LIVE REVIEW: Patton Oswalt

by Jessica Agi

At a recent headlining spot in New York City, stand-up comic and regular guy, Patton Oswalt let’s the laughs – and the spit – fly

Carolines – New York City

November 17, 2006

It’s 11:05 on Friday night, and the crowd goes wild as a man shorter than the mic stand takes the Carolines stage with a drink in hand. Patton Oswalt is relaxed and confident. His material covers everything from his knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons and KFC meals to current events and Cirque du Soleil.

The only constant throughout Oswalt’s set is his honesty and lack of shame— like when he mentions his disappointment that his wife wants to have a baby: “But we agreed we’d have an invisible baby and name it ‘10 hours of sleep a night!’”

Oswalt skips segues; his quick pace keeps the audience hanging on every word, no matter how raunchy or down-right random it may be.

“I wanna fuck you hard,” he abruptly says, lowering his voice. “I wanna stick my hard cock in your wet pussy.” He acknowledges the bluntness. “But G-rated filth is so much creepier,” he explains. “I’m gonna fill your hoo-ha with goof juice!’ Yeah, go home tonight and say ‘I’m gonna fill your hoo-ha with goof juice’ when you’re fucking, and get ready for the wintry freshness of mace.”

Next on Oswalt’s to-do list: birthdays and which ones deserve celebrations.

“When you’re one through nine, you get a birthday because you’re a little kid,” he explains. “After 21, you only get a birthday once for every new set of 10s you enter, until you hit 90. Once you hit 90, every year after, one law no longer applies to you. At 95, you can legally steal anything. Because if you own something and a 95 year old can get it away from you, it was never really yours. At 100, you can legally commit murder— you can’t use a gun or a knife or poison, but if you can strangle or pummel someone to death with your bare hands, no one can convict you. That’s how we weed out the weak people.” The crowd eats it up.

Midway into his set, he asks for another Glenlivet. “Fuck you, liver!” Then, mid-joke, he accidentally spits on a man sitting next to the stage and profusely apologizes, losing his train of thought. He tells a Star Trek joke, then returns to apologizing to the man and quickly buys him another Corona.

He interacts with the guy he spit on, and begins his last joke about how to entertain parents/in-laws in Vegas. “Cirque du Soleil is like catnip for old people. It’s something a gay French dude sees in his head when he’s tired and horny. It’s wet and gay and French and on fire at the same time.”

Though Oswalt could certainly wax political, it’s his inner underachiever that makes him so endearing. And whether he’s exploiting society’s ills or Star Wars for a laugh, he’s consistently likeable and funny.

— Jessica Agi

Paul Mecurio: On Top of his Game

by Dylan P. Gadino

For the last decade, stand-up comedian Paul Mecurio has helped make The Daily Show what it is today. But now, with a new satirical sports show in the works, the former Wall Street lawyer is poised to break out on his own.

By Dylan P. Gadino

There’s a measured confidence in the way Paul Mecurio peacefully navigates the otherwise bustling hallways that make up the offices of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. With little more than 30 minutes until taping, 20-something-year-olds hurriedly transport videocassettes to darkened production rooms, guys wearing headsets pace and that tie-clad dude who plays the PC in the Apple commercials leans up against a wall, that is, until he sees Mecurio. That guy – John Hodgman, an accomplished writer and now sometimes correspondent on The Daily Show – approaches Paul to introduce himself. “I don’t think we’ve ever met but I’ve heard a lot about you and I’ve seen you perform.” Hodgman says. “You’re like a legend.”

It’s true. The stand-up comic has been working – as a writer and performer – at The Daily Show since its 1996 inception, two years before Stewart even found himself helming one of cable’s most popular and influential programs. Today, like many days at the studio on Manhattan’s West Side, Mecurio is here to warm up the crowd.

It’s a job that goes largely unseen – unless you’re lucky enough to score tickets to a live taping – but it’s one Mecurio takes seriously. There’s no laugh track, no intermittent “applause” signs and the temperature on set is not unlike that of the Arctic tundra. The audience can do well with some warming up.

