Back in a bit & some podcasts to check out

Sandpaper Suit is going on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Back in 2011 so don't get yer knickers in a twist.

Meanwhile, I recommend you check out Norm Macdonald on Greg Fitzsimmons podcast. Fuck is he funny. Just so so good.

Norm Macdonald comes to Greg’s garage for possibly the funniest podcast in the history of mankind. Norm gives his thoughts on Oprah, he announces women are not throwing, and have never thrown themselves at him, and tells what happens when Alan King mouthed off to Don Rickles. Norm gives comedy lessons with the help of Steve Allen, Greg premieres the new game Talk Your Way Out of It, they play Liar’s Poker, and they write a joke for Greg’s Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance.

And over at AST, ericluxury compiled a comprehensive list of podcasts (with links) in which Paul F Tompkins has appeared. PFT might be my fave podguest around. Those links will show you why.

If you need some reading material, see if you missed any of the "Best Of" posts here or check out "The Pocket" links over at Delicious (that's all the comedy posts I link up in the sidebar).

OK, I hope your stocking is not filled with coal. Although come to think of it, that would certainly be comedic. Give it a go!

Dunkin' Donuts drag and the Ziploc finger

One last thing about that Seinfeld/Conan post, specifically this idea that "Jews do not celebrate martyrdom." Um, tell that to my Grandma. If complaining was an Olympic event*, that woman woulda been its Michael Phelps.

The poor lady considered herself the victim of, well, pretty much everyone/everything in the world. Even when watching TV. I still have vivid memories of being a kid and being amazed by her disgusted reactions to two commercials.

Whenever these commercials came on the air, she would go, "Oish, oish, oish. It's disgusting. How can they do this to me?" As if there was a boardroom somewhere with the goal of trying to outrage her elderly Jewish sensibilities.

And I'm still not so sure what was so offensive to her about them. Here's one. It's with the Dunkin' Donuts guy dressed up in drag:



I guess maybe the drag element of the donut dude was the problem? Or the way he fails to hide his mustache? Whatever it was, she was not having it.

The other featured a talking finger plugging Ziploc bags:



I don't even know what's up with the finger thing. Why is that offensive? Is there something sexual about a talking finger? I truly have no idea what the problem was.

Anyway, she also smoked More cigarettes, made a mean babaganoush, and bragged about stealing ashtrays from hotels around the world. Go figure.

* Speaking of strange Olympic events, I was talking to an Indian friend the other day. I asked what sports they're good at in India. He said, "None, really. But if spiritual enlightenment was an Olympic event, they'd win every year." Hmm, turning enlightenment into a sporting event might be slightly missing the point.

But let's go with it. First we need a name for this enlightenment competition. Instead of March Madness, I suggest March Mindfulness. To measure the winner, I'm thinking a "yo mamma" type contest between competitors. The twist: You win by complimenting your opponent's mother instead of insulting her. Bonus aura points if you get extra Zen with it. "Yo momma is so thin that when she sits around the house, she moves quietly and gently from one room to another — leaving no trace, like the path of birds in the sky."

Friday's Hot Soup lineup

FRI (12/17): HOT SOUP
8pm - Free
O'Hanlon's Bar - 349 E 14th St between 1st and 2nd Ave.

Lineup:
Keith Alberstadt
Jeffrey Joseph
Dan Soder
Jake Young

(Hot Soup is a weekly show produced by David Cope, Andy Haynes, Mark Normand, and Matt Ruby.)

GhettoMyspace and the world of merch

Dan Goodman is a funny comic. GhettoMyspace is his pet project that explores the underbelly of MySpace. It's pretty hilarious.

GhettoMyspace.net, recently featured on Tosh.0, is a site dedicated to real photos from people’s myspace profiles. On this site you will find kids with guns, drug dealing, ghetto booty, hood funerals, and in general people having a great time. May we all have as much fun as the people in the pictures.

