Rob Schneider: Our next big political comedian?

His first ever comedy album, Registered Offender – a collection of sketches — is officially out this week, he’s on a nationwide stand-up comedy tour through February 2011 (so far) and well, he’s got a lot of smart shit to say. Forget what you thought you knew about Rob Schneider. Things are about to get real serious.

Chatting with Rob Schneider – comedian, actor, animal, gigolo, hot chick, surf ninja – is something of a surreal experience. No wait, scratch that: it’s a very surreal experience. And as the conversation progresses into a 45-minute think piece, this sense of surreal-ness begins to stem increasingly not from the realization of speaking with someone whose work I idolized as a child, but from the things that the much-maligned oddball comic is discussing with me at length.

“I don’t find Obama’s policies any different from Bush’s or Clinton’s,” he says, for example. (An utterance at which, I’m ashamed to admit, I have to bite back my tongue to refrain from replying with a plaintive “makin’ copies!”) “He’s the same guy, because at the end of the day, you can’t change this military industrial complex or this medical industrial complex, and you just think it’s unchangeable. And what’s really going to sink us is not our 40% spending on the military – it’s that no country has ever survived spending that much on the military.”

Huh? Can this highly educated, well-rounded bit of biting social commentary really have sprung forth from Rob Schneider, the star of decidedly un-intellectual fare like The Animal and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo? Indeed, Schneider is full of surprises – the living embodiment of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, microphone clutched firmly in hand as spitfire smarts rain down on his crowds from atop his onstage perch.

If you’re a member of the Millennial generation, like me, chances are you owe a great deal of cultural debt and comedic awakening to the early ‘90s Saturday Night Live powerhouse troop of Schneider, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, and Chris Farley, god rest his limber, light-footed soul. Who could quickly forget the social reverberations of the “Gap Girls” sketch, or the innocuous ripple effect caused by Schneider’s Richard Laymer character. (See aside on Obama quote above.) But if you do indeed count yourself among the SNL quoting elite, chances also are that you’ve been largely disappointed with Schneider’s film career – a seeming waste of a genuine comedic original and talent on one outlandish, convoluted plot-line after another.

But this year has seen Schneider step out of the clunky shoes of Deuce Bigalow and into the role of a born again stand-up comic – one who has been criss-crossing the nation nonstop in his first headlining tour, and causing audience members both young and old to fall into stitches with a healthy dose of sharp, insightful wit, at that. “You know, it’s interesting, because I used to be a stand-up. I hadn’t done it in 17 years,” he says. “I’m like a performing butterfly – ‘he emerges every 17 years from the ground to…’ It’s like about my life, it’s about being 40 now, and having a different take on things. But I really take it seriously, the art form. I’m not just some celebrity doing a victory lap.” (Note: portions of this interview and introduction were originally published in Real Detroit Weekly.)

Where did the idea for this comedy tour come from? What propelled you to do it?
Adam Sandler has been telling me for 10 years, “Hey, you should just go back and do this, blah blah blah.” Then I saw George Carlin’s last concert. He was amazing! It made me think that man, I never got that killer hour, and this guy’s been doing stand-up for 30 years.

Then, I worked with Chris Rock and Adam Sandler in Grown-Ups last year, and I asked Chris how to go it, and he was like, “You’ve just got to get back into it, man.” So I… I did. I started writing jokes last summer, making notes for stuff, and then I started kinda doing it here and there, but then I said screw it, and just took a year off to do it.

What sort of sources did you tap into for your material?
There are so many things going on in the world that you could talk about. It’s interesting to me; you know, whether it’s the economy, or whatever. I’m enjoying just having contact with that immediacy. You know this movie we made, Grown Ups – we did it a year ago, and I couldn’t even tell you the jokes in the movie. It’s taken a year for it to come out.

It seems like it’s a sort of “back-to-your-roots” career move.
Yeah; I like it a lot. It’s just kinda fun to talk to all the people who I can’t believe all the movies they’ve seen. It’s when the real fans come out. I just want to put on a good show for them and have fun. America’s kind of bitter and angry – I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s like a sense of a real, terrible… well, actually Jimmy Carter never used the word “malaise,” but there’s a really, kind of settling into the [attitude] of, “Wow, things aren’t going to get better any time soon.” It’s such a new kind of attitude; I find it to be almost British, where we’re screwed, and that’s just a wonderful backdrop for comedy.

Do you think it’s almost easier to do comedy now than when you first started out?
Absolutely. First of all, I’m smarter. I’m adept at this because, hey, I made it already. I don’t have to prove anything, so now I can just talk about what I want to talk about. I mean, literally. And I don’t want to be too self-indulgent, but I feel like I need to do stuff that’s interesting to me, otherwise why am I doing this? So in that sense, I still have to entertain first, but I want to talk about what’s interesting for me to talk about. If that makes sense.

Since there was such a long gap between when you last performed and now, was there anything in particular you did to get back into the swing of it?
Well, my fiance is a wonderful lady. I’d been doing a week of gigs, and the first couple shows were rocky. And I said, honey, I don’t know. But she just pushed me and said, “You can do this, you can do this.” But anyway, there’s no shortcut. I mean, if I go three to four days without performing, I feel stiff. I miss performing all the time. I’ve written some jokes and I’ve written some routines and stuff I like to talk about, and I’m figuring it out as I go. I’m really more kinda turned on by this than I’ve been in a long time.

What’s the main difference between Rob Schneider the stand-up and Rob Schneider, the actor?
Well, I think people are always kind of amazed that I have some grip on the issues. They’re much more shocked about that than anything else. There’s [this conception] that there’s not much thinking going on in comedy, but comedy’s much more complex than you feel. If the comedy in a movie is not working – and there are so many things that can kill it – the chemistry’s off, the music can be off, the editing can be weird, there are so many things that can kill it in a comedy movie. No one really ever says, “Wow, they worked hard on that comedy.”

It’s either funny, or it isn’t. And that’s why comedy hardly ever gets nominated for an Academy Award, but you ask Al Pacino or any other actors about comedy, they’ll tell you it’s the toughest. But I respect them, and I kinda like to do things a little difficult.

But with stand-up, you really have to work to kind of constantly keep it tight. There’s the thing about comedy and brevity going hand-in-hand, so I can’t take too many little breaks just to talk about what I want to talk about. But at the same time, I feel I need to push it, and see if the audience is receptive to being pushed. That’s a good little struggle, and I’m not minding it.

Do you feel that you’ve developed a lot not only as a performer, but also as an individual?
Absolutely. We’re not the same people we were a few years ago. I don’t think we’re the same people we were two years ago. Like, I don’t know who they thought Obama was, but that guy turned out to be a real disappointment in our leadership, and it’s not just his fault; the Republicans have tried to stop him at every turn. But at the same time, I don’t find Obama’s policies any different from Bush’s or Clinton’s. He’s the same guy, because at the end of the day, you can’t change this military industrial complex or this medical industrial complex, and you just think it’s unchangeable.

I think it’s kinda sad, in that sense, and I don’t know who we thought he was. He kinda ends up being a little bit of a war-mongerer, like Kennedy, but we’re dumb because we voted for him. He said, “I want change!” but yeah, I didn’t realize it was minute change. It’s the same status quo that exists without getting rid of these insurance companies, taking that money, putting it into the medical program and saying, “This just doesn’t work.” And what’s really going to sink us is not our 40% spending on the military – it’s that no country has ever survived spending that much on the military. Nobody ever has because you can’t survive that way, and that’s why we’re broke.

At the same time, what’s really going to bankrupt us is our healthcare. It’s not that we can’t [reform] it, it’s that we don’t have healthy people. Like we tax cigarettes, we’ve got to start taxing fast food. That’s what makes people sick. And instead of the corn lobby… there’s this whole idea that there’s a free trade agreement. There’s no free trade agreement. It’s a free abuse agreement. We protect our corn, we protect our timber industries, and corn gets subsidies, but corn makes people sick.

It’s an unfair trade practice, because when it subsidizes your industry like that, corn in other countries can’t compete, and that’s why the Mexican corn industry went bankrupt. So now they’re coming over the border to get jobs, and we’re having the immigration issue. This is all because of NAFTA, and unfair trade. It’s illegal immigrants that are doing it, and they’re paying them lousy, substandard, almost slave wages. This stuff is ridiculous, and government regulations aren’t meant to handcuff it – it’s to protect the people. So this is part of the things we need to educate ourselves with. And I love talking to people, because maybe I can have more of an impact than with making movies.

Is this a sampling of our stand-up that I’m getting here?
Well, this is the more straight version, but you’ve got to start talking about some things if you want to make change. So when Obama talked about change, it was minute change. You know, not closing Guantanamo Bay is cowardice. We need to throw a lot of it out; we need to start over. Unfortunately, in this country, we’re susceptible. Until we change, until we [get rid of] lobbyists and make a more democratic system, we’re going to have a democracy that’s for the rich, rather than for all the people.

Do you tend to invoke more topical anecdotes on stage, as opposed to biographical material?
Yeah. Well, I do a little bit of half and half.

Have you been getting a good reaction to it?
Oh, they love it.

Why do you think people aren’t as familiar with this side of your personality?
Because people just know me as an actor. I don’t want to be famous for being on TV, doing stump speeches about politics. I like to get to people through a comedy club setting, because it’s a lot more interesting. I don’t like to preach, but I like to talk about these issues in a way that they can get to people. A comedy club setting is very subversive – even Hitler knew you’ve got to be careful about what we allow on the screen.

It’s funny to me when people talk about the left and liberal media. There’s no such thing as the liberal media. If you think Time Warner is a liberal media, you’re wrong: it’s not anything less than the right wing. I’m sorry, but until we see Noam Chomsky hosting a program on CNN, I’m not going to say that that’s a liberal outlet.

You know, most of the damage that was done to the banking was done not under Bush, but under Clinton. Clinton was the one that really let the banks get away with deregulation, and let the banks take over. The idea was that Clinton was looking out for the best interests of the average Americans was hogwash. How flawed his health care plan was, it was the first genuine effort to help poor people.

Rich people are always going to be okay in this country, but you have to help out the people who are going to be left behind. I always hear attacks that socialized medicine sucks, but hey, you’ve never been to Canada; you’ve never been to France. Only four percent of the American population has passports, but they think they know what goes on in other countries, and just believe the crap you see on the news. That’s what Noam Chomsky talks about in Manufacturing Consent. There’s so much propaganda, because people believe the New York Times. It’s just so much, and with most of the stuff, you have to fight to get an interesting, consumer-related story in there.

Are you active in many political causes or non-profits?
Yeah, but in a way, it’s like I don’t want to be famous for that. It’s going to be a lot more tougher [sic] now, because it’s going to be more and more of a push to cut back. The schools are already butchered; we have a 50% dropout rate in Los Angeles Unified. We’re just creating two groups of people: people who have no chance in society, and are going to struggle their whole lives, and then people who don’t. It’s proving to be what I joked about 20 years ago, which is like the middle-class, which is the strength of the American society, is going to end up being, in the second-half of the 21st century, an apparition that has outlived its time. It’s just funny, though, because the same kinds of people that are the victims of the right wing Fox News propaganda are the people supporting it. It’s the same people being punished by these programs; they’re buying into this propaganda.

It’s an interesting time, but I think at the same time, it’s an opportunity – an opportunity for Americans to wake up and realize what’s most important. I just hope we realize it before it’s too late, you know? America is a very well-intentioned country, but we’ve caused a lot of harm. I mean, the reason why Pakistan has nuclear weapons is because of the United States.

What do you think needs to be done to make Americans more aware of these issues?
I think they’re going to have to hurt a little bit more. I think people are going to have to do some ground-roots support, and people are going to have to realize that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party aren’t really there to help people. We’re going to have to have another group that challenges us.

We also need to realize that presidential powers have been abused for the last 30-40 years. If you look back at the leaders we admired most, there was George Washington, and this was a guy who walked away from power, from more power.

People are just going to have to get involved, and I think a parliamentary system would work a lot better than what we have now. We really have, in the United States, one of the oldest forms of government that exists. It’s not really responsive to meet to the needs of the people. It’s completely usurped by big money, and just by lobbyists. It’s almost impossible to be in Congress right now without this huge, constantly, endless campaigning. I think it’s democracy usurped, whereas real democracy is ugly, in the sense that it’s messy.

In the ‘60s, when people were protesting in the streets, they called it democracy in action. It’s supposed to be messy, but people have been pacified here. I remember with the Iraq war, for the first few months people were in the streets, but then they just went back to their jobs. If we want things, we’re going to have to really protest. But people are going to have to stand up, because they’re not going to get better, they’re going to get tougher, and if they want to keep their rights, they’re going to have to stand up. But look, hey, we’ve got to get involved, and if I can have a positive impact in some small way, that makes all the difference.