When he comes out to the crowd, it’s under thunderous, wholly disposable radio rock music. The wiry, minutes-ago-soft-spoken Mecurio sheds his track jacket and engages the gathered like one would engage the audience at a Journey concert circa 1981. It works.

“You basically have to act like a monkey in a cage that hasn’t been fed,” Mecurio says of addressing the 150 people. “You need to explain to the crowd why they’re there. They need to be vocal and to react and have a good time and let it be heard that they’re having a good time. So I do that and then they throw me a couple of bananas and I go back to my cage and I do it again the next day.”

After watching Mecurio for a few minutes, it’s clear where his material comes from and why he’s a nationally touring, headlining comedian. He’s constantly observing, is wildly inquisitive and is able to form a connection with a dizzyingly array of contrasting people: Navy guys, business owners, a hitchhiker; they’re all represented and Mecurio deftly chats them up and down, even suggesting to one grandmother type that she flash Jon when he comes out.

The studio, however, is not a place where Mecurio does a lot of his original material. Which is fine since there’s not enough time here to properly accommodate his style of controlled but high-energy comedy. Not likely to be pigeon holed as a story teller or a one liner or an observational comic, Mecurio takes great care not to get caught up using just one vehicle to create punch lines during the course of a set.

He also seamlessly bounces from waxing biographical to chatting about pop culture to investigating headier things like politics and racism.

“A lot of stuff hits me viscerally, he says about his joke writing process. “A lot of it is what’s going on in the news. Everyday I try to write. I don’t necessarily write at a specific time because for me it just sort of comes. I carry a pad around and scraps of paper all over the place. Sometimes I’ll even put things into a handheld recorder. It’s an ongoing process where stuff is getting written and rewritten. There’s this sort of open pipeline to my head.”

SPORTING THE FUNNY
This pipeline has served the Providence, Rhode Island native well over the last 10 years, not only for his stand-up but also for his work at The Daily Show where he’s shared, with the staff, Emmys and the highly respected Peabody award in journalism. And now, Mecurio is quite possibly entering a new phase of his career in front of the camera.

He’s recently completed a pilot called Sports Central, a satirical sports news program, on which Mecurio acts as the co-creator, host and executive producer. The show pokes fun at athletes and at the genre of sports news programming in general: think SportsCenter if it were infiltrated by the minds at The Daily Show. For a further hint at the show’s tone, one needs only to listen to the pilot’s opening tagline: “Sports Central – because you want to see athletes ridiculed by the people they beat up in high school.”

“The show focuses on all things about sports that go on off the field,” he says. “[Co-creator Jim Jones] and I realized that there’s really no satire in the world of sports. It’s such a huge part of our culture and it seems like it’s the only thing we don’t satirize. The show’s got that false positive sarcastic thing that doesn’t hit you over the head. It lets people hang themselves by the absurdity and stupidity of their own comments and actions.”

In addition to the pilot, Mecurio recently became a staff writer at newly launched joke site DailyComedy.com, where – along with other well-known comics like DC Benny, Tom Shillue and Laurie Kilmartin – he contributes daily, short topical bits.

And although Mecurio’s pilot has garnered interest from three networks – it’s too early to tell which will pick it up – and his profile is up thanks to DailyComedy as well as regular appearances on Sirius satellite radio’s Bower Show and Jim Breuer Unleashed, Mecurio says stand-up is his first love. “Ideally, I’d always want to do stand-up,” he says. “Performing live is my main focus and what I love to do.”

But for Mecurio, stand-up comedy wasn’t always such an obvious career path.

THE SECRET LIFE OF COMEDY
Years before he became a full-time comedian, Mecurio graduated with honors from Georgetown Law School and began working at Willkie, Farr & Gallagher on Wall Street and eventually as an investment banker at CS First Boston. But when he sold some jokes to Jay Leno and he heard them performed, Mecurio felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. It was something he couldn’t easily turn away from.

