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
My good friend Ian Lendler, author of Alcoholica Esoterica, checked out a couple of the shows from the excellent San Francisco Sketchfest for the blog. He’s got two reports from this past weekend. This is his first.
So the San Francisco Sketchfest line-up looked something like this:
Kids In the Hall re-union
Mystery Science Theater 3000 on-stage riffing on “Plan 9 From Outer Space”
and pretty much every sketch group and comedian you can think of
SFSketchfest is clearly throwing its hat in the ring to make the Aspen and Montreal Comedy Fests look like corporate wussies. Simply put, I love this festival. So the question looms: with a limited amount of money to spend, what show to see?
For Your Dead Frog Correspondent (YDFC), the answer was simple: An Evening with Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist (and Patients).
Why? It reminds me of the golden days. When Comedy Central was trying odd shows, intelligent shows, before they devolved into the Daily Show/South Park/and also-lots-of-things-which-suck network.
But mainly, the show had the strangest comedic timing this side of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, courtesy of Dr. Katz and the funniest human being on the planet, Jon Benjamin, playing his son, Ben. Comedy is all about timing and the show’s laconic rhythms made it a unique source of humor. You didn’t hear jokes like it anywhere else on television.
Comedians value anyone who can wring laughs out of people with a unique style, and perhaps that’s why Jonathan Katz became something of a comedian’s comedian. And he returned the favor, giving a spot on his couch to a number of comedians before they hit the big-time.
That’s to say nothing of the surprise patients that showed up each night. On Friday, it was Robin Williams sporting a giant horse head… umm… for no particular reason. And on Saturday, The Office’s actor/writer/producer, B.J. Novak.
So the question was: What would Dr. Katz be like on-stage? Two people facing each other in a faux-therapy situation and speaking in quiet tones is a tough sell. Fortunately, the crowd was there to show its love.
To be honest, the show wouldn’t qualify as the funniest event of the festival. But then again, the television show was never guffawingly uproarious. It just charmed you with its quirkiness. And Dr. Katz certainly did that on-stage. He was clearly enjoying playing the straight man as he giggled his way through setting up each comedian for their jokes.
The stand-out patient was Andy Kindler. Though he’s always struck me as a little too reliant on “I’m a Jew” humor, his anguished worrying turned the show into something out of Portnoy’s Complaint.
This highlighted an odd quirk of the television show. The best guests used Dr. Katz’s couch in the intimate confessional style of a real psychiatric office. That was why Ray Romano and Emo Philips’s low self-esteem kvetching made them better guests than, say, Mitch Hedberg, who despite being a far superior stand-up, just delivered his normal one-liners.
So despite the fact that B.J. Novak is a certified genius for his work on The Office, his funny one-liners (“People love Popeye, but he’s a devious guy. He opened a chain of restaurants and he doesn’t serve spinach at any of them…Popeye wants to keep us weak.”) simply came off as funny one-liners and nothing more.
Kudos should also be given to Robin Williams, who seemed on the verge of launching into his standard once-inspired now-tiresome riff-shtick until he veered into panic attack mode (“Dr. Katz, you told me go into rehab. Now my career’s in the toilet. What do I do?”).
Dr. Katz, too, provided the audience with the briefest moment of confession, revealing that he suffers from multiple sclerosis. Although he was just as quick to brush off this bad news with what he openly confessed was the worst joke of the evening: “How do you deal with terminal illness? Some people climb Mount Everest. Some people sleep with lots of women. I’m going to mount Geena Davis.”
Which just goes to show that Dr. Katz may enjoy being the straight man for other comedians, but Fate is the best straight man of all. And in that case, Dr. Katz is more than willing to take his place on the couch and find the punch-line.
Though the show deliberately targets shallow adoption of new age/native american/eastern spirituality, Xavier is itself a consciousness expander - it demands your attention to get all the little jokes or else they slip by. In twelve minutes, so many ideas get packed in and then tied back together again. The speed it moves and the willingness to appear like nonsense, makes the show seem random to a casual eye.
A collection of bizarre physical traits including backwards legs and a snake for a hand, Xavier wanders the Earth, looking for the arsonist who murdered of his father. As a self-styled mystic and helper of the innocent, he finds people with problems to help along the way. But everyone he meets, he harms - often because he’s as narrow minded as the people who inevitably beat him up for being a freak when he first arrives into town. (Appropriately enough, the killer he’s searching for is himself. He burned the house down while meditating in a room with an insane amount of candles.)
Like the creators previous’ program Wonder Showzen, the creators’ willingness to use ugly imagery and darkness to create humor is bracing. It’s so rare. In this clip, happiness is equated with murder:
And the demented logic of it all. Take last week’s episode. Smoking and eating bacon takes years off your life, therefore if you eat enough of it you can travel backwards in time. How to travel forwards again is predictable…
...but the detail of how Xavier, who can’t touch anything without turning it to shit, strands two other people in the future in the process is pure genius.