Now he's selling merch that uses images from the site. His room is filled with boxes of GhettoMyspace clothes. I asked him what it's like to go into the merch biz. Here's his answer:

Welcome to the Adult Learning Annex:

Below is a picture of the room I sleep in. It is now full of boxes of GhettoMyspace clothes. There's something really funny about sleeping next to your debt. I think it would be harder to get deep in debt if you actually had to sleep next to large heavy boxes. Like for every thousand bucks you owe the credit card company they would send you a giant box full of weights. Every time you send in a payment you would send it in with a proportionate amount of weight. That's actually where I'm at living with these boxes of clothes. Every shirt I sell gives me more room.

This all started innocently enough. Like everyone else I'm trying to figure out how to make money off the internet. After GhettoMyspace.net started to get some national attention (Tosh.0, Bossip, Death and Taxes Mag), I asked around and everyone else who I knew making internet money was doing it with merchandise.

Here's where my own business failings step in. I get it in my head, I don't just want to make crappy promo merch, I want to make nice clothes. Great idea, but nice clothes are expensive, and I know nothing about starting a fashion line. The whole thing cost me way more than I thought in my obsession to get it just how I wanted it. If I sell all those these clothes I can do another run where I'll actually make money. Until then I am selling clothes just to get out of the hole and make room in my apartment. The attached picture is how I wake up, in sheer terror. The only saving grace is the clothes are awesome.

My whole time in comedy has been spent trying to be successful doing only what I think is funny. When I finally made a compromise I still fucked it up. I decided to get crazy high standards for something nobody has standards for, after show merchandise. I don't know how it's going to turnout, but at least my name with be on something really funny which is worth more than a couple grand.

Buy a GhettoMyspace shirt and support a hairbrained scheme. If we all supported more clueless dreamers and their goofy ideas the world would be a lot less dull. Besides where else are you gonna get a tshirt that has a baby with a gun on it.

Performing wired

Another interesting bit from that Bill Simmons podcast with "The War for Late Night" author Bill Carter I mentioned the other day: Carter mentions Letterman is totally wired when he hosts his show.

First he drinks incredible amounts of coffee. So he's really wildly stimulated. Then he sits down and right before he starts the show, he unwraps four Hershey bars and he breaks the squares up and he builds a tower, a huge tower of Hershey bars, and then he wolfs them down one by one right before he goes on the air. And so when he hits the air, the guy is flying on sugar. Absolutely flying on sugar. Maybe this is why he had a heart problem. Occasionally when he's on the air, he will say, "There's nothing better than a Hershey bar."

Never seen Letterman live but I mentioned this to someone and he told me that Letterman can't even sit down between guests and paces around when the cameras are off.

And speaking of getting amped up for the stage, I've seen Kindler down Red Bulls before going onstage. And a NYC comic you may know, in a revealing "In The Tank" interview a while back, discussed doing blow before performing.

Tortoise/hare paths to creativity

What if you're someone who's been working at comedy for years and nothing ever happens? When is it time to quit? I asked that a while back. Couple of articles I read recently reminded me of the topic.

Stephen King argues you need to know when to give up as a writer.

The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn't get paid. If you're not talented, you won't succeed. And if you're not succeeding, you should know when to quit.

When is that? I don't know. It's different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it's time you tried painting or computer programming.

Further, almost every aspiring writer knows when he is getting warmer - you start getting little jotted notes on your rejection slips, or personal letters . . . maybe a commiserating phone call. It's lonely out there in the cold, but there are encouraging voices ... unless there is nothing in your words which warrants encouragement. I think you owe it to yourself to skip as much of the self-illusion as possible. If your eyes are open, you'll know which way to go ... or when to turn back.

Then again, economist David Galenson has studied creative output and found there are different paths for successful artists. If you judge by the current value of their artwork, some artists burn bright early and then fade away (Andy Warhol peaked at 33, Frank Stella at 24, Jasper Johns at 27), while others grow over the long-term and do their best work later in life (Willem de Kooning at 43, Mark Rothko at 54, Robert Motherwell at 72). The same split is seen in writers too.

