Category: Comedy

The Meltdown is a weekly show co-hosted by Jonah Ray (absent last night shooting a Bing commercial) and Kumail Nanjiani (a warm host, funny and wry, who did some great work on a Harry Potter bit I hope to write about in another post) in the back of Meltdown Comics on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a dark room about the size of a racquetball court, but with a very low ceiling and a unisex bathroom. Meltdown packed the chairs in like proverbial sardines. Is this what made it, easily, the most generous room I’ve seen so far? Every comic killed, but I want here to talk about two who stood out: Anthony Jeselnik and Matt Braunger.

Jeselnik‘s on what Meltdown’s billing as a “summer fling”, which I think means that he’s been booked each week. He told us that every week he writes about 50 jokes and brings the best 25-30 to try out on the room. He held some stapled sheets of paper in his hand. Those that killed would get a check. Those that did not would be X’d out. Some jokes were X-worthy and some got checked. “Three weeks out of the year I run a summer camp for kids about to get molested,” got maybe his biggest laugh of the night. Check plus.

What was fascinating about the act was that reports on how well, to Jeselnik’s ears, the jokes landed would be kind of jokily delivered to us after the jokes had landed in the very room we were sitting in. “I like a change of pace…check-minus that one.” “You see what I was going for there, just wasn’t funny.” Of course, these reports on the jokes’ statuses often got more laughs than the jokes themselves. It’s like the decision comics make to address heckling or other discomfort in the room. You can always get a laugh out of it. Jeselnik tours around the country, has been on a couple Comedy Central roasts, and just taped a one-hour special, so it was great to watch how a comic can use a small and generous room of thinky comic nerds to work out new material for a future larger audience. Oh, and don’t miss his Dane Cook impression.

Oh yeah, Paul Scheer showed up, but the as-yet-aired episode of NTSF:SD:SUV he brought to screen for us had technical problems so he just did some welcome banter with Nanjiani on stage about piss porn and other dream-killing jobs.

Matt Braunger you’ve seen maybe in commercials or as neighbor Gene on Up All Night. We know the old saw about comedy and timing so well it has its own Wikipedia entry, but Braunger’s comedy is so gorgeously timed. Maybe all gorgeously means here is speedily. Braunger doesn’t let the room get silent before a bit has been completely and thoroughly milked. He’s like the opposite of Tim Hammer, who will let a room titter away to nothing before he drops his next line. The only silence you hear in Braunger’s act is when he moves from one bit to another. Otherwise he’s presenting a premise—as in an extremely funny bit about the combination of “a gulp, a sigh, and a swallow” that forecasts vomiting—clowning/acting the premise out, providing examples, and developing little narratives about the premise manifested until he gets to the climactic line. Then he lets the room rest and picks us back up again with a new premise — “Yeah, I get heckled every now and then” — and we get ready for another round. An ecstatically fun act to watch.
Continue reading L.A. Comedy Trip: The Meltdown with [Jonah and] Kumail

Jesus, there is so much incredible comedy going on in Los Angeles.

Last night I went downtown, which like most sprawled cities’ downtowns is smaller than you’d imagine, to see Holy Fuck, a weekly standup showcase hosted (normally) by Dave Ross at the Downtown Independent theater. Taped sketches, ten comics, and host Jeff Wattenhofer all in just around two hours.

This was my first such packed, hosted showcase of comics (unless you count the 6:30 open-mic I caught at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, which cost me $15 for the ticket, an extra $1.50 to buy said ticket online, and another extra $1.50 for the privilege of having the ticket waiting for me at will call as opposed to printing it out myself, which with the two-drink minimum the club enforces made for an event that was worth nobody’s time or money). I’m going to try to replicate the experience here, in short-burst reviews of every bit of the show.
Continue reading L.A. Comedy Trip: HOLY FUCK.

