Daily Comedy News Podcast Transcripts

---

---

Featured: Wanda Sykes, Aziz Ansari, Margaret Cho, Elaine Boosler, Reggie Watts, Freddie Prinze, Russell Peters, Amy Schumer, Phyllis Diller, Bernie Mac, Gary Shandling, Roseanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Tig Notaro, Patton Oswalt, Janine Garofalo, Patrice O’Neill, Sarah Silverman, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, Robert Klein, Redd Foxx, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor

What’s in This Episode

• Rolling Stone’s 2017 list of 50 best stand-up comics evaluated nearly 10 years later in 2026
• Controversial inclusion of Aziz Ansari in top 50 comedians of all time
• Reggie Watts’ inclusion on list amid recent cancellation
• Gary Shandling’s legacy and underrated career impact
• Tig Notaro and Patton Oswalt’s Star Trek involvement criticism
• Eddie Murphy’s Richard Pryor influence debate
• Dated assessment of Amy Schumer and Roseanne Barr’s legacies

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

A little different today. I’m doing this one on the fly. So recently I was recording an episode and I referenced Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time, which was published February 14th, 2017. And I haven’t looked at this. I’m doing this cold.

I just thought it’d be interesting together to go through this list and see how we feel about it. Nearly 10 years later. I don’t know how this episode is going to go. We’re doing this on the fly here. Back in 2017, Rolling Stone said, and coming up with our version of a comic canon, we weighed artistic merit, technical proficiency, and sense of timing, quality of their written material, their delivery, and degree of influence, and often their sense of what makes something anything funny.

No disrespect to the foundational figures who shaped the earliest incarnations, but this list tiptoes past some of the early craftsmen, and focuses on the unique voices who have helped push stand-up forward in more recent days. These 50 stand-ups best embody what we’ve come to expect of our modern-day comedians. Okay, so that’s fair. So that eliminates, you know, do we have to talk about Mark Twain or Bob Hope or anybody? So we’re doing modern stand-up.

Now, I don’t know where Rolling Stone considers the line. It’s usually around Lenny Bruce or very early George Carlin is where that line is drawn. At number 50.. They have Wanda Sykes. Now I have to see some more names, but initially I’m looking at this and going, Wanda Sykes is in the top 50.

Now we’re just starting. I don’t know who’s not on this list, but already 10 years later, I’m like, Wanda Sykes? 49. Aziz Ansari. How do you feel about that 10 years later? That’s crazy talk, isn’t it?

Again, I don’t know who’s on the list or not on the list yet, but Aziz is crazy to have him as one of the top standups of all time. That’s nutty. 48. Margaret Cho. 47. Elaine Boosler. Now she has become forgotten.

Rolling Stone wrote, imagine the prototypical female comic of the 1980s. Big hair, suit jacket with shoulder pads. I like the shoulder pads. And sleeves rolled up. The brick wall behind her.

You’re imagining Elaine Boosler. At a time in which women comedians were not talking about sex, Boosler addressed it head on. 46, Reggie Watts. I mean, really? Reggie Watts? One of the top 50 stand-ups of all time?

Nine years ago? Are you insane? Plus, he’s a little canceled right now. Crazy, crazy, crazy. 45, Freddie Prinze. He’s forgotten.

Do you even know who this is, younger listener? The reason you might not is because the charming, mustached kid had nothing but potential, but he got caught up in 70s drug culture and had problems dealing with a dizzying rise to fame after sitcom Chico and the Man took off. Freddie died by suicide at age 22. He only had one album called Looking Good and one early HBO special. But yeah, he was huge for five minutes there.

Number 44, Russell Peters. Top 50. 43, Amy Schumer. I wonder where she’d fall on a list in 2026. 42, Phyllis Diller. Somebody you don’t hear much about right now. 41, Bernie Mac. 40, Gary Shandling. I should throw him in the deep dives as well.

He’s become forgotten. I’ve got to add to my list here for the deep dives. Hold on. I’m going to hit pause on the recording and leave myself a note. Note has been left.

I forgot how much I liked Gary Shaling. I feel like Gary Shaling has gotten summarized as just a guy that hosted Larry Sanders, or maybe you remember he was one of the two permanent guest hosts of The Tonight Show. He was in rotation with Jay Leno there. There’s definitely an alternate universe where Gary Shaling got 1130. Rolling Stone in 2017 wrote, watch any of Gary Shandling’s specials.

They recommend Alone in Vegas and you’ll see a charming neurotic burying Una’s looks in his failure with women in an attempt to let the audience breathe easily. He told GQ in 2010, what I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn’t realize it’s funny until they’re driving home. Number 39, Moms Mabley. I am ignorant about Moms Mabley’s career, so I will not comment on whether that is a good pick or not. 38, Roseanne Barr. Times change over a decade, don’t they? 37, Sam Kinison.

Sam was a shooting star, man. When he was hot, he was hot, but I’m not sure he lasted long enough. 37 probably feels about right to me. Rolling Stone wrote, It’s being a little kind, actually. He would occasionally acknowledge why he never groused about the evils of men. Because a man never broke my heart.

A man never made me want to drive my car into an effing wall. 36. Daniel Kitson, who I’m ignorant about. Fusing stand-up and theater into carefully structured solo ventures, this British comic scrutinizes bits of his biography while contemplating bigger issues, the nature of time, memory, and individual perception. I don’t know anything about Daniel, so I can’t judge. 35. Do you hear the reaction?

Okay, in 2017, somebody at Rolling Stone.. Thought of the top 50 comedians of all time. That Tig Notaro was number 35. Star Trek ruiner Tig Notaro. No, no, no, no, no. 34.

Another Star Trek ruiner, Patton Oswalt. All these comedians went on to ruin Star Trek. 33. Wow. Here’s a name. Janine Garofalo?

When’s the last time you thought about stand-up comedian Janine Garofalo? 32. Patrice O’Neill I have shared on this podcast. I did not enjoy The Man’s Company. He loved to F with people, and when I’m working, I just try and be professional, so be professional back, dude. The comedians love Patrice O’Neill.

I did not enjoy the man, so I am biased here. He’s number 32. 31. Sarah Silverman. Almost top 30 of all time. I mean, Sarah’s nice and all, but I mean, you know what?

The more I think about it, her last two specials have been great, and I’ve had them above my top of the year. All right, maybe I got to reevaluate Sarah Silverman. Maybe that’s not crazy. 30, Woody Allen. And when I said Woody Allen, you kind of went, ugh. Yeah, so it’s hard to judge Woody Allen’s career.

I wonder if Mr. Cosby’s on this list. So let’s just move on. 29, Dick Gregory. I’m under-familiar with Dick Gregory. Rolling Stone told us since breaking out while working at the Playboy Club back in the day, Dick Gregory has been at the forefront of the fight for civil rights in his comedy and in life.

He was jailed at Selma, shot during the Watts riots of 1965, ran for president in 68, and always, always brought the struggle to the stage. Confronted by a southern waitress who told him, we don’t serve colored people here. He said, I don’t need colored people nowhere. Bring me a whole fried chicken. That is funny.

Dick Gregory, number 29. 28, Robert Klein, another one of those pioneers of 70s comedy whose name you don’t hear, but gotta respect the work. Do you like observation on autobiographical stand-up, asks Rolling Stone. You have Robert Klein to thank. When he recorded his first special for HBO in 1975, the very first stand-up concert the premium cable channel ever aired, He enjoyed his linguistic freedoms and said it’s subscription and then dropped an S word. But Johnny Mac likes to keep it clean.

Rolling Stone correctly says Robert Klein’s rhythm would highly influence comics like Jerry Seinfeld. Highly influenced. Doing a lot of work in that sentence. Red Fox at number 27. If you’ve never listened to Red Fox comedy, it is a wonderful wordplay.

And we’ll take the break into number 26, Rodney Dangerfield. We’ll come back. We’ll look at the top 25 of Rolling Stone’s top 50 best stand-up comics of all time from 2017. We continue. It’s Rolling Stone’s 50 best stand-up comics of all time as written in 2017.

At number 25, Eddie Murphy. If you’re old like me, you loved Eddie Murphy until you got a little older and realized it was all just a Richard Pryor cover act. It was still funny. It’s still great. But it’s a Richard Pryor cover act.

Rolling Stone writes, in his magic moment, Eddie Murphy saw stand-up comedy transform into rock star art. The SNL breakout star strutted, preened, and doused the audience in sex like Let It Bleed-era Mick Jagger. That is a good comparison. Listen to the crowds in the films Raw and Delirious. They’re not at a comedy show, they’re getting lit at a party in which pants might be optional.

Some of Murphy’s Act from those days hasn’t aged well, but certain bits like the one about the ice cream man will remain evergreen. Yeah, you listen to some of that stuff and it’s like, oh, times have changed. Number 24, Eddie Izzard. 23, Don Rickles. 22, Jonathan Winters. I never got or enjoyed a Jonathan Winters. I feel like that picks too high. 21, Bob Newhart.

Number 20. Okay. Now, I’m going to say a name. If you’re a long-time listener, you know I love this person. A decade has gone by, and I feel like this is way too high because the body of work just isn’t there.

But you know that I love. Number 20, Mitch Hedberg. They write jokes like, when I was a boy, I laid in my twin-size bed and wondered where my brother was. Or, Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read. Only gave you a sense of Hedberg’s wonderful efficiency.

He also paid a high degree of attention to syntax. And while some of his jokes bordered on dad material, he’s a hippopotamus, just a really cool potamus. But it was all just a way for him to show his audience that they should be looking through the groovy, rose-colored lenses he had on, seemingly all the time. His hit-to-miss ratio was off the charts. He was great, but there’s just not the body of work there that the others have.

Number 19, Albert Brooks. Rolling Stone wrote in 2017, back when he was a stand-up, Albert Brooks was as interested in how comedy works as whether it worked. His record Comedy Minus One was just half a routine with lots of dead air for you, the listener, to perform the other half with the lines printed in and an insert provided. That’s insane. 18, Kevin Hart. And they were saying this 10 years ago.

Interesting pick. 17, Bill Burr. I would guess over the past decade, Bill Burr would move up on such a list. Sixteen, Billy Connolly. Fifteen, Stephen Wright. Fourteen, Andy Kaufman.

That’s an interesting pick. They wrote, even if Andy Kaufman hadn’t wrestled women for the Intergender Wrestling Championship, hadn’t created abusive, overly hacky, alter ego Tony Clifton, and hadn’t took his entire audience at Carnegie Hall out for milk and cookies, he would still be a legend. An audience-baiting bit of performance art Hoffman’s career was the country’s first major introduction with what’s sometimes called anti-comedy. 13. Bill Hicks. I’m sure Dennis Leary would agree.