Conceptual poets like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Plath, each of whom made sudden breaks from convention and emphasized abstract ideas over visual observations, were early achievers. Eliot wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at 23 and “The Wasteland” at 34. Pound published five volumes of poetry before he turned 30. On the other hand, experimental poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams, whose work is grounded in concrete images and everyday language, took years to mature. For example, both Pound and Frost lived into their eighties. But by the time Pound turned 40, he had essentially exhausted his creative output. Of his anthologized poems, 85 percent are from his twenties and thirties. By comparison, Frost got a late start. He has more poems in anthologies than any other American poet, but he wrote 92 percent of them after his 40th birthday.

On and on it goes. Conceptualist F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby – light on character development, heavy on symbolism – when he was 29. Experimentalist Mark Twain frobbed around with different writing styles and formats and wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at 50. Conceptualist Maya Lin redefined our notion of national monuments while still a college student; experimentalist Frank Lloyd Wright created Fallingwater when he was 70...

We should also leave room for those of us who have, er, avoided peaking too early, whose most innovative days may lie ahead. Nobody would have heard of Jackson Pollock had he died at 31. But the same would be true had Pollock given up at 31. He didn’t. He kept at it. We need to look at that more halting, less certain fellow and perhaps not write him off too early, give him a chance to ride the upward curve of middle age.

So even if you suck now, maybe you're a comedy Rothko who will bloom later in life. Maybe.

Obama riffs on his lip

Ah, the ol' verbal miscue into funny riff. Ya don't always see it from the prez, though.

Why Seinfeld took Leno's side over Conan

In The B.S. Report: 11/10 (a podcast), Bill Simmons has a revealing talk with "The War for Late Night" author Bill Carter about Conan, Leno, and Letterman.

Carter says Seinfeld took Leno's side because he felt "[Conan's] youth movement thing was against the old time comics." He summarizes Seinfeld's view this way:

You don't take the #1 guy off the air. You don't do it. I took myself off the air. That's one thing. You don't go to a guy who is #1 and tell him: "That's it. You're off the air." Who does that?

We're in show business. This is what we do. We're supposed to look for the best jobs. We're supposed to get them. We're supposed to pursue them. It's not right for Jay to walk off the stage and say, "It's all yours Conan, take it." You just don't do that in show business.

Here's the Google Books excerpt where Seinfeld gives his .02. Basically, he feels The Tonight Show is a meaningless concept since people never say "I'm doing The Tonight Show" and instead say "I'm doing Jay; I'm doing Dave; I'm doing Conan."



Carter ends the section by describing Seinfeld's frame of reference this way: "Jews do not celebrate martyrdom."

Fri = Hot Soup with Kaplan and Wong

FRI (12/10): HOT SOUP
8pm - Free
O'Hanlon's Bar - 349 E 14th St between 1st and 2nd Ave.

Lineup:
Myq Kaplan
Ali Wong
Greg Barris
Sara Schaefer

Normand is hosting and I'm doing a spot.

(Hot Soup is a weekly show produced by David Cope, Andy Haynes, Mark Normand, and Matt Ruby.)

Conversational CK-ness

I liked what Sean said about it at The Comic's Comic:

Louis CK, still so great. Even when he's clearly doing material, because the way Louis CK does material is so conversational already.

Sometimes people ask me "What do you talk about when you do standup?" The real answer I'd like to give: the same things I talk about when I'm not doing standup. I'm not all the way there but that to me is the pinnacle — to talk about the same things onstage that I talk about when offstage, when I'm hanging out with a friend or someone who I find interesting. If those things are what I talk about with someone I like and respect, but then I go and talk about meaningless bullshit in front of an audience it shows either 1) I don't respect the audience or 2) I'm not good enough to get laughs out of the stuff I truly want to talk about. Either way = kinda shitty.

