Christian Finnegan, Marc Maron raise bucks for pups

Punchline Magazine’s comedian friend and occasional guest blogger Lord Carrett is producing another one of his ultra-excellent animal rescue fundraising shows. It’s going down at the Metropolitan Room in New York this Saturday, Jan. 17 at 9:30 pm. There’s a $25 cover, which all goes to Mighty Mutts, a no-kill animal shelter.
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Video interview: A Tight Five with Lord Carrett

In our fifth installment of A Tight Five, our weekly comedian interview series shot at Comix in New York City and powered by our friends at RooftopComedy, we sit down with comedian Lord Carrett. We chat about his Rockabilly style, dealing with unruly comedy crowds, telling jokes in Europe and much more! Check him out at lordoflaughs.com and be sure to pick up his album Unsweetened.

A Tight 5ive

A Tight 5 is a web series produced by RooftopComedy and PunchlineMagazine.com and filmed on location at Comix comedy club in New York City. Each week, host Dylan Gadino, founder and editor in chief of PunchlineMagazine.com, chats with well-known comics about their approach to stand-up comedy, the art of comedy and their personal lives. At times, informative; at others, just plain fun, A Tight Five is always entertaining. Whether you’re a hardcore comedy nerd, an occasional comedy show fan or are just getting interested in stand-up comedy, A Tight Five is sure to become one of your favorite weekly viral video destinations.

Episode 9: Robert Kelly

Episode 8: Mitch Fatel

Episode 7: Christian Finnegan

Episode 6: Todd Barry

Episode 5: Lord Carrett

Episode 4: Lisa Landry

Episode 3: God’s Pottery

Episode 2: Paul Mecurio

Episode 1: Mike Birbiglia

Lizz Winstead, Christian Finnegan, Lord Carrett, more to raise cash for cat rescue program

Punchline Magazine guest writer: Comedian Lord Carrett on the nothingness of reality television

Reality television has as much to do with reality, as corn-holing has to do with corn. There, I said it. Someone had to. I was on one of the earliest reality TV shows, A Dating Story, and hardly a genuine moment was captured on tape, much less lucky enough to find its way on-air.

So having been inside the belly of the beast, I’ve never watched reality TV. It’s like child porn: I feel that if I watch a second of it, I’m condoning it.

Along with A Wedding Story, and A Baby Story, A Dating Story rounded out TLC’s trilogy of early reality shows. Each episode started with a matchmaker type telling why they felt their two friends should go on a blind date. Then they’d interview each of the friends, of which I was one. The cameras then follow them though the process of getting ready for the date, and going on the date. All told, it was a three-day affair.

I nearly backed out of it when the producers told me they didn’t want my job description to appear on camera as “comedian.” As this was shot in Los Angeles, they said they’d had too many “comedians” and “actors” on the show already. They wanted the show to feel accessible to non-industry-types.

Fair enough. But I explained that the bulk of the people who had claimed to be comics were more than likely waiters; I was the real deal. With the exception of a six month job writing jokes and trivia questions for the Austin Powers: Operation Trivia CD-ROM game, I had done nothing but stand-up for 15 years. To me, it didn’t make sense to alter reality before the cameras were even rolling.

I told them the only reason I was doing the show was to get exposure for my stand-up career, and if I couldn’t be a comedian onscreen, I wasn’t interested. They capitulated, and I signed on the dotted line.

Fast forward to the big date. They have me pull up to a parking space they’ve saved for me right in front of my blind date’s Hollywood apartment. So much for reality; no one has gotten a parking space directly in front of where they were going in Hollywood since the 1920s– and that guy was parking to pick oranges!

But then the camera crew simply could not get all their equipment to work at the same time. I pulled up to the saved spot, glided in, got out, walked to the front door all cocky like, and rang the bell. The sound guy wasn’t ready: “Do it again,” he said.

I back out of the perfect parking spot and before I’m even 10 feet from the space two freshly-fuming LA drivers start fighting over who saw the space first. A production assistant stops them from coming to blows.

I glide back into the coveted spot, and repeat the process; this time, the camera guy wasn’t ready. This goes on two more times. By the fourth time I get up to the bell, I’m thinking, “Do I even walk like this? They need actors for this– and they need better ones than me!”