You don’t hear much about Bill Hicks these days. 12. Robin Williams. Some people have accused Robin Williams of being a comedy thief, but the man knew how to perform. 11. Steve Martin. Now, this is one of those interesting things of, you know, you hang around long enough and people forget, but Steve Martin was a rock star comedian in the 70s.

You listen to the material now, and you’re like, what? But back in the day, okay. Ten, Mort Sahl. Okay, Rolling Stone is being artsy here. They said, when Mort Sahl was playing the hungry eye in San Francisco during the 60s, he brought a new informality to weighty issues.

Casually clad in red cordigan and button-down shirt, a newspaper folded under his arm, he riffed on politics in a way no one had heard before. All right. And into the top nine, I guess. We’re already into the top ten. Back in 2017, Rolling Stone has, at number nine, Dave Chappelle.

I think Dave might rank higher these days if we were to redo the list, and that is high praise. Eight, Bill Cosby. Again, Rolling Stone wrote, his legacy is beyond tarnished now, but without Bill Cosby, there would be no Richard Pryor, no Dave Chappelle, no Louis C.K. As a comic and storyteller, he advanced the art of stand-up by leaps and bounds. If we just judge the work, absolutely.

If we judge the man, it’s a lot more complicated, but here we are judging the work. Someday Bill Cosby will pass away, and I will tell you a story. Number seven, Jerry Seinfeld. Now, a decade later, would Jerry have moved up or down? Probably slightly moved up.

I feel like Jerry’s just more and more revered as time goes on. And I think 10 years later, he would absolutely move ahead of number six, Joan Rivers, who is starting to become a little forgotten. Five, Chris Rock. In 2017, they had Chris Rock ahead of Jerry Seinfeld. Would you rank them that way these days?

I don’t think so. There was a time, probably 15 years ago, at the Las Vegas Comedy Special, I saw Rock and Seinfeld on back-to-back nights at Caesars in Las Vegas, I think. And that was the order. Rock, and then the next night, Jerry. I walked out of Chris Rock going, wow, that’s stand-up comedy at the top.

And then I saw Jerry the next night, and Jerry was even better. So I would have to flip the ranking there. I am not dissing Chris Rock, but I would move Jerry up. Four. Louis C.K.

It’s 2017. When was C.K. Canceled? John, you host the show. You tell us.

OK, the infamous New York Times, Louis C.K. Is accused by five women of sexual misconduct. Article came out November 9th, 2017. And this article came out February 14th, 2017. OK, so about eight months or so.

You do the math. I didn’t do it. They had Louis C.K. As the fourth greatest all-time stand-up comedian. Now, we haven’t said Pryor, we haven’t said Carlin, we haven’t said whoever they have at number three that I’m obviously forgetting.

But back then, when he was number four, Rolling Stone wrote, the tall redhead had been working comedy clubs across the country for decades, making his bones along with countless other stand-ups. But somewhere around the time, he called his four-year-old an a-hole and imagined his wife giving him a favor, the saddest favor in America. The next level artist we now know as Louis C.K. Was reborn with a vengeance, starting with his 2007 special Shameless. He turned a guy slinging penis jokes and absurdist one-liners into a guy slinging penis jokes and rigorously honest stories about his life and those closest to him.

Since then, CK has challenged himself to deliver on an unprecedented scale. The self-deprecating social critic has crafted many hours of new material, one almost every year, and let the material go after recording it. In these specials, he not only mapped the mind of a lazy, horny, gluttonous dude who happens to be a dad, but a culture of entitlement, which everything is amazing and nobody’s happy. This is what a comic genius looks like, wrote Rolling Stone eight months before Louis C.K. Was canceled.

Number three, Lenny Bruce, which leaves the big two. And on any list, you can flip the order around. Depends on your personal preference. My personal preference is the opposite of how Rolling Stone had it. George Carlin at number two.

And Richard Pryor, obviously, I didn’t even have to look. Would be number one on the list. They wrote, at his Acme, which was caught on tape and specials, including live in concert and live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor was untouchable. Won’t argue with them. It’s a personal preference once you get that far.

And that is a look back at Rolling Stone’s 50 best stand-up comics of all time from 2017. Now, just off the top of my mind, if we made this list today, I didn’t say words like Mulaney would probably be pretty far up these days. Bregazzi right? Not even on the radar 10 years ago. We had a list with Wanda Sykes on it, but no Nate Bregazzi 10 years ago.

Would you have Sebastian Maniscalco on a list? I’m not doing research. I’m just going off the top of my head. Is Nikki Glaser on a list of these days? Jim Gaffigan, not on the top 50 on a list that had Wanda Sykes and Margaret Cho and whoever else I didn’t like at the bottom of the list.

No Jim Gaffigan. Now, Jim won’t call you back, but he should be on the list ahead of Aziz Ansari. He won’t call you back either, right? Yeah. So these things change.

And if we make a current list, I’m sure it would be a lot different. And I’m sure you’re screaming in your phone right now going, John, you totally forgot about so-and-so. Again, I’m just doing this off the top of my head. Anyway, a fun little diversion. And that is your comedy news for today.

I’ll catch you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Jerry Seinfeld, Rodney Dangerfield, Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Shecky Green, Buddy Hackett, Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin, Merv Griffin

What’s in This Episode

• Rodney Dangerfield’s joke construction and comedic technique
• The structure of perfect jokes in stand-up comedy
• Rodney Dangerfield’s early life and career path
• The ‘no respect’ premise as comedic innovation
• Rodney Dangerfield’s Ed Sullivan Show debut in 1967
• Dangerfields comedy club opening on Upper East Side New York

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Hi, I’m Johnny Mac, and on Saturdays I’ve been doing these deep dives into one particular comedian. Today, let’s take a look at Rodney Dangerfield. Jerry Seinfeld was asked a question. If you had to put one joke on a recording to represent comedy to aliens, what would the joke be?

Seinfeld did not hesitate. He picked a Rodney Dangerfield joke, specifically this one. I was making love with my wife, and she had a faraway look in her eyes, and I said, darling, is there someone else? And she said, there must be. Seinfeld said, that’s as perfect a joke as I can imagine.

Not picking his own material, he picked Rodney Dangerfield to represent the entire form to an alien civilization. Rodney spent most of his adult life trying to solve a specific technical problem. How do you construct a joke that works every single time, that has no loose parts, and can’t be made funnier by changing anything about it? Ronnie got closer to solving that problem than almost anyone who has ever held a microphone. The self-deprecation, the no-respect thing, the loosened tie, the bug-eyed delivery.

Those are surface features. Underneath them is something that serious comedy people have been trying to articulate for years. The jokes work at a structural level that most jokes don’t reach. This is one place they treat you right, you know? Although before the show, one guy gave me a hard time.

He kept looking at me, he looked at me, he said, what do I know you from, you know? I said, you ever watch The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson? He said, yeah, you too? I meet the wrong people. That’s my trouble.

Like last week, I met the Surgeon General. He offered me a cigarette. I’m going to lose some weight. That weight is a rough one. Every day is a battle with weight.

Last week, I went nuts. I tried the rice diet. Between meals, kept folding my shirts. Ronnie Dangerfield was born as Jacob Cohen in 1921 in Babylon, Long Island. His father..

Was a vaudeville comedian who was essentially never home. Dad performed, traveled, absent in the way that show business fathers of that era were often absent, which is to say thoroughly and without apology. According to Rodney, mom was unstable and the childhood was hard in a specific way that produces either damage or comedy or both. He was writing jokes as a teenager, understanding instinctively that language arranged in a specific way could produce a specific effect in other people. He changed his name to Jack Roy and worked at Catskills in the late 30s and 40s.

The borscht belt taught him that audiences are demanding and the competition was real and you figured out quickly what worked and what didn’t or you went home and did something else. He was doing that, grinding, then he stopped. He got married in the early 1950s, had two kids, sold paint and aluminum siding. He hung out at Hanson’s Drugstore, a 24-hour diner in Midtown Manhattan. You know who else hung out there?

Don Rickles, Shecky Green, Buddy Hackett. He was part of the world and not quite in it. He was selling siding during the day, sitting at the counter at Hanson’s at 2 in the morning, carrying around the jokes he wasn’t performing anymore. He eventually went back. He couldn’t explain.

He told a reporter it wasn’t about success. He was depressed. He was seeing an analyst and suddenly had a tremendous urge to go out on the floor and perform. He changed his name again, Rodney Dangerfield, suggested by a club owner and started building his act around the thing that had already been in the material. He doesn’t get any respect.

I guess it’s the same old story, you know. I don’t get no respect. I mean, in my whole life, I don’t get no respect at all. I found out when I was born. They bought me a baby carriage with no brakes.

And today it’s the same thing of my kids, no respect. I remember one day my kid came home from school, my boy was depressed. I said to him, why are you depressed? He told me that day he learned a new saying, like father, like son. Now I tell you, I can’t take it no more.

Well, the other day I said to my little daughter, I says, when you grow up, what do you want to be? She looked at my wife. She said, single. The no respect premise solved a specific problem, which was the problem of setup. Every joke needs a context that makes the punchline land, and the challenge is building the context efficiently so that the audience doesn’t get bored before you get to the punchline.

Rodney’s solution was to make the context permanent, establish it once at the beginning of the act that his entire world is a place where he receives no respect from anyone, and fire jokes one after another in rapid succession, each one landing faster because the setup’s already there. Here’s one. I was an ugly kid. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I get.

Three sentences. The first establishes the condition. He’s ugly. The second delivers the misdirection. Pet store.

The third lands the punchline on the implied comparison to an animal. Three sentences producing one complete comic observation. No wasted motion. No filler. There’s nothing you can take out there.

In 1980, in the Chicago Tribune, Larry Cart.. Described Rodney Dangerfield as one of the last comedians in America who’s serious about jokes. Stand-up was moving towards storytelling and performance and personal revelation. Rodney didn’t tell jokes the way a storyteller tells a story. He fired them one after another with barely enough air between them for the laugh to complete before the next one arrived.

The rhythm is a choice. It has a specific effect that the audience has kept slightly off balance. Slightly ahead of themselves and constantly arriving in a laugh just as the next setup is already beginning. It keeps the audience working. It keeps them paying attention.

By the end of a Rodney Dangerfield set, you felt like you’d been through something. Even though what you’ve been through is basically a man telling you about his terrible life. The national audience first encountered Rodney Dangerfield on Ed Sullivan in 1967. There you got not just a large audience, but a specific kind of legitimization. Ed Sullivan liked comedians who were clean enough for the family audience and good enough to stop people from changing the channel.