Also, I think hitting that level of conversationality (?) comes from how you write. When you manufacture jokes like they're math problems, they come out sounding like jokey jokes. When you go onstage with an idea and just talk it out and find the laughs organically, it winds up sounding like a real conversation.

Or, when a bit is based off a real conversation with someone, that has a similar effect. Sometimes I find the best way to write material is to go get drunk with a friend I think is smart/interesting and carry along a notebook for anything standup-ish that pops up.

Spellchecking Hanukkah

Happy Hanukkah! Burn that midnight oil! That phrase is about Hanukkah, right? Or is it a quote from that bald Australian dude who is worried about our beds burning? I can never remember.

(Have you ever tried to spellcheck Hanukkah? I just did and my Mac responded with "whatever"...hmm.)

Hanukkah is a weird holiday because it kinda reinforces some negative stereotypes about Jews. What shape do we like our chocolate? In the shape of gold coins! If only I could have all my food shaped like cash. And waiter, bring me a slice of that cake that's in the shape of controlling the media.

Also, the whole holiday is based on the idea that we got a great deal. We paid for one night of oil yet it lasted for eight nights. What a value. It's like Uncle Morty going, "These slacks? I got them for 70% off at a Macy's. A real bargain. We should turn this into a holiday!"

Speaking of relatives, did you know my dad used to inspect my hands before I could eat dinner every night? True story. He would smell them in order to make sure I had washed them. That's a father's way of saying, "I've got this problem. And now I'm passing it on to you."

Needless to say, I now wash my hands all the time. And I have issues with grabbing that pole on the subway. Have you ever seen someone do that and then bite their nails? Blech. I'd rather lick a SARS popsicle.

Anyway, back to Jew stuff: I remember the first time I heard the word "jewed" used as a verb. I was in college and it was said by a guy from Iowa who had a mullet and drove a lowrider and whose nickname was "The Duder." That was on his license plate too. Also, everyone would go to his dorm room every day to watch him feed a mouse to his snake.

I consider this the perfect person to deliver the word "jewed" for the first time. See, people talk a lot about who they lose their virginity to, but who you lose your slurginity to can be just as important. Like the first time you hear the n-word, it should be from a guy wearing a Celtics jersey. Preferably one named Sully who has strong opinions about which House of Pain album is the best one.

Carlin: "Originally this job was called fool"

Well this is a different way to open a TV set:

Hot Soup Hanukkah Show!

Y'know how much you think you'll laugh? It will actually be 8x as much laughter as that.

FRI (12/3): HOT SOUP (THE HANUKKAH EDITION)
8pm - Free
O'Hanlon's Bar - 349 E 14th St between 1st and 2nd Ave.

Lineup:
Josh Gondelman
Jared Logan
Calise Hawkins
Sean Donnelly

I'm hosting and Normand is doing a spot. Last chance this year to see me at the Soup, I think.

FYI, Hot Soup is a FREE weekly standup comedy showcase every Friday. It's produced by David Cope, Andy Haynes, Mark Normand, and Matt Ruby.

Other upcoming shows I'm doing:
Thursday, 12/2 - 8:00pm - Time to Kill @ The Creek
Saturday, 12/4 - 8:00pm - Lil' Seany Boy Show @ Triple Crown
Sunday, 12/5 - 8:00pm - Buns and Puns @ Arlo & Esme
Friday, 12/17 - 9:00pm - Sack Lunch @ Cafe Vivaldi

More Giraldo clips (Insomniac tour, Bonnaroo 2010, and Conan 2003)

Was talking with another comic last week about how he didn't appreciate how good Giraldo was until after he died and he started seeing more of his stuff online. For example, he mentioned how much Giraldo killed it on Attell's Insomniac special on Comedy Central. Here's that.



The beginning of the set is at the end of this clip.

And here's Giraldo at Bonnaroo 2010.



