The following interview with Maria was conducted over email.
A female comedian friend of mine was a little bothered that you weren’t part of Vanity Fair’s Funny Women issue. I was bummed that you weren’t on there too. Did you feel like it was an oversight?
Oh no! Not at all. I’m not at all in that league- there were tons of lots more relevant ladies left out because they probably didn’t have the room in the picture.
That Vanity Fair issue was focused more on comedy on TV or movies. Like a lot of mainstream media, they kind of ignored live comedy. Is being a stand-up like stealth show business?
Stand-up is listed with Karaoke in most newspapers- but, once people can get your emails and myspaces it gets better as far as letting people know about your showbiz. I love the internet.
I’ve heard you mention the book The Artist Way helped you pursue stand- up as a career. Self-help books are very sincere and comedy is very cynical by nature. Was getting through the book a little hard as your comic mind grew – that you found more in the book to make fun of the more it helped you?
I LOVE SELF HELP. Help me to help me help me help ME help ME. I have a hard time being sincere on stage, but off stage- it’s all solid eye contact, low voice and a deep yearning to understand. I love to make fun of that book but I also LOVE THAT BOOK.
There’s a little under 15 minutes of the upcoming sixth season of Last Comic Standing in this post. A couple of interesting things about it:
It’s all stuff too filthy for network TV, so it’s unlikely you’d see any of it on LCS anyway.
Since it’s raw footage, there’s none of LCS’s typical tells about the funniness of the performer. No music, no judge commentary, no sandwiching between bad or good comics. Just the stand-up, so you can judge for yourself whether the comic is funny. What a novel concept!
With the later in mind, I’m not going to comment on any of these videos. You can decide on the hilarity or lack thereof of the comics within.
I suspect this is an attempt at that old viral marketing, but I think I’m the first person to stumble on the footage. They’re were all uploaded a couple of days ago but none of them even 50 views yet. So NBC may have no idea this shit is out there. They might disappear quick. Watch while you can. The first two are below:
This isn’t something that I’ve really heard a lot of complaints about in the LA theater. In LA the theater is not that big so it would be easy to spot someone doing that so maybe people don’t do it as much. Sometimes people will do it in Asssscat and I guess we don’t care because we’re not doing written material. On the other hand, I had a guy tape me when I was doing my one man show in North Hampton MASS. It’s 30 seconds of part of one of my bits and it’s totally out of context so I’m not sure make any sense, and then it cuts to me doing my outro where I plug my CD and website. So that’s a pretty lame representation of my show.
If comedians told us that it is a regular problem then we would have our theater manager patrol the audience a little more. If we saw someone taping then we’d ask them to stop and cut off a finger (not a thumb). If they did it again we’d cut off a hand. A third violation is when we then cut off the hand of the mother of the perp.
Matt’s punishment strategy is sound I believe. Even douchebags love their mothers.
But Matt’s got an even better attitude about it, perhaps stemming from his improv background. Check out this recent Australia performance where he actually gets up close and delivers the address about his dog Martin Luther King and his dream for the audience member’s camera, heightening the conviction of the bit.
It’s not necessarily something stand-ups could do, but it’s a brilliant example of a talented player using what’s in the room.
Edited to take out the Australian referrence. It was in the YouTube video but apparently is not accurate. Thanks for the correct, Jouster!
All comedy is comedy, right? So we can put some aggressively cheerful girl out on the street and have her interview Neil Hamburger fans waiting in line to see his show and it’ll be web gold! Warning: This is car wreck viewing.
Of course, this might be genius. After all, uncomfortable moments like these are very much the definition of funny unfunny. But I’m probably being too charitable.
By a mile.
I can’t leave you with that above. So here’s the Courtney Love / Cranberry Sauce routine loved by so many of those fans above. But with Hamburger drawing it for an inordinately painfully funny long, long period of time.