Rodney fit both requirements. I was a little late getting over here tonight. I took the wife and kids out for a ride and I got lost over in Jersey, you know. I’ll tell you the way some people give you directions, you can’t help but get lost. They always tell me the same thing.

Let’s go straight ahead. You can’t miss it. Just keep going straight ahead. I mean, as soon as I. Pull away, I come to a fork in the road.

I’ll tell you, I had a guy last week. He gave me religious directions. Hey, you ever get these guys? He says, you go down here to St. Anne’s Church, make your right.

You keep going past St. Mary’s, past St. Catherine’s. You’ll pass Holy Trinity. You come to Our Lady of Mercy.

I’ll tell you, after those directions, I don’t even thank the guy. I looked at him. I said, I bless you. Lately, with my car, I got a new problem. My wife just got her license to drive.

And I’ll tell you, since my wife is driving, she now has two men in her life. Me and a body and fender man. I was out driving my wife the other day. She told me she was going to make a U-turn. I’ll tell you the letter she made.

You’ll never find any alphabet. That led to a run of talk shows. Johnny Carson. Would give Rodney the visible laugh that Carson gave to the comedians he actually found funny rather than the polite laugh that he gave some other people. Rodney did Dean Martin’s show, Merv Griffin.

There was the comedy club on the Upper East Side of New York City. I think I went there after my prom, if I recall correctly. That one was called Dangerfields. Dangerfields was open from 1969 to 2000. Rodney opened a comedy club because he understood what a comedy club needed to be and wanted to build a version that didn’t yet exist and kept it open for three decades.

Even as the comedy landscape shifted around him. Some of the people who came through Dangerfields in those years include Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Bob Saget, Tim Allen. Rodney didn’t just give them stage time, he went to the mat for them. He produced a series of HBO Young Comedians specials that gave young stand-ups national TV exposure before they had any other way to get it. Here’s a guy you’re going to hear an awful lot about, okay?

He smokes in bed, face down. But I’ll tell you, in this thing called showbiz, he’s one of the guys who’s coming up real fast. He’s really great. Jerry Seinfeld. All right, here we go.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, this is it, huh? This is your night.

You’re out. You’re making it happen. New York City, this is where I’m from. And to me, the most amazing thing about when you go out in this city, you know, you go to a show like this and you’re with your friends and you talk and maybe you have a good time, maybe you don’t. The most amazing thing that happens to you on a night like this is the ride that you have in the cab.

You know, isn’t it incredible the chances that these guys take with your life and that you’re so calm in the backseat, you know, because they got that glass partition and you’re just watching them. It’s like it’s happening on television, you know. You know, he’s flying around the road and you’re going, boy, that looked dangerous. Here’s a guy who’s rather unusual. And I love people who are different, you know?

When I say rather unusual, you know what I mean when you meet him, okay? We all love him here. Let’s have a nice, warm reception for Sam Kinnison, okay? Here you are, Sammy. Hi, baby.

Here you are. Baby, I love you. I love you. Well, I’m sorry I’m late. I was supposed to be here a little earlier, but I spent the last two hours at a 7-Eleven going, Marburg!

Cigarettes! Smokey, smokey! He’s a guy who’s very funny, but he’s lonely. He needs acceptance. Make him happy, won’t you?

Bob Saget, how about it? All right, Bobby, here you are now. Guys, you’re a wonderful audience. You really are. I’m not just kissing up.

I’m really not. I swear, I’m slobbering all over you is what I’m doing because I need you to like me real bad because I have no act and I have no life and I have no future. I’m serious, man. Mom is Gumby, my dad is Pokey, and I’m Mr. Potato Head, so..

I’ll talk real fast. If you have any drugs, take them now. I’m serious. I’m not funny, but I am quick. That’s the problem I have with women, too.

But it’s good to be here. It really is. You’re a great crowd. I’m not just kissing up again. It’s the second time I’ve done that.

I just want to take a jacuzzi with you and throw in a toaster. Here’s a guy I saw five years ago in Minneapolis. He was working with a comedy club there. And I said to myself, here’s a guy you’ve got to watch. In fact, you can’t miss him, okay?

Give him a big round of applause. Louie Anderson. Okay, Louie. How you doing? Listen, I can’t stay long.

I’m in between meals, so bear with me a minute. Let me move that so you can see me. Yeah, I live out in California where there are only three fat people. They have us on eight-hour shifts, so it works out. Then there are the movies. 1980, Caddyshack.

They originally wanted Don Rickles for the role of the loudmouth nouveau riche, a real estate developer whose arrival at the country club sets everything in motion. Don Rickles wasn’t available. Rodney Dangerfield got the role. What he did with it, the improvised energy, the vulgarity of money flaunting, the way Rodney’s delivery made every line land faster than it should have, turned a supporting character into the thing people remember most about the film. Technically, Caddyshack has a Bill Murray movie.

Rodney Dangerfield is why it holds up. Then the stuff people knock Rodney for, the rest of the movie career. I don’t, but people do. Easy money in 1983, back to school in 1986. The money that came from the film career after Caddyshack was a lot.

And was mainstream recognition that talk show appearances and comedy clubs didn’t really produce in the same way. Remember that guy Larry Cart from the Chicago Tribune who said nice things about Rodney in 1980? In 1986, Cart reviewed a show in Chicago and said, Gone were the perfect little perfections of rhythm, sound, and nonsense that burst into laughter even when you knew it was coming. The craft was still there, but the urgency was different. The man who had spent years constructing jokes as perfect objects because the joke was the only thing he had was now a man who had movies and a club and mainstream fame, and the desperation that had sharpened the material into something almost crystalline was no longer quite the same desperation.

The history of comedy is full of performers whose best work came from a combination of talent and necessity, and their work changed when the necessity changed. We’ve seen a lot of comedians over the years that get a little rich, and it’s just not the same anymore. With Rodney, it’s not that the jokes got worse, the construction was still there, the no-respect premise was still doing the work, but something had shifted. The last week I saw my psychiatrist, I told him, Doc, my wife comes home so late. Well, last night she came home, must have been 3, 4 o’clock in the morning.

He said it was 2.30. Well, last week was a rough week. I sat my kid down, I told him all about the birds and the bees. He told me about my wife and the butcher. I’ll tell you, my wife never went for me, you know.

That’s not how I told her, honey, you know what I say, that sex makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. She told me, consider myself sick, poor, and stupid. Rodney passed away in October of 2004, age 82, after complications from heart surgery. I feel like over time, his legacy has held, and he does get respect. That’s your comedy news for today.

I will see you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Pete Davidson, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Stav Stathis, Steve Carell, Mel Brooks, Don Adams

What’s in This Episode

• Pete Davidson reflects on 9/11 anniversary 25 years after father’s death as a new father
• John Mulaney rumored to star in Get Smart reboot
• Chris Rock Variety cover story on new direction as writer-director
• Chris Rock addresses Oscar hosting future and the slap incident
• Stav Stathis new Netflix special review

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Got a big Mulaney story and a huge Chris Rock article to talk about. But, you know, today is 9-11, so I do want to lead off with a 9-11 story. I did an episode on Sunday about how comedy dealt with 9-11 after the fact, if you want to go back and check that one out. I also wrote a little bit About my own experience in my sub stack link in the show notes.

Today will be a normal episode, but let’s lead off with Pete Davidson, who is reflecting on his first 9-11 as a father. 25 years to the day after his own father, New York City firefighter Scott Matthew Davidson, was killed at the World Trade Center during the attacks. Pete told the New York Post, I thought, oh, he was an old guy. He’s 33, but now Pete’s 33 and I have a kid. And that would be like my kid not having her dad. So this year is extra tough, but also extra beautiful because I get to spend the day with Scotty.

That’s his daughter. It’ll be very healing and special. It was also very cool that Elsie wanted to name her Scotty. My dad’s name was Scott, but his nickname was Scotty. When she arrived, we both looked at her and we’re like, she looks like a Scotty.

It’s nice to keep that name alive. Pete says he’s looking forward to telling his daughter about dad. Pete said, I have old videos and pictures and stuff, and I’m excited to share the classic stories I have of him with her. Scott Davidson was dispatched to the World Trade Center after the second plane hit the South Tower. In 2023, Pete was on the Real Ones podcast and said he found out his father had died from TV.

Pete told the story, I had no idea. His mother had told him he was grounded and not allowed to watch TV. Pete said, I was like, what? I didn’t do anything.

And then one night I turned on the TV and I saw my dad on TV and they’re like…

He said it was weird because they didn’t know that he was dead for like three weeks. Pete reminds us they were finding people, you know, they were pulling people out and there was just some sort of hope. And it was just up and down and nobody knew how to deal with it. Again, I got into that on Sunday. It’s a tough day, especially if you were in New York City that day like I was.

So let’s just awkwardly move on and talk about John Mulaney, who might star in a reboot of Get Smart. Not the worst idea ever. You may recall Get Smart was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry and ran for 138 episodes from 1965 to 70. The first four seasons of the James Bond-type spoof aired on NBC. The final season was shown on CBS.

Don Adams starred as Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, opposite Barbara Felden’s Agent 99, and Edward Platt, who played the Chief. They worked for a secret U.S. Government counterintelligence agency called Control, which was in a constant battle with evil chaos. While smart always has the upper hand, he was often incompetent. There was a 1980 feature film called The Nude Bomb, which was just a terrible name made without Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.

You can kind of tell there was the 1989 made for TV sequel Get Smart Again.

---

And then I don’t remember this at all.

There was a 1995 reboot that also starred Don Adams and Felden and Andy Dick that aired on Fox for seven episodes in early 1995. I gotta go find that. I don’t remember that happening at all.

---

And then in 2008, there was the film adaptation with Steve Carell as Maxwell …

Anne Hathaway is Agent 99. Alan Arkin is the chief. And Dwayne The Rock Johnson is Agent 23. Not good. Not good.

And Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart is not a terrible idea. So John Mulaney, I don’t know, man. I’m rooting for you. Chris Rock got a big, fancy cover story in Variety. The subheader Chris Rock isn’t exactly who you remember him to be.

He likes to take his time. He asked himself repeatedly, what am I trying to say? I don’t want to say something mean and get canceled. It’s a wide-ranging interview. At one point, they talked about the president of the United States.

Chris Rock was one of the celebrities who predicted Donald Trump would win in 2016. Chris Rock said, I’m not a fan, but it’s weird when somebody gets one thing right and the one thing almost clears them all of their other sins. The news is fake. He got that right. He talked about one of his famous routines.

You know, the one Michael Scott does in the office? I’m not going to do it for you. You know that one. He says when he was working it out, it brought controversy. Variety tells us if you thought the recorded version was uncouth, you should have seen him workshop it on tour.