Is this one of your goals with your stand-up tour; to educate people about these issues with humor?
Absolutely. Rather than keeping your kids off drugs, I’m like, “Keep your parents off drugs.” Prescription drugs, of course.

I don’t think a lot of people realize how dangerous these drugs can be, even though they’re legal.
You’ve got the military industrial complex, but you’ve also got the medical industrial complex. That’s why every commercial on TV is some kind of medicine. They’re just drugging America to death, and it’s all about money. They never used to allow advertising of drugs on TV, and now it’s every other commercial. Why? Because the lobbyists were able to change the laws, and now there’s no way to double check; it’s exactly what the big pharmaceutical companies want. It’s all about profits, of course; they don’t care about us. This is just this insane system that has not been changed under this new health care program. It’s not helping people – it’s helping big business.I’m not saying the whole medical establishment is evil: it just needs to be completely abolished and started over.

How do you reconcile these two parts of your personality? There’s of course the goofy, comic actor that everyone is familiar with, but what I’m hearing here is a very civically minded, tuned-in individual.
Well, people are of course free to not come to my shows if they don’t want to. I just think at the end of the day, people want to laugh, and there’s fun in that. Those movies, I had a lot of fun with that, but after my dad passed away – he was on 10 different medications at the end, and none of them were helping him – he died at 68, and I realized, this is so totally unnecessary. All this stuff is making him more sick. For whatever reason, I’ve achieved whatever fame I have, but if I can just affect a few people in a positive way – not being too preachy, like I am now – they can sit and talk to me and find that I do have knowledge about this stuff, and I love to talk to people about it.

I got my mom off all her drugs: she was on arthritis, blood pressure, pain pills, cholesterol, water pills. I said, mom, you’re going to die if you keep doing all those things, and I got her off all of them. Now she’s doing great – she works two full time jobs, and she’s 81. We’ve got to get all the old people off the drugs. The death of a society is not allowing… the most valuable members of our society are our seniors and children, and by not feeding them well or not educating them, then we’re losing out on both ends of our society.

Why don’t you want to be known for this?
I do; I mean, I’ll talk to people about it, but I just don’t wanna, I don’t know. To me, I’m an entertainer. I’m talking to you about it right now, so it could end up in the newspaper tomorrow, but I’m not ready to run for Congress. I think I could do more as an entertainer.

Why not? Al Franken did, and he’s been pretty successful with it.
Well, Al Franken isn’t an entertainer. He’s a very selfish, self-minded guy. It makes perfect sense that he ran for senate, because Al Franken was always out for Al Franken. That isn’t to say hey, Rob Schneider isn’t out for Rob Schneider, but whatever. I’d rather have him in there than that moron who was there before him. That really staunch conservative guy who’s now in a think tank… Norm Coleman. As much as I don’t particularly love Al Franken, I know that he’ll have the interests of Minnesota a little bit more instilled in him.

The Democrats are a mess, but at least they in some way resemble what America looks like. There’s women, there’s Latinos, there’s blacks, there’s whites, there’s middle income people and lower income. That’s more or less America, whereas you look at the Republicans, and there’s just gated communities, white people, wanting to build up fences and not spend any money, protect themselves. I find that to be very transparent.

What are some of your other goals with this stand-up tour, as opposed to just using it to educate people?
Um, I eventually want to film a movie of it, and do an independent film, but I also just want to talk to kids, and get them more involved.

Would you say that it’s a fair assessment to say your comedic side is some of a catharsis, since you’re obviously a very serious-minded individual?
Yeah, I mean, I’m able to talk about things, but at the same time, I just think that if people aren’t sitting down and talking about these things, well, somebody’s got to. For whatever reason, I feel that it’s made sense that I’ve finally been able to be in a place where I can. People have to step up and use whatever influence they have.

But I tell ya, if the Republican Party points to Sarah Palin and says, “That’s our guy,” and if Fox News doesn’t have its license pulled by the FCC… this is so blatantly just for big business, and it’s no longer news; it’s just pure propaganda. Yet look at their shows – they’re much more popular than CNN.

But you have to admit that Palin is a comedic goldmine.
Well she is, but so was Hitler. If you look back at articles in the late ‘20s, it was all like, “Eh, [the Nazis are] just a bunch of thugs.” She had to be within a heartbeat of the presidency. The Democrats only win when the economy tanks so badly, and look at Obama. He said change, but we should have asked what that was. His policies are no different from George Bush’s or Bill Clinton’s, with the exception of this health care bill, which is just a watered down piece of garbage.

Unlike Hitler, don’t you feel that Sarah Palin’s all talk and no action?
No, I think she’d be just as dangerous. I don’t want to be a fear-mongerer, but I find loathsome, her lack of knowledge. She’s just a reactionary. I think if you want to run for higher office, that should make you ineligible. I think what we should do is have the most talented, educated people, like from Harvard Business, Cal-Tech, MIT…

Be careful – that’s where Bush came from.
But Bush, he got grandfathered into it. We take the most talented people we have, in business and in the arts, we stick them all in a hat and be like, “Here you go, you run things for the next couple of years.” They would make some unpopular decisions, like, “We have to cut this, get rid of this.” That’s one of the things that’s disappointed me with Obama.

How do you see your career continuing to evolve? Are you going to stay focused on stand-up for a while?
Yeah, I wanna do it at least for a year, and then see where it goes. I mean, I’ve made 40 movies; it’s not like a new movie is going to make that much difference for me. I’ve been very fortunate, and I would like to see where this leads. I’m not interested in a political career, but I am interested in seeing peoples’ response to talking about things like this.

Have your shows been attended by both your older fans and also newer converts?
Yeah, both. I’d like to see younger people keep coming out, because those are the people you can really reach and make a difference with. You can make change pretty quickly, if you want to.

For more info on Rob, including tour dates, check out his official site at RobSchneider.com. Buy Rob’s album by clicking the image below.

Paul F. Tompkins: Something personal

It’s been a busy year for Paul F. Tompkins. Besides the usual planning and prep involved in putting together his monthly Paul F. Tompkins Variety Show at the Largo Theater in Los Angeles, the comic has been revolutionizing the way comedy shows are booked, creating a podcast and releasing a new one-hour special – June 11 at 11pm EST on Comedy Central – titled You Should Have Told Me, filmed at the intimate Laughing Skull Lounge in Atlanta. All this, while planning a wedding, getting married and trying to enjoy a honeymoon.

A clear departure from bits like “Sexy Bee” and debating “Pie vs. Cake,” You Should Have Told Me is Tompkins’ most intimate released set of material to date. He moves from dealing with aging and the maturity that is presumed to come with it, to trying to find the funny in his mother’s death. It’s clear that Tompkins has evolved into a master storyteller; now more than ever, he weaves together absurd situations with deep emotion. Punchline Magazine recently caught up with Paul to talk about this evolution.

So how are you doing?
I am well. I’m a little on the tired side because I just got back from Madison [a Tompkins 300 show, wherein 300 fans pledge to attend a show in their city and then PFT books it], and then had a couple hours of downtime and then did a long set at the UCB Theater.

Do you take red eye flights in to all the Tompkins 300 shows and then get out of dodge the next morning?
Not all of them. I just had to do it with this one because I had a show last night and the Madison show was the night before. If I did all that traveling on Saturday I would have been cutting it a little too close to showtime. So yeah, I took the red eye but that’s not my favorite thing in the world to do. If it’s far enough away I”ll try to get in the night before if I can.

I thought before I get into the meat of the interview – my editor apologized on my behalf some time ago for that Twitter article fiasco. [ed. Note: Chase once blogged on Punchline Magazine that he was no longer going to follow PFT because he @-replies too much]
Right.

This is a good opportunity for me to go on the record. I was WAY out of line.
It did seem like disproportionate anger over how much I was using Twitter.

I was serious about it seeming like a lot. It was a bit overwhelming—
Overwhelming. Hold on a second.

I just felt—
HOLD ON. This apology is off to a BAD START if you’re talking about Twitter being overwhelming. That’s a big word.

You’re right. The rational point I was making in my article was that I was getting too many @-replies from you to other Twitter users. It turns out, I was using Twitter wrong.
There you go.

It was actually all my fault.
Look, I’m not trying to assign blame. If anything, I’m trying to remove blame from a situation that does not require it.

So that will be in print.
Well, I appreciate that, thank you. It’s behind us.

Moving on, I think that the Seattle radio station you called into a couple weeks ago was retarded.
Oh man. Do they have some sort of conservative bent or something?

Well, it’s a classic rock station. But they have comics as in-studio guests all the time. In fact, the day after you called in, Andy Kindler was on.
Right. I wonder though sometimes, if they see Countdown [with liberal pundit Keith Olbermann] on my IMDB page they think ‘Oh, this guy was on Olberman.’ But you know, I’m not a politcal comedian and what I do on Countdown is not really political commentary. I’m at the end and I just talk about whatever the goofiest story is.

But those guys brought politics up and they just seemed mad at me for some reason. So I don’t know what was going on with that.

It was odd and unexpected. I assumed that if they were interested in having you on their show, that they must have known about you. But they asked you, “SO what are you all about?” at the top of the call.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview start like that. And let me say this, I don’t think it was even supposed to be an interview, right? I thought I was supposed to be there as a funny guest and we would joke about stuff. But they sort of treated it like a very poorly prepared interview where they thought that I was the host of the podcast The Sound of Young America. Which I am not. And when I pointed out to them that I am not the host, they went ahead with their preplanned question, ‘What do you think is the sound of young America?’

We’re going to ignore the fact that you are not the host of this show and we’re going to ask you the one question we prepared for this.
Exactly. This is the one question we thought would be interesting. And uh, not only were we wrong, but it’s not interesting. But it’s radio, so what are you going to do? Radio by and large is the worst.

Yeah, I can see why you would want to avoid it.
I wonder if they were mad at me because I had given them my cell phone instead of my land line, and so I was waiting for my land line phone and I did not realize that my cell phone was ringing. They might have had a chip on their shoulder because of that but I started out by apologizing and talking about how stupid I felt.

Maybe they had a real segment planned and decided instead to make you play the Defend Your IMDB Credits game.
Yeah, we’ll show this guy for giving us the wrong number.

I bet he’s not even in this movie at all.
Oh yeah, and their idea that There Will Be Blood was a terrible title for a movie and it will keep that movie from being well regarded in film history. It will be forgotten because of that awful awful title that is not memorable, or interesting, or intriguing in any way.

I asked some fans on Twitter for some questions and the idea that came up the most was your obsession with pills. Everyone wants to know, what are these pills?
I believe it was a reference to some kind e-mail spam or something about erectile dysfunction pills. It somehow related to that. Either somebody said something or I said something that sounded like that. Then I think I wished everybody on Twitter a good night and good pills. You know, I did a bunch of tweets in a row with the word pills in them and that was it.

Then I just kept on doing it because people kept responding to it and wishing me good pills and so now people ask me on Twitter and I’m not sure how to explain it in 140 characters. But man, it really snow balled. Sorry everybody. It was just an offhand joke that should not have lasted as long as it has.

It seems that with the Tompkins 300 shows you are relying heavily on the old “Honesty is the best policy” policy. How are those showing going?
Well, what do you mean by that?

People join those groups and say, ‘I am going to go to this thing,’ and there’s a lot of trust on your end to book the show and hope that these people aren’t, you know, liars.
Yeah, that is a good way to put it. It is asking fans to think beyond just the theoretical. The way the first group started by Bob Kerr in Toronto, he stressed to everyone, ‘Don’t join this group if you think you’re going to help me out or you just like joining groups because its easy to do. Only join if you really are committed to seeing a show.’ Like, if you are at all able to see a show, you’ll see the show.

Obviously, not everybody who is joining the groups is doing that, but most people are. Most people are really taking it seriously— if the attendance at these shows have been any indication. I’ve done Toronto, Halifax, Memphis, Dallas, Seattle, and Madison. The response has been great. The only two shows that were under atteneded were Memphis and Dallas. Memphis we probably should have just done one show. It would probably would have been around 300 I think, but we did end up doing two shows and it was just not that big of a crowd at both shows. I think if we would have done one show, it would have been packed and it would have been fine.

Dallas, I don’t think we even cracked 100 people but you know part of that is because of the markets. Certain places don’t have as big of comedy markets as other places. Memphis I’d been to a couple times before and it had never been that great when I performed there. People didn’t really know me that well there. I didn’t have that big an amount of fans there but I thought this would be something different. It ended up being about the same. It just ended up being as good as a really good comedy club show is. But not as good as some of these other shows have been.

