popular thinking

On second thought, I may not look at all like my Simpsons character. Or do I? If this video of me from April is any judge, not really. But that's not why I posted this. Rather, I finally got around to figuring out how to turn my Comedy Studio DVD from April into a YouTube video. And here it is. If you've never seen me tell the jokey jokes or say other words of relative amusement and amazement into a microphone whilst standing onstage in front of living, breathing, willing human audience members, then, well, this is your chance to make things right in the world. Plus, there are people in this little-known universe who may not have understood nor believed that I'd done it before, this comedy thing. So, without much further ado, five minutes with me (preceded by about 30 seconds with Rick Jenkins of the Comedy Studio saying nice things about me). Enjoy? No. Enjoy! :)

Labels: comedy

Last week's episode of Live At Gotham featured some very funny comedians. I know because I was at the taping back in March. And yet. And yet, I saw that Comedy Central chose to air a bit by Bryan Callen about how he'd change his name to a couple of sounds -- sounds more than a bit familiar. Especially to fans of Dane Cook and Louis CK. I wrote about the issue last summer. Dead Frog also weighed in, and includes audio from Steve Martin showing the bit predated both Cook and CK.

So why would Callen, a TV and movie vet, even go near this bit? It's not on the Comedy Central site, but Callen has uploaded a previous version of his take on it...

Labels: comedy, videos

The Globe misses the story about the new D'Angelo's TV ads with David Ortiz. That's not "a talking sandwich." That steak and cheese is Boston-based comedian Micah Sherman. No wonder Big Papi kept cracking up on camera. Funny stuff, Micah. Funny stuff.



UPDATED: Thanks to Adam, Mr. Universal Hub, for reminding me to include the video!

Labels: advertising, comedy, TV

I had a chance to chat earlier this week with 79-year-old Dorchester native Norm Crosby, aka the master of the malaprop. He's in town tonight performing at the Cutler Majestic Theatre.

Crosby told me: "When I started, I was doing it for fun. I was working in the advertising business. I was the ad manager for a big shoe company in Boston. I did it for fun. I got kicks out of it…I think every comedian starts out as being the funny guy in their family, in their office, in their school…I just did it as an avocation really until I got to a point where I had to make a choice. They were booking me on dates out of town...I decided to do the comedy figuring I could always go back and do the other stuff." Turns out he didn't have to go back.

Read the rest of my interview with Crosby in today's Boston Globe.

Labels: comedy, newspapers

At least for the next 24 hours, starting at noon today, as the guys from Human Giant take over the MTV and MTV2 airwaves. Yes, that's right.

From their announcement:

"Literally a week ago MTV came to us and asked us if we would be interested in doing a 24 hour event…in a week. We said, “Yes!”" and since then we have been working our asses off to figure out how exactly to fill the time. We have full access to the MTV vaults, we can play pretty much anything we want, with the exception of anything Nirvana related (Damn you, Courtney Love). So that means Old Remote Control, Singled Out, Beavis and Butthead, Sifle and Ollie and tons more. Plus we’ll be airing a Human Giant Marathon. Every episode from our entire 1st season and we have a ton of amazing guests like….

Will Arnett, Chris Anderson, Fred Armisen, Matt Besser, Andy Blitz, Michael Cera, Cracked Out, Curtis and John, Jon Daly, Zach Galifianakis, Brett Gelman, Jon Glaser, Bill Hader, Kane Brothers (Wrote the Theme to Illusionators and Spacelords), Nick Kroll, Adam McKay, Eugene Mirman, Morningwood, John Mullaney, The National, Bob Odenkirk, Rob Riggle, Andy Sandberg, Slovin and Allen, Michael Showalter, Jorma Taccone, Tapes ‘n Tapes, Ted Leo, Tegan and Sara, The Walkmen, Andrew WK…..and many more"

So check it out! MTV, finally safe for human viewing again, at least between now and noon Saturday. They opened up with a brief sketch followed by a live performance by Mastodon.

And hit up the Human Giant site online, because apparently, they need one milllllion hits to get renewed by the network.