Chris Rock says in Oakland one night, I remember dying a death. People wanted to fight because I didn’t have it right yet. You got to go over the line to find the line. That’s what people don’t understand. When a comedian gets in trouble for saying something at a club, it’s like, dude, that’s what the club is for.

Chris Rock, now 61, says he doesn’t spend much time at comedy clubs anymore. This is interesting. He said, we’re all different people at different points in our lives, and I think I got everything I could out of the last guy, whoever I was then, meaning the comedian. Now I’m this director guy. Huh.

He is directing Misty Green, which will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. He says, again, I’m a different guy. I’m trying to be anyway. Is he making jokes? He says, we’ll see what happens.

I’m saying I’m a writer-director guy. Then I’ll get an offer for some show on CBS where I’m Mandy Patankin’s neighbor. Hey, I brought back your wrench. Making 80 grand a week. They did ask him about the Oscars.

Would he host again? Great answer here. He says, when people ask those questions, they’re being disrespectful to the people that got the gig. They have great hosts. Conan O’Brien is amazing.

He then added that Nikki Glaser is amazing on the Golden Globes. I feel like the industry is just prepping us for Nikki Glaser stepping up onto some other show. We’ll see what happens there. I’m not going to say never, but my time might have passed, honestly. Would he return to the Oscars for the first time since 2022?

Is it that long ago the slap happened? Rock said, the only way I’ll go back is if I’m nominated. And I’m not getting nominated, and that’s okay. We’ll deal with it if it happens. Like, let’s manage expectations.

As for the slap, he says, you know, to answer the question, I wish nothing would have happened.

---

And also, I don’t want to say anything that takes attention away from how goo…

It’s a crazy world. We walk by homeless people. There’s all sorts of stuff going on right now. Me having a bad day. It’s not that important.

Stavros Akias. I watched his special. I really liked it. I should have mentioned this yesterday. I watched it Tuesday night, I guess.

I liked it. Now, I had my laptop out, so I was second screening and just trying to free up drive space on this computer that I record on. It fills up all the time. So I had Stavros on, but I wasn’t staring at it. But I found it nice company.

I effing wish he would effing stop effing cursing effing a little bit. Effing, effing, effing. It’s just unnecessary and it’s jarring, especially in the first 10 minutes. He’s effing cursing like every effing word, dude. But then he kind of found the rhythm or maybe I got used to it.

So at first I found it jarring, but I found it nice company. It’s not great art. It’s not George Carlin. It’s just an hour of a guy telling humor stories. I found a good company.

Definitely worth your time. Stavros in the GQ cover story said the first taste of mainstream success I had probably, I forget the year, maybe 23 or 22. And that year I did a theater tour, shot my first Netflix special. Second special overall. Did an indie movie.

We shot season one of Tires, and I started Stavi’s World that year, and that was all great stuff, but I wasn’t prepared for it. I wasn’t prepared for that workload. I wasn’t prepared to do that many things. I had no guardrails back then, and it was also off the pandemic a little bit. It was like, leave your house and go get messed up.

Do all the fun stuff you haven’t been able to do. It was bad timing. It was like you’re handed everything It was both celebratory and stressful, which is the perfect storm to just completely give in to your vices. I was just like eating crap, getting high, a couple pills mixed in, a little drink. I was never really a drinking guy, just to get through it.

But also, I had a good time doing it.

---

And then I was like, damn, it’s kind of hard to breathe right now.

If somebody unplugs this CPAP machine, stuff’s going to go bad in this Courtyard Marriott. So yeah, there were times that I thought for sure it’s kind of like the end of The Witch. It’s like, would you like to live deliciously? I was living deliciously. And you’d die if you do that too much.

Starburst said, I love stand-up, but I feel like it’s a thing I have to trick people into coming because they see me podcasting, acting, they see a clip go viral, whatever. But in general, that’s how the entertainment industry feels now. It’s like you have to quietly work on your art and get better at everything while also being famous because nobody has any infrastructure anymore and everybody expects you to do everything. And so you have to keep getting famous because I want to keep making movies. I want to keep doing stand-up specials.

I want to tour till I die. I love stand-up. To do that, you just kind of have to have fans and be famous. Hmm. I don’t think he’s crazy at all.

Dane Cook has lost some weight. Now, I never thought of Dane Cook as heavy, but when I was looking at the pictures, I was like, all right, he’s not as thin as he was 25 years ago. Who is? Anyway, Dane Cook, now 54 years old, showed off his slimmed-down figure on Instagram, telling fans he’s lost 50 pounds. Can you imagine Dane Cook losing 50 pounds?

I mean, again, I don’t think of him as a big guy at all. Dane wrote on the caption, down over 50 pounds to 195, not since 2009. He showed off chiseled arms and a sleeveless gray shirt. We learned Dane Cook swims daily to burn 500 calories, then does 30 minutes of Pilates, kettlebell work each morning, and ab roller workouts a few nights a week before bed. He described his diet as carnivore adjacent and says he fasts daily until noon when he has a protein shake with collagen.

He also listed NAD plus three days a week. I don’t know what that is. What’s NAD plus? NAD +, is an essential coenzyme found in all living cells that helps turn food into cellular energy and repairs damaged DNA. Okay.

So he does that three times a week, light therapy, and several peptides, which he says he uses mostly for muscle recovery. Oh, and he happens to have a movie coming out. What a weird coincidence. Funny Money, the documentary about his brother, allegedly, is it allegedly? I’m going to say allegedly.

Allegedly stealing some money. That’s out September 18th. The trailer looks pretty good. I’m looking forward to that one. Kathy Griffin, often in the news for controversy, today she’s attaching herself to Dolly Parton.

She says Dolly Parton once sent Kathy Griffin a letter after Griffin asked her to appear on My Life on the D-List. Kathy Griffin says she couldn’t do it because I’m a little outrageous for her fans, but she wrote me the nicest letter saying, I wish I could do it. I watch it all the time. Keep doing your thing. You’re so good at what you do.

I appreciated her honesty. Which was, I love the show, but I live in Pigeon Ford, Tennessee. That’s pretty funny. Now, according to Kathy, Dolly said she’d be like, Hmm. All right, this weekend on this program, on Saturday, the weekly deep dive is about Rodney Dangerfield.

On Sunday, I remember a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across Rolling Stone’s top comedians of all time, the article from 2017. I went in on it, and let’s see how it has aged or not. So that’s Sunday’s episode. Tomorrow is Rodney. It is Friday.

It is time for the Comedy Stock Market. Comedy stock market. Thank you, Burt Reynolds. Uh, this week, I don’t have much for you. I do want to recommend we buy Nimish Patel.

He’s got a special on Netflix on September 22nd. I played the trailer for you the other day. That sounds pretty funny. Uh, you want to buy some more Joe Coy? We could buy low on Joe Coy.

His specials out on Netflix on Tuesday. I don’t know. You want to buy even more Mulaney? I feel like people know about Mulaney and we’ve bought Stavros Alkia is like the last three weeks in a row. Uh, So I don’t really have too many buy recommendations.

No sells again. I’ve been pretty positive, right? We haven’t sold a comedian in a couple weeks. So that’s it. Buy some Nimesh Patel.

That’s your comedy stock market for this week. Saturday Night Live UK is back this weekend. Jeff Goldblum is the host of SNL UK. Musical guest is somebody I’m really into. C-MAT, real name Kira Mary Alice Thompson.

The only reason I know about C-MAT is when I was in Ireland last year, March? Yeah, not this year. St. Patrick’s Day the year before. I kept hearing good music and I’d pull out Shazam and be like, what is this?

And just add it to like an Ireland playlist. And CMAT was on the radio over there. And nobody over here knows who she is, I think. But she’s really good. I like her a lot.

Anyway, if you guys watch SNL UK this weekend, you will see her. Her album Eurocountry was nominated for the Mercury Prize and won Best Album at the Novella Awards in May. SNL UK has added a new cast member. It is actor Freddie Meredith. You may know Freddie from Such Brave Girls and Big Boys.

I don’t, but doesn’t mean he’s not good. He also just did the Edinburgh Fringe. His debut show was called Need a Light, which was nominated for Best Newcomer. He said it was a no-brainer to join SNL UK, calling it the most iconic comedy show. It will undoubtedly inform everything I do for the rest of my career, and I can’t wait for the experience.

I’m not sure SNL UK is iconic, but, you know, good point. Why wouldn’t you jump on that? Morty Gleeson was the winner of Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Morty caught up with the Irish Times. She said she has two middle names, Louise and Elizabeth.

And when I was a kid, I thought my name was Marty Louise Elizabeth. My confirmation name was Valerie. And I picked that just because of the TV show Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I wanted to pick Sabrina, but they were like, you can’t pick a witch name. It was too pagan for them.

So I picked Valerie because that was her best friend’s name on the show. They asked Marty when she last got angry. She said, I don’t generally get angry, to be honest. But I recently got introduced on a stage by a male MC as adorable. I thought that was crazy, but that was probably the last time.

I let things slide until it’s a situation where I should say something. I’m quite chill. If I’m in a rush, I’ll get angry, but just internally angry at myself. Hey, Marty, who would you like to play you in a biopic? She said, it has to be a cartoon.

Maybe like Cartoon Network visuals, like Cow and Chicken. Then I could do the voice. But if I had to pick someone else, it’d be a hybrid of different people. There was a way to putting them in a machine and making it one person. It would be Jack Black and C-MAT.

C-MAT’s all over. In Osaka, the Osaka Comedy Festival, Saturday, October 10th through Monday, October 12th, if you want to go, Columbus Day weekend, why don’t you head on over to Japan. Free street performances will be held at Namba Square throughout the three-day festival. But this is the catch. Why are you telling us about this, John?

We’re not going to Japan. You know that. I know that. You know that. Why are we telling them about this?

They’re doing nonverbal comedy in the square. Osaka has developed a distinctive performing arts culture that includes manzai comedy and rakugo storytelling. Now, what are those? I don’t know, but John, you host the show and probably have Google. Can you tell us, please?

Okay. Manzai is a traditional style of Japanese stand-up comedy performed by a rapid-fire two-person duo standing in front of a single microphone. So the Sklar brothers, but Japanese. Rakugo is a 400-year-old traditional Japanese art of comic storytelling where a lone performer sits on a cushion.. And acts out multi-character conversations using only a fan and a cloth.

Someone tell Chris Fleming. And that’s probably enough for today. Behind the scenes here, there’s a podcast conference next week, so I’m going to have to pre-tape next Friday’s. So let me hold on to a story. What story, John?

What are you bumping? It’s about what comedians eat before shows. That can wait a week. That’s your comedy news for today. Rodney tomorrow, and a look at the best comedians of all time, 2017 version on Sunday.

