bits that stay with you for a long time— not only because the jokes’ obvious depth but because Giraldo is consistently bust-a-gut funny.

The Queens, NY native also does an excellent job culling his best older bits (“Civil War Letters,” “Illegal Aliens,”) and rolling them up with slightly newer material like “Death by Chocolate” and “Wal-Mart” and surprising even his most diehard fans with brand new, gasp-inducing bits like “The Floater,” where he rails against reality television: “I’m half waiting for a show where they just toss a bunch of paraplegics in a lake just to see what’ll happen.”

Giraldo’s proven himself on Dave Attell’s Insomniac Tour, Comedy Central roasts, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and Stand-up Nation with Greg Giraldo. And he proves himself once again on Good Day as one of this generation’s funniest stand-up comedians.

Steven Wright: Don’t Call it a Comeback!

by John Delery

Stand-up comedy legend Steven Wright has been expanding minds with concise quips for nearly three decades. Now with a new Comedy Central special — his first in 15 years — the master of the monotone is arming a whole new generation with brilliant one-liners and bizarre musings.

By John Delery

After 27 years of expanding the boundaries of imagination by telling pre-shrunk jokes, comedian Steven Wright still uses words economically, as if he were paying retail for every syllable.

“When I was kid,” Wright declares at the beginning of his new Comedy Central special, When the Leaves Blow Away, “I wish my first word had been ‘Quote,’ so right before I die I could say, ‘Unquote.’”

The quip travels through the audience at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto and settles in its consciousness. An instant later — hey, Wright isn’t the only person required to think during one of his performances — the crowd roars in recognition and Wright resumes the amusing journey through his technicolor gray matter.

In the hour-long special, which premiered Oct. 21, the spotlight illuminates Wright’s Nicole Richie–lean comic style — his signature style since diving headfirst into the deep pool of comic talent in the early ’80s (his contemporaries include Roseanne Barr, Drew Carey and Jerry Seinfeld) and making a splash the size of a tsunami on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson in 1982; he first appeared on Aug. 6 and then reappeared six days later.

Apparently, one day late last year he looked at his watch, not to mention his audience, and along with his manager, Tim Sarkes, decided it was time to cast fresh one-liners and hook another generation on his musings. The result after overcoming various delays: Wright’s first special since Wicker Chairs and Gravity for HBO in 1991.

“Most of my audience is in its 40s, 50s, 60s, even older,” Wright, who’s 50 himself, says from his residence in Carlisle, Mass., always his home state. “The kids in college now were only 5 years old when I did my last special.” So what better place to reach a younger audience than on Comedy Central, a TV hangout for teens who regularly tune in to, say, South Park and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

“Comedy Central is like this whole other world,” says Wright, who neither looks nor acts his age. After all, his curly (well, more like Larry from the Three Stooges) locks still stretch to his shoulders, and he retains his kidlike creativity.

He muses: “What did Jesus ever do for Santa Clause on his birthday?” Wright wonders in the special.

Offstage, Wright paints, abstractly, of course; onstage, he illustrates his oblique perceptions with the verbal equivalent of stick figures drawn from a master surrealist’s cockeyed viewpoint. “I’ve lasted this long, I think,” he says, “because I really just talk about everyday things, things people can identify with…but then twist it another way,” meaning he tilts the frame holding his exaggerated word pictures. The simplicity of his writing style masks the complexity of his mind:

“If I ever had twins, I’d use one for parts.”
“When I was a little kid, we had a quicksand box. I was an only child…eventually.”
“If you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer?”
“I have a fax machine. I have fax waiting.”
“If you didn’t know me would you think I was a stranger?”

Wright, like all his fellow jesters, collects “millions of pieces of information” he either hears or observes every day, blends the data in a thought processor, then shares his concoction with people looking to laugh. His sharp mind whittles memorable witticisms from splinters of ordinary life.

“I bought an iPod,” he announces onstage in his familiar “no-I-swear-you-didn’t-just-wake-me-up drowsy monotone. “It can either hold 5,000 songs or one phone message from my mother.”

Unlike so many younger comedians who sprint onstage and appear to be mainlining adrenaline, Wright continues to work at his typical pace — the speed of sound…asleep. Or so it sounds and looks in clubs, on TV (as the recurring character Warren Mermelman in the old NBC sitcom Mad About You) and in many movies (ranging from the DJ in Reservoir Dogs and Dr. Emil Reingold in Natural Born Killers, both ultraviolent dramas, to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in Canadian Bacon and an uncredited role as the Guy on the Couch in Half Baked, both goofy comedies).

Wright’s comic roots show in When the Leaves Blow Away (available on DVD from Image Entertainment early next year). Periodically throughout the special, he connects his usual patchwork of random thoughts with stitches of stories. “I didn’t intentionally set out to be this abstract comedian, the ‘one-liner guy.’” says Wright. “In this show, I tell more stories; I evolve back to the beginning.”

His familiar style, Wright explains, “really was an experiment,” hatched in the comedy incubators of the Northeast, especially in Boston, where, at 23, after graduating from Emerson College with a degree in Mass Communications but no concrete professional goal, Wright finally confronted his childhood dream and conquered his trepidations at the Comedy Connection.

He took the short route to acclaim, and along the path to success, Wright even scored a Grammy nod for his 1985 album, I Have a Pony; four years later he won an Academy Award for best short live-action film for The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, the story of a man (Wright, in the title role) who escapes from the maze of the rat race long enough for weekly sessions with his psychiatrist.

Since there’s no mandatory retirement age in professional comedy, Wright expects to continue touring, performing and stretching his imagination — on a rack — maybe until he, well, unquotes.

For more information, check out www.stevenwright.com.

Aaron Karo: Recovering Frat Boy

by Noah Gardenswartz

Comedian Aaron Karo, the best selling author of Ruminations on College Life and Ruminations on Twentysomething Life, is back at it again, dropping humorous observations about his life as an eternal party boy.

Only this time Karo’s not documenting his experiences as Mr. Fraternity via the written word; instead he’s traveled back to Philadelphia, five years after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania – where he did his partying – to tape his hilarious stand-up comedy DVD, Recovering Frat Boy.

On stage, Karo often draws upon familiar situations for twentysomething bachelors and explains his take with a handful of clever analogies like, “Single women in their 20s are like a preseason football game— they may seem like they want to score, but really they just don’t want to get hurt.”

During the 60-minute set, Karo also deftly utilizes the callback – a tool comedians use to refer back to a previously told joke – it helps to showcase intelligent writing that made him famous in the first place.

Karo also succeeds in covering seemingly brainless topics like college girls and binge drinking, but somehow manages to handle these themes with a sharp wit. The material has its R-rated moments, like when Karo says, “I love when a girl says, ‘Karo, I’m not sleeping with you,’ because all I hear is ‘Karo, I’m gonna blow you and then you can leave.’” But, generally, this performance is a fairly innocent look into his life at an Ivy League Animal House, and the malaise that’s ensued in the following years.

Recovering Frat Boy is also loaded with 20 minutes of extra footage, which includes a clip from Karo’s first ever comedy performance at an open-mic in New York City. Watching him as a beginner, talking a mile a minute and clearly nervous, and then him standing confident and speaking clearly four years later is an amazing thing. Between his subject matter and the quality comedy he dishes out, Recovering is worth opening a case of beers to and watching as you get wasted.

Click here to read our interview with Aaron Karo.