The shows in Toronto, Halifax, Seattle and Madison were some of the best shows I’ve ever had. I felt like I really had a connection with the audience. Even the Dallas show, not that many people turned out but the people that did turn out were amazing. It was an amazing audience. The Memphis shows being the weakest ones were still great shows. Just not that many people came out. People weren’t as excited as they have been in other places.

So you know, I’m figuring this out but so far so good. It seems to be working. I think the venue has a lot to do with it. The venues is Memphis and Dallas were not ideal. The place in Dallas was gigantic theater and the people said, “Yeah, we can shrink it down to any size,” but it didn’t seem like any attempt had been made to shrink it down to any size. So, I’m in this big giant barn playing to not that many people. It’s kind of making sure, you know, that if the place is too big – let’s find a smaller place.

What type of venue do you think works best for these kind of shows?
Ideally, I’d love to do all theaters but I just did this place called The Re-Bar in Seattle, which you are well acquainted with, that I would hardly call a grand theater. It’s a kind of down and dirty place that seems well equipped for a band and stuff like that. Some fans had expressed some concern. I wondered if it was a mistake to book that place but when I got there it was filled with people who all wanted to see me, everyone had a place to sit, and we had a great time.

So it didn’t matter that the place didn’t have velvet seats. People were perfectly happy there and it was a nice intimate place. I really enjoyed performing there and I would absolutely perform there again. I think if it’s the right size and everyone is there for the same reason it doesn’t matter what the venue is.

How long until you’ll revisit a city? Let’s say Halifax sets up another group that reaches 300 in month.
I haven’t done any return dates yet, but I’m getting ready to do the first one in Toronto which will be as soon as September or October. The idea is I’d go back to these place once a year as soon as I have a new hour of material to present to them. And I can communicate to them through the group. You know, ‘Hey, I’m coming back.’

So now people are aware of me there and then it’s hopefully continuing to use that group, and Twitter along with other social networking stuff, any kind of press that I can muster, to keep spreading the word and keep letting people know so that there is a base of people already talking about it. The idea is that the groups also will continue to stir up interest amongst themselves so that it’s not all up to me and its not all up to them but that we’re doing it together.

I think you may have cracked the code.
Hopefully. The return engagements are the next step in terms of the things I have to figure out. I don’t know how much longer people are going to stick with facebook. These social networks seem to only last so long. I am trying to look toward the future to see what the next big thing is and see how I can build this into my own website. It’s going to take some brainstorming.

Any International groups, I mean, besides Canada?
There have been a couple that don’t really go anywhere. There’s one in Sweden and one in Australia. I think the one in Sweden has 15 people and the one in Australia has 3 people. I also don’t know how many people it would take to make that trip economically viable. I would love to go to the UK, it would be great to know that I have a handful of fans to see a show but I think it’s going to take more than 300 and I’d have to crunch some numbers to find out what that number would be.

You have been hinting at a podcast forever. Can we get a taste of what you are envisioning? Or are you waiting for technology to catch up with your vision?
No, it’s that I have learn the technology. If it was going to just be me and a couple other people sitting around talking – it would be done already. What I want to do is a much more produced kind of thing. I want to have produced comedy for it. Sketches that I would write and perform specifically for the podcast. I’m going to have sound clips from my Variety show I do at Largo every month. There’s going to be some conversational aspect to it where I will call a pool of people I would talk to via phone, but then edit the conversation. So it’s not simple. It’s a lot of different elements that I have to put together. I’m drawing on all my inspirations and stuff that I enjoy listening to and put it all in one place. I want it to reflect all the facets of my comedic sensibility.

I’m trying to spread the word of me as far and wide as I can. I would love nothing more than for the Largo show to be my job but I think more people need to be aware that it even exists and what other kind of things would I need to do with that show to generate enough interest in it outside of just Los Angeles. I would love to do it on the road. I did it a couple times in San Fransisco, which was great fun and love to do it more places. I need to talk to Andy Wood, who runs the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, and talk to him about maybe bringing my variety show up there. I would love to do that. So, you know, that’s what’s taking me so long. It’s not a simple thing, it’s very involved. Unfortunately, my career involves a lot scrambling around and developing a lot of out of town gigs.

So yeah, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write and record and edit and upload all of this stuff. So if everybody will just give me to two fucking seconds, I will do it. It is going to happen. I’ve already begun putting everything together on paper. It’s just not going to be a simple thing. It will probably end up being a monthly podcast. But also, it’s going to be free… so take it easy.

I think a lot of people don’t realize how much time and effort goes into producing something like with zero return on investment— as far as money goes.
Yeah, and it’s a thing I’ve never done before, you know what I mean? It’s a lot of stuff to learn. First, I have to depend on other people to help me out and that’s not easy. To coordinate other people’s time and to have them give me their time for free, you can’t make too many demands on people’s time when they’re helping you out. But it’s definitely going to happen. It’s something that I really want to do. A format that I really really enjoy and that has added so much to my life. Just pure entertainment. And I really want to express myself in that way and I’m definitely going to do it. But I’ve stopped putting a time frame on it.

Instead of saying “in a couple months,’ now you just say, “eventually, so leave me alone.”
Yeah, plus I just got married and got back from my honeymoon. OK, everybody? Fucking take it easy.

You’re new one hour special You Should Have Told Me comes out June 11 at 11pm EST on Comedy Central. It’s a lot different thematically, from your previously released works.
It’s my most intimate material to date in a very intimate setting. It’s not a new direction for me but it’s definitely the next step in my evolution as a writer and performer.

You cover a lot more personal subjects.
Yeah.

Was there a point where you consciously decided to start opening up and being more personal or does that just occur naturally over time?
I think it was a natural occurrence but I also think there was a point where I wanted to try it. I had told a couple stories on stage that were just purely comedic stories; they weren’t really that personal. And I thought, ‘ok, well maybe there’s a way I can tell some other stories that really are about me.’

I gradually lost the fear of revealing myself on stage. For me it came with maturity and realizing that a lot of people have had similar experiences and a lot people can relate to these things that have happened to me. That’s the basis for observational material. If you’re going to do ‘have you ever noticed’ Seinfeldian type material, then that’s where it starts. It’s saying, ‘I know other people have had this experience.’

So, I just took it to a place where ‘hey, if I’ve had this emotional experience, then I bet other people have had this emotional experience’ And it’s been really rewarding. It’s a very exciting thing to make that kind of connection with an audience. That’s kind of where I’m at now, Whatever I’m doing, I want to really connect with people. It’s like nothing else. It’s a very exciting moment in performing. I think that a lot of us who perform are always chasing the transcendent moment—that transcendent experience on stage. Where it goes beyond, ‘Well, I got up there and I told some jokes, and some people laughed at it and everybody left happy.’ When there’s really something special that happens and can only happen in live performance those moments are like nothing else. Knowing that it’s not going to happen like that every time— that’s the pursuit.

You spend some time in this special talking about getting older. Does getting older bother you?
Yeah, in a way. It’s just that time seems to go by so much more quickly now, then it did when I was younger. And once I hit my mid-thirties – I would say probably around 36 when I was that point when I was past my mid-thirties and was starting to get into my late-thirties and realized well, that’s how I have to describe myself now, it just felt like,’ man time just goes by so fast and before you know it, that’s it.’ I can’t believe that I’ll be 42 this year. It’s seems crazy to me.

On the one hand there is a new found comfortability in my own skin that I did not have for the longest time. There’s a maturity where I realized, ‘Hey, you know what? I’ve grown up in a lot of ways and I take care of myself better than I ever have before.’ And I like myself more than I ever have and I treat other people better than I ever have. And that’s all good. But at the same I’ve been realizing, ‘Wow man, you really only get a short time on this Earth.’ It’s never going to be enough time. If you live to be a hundred, that’s – so what? That’s all you get is a hundred years? So it’s on my mind a lot. Mortality is on my mind a lot. Not so much that it gets in the way of things, but it’s definitely something I think about.

Well, you know what’s good for that? Pills.
Exactly. Hence my new found obsession with pills.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
Oh, my pleasure, thank you.

You are doing the Lord’s work.
Not on purpose.

Watch Paul F. Tompkins’ new hour-long special on Comedy Central You Should Have Told Me on Friday, June 11 at 11 pm EST. For more info on Paul, check out paulftompkins.com.

W. Kamau Bell: Face Full of Flour

“I don’t mind the crowd dividing up,” W. Kamau Bell says after a collective should-we-laugh? moment early on his debut album, Face Full of Flour. “That’s when we’re getting to shit.”

Bell gets to a lot of shit in a hurry here, proving himself one of our country’s most adept racial commentators with a blistering wit and a willingness to say what you quickly realize you’ve always thought. He is relentlessly intelligent, fusing references to create a rich expression of incredulity in a post-Obama world.

He bemoans the fact that the first black president isn’t more of a dick; and his title track implores Obama to shield himself from criticism by making it look like he’s working harder than he really is, a la the mother in the old Rice Krispies Treats commercial who throws flour in her face, “even though,” Bell says, “we all know there’s no fucking flour in Rice Krispies Treats.”

Some weighty issues get handled with ease here, and Bell rightly credits himself after one joke for getting a 10 from the Russian judge for technical difficulty. He compares the recent town hall meetings to Casual Friday at a KKK rally, and in a riff on the Henry Louis Gates story (listen below), he suggests that your home exists precisely so that you can flip out there, which is why we get mad at homeless people for flipping out on the street.

Bell is head-shakingly clever when he hopes aloud the economy gets so bad that Native Americans use their casino money to buy the country back. And his vision of apocalyptic America has nothing to do with mushroom clouds, but with a mass liberal exodus to Canada had McCain and Palin won the election, and the cries of the left-behind conservatives: “Hello? I don’t know how to make a latte!”

This is a thinking man’s album for the common man’s problems, an applause-worthy effort from a comedian with plenty of important things to say about the world.

To buy W. Kamau Bell’s Face Full of Flour, click the image below. Do it. Seriously. Now.

Bill Hicks: Behind the previously unreleased interview

Just this week, the audio of a never before heard interview with Bill Hicks was released online as part of the British comedy podcast Doubling Up. Co-host of the show and comedian Nick Doody conducted the interview in 1992; the legendary Hicks would die in 1994. And not only did Doody get a great interview out of Hicks; he got to open for the man in front of 1,500 people. Here’s Nick’s story about Hicks and the love of comedy.

“Shit! During your show?!”

It’s November 1992 and Bill Hicks has just stunned rookie stand-up Nick Doody by asking him to open for him at a 1,500-seater gig in Oxford University. Doody, a 19-year-old languages student, has been interviewing his idol on the phone for his university newspaper, and impressed by his questions, Hicks takes the unprecedented step of offering the young Englishman a 15-minute support slot.

Doody, his real name, chuckles in recollection. “It was really cool,” he says. “And I reacted to it in the least cool way imaginable – ‘Yeah, I’d love to, but I’m doing a play.’ I try not to listen back to it.”

Nevertheless, Doody did open for Hicks on that Oxford date on the Texan’s final UK tour before he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994, going on to become an established act on the UK’s stand-up circuit. Now, after 17 years, and despite his embarrassment, Doody has publicly released the recording of their conversation for the first time, on the Doubling Up podcast he hosts with fellow comic Rob Heeney.

Hicks was lionised in the UK and even went apartment hunting in Edinburgh. In the interview he tells Doody that he appreciates British audiences for their “respectful attitude to performers, they give you an opportunity to really explore ideas … you don’t necessarily have to be funny every three seconds like you do in the States”.

He was delighted to be performing in the institution that educated Oscar Wilde, reveals that he’d just quit smoking and recalls witnessing the infamous 1991 Just For Laughs Festival incident, in which New Jersey-born, Scottish comic Jerry Sadowitz was punched unconscious for beginning his set with: “Hello moosefuckers! I tell you why I hate Canada. Half of you speak French, and the other half let them!”

“Sadowitz was hilarious” claims Hicks. “I swear to God he was up there a minute when this happened and I didn’t understand a fucking word he said, he sounded like a bird tweeting to me … And then suddenly there’s this guy there and ‘boop’, ha, ha, ha. It was really, really shocking”

British comedian Nick Doody

Along with Richard Pryor, Woody Allen and “the myth of Lenny Bruce,” Hicks cites Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton as influences, interesting given the glimpse of slapstick skills he showed in the never-picked-up ABC pilot Bulba. “I don’t think many comics notice or care about [physical skills] but I do, it makes a big difference for me. I like creating a scene and using whatever it takes.”