Why do I find so much joy in watching Patton Oswalt perform? And not just me. Last night at the Irvine Improv he killed, unequivocally. The crowd (a sold-out show on a Monday night) roared with love for nearly a minute as he got up on the stage. But his hourlong set, though great and funny, was nothing innovative. I mean, I wasn’t transformed the way I’ve been while watching Maria Bamford or Jon Dore this week. Is it a heart-over-head thing? Just what is it that makes Oswalt’s comedy so different, so appealing?

I was thinking about this on the drive home, and then R.E.M.’s “Stand” came on the radio. In 1998 I took a class in American Sign Language, and our final exam involved grouping up with classmates to perform choreographed routines to pop songs, translating the lyrics to ASL. It was precisely like that scene in Napoleon Dynamite where the Happy Hands club does “The River” except we were in college and the audience was larger. The whole thing remains a nightmare. It was my idea to choose “Stand” and I regret it.

Because I’ve been thinking only about standup for the last two-and-a-half days, the first thing I did when I remembered this terrible experience was try to form it into a standup bit. How to render it in a way to generate maximum laffs? One time, doing my ASL homework at my desk, I miscalculated the path of trajectory for my index finger and ended up giving myself a bi-nostril nosebleed. I thought it would be funny to revise the truth and imply that this was enough to make me quit. Like after laffs from the “Stand” confessional bit I could say something like “I didn’t last long in that class. I had to drop out after I gave myself a bi-nostril nosebleed doing my homework.”

I find the fact that I gave myself a bi-nostril nosebleed while practicing my ASL homework very funny. And I found myself fussing over the proper wording of this joke to evoke the greatest amount of laughter. Was bi-nostril itself funny, or not at all funny because it’s too clunky?

Oswalt would never bother with this kind of problem. “I wish I could sit down and write jokes,” he says, “but my method has always been spewing on my feet. It’s all topics scattered, and the writing happens between signal and noise, mouth to microphone.” I figured he was being disingenuous when he told me this. Or terse, because busy, and eliding over some truth of the process. But no. Oswalt’s delivery has this continuous looseness that invites us to laugh whenever we feel impelled to. His jokes land more like napalm than missiles.
Continue reading L.A. Comedy Trip: Patton Oswalt’s Comedy

Went last night to Stardumb, a new comedy game show hosted by Bil Dwyer at Flappers in Burbank, which is a newer and very clean club with great sightlines and food that looked attractive. Stardumb involves Dwyer leading six people in the entertainment industry, most (but not all) of them comics, through a series of games wherein he (Dwyer) recalls some foibles about his career in show business, then asks the contestants to share their foibles or come up with funny improvised notions, and then awards points to the best one. Like with Whose Line, maybe, the points are mostly arbitrary, an excuse to have a young co-host grace the stage, in that Stardumb ends through a series of elimination rounds that take into no account the previously won points, and but this quibbling is of course silly to do with a game that made me laugh enough that my face hurt afterward.

Last night’s contestants were these people:

• Maria Bamford
• Jimmy Dore
• Jon Dore
• Ben Gleib
• Samm Levine
• Janet Varney

I came for Bamford, but all the other comics on stage (Dore, Dore [no relation], and Gleib) were a revelation, in that I’d never heard of any of them before, and each was good. One of them, Jon Dore, was great. And I want to try to get at what made him so great.
Continue reading L.A. Comedy Trip: The Trickster and the Sycophant

Two things happened recently:

1. This:

People have been saying to me in face-to-face situations stuff like “I see we’re no longer Facebook friends” and it’s probably true and the reason for it is that I’m no longer on Facebook, not that I’ve had one of those annual private cullings people seem to perform there. This decision wasn’t made hastily. I just stopped liking Facebook, and, if you listen to the folks over at Gizmodo, it’s only going to get worse now that it’s a publicly traded company.

2. I taught last weekend at the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, which was my first-ever such teaching gig and totally enjoyable and great. Now I’m up in South Dakota, preparing for my standup research trip to Los Angeles, which starts Saturday. My first celebrity interview is happening in less than a week. Also, The Cupboard is launching a new Web redesign any day now.