Each time we repeat the process, two or three more Hollywood hipsters threaten to kill one another over our seemingly vacant parking space. It was “a very negative experience, dude.”

Meanwhile, the a similar rigamorol is going on upstairs — minus the fist shaking — and my date is instructed to do everything five or six times because of this or that Snafu. I’m chomping at the bit to finally meet her. After all, that’s what my last three days have been devoted to.

I’ve been at her apartment for over an hour, and we still haven’t seen one another face to face. By the time we meet, we’re both so eager to get on with it, that I grab her elbow, and we zip down the hallway so quickly that the cameraman who’s walking backward in front of us falls down and we literally step on him. It was the first real moment of the evening — and the funniest — and the first to wind up on the cutting room floor.

By the time we’re equipped with our wireless packs and we’re in my car, it had started to rain. We pull out with the camera crew following in the car behind us. At this point I found myself hoping that I’d lose control of the car; T-bone a police cruiser with a Cops crew in the back; and wind up on two crummy shows at once.

I’m a record collector, so most of my dates are going to involve watching a top-notch band my date has never heard of. Going to see a band, and several other ideas for fun dates were shot down by the producers as being “too expensive.” The show didn’t have the budget for copyright and performance fees so live music, and almost everything that’s cool to do in LA, was nixed.

Reality takes another solid punch, and its legs are starting get rubbery.

Instead, we go to a party at our matchmaker’s apartment, and a lot of my best comedian friends are there for the fun. Well-known pros like Patton Oswalt, Blaine Capatch and David Spark are there– but guess what? Despite truly hilarious moments involving them, none of them could be used, because Patton and Blaine are both SAG, and would have to be paid SAG rates. At this point, I’m prepared to reach into my own pocket to cover the fees, so I don’t look like a lame-o on national television. As it turns out, I didn’t need any help.

To the crew’s credit, the party looked better on camera than it really was. There was unlicensed music (i.e. free music) for us to dance to. By the way, there seems to be a connection between unlicensed music and it being impossible to dance to. Not that anyone wanted to dance in the first place: comics are fine with being laughed at, just not while they’re taking part in ancient mating rituals.

So I learned a valuable lesson. Never take a dance lesson with a camera rolling.

At first I refused. The director pointed out that this guy, and that guy, were going to take a swing dance lesson, and it was only going to be a tiny part of the show. I pointed out that those guys weren’t rockabilly cats, like myself, so they didn’t look like they should be able to swing dance. I do.

I explained it like this: If Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern are standing around on a street corner, and there’s an emergency, and Batman and Superman fly off while Batman hops on a bus, people are going to blow him some crap: “Hey! Why do you have a cape if you can’t fly like your friends?”

Needless to say, the dance lesson was the focus of the show, and I took a lot of ribbing for my incredible lameness. I have not swing danced since.

But we got through the date. The girl and I actually got along well– partly because we were adrift in the same leaky boat up the same dank creek. But we never went out again. When the show aired, it froze with a shot of us dancing and the subtitle said that we were “still swing dancing together, as boyfriend and girlfriend.”

Not only that, but the only reason I agreed to do the show was stripped from me. When the show aired, my job description was listed across the bottom of the screen as “CD ROM Game Writer.” You’d think a writer would know that you should always get everything in writing.

Lord Carrett is a stand-up comedian and writer based in New York City. For more information, check out www.lordoflaughs.com.

Taking Stock: Tolerated Joke Theft

Joke stealing has been getting a lot of attention lately, due to the battle between Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia. Joke theft is always going to exist, for the simple reason that stealing jokes is a lot easier than writing them.

But there’s a brand of purloined punch line that no one seems to mind so much: the “stock line.”

The existence of “stock” is a generally accepted and erroneous notion that there exists a collection of sure-fire jokes that are kept “in stock” in an imaginary pantry for the use of the comedy community.

Some of them would be nearly impossible to trace back to the person who wrote them. Jokes like: “What is this an audience, or an oil painting?” seem to have simply appeared from the mist fully formed around the time the first comedian crawled out of the primordial ooze.

