Bonnaroo is coming up June 12 to the 15th with performances by lots of Dead-Frog fave comics including Cross, Galifianakis and Garofalo. But with Fabrcie Fabrice’s doppelganger Nick Kroll not on the bill, who will handle the craft services for all these funny folks?
Here’s a vid from last year’s fest which shows how good Fabrice Fabrice is at getting those soggy vegetable plates to stand-ups.
Aspen and comedy will keep their somewhat surprising association thanks to the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival, which fills in for the recently abandoned U.S. Comedy Arts Festival run by HBO. The new fest takes place at the end of this month on the 30th and 31st.
I’m not sure about keeping up a comedy fest in Aspen, other than the sentimental and promotional reasons. The place is still expensive. But on the plus side, the fest is not being held during ski season which should help. it also kind of ensures that the people coming are there for the talent, not as an excuse for a ski vacation on the company dime.
Stand-up: Kathleen O’Brien, Tim Ball, Reid Faylor and Mary Sasson
Short Film: Icescraper! by Mark Potts, The Breakup by Amos Vernon, Actor Hunters: Ep. 1 Pt. 1 by Matthew Schwartz and Car Phone by Dan Perrault.
Previously, there was the suggestion that the stand-ups would perform in a show at the Wheeler Opera House in a show headlined by David Brenner, but no schedule has yet show up. (The other piece of news at the time - that this might be a cleaner festival that the HBO one - is also not clear as well.)
While all the details aren’t clear yet, the invite I received from Rooftop did make one thing clear. Right after the award ceremony, they listed “Games & Cake.” Yea! and Yum!
The last in Mo Diggs series which gives a broader take on alternative comedy looks at the current comedy movement we most typically associate with the term.
A Scene Is Born: ‘90s–Today
After the comedy bust of the early ‘90s, comedians like David Cross, Andy Kindler and Janeane Garofalo would stop by a room started by performance artist-turned-comedian Beth Lapides. Much as Carlin grew impatient with the unctuous nightclubs like the Copacabana, Lapides was repulsed by the homophobia and racism she found at venues like The Comedy Store and The Improv. Unlike Carlin--or any other American comedian before--Lapides made her own show as an alternative to this style of comedy. Starting in 1993 and continuing for seven years, Lapides would produce Un-Cabaret on Sunday nights at Luna Park.
Un-Cabaret’s brand of alternative comedy was based in storytelling and stream-of-consciousness rants, and added a structural innovation: a second microphone in the back of the room that Lapides used to talk to other performers while they were onstage. This ensured an informal, conversational and spontaneous performance situation in keeping with Un-Cabaret’s insistence that performers never “do their act.” (Wikipedia)
And so the LA alternative comedy scene began. David Cross and Bob Odenkirk would try out Mr. Show sketches before airing them. Patton Oswalt and Dana Gould would talk about comic books. Janeane Garofalo would read from her notebook onstage. Lapides would urge comedians to be unflinchingly honest onstage and to not do their act. TV writers like Larry Charles and Judd Apatow would do Un-Cabaret at night.
Thus, the alternative comedy business model was born: music venues would have non-mainstream comedians who often wrote for TV in the day.
The first television show to reflect the new comedic sensibility was The Ben Stiller Show (Fox, 1992-93), which featured Janeane Garofalo, Ben Stiller, Bob Odenkirk as actor and writer as well as the writing debut of David Cross.
In downtown New York, comedy flourishes outside of the stand-up club circuit. Theatres that are more known for improv or sketch comedy, like the Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater (UCB), and The People’s Improv Theater (PIT), as well as cabarets that do not exclusively offer any kind of comedy, like Rififi, have weekly comedy shows.... The comedians at these shows offer character-based humour or surreal humour as opposed to observations of everyday life or more polemical themes. A growing number of comics (Demetri Martin, Slovin and Allen, Andres du Bouchet) do not only tell jokes, opting to play music, give Powerpoint presentations or act out sketches as well. It’s rare to see these performers in a traditional New York comedy club much like it’s rare to see a traditional “club comic” in an underground room. A few alternative comics (David Cross, Todd Barry, Patton Oswalt) have enough crossover appeal to play in more mainstream venues.