When I call, Doody is about to head out to Méribel in France for the Altitude Festival, in which stand-ups and musicians perform for snowboarders and skiers at the Alpine resort. Although he’d been performing comedy for two years when he interviewed Hicks, “I’d actually only done about a dozen gigs.

“I remember at the time it was amazing, I was playing the tape to everyone,” he recalls. “He was such a major comic figure and pretty much a year later, he was dead. So it became this incredible, iconic thing to say I opened for Bill Hicks.”

“I’d only become aware of him the previous year, when Channel 4 showed Relentless on television. I remember me and my brother stumbling upon it by accident. I was fascinated by stand-up at the time, but it was one of the first times that gags really gut-punched me, the routines were ruder than anything I’d ever heard, in a really interesting way. It wasn’t like British comedy, it was a lot more like stand-up now – visceral, brutally honest, very graphic.”

As it transpired, there was another support act at the gig, the folk band Balloon.

“I met Bill at the sound check. And then he just went to his hotel room in a way that now, with plenty of years on the road, I can appreciate,” he recalls. “I don’t remember anything about Balloon except that they were heckled throughout because people had paid to see Hicks.”

“It was after midnight, the crowd were all pretty drunk and there was no announcement when I took the stage, a white guy, with dark hair, dressed all in black. I got this incredible fucking applause!”

“You can tell where this is going but I was only dimly aware and started doing jokes about trying to find a place to lock up my bicycle. And it was like watching a Guess Who? of disappointment, a Mexican Wave where the faces in successive rows flipped in disappointment when they realised “this isn’t him either!” I got some heckles and simply replied to them. But I knew my last line was going to be killer, because whatever else happened, I was going to introduce Bill Hicks. He did almost three hours and stormed it.”

Doody went on to write Tell Me The Truth: The Life And Works Of Bill Hicks, a study of the comic as a social commentator. But the bankruptcy of his initial publisher and then the 2002 publication of Cynthia True’s Hicks biography American Scream meant that it never saw the light of day, although the introduction was available on Hicks’ friend Kevin Booth’s Sacred Cows website for many years.

“I lived and breathed Hicks for the time I was writing the book, it was almost creepy” he says. “I was just listening to interviews with him all the time, watching little bits of footage, reading every single article. I could almost channel him. Not in a supernatural way, but I had a really good idea of what he’d probably say to most things, the phrasing of it.”

Like Hicks, Doody had a strict religious upbringing, experimented with drugs and has forged a career performing dark, intelligent, philosophically-inclined stand-up. Still, he’s reluctant to concede too much of an influence.

“There might have been phases as a student when I was into expanding my consciousness, but I ended up getting less mystical as I went on” he maintains. “Although Hicks rejected organized religion, he was into aliens from quite a druggy, mystical perspective and quite an introspective philosophy, so he was still fairly religious, just not in the standard way. The UFO stuff was a great device for him to comment on human affairs, as he says in the interview. I had a vision of heaven on acid once and it was fantastic. But I’m a rationalist and I don’t believe you could endure eternity and not go mental.”

In the course of their conversation, Hicks claims he talks to a crowd in exactly the same way as he does his friends. One of the negligible pities of his passing is that he never got to podcast.

“Our podcast was very much Rob’s idea,” agrees Doody. “But even since before podcasts had really penetrated the mainstream consciousness, there’d be some party or evening that turned into a morning and you’d realise you’d been hanging around with a bunch of very, very funny people for hours and nobody had recorded it. The number of conversations when you go: ‘Wouldn’t the good bits of the last few hours make really good radio?’ And I know a lot of comics have had that thought, about recording themselves chatting about the circuit and swapping stories.”

Doody is a close friend and sometime housemate of former Last Comic Standing contestant Matt Kirshen; the pair have collaborated on the BBC Radio series Bigipedia, an audio parody of Wikipedia that has been recommissioned and is now being pitched for British television in an adapted form, spoofing the Internet, television shows and mobile technology as “artificial intelligence that’s supposed to be helpful, but ends up being a little bit malevolent.”

He reckons Hicks’ legacy is every bit as double-edged, at least in terms of how it shaped British stand-up. “What’s most interesting, but perhaps isn’t often commented upon is just how many bad comics were waywardly influenced by the idea that he was the be all and end all. If it’s not like Hicks, it’s not worth doing. I’ve seen too many comics with his anger but none of his focus and ability to write such incredible routines.”

To listen to Nick Doody’s interview with Bill Hicks, check out the Doubling Up podcast (@doublingup). You can follow the author of this story, Jay Richardson on Twitter at @jayirichardson.

Tom Green: Comic mercenary

Comedian Tom Green has gone back to his stand-up comedy roots by launching an international tour. The traveling circus hits Comix in New York this week. You’re town just may be next.

Tom Green wears a lot of labels, but in reality, everything you think you may know about him is probably wrong. (Or, at least, partially incorrect.) Yes, he’s irreverence incarnate – remember, he’s the former MTV star who once gained notoriety by both suckling on a cow’s utter and humping a dead moose on camera. But what you may not suspect of the Canadian export is Green’s intimate understanding of how to both manipulate and overhaul the comedy establishment simultaneously, or his keen sense of what constitutes tools to build the perfect joke. (Wackiness frequently included.)

Although he’s well-adept at playing dumb, there’s nothing remotely dumb about Green, despite the outrageous and often shocking comedic persona he sports. He has recently managed to stay several steps ahead of the competition by pioneering his own Web TV, streamed on TomGreen.com, which has provided him with the perfect, uncensored outlet for his unique brand of humor while effectively keeping the oddball comedian out of the corporate, restrictive fold of network TV. (Conan, you may want to be writing this down.)

Along with the TV show, Green is also in the midst of embarking upon the TomGreen.com-sponsored world stand-up tour – an endeavor sending him and his loyal band of jesters traipsing across the globe for a stand-up extravaganza that makes ample use of Internet broadcasting and new media technology, mainly by video updates from Green’s website and an open invitation to fans to bring recording devices to the shows to tape their reactions.

Checking in from the television studio that doubles as his house, Green waxes philosophic with Punchline Magazine about the corporate media monopoly, Andy Kauffman, and Green’s own reputation as the continued torchbearer of “gonzo” comedy.

How does your stand-up act differ from your well-known TV persona?
Well, I’m being myself as much as possible when I do stand-up, as I do when I do the TV show. I’m goofing off and being silly as well, and talking about things I find interesting and ridiculous. It’s not like I’m doing a different persona, you know? I always like to keep it as real as possible, but I always tend to be a little bit wacky, too.

Obviously, there are a lot of differences between doing television and stand-up. Stand-up is so much more of a pure art form. You’re standing there all by yourself on the stage; you don’t have a teleprompter, you don’t have a bunch of cameras pointed at you. You’re talking directly to the audience. On television, you’re talking to two audiences at once: you’re talking to the audience that’s in the studio and you’re talking to your audience that’s [watching] television. You’re kind of splitting your attention between the two.

But it’s exciting. You can’t yell “cut!” when you make a mistake and hope that they’ll edit it out, so the differences are obviously more technical, you know? As far as what I’m trying to do and as far as the message I’m trying to convey, what I think is funny, it’s the same.

Did you always envision yourself as an Andy Kaufman-style gonzo comic?
I’ve always liked weird and outrageous and ridiculous things that are kinda coming from a different perspective than the mainstream. I don’t know what word I would use to describe myself, because there are so many words. People call me a “shock comic,” people call me a “gross-out comic,” people call me “outrageous,” “wacky,” “goofball.” Obviously, things evolve over time, too – I’m doing different things now than I was maybe 10 years ago.

The main thing is that I’ve always kind of liked to take on the status quo. I’ve never liked to go out and do exactly what everybody is doing in the mainstream; I’d rather challenge the mainstream. I’ll take “gonzo.” Sounds good to me. Andy Kaufman, he was awesome because he seemed like he was pretty acutely aware that the mainstream way of doing things didn’t [work], and was often a little bit contrived. He had a fun way of taking that on, you know? Sometimes, he would sort of make himself look foolish in a way that not everybody understood, in order to make a point. I definitely think I do things like that at times.

Do you feel like he’s always been an inspiration on your comedy?
You know, it’s funny, because I didn’t know who he was until Man on the Moon came out. It was sort of one of those things that kind of missed me; it was just a few years before my time. But then, when I started doing my show… I did my show for a long time in Canada, and it wasn’t until I moved my show to the States that it started drawing that comparison, and I kind of went in and looked into it. I realized that I find him really hilarious. I definitely find him very inspiring now. I grew up really interested in comedy: folks like Monty Python, David Letterman, and all sorts of different things. I don’t really think that I would compare my stand-up to his, you know, now, but there are some things that I do that might be similar.

I was just reading that your new stand-up act incorporates not only stories onstage, but music. How do you weave those things together to make a show that’s compelling?
Yeah, I do a couple of songs. I’ll sing two songs from Road Trip, “The Salmon Song.” Most of my audience knows the song, and everybody sings it with me. I like to pull a guitar out for three or four minutes, and I’ll do a couple of little things. And, I may or may not do some rapping, if I feel like it – I do some rapping in the show because I’ve always liked rapping.

But mostly, it’s pretty heavy spoken word stand-up, joke-telling and storytelling. I don’t get too, too much music. Maybe if I start doing longer sets; when you do two shows a night at comedy clubs, you tend to not go too much over an hour. I don’t want to incorporate too, too much music into that; I want to think about the stories and the jokes, but I could see myself bringing more music into the show in the future, as I move into larger venues and do longer shows and things like that.

What have you done over the years to develop your comic style?
Well, to be honest with you, I didn’t really do stand-up [consistently] over the years. I wanted to – I did stand-up when I was in high school, but then I sort of stopped doing it and I started doing a public access show. I tend to be somebody that kind of focuses on one thing at a time: I really ended up focusing on that show for five or six years in Canada, and then it got picked up by MTV. It was very specific to itself – it was all about me going and out doing guerilla pranks on the streets and stuff.

I was building this talk show, but I always wanted to go back and do stand-up, and I was never really able to find the time to devote to doing stand-up. Now, I’m doing a Web TV show in my house. I built a TV studio in my living room, so with my comedy… I’ve got to put it all in the same category, though, because being up onstage, doing the show, hosting the show, it’s been sort of in the same vein, and I’ve been thinking about how I would apply that to doing stand-up. About a year ago, I started up onstage in LA, running this live show and practicing.

Speaking of MTV, is there a moment from your run there that sticks out most clearly in your memory?
Well, you know, my show started in 1999 on MTV, basically through 2000, and I had been doing it for a few years before in Canada. Is there a moment that sticks out? Well, there are a lot of pretty crazy moments. It was a much longer process than most people in America realize. I sort of had seven years of working my way towards getting that show, so obviously, I think just getting picked up by MTV was a huge moment, because I’d been doing it for so long. I’d been doing it in such an independent way, and when they picked it up, it was just very exciting.

As far as the comedy itself, there were watershed moments when I realized that we were doing something that was really striking a chord with people. Five years before MTV picked up the show, we did a couple of pranks on my parents when it was playing on the public access station, and it really seemed to strike a chord with people. Like, here’s this guy who’s waking up his parents in the middle of the night, and he’s pulling all these pranks on his parents; that was something where I kind of realized that, like, this is something that people really like.

It was also just kind of like figuring out all the stuff with video cameras that you can do – at the time, I didn’t have any television people telling me what to do, and all of a sudden, we’d be realizing that, hey, it’s funny to film people’s reactions. The reactions of people can be a really funny one, you know? It was really figuring all that stuff out that was really kind of exciting. Obviously, the show got picked up by MTV and it took off and became sort of a huge show on MTV, that was hugely exciting. It surpassed my expectations, and obviously was the dream, you know? MTV picks up your show, and the next thing you know, you’re walking out on the David Letterman show and sitting down with Jay Leno, and you’re getting all these great opportunities and exposure. People are loving your show – that was exciting stuff.

Since you’re a talk show host yourself, I’m curious to know what your whole take on the Leno/Conan late night debacle is?
I think it’s the nature of the television business. At the end of the day, everybody involved is extremely talented and highly capable; there’s only one time slot at 11:30, and everybody seems to want it. Things end up happening, and sometimes I think it’s kind of nice, in a way, to be doing the show in my living room on the Internet, because nobody can come along and cancel me. But I’m not being paid $40 million to walk away from a canceled show, either, so if I could cancel myself and get $40 million, I’d probably do it.