And here's a pre-arm-tattoo Giraldo on Conan in 2003. Love his opening jab at Jake Gyllenhal's Craig Bierko's shirt. The warlord joke is great too.

Some good newish sites about standup

Some new sites on the scene that are worth checking out:

Premise PUNCH Tag is a blog that is mainly concerned with discussing stand-up theory. It's from Toronto comic Joel Buxton. Sample post: When Comics Fail: How I Learned to Love the Bomb Part 2.

When you bomb, it is the ultimate gift from an audience. They are saying loud and clear: “This shit ain’t funny.” And by doing so, they are helping you to discover what is. The audience is an unpaid writing partner, your personal humour adviser. It helps me to think of bombing not as a judgement of me as a person, but more of a brainstorming session that didn’t go well.

Splitsider is a website about comedy and the people who create it. It's run by writer and performer Adam Frucci under the umbrella of The Awl. Sample post: Jerry Seinfeld Crashed My Comedy Show.

As comedy code dictates, you don’t issue an APB when established comics swing by to experiment. You let them work in as normal an environment as can be created to get as honest a reaction as can be expected. But Jerry Seinfeld, as you may know, is a comedian with whom a great deal of people have a great deal of familiarity. Our show, as you can’t possibly know, rarely draws the tens of thousands of people it deserves, or more than 80. Using the former to draw people to the latter would have been a desirable arrangement. We were told not to do so. We wanted Jerry Seinfeld to come to our show. We obeyed.

Ask me about comedy is a Q&A site from Dylan Gadino, the founder and editor of Punchline Magazine. Sample Q&A: Do you think stand-up will ever become more acknowledged by the entertainment world in the near future?

There's a lot of overhead that goes into a film or television show. There's much less overhead, in general, for stand-up comedy and therefore more room for taking true risks. And true risks mean the status-quo will never embrace the art form the same way it has more "traditional" forms of live entertainment. Stand-up comedy is the punk rock of the entertainment world-- moreso, these days, than punk rock is the "punk rock" of the music world.

Take a guy like Philip Seymour Hoffman. I think we could all agree that the man owns some edge, takes chances and doesn't conform to what Hollywood looks like. And still, he's one of the industry's most respected members.

But he's no Doug Stanhope. As unfiltered and unfettered as Hoffman is compared to the rest of his contemporaries, he's not onstage telling a room full of strangers that he has herpes or that he once got a blowjob from a dude on accident or that a fan of his postponed committing suicide -- and eventually followed through -- because he had tickets to see him perform. But Stanhope does those things, because that's who he is and he answers to no one. And, from an economic standpoint, he can afford to do that, since the cost of producing comedy shows is negligible compared to the cost of mainstream entertainment productions.

Also, NYC comic Brooke Van Poppelen is helming truTV's Dumb as a Blog. It's not about standup but it is about the dumbest stuff people do so that's kinda close.

Standup: "Just one stop"

I did the show Midnight Run on Saturday at The Creek in Long Island City. That's just one subway stop outside of Manhattan and Brooklyn. But sometimes it's tough to convince people that it's actually pretty close.

Thanksgiving editions of We're All Friends Here and Hot Soup

It's a special Thanksgiving We're All Friends Here show! There will be a big deep fried turkey dinner blowout at The Creek at 5pm and then we'll be roasting some turkeys onstage. I mean not for real. Making fun of comics is kinda what I was getting at. But I can see how you would take that literally. But there will be a turkey dinner at 5. And then our show. Anyway...

THU (11/25): WE'RE ALL FRIENDS HERE
7pm showtime
The Creek and the Cave
10-93 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY

Lineup:
James Adomian
Nate Bargatze
Dan Carroll

One's gay, one's from the south, and one's got a drinking problem. It's like we split Tennessee Williams into three people!

And then Hot Soup is on for Friday.

FRI (11/26): HOT SOUP
8pm - Free
O'Hanlon's Bar - 349 E 14th St between 1st and 2nd Ave.