They’re usually two kinds of jokes: “saves” (like the line above) that help a comic recover from a failed joke, and “slams” on the audience as a whole or, in the case of a heckler, on an individual.

In truth, these jokes are victims of their own success. They’re so certain to get a laugh that thousands of comics have turned to them in a pinch. As a result, these amazingly effective jokes are reviled rather than revered. It seems familiarity really does breed contempt.

Let’s face facts. Stock lines are theft. Someone wrote them. Moses didn’t come down from the mountain with Ten Commandments, and “a few good lines in case you get in a jam!” Simply put, there are two kinds of jokes: jokes you wrote (before anyone else did) and jokes you didn’t. If you steal a stolen bicycle, you’re still a thief.

Just as Shakespeare wrote many expressions that are still as common as muck, many jokes that are considered stock are attributed to David Letterman or Richard Belzer. Belzer is generally credited with the classic heckler line: “This is why some animals eat their young,” but it could, and some of them do date back to vaudeville.

Some deal with specific situations, like people arriving after a show has started: “Can I get you anything… like a WATCH?” or people making themselves a little too at home: “Are you in show business? Then get your feet off the stage!” That joke was ancient when Mel Brooks used it in Blazing Saddles, and comedians still use it!

Comedians are thought of as mavericks and individualists, but for some reason, otherwise groundbreaking comedians will fall back on stock lines when challenged by a tough crowd or heckler– as if being heckled doesn’t come with the job! It’s going to happen, so why not write jokes for the occasion? If a comedian doesn’t have at least two or three original jokes to deal with hecklers, then they’re two or three jokes shy of truly being a comedian.

I’d like to attempt to reunite some of the best-known stock jokes with their originators, to illustrate my point. I’ve come up with four that I’m reasonably certain of the source of, owing largely to the unquestionable reputation and unfailing originality of the earliest person I can trace them to.

If you’re a comedian doing one of these jokes, or a variation of one of them, please stop. And by “please stop” I mean, please stop doing comedy. Today.

A good starting point is Steve Martin, whose ability and inventiveness are beyond reproach. On one of his early comedy albums, upon being heckled, Steve replied: “I remember MY first beer.”

That joke is simply a work of art. Steve passive-aggressively identifies with his adversary, sheds light on the heckler’s impropriety, and yet makes no real judgment. Steve deftly sidesteps the attack like a bullfighter.

You’d be hard pressed to listen to an hour of morning radio without hearing some variation of (the underrated) Margaret Smith: “When you went to school, did you go in a long bus, or a short bus?”

The unfailingly original Bill Hicks was known to follow a particularly offensive tirade with the now common: “By the way, I’m available for children’s parties…”

And many years ago, the wildly creative Roger Rittenhouse came up with: “I’m sweating like Mike Tyson in a spelling bee,” itself a wondrous reinvention of: “I’m sweating like a whore in church,” and then watched the joke spread like wildfire.

It’s an industry-wide blind spot that stock lines do, of course, come from somewhere, but many/most performers and producers adopt an “Everybody cheats on their taxes” attitude toward the practice. No, everybody doesn’t cheat. Please don’t attribute your lack of integrity to an imagined epidemic.

The average audience member believes comedians come up with everything they say on the spot. So, if a comic tells a joke they didn’t write, even without claiming that they did, they’re in effect taking credit for the joke–  and they know it.

And that’s where it gets dangerous for comedians, who tend to have a strong streak of self-hatred. Letterman can’t stand to watch tapes of his show, and if he isn’t happy with himself after all he’s contributed, chances are the featured performer at Koo-Koo’s Komedy Korner isn’t going to be if he’s looking outside of his own notebook for material.

Every comic I know is a damaged individual. Every comedian seems to have a hole in them that at first can be filled with laughter, applause, free alcohol and the attentions of the opposite sex. But it’s a temporary fix.

Diligently writing and performing their own material exclusively, staying true to themselves, and becoming accomplished at comedy not only fills, but repairs the hole. And, in the words of Wilson Pickett: “Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do).”

The expression’s been traced to 1440 A.D. and it pops up all over the place, from Lord Buckley to Buckaroo Bonsai, but: “Where ever you go, there you are.”

So you’d better learn to like yourself.