It’s just the nature of the television business right now. Things are changing right now: everything’s influx, the Internet is here, TV ratings are going down, more people are getting their [television] intake online, so there’s a lot more competition. I don’t personally believe that anyone’s to blame in what happened, you know? It’s just kind of… shit happens.

What sort of creative process do you employ when coming up with ideas for your bits?
I always start out with what makes me laugh. I tend to joke around a lot with my friends; pretty much always analyzing and talking about things that are going on around the world, things that are going on in my personal life, things that are going on in the media. If I’m talking with my friends and thinking about something that makes me laugh, I’ll just write it down. I used to carry a notepad around with me and write everything down in the notepad, but then I’d lose the notepad. But now, my cell phone has a little electronic notepad, and I’m always jotting down notes to myself in my cell phone.

Every once in a while, I’ll sit down at my computer and look at all the notes I’ve made and see if I can actually write it all out, and then try and craft it into more of an actual joke. Then I try it with stand-up onstage, and usually by the time I try it onstage, it gets a laugh, but sometimes you need to try things or type things up. I tend to think outside the box, so sometimes I’ll say things that are a little out there and people don’t necessarily know what I’m getting at, so I’ll revise it or change it.

That’s the great thing about getting up onstage and doing a world tour, where I’m doing six shows a week, an hour at a time, so I’m constantly revising what I’m talking about, whether people are kind of vibing with what I’m getting at.

I really want people to connect with not just the silliness of what I’m doing, but also the points I’m trying to make and what I’m trying to say. I think we’re living in kind of a crazy time right now, where corporations are really taking over a lot of [everything], and we’re being forced to ingest by the media. I don’t think that’s necessarily fair to consumers or society as a whole, that we’re being told what we have to watch, basically. There are only a few companies that really run all of the television stations and all the magazines, and I think there’s a lot that needs to be said about that.

I like to make jokes about that, but sometimes I think I go so far down the road that people miss the point, because we are so consumed by that media that I think some people don’t question it. It’s always amazing to me that sometimes an audience might not even necessarily… I can really tell the way people think when you get up onstage and make a joke about the Kardashians, or you make a joke about American Idol, or you make a joke about TMZ, right? Sometimes the audience reacts like they really, really like that stuff, you know? I was sort of trying to make the point that that was some mainstream stuff that we’re being force-fed, but when you’re taking on the establishment, you’ve got to remember that a lot of people like the establishment.

So I try to walk the line. I want the show to be something that’s cool to the mainstream audience, but also not complete milquetoast, middle-of-the-road garbage stuff.

Because you’re doing your new show on the Internet, do you feel like that’s given you a better outlet for saying what you want to say, without having to adhere to certain corporate principles?
Well yeah, absolutely. You know, I started with a public access show, and there were no real rules; it wasn’t run by corporations. I didn’t come up to the system of working for the man, so to speak, where you kinda had to play by all these corporate rules. I definitely think that’s made me kind of used to working without those rules, but I also have the experience of going to MTV and working with major movie studios.

By the way, I like working with both – it’s fun working with major networks and studios, because they kind of come in and put their own constraints on, but they put them on for a reason. You don’t necessarily want to be flying around and not appealing to a mainstream world. When I first went to MTV, I’d been doing my show, as I said, for six or seven years, and I had audiences where I knew what they’d like. I had a lot of people coming up and following my crazy little college radio show to my crazy little public access show, and they were loving what I was doing.

You move to MTV, and they wanted you to kind of [cut out] a lot of the rough edges, so that mommy and daddy and grandma and grandpa like it, too. And, you know, that’s cool, because you want mommy and daddy and grandma and grandpa to like it. They’re people. I don’t just want to appeal to 21-year-olds, 25-year-olds; I also want to appeal to 35-year-olds and 45-year-olds and 55-year-olds, so you kind of get a different perspective.

I worked for The Tonight Show for a few years, and I’d go do these little bits and musical pieces, and sometimes I’d run off the handle and do something completely outrageous, and they’d edit it in a way that they didn’t show the most outrageous thing that I did. I’d go, “Hmm, wonder why they didn’t show that,” but then [I’d realize] that oh, that might not necessarily appeal to somebody who’s kind of more of a mainstream person. And it’s cool – it’s cool to have that experience, and that’s why The Tonight Show has been rated so well over the years.

But when I do my stand-up, I like to kind of play with both things, you know? I think it’s kind of fun for me to play with the audience a little bit. I like to kind of confuse the audience a little bit and take them on a little bit of a ride, you know?

That sounds a lot like in the tradition of people like Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin.
I just read Steve Martin’s book about stand-up, Born Standing Up. It’s something that’s really exciting to me to just be able to play these clubs that a lot of these comedians have played in, with the history. We just did Zanies in Nashville, and you get to see all the pictures on the wall of Seinfeld and Leno, Adam Sandler, all these people that have come there over the years. It’s definitely very exciting to me, to be able to do what I’ve always wanted to do, to follow in the steps of these great comics.

Is there any goal that you’ve set for yourself that you haven’t yet accomplished?
Yeah, I really would like to be able to kind of, you know, independently make my comedy and do what I want to do without really having to worry about being allowed to do it. I still haven’t quite gotten to that point. I can always work, and that’s cool, but I can’t always go and do exactly what I want to do. I love doing my Web television show, and it’s done really well – it’s really highly rated – but it’s an ongoing struggle to get financing and sponsorship. It’s still an underground thing: TomGreen.com is the website for the television studio that I’ve built in my house, and it gets 2.8 million views per episode.

I’ve got a great little thing going here, but it’s still an underground thing; it’s not like I can hire five or 10 employees and do whatever I want. It’s still something that I’m trying to get off the ground, interestingly enough, and I’d like to be able to expand that. I’d like to be able to make a movie once a year, and go and direct, but I’m still not quite to that place.

It’s funny, though, because I just finished directing a movie, which took a few years to get made. It’s a really crazy movie, and I love it. It’s called Prankster. I’d like to be able to kind of continue to grow and be able to continue to create funny, crazy, non-conventional things. It’s a catch-22 that I’ve always had to deal with, because I like to take things so far and make the point that I’m not conventional, and the point that I’m not just sort of doing what I’m told.

The point of making comedy, to me, is then just a bit of rebelliousness to me. I like to make the point that this is making fun of the system, but if you make fun of the system too much, sometimes the system doesn’t support what you’re doing. I’m really excited about [what’s going on] with the Internet and independent television, and I’m trying to create this really independent business model for the Internet so that I can go directly to sponsors and just make a great, self-produced TV show every week, without having to worry about somebody coming in and saying, “Oh, you can’t say this! You can’t do that! You can’t interview this person! You can’t do that joke!” That’s the goal for me – that’s always been the goal, to get to that place where I can get a real good rhythm, and not have somebody tell me that I can’t.

To me, I like to look at it as art. I like to feel like I’m being artistic and doing something that’s pure and true to an idea that I come up with and accomplish. I don’t like to look at it as a corporate thing, but it is a corporate thing. It costs money to make this stuff; it costs money to make movies, and it costs money to make TV shows. Finding that balance is something I want to do, and not really have to worry about funding.

I think for as long as artists have found a way to make money off their art, that’s always been the conundrum.
I’m not complaining. I certainly have done some successful things. Ultimately, I’d like to find an ongoing way to do this Web television show; I think it would be really cool to do that with a decent budget and sponsorship and good distribution. I just want to continue growing that and be able to do what I want to do.

Can you tell me one thing about comedian Tom Green that’s completely true and unexpected?
Uh, let’s see. Completely true…but also unexpected. Well, I’m kind of a normal guy. I’m much more normal than I think most people would expect. A lot of times, that’s what I hear more often than not, and when I do interviews like this, people tend to think that I’m going to be, you know, making a bunch of funny sounds or funny faces or what have you.

But all that sort of silliness and wackiness, that comes from when I was younger, and when I was in high school and was a kid, I was sort of a very high energy, hyperactive kid. I was always trying to get attention, and started doing these funny faces and things that I do. Now that I’ve gotten older, I’m not running around making all these funny sounds or funny faces all the time. I think sometimes there’s a disconnect where people think that I’m going to be constantly on or constantly flying off the handle, but really, I tend to think things through a lot.

I like to try and craft my stand-up, like, “Okay, this is where I’m going to make the funny face, or do the funny sound. This is where I’m going to tell the story; this is where I’m going to tell the joke.” I think there might be the misconception that I’m a nut-job.

For more info and to check out Tom Green’s talk show online, visit TomGreen.com. Get to tickets to Tom’s New York City shows here.

Comedy Matters with Russell Peters, Kevin Hart and more

The Phenomenon That Is Russell Peters

Russell Peters is not just a comedian. He’s a phenomenon, and that’s a hard word to type more than once! I’ve often referred to him as The Messiah of Comedy, because he has such a diverse audience and makes people of all backgrounds laugh together, and at each other. And he can imitate every accent in the world, but nothing is funnier than when he does the Indian accent. With the requisite head movements!

The show opens with a two minute film where Russell magically morphs into about 100 characters within the two minutes. It was made by his cousin Shaelin. (I hope I spelled that right!)

Russell is just too hip. He comes out on a stage fit for a rock star. And he’s just so calm and relaxed. Like he’s in his living room. Not one, but two DJ booths, with two hot DJ’s on the ones and twos. DJ Spinbad in one, and DJ Starting From Scratch in the other. It was great to see those guys again.

Russell Peters’ backdrop on the stage at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

So the audience comes in to hot music, and doesn’t just have to sit there waiting for the show to start, twiddling their thumbs. (Coincidentally, there’s a brand new course on thumb twiddling at The Learning Annex.)

It was Russell’s 20th anniversary of performing and he was on his Green Card Tour. I was so happy to receive an e-mail from his assistant a couple of weeks back saying that Russell and Clayton (his brother and manager), would like to invite me to his show, and to the after-party at Radio City Music Hall. That’s six thousand seats!

Russell Peters and I at Radio City using the big pens in a different way!

Russell sold that out two nights in a row. Along with my tickets was an actual green card that gave you access to the after party. You had to stick it to your clothing. The guards made you put it on, I guess to avoid giving it to someone else. I fooled them by only taking the top piece of paper off the sticky side, and putting it on my jacket, and as soon as I walked through, I put the paper back on and kept the card as a souvenir.

At the after party, I asked Russell what the largest crowd was he ever played to. He said 18,000 people. In Canada. Vancouver to be exact. Four nights in a row. That’s 72,000 people who came out to see him perform.

And I get nervous in a room of 30!

South Beach Comedy Festival

In the midst of 23 degree weather in New York, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to go to Miami for a few days? Especially when you’re being flown out there as I was to cover the South Beach Comedy Festival for Punchline Magazine.

The festival featured Gabriel Iglesias, Mike Birbiglia, Kevin Hart, Brian Regan, and a couple of guys from The Daily Show, namely Rory Albanese who is not only the producer, but also a great stand-up comic, and the great John Oliver who puts on such a fantastic English accent you’d think he was actually a Brit. And he manages to keep it up through his entire act! It’s amazing.

Needless to say I had an incredible time. The success of a comedy festival is not based only on the comedians. In this case it was thanks to two people in particular, Woody Graber the P.R. person for the festival, and Aubrey Kessler the fantastic director of the festival.

Woody Graber, me, and Aubrey Kessler at Lucky Strike Bowling Lanes.

Between the two of them they made sure I was totally hooked up. I was given the Spa Penthouse in a fantastic little boutique hotel called The Sanctuary. My rainfall shower was the size of a small room, and there were three flat screen TV’s in this one room. There was one near the bed, one outside the shower, and even one in the bathroom. The hotel spared no amenities, and had a fantastic restaurant called Ola, that was packed every night, so definitely check it out next time you’re in Miami.

A scene from my room at The Sanctuary.

What made it even better was that it was literally right around the corner from The Fillmore Theatre where I went to see Gabriel Iglesias, Kevin Hart, and Rory Albanese and John Oliver from The Daily Show.

It was also walking distance from the shows on Lincoln Road where Mike Birbiglia was performing. I had a fantastic time, and the manager, Max Dietermann made sure I was taken care of from the moment I checked in till the moment I left.

People often ask me if I ever write anything bad about any of the performers I see. I have a concept that guides me concerning things like that. Having performed comedy myself, I know how hard it is. You take your life in your hands stepping out on a stage trying to make people laugh. Because I have so much respect for comics, if I don’t like someone’s act I just don’t write about them. I don’t include them in what I write. It’s like they don’t exist. I’d rather not put out any negative energy to the world. There’s already enough of that.

The first night of the festival, things got kicked off with a show and party at the Lucky Strike Bowling Lanes.