This weekend’s episode (available at Adult Swim at 6 PM today) brings together Mother Earth, Darfur, rampant consumerism and some really wonderfully juvenile jokes about tampons all together. If you haven’t had a chance to tune in or have only seen the show once, you owe it to yourself as a comedy nerd to use the Adult Swim generosity of clips to watch a couple of episodes in a row.
The good news for those who have fallen into Xavier’s rhythms. I recently corresponded with Vernon Chatman, one of the series co-creators, who told me that they’ve already received an order for a second season (10 episodes) from Adult Swim. Great News.
There’s been more than a few articles lately that seem to tear down Jerry Seinfeld, mostly motivated by the near relentless advertising and promotion for his “Bee Movie.” I can see why people get annoyed with this stuff - but I passed most of it using fast forward on the DVR. So maybe that’s why I’m not surprised that Seinfeld still has a bullshit detector himself, specifically during at his Larry King appearance, where he takes umbrage at the famously unprepared King saying Seinfeld (the show) was canceled.
It comes off a little mean, but wasn’t Seinfeld (the show) a little mean? Isn’t that what we kind of wanted to see from Jerry again?
I recently saw a Talking Remy from Ratatouille in a store and enjoyed the idea of kids cuddling up with a stuffed rat with Patton Oswalt’s voice. But then I realized I wanted one, but only if someone can mod the thing so it stated the food-related phrases of Oswalt’s act, specifically his bits on KFC famous bowls and chefs from Fleur de Lys. I don’t have the technical background to mess with a toy like this - although I’ve seen instructions on how to do it with other toys. So I’m just putting this out there, anybody who wants to mod one, I want one. Thank you.
Long time Simpsons writer Dana Gould is making a return to stand-up as of late (much to the delight of his peers - I remember Penn and Provenza on the commentary to The Aristocrats raving about his performances and wishing he’d go back). I’m really looking forward to hopefully catching him live someday in the near future.
But until then, Gould recently posted a full episode of his rarely-seen MTV series Super Adventure Team entitled “Kiss My Embassy” on his myspace profile. A parody of marionette shows like the Thunderbirds, this preceeded Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America by a few years. Team America is definitely better - probably because there’s a sharper satirical target. But if you thought it was a good format worthy of more exploration, SAT is worth a watch. Here’s part one.
The Reason Online has a wonderful transcription of a talk on free speech with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Much in the past has been made of the idea of South Park Republicans, but Matt & Trey assert in this talk that they’re not really comfortable with any label for their political positions. The only reason they seem to be even willing to partially take on the label of Libertarian is due to the prompting of the moderator. (None of this is to say that they don’t cozy up to one side or the other. Conservative Andrew Sullivan posted today an e-mail rave about his book “The Conservative Soul” from Matt Stone.)
For a show that’s often been described as provocative, it’s incredible how levelheaded and even fair South Park is. Much of the talk focuses on religion and, of course, the frustrations of attempted censorship by both the Catholic League and Scientologists in the past year. But an episode of Mormonism is very much a stand-out on how incredibly gracious South Park can be in religious satire. Though it essentially describes the origins of the Mormon faith dumb, it firmly admits “so what?” because Mormons are, on the whole, kind and generous people. Satire can have a single minded view of its targets, sometimes even to point of setting up straw men. The fact that Matt and Trey can savage a target and then admit to the grace within it is a marvel.
With politics, South Park finds their middle ground by piercing the excesses on both sides of an argument. I remember once Jon Stewart saying that nobody ever takes the streets yelling “Let’s all be reasonable.” But it occurs to me the South Park, and comedy is general, are the model of political expression for those of us who don’t think either side has a monopoly on truth. So much is made of humor being exclusively a tool for the left, but the left hasn’t been ascendant enough during comedy booms to be a target. Satire’s a weapon that can and should be used on both sides. It’s a balance beam that Matt & Trey continue to walk upon and one I hope that more of our current satirists decide they should tread.
A visit to the set of "Extract", Mike Judge's next comedy. It involves a factory owner's life going awry after one of his employees loses a testicle. He filming it independently, so no studio idiocracy this time.
Oct2
Starting tomorrow in Los Angeles at the New Beverly Cinema is Patton Oswalt's month of films. The first weekend's theme is "Walter Mathau Saves the World."
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, checked out a couple of the shows from the excellent 
from Ratatouille in a store and enjoyed the idea of kids cuddling up with a stuffed rat with Patton Oswalt’s voice. But then I realized I wanted one, but only if someone can mod the thing so it stated the food-related phrases of Oswalt’s act, specifically his bits on KFC famous bowls and chefs from Fleur de Lys. I don’t have the technical background to mess with a toy like this - although I’ve seen 
by a few years. Team America is definitely better - probably because there’s a sharper satirical target. But if you thought it was a good format worthy of more exploration, SAT is worth a watch. Here’s part one.
The Reason Online has 
from Matt Stone.)