Comedy group Stella (Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black and David Wain) and the sketch group Upright Citizens’ Brigade were heavily influential on the current New York alternative comedy scene. Stella—a trio whose absurdist humour has been compared to the Marx Brothers—began doing their shows (in which they would perform along with other comics and sketch groups like Eugene Mirman and the Upright Citizens’ Brigade) at the NY club Fez in 1997. In 1999, the original Upright Citizens’ Brigade Theater opened in Chelsea. Four years later, in 2003, several performers at the UCB spun off their own theatre, and formed the PIT.
(Wikipedia) (Disclosure: I wrote almost all of this text.)
There were also shows like Eating It at the Luna Lounge, where Todd Barry would perform along with East Village stars like Reverend Jen. The now-defunct club Surf Reality would feature Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, The Sklar Brothers, Rick and Rob Shapiro and the Upright Citizens Brigade alongside performance-art comedians. (PDF)
“Michael Ian Black once laid down a sheet, put a bunch of belongings down and just sold them one by one. Interesting? Definitely. Funny? Who cares?” - Seth Herzog in The Apiary
In this decade, Eugene Mirman, Human Giant and Jonathan Coulton have all used the web to further their careers and many alternative comedians today use the web the way Hope and Benny used radio to embolden their efforts to forging new comic ground.Eugene Mirman’s surreal, bizarre comedic imagery has proven particularly effective on the nascent indie comedy scene, which has seen an increasing amount of comedians getting signed to indie rock labels and performing at music festivals. Perhaps a new form of comedy will emerge, making stand-up comedians look as obsolete as vaudevillians. More likely, stand-up will adapt through transformation yet again.
I have to second VideoGum. Why aren’t all the good unaired SNL clips online? Particularly after seeing this one, where Shaq protects and cares for (and carries) a picked-upon Will Ferrell.
They probably aren’t all as wonderfully ridiculous as this one. But there must be some more gems they regret we haven’t seen.
Another installment in Mo Diggs series about the history of alternative comedy as a broader movement, always playing against the mainstream.
New Wave: ‘80s
During the comedy boom, not as many comedians railed against the comedy establishment. The focus was on maintaining a quirky, strange voice. Formal experimentation was at an ebb, but character comedy was on the rise.
The alternative stand-up of the ‘80s was like new wave music: it had it’s roots in the radical experimentation of the previous decade (Kaufman and Sex Pistols, respectively) but it was accessible. Milions of fans enjoyed it.
One-liners were nothing new. But Steven Wright’s flat, deadpan delivery made all the difference. It was as if someone shocked before he was onstage. Bobcat Goldthwait’s delivery was even more unusual. Each joke was delivered in a pitchy, high voice that was interrupted by seemingly unprovoked growls. To add to the overall effect, during Comic Relief III he stood on hot coals while telling jokes.
Other characters would emerge, including Emo Phillips and Judy Tenuta. But Pee Wee Herman was by far the biggest character comedian of the ‘80s.
In 1977 The Groundlings staged a performance in which its members created characters that one might see in a comedy club. Paul decided to play a guy that everyone immediately knew would never make it as a comic, partly because Reubens couldn’t remember jokes in real life - he had trouble remembering punch lines and couldn’t properly piece information in sequential order. Saying that Pee-wee Herman was born that night, his distinctive guttural “Ha Ha,” followed by a high-pitched “Heh Heh Heh Heh,” laugh became the character’s catch phrase, as has his insult comeback “I know you are, but what am I?” (Wikipedia)
If the boom is not associated with great alternative comedy, it’s because there was no alternative. Comedians with distinct voices like Judy Tenuta and Pee Wee Herman could--and did--make money in the comedy clubs that were suddenly popping up everywhere. But when the boom was over, unique voices would need to look outside of the clubs to be heard.
We continue our look at alternative comedy (in the broader, and perhaps truer, sense) with chapter three of contributor Mo Diggs history, this time looking at the 1970.
Wild and Crazy: ‘70s
By the early ‘70s, George Carlin seemed to be spinning his wheels in the mud. Nightclubs like the Copacabana wanted nothing to do with the bearded Dionysian madman with a foul mouth and a distaste for authority. Carlin wanted to play coffehouses and colleges, growing tired of the clubs, but hippie bastions like The Bitter End and The Troubador were also not embracing the new George Carlin (the Troubador eventually gave him a chance). Many hippies thought he was trying to hop on the bandwagon.