Only comedians would be expected to perform over the noise of bowling. Like it’s not hard enough to make people laugh. You need to be hearing loud screaming, and pins falling in the background besides. They had roped off part of the bowling alley for the show. At one point in the show I walked over to the other side where people were trying to concentrate on bowling and realized that they were forced to try and bowl while listening to the comedy, so both sides had it rough.

I got to see two talented acts that first night that stuck out in my mind. One was Will Hatcher who I saw again at the big party at The Gansevoort Hotel, where he was hosting the red carpet, and so when he interviewed me I was able to tell him I thought he was really good.

The other act was two guys who go by the name “A Pair of Nuts,” and they definitely are. Johnny Trabanco and Yamil Piedra are the two guys, and they are a two man sketch group that are very funny, and inventive on stage.
Needless to say if you’re performing in an active bowling alley you can’t expect to have great dressing rooms, so I met with them in a utility closet where they were changing, so I could snap their photo and show people what it’s like when you’re first starting out.

Johnny Trabs and Yamil Piedra, A Pair of Nuts with “a Pair of Bacardi Rum Bottles.”

Next year I hear they’ll be performing in a gas station!

Gabriel Iglesias is just so funny, and one of the nicest guys in the business. Lots of guys are funny, but they’re not that nice. He’s both. He was so concerned about the sound not being right in the first four rows that he comped the people who were sitting there, and kept stopping his show to inquire about them. He’s gracious to a fault and after the show stayed to greet every single audience member who wanted to meet him, despite the fact that the security was anxious for him to wrap it up.

He brought his boys from LA with him. Four Mexican comics, and they were all hysterical. Martin Moreno was the MC., then Alfred Robles, and then Noe Gonzales who made the astute observation that you never see a Black guy with a cat. They might have a dog, but never a cat. You’ll never hear a Black guy yelling out, “ Yo Boots!”

The same way I don’t write bad stuff about people, I can’t go backstage if someone I know had a bad set, cause I don’t seem to have the ability to lie, or to hide my feelings. If someone has a bad show, they know they had a bad show, and if I try and say “Great show” they know I’m lying, and it makes it even worse.

With Gabriel I ran backstage cause I LOVED his show and the first thing he said when he saw me was, “You got it with you?” And I knew exactly what he meant. He was referring to my big pen. That’s PEN, like the kind you write with!

Someone gave me that pen a couple of years back, and I’ve been carrying it ever since. When I first met Gabriel out in LA at the Latino Comedy Festival, I had the pen, and it made such an impression on him that he never forgot it. I also carry a medium size pen in case the big one is too big for whoever!

Gabriel Iglesias and I, each with a big pen, in Miami.

The next night I went to see Kevin Hart. Everyone went to see Kevin Hart. Kevin Hart is a star. Shortly before his show I got a text message from Aileen Budow from Comedy Central that she was on her way to see him too. People LOVE Kevin Hart. And the theater was PACKED!

His road manager Nate Smith, who’s a really nice, hard working guy, makes sure that everything goes down the way it’s supposed to, and because of that was the brunt of Kevin’s jokes for the last part of his set.

Me and Kevin Hart backstage in Miami.

Opening for Kevin was his boy Na’im Lynn who travels with Kevin a lot. That’s an enviable position to be in, opening for a guy who’s on his way to the top. Na’im says he’s finally ready to settle down. All he needs to do is find two nice young ladies, …

When speaking of his favorite body parts, he says he likes “ass” all day long. He says he likes girls who’s ass is so big, “when she sits down she looks tall!” And he had a great observation. He said that any guy who comes up behind another guy, puts his hands over his eyes and says, “Guess who?” is stone gay. And if you’re the guy and you “guess who” you’re gayer than he is! Hysterical!

Na’im Lynn and comic Michelle Buteau on the red carpet in Miami.

Kevin just has a very endearing way about him. Not only is he incredibly funny, but he’s a story teller. Not many of those. When he tells a story, it’s so expressive, he paints a verbal picture, and takes you on a ride with him, while you’re laughing the whole way. All I kept thinking through his whole show was, in about three weeks, my partner Jean Alerte and I are producing him at Westbury, and he’s gonna be AMAZING!

When I went backstage after the show, he was in his dressing room with a guy that looked just like Ludacris. And it wasn’t till after he left that I found out it actually WAS Ludacris. There was someone standing between us, and I couldn’t really see. I shoulda said, “Move bitch, get out the way! “

Comedy Central was filming Kevin constantly. Even backstage he was shooting promos for them. He was also chosen to be the host at the big festival party at The Gansevoort Hotel, where Comedy Central was filming the festivities.

Kevin had the mic, and interviewed most of the comics who performed. It seemed like he interviewed half of Miami by the time he was finished. I was dying to get on camera and plug our Westbury show, but I wasn’t able to hook it up. But everyone I spoke to about it already seemed to know, so that’s cool.

Jean and I saw Kevin again a few days later at the first of his ten sold-out shows at Carolines. I ran into Caroline and Andrew Fox walking into the party at The Gansevoort in Miami, and congratulated them on selling out Kevin’s shows so quickly.

Andrew asked me if we sold out Westbury yet, but I explained to him that Kevin had to promote his shows at Carolines first before he could do ours, and that we’d probably sell out in a week or so. Kevin has 200,000 followers on Twitter alone, and we only need 2800 people to fill Westbury! Hey Kev, start Tweeting!

Jean Alerte, Kevin Hart, and I backstage after his first show at Carolines.

CBS At The Comic Strip

So co-owner/founder of The Comic Strip Bob Wachs got on the phone to his friend CBS Pres. Les Moonves, to tell him about some talent that he and partner/co-owner and Pres. Richie Tienken are working with, and the next thing you know a CBS video team is at The Strip, along with agents from ICM.

They came to shoot the sets of Marina Franklin, Brian Scott McFadden, Ray Ellin, who was the host of the evening, Jermaine Fowler, and the great Chuck Nice, for possible CBS TV deals.

It was a packed house and every one of the performers had such a strong set. I think they were all really happy with the way things came out. Sometimes it’s better not to know who’s in the audience, so you just come out and do what you do, but in this case they all knew, and absolutely rose to the occasion.

Richie Tienken, Jermaine Fowler, and Bob Wachs being filmed at The Comic Strip.

Brian Scott McFadden recently made his first Letterman appearance and killed it. His bit on what women want in a man borders on comedic genius. Just to be able to remember it is a major accomplishment.

Marina Franklin had been chosen as one of Jay Leno’s correspondents for his late 10 P.M. show so we’ll have to see what happens with that. Ray Ellin is currently taping a series for AOL called Late Net with Ray Ellin, which I covered in a previous column, and Ray is a great host. He knows how to ask the right questions and make his guests feel comfortable enough to elicit the kind of answers that make for a good show.

Sexy Fairy Marina Franklin and Jeffrey at The Strip.

I think Bob looks at Jermaine as the next Eddie Murphy who Bob and Richie co-managed for 11 years, and you can’t say enough about Chuck Nice.

Chuck has managed to combine his real-life personality into his stage act. What I mean by that is that he is an intelligent, elegant kind of guy, who takes pride in his appearance. He can also be “street” and very cool.

He brings that mix to the stage. He can speak eloquently on a subject, in explaining his comedic premise to the audience, and then launch into a very hip take on what he just expounded upon. It’s what every comedian strives for, a unique comedy stage persona, and he goes back and forth effortlessly between the two Chucks.

We first met years ago, when he was the co-host of Leslie Gold’s Radio Chick Show, and I was a guest. Chuck and I just clicked, and I’ve seen him evolve into a really great talent. He’s a perfect example of what stage time can do for a performer.

Chuck Nice and I hangin’ at The Strip.

I always look forward to seeing him perform, and also to just seeing him ’cause he always has a smile and an upbeat mood to share with those around him.

At the same time that the CBS crew was there, the crew from Letterbox Pictures, led by Brent Sterling-Nemetz was there as well, filming the proceedings to be part of the documentary film being done for the 35th anniversary of The Strip coming up next year. Chris Rock is exec. producing, and Richie, Bob and myself are producers of the film.

Gotham Happenings

I hadn’t seen Tony Woods in too long, but I didn’t think it was long enough that I wouldn’t recognize him.

He was headlining at Gotham and just before the show this guy came over to say hello. He was all thugged out and “hard” looking, and it took me a minute to realize the guy I was talking to was Tony Woods. That and the fact that Jason Steinberg, his longtime manager was standing nearby.

Tony Woods in his “gangsta comic” persona with Joey Gay.

The man has different looks. The next night, when I saw him on Anthony Anderson’s Mixtape one year anniversary show, he looked like a Harvard graduate in a nice argyle sweater.

No matter what he looks like, the man is funny. Very funny. On his headlining show, Karen Bergreen was the MC. Her children drive her crazy by repeating the same question over, and over again. “Why don’t you love me mommy, why don’t you love me.” Her husband says, “ Now you know what it’s like to have a wife!”

One of my faves Ted Alexandro went next, and I think he spoke for all of us when he said, he wants to learn to speak real Chinese, cause he’s so tired of speaking fake Chinese.

Commenting on the fact that Obama is half Black and half White, he said, “Maybe someday we’ll have a woman President. Or maybe half a woman.”

I’ve often thought that Joey Gay’s performing voice was so loud that he didn’t need to use a mic. I guess he thought the same thing cause he did his whole set sans mic. Most guys you wouldn’t hear at all. Joey was still too loud! He makes up for it by being very funny.

Tony Woods has always been a crowd pleaser, but he’s not only funny, he’s also so clever, and he does a great African accent. I’ve said it many times, but audiences LOVE when someone does a good accent. It’s funny the way people mangle our language. Like a comedic anthropologist, Tony humorously examines all the different types of Black people.

Re: Aborigines, who he saw on his tour through Australia, he says he never saw a Black guy like that, … “even in Baltimore. It was like a horse meeting a zebra for the first time.”

He described a boomerang as an Australian murder weapon that comes back to you when you try and throw it away. That would never work as a murder weapon in this country. He said, “No Black guy wants to throw away a murder weapon and have it come back.” The visual of a guy trying to throw away a gun, and having it come back was absolutely hysterical.

Tony never seems to run out of material. He did his hour seamlessly, not like some guys who suddenly ask the audience, “So what do you want to talk about now?” The only reason he ever stopped was because he had another show to do.

I saw Tony again the next night at Anthony Anderson and Royale Watkin’s amazing Mixtape Show. I am now a loyal fan, and will try and make it every month. This was their one year anniversary and they KILLED IT!!! It was filmed for the Internet on Ustream.com.

The same Tony Woods in his Harvard Professor get-up with Royale Watkins.

Anthony opened the show, and introduced the hysterical Rodney Perry, an LA based comic I had seen before. Then Mark Viera stepped up, and also brought the house down, as I had also seen him do previously.

I was glad to see Carmen Lynch up there who was commenting on how when you break up with someone suddenly everything you see reminds you of that person. She said she was dating a Black guy, and when they broke up, not more than a week later there were Black people everywhere.

Tony Woods was on that show also, and did a bunch of things he hadn’t done the night before. The man is a never-ending source of material.

Besides a rap battle, there was even a dance off and Anthony Anderson showed himself to be an amazing dancer. He even did a complete body flip on stage. The man is so agile, he moves like he used to be a stripper. He recently lost 30 pounds and looks great, but despite the fact that he’s still a big guy, he’s got moves that would make Randy Jackson’s Best Dance Crew. For real!

Anthony Anderson, me, and Rodney Perry at Gotham’s Mixtape Show.

Comedy Matters Shorts

I’m In The Press

It was a good start to the year for me and Comedy Matters press-wise.

Within a period of a week, I had a story in Crème Magazine about me being one of the producers of the documentary film on The Comic Strip, that Chris Rock is exec. producing, had the classic 4-in-one photo of me, Belzer and Paul Shaffer, holding a photo of me, Belzer and Paul Shaffer, holding a photo of me, Belzer and Paul Shaffer, holding still a fourth photo of me, Belzer and Paul Shaffer in an article by Mandy Stadtmiller in the NY Post, and in light of the terrible events involving Artie Lange, was featured in a big story on ABC.com on the dark side of comedy, (known to anyone in the biz) , and was quoted throughout.

I know we all send Artie our love and prayers for his speedy recovery to good health.

The famous 4-in-one photo of me, Belzer and Shaffer. (Photo by Richard Lewin of The Friars Club)

Mark Anthony Ramirez at Iguana

Mark Anthony Ramirez is a comic we should see more of. He launched a new comedy show with Sean Lynch at The Iguana café on West 54th Street on Tuesday evenings at 8 P.M. I attended the opening at which Lynch was the MC.

Great comics like Carole Montgomery, Joe DeRosa, who does a masterful bit on how people go crazy by living in New York, and Jamie Kilstein performed, but guest star Janeane Garofalo had to cancel at the last minute due to illness.

Fortunately for everyone, the great Colin Quinn stepped in and did his usual amazing, genius take on every ridiculous thing you ever saw and experienced in your life, but didn’t have the wherewithal to comedically dissect.

Mark Anthony Ramirez and Colin Quinn at Iguana.

Colin is a master of language, whether it’s examining the people who ask you a question and answer it for you, “ How you doin’, … good?” And even if you say something like, “my girlfriend just broke up with me,” they insist on ignoring that by saying, “Yeh, but you’re doing good right?”

Or guys who have to act out physically on YOU, what they did to someone else, while regaling you with the story. This is fine until the story involves throwing the guy against a car and beating the crap out of him, and you have to remind them that you are only an actor in their fantasy, and don’t deserve to be beaten.

Gabrielle Bernstein Adds More “ING” To Your Life

Gabrielle Bernstein is a very successful motivational speaker whose new book, “Add More – ing To Your Life” is called “A Hip Guide To Happiness.” (addmoreing.com) I went to her book party, and just had to show you a photo of the dress she was wearing. It definitely belongs in Comedy Matters!

This dress may not make Gabrielle Bernstein happy, but it makes us VERY happy!

Fundraiser for Haiti

My partner Jean Alerte and myself are producing “Kevin Hart Live” on Feb. 20th at the Capital One Bank Theatre in Westbury, Long Island, starring the hilarious Kevin Hart who sells out every show he does.

My partner Jean is Haitian, and literally three days before the quake, I brought him to meet my longtime friend Unik Ernest, the nightlife impresario who is also Haitian, so that we could align ourselves with a charity to receive part of the proceeds from our show.

I knew they would get along, and Unik is the founder of Edeyo (edeyo.org), which means “ Help Them” in Haitian Creole. It’s a Haitian charity that dedicates itself to helping educate Haiti’s poorest children. They recently built a school for 200 kids. We decided to make our charity Edeyo.

Wil Sylvince and I just chillin’ at the 40/40 Club.

Three days later, the tragedy occurred, and we already had everything in place. On Monday, Jan. 25th we held a fundraiser for Haiti at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club, and raised about $6,000. plus lots of food, bedding and supplies for the Haitian people.

I myself donated about ten bags of clothing to Haiti, and three days later I got them back with a note that said, “Thank you anyway. We’re desperate, but not THAT desperate!”

Wil Sylvince attended the fundraiser. Our show on the 20th also features TV/film star Tony Rock, and Wil will be the MC. Check it all out at kevinhartlive.com.

Anyway, until next time, remember, … COMEDY MATTERS!!!

Al Madrigal: Half Breed

“Always get the name of the dog.” That’s a common refrain among journalists, a reminder that the beauty of any story is in the details.

On Half Breed, Al Madrigal’s latest comedy album, the master storyteller gives you the dog’s name, address, favorite color and Social Security number. The veteran comic’s jokes unfold less like set-up-beat-punch line and more like exquisitely conjured scenes from a novel.

Consider the real-life pictures the Californian paints: Standing at an inner-city Burger King filled with assorted miscreants, including an unintentionally bearded lady working the counter and a Filipino man behind him in line who starts complaining loudly without ever speaking in plurals.

Going to a nightclub in Mexico and finding a floor covered in sawdust, tourists dutifully avoiding the water but throwing up from Jell-O shots – they’re not making them with Evian, Madrigal says – and a geographically ambiguous DJ who botches song lyrics and gives shout-outs only to people from Canada. Or riding to school as a kid in San Francisco and wondering how peculiar he must have looked wearing a sailor suit on a trolley and singing “Freres Jacques.” With a writer’s eye for detail and a musician’s ear for pacing, Madrigal weaves these tales so seamlessly that by the time the laughter dies down, it’s hard to imagine he’s just filled three solid minutes without ever slowing down the narrative.

He also deals skillfully with his peculiar nationality, calling himself a “modern-day Paul Reverez” with the warning of “the Mexicans are coming!” And he devotes plenty of material to his two kids, whom he describes with the adjectives guinea-pig and let’s-not-make-the-same-mistakes-again. It’s the most authentic form of the art – comedy that’s not just written, but lived.

Click on the graphic below to purchase Al Madrigal’s Half Breed.

Jon Lajoie: One comedian’s scourge on pop music

photo by Lisa-Marie Glive

When musical comedian Jon Lajoie uploads a new video to YouTube, it’s almost guaranteed to get at least a million views. So it was a no-brainer for the Canadian star to release an album — available now on iTunes — with all of his hits.

Two years ago, Canadian Jon Lajoie was a virtually unknown actor, working on a TV show in Montreal. Today, he is one of the fastest-rising stars in the  comedy scene, singled out by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell as one of the funniest contributors to FunnyorDie.com. His videos have garnered millions of views on YouTube and he has released his debut album this year, You Want Some of This? He also recently kicked off his first national tour, Jon Lajoie: Live as Fuck.

Lajoie recently chatted with Punchline Magazine about his song writing process, why some musical comedy sucks, the power of YouTube and much more.

Were you doing stand-up before you started posting your songs?
No, I studied acting and theater stuff. I was on a Montreal TV show for a few years— a French language, family-type TV show. It wasn’t a very good show, but it was work. I was in a band for four years. Then the band broke up a few years ago, and I had the summer off from the TV show, and I wanted to do something I really enjoyed. And I grew up on sketch comedy— Kids in the Hall and Monty Python. And my dream was to do that. So I started writing stuff, but it’s really hard to write sketch when you want to show it. So I bought a camera, hooked it up to my computer, and that’s how I got started.

So then you posted your first song “High as Fuck” in late 2007. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?
I started posting stuff earlier, but it was mostly short sketches, commercials and stuff. The first thing that got popular was the “High as Fuck” song, which was the first time I ever did musical comedy. And I wasn’t really sure about it; I never wanted to be a comedian with an acoustic guitar. But that started getting popular and I thought, ‘OK’ and kept going in that direction.

And you became an Internet celebrity pretty quickly. At what point did you realize that your videos had really become sort of a phenomenon?
When “Everyday Normal Guy” came along, that’s when things really started blowing up. I noticed it when in Montreal, where I lived at the time, I started getting recognized more for the videos than for the TV show. That’s when I realized, ‘Oh shit, people are really watching this.’ The first time I was recognized for it, I thought the guy somehow knew someone in my family, and my brother had put him up to it or something. But it started happening more and more, and it kind of hit me.

What are some of the most notable complaints or angry reactions you’ve gotten?
I mean, there’s a lot of positive, a lot of negative. And I don’t really listen to people’s feedback. But one really negative one came from a sketch I did called “Friends with God.” It’s about a janitor who befriends God. He becomes kind of his roommate. It’s just ridiculous. God likes CSI: Miami, you know. It’s clearly a joke. But I got a bunch of emails from angry Christians telling me that they wanted to kill my mother, and put a gun to my head, and watch me beg God for forgiveness. And it’s funny, because those people clearly listen to the teachings of Jesus. That was the most negative responses I’ve gotten. The rest is just stuff like, ‘He’s a fag,’ ‘Such a fag.’ These are guys sitting in their mom’s basement jerking off four times a day, so whatever.

Can you describe your song-writing process?
I always come up with a general idea. Like “Everyday Normal Guy” or I thought I should write a love-song about “Two Girls, One Cup.” And then as a musician, I do all the chords and melody and stuff. Then I fill all the words in. But it always starts with that topic and then it’s just fill-in-the-blanks. But as a musician, my main criteria is to make it sound like a song that can exist– that it sounds like a song that would be played on the radio. The jokes are funnier if it sounds like something that’s really serious and sincere, then people are like, ‘What the fuck did he just say?’ in the context of a real-sounding song. Like the ‘Two Girls, One Cup’ song, I wanted it to sound like a James Blunt song.

For straight-ahead stand-ups, a lot of them will start with a general idea and then they can work it out on-stage every night until it’s better. You weren’t on stage doing your stuff much until recently, so would you run your stuff by anyone or perform it at a local place before you posted it?
No, I’m pretty impulsive. I’ll write something. The next day, I’ll be recording it. The next day, I’ll be making the video and posting it. I try to be spontaneous with that kind of stuff. I have a bunch of songs that I recorded, but I just let them sit around too long and now I’m bored with them and don’t want to make a video of them. I usually come up with an idea and I get really excited about it. I want it to be in front of my audience quickly. And sometimes that sucks.

I’ll give you an example of a clear mistake. In my new video, “I Kill People,” I wrote it really fast and posted it online. And one of the lines referenced being like Bruce Willis in the movie Invincible. Then right away one of the comments was that Bruce Willis was in Unbreakable, not Invincible. I was thinking “Oh fuck, maybe I should have reviewed that.” So little things like that will come out. But generally for the comedy, if I think it’s funny then I try to trust my instincts.

Is there any topic that you deliberately try to stay away from in your songs?
I don’t know if there’s anything I wouldn’t touch. It all depends on the angle that I take. I try to stay away from relationship stuff, because that territory is dead. It’s been done. But if I find a cool angle, I’ll go for it. One thing I try not to touch is religion; and the only time I touched it was with the “Friends of God” video, because my parents are really religious people. I try to stay away from it in my videos. And yeah, I joke about girls shitting on each other and stuff like that, but I couldn’t say, ‘Your Jesus religion is retarded,’ I don’t want to offend them by talking about that.

What do you think makes for bad musical comedy?
When someone’s just putting jokes to music for no reason. If there’s no reason why it’s a song and you’re just playing chords. And all of a sudden, you have an acoustic guitar and you’re saying things and the song is boring. We have a few of those guys in Canada and there are a few in the U.S. But people that do it well, it makes sense that it’s a song. Flight of the Conchords, Lonely Island, Bo Burnham they do it well and it makes sense that it’s music with them. But for other guys who are like, ‘Hey look, I’m making jokes and have a guitar in my hand,’ you want to smash the guitar over their face.

Are a lot of fans sending you their own awful songs or stupid suggestions?
All the time. I usually keep the best ones for stage material. My favorite one, a guy wrote me and said, ‘Yo man, I got this song idea. It’s just an idea. You’re gonna have to finish it: “‘I’m an animal, I’ll eat you up like Hannibal, ‘Cause I’m an animal’ You should finish it.’”

What was the first live show you did featuring your YouTube songs? Were you nervous about it at all?
In May 2008, I did one show; then, I did the Just For Laughs Festival. I did one show before the Festival just to get on stage and see if I want to do live comedy. And I really enjoyed it, enjoyed writing the material for it. My fear with doing the live show at first was really that I don’t want to stand in front of an audience and perform the stuff they know. I really wanted to construct a live show that had a video component, a musical element, a stand-up element, and a sketch portion— all with new material and material they know to mix it up.

What’s going on with your national tour? You’ve been around the country now for a few months, anything surprising or unexpected on your first tour?
Yeah, there have been places that I’ll be positive that no one will be at this show. Like we went to Minneapolis. And I’ve never been to the city, I know nothing about it, and I get there and there’s a line going around the block. And I walk up to them and say, ‘You’re not here for this show, are you?’ And they were, so that was surprising.

But then there are other places where they have no idea who I am and just don’t get my sense of humor at all. That’s what it was like at the Irvine Improv. Some of the audience, they wandered in, and just didn’t get it. You’d get nervous giggles. They weren’t my audience, they were there to see the comic get on stage and talk about his girlfriend. But it’s fun to do that, because you’re standing there naked in front of them. And it’s up to you to win them over.

Do you think anything gets lost in translation from video to live onstage?
Yeah, it’s a mix. There are some songs, like “Sunday Afternoon,” that I made a video, but wouldn’t perform it live. Because live, it would take away from the images you can see in the video, and it wouldn’t be funny in front of a live audience. But then there are a lot of jokes I’ll write specifically for live shows, because I know it’s funny that I’m saying this in front of 300 people and they’re all gonna listen to me and go, ‘What the fuck did he just say?’ But you’d lose some of that shock value on a video.

What do you have planned for the future?
I just landed a role for a show on FX. We’re shooting the pilot soon. It’s a funny show. It’s about a bunch of guys who get together for Fantasy Football. I kind of want to do everything. I love the touring, the Internet stuff— which I’ll never stop, because the creative freedom is amazing. I’m also writing a musical feature. I’m preparing a second album. I like doing all of it, so when a few of those things fail, I have a back-up plan.

For more info on Jon, check out jonlajoie.com.

Bill Burr blogging for NHL.com

Two years ago, Bill Burr proved to a mostly-Philadelphia crowd that he knew a few things about sports, namely how horrible the City of Brotherly Love’s athletic history is. Now, he’s taken his sports knowledge — and his love of the place where he honed his stand-up chops — to the NHL.com, where he’ll be blogging about the Boston Bruins throughout the hockey playoffs. His first post went up this morning. And it begins:

I was doing a gig at a college in St. Louis the night that the Bruins played their final game against the Canadiens. I have the NHL Center Ice package and my plan was to not watch SportsCenter, fly home, order a pizza, and watch the game with no knowledge of the outcome.

That plan lasted about three minutes. My show ended and like a crackhead, I immediately went to the nearest sports bar, ordered a beer and waited for the highlights. I told myself to remain calm. “We have home ice throughout the playoffs. Even if we lose, we still won the season series. No need to get excited.”

Check out the whole thing here.

Column: Comedy Matters with Chris Rock, Pablo Francisco, more

CHRIS ROCK AND PAUL REISER AT THE STRIP

The Comic Strip was and is still considered home to some of the biggest stars in the stand-up comedy business. Those stars openly acknowledge their debt to The Strip in a book I’m writing now about the legendary club. The Strip opened on June 1, 1976, and after 33 years is going stronger than ever.

Owner Richie Tienken, who had left home at the tender age of 13, and went on to become a successful bar owner in the Bronx, owned six bars across the New York City area, then ran the biggest bingo hall in the world. But after opening the Strip he went on to manage one of the biggest stars in the world— Eddie Murphy. Richie worked with Eddie for about 11 years, from his stint on Saturday Night Live through Beverly Hills Cop 2 in which, at Eddie’s request, Richie made a minor screen appearance at the end, as Mr. Anderson.

Richie Tienken ,Chris Rock and me at the Comic Strip Live

One night in 1986, Eddie discovered Chris Rock, who had been cleaning up the club and stacking chairs at closing, in exchange for stage time, which is a deal he had cut with Lucien Hold, the legendary manager of the club for more than 25 years.

Eddie came in that night and wanted to know if there were any black acts he could see. Since Chris was the only one there, he got his shot. He had never performed for more than about 10 people before, and that was usually at 2 a.m. But this night he got to go up during prime time, in front of a packed room, and he killed.

That set led to Rock’s friendship with Eddie, and his appearance in Beverly Hills Cop 2. The story is one of “synchronicity,” and being in the right place at the right time— although Chris explained that he basically lived at the Comic Strip, so “if you’re someplace ALL the time, eventually one time will be the right time.”

Chris considers himself to be a very lucky man to have come out of Bedford Stuyvesant with two wonderful parents, Rose and Julius, and then to have had a nurturing presence to guide him into show biz, like Richie and the Comic Strip. He is also one of the most humble people I have ever met.

I have the honor of writing this book with Richie , who I also just had the honor of sponsoring for membership in The Friars Club. So far we’ve interviewed about 20 comedy greats: Larry Miller, George Wallace, Paul Provenza, Rick Overton, Gilbert Gottfried, Susie Essman, Colin Quinn, and Paul Reiser are just a few.

Reiser came in right after New Year’s and shared the story of the annual New Year’s Day brunch at the River Café in Brooklyn, with Jerry Seinfeld, Larry Miller, and Mark Schiff. There had been a fifth, a comic named Michael Cain who unfortunately died at a very young age. It’s been going on for 28 years, and they still walk The Brooklyn Bridge in his memory.

Me, Paul Reiser and Richie Tienken at the Comic Strip Live

GOTHAM HAPPENINGS

With all the time I spend in the clubs, it’s amazing I manage to do anything else at all. I guess that’s the reason that on the first gorgeous day we’ve had in a while, I’m home writing this column.

Chris Mazzilli’s club, Gotham Comedy Club is representative of the man who runs it. Always impeccably dressed, Chris has his finger on the pulse of everything that happens in that club, and it shows. The club is gorgeous, the staff is great, and everything runs like clockwork.

Within about a week, I found myself there about five times. I was afraid I was going to get arrested for loitering. But there were too many cool things to attend.

It started with a party for Steppin’ Out Radio, the 12-step Radio Show, which is hosted by Scott Clark and producer Denise McIntee, for people conquering all kinds of addictions. It was billed as a “night of sober fun.” I’d love to tell you who was there, but it’s Anonymous! (get it)?

Actually it was hosted by Karen Bergreen, who joked about the annoying year-end letters you get from people telling you about their families’ accomplishments and plans for the future: “We had a powerful year. We’re taking a walking trip around the world!”

Jesse Joyce opened by telling of how he performed for our troops in Iraq, and had to wear camouflage for protection. The only problem was it was left over from The Korean War, so he was disguised as a bush from Korea on the desert in Iraq! Very effective!

Jesse Joyce and Greg Giraldo at Gotham Comedy Club for Steppin’ Out Radio

He described a fight breaking out on Halloween, where a guy dressed as a Black Gilligan got into it with a guy dressed as a box of tissues. Anyone who knows me knows that’s my sense of humor. Great visual.

One of my faves, Wali Collins was there; he said his wife is so Dominican she’s batting .337. He also discussed Black girls having strange names. He’s Black and he can do that. He met one girl who wrote her name La-Ah. He said, “How do you pronounce that? La-Ah? She said, “No. La-dash-ah.”

Greg Giraldo closed the show, bemoaning the fact that he’s straight and is attracted to women, because approximately every 10 years he has to give all his shit away and start from scratch!

The next night I was back at Gotham helping my good friend Marion Grodin with her wonderful charity event for the Children’s Health Fund. Her Dad, the legendary Charles Grodin and the incredible Lewis Black were performing. And since I love them both, there was no chance I was missing this.

Marion Grodin, Lewis Black, and I at the event for the Children's Health Fund at Gotham Comedy Club

The Children’s Health Fund, (CHF) was started in 1987 by singer Paul Simon and Dr. Irwin Redlener, and works to develop health care programs for the nation’s most medically underserved children, as well as advocating on their behalf. CHF’s 22 pediatric programs have provided essential primary care services in more than 1.7 million patient visits. You can see more at ChildrensHealthFund.org. People packed the room. They raised a lot of money, but they can always use more, so if you were one of the lucky ones who did not invest with Bernard Madoff, go to the website and send in a contribution.

Me and Charles Grodin. Photo by Bobby Bank.

The next night, when I returned yet again to see Dan Naturman, I think the staff of Gotham was afraid I was moving in. Very few comics have as unique a delivery as Dan, and I think he’d make a great sit-com character, like maybe the quirky best friend. I was so glad to see my girl Karith Foster opening the show. She is so perfect as Don Imus’ sidekick on the radio, and she’s such a classy lady. Success agrees with her.

Karith Foster and Dan Naturman at Gotham Comedy Club

Then Mike Vecchione took the stage. Mike is very funny, aggressive, and looks by his own admission like a Staten Island cop. He’s an ex-wrestler with an interesting delivery, and he figured out how to keep his apartment from being robbed. He keeps police tape on his door so it always looks like a murder was committed in his apartment.

But Naturman is a wordsmith, and understands the importance of each word and it’s position in a joke, so when he talks about the commercial that tells you to ask your doctor about Previcid, he follows it up by saying, “How is that my job?” Which is so much funnier than any of several other ways to say that. And then when your doctor says, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do for you,” he asks, “Well, how about Previcid?”

I used to not like performing because it felt weird having to repeat the same jokes every night, which of course is the essence of building an act, proved by the fact that I look forward to hearing certain comics tell particular jokes. So I look forward to hearing Dan say, “9 out of 10 students in New York couldn’t pick out Canada on a map, and it was a map of Canada.” I also like “Things Not To Say on a Job Interview”, like “How’s the psychiatric coverage?” and “Can I have my resume back, it’s my only copy!”

And just when I thought I could stay away from Gotham for a few days, I went down to catch their monthly show, in the downstairs lounge, with Marc Maron as the MC, who I had recently seen at Cal Wynter’s Bleecker Street Street Theatre, where Mike Birbiglia’s show Sleepwalk With Me is playing. Maron was wonderful in a funny, poignant, brutally honest, and sometimes sad show called Scorching The Earth (produced by Punchline Magazine), about the break-up of his marriage.

I’d like to bring my comedy/variety show “Uncle Nat’s Traveling Peep Show” to that theatre… maybe this Spring.

By the time I went to see the incredible Pablo Francisco, from Mad TV and Comedy Central, who was at Gotham for three days, I was afraid that the staff would think I was homeless, and just went to shows to get out of the cold.

Pablo Francisco and I at Gotham Comedy Club.

I actually wanted to go and see Pablo twice just to see him try and duplicate his act, which is so frenetic. The man does not stop for a minute. He makes Robin Williams seem like he’s on downers. Everything Pablo sees, or thinks of, leads him into another bit with the most amazing sound effects. I can’t imagine him doing the same show twice. At the end of his show he greets the audience and poses for photos and signs autographs and DVD’s. He was kind enough to give me a signed copy of his latest DVD, Bits and Pieces, and as soon as I finish writing this column, I’m going to watch it.

COMICAL RADIO IS A HOOT

I always have fun going on Comical Radio with Danny Lobell and his crew, David Kasten, Chris Iacono, and new addition Myka Fox because, mainly because I can be myself. They give me time to talk about my inventions— like the flashlight that only works during the day, the 24-hour stapler, and the battery-operated beard. I invented the flashlight that works during the day so now people can see where they’re going during the day also. It didn’t seem fair to only have a flashlight that worked at night. Why should people only be able to see at night?

And the battery operated beard has changed dating as we know it, because as you well know, most young women like dating men with long, Biblical length beards, especially ones that swing back and forth like a pendulum. Until recently, you would have had to plug your beard into a socket in order to keep it swinging all night, but then you had to bring an extension cord with you, in case the girl you wanted to talk to was on the other side of the room. Before you knew it, extension cords were getting tangled, and clogging up the dance floor, which was kind of dangerous, especially after you’ve had a few drinks.

Myka Fox, Dave Kasten, me, Ann Carr, Danny Lobell and Chris Iacono.

I also got to reminisce while on the show. I enjoy reminiscing about all the parking spots I ever found, but then I find myself wondering who’s parked in them now. Then I think about all the wrong numbers I ever received, and whether I should have kept in touch with those people, and that leads me to recall all the people I passed when I was on the down escalator who were going up at the time, and wondering how they’re all doing.

And that’s why I like going on Comical radio, because they give me free rein, … and a small amount of water.

NO WRITERS GUILD AWARD FOR ME

So I went to the annual Writers Guild East Awards at the Hudson Theatre in the Millennium Hotel, with my trusty photographer, “hot” Asian model/actress/photog Evie Liu, just to see if I had accidentally won anything, and I didn’t.

It was ably hosted by John Oliver from The Daily Show, who was sharp and funny, and kept things moving along. I didn’t know any of the winners, except for Tom Fontana, but I knew a bunch of the presenters, and ran into Gilbert Gottfried with his pregnant wife Dara. That Gilbert did it again! Dara looked great, and is expecting a baby boy to go with their daughter Lily.

Me and Gilbert Gottfried at The Hudson Theatre for the Writers Guild Awards.

Gilbert turned the event into a Friars Roast, when he used the “C” word in referring to Kim Basinger, and claimed that Alec Baldwin called Gottfried’s house and insulted Gottfried’s daughter Lily, who was only one at the time. The audience screamed as they always do when Gilbert is on stage.

Jerry Stiller and his wife Ann Meara were presenters. You hardly ever see them together, and a funny, awkward thing happened. When I got there, I put my coat over the back of a chair at one of the tables, and my bag under my seat. Evie did the same on a seat at the same table. When we went back to our coats, expecting to sit down, Jerry and Ann were sitting at that very table eating comfortably by themselves.

Of all tables they had picked that one, and I didn’t want to just sit down and join them even if my coat was there first, as it felt kind of pushy for me to do that. So Evie and I just stood around, and talked to other people like writer/producer/series creator Tom Fontana until they were finished eating.

Jerry Stiller and his wife Ann Meara at my table at the Writers Guild Awards.

And get this: Judah Friedlander was there in a suit and no trucker hat. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him without a trucker hat. He came sort of late for the cocktail hour, grabbed some food and a drink, and was hanging with cast mate Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock.

Me and Judah with no trucker hat. But he’s still the World Champion.

Anyway, until next time, remember … COMEDY MATTERS!!!

Find me at jeffreygurian.com or youtube.com/guriannewsnetwork.

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