That one’s a lot of fun. Stuff has not aged well. Here, I’ll lead with one of them. Aziz Ansari? Really?

Aziz Ansari you put on the list? That didn’t age well. All right. See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Jimmy Kimmel, Donald Trump, Bill Carter, Jon Stewart, Nathan Fielder, John Oliver, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Jerry Seinfeld, Pete Davidson

What’s in This Episode

• Jimmy Kimmel’s show potentially ending in May 2027
• South Park renamed to South America for Season 29
• Jon Stewart trolls Trump using Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary
• Comic Relief Live revival at Carnegie Hall October 19th
• Comedians boycott Jerry Seinfeld-headlined Portugal festival over Israel support
• 9/11 comedy benefit at Madison Square Garden with Jon Stewart and Pete Davidson

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Big, big day today. A lot of big stories. Plus, the 49ers play tonight. And if it’s your birthday..

I hope everybody in your life makes a big deal out of it. Like if you have a Facebook group, I hope everybody jumps on there and wishes you a happy birthday.

All right, let’s jump in.

Jimmy Kimmel’s summer is over. Everybody’s summer is over. But Jimmy Kimmel’s back. He hosted his 4,000th episode and took shots at the president of the United States. As always, send your letters to Jimmy Kimmel, not me.

Kimmel said, Donald Trump and I have one thing in common. We both accomplished nothing all summer long. He then slammed the president of the United States for 15 minutes. He particularly made fun of the reflecting pool. Now, I was in D.C.

A few times during the summer, and yeah, the reflecting pool is not coming out too well. Kimmel used photos behind him and told viewers when he left in June, the country was a mess. Now, only three months later, I’m pleased to report that thanks to your favorite president, DJ Jazzy Donald, every one of those problems has been solved. We made America great again. So he focused on the pool and said the president had three months, spent $ 20 million, and couldn’t even get a pool cleaned.

I thought he was supposed to drain the swamp. He turned it into gravy instead. Kimmel also talked about the Strait of Hormuz and said on Friday, fuel prices hit an all-time high. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. At this point, Blockbuster Video has a better chance of reopening than the Strait of Hormuz.

But the big story came out of Page Six. Page Six published a report suggesting that Kimmel’s show would end in May after Jimmy’s contract expired. ABC has denied the reports, calling them purely speculative. Bill Carter, he’s written a few books about late night. He knows more about late night than anybody.

Let’s see what he said via Late Nighter. Bill reminds us on February 11th, 1991, the headline in the New York Post read, There Goes Johnny, NBC Looking to Dump Carson. 35 years later, the headline on page six is Jimmy Kimmel’s Late Night Show Set to End in 2027. Amazingly enough, the post is being run by the same guy, Rupert Murdoch, who was 60 when the first story ran and is now 95. Bill Carter reminds us, I did a little reporting about that infamous Carson story 35 years ago from my book, The Late Shift. I found the person who planted the story in the post.

He worked for Helen Kushnick, then the manager of Jay Leno. He related how he and Helen hatched a plan to use the manufactured story in the post in an effort to force NBC’s hand in moving Johnny Carson out so Jay Leno could take over. Carter writes, not one NBC executive had discussed this with Kushnick or her source. It was completely fabricated and it landed like a grenade in NBC’s offices and in Carson’s heart. He was devastated by this public diminishment of his reputation.

Carter says Carson was not mollified by NBC’s response at the time, which was Carson would be the one to decide when to leave. What NBC did not say is that it hoped Carson would stay forever. I think Bill Carter and I are aligned on this next point. Bill writes, Jimmy’s contract expires in May, but he’s hardly at retirement age. He’s my age.

And what else are you going to do? Host a podcast in the basement wearing a 49ers jersey like a loser? No. We’ll see. As I’ve said on this show several times, I could see Kimmel negotiating to work less, perhaps make less and work less.

You know, Seth Meyers is on a seven-week break. The Rosie O’Donnell experiment worked well for a week, so maybe you bring in Rosie to do a couple weeks a year around the holidays, stretch out your summer break. There are solutions here. I don’t think the show’s going anywhere, but what do I know? Jon Stewart also returned from summer vacation.

He hosted on a Tuesday night. He used the trailer for Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, to troll the president of the United States. I told you about that trailer yesterday. If you haven’t seen it yet, you absolutely have to watch it. Jon started talking about Trump’s assistant, Natalie Harp, and asked, can we even trust her?

Well, decide for yourselves, because tonight here on The Daily Show, we’re premiering exclusive footage. We lived with Natalie Harp and the president for a month to determine what the relationship was really like. He then took clips from the viral You Can See Everything trailer, except had Trump superimposed over Fielder’s face. In the preview, Elizabeth Holmes says, Why would I deceive you? There’s no reason for me to do that.

We’ve got a lot of late night today. I’ve got this Jerry Seinfeld story that originally was the lead off, but all this other stuff moving ahead of it. John Oliver is going to host the return of Comic Relief Live. Remember that from the 80s? Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams would raise money and comedians would come on.

It was pretty cool back in the day. Well, Comic Relief Live will take place Monday, October 19th at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. So is that right after the New York Comedy Festival? I’m not part of it. That’s interesting.

We know some of the performers. They will include Roy Wood Jr. Josh Johnson, Zorna Garg, and Mary Beth Barone. Comic Relief will also present the 2026 Visionary Award, an honor established to recognize leaders and organizations who use the platform, innovation, and resources to advance systemic change for children and families facing poverty. Tickets go on sale today if you want to go.

South Park has changed its name. I love this one. It’s no longer called South Park. It is now called South America. It is the show’s 29th season, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone have announced, inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to South America.

We especially want to thank our parent company, Paramount, a Skydance capitulation. Season 29 premieres on the 16th at 10 east and west on Comedy Central. And streams on Paramount +, where they have that horrible new Star Trek series that ruins everything, so don’t support that now. Comedians are boycotting a festival headlined by Jerry Seinfeld in a protest against Jerry’s support of Israel. It’s a comedy festival in Portugal, I’ll butcher this, but it’s the Comedia a la Cartfest, something like that.

It was going to be November 1st, Seinfeld was going to be the headliner there. A comedy duo, Cibola Mole, were among the first to withdraw, announcing the boycott on Instagram with a picture of themselves with a slice of watermelon. Which is a symbol of Palestinian resistance. None of the artists who have pulled out have named a jury specifically, but one said Deshi pulled out because one of the performers insistently defends indefensible ideas and actions. We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.

You may recall that in 2025 at Duke University, Jerry Seinfeld was quoted as saying, Free Palestine is to me, you’re free to say you just don’t like Jews, just say you don’t like Jews. I’m actually thinking the Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say we don’t like blacks, we don’t like Jews. Okay, that’s honest. Another time, an influencer asked Jerry Seinfeld to say Free Palestine, and Jerry said, I don’t care about Palestines. In 2024, students at Duke University jeered Jerry Seinfeld and staged a walkout when he was awarded an honorary doctorate.

Last week, the comedy festival said it regretted to announce the first two acts it pulled out without explaining the reason. Over the weekend, three more artists pulled out of the festival. Tonight in New York City, Madison Square Garden. New York City still rising after 25 years, a 9-11 comedy benefit. Jon Stewart and Pete Davidson have put this thing together.

Proceeds go to various 9-11 charities. The performers include, now, this gets very complicated very quickly. Here are the list of the performers. Aziz Ansari, who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Bill Burr, who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Dave Chappelle, who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Ronny Chieng, who played the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Pete Davidson, whose father, Scott, was killed on 9-11. And Pete also played the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Plus, Nikki Glaser, Josh Johnson, and Jon Stewart.

In a joint statement, Stewart and Davidson said, We look forward to once again celebrating this great city’s tenacity, resilience, and championship heart, and we don’t only mean our Knicks. This one is a little weird, and John Mulaney is getting pulled into this because all the headlines are saying John Mulaney, and I thought Mulaney had pulled out of a festival, but no, the entire festival pulled out of the festival. The Great Outdoors Comedy Festival was supposed to play in Arendelle Park up in Canada this weekend, the 11th through the 13th. The entire thing has been postponed. Organizers didn’t give a reason The statement says, after careful consideration, the GOCF team has made the difficult decision to postpone our shows scheduled for September 11th through the 13th, 2026.

We know there’s a lot of excitement around the show, but our priority is to deliver the best possible festival, and we believe postponing this week’s performance is the right decision to ensure we can do that. Organizers are trying to figure out new dates and how to handle everything. Mulaney was going to perform on Friday night with opening acts Stavros Halkias and James Austin-Johnson. Other headliners at the now-postponed festival were Adam Reyes, Dr. Phil, Jeffrey Curie, Matt Matthews, the wrestling guy from yesterday, yeah, Jordan Jansen, Hasan Minhaj, and Ronny Chieng, Ms.

Pat, TJ Miller, Brad Williams, Grace O’Malley, Catherine Blanford, and Michael Costa. John Mulaney posted on social media that the decision was unfortunate, but he intends to perform in the area soon. Very strange. We’ll see what’s going on there. Johnny Mac loves a good kerfluffle.

No, it’s kerfluffle. I was told I say it wrong every time. Kerfluffle is wrong, but I like kerfluffle. Anyway. Ari Spears.

Not impressed by Bernie Mac’s comedy, apparently. Ari’s was on Live from the Green Room. He was asked to name acclaimed comedians whose appeal he has never quite understood. So, like, if I was on that show, somebody would ask me that, and I would say Adam Sandler, the great dramatic actor. Some people think he’s a comedian, but I don’t say it at all.

He’s good in movies. Dramatic movies. Anyway, Ari Spears said Bernie Mac. I just don’t get it. The voice makes you lose.

It’s hard for me to buy into the jokes because I’m so caught in the.

---

And then he kind of did like the Peanuts teacher voice.

I guess the I guess he did that. Now, before saying this, Spears joked that his comments would be considered, quote, blasphemous by the black community because we hold these people in these institutions to such high regard. He also took a shot at Martin Lawrence’s comedy, saying that it’s so over the top that it, quote, bordered buffoonery. Tracy Morgan, also a target. I certainly would not say that he’s not talented.

But he described Tracy Morgan as hard on the palate. This is not going over well. Comedian Faison Love shot back saying, Bernie Mac was a compadre of mine. We shared a lot of laughs together. In regard to Ari Spears, consider the source.

All right, we’ve got a cast change on set. Night Live. Late Nighter reports that Martin Herlihy, he’s one of the Please Don’t Destroy’s, has left the show after five seasons. John Higgins left after season 50. Ben Marshall was promoted from writer to feature player last season.