All of which is to say I may be in poor touch for a while. In the meantime, let’s all bookmark Fred Armisen’s Be Serious for 30 Seconds video project on YouTube, which asks folks to submit their own videos following 7 constraints:

1. It has to be serious.
2. It has to be 30 seconds or less [sic?].
3. No more than 2 people in it.
4. At least one 5-second dramatic pause.
5. At least 1 cutaway to an object.
6. Do your best acting.
7. It needs to have a door slamming

That a comedian is starting a new web series with a pointed lack of comedy in it in 2012 is like maybe a whole chapter of my standup book right there.

From the June 2012 issue of Men’s Journal:

Richard Ford is driving around Memphis looking for barbecue, with his wife, Kristina, a leggy, blond PhD.

Ford just drove in from Oxford, Mississippi, where he’s teaching a writing class at Ole Miss—filling in for his friend, novelist Barry Hannah, who died in 2010. [. . .] Throughout his career, hes gone to great pains to distance himself from the Southern literary tradition. He gets a headache just thinking about all those post-Faulknerians with their clichés that proliferate like so much Spanish moss.

For the past 20-odd years, Ford has been the standard-bearer for a certain kind of American literary masculinity. […] But [sic] he’s also a guy’s guy who trout fishes, rides a Harley soft-tail, and knows how to handle a shotgun on a duck hunt.

He can be ornery, short-tempered, acerbic, profane—but somehow he’s also totally loveable.

Ford drives on, doing 80 through the Mississippi darkness, south toward home. A few miles later, Kristina directs his attention to a gas station up ahead. Ford looks at the sign, glances down at the needle, and keeps on driving.

He’s a powerful presence—6-foot-2 and distance-runner rangy, with blue eyes and a lean, wolfish grin.

Ford gets a kick out of confrontation. When a writer for the New York Times reviewed The Sportswriter unfavorably, Ford took one of her books out to his backyard and shot it with a .38. He then mailed it to her.

Ford drives like a man who likes to drive.

[A]fter his mother died in 1981, he decided to commit to Mississippi as his home. He and Kristina bought a big white plantation house, which they ended up selling a few years later.

Yesterday, The Economist reported that 9,000 jobs in newspapers and book publishing have been lost since 2002. Borders went bankrupt last year, just months after the Los Angeles Times laid off all its freelance book reviewers. Each week The New York Times Book Review receives nearly 1000 books to review. It selects fewer than 30.

The excerpts above were written by a man named Josh Eells. And then it all got published in a national magazine, who paid him for it.

When you’ve got an American in Germany, say, or just like a person speaking German with a bad/American accent, the funniest thing for him or her (well: a man doing it is innately funnier) to say in said accent is Ich bin nicht daran interessiert.

Recent Facebook and Twitter (respectively) complaints about holiday car “antlers” from a friend and then a standup comic (click to enlarge as needed).

Maybe comedy evolved as a way to get people to listen to one’s complaints. Or no wait, that’s what Facebook was invented for. My point here is not anything about quality of cultural critique (friend’s update garnered 10 likes and 21 comments, whereas Delaney’s tweet garnered 28 retweets but only 8 replies), but more about where the comic’s default mode intersects with the poet’s. No ideas but in things. This tweet and all it has to say about those antlers fails completely without that Andie MacDowell sweatshirt.

I’ve been doing a lot of research (well…”research”; it’s mostly watching TV) on stand-up comedy. Today I popped in Seinfeld’s Comedian documentary. I thought it might be interesting to share with you all what my process, so far, is when I start working on a nonfiction book. I tend to have a very loose, MS-Word-based notetaking method. Sometimes it’s a clear outline. Other times it’s like I’m doing rough drafts right in the notes.

At any rate, here’s everything I got down while watching the movie: Continue reading Notes Toward Research