Full episodes of Daily Show, Colbert Report now on Hulu

by Punchline Magazine

In a shocking move, Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom announced that it is offering full episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report on hulu.com, the popular video site that currently boasts a roster that includes The Family Guy, Saturday Night Live and The Office. It’s a surprising development since Viacom [...]

Comedy Central to produce Bobby Lee pilot

by Punchline Magazine

Comedy Central will produce a show pilot centered around stand-up comedian Bobby Lee, best known for his gender-bender sketch characters on MadTV. The narrative sitcom will be based on Lee’s character trying to deal with a multicultural world. The project does not have a title yet.

Comedians looking out for number one… and each other

by Brendan McLaughlin

Not that comedians are selfish (self-involved maybe), but an upcoming comedy show is in the works that will raise money not for tsunami victims or battered women, but for comedians.
“This is long overdue” says Budd Friedman, founder of LA’s The Improv. “We are doing a benefit for those people (the comedians) who are always [...]

Comedy show to benefit tornado victims

by Brendan McLaughlin

Denver club, Comedy Works will be hosting a special show to benefit the victims of the recent tornadoes that passed through Windsor, Colorado in Weld County. Many homes and businesses were badly damaged. The show will take place on Wednesday, July 9, with 100 percent of the proceeds going directly to aid through [...]

Bill Engvall: The family guy

by Meredith Daniels

Comedian Bill Engvall is bringing family back to comedy. The proof is in the blue collar comic’s stand-up and on The Bill Engvall Show; the second season premieres on TBS this Thursday.

On his sitcom, The Bill Engvall Show, debuting its second season on June 12 on TBS, stand-up comedian Bill Engvall plays the kind of guy you’d want as your neighbor. After talking to the real Engvall in person, you realize he is the kind of guy you’d want as your neighbor.

Although he’s sitting in the lounge of the posh Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, he’s wearing regular guy jeans and orders a regular guy lunch: a burger– albeit, without the bun. And, when he offers you the fries off his plate, a good neighbor is not going to take no for an answer.

He smiles when he talks about his wife of 25 years, Gail, and their two children Emily, 22, and Travis, 17– his real family. And, he even smiles when he talks about his TV wife, played by Nancy Travis and the couple’s three children played by Jennifer Lawrence, Graham Patrick Martin and Skyler Gisondo.

“Im proud of this show and hope I’m not naive to think that people are thankful we are doing a show where they don’t have to worry about the content or language,” says Engvall about the sitcom wherein he plays a family counselor from the outskirts of Denver. “One thing we try to do is say it’s okay to be a family.”

As executive producer of the show, Engvall had a hand in picking the cast. First, he says, they wanted real kids. And while Jennifer, Graham and Skyler have some acting experience, this was really their first TV gig.

Choosing his television wife was the most challenging casting decision for to 50-year-old Engvall. “There had to be a chemistry like we’re married,” Engvall says, between bites. Travis, who co-starred in CBS’ Becker for two years and starred alongside Maria Bello and Amy Brenneman in last year’s motion picture The Jane Austen Book Club, was taping a pilot for another show at the time but ultimately signed with the Engvall’s show. “We just had so much fun and it was so natural we knew the minute she read the script that she was the one.”

And while Bill and his TV wife and kids have lots of laughs, no one in the cast can make him laugh more than former Saturday Night Live veteran Tim Meadows, who plays Bill’s best friend.

“I love Tim,” says Engvall. “When I see a scene we’re going to be in I know it’s going to be a blast. He’s just a master of improv.”

Bill proceeds to explain a scene where Tim teaches Engvall to salsa dance. “We just started doing this thing ourselves and it became hysterical.” Engvall acts it out a bit at our table without getting out of his seat, showing how Tim gingerly takes his hand despite Bill’s reluctance to dance. He then puts his hand in front of my face so I can get the full effect of how Tim shushes him so he can just learn the steps.

Although Engvall’s got his own show, he wouldn’t mind popping up on shows like Sesame Street and Celebrity Survivor (with his son, with whom he goes scuba diving). He also admits to wanting to be a contestant on Jeff Foxworthy’s Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader; it’s not as if he doesn’t have an in with Foxworthy who he had just spoken to that morning. “I think I’d do well on that show. I read a lot which I’m sure shocks a lot of people.”

He, Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy and Ron White are finding huge successes on their own these days, but together they had a great run on their sketch collaborative, Blue Collar TV and of course the Blue Collar Comedy Tour concert films.

“You won’t find better human beings than those guys,” Engvall says. He compares his time on Blue Collar productions, to “being married to a rich girl”: It’s great while it lasts, but at some point you want to prove you can go out and earn your own living.”

Despite the upward movement of his acting career, stand-up comedy is still an integral part of who Bill is; let’s not forget that the man has gold and platinum albums as well as a multi platinum DVD and he’s already got tour dates booked through December. He admits that he cuts back on the road while the show is in production, but with tapings on Thursday nights he still has Friday and Saturday for live dates and then six to eight months to “hit it solid.”