Lineup:
Sean Patton
Robert Dean
Sam Morrill
James Harris

Cope's hosting and I'm doing a spot.

Hot Soup is a FREE weekly standup comedy showcase every Friday in the East Village. Doors at 7:30pm and showtime at 8pm. It's produced by David Cope, Andy Haynes, Mark Normand, and Matt Ruby.

Hardwick/PFT on one-liners, clubs, and tangents

Chris Hardwick's Nerdist Podcast #33: Paul F. Tompkins has lots of good stuff.

They talk about the difference between longform and shortform standup. For example, one-liner quick hit jokes can work great for a showcase set or a quick TV spot. But keeping that tempo up for 45-60 minutes is a whole different beast.

Chris Hardwick: I don't know how the two line joke comics survive in an hourlong set. I know they do but I can't write those kinds of jokes so I don't really understand.

Paul F. Tompkins: That's so much stuff that you have to write. You have to fill up 60 minutes of one-liners. That's A LOT of material.

Chris Hardwick: And they're all hit or miss. A two-line joke is hit or miss and that's it. For all the ones you have to write to put together an hour, there's probably 8 times more that you've written.

PFT has moved away from clubs thanks to the Tompkins 300 revolution. He talked about what's wrong with the club system. Basically, comedians are like a human bowl of pretzels.

Paul F. Tompkins: [Clubs] are in the restaurant business. You're the only one who's in the comedy business. You're doing your comedy in somebody's restaurant. You're in the comedy business. They're still in the booze business.

Chris Hardwick: We basically keep people focused so they keep pouring beer in their gullets.

Hardwick also admires PFT's ability to start a bit in one place and end it somewhere completely different. ("Cherry Picking" off Impersonal is a good example of this.)

Chris Hardwick: You have a writing skill with your standup that is incredible to me...Within the body of a bit, you can take a tangent onto some minor detail that almost seems accidental and then all of a sudden you go into that and that becomes the focus of the bit. And then some tangent on that takes you further into the bit. It's like levels in Inception. You're in limbo. But that is a phenomenal way to write and that's not something I see anyone else do.

Paul F. Tompkins: Well thank you. A lot of that I must admit is by accident. I feed a lot off of the energy of the crowd and I like to allow for the possibility of improvisation. I might write one tangent in there but where it goes depends on how people respond to the tangent. If they laugh at this weird thing that I threw in there that's ultimately a thing that I think is funny that I don't know necessarily if the audience is going to think it's funny, but I hope they think is funny.

You know, when you're writing standup, the idea is this is so funny in my head I am reasonably sure that other people will find this funny too. I have to translate it from the language in my head where it's just a thought, just a flash that made me laugh. I have to translate things like that into human speech so that other people who don't speak the language that's in my head will understand. And then I know that if I phrase it this way, this is how I say funny things, people will laugh at that. I'm pretty sure.

Then there's other stuff where I'm like, "I think this is funny but I don't know if anyone else would ever think this is funny." I'm compelled to throw it out there just to see if anybody laughs at that. That's the little tangents. And then if people do laugh at that, then my instinct is always: Let's see how far I can push it. Let's see what I can get out of this...

You keep talking until they stop laughing. And then the next time you talk about the same stuff, you cut out the part where they stop laughing.

Also worth checking out: recent Nerdist podcasts with Birbigs and Gaffigan.

Podcast: We're All Friends Here highlight show

The latest We're All Friends Here podcast is now available. It's a "best of the past year" clip show featuring Kevin Barnett, Mike Lawrence, Ray Combs Jr. and some other stuff.

Hot Soup with James Adomian and more

Friday's (11/19) lineup:
James Adomian
Reese Waters
Harrison Greenbaum
Ross Parsons

Hot Soup!
Every Friday at 8pm
FREE SHOW
O'Hanlon's (back room)
349 E 14th St between 1st and 2nd Ave. (map)
Produced by Matt Ruby, Mark Normand, Andy Haynes, and David Cope