Herlihy hung around and starred in a series of pre-taped shorts billed under his own name, Altogether, Herlihy appeared in 42 sketches over his five seasons at SNL, 34 Please Don’t Destroy shorts, and three A Film by Martin Herlihy pieces, plus five sketches. Please Don’t Destroy remain active as a trio. They recently played a pair of shows in Brooklyn, New York. I’m excited for this one. There’s a TV show called The Inbetweeners.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s fantastic. Netflix is bringing it back for a movie, The Inbetweeners 3. Simon Bird, James Buckley, Blake Harrison, and Joe Thomas come back as the in-betweeners Will, Jay, Neil, and Simon, who get into all sorts of misadventures. They were like horny high schoolers when this thing started. Now they’re like 40.

I don’t know. The Coming of Age sitcom was originally broadcast on Channel 4 between 2008 and 2010. All right, so 2008’s 18 years ago. So if they were pretending to be 16 then, so the characters are 34 now. Did I do the math right?

Following the misadventures of suburban teenager Will and his friends Simon, Neil, and Jay at the fictional Rudge Park Comprehensive School as they navigated school life, friendship, and failed sexual encounters. Over three seasons, the series set ratings records for the British broadcaster and won multiple awards. I forget where I saw it. Like, I used to watch it. It was really good.

They did do an American version. I think MTV did an American version that was okay. But wherever this thing is streaming now, you should check it out. And that is your comedy news for today. Go Niners.

Here’s my Niners jersey that I’m wearing. And again, if it’s your birthday, I hope you have a great birthday. And everybody in the Facebook group wishes you well, assuming you have a Facebook group. Some people do. See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Nikki Glaser, Stavros Halkias, Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, Rob Reiner

What’s in This Episode

• Nikki Glaser jokes about attending secret Taylor Swift wedding at Madison Square Garden
• Stavros Halkias discusses health struggles and drug relapse in GQ interview
• Nathan Fielder documentary ‘You Can See Everything’ with Elizabeth Holmes premiering in October
• Rob Reiner wins Emmy for guest role on The Bear, first major award since 1978

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. We have a lot to get to today as everybody got back to work. Nikki Glaser talked on stage about the wedding of Taylor Swift. I’m not sure that’s the best way to stay in the Taylor Swift camp there, Nikki, but I guess Nikki doesn’t care.

She apparently was doing this on stage during her Caesars Palace Las Vegas residency on Friday night. Nikki told the audience, I want to say I went to a wedding in Madison Square Garden three months ago, and I just want to talk about it a little, allegedly. Nikki couldn’t believe she made the guest list. She said, I’m a huge Swifty, probably the biggest Swifty that was at the event. I got the text inviting me to the wedding.

Text? I never thought a million years I’d get invited. I don’t even know them. You should thank your agent or agents. But she switched agencies.

Boy, I don’t know, Nikki. Anyway, she says, I’m in there for 12 hours and none of my family or friends know where I am. I’m off the grid for 12 hours. That’s because guests were required to surrender their phones, leaving Nikki Glaser without a single photo from the night. Nikki said she was shaking as she opened the invitation and desperately wanted to share the news with her friends.

But the instructions made it clear you can’t do that. It’s a top secret. So maybe don’t talk about it on stage in Las Vegas. So she told nobody. She says it sucks so much because it was like the best night of my life as a Swifty.

The coolest thing I’ve ever seen, the purest love I’ve ever witnessed. She talked about the A-list celebrities there. There were so many celebrities there. It was wild. Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, Julia Roberts.

Some of these celebrities were alone, and these people are never alone. One of them was J-Lo. J-Lo was alone. J-Lo was kind of like a wallflower, like alone, awkward. So since Nikki had previously met J-Lo, she approached her, and the two became best buds for the night.

Nikki said, we were like pals all night. Nikki then joked that she had to introduce the superstar to the concept of a public bathroom. Then Nikki shares that she really wanted to have a memento. She said, I got really close to stealing something from it. I want one cool artifact from that.

Later in the evening, Nikki found herself near the wedding cake while everybody else was dancing. As she watched the dance floor, she joked that Mark Zuckerberg was doing the robot and Jilly Roll was doing the worm. Then she spotted the cake. On the top was a miniature Travis, but Taylor’s cake topper was already gone. With no phones or cameras around, Nikki decided she would take the Travis, she says.

So I reach up, I get it. I’m two seconds from putting in my purse.

And then the punchline, clearly told better by Nikki Glaser, but it took me f…

She said, I hear Tom Cruise be like, put me down. You see, that’s a joke about Tom Cruise not being all that tall. The first three times I read it, I just thought Tom Cruise was actually at the wedding, and he probably was. Savros Halkias has a new special out on Netflix. He spoke to GQ in a big cover story, talked about his body.

It’s just crumbling, dude. My health’s been insane. I threw my back out right before tires started. The week before, I was deadlifting, which feels unfair to have an injury from trying to get healthy.

---

And then I broke my arm before filming this movie, Comeback King, with Judd A…

So yeah, I feel bad. I’m trying to stop doing drugs and eating crap all the time because that’s the best way to get through stress for me. Well, Star Wars, how’s that going for you, stopping doing drugs? He told GQ. I tried.

I was like, all right, we shot the special. Now my work is done.

---

And then now you have to edit it.

You have to promote it. And so I tried.

---

And then my back hurt and I couldn’t sleep.

It’s really pathetic. I’m addicted to edibles. It’s so funny. They’re drugs for children. The way we do drugs now is gummy bears.

What a pathetic and infantilized generation millennials are. But I’m addicted to those. I take a handful of candy that Fs you up every night.

---

And then I try to stop and I couldn’t sleep.

My PT was like, hey, is something different with your sleep? I was like, yeah, man. I’m like, I’m trying to stop smoking weed. And he was like, legally, I can’t tell you to do anything. But he was like, I wouldn’t do anything that disrupts your sleep right now.

So a doctor told me to keep getting messed up as far as I’m concerned. So I’ve regressed. I’ve fully relapsed. I have three more weeks of this press run. And if I stay alive through that, I think I can fix my whole life after that.

I have no ability to multitask. If I’m being successful, I’m dying. Every time I succeed, it’s like I’m trading part of my life force for the success. It’s purely transactional for me. He then said the two most successful years of my life easily shaved four to five years off my total life.

Chi-Ki was curious, is that a trade you would make? He said, no, if I knew about it ahead of time, no. But this is Aesop’s fables crap. It’s like you get everything you want and it kills you. There is tremendous buzz on this Nathan Fielder movie trailer.

Have you seen this thing with what is her name? Elizabeth Holmes. I keep confusing her with a different Elizabeth who’s in the true crime averse. But Elizabeth Holmes, you know, the Theranos woman. Have you seen this thing?

It is insane. I don’t even want to. I’m going to spoil it. But you have to watch this thing. 36 days before reporting to prison, Elizabeth Holmes, who hadn’t given an interview in a decade, decided not only to be interviewed, but she let Nathan Fielder and his crew into their home in San Diego with the understanding that, quote, you can see everything. And the people who saw the screening of this say it’s insane.

It is a hybrid documentary called You Can See Everything. It runs nearly three hours. And this is pure Nathan Fielder stuff. It was shot beginning in 2023 in top secrecy. And nobody heard about this thing until like Labor Day.

Suddenly this was all over my newsfeed. They screened it at Telluride Sunday night. You had to put your phone away. It was like a Dave Chappelle concert. 174 minutes. We are told in one scene, Fielder asks if they’ve ever heard of Abbott and Costello.

The answer, no. Or their classic comedy routine, who’s on first? He then shows them who’s on first to get their interpretation of it. Apparently they agree to be mic’d up for 12 hours a day, wide-angle cameras in place to get all the movements, other cameras getting close-ups. Fielder immerses himself in this weird world as someone she comes to trust, much to his astonishment.

Becoming so close, she asks him along on the last drive to prison. Fielder seems baffled by it all, stunned that the idea turned into a three-year trip into the mind of Elizabeth Holmes, no holds barred or expected. He told the Telluride audience, what I’m really excited about is for you to see the movie and tell me what I experienced. I don’t know why they wanted me there. Why am I there?

This thing is out in October via A24. Two hours, 54 minutes. Should be good. Catching up from the weekend. LSU football head coach Lane Kifflin walked the Tigers traditional Tiger Walk, joining him Theo Vaughn.

Rob Reiner won the award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards for his role as a restaurant consultant on season four of The Bear. Presenter Wendy McLennan-Covey accepted on behalf of Rob, who said, we all wish he was here. Rob got a standing ovation. It was his first win since 1978, a half a century ago, which is just insane. He picked up the award for Outstanding Continuing Performance by a Supporting Actor at a Comedy Series for his work on All in the Family.

So over the weekend, I went into a Jerry Lewis rabbit hole. If you listened over the weekend, you heard the Jerry Lewis episode on Saturday. So Sunday night, I found on YouTube the 1978 Jerry Lewis telethon asterisk. They cut in some stuff from later years, but the bulk of it was like a 20-hour stream of Jerry Lewis, and I watched it. I didn’t watch 20 hours.

I fast-forwarded through a lot of it. I just wanted to watch Jerry increasingly get tired. What I was stunned by was the lack of star power. It’s 37 minutes before you get to somebody you’ve really heard of, and Jerry sings three songs in the first 37 minutes, and then finally you get Tony Bennett, major star, And then the next star that I was familiar with might have been like at two in the morning. Remember Fred Travolina used to do impressions in the 70s?

You probably don’t. I mean, I was shocked at how little star power there was on this thing. I got to about the 9 a.m. Hour and Jerry was getting a little flirty with there was a performer named And he was curious as to where she had her microphone tucked away because she wasn’t holding a handheld like me or like Jerry Lewis and didn’t seem to have one on her. So you can imagine where it was hidden.

And he got a little flirty. So that was interesting. I want to finish that up. It is Wednesday. Volleyball season is over.

So I’ll be back at Trivia tonight. I’ll see the Trivia guys at 7 o’clock at the brewery. And I went out after volleyball last Wednesday. And I pulled up at the local restaurant. The local restaurant has a comedy club of sorts on the upper level.

So we pull in the parking lot, and it’s full. I had to actually park down the block. And I was curious, oh, who’s performing tonight? Joey Diaz, who some people say is the worst person on the planet and the worst person they’ve ever met. I’ve heard people say that, that Joey Diaz is terrible, terrible, terrible.

I thought it was funny that Joey Diaz was in the same building as I. I did not go upstairs to see him. I had a nice, what did I have? A buffalo chicken sandwich with my friends. Matt Matthews, a comedian I’m under-familiar with, apparently has 12 million followers on Instagram and TikTok, and he was dragged into the ring on Monday Night Raw in Alabama.