In the midst of struggling with what to do with the rest of his life, Mecurio’s father died suddenly. He took a leave of absence from his Wall Street job and returned to Providence, where he thought he would help bolster the family’s furniture business. As it turns out his mother treated Mecurio like he was still 12 years old.

“On Sunday nights, my mother would make me take her garbage canning where she would go through people’s garbage looking for things that needed to be fixed a little bit, like broken clocks,” he says. “It was just a nightmare. One night I was the lookout for her as she was going through trash. She turned to me with curlers in her hair and a whistling hearing aid and a housedress. She says to me, ‘I can’t believe people threw this clock out. They’re crazy!’ And I’m like ‘They’re crazy? That was the moment of clarity where I knew staying home was not an option.”

So Mecurio returned to his job. While working late one night at the firm, Mecurio ducked out of the office, hopped a cab and did a few minutes at an open mic place called Downtown Beirut II. It was the type of place where a comic might hit the stage shortly after an audience member gets slashed across the neck. At least that’s something Mecurio was lucky enough to experience.

“This guy is screaming, ‘he cut me, he cut me!’ and I go on and I say, ‘It’s nice to be here at Downtown Beirut. I always wanted to follow a slashing.’ The guy thought I was making fun of him. So he just wadded up all these bloody napkins and he threw them at me and they landed right on my shirt. But I stayed on stage.”

Mecurio rushed back to the office for an all-night work session. When one of the senior partners asked why, in god’s name, there was a giant bloodstain on his work shirt, Mecurio knew he’d better come clean. It was time to make public the secrets that bound together the double life he was leading— a life of a comic by night, high-powered mergers and acquisitions lawyer by day.

He knew this was the turning point. “My wife thought I was cheating on her because I would come home smelling of beer and cigarette smoke,” he says. “She had no idea what I was doing.”

Eventually Mecurio left his giant Manhattan apartment, sold all his suits and moved into what basically amounted to a halfway house in New Rochelle, NY. “I was literally living in a 10 by 12 rooming house with ex cons and pushers,” he says. “I was sharing a bathroom and a kitchen with these people.”

It got so bad that one day, Mecurio found himself on a train to New York City again, uniformed in a blue suit and red tie, accessorized with the Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. But after a few months, he was finally convinced. He turned his back on a life of obvious wealth and future security for the scraping and clawing that is a career in stand-up comedy.

“I liked writing jokes too much,” he explains. “It was the idea of creating something that was my own and having people react to it that gave me a tingle. I couldn’t keep away from it. I was addicted.”

For more information, check out www.paulmecurio.com. To watch the pilot of Sports Central, log onto www.myspace.com/paulmecurio

Brian Regan: Simply Funny

by Dylan P. Gadino

Stand-up comedian Brian Regan never had a sitcom, doesn’t have a movie credit to his name and you can’t see him on commercials. So how, then, did this Miami native reach the top of the comedy scene without the usual vehicles to high visibility?

By Dylan P. Gadino

Moments after leaving the stage at Tarrytown Music Hall, Brian Regan returns to the microphone, it seems, to simply thank the 843 people in the seats for showing up. That is, until more than a few fans in the New York audience start shouting out names of their favorite Regan bits. The veteran comic can barely respond to their requests; each time he opens his mouth to speak another shout comes darting from the depths of the theater. He’s being pelted with appreciation.

“You know what’s weird,” he informs the audience with a laugh. “Usually at a comedy show, a crowd likes to be surprised a little. But you guys apparently don’t care about that.”

When it’s quiet enough Regan eventually settles on telling a story about playing little league, about how he was terrible but that regardless of his skill level and innings played a refreshing free snow cone was there at the end of every game. It’s a bit that, among many others, has become one of the most embraced by his loyal fanbase.

This is due in large part to its inclusion on the one CD he’s released, the nearly decade-old Brian Regan Live, which, with the amount of times its quoted amongst comedy fans, has become the Caddyshack of contemporary stand-up albums. Though his 2004 DVD, I Walked on the Moon is quickly catching up to his album’s popularity.