“Acting is something I’ve always wanted to do. You have that fantasy of your perfect little TV life,” he says with a little grin. “But I love doing stand-up because of the thrill of that live audience. It’s a high wire act without the net. You’ve got 2,000 people on the same wavelength as you. And it’s just me being Bill.”

You could say that playing a husband and father in the middle of his life who is just trying to keep the family unit together is Bill being Bill. His real life wife and real life daughter take his TV daughter shopping, and when his youngest TV son is running down the hallway and takes a spill, Bill will pick him up and ask him, “now what did we learn here?”

Identifying himself as a husband and father above actor and comedian, Engvall says what happens at home in Southern California (where he and his wife have resided for 23 years) is the most important thing to him. He is unaffected by the celebrity that surrounds him and makes sure the family is also untouched by fame. “If we go on trips, we go to our place in Park City, Utah and we we fly Southwest; we drive to ballgames. If you lived next door to me you wouldn’t know what I did for a living.”

Engvall leans back in his chair, offering me the last bit of fries before the busboy comes to clear his plate. He seems incredibly satisfied with both his meal and his life. Before we get up and say our good-byes, two men at an adjacent table look over; one calls out to Bill. “Hey, I’m sorry, you just look so familiar to me. Bill walks over to their table for a friendly chat. Maybe they used to be neighbors.

For more info, check out billengvall.com and tbs.com.

Video: Paul Provenza kicks off second season of ‘Live from the Purple Onion’

by Punchline Magazine

Today, Crackle.com goes live with the second season of their stand-up comedy web series, Live From the Purple Onion. In short, the program is a string of some of the best performances from The Purple Onion, a hip comedy room in San Francisco; Zach Galifianakis recorded his latest DVD there. This season boasts the likes [...]

Dana Carvey: Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies

by Dylan P. Gadino

For comedians who have impressed the masses on television and in movies, it’s easy for them to slip quietly away from their roots in stand-up comedy. For many, it turns out that the sweating and the toiling on smoky stages was just a means to an end.

And for Dana Carvey the end was six amazingly successful years on Saturday Night Live — creating pop culture icons out of his characters The Church Lady, Hans and The Grumpy Old Man — not to mention two Wayne’s World movies, which were based on Carvey’s most popular SNL character, Garth Algar, and Mike Myers’ Wayne Campbell.

But with Carvey’s motion-picture career at a stall since his ill-received The Master of Disguise in 1992, combined with a newfound respect for stand-up comedy as an end — and not just as a vehicle to movie stardom — it makes sense that Carvey has returned to the art form he first embraced in the late 1970s.

But to call Carvey’s new HBO hour-long special Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies (premiering June 14 at 10 pm EST) a triumphant return to form would be an overstatement. Rather, the 53-year-old comic’s second HBO effort — remember his masterful 1995 Critic’s Choice special? — lands somewhere between competent and triumphant.

While entertaining throughout — there really are no lulls — – Squatting Monkeys suffers from lack of innovation. At times, it’s as if Carvey simply polished up old bits and impressions (always his strongest asset) and tried running them through a 2008-filtered lens.

He clumsily crowbars his way into impressions of Bill Clinton (still?), Ronald Reagan (the poor man died four years ago), George Bush Sr. and even Ross Perot and Neil Young — two guys he mocked to hilarious effect in his first HBO special. That’s not to say Carvey doesn’t attack — via impression — the relative newcomers to our socio-political landscape: John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and, of course, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

But even at that, Carvey adds nary a new twist (read: things we haven’t heard from what seems like every comic from the previous decade) to the characters. Kerry has a long face; Hillary Clinton wears pantsuits; McCain is really old, Al Gore sounds like a “gay Forrest Gump” (OK, that’s a new one); Bush is dumb and Cheney is “half penguin, half man” and, incidentally, is a very bad shot with a pheasant rifle.

Impressions or not, Carvey is at his best when he talks about family life and when he waxes absurd.

He imagines that with all of his insane comparisons and theories, 60 Minutes‘ Andy Rooney — he’s 89 and still commands comedians’ attention! — is a stoned philosopher type.

In Rooney’s voice, Carvey begins: “Why does the expression ‘Does a bear shit in the woods, substitute for the word, ‘yes?’ You say to your friend, ‘Did you go to the store? And instead of saying yes, they’ll say, ‘Does a bear shit in the woods? Bears don’t always shit in woods. Polar bears might shit on ice or in water. An overworked circus bear might shit his pants while riding a unicycle.” This is very absurd and very funny stuff.

And then there’s Carvey’s equally hilarious handling of the domestic, especially a bit about why divorce is bad but worse when children are involved, mostly because you have to explain the situation on a 5-year-old’s level: “Well, sometimes Mommies and Daddies don’t get along,” he starts. “Sometimes Mommies like to go nigh-nigh time with a different Daddy. Mommy went nigh-nigh time with our gardener, Antonio. Mommy had too much happy juice. That turned Mommy into a whore. A whore is a Mommy with so many nigh-nigh partners, that she doesn’t know who to have a sleepover with.”

Throughout Squatting Monkeys, Carvey doesn’t snag many points for creativity. But that he’s still amazingly likable and not at all divisive means he will continue to entertain the masses onstage — if he so chooses — for years to come.