He was cheered as he spoke to Jackie Redmond during the show, but then he felt the wrath of WWE stars The Miz and Braun Breaker. They interrupted Matthews’ segment as the two poked fun at the Alabama crowd. The wrestlers took him out of the stands and dragged him into the ring. But luckily, Matt Matthews was able to fend off Wilson with a head-scissors takedown, but then got caught in The Miz’s skull-crushing finale. The Miz and Wilson, we’re told, got booed as they walked to the back.

Matthew was still in the ring when Breaker was making his entrance for the Money in the Bank qualifying match against Rey Mysterio and Ethan Page. Breaker speared The Miz and Wilson as he came out, then he put his attention on Matthews. Breaker bounced off the ropes at full speed and crushed Matthew with a spear. In a Facebook group, comedian Matt Matthews wrote, Welp, that was fun. Nimesh Patel will have a Netflix special coming out on September 22nd.

I like this trailer a lot. Let’s listen. Gushup Pramod Vinod Patel is the first Indian director of the FBI. And that means something. It means he’s also the last Indian director of the FBI.

There will be no more Indian directors of the FBI. There might never be. Indian directors, period. M. Night Shyamalan may never work again.

That’s how bad cash is up. He’s too short to lead the FBI. You can’t be 5’7 and in charge of finding missing people. How about you find the rest of yourself first, huh? If I kidnapped Savannah Guthrie’s mom, I would hide her on the top shelf.

Is she up there? I don’t know. Is she up there? Where did she go? Up next on Cash’s Most Wanted, legs.

And congratulations to controversial mega comedian Nate Bergetzi. The very controversial MAGA comedian will headline the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce’s and Industry’s inaugural Chairman’s Dinner on November 10th at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, which is an awesome building. Great museum if you’ve never been there. Josh Brown is the president and CEO of the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and he said of the controversial MAGA comedian Nate Bregazzi, we’re honored to have Nate join us for our first ever Chairman’s Dinner. And that is your comedy news for today.

See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Stavros Halkias, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler, Taylor Swift, Maria Bamford, Asku at Costco, Kelsey Cook, Taylor Tomlinson, Chad Daniels, Jim Norton

What’s in This Episode

• Stavros Halkias Netflix special release
• Stavros Halkias Maria Bamford questionnaire interview
• Conan O’Brien discusses Adam Sandler officiating Taylor Swift’s wedding
• Asku at Costco Guardian interview and fan interactions
• Kelsey Cook discusses her mother’s dementia in comedy act
• Jim Norton’s mentorship of Kelsey Cook’s comedy career

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

I hate today. Today’s the worst day of the year. It is the Tuesday after Labor Day. And boy, back when I used to actually have to go into an office, this would be the day the boss would be like, OK, summer’s over. Let’s do fall initiatives.

And like just immediately jump from, dude, I was at the beach 16 hours ago. Now you want to work? No, stop. I hate today. We’re as far from the summer in the Northeast as it gets.

Every now and then you get like one last warm weekend day where you can go down the Jersey Shore and boy, the beaches are empty and the water’s warm. If there’s not jellyfish, it can actually be a pretty awesome late bonus day. But it’s over. Now we’re back and there’s football and school. I’ve already had to teach my college classes.

I hate today. Hi. I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Stavros Alkias has a special out on Netflix today. He also answered some of the questions for the Maria Bamford questionnaire, a series of 25 questions designed by Maria Bamford.

He showed up on Vulture. I did a few of them yesterday. His answers have been pretty funny. One of the questions, what place will you never return to? Now, see, if that was me, I would get all philosophical and be like, realistically, I don’t know if I’m getting to Deception Island in Antarctica again.

I loved my time at Deception Island. I would love to go there again. I’m just being realistic at my age. I don’t know if I’m getting there again. Stavros went in a different direction.

He said, the comedy condo provided by Sidesplitters Comedy Club in Tampa. It’s bleeping disgusting. Here’s how much that place sucks. And he had an extra word after sucks. Use your imagination.

The headliners stay at a Holiday Inn instead. Nothing wrong with Holiday Inn, but you’d think a condo in Florida must be nice. But that condo, when I was an opener, this was probably eight or nine years ago, just feels disgusting. It’s in a food desert. I walked on the side of a highway to get Hormel chili and heat it up and eat it with a coffee stirrer because there were no utensils in there.

It’s the kind of place where the carpet is dirtier than outside. So I promise you, no matter how bad stuff gets, I’ll never return to that comedy condo. Stavros, if you had to move anywhere outside the U.S. Where would you go? He said, easy, Greece, immediately.

My goal in life is to end up in a place where I’m just living in Greece four months a year, beached up. Little shack. You know, a bunch of losers are pretending trad life. Like, trad is real, and they have all these anachronistic hot blonde ladies with large assets in a meadow milking a goat and stuff like that. Clean that up a little.

That doesn’t exist. I have trad Greek life where I go out and I fish and I have a little cap and my gorgeous wife with curly hair and huge assets fillets the fish and I grill it. I would chase that fake fantasy, which would probably be me splitting an apartment with a friend and we take a bus to the beach every once in a while, but I’m going to Greece for sure. His answers are fantastic. Next one.

What was the best thing you ever learned from someone you don’t like? Stavro said, I played lacrosse for half a season in high school and I effing hated it. It was too much running and I’d rather play video games and hang out with my friends. So I made up a lie to my lacrosse coach that my mom was forcing me to quit the team. I think he could tell my voice I was lying.

And he was like, hey, man, just want to let you know, life is about sticking through hard stuff. You just can’t quit when times get tough. No matter what’s going on, we could figure it out. He’s been real with me. He also gave me the space to just admit I was lying.

I was like, you’re right, coach. You’re making a lot of sense. Unfortunately, my mom is really dead set on me quitting. But now I’m curious what in that story means that Stavros didn’t like his coach. I think he didn’t like lacrosse.

Sounds like the coach was a nice guy. I will save some of those for tomorrow. It’s probably going to be a slow news week, usually is this week. Conan O’Brien was humble bragging about being at Taylor Swift’s wedding, a fancy schmancy regular guy, Conan O’Brien. He said Adam Sandler, who you may recall, officiated the wedding.

I mean, just what kind of decision is that? Like, I’m being serious. Hey, we’re getting married. We’re going to stand before our friends, including Conan O’Brien. And God, and pledge ourselves to each other, and who should officiate this beautiful, momentous occasion here at Madison Square Garden.

How about Adam Sandler? I mean, what is even the thought process there? And I’m not even dumping on Sandler, who I think he and I could be friends. We seem to dress the same, and we both like his dramatic acting roles. But, I mean, what are you doing?

Anyway.. Conan said Adam Sandler was brilliant and really sweet and perfection. And I kept bothering him because we’re friends. I kept telling him how it’s one of the finest things I’ve seen a person do. He just hit the tone.

He was funny. He was sweet. It was perfection. The Guardian asked Otzko at Costco, what’s been your most memorable interaction with a fan? She said a couple of people have cut their hair to look like mine.

Time out. I’ve seen you live, Otzko. It’s not a couple. There’s a lot of people in the audience who show up with hair like yours. Asko, what are you secretly really good at?

She said, I’m really good at physical therapy, especially for senior citizens. Like if my grandma’s knees are hurting or my mom’s knees are hurting, I know the right exercise to strengthen the muscles around there. I think it’s from my days teaching dance fitness. I really got into dance fitness in junior high and studied a lot on my own. I was cheerleader too.

Asko, if you could plan a fantasy dinner party of people living or dead, real or fictional, who’s on your list? This should be interesting. She said Lucille Ball, Stitch from Lilo and Stitch, Charlie Chaplin. I want to meet Hachiko, the Akita dog that everybody in Japan loves because he’s loyally waited for his owner at the same train station for years. And Paddington Bear.

Kelsey Cook talks to the Minnesota Star Tribune about including her mother’s dementia in her act. One of the jokes in this show is sometimes my mom thinks of my brother and I’m like, oh, I shouldn’t have cut my hair. That doesn’t get a big laugh, but she says the longer I do comedy, the more I want to make people do more than laugh. I want them to feel connected. Taylor Tomlinson said, Nobody works harder than Kelsey.

She’s one of the best comedians working today, and she only gets better and better with each new special. Husband Chad Daniels said, It makes me feel like I’m not doing much. I’ll just sit down and write and rewrite. I don’t have the concentration for that. Cook talked about her early days in clubs in Spokane and then Seattle and said, I was really dark.

One of my early jokes was that I was driving with a friend who had hiccups and she told me to scare her, so I swerved into oncoming traffic. She’s paralyzed now, but the hiccups are gone. That is dark. She reached out to Jim Norton, asking Norton to appear on her obscure podcast Norton Accepted, and then gave her a shot as a regular opener. She said, When I found out about my receptionist job, I cried at my desk and then put in my two-week notice, Jim Norton is my comedy fairy godmother.

Jim said, I was at a fairly low point in life when Kelsey and I toured together, and she was a much more valuable friend than she probably realizes. She has the ability to laugh at herself as well. I missed loudly accusing her of stealing when we were at stores while paying at the register. Jim was impressed by how Kelsey Cook handled the rise of her buddy Taylor Tomlinson. Jim said there wasn’t an ounce of jealousy or bitterness, just pure joy for the success her friend was having that says so much about the person she really is.

Jeff Curry talked to NPR about doing crowd work. He said, I would basically cut my sets in half and then supplement it with crowd work. I just kind of asked the audience about a premise before I’d get into it, and I was finding there was a lot of fun to be found in premises from the audience’s perspective. For a few months when I was on the road, I’d start the show by saying, this is kind of how it works. Like, I’m going to engage with you guys.

I don’t want you randomly yelling out. I was giving this little speech before shows, but it felt very condescending to tell them how to listen to me. So I stopped doing that. I started kind of adjusting on the fly. So if somebody was yelling out, I’d kind of separate them from the rest of the crowd.

And I say, this is kind of what not to do. When somebody’s being a jerk or whatever, I like to find an avenue for them to become someone that we clap for. Like, I’ll have a moment where I’ll be like, hey, buddy, you’re doing good. You haven’t yelled out in 20 minutes. I’m so proud of you.

And then the audience goes, oh, wow. And that’s how that guy got attention in a positive light. Homa Jalili has a new four-part stand-up special on Radio 4 in the UK. He says comedy is one of the last bastions of truth. So many posts are created specifically to make discourse more polarized, but thankfully, comedy’s one of the last bastions of truth.