Variety recently published a column by Brian Lowry about stand-up being in decline. It’s painfully obvious from the column that Lowry has no understanding of the current stand-up renaissance and boy, have my fellow bloggers been letting him have it: here, here and here. (WhipItOut has a slightly different tact here.) They all make great points, so I fear my post might possibly be just that final kick or stomp to something that’s beaten and left for dead anyway. But it looks like too much damn fun not to talk about it.
Lowry’s column states that stand-up is in decline because its no longer a career hop for sitcom stardom. At best, a comic can hope to host a game show. He concludes with this:
Given the potential payoff, there remains a strong incentive to get standup back on its feet as a feeding tube to TV.
And this is the key sentence, because, if anything, this generation of comedians looks at stand-up and television the other way around. Having a TV show is a feeding tube for your stand-up, allowing you to widen your audience and attract bigger crowds. Most emblematic of it is Mitch Hedberg, who, naturally, put this manifesto as a joke:
I got into comedy to do comedy. But when you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. They say, “Alright, you’re a stand-up comedian, can you act?” That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook and I worked my ass to become a good cook. And they said, “Alright, you’re a cook. Can you farm?”
Mitch may be gone but that attitude is still going strong. Stand-ups are sticking with the person that brought them to the ball. Many comics who are in stand-up generally aren’t doing it because they want to be famous for doing something else. Those people are gone, now auditioning for reality TV. Stand-up is its own art form again, not one in service to another.
Lowry is measuring on a ruler and seeing failure. Stand-ups are using the same ruler, they’re just at the other end.
I mentioned that The Comedy Festival in Vegas lacked more low-fi shows. Besides the Garage Comedy show I attended, another alternative show going on at the time was a Backyard Comedy Show that I missed. But some footage of it just made the web. Here’s the video featuring Brody Stevens and Morgan Murphy, as well as the show’s founder Brandt Tobler.
Obviously, a little bit of this is had to be there stuff. But I dig the idea a lot. People getting together, probably mostly the comics and the comedy nerds, bringing a lawn chair (yep, it’s BYO Seat) and laughing. This show is something I can really see working over the web. So much of stand-up is presented cleanly - too cleanly. Seeing stand-up performed intimately, emphasizing the communal nature of laughter by making the show like a get together between friends. And then, if you’re going to share it with the world on the web, make it like that same group filmed it with handheld cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. all cut together.
Of course, some people’s backyards are bigger than others. The last show in February, which featured Doug Stanhope had 250 people at it, according to Backyard Comedy’s myspace page. How big is too big for something intimate?
With TBS now holding two comedy festivals, they need somebody to handle the production of them. Hence this listing. A couple of interesting passages from the job description:
Collaborate with Los Angeles-based originals group to develop and produce television programming for national network, VOD, broadband and wireless.
and
Create and lead business development plan to expand revenue sources for these properties (example scenarios: DVD sales, tours).
Which suggests to me that my earlier suggestion that TBS plans to compete with Comedy Central in stand-up might be accurate. It certainly says that TBS sees this fest closer to the business than Comedy Central currently does with its South Beach festival, which, to my knowledge, has not produced any programming or DVDs.
Couple this with Just For Laughs, which is co-producing the Chicago Very Funny Festival, stating frankly that they want to be on American TV. Add in that many stand-up specials are now independently produced and then marketed to networks (primarily Comedy Central, but also Showtime). A lot of these comics may now have another player, an apparently ambitious one, bidding for them.
My only question: how much have network execs learned from the 80s boom, where stand-up became comically ubiquitous at the expense of quality? Good to have a new player. Let’s hope they’re a smart one.
Reportedly: SuperDeluxe to be folded into AdultSwim. SuperDeluxe did some brilliant stuff - hopefully some level of web content will continue under the AdultSwim brand.
Comix publicist Kambri Crews foils a scammer posing as stand-up Todd Barry. Con man, as Barry, claimed he needed money to get his car out of the impound lot. Barry does not even own a car.
The following interview with Maria was conducted over email.
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