Here's a video to keep you company while you're turning on your TV:

Labels: comedy, TV

I first met Nick Swardson earlier this year at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. We were hanging out in the “Sierra Mist Lounge,” a popular free food-and-grub afterparty area in the hotel, and Swardson and I quickly got into a prolonged chat about comedy and the backlash within the stand-up community against its biggest stars of today (that’d be Dane Cook, Carlos Mencia, and Larry the Cable Guy, all provoking scorn and jealousy for different reasons). And then we got down to fun.






See. Here is a photo of him with a Sierra Mist girl at the foosball table.


















Later that night, things got sloppy at the after-after-afterparty – the grand finale bash at the Goldberg mansion up high on the opposite mountain. People hunted and fought over cars to make the trek, and at one point, a woman yelled at Swardson: “I’m not f---ing driving him anywhere!” Owen Benjamin and others tried to defend Swardson, to no avail. Eventually, though, everyone made it to the mansion. And back again. And before we parted ways, Swardson said I needed to remember to talk to him before his tour showed up in Boston (May 5, Berklee Performance Center, $27.50 via Ticketmaster).

Fast-forward to this week.

Swardson already could laugh at himself about Aspen. He said his manager, Bernie Brillstein, worriedly chewed him out about his post-show partying. “The guy who managed Chris Farley and John Belushi is telling me I’m a train wreck!” Swardson said.

It’s not going to stop him from looking for a party in Boston on Cinco de Mayo.

Any chance of you doing anything worthy of being called a train wreck?
“Ah, possibly. But I really only drink. I don’t do any drugs anymore.”

Swardson, 30, won’t have to look far to find someone to party with – his friend and sometime collaborator, Jamie Kennedy, rescheduled his own comedy show at the Paradise to the same time as Swardson’s gig. Swardson appeared in many episodes of TV’s The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and together, they co-wrote the 2003 film, Malibu’s Most Wanted. I jokingly informed him of this booking situation.

Really, though, doesn’t this just mean there are two Nick Swardson shows on Saturday, since you’ve written most of Jamie Kennedy’s funnier stand-up bits?
(laughing and catching his breath) “No f---ing way! Oh, that’s wild. Holy s---! I don’t even think he knows I’m there. If he did, he didn’t tell me. That’s really wild. What an idiot.”

“That’s funny. When I first moved to Hollywood …they said, ‘Yeah, we want you to be our next Jamie Kennedy.’ I said, ‘F--- that, I’m going to be better than Jamie Kennedy. I told him that and now we laugh about it. He’s always been one of my best friends.”

Swardson explained that Kennedy tried stand-up first at open mikes before getting his big break as an actor in the films, first Romeo + Juliet, then memorably in the Scream franchise. By the time their careers crossed paths, Swardson had the comedy credentials as a national headliner with a half-hour Comedy Central special, but Kennedy had the name draw. So when the pair traveled to the Tempe Improv a few years ago, Swardson found himself opening for Kennedy.

“When he did that club, he was already famous. I wasn’t a normal MC. I was just doing the Improv a favor. It was one of those situations where he could’ve been threatened by me, but he was really nice and cool to me.”

No one can question who the star of this comedy tour is, with MySpace as its sponsor. Swardson said he has put “a lot of original content, like videos” on the site. A lot of the photos and videos feature the comedian without his shirt.

So if you and Matthew McConaughey ended up at the same party, who’d go topless first?
“Wow. Tough question. I would say I would be topless first. But my being topless would probably bum more people out. Whereas his would start the party. Matthew took his shirt off. Hooray!”

Your tour alternates between theaters and clubs. Was that a conscious decision? Or logistics?
“I wanted to do theaters and my agent was like, I don’t know why, but he’s married to comedy clubs. The only clubs I’m doing are Chicago and New York. Whatever. I shouldn’t say anything. I prefer doing theaters just because it’s less draining for me, to do 1,500 people in one night than to perform to 400 people in a club several times in a weekend. Especially since I still go out and party after the shows.”