Having started his stand-up career 25 years ago, Regan is not a stranger to this type of adoration. In fact, he’s built such a huge cult following that recently he’s moved his act from the country’s bigger comedy clubs to theaters only. “Theaters are cool because no one would even be there unless they were familiar with you or came with people who were like ‘Man, you gotta check this guy out,’” Regan says from his home 30 minutes from the Las Vegas strip, days after the Tarrytown show.

But that’s not to say he won’t miss some of what the clubs had to offer. “Part of what I liked about them is that there’s a lot more curveballs— blenders in the background, stuff being dropped, birthday parties.”
Case in point: Regan was on stage Jan. 28 at Carolines in New York City (his last weekend playing clubs) when a woman in the front row – more than just a little inebriated – fell asleep in front of him. Halfway through his set, Regan asked as nicely as humanly possible if she was ok, which one could only assume was code for ‘Can you please leave? You’re kinda screwing up my momentum, what with your sleepy-time drool at my feet.’ The crowd roared when she finally left. But you could tell Regan felt bad for her.

“There’s a lot of funny things that happen,” he says. “But while you’re on stage dealing with them, they’re not so funny.”

That night, he didn’t let the drunk-sponsored mishap kill the show. He’s not the type of comic to dwell on the negative. It’s obvious. You can hear it in the way he talks off stage and in his comedy.

“I have my cynical moments,” Regan admits. “I don’t want my comedy to be completely devoid of cynicism. But for the most part, I have a positive outlook on life and I’d like to think people are generally good.”

And when cynicism and sarcasm do creep in to his material, it’s usually unleashed on the smaller things in life. Regan’s act is devoid of the usual stand-up hot topics like religion, politics and sex. Instead, the native Floridian is more likely to expose the idiosyncrasies of mundane human interaction, like when a guy in a convertible obnoxiously raises his pinky off his cell phone as a sign of thanks for letting him merge in front of you. Or when you order a black coffee and the waiter asks, “How would you like that?” Regan’s response: “Can you put it in a cup? Don’t just splash it on my face.”

Regan also lets his cynicism out when he obsesses over language, as in why the “catch of the day” is always fish: “Don’t you have to catch all animals?” He’s also one to point out that the name of the show Dora the Explorer doesn’t rhyme and that “French fries and Pepsi Cola” sounds like “franchise in Pensacola.”

“I think I’m finding from doing this,” says Regan, “there’s a lot of people out there who like to feel pretty good about things and like being able to go to a show and have a good time and not have to walk out saying, ‘That was funny as Hell and he was right, this world does suck. Here we are out in the sucky world. Here we are stuck in traffic. That comedian was right.’”

 

BIG APPLE; BIG TIME

Raised in Miami as one of eight children – brother Dennis is also an accomplished stand-up comedian – Regan, now 48 and married with two children, assumed he’d do as his father did and become an accountant. He almost made it there too. But during his last semester in 1980 at Tiffin, Ohio’s Heidelberg College, Regan dropped out to properly pursue comedy.

It was in these early stages where, in addition to his material, his wholly endearing and now unmistakable stage demeanor began to develop. His crinkled forehead, constantly dancing brows and expressive eyes are almost as much a part of Regan’s act as are the words in his jokes.

After leaving college, he got a job at a Fort Lauderdale comedy club bussing tables, washing dishes and telling jokes on stage where he honed his stand-up chops. This is also when Brian embarked on his first road gigs. In 1986, Regan moved to Manhattan where two years later he won a $10,000 contest that dubbed him “the funniest person in New York.”

Regan suddenly found his schedule filled with appearances at bigger and better clubs and landing gigs on MTV’s Half-Hour Comedy Hour and The Arsenio Hall Show. One of his biggest breaks came in April 1991 when he appeared on Johnny’s Carson’s The Tonight Show.

These semi regular television appearances certainly helped push Regan into people’s view. But it has always been his live show, his stand-up material that earned him such a devout following over the years. You’d be hard-pressed to find one other comedian today that could sell out theaters the way Regan does without a career in television, radio or movies. Besides the occasional spot on late night talk shows, Regan – unlike Ray Romano, Drew Carey, Jerry Seinfeld, George Lopez – is purely a stand-up comedian.