The release of his 1972 album, FM & AM, would change that. Spending thirty five weeks on the Billboard pop charts, the album was as important to comedy as Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was to rock. Much like Bringing It All Back Home had one familiar acoustic side and one electric side, the AM side of the record had parodies of pop culture ephemera. The FM side showcased the new Carlin: the Carlin that talked about drugs, profanity and birth control.
Carlin was now welcome everywhere, including the coffeehouses and colleges that he loved so much.
Carlin wasn’t the only one frustrated with the establishment. In 1967, Richard Pryor (who smoked weed with Carlin in the back stairwell of Cafe au Go Go) was performing in front of a sold-out crowd at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. While onstage, Pryor underwent every comedian’s worst fear: he froze. He saw Dean Martin in the crowd. Up until this moment, Pryor was staying away from race in his act, much like Bill Cosby did (Cosby briefly touched on race in his early days in Greenwich Village, but he almost immediately switched gears). But Pryor, looking at the crowd, said “What the fuck am I doing here?” and stormed off stage.
This was the birth of the new Pryor. The new Pryor would reach full maturity in 1974, with the release of That Ni**er’s Crazy. Pryor didn’t tell jokes on this album, opting for autobiographical stories and observations. Pryor brought the winos and junkies of his old Peoria neighborhood into the living rooms of middle class white people.
While Pryor and Carlin were known for their rebellious content, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks and Andy Kaufman played with form. Steve Martin would tell silly jokes without punchlines. In his most amazing feat, he led an audience into McDonald’s, ordering 300 hamburgers before changing the order to one small fries. Albert Brooks would pretend to be a delusional sideshow act (a ventriloquist that would have the dummy drink water while Brooks was singing was one of his many bizarre acts).
But no one before or after would be as radical (or, in the alternative world, as influential) as Andy Kaufman. As Foreign Man, as “himself” and as tacky lounge singer Tony Clifton, Kaufman’s brand of Dadaist performance art made the audience’s reaction the punchline. Whether he was eating ice cream onstage, telling bad jokes about President Carter or pouring a pitcher of water over an “audience member’s” head (it was often his friend Bob Zmuda) Kaufman would relish the awkwardness that he would create, paving the way for the cringe-inducing comedy of Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen as well as the surreal performance art of Brett Gelman and Reggie Watts (who won the Andy Kaufman award in 2006).
Analysis later perhaps, but here’s some of the highlights:
July 16th “South Park Live” with both of the show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. It’s more of a look at the actual series rather than a performance of a script.
July 18th Judd Apatow, who will already be honored at the concurrently running Just Comedy conference, appears to be making a return to stand-up with “Apatow for Destruction” which will also feature Apatow regular and Canadian Seth Rogen.
Also on the 18th - The Late Late Show’s Craig Ferguson will host a Gala featuring unannounced talent.
July 19th Not to be outdone, incoming Late Night host Jimmy Fallon will also host a Gala. Talents also unannounced here. Who will appear on who’s Gala? The first step in the Late Night wars?
July 20th A third gala, the All-Star Gala will feature stand-up from Ron White, Paula Poundstone and Larry Miller among others.
Also part of the fest will be multiple performances of the following:
Tom Papa in his one-man show “Only Human.”
J.B. Smoove as part of “Best of Uptown Comics”
Greg Behrendt will host Laugh-rodisiacs, a relationship themed show.
The Ethnic Heroes of Comedy which will include Steve Byrne and Gabriel Iglesias.
Besides his regular “State of the Industry” address, Andy Kindler will host the Alternative Show. Kindler was also described as “festival troublemaker” in the press release.
Greg Giraldo and Dana Gould will alternate hosting duties for introducting the rising stand-ups in New Faces of Comedy.
And of course, The Nasty Show, with a variety of degenerates and hosted, depending on the show, by Nick Di Paolo or Patrice O’Neal
Letterman Intern has already learned the most important lession: "To try as hard as you can, because there are 50 people ready to take your spot at the drop of a hat." (Washington Post)
Megan Ganz of the Onion: "I think you get to a certain level of comedy sophistication and you come full circle. Then the only thing that makes you laugh anymore is when someone shoots a bean out of their nose." (The Apiary)
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