You began in improv, right? How’d you make the transition to stand-up?
“This is kind of funny, too. I did theater in high school but I joined an improv group. We did a ton of improv, long-from improv. I always looked down on stand-up. Thought it was kind of corny. Remember this was the mid-90s and the end of the boom. I thought stand-up was Seinfeld and Paul Reiser, guys talking about their wives. There was nothing really hip about it. There was a small alternative scene starting up with people like Janeane Garofalo and David Cross…But in 1996, when I graduated from high school, I wanted to take a year off…My improv group folded, though, so I was stuck without a format to perform. I was in Minneapolis. So I went down to an open mike and was going to perform with a bunch of my friends, but my buddies never showed up. So I just went up and performed.”

With two Comedy Centrals under his belt and writing credits on three films (Grandma’s Boy and The Benchwarmers are the others), Swardson’s fan base knows him just as well from his stand-up as they do from his memorable characters – most of them outrageous, like gay roller-skating prostitute Terry in Reno: 911 and the figure-skating stalker in Blades of Glory. He also created a show called Gay Robot.

Most reports say Gay Robot is going to get a second chance as a cartoon. True?
“Yeah, Gay Robot is still alive. Comedy Central had always wanted it animated. So I think this time will be more successful. But I really love that pilot. I really do.”

Have you ever caught any flack from the gay community over all of your flamboyantly funny characters?
“No. It’s usually the opposite. I don’t think you can be more outlandish than Terry in Reno: 911. That would be ridiculous. I was talking to a friend to think if it was the gayest character ever on TV. There’s no gray area to the character. We just did season five and the character has a girlfriend. It’s great. There’s some really funny s--- that we did.”

Anything special about your Boston show people should know about?
“This show I’m really really excited for. I grew up a big Celtics fan. I love the Red Sox. I’ve always had a blast there. The last time I did stand-up in Boston was like, seven years ago. I opened up for Anthony Clark on New Year’s Eve. It was freezing! All I remember is being black-out drunk, eating a sausage I had bought from a cart, watching three or four guys beat each other up. I can’t wait for the same situation to play itself out. Just warmer.”

NOTE: An abridged version of this interview appears in today's edition of BostonNOW.

Labels: celebrities, comedy

The show Extra claimed the first interview today with Amy Murphy, Richard Jeni's girlfriend. Video and transcript here.

Labels: comedy, TV

Jamie Kennedy's new documentary, Heckler, prompts the New York Times to explore the proliferation of heckling both in public and online. Ugh. Now I know why my Arizona friend enforced a strict no-heckling policy in his club, with bouncers showing up at your table to warn you first, then escort you out the door if you continued.

Labels: comedy, media

Just look at the list of 13 comedians in this season's Funniest Mom in America contest from Nick at Nite, which debuts at 9 p.m. Tuesday. At least four of them come from Massachusetts...

Jan Davidson
Kim DeShields (advance local press here)
Janine Hayes
Andrea Henry (or on MySpace)

This season should also prove interesting because, unlike most other reality contests, this one includes at least two headlining comedians with long lists of credits to their names (Cathy Ladman and Carole Montgomery).

Labels: comedy, TV

My travels with Boston comedian Shane Mauss found a journalistic home in this week's Boston Phoenix. Read it here. I'll have plenty of details, photos and more on this matter.

Labels: comedy, media, newspapers

The Los Angeles Times covered Richard Jeni's memorial at the Laugh Factory last weekend. Read its report. I was friends with his girlfriend, TV reporter and meteorologist Amy Murphy (we worked together in Phoenix, and the first thing she said to me when she found out I was a comedian was how much she loved Richard Jeni -- she hadn't hooked up with him yet) and so my heart goes out to her and to Jeni's family.

Labels: comedy, media

So the latest, possibly greatest sketch comedy show debuted last night on Fuse, showcasing NYC's Whitest Kids U Know. Mostly good stuff in the first two half-hours, which will repeat almost nightly throughout the week on the cable channel (check your local listings, in Boston it's on Comcast's 271). Here is one of their outlandish sketches that's already made the leap to TV. Prepare yourself for "Timmy Poops His Pants." NSFW, needless to say.