It’s not like Regan never considered these things. “Less and less I want that,” he says about possibly working in sitcoms or movies. “I used to want those things to increase my visibility and to help me with stand-up. In the meantime people just kind of caught on with the comedy. So I like what I’m doing right now. I wouldn’t be opposed to being on a TV show as long as I had complete creative say and I was doing something interesting. I don’t just want to be the goofy dad in a sitcom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it’s just not what excites me.”

And though he’s earned the right to coast a bit, Regan is vigilant about challenging himself; he writes constantly and rotates his material around to ensure that each time you see a show, you’re getting well more than a few minutes of new jokes.

“I used to be more loosey goosey with that but as I’ve gotten a little older, I’ve realized that this is a craft and I want to do this as well as I can,” says Regan. “To me, it’s a blast to take the nucleus of the joke and find goofier words to plug in or a more succinct way of getting to it. Like I’ll say to myself, ‘I have a joke and it’s getting laughs but how can I get more laughs?’”

“To me, it’s about the comedy,” he continues. “My dream was to be able to play theaters and do comedy in front of people who kind of think I’m funny. I’ve gotten to where I wanted to go and I’m having the time of my life.”

For more information about Brian, visit www.brianregan.com.

Aaron Karo: Ivy League Comedy

by Noah Gardenswartz

What started as one e-mail to 20 friends has turned into 50,000 subscribers and a career in stand-up comedy. But Aaron Karo still uses his degree from Wharton. Sort of.

By Noah Gardenswartz

Comedian Aaron Karo has made quite a successful career out of partying. Taking his best memories as a rowdy college kid and turning them into a humor column called Ruminations turned out to be one hell of a move; it has since spawned two best-selling books, an advice column and a national comedy tour. Amidst his 30 day, 12-city tour to promote the release of his new DVD, Recovering Frat Boy, Karo took some time to talk about the path he chose.

So how did the Ruminations column originate?
My freshman year at Penn [University of Pennsylvania] I was just partying a ridiculous amount. I would be up all night drinking and then I’d sleep all day and eventually it really fucked up my body clock. On Sunday nights I couldn’t sleep at all. One Sunday night I just wrote down some funny observations I had made about college and sent it out to 20 of my buddies from high school. They thought it was funny and forwarded it to people, who then forwarded it to more people, and by the time college was done I had 11,000 subscribers to my monthly Ruminations.

And how many subscribers do you have today?
Right now there are something like 50,000 subscribers.

What did you major in while you were at Penn?
I graduated from Wharton as a business major.

And how has your knowledge of business and economics benefited your career?
Man, people always tell me I’m wasting my Wharton degree by doing stand-up, but I use my education now more than I ever did when I was working on Wall Street after college. My background helped me turn stand-up into a business and learn how to market myself, and turn my writing into a product.

Two of the products you put out were the books Ruminations on College Life and Ruminations on Twentysomething Life. How did you go about getting those published?
Well after college I went to work on Wall Street doing equity research. But one day Simon and Schuster just approached me about publishing a book of my past columns, so, in the summer of 2002 I left Wall Street and we published the first book. Then I restarted my e-mail column, this time ruminating on life as a twenty-something male and Simon and Schuster wanted to publish a book of those columns as well.

The books and the e-mail column are not the only writing you’ve done though. Tell me about some of your other columns?
I’ve written for collegehumor.com, and I actually used to have an advice column in Seventeen. I was an old frat boy giving advice to these high-school girls about going away to college. I mean, what was I really going to tell them?

Well you certainly have a strong fan-base among college kids, and you do a lot of college tours. What’s your favorite college to perform?
I’ve gotta say the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor is awesome and the students there are great.

What’s in the works after the tour?
I’m going to continue doing stand-up out in LA. I’ve got a monthly show called “Happy Hour with Aaron Karo” at the Improv. I’m also looking to do some writing for television, continue with the columns, and of course keep going out and drinking.

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

Click here to read a review of Aaron’s new DVD.