Comedians, by and large, wish to only entertain, inform, or elevate. Doing all three is a challenge, but it’s a good test to set yourself. Such noble intentions will always yield good and juicy fruits. In his new special, Namaste, Jalili explores how people’s lives can be shaped by stereotypes. He said, all too often, human beings think in boxes.

Sometimes we have narrow frames of reference, so we can’t really compute what has actually happened and how to react to it. Stereotypes are broad-stroke frames of reference to make us understand the world. Namaste begins September 10th at 6.30 on BBC Radio 4. Episodes also available on BBC Sounds. Leanne Morgan sounds pretty down-to-earth.

She says, I still love to wash clothes. I love going to the grocery store. I love a Costco run. I even do that on the road sometimes, which is crazy. And I try to cram stuff in a suitcase.

Not sure if she’s talking about herself or my wife. I think they would really get along. My wife loves her show. Leanne said, I really am doing the same thing I’ve always done. I’m driving an older car.

I think about grandbaby toys. That sets me on fire. I do get to stay in nicer hotels. I get to do that now. I’m very lucky, and I think I’m in a lane by myself.

They tell me that all the time at Netflix. There’s nobody like me talking about the things I’m talking about. Talked about getting older. When I turned 40, I cried all day. Don’t even know why, because the next day I was fine.

When I turned 50, that scared me to death. But then it was the most freeing decade of my life. A wonderful decade.

And then 60 was, that was a booger.

I felt like, okay, am I a senior? I do think that it’s now the new 40. I really feel that way. I think women are going and doing and feel good and feel pretty and taking care of themselves. It’s not like when my little grandma was in a house dress killing a chicken out in the yard and then frying it in front of me.

She was a farm woman. She looked 100 when she was 50. But nobody looks like that now at her age. And that is your comedy news for today. Summer is over.

I’m depressed. Dang it. I like my summers. I’ll get over it. It’s not even volleyball tomorrow.

Volleyball’s over. Now we’re back to being a trivia team. And we’ll see the trivia guys. Hi, trivia guys. And have a beer or two.

And then you don’t sleep well. And it’s a whole cycle. See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Pete Davidson, Cat Williams, Joe Rogan, Ricky Gervais, Stavros Halkias, Kelsey Cook, Josh Johnson, Ronnie Ching

What’s in This Episode

• Netflix renews Pete Davidson podcast and orders Cat Williams project
• Pete Davidson donates $20K to fan with 5P syndrome
• Joe Rogan criticizes president’s Lake Ontario renaming claim
• Ricky Gerzais Legend tour receives mixed reviews from The Telegraph
• Stavros Halkias Netflix special and Bamford Questionnaire answers
• Kelsey Cook discusses foosball, parents’ love story, and mother’s dementia

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Oh boy, it’s the last day of summer. Make it a good one. Hi, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Netflix is doubling down on podcasts. They have renewed the Pete Davidson thing, and they have ordered a podcast, you know, well, I don’t have that argument.

It’s not a podcast. It’s a TV show. There’s nothing podcast about it, but they’ve ordered a thing from Cat Williams. It is unclear what Cat Williams will do, but I’m sure it will be interesting, as he always is.

Meanwhile, Pete Davidson met a fan in Brooklyn who had a genetic disorder.

Liam is an aspiring comic who has 5P syndrome. According to People magazine, the condition can cause symptoms including high-pitched crying that’s like a cat’s voice, and physical symptoms like a small jaw, round face, and low-set ears. Pete ran into the guy while filming Tommy Karate. And apparently made a $ 20, 000 donation. Liam’s mom shared a photo and captioned it, a heartfelt thank you to actor, writer, comedian, and native New Yorker Pete Davidson for taking the time to learn about 5P syndrome.

Meet our Liam the lion and show him so much love. We couldn’t help but smile knowing that along with being New York kids, you both have something pretty special in common. You’re both comedians. Nice job out of Pete. Joe Rogan, not happy with the president of the United States claiming to have renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, which is, of course, nonsense.

I’m not going to pull a punch here. Nonsense. Send your letters to me. Joe Rogan said it’s to distract you from the fact we’re in a war. We can’t win with Iran.

It doesn’t make any sense. Who cares if it’s Lake Ontario? It’s a good name. We’ve had that name forever. Ricky Gervais kicked off a new tour.

The folks at The Telegraph went to see him and apparently did not enjoy it. The Telegraph writes Ricky Gervais kicked off the opening night of his new tour in Guildford with a recycled joke from his 2024 show Mortality. That joke is about how Ricky feels like he’s still working class, so when builders come by, he’s rude about the artworks in his own house, insulting Monet in his most working class accent. The Telegraph says it’s one of several familiar routines that he revisits in Legend. The second is all about the hostile tweets he receives.

And I don’t want to repeat what he said. You can go see this show. I don’t want to get in trouble. We’re told in this slightly confused new show, Ricky Gervais seems to be caught between rehashing old gags and his own identity crisis. He hates the middle class that makes up his audience and feels bad about the builder joke because it’s perpetuating middle class myths about working class people and prejudice.

The evening feels like a hodgepodge of brief ideas, which are superbly connected due to Gervais’s sheer will of confidence, but are rather short and underexplored. Spoilers here, but this is pretty good. Ricky sets his father’s life story. Born 1919 in Canada, volunteered in the Second World War, fought in Europe, met Ricky’s mother, worked on building sites till he was 72. Against the modern Sunday dads taking babies out for avocado in Hampstead cafes.

The only time Ricky saw his father cry was wiping away a tear at the news of his own father’s death. Ricky said, we never spoke about it again, but if you go online today, you’ll see a 20-year-old film himself in his car. Crying out his eyes because he was misgendered in Starbucks. One more spoiler, at the end of a Holocaust routine, Ricky said, whatever you think of this joke, remember, I did The Office. Stavros Alkias has a special out on Netflix tomorrow.

He did The Bamford Questionnaire, which is a series of 25 questions designed by Maria Bamford. Vulture had this story. Let’s take a look at a couple of them. Stavros, what do you like to eat or drink right before bed? He said ice cream.

It’s a big problem, actually. The addiction I have not been able to kick for real is night ice cream. It has ruined my life. Actually, this is so pathetic. I’d almost kicked my night ice cream addiction two years ago.

The Ravens lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC Championship. I was at home. I was at the game. The Super Bowl was on my 35th birthday, and I had convinced myself that it was fate. We were going to win because it mattered so much.

I was clean off night ice cream. Then that loss sent me on a three-week bender where I was getting Ben and Jerry’s stuff. Now I’m on Halo Top. I’m on that low-cal stuff, which is basically the methadone of ice cream. But honestly, I eat it every night.

Now, I’m on a Klondike bar jag, and that’s a big problem. I don’t like where that leads. These are great answers. Next question. What would your religion be like if you could make up your own?

Stavros said, Unfortunately, there’s a part of me that really wants to be at the top of a sex cult. I got a buddy who just moved up to Tilson, New York, and I spent a weekend there and had a great time. What if, instead of my buddy’s place, I had a nice meadow and it was me, 12 people, it’s mostly women, but maybe some gay guys in the mix because I still want some bros around, but I don’t want that much sexual competition. That’s my ideal religion. It’s just me pampered.

I think I’d be really good at that. I just love how every cult starts with these beliefs and then everybody sold their possessions and moved across the country and they’re like, oh, by the way, this is nuts. But God said I have to, I’ll clean this up, hook up with everybody’s wife, so I’d love to be the figurehead of that type of religion. A hedonistic, pleasure-based, I’ll skip the next phrase, style religion. He was quite naughty there.

You can read this on Vulture. Let’s do one more. What’s your most repetitive long-term fear? Stavros said death, without question. The Reaper’s coming for us, and this year is the year I realized I’m dying.

I mean, you always know you’re dying, but this is the year I was like, oh, stuff’s starting to go. My back is messed up. I broke my arm. My shoulder will never be the same again. It’s like when you stop taking a car to the mechanic and you’re like, am I going to replace the muffler or am I going to get a new car?

That’s what’s happening with my body. Kelsey Cook talked about her love of foosball and said, it’s generally a solo sport. You can play doubles in foosball, but if something goes wrong, it’s not like a team sport where you have a bunch of other people to blame. Same with comedy. You’re accountable for your own stuff.

I love both of them so much. It sounds silly because it’s foosball, but it’s literally the reason I exist. She explains. My parents met playing in a professional foosball tournament, so I would not exist if it weren’t for foosball. I still go to the weekly Minneapolis tournaments.

I can’t go all the time with a tour schedule, but I’ll still try to go quite a bit if I’m back in Spokane. My dad has started to get back into it again, so I’ll go with him. I have this wonderful foosball table. My wife was trying to have me get rid of it because it wasn’t being used because the kids are grown, empty nest. So I move it up to the lake house.

I have this fantasy that someday, like, my children are going to visit me at the lake house and we can play foosball and use the new dartboard that I hung. But nobody comes. Nobody visits, Dad. Very sad. But I do have a nice foosball table that I’m fond of.

Kelsey said, my mom and I won women’s expert doubles together at the Hall of Fame foosball tournament in Vegas. And that was, like, somebody got the winning shot on video and I have it and I cherish it because.. As you would know from my special, my mom has dementia, and I’m so happy we got to do that together that I have that moment on video because we both look so happy. Josh Johnson and Ronnie Ching had a conversation for Interview Magazine. Josh said, when I look at YouTube and what I put out each week, those are very topical videos, very of the moment.

They’re also me trying to share as if we’re just chilling in your living room, like having a conversation with a friend. The special was intended to be timeless. I’m fully aware that a year from now, there’ll be plenty of sets that I’ve done that people don’t care about. That’ll happen. I also think that specials are how you distinguish certain areas of your evolution.

My former co-worker Jamie Foxx is putting out a comedy special. Take Care of Yourself will be on Hulu October 7th. Regular listeners to this program know that I fear when your comedy special goes to Hulu, you’re a little past prime here. Sorry, Foxx. The Hoolaria specials, if you want a list, Hannah Berner, Ralph Barbosa, Bill Burr, Chris DiStefano, Gaffigan, Zarna Garg, Nikki Glaser, Alana Glaser, Jessica Kirson, Mateo Lane, and Sebastian Maniscalco.

I don’t know, but okay, I’ll watch it. The Boston Globe asked Daniel Sloss, if you could travel anywhere right now, where would you go? He said, Mallorca, Spain. His wife likes hotels with swimming pools, so he’s been converted to those type of holidays. Does he like being unplugged on vacation?

I would never want to be fully unplugged because it’s not a reality anymore. But I’m for things like agreeing to leave the phone in the hotel room when you’re out and sticking to it. But yeah, I don’t need to be in my head that much. I got a therapy to get out of my head. If you hang out with me, my phone is almost always in my hand.

I am a phone addict