Labels: comedy, TV

For the second time this season -- third if you count guest host Dane Cook -- Saturday Night Live turned over the reins to an outsider to perform stand-up on the show. Well, Chris Rock had gotten his first big break as an SNL cast member back in the day, but that didn't make it any less surprising to see Rock opine on the 2008 presidential campaign for the SNL open on March 17, 2007.



Not too shabby, even with a slight flub in Rock's delivery. Here are the other examples in this season's SNL stand-up showcase. Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) took over the show for about five minutes earlier in the season.



And here is a transcript of Dane Cook's monologue from the SNL season premiere in September.

Labels: comedy, TV

Don't hate. The New York Times apparently decided this past weekend to write soft happy profiles of two popular comedians, Jim Gaffigan and Amy Poehler. Read them while the links remain valid! You won't learn as much as you'd like to, but you'll still enjoy knowing temporarily that the "paper of record" has decided to feature a couple of good comedians for all of the right reasons.

Labels: comedy, media, newspapers

If you happen to visit New York City anytime soon, let me put in a word for a stop at the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. Or is it the Meatpacking District? The site says it's in Chelsea, two blocks north of the Meatpacking District. Anyhow. I've already gotten away from the point. Point is, if you have several hundred dollars per day to blow on lodging here, you're likely to have casual encounters with celebrities. And not just all of the stand-up comedians who stayed at the Maritime last week. In a period of less than 24 hours, I exchanged words with Michael Stipe (whom I now realize was hanging around for Monday's induction of R.E.M. into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!) and saw Tate Donovan hanging around in the lobby. I believe my exchange with Stipe went something like this:

5:50 p.m. Saturday, comedian Dan Boulger and I head down the steps and out of the Maritime. Just then, Stipe is heading inside. We almost collide. "Oh...hi!" I say. "Hello," he replies. Boulger stares oddly. And that was that. Stipe wore some sort of beret and was sporting a grayish brown beard.

And now for the rest of the weekend story.

Boulger invited me to hang out for Saturday night's tapings of Live at Gotham. During the day, all of the stand-up comics get to run-through rehearsal. They'll put anything on the teleprompter, even a word-for-word transcript of a comedian's routine. Odd to think you could get on TV and simply read your stand-up routine. Who does that? It's odd just to see a comic read off their notes during a major set. But I suppose Comedy Central might also offer this service just in case a comic gets a case of the TVs and freezes up. Plus, it turns out the teleprompter also can be used as an alternative to the light, sending messages such as "one minute left!" As for audience members, they're told no food, no bathroom breaks, the better to keep disruptions to a minimum. And the production hired a special audience coordinator to hand out specific seat assignments. Apparently, seating a comedy show can be looked at as a science. Put the best-looking best laughers front and center. Put industry people in the back corner. Audience members also got instructions on what not to wear (no logos, no whites). And then, as talent manager Max Burgos pointed out before the first taping began: "The smoke machine really does it, man." Suppose it adds an old-school comedy club feel, although it'd really be old-school if they let you smoke. The tapings also have an official warm-up comedian. Dan Ahdoot more than honorably worked this non-televised job, working the crowd (and adding another several minutes of material when the second show incurred technical difficulties) and helping establish pre-show shots of crowd applause and laughter.

The first show's lineup: Gerry Dee, Pete Dominick, Lisa DeLarios, Bryan Callen, with host Jim Breuer.

The second show's lineup: Michael Kosta, Julie Goldman, Dan Boulger, Eric Andre, John Hoogasian, Brian Scolaro, with host Jeffrey Ross.