Lord Carrett is a stand-up comedian and writer based in New York City. For more information, check out www.lordoflaughs.com.

Lord Carrett: Of Human Bondage

I’m new to Manhattan, and the first Christmas in a new city is always strange.

My first Christmas in Los Angeles, my finances wouldn’t allow me to head home for the holidays, and by the time Christmas Eve rolled around I was “over” Christmas.

I decided to have the least Christmas-y Christmas ever, so I rented Leaving Las Vegas. When you rent a movie about a guy who goes to Vegas to drink himself to death — on December 24 — you expect a strange look from the clerk. “You’re not going to live to see tomorrow,” was written all over his face. I half expected him to say, “Why don’t I just charge this movie to your credit card now, and save your estate the price of a couple week’s rental?”

The flick turned the trick, and I was quite happy with my unorthodox Christmas. Years later, I was still living in L.A., and planning a tour of Europe when my future wife (a producer and comedienne) and I became acquainted through an interview I’d done. Within six months, we co-produced two shows, fell in love online, got married and I prepared to move, which is no easy task when you’re a record collector with 4,000 vinyl albums.

I sold a third of my stuff, so I’d fit into a smaller Manhattan apartment. As I was still touring constantly, it took me three months to pack. I sold my car to finance the move, and drove 3,000 miles to start our life together.

I spent three more months unpacking and, one day, my wife said, “You can’t KEEP BOXES in New York. Nobody KEEPS BOXES in New York.” So, I threw away $200 worth of packing materials. Four days later, she says to me, “You’re a good guy, you’re a GREAT husband, but I want my life back. I said, “I want my BOXES back!”

I was in a bad situation. I couldn’t go back to L.A. I’d had going away shows. I was under a moral obligation to go away! I’m not The Who! And, even if I wanted to move thousands of pounds of records again, I couldn’t afford to.

Part of the problem was that I married a woman 17 years younger than me. You know what you get when you marry someone 17 years younger than you? A lot of text messages. Blaine Capatch sent me a one-line email that pointed to where I went wrong. It read: “Never date comics.”

But, I learned a lot from this relationship. I learned that they won’t sell you a hand gun if you’re crying.
Ninety days is an awfully short time under one roof to give a marriage — unless you’re Cher. Knowing it’d look like sour grapes but feeling it was my last obligation as her husband, I spoke to my wife’s mother about her precarious mental state, which went over like “Cat-Shit Lip Gloss.”

The second thing I learned from this relationship is that you can’t save a rainforest that doesn’t want to be saved. I was sitting in our former apartment, on Christmas, writing this, and I decided to do what worked well for me years before. I’d find the least Christmas-y movie imaginable– the new James Bond flick! The closest I expected to come to being reminded of my wife, would be if 007 got attacked by a barracuda.

If you haven’t seen the flick, you may not want to read further. After an exhilarating first hour, Bond’s situation began to mirror my own!

Bond falls in love with a double agent, resigns from Her Majesty’s Service, and leaves his life behind. The object of his affection, the lovely Vesper Lynd, betrays him and bolts– only to be trapped in an old-fashioned cage elevator in a rapidly sinking Venetian building.

James swims to her. It was the first time I’ve ever truly identified with Bond; our lives normally being so disparate (laser beam wristwatch aside). I thought, “Save yourself James! Swim to Los Angel… errrr THE SURFACE!

Vesper locks the door, backs away and begins inhaling water (Yecch! I’ve been to Venice, and the water’s disgusting!) Bond fails to save her.

It’s said, “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” Johnny Carson once joked about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the audience groaned, and Johnny said: “Too soon?”

The longer I live, the shorter the turn around between comedy and tragedy gets. I was in the darkened theater, feeling melancholy, and I heard myself chuckle at my own expense. If it were happening to you, dear reader, I’d think it was hilarious!

Things are never as bad as they seem. I love Manhattan, and I’ve made amazing headway here. I’ve got my health and, unlike 007, no one’s hit me in the balls repeatedly with a knotted rope. You have to be grateful for the little things.

James Bond will be over his Vesper by the next time I see him, and I’ll get over mine.

Lord Carrett is a stand-up comedian and writer based in New York City. For more information, check out www.lordoflaughs.com.