Each comic got to work out about 10 minutes of material, knowing that Comedy Central might edit out a couple of minutes for the Web and other material for ad time. I'd think they might cut Callen's bit about wanting to change his own name to something along the lines of Meeeeowww Cah! (Um, didn't he see the whole online debate about Louis CK and Dane Cook?) Guess not. Also, Breuer had to come back onstage at the end of the first show for several attempts at pronounciating the Colbert Report. The second show had much more energy. Perhaps that had to do with the lineup. Goldman had so much more going on than when I'd seen her last year at a Laughing Liberally show at Jimmy Tingle's. Boulger, going up after her, looked nervous for the first time that I'd ever seen. Then came Andre, who blew the roof off the joint, took extra time out of his act to encourage the audience to make fart noises, just to see if Comedy Central would use it! Hoogasian, up next, tried to sound like Emo Philips but mostly sounded weird. And it seemed odd at the end when Scolaro went with a bit about cavemen having to determine what was edible (since in the previous show, Ramsey had a similar bit about the first guy to bite into a pineapple!). No matter. At least not for me to worry about. That's why they're on separate shows, right? Right. Anyhow, onto the after parties, first downstairs, and then out onto nearby streets and a place called Dusk which was small but had a good vibe, especially when a bunch of comedians and like-minded people took over the bar. Good times. Couldn't you tell from the photos I posted earlier? Of course you could.

Labels: celebrities, comedy, TV

I was in New York City, celebrating with comedians and Comedy Central folk after a successful night of tapings for the second season of Live At Gotham, when the audience coordinator delivered the news to us. "Did you hear Richard Jeni died?" My first reply: "You've got to be kidding. That must be one of those Internet rumors going around." Nope. No rumor. Although it took until Sunday morning to find out anything that might confirm the tragic news, and that came via my friends at Shecky Magazine.

The official Richard Jeni site first went black, then emerged first with his dates (1957-2007), and later with a note from the family on Monday, and now a note from one of his good friends. It's good that Jeni's family and friends have come out quickly with an explanation -- well, not a complete one, but how can you for a suicide -- so all of his fans don't spread falsehoods about him.

Couldn't help but immediately think of Mitch Hedberg's sudden death two years ago this March.

These two great comics took different paths to self-destruction. Jeni, a gun; Hedberg, drugs. They both needed much more support and comfort than we gave them. It's just so sad.

I knew Hedberg a lot better than I knew Jeni. I had the good fortune to both perform with and interview Hedberg, so his death hit me harder. Though he had always been jovial and mostly sober when I saw him, the signs were so very clear that Hedberg was falling away from us, from his arrest in Texas to his dismal performance in Tempe, to his no-show in Phoenix. Instead of dwelling on that, today I went to this tribute site and watched a bunch of Mitch clips. Still so very funny. Watching the 1995 Comedy Central clip also gives you a glimpse into Mitch's early stage presence, when he had the material but a more traditional delivery. He hadn't yet become the Mitch we all grew to love.

As for Jeni, I didn't really know him at all. Remembered him from The Mask. Remembered him even more for his cinema comedy clips in the late 1990s. Saw him all over the place when I went to the Aspen fest in 2002. Saw him again onstage in Tempe a year or two later. Always quite solid and quick with the quips. I knew a girl who dated him. Now wondering if she was "the girlfriend" and feeling so sorry for her and what she's going through. Talked to some people who did cross paths with Jeni recently and they reported that all was not quite right, or that they had seen a different personality out of Jeni.

They both needed much more support and comfort and a positive kick in the arse than we gave them. It's just so sad. We need to keep an eye on our friends and loved ones, and make sure they know how much we love and care about them. I'm not saying anything new here. But it's still the kind of thing that we need to keep saying if we want to prevent another comic tragedy like this.

Post your thoughts on Jeni's MySpace page or Memorial Guestbook.

Labels: comedy, media

Managed to get two clips out of talking with Stephen Colbert in Aspen, one specifically about his desire for a second TV chance with Congressman Barney Frank for the Boston Globe (my first clip for them: the lead item in today's Names column) and a more general Behind the Colbert Report report for Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch blog.

Labels: Aspen, comedy, personal

Labels: Aspen, comedy

Labels: Aspen, comedy

Labels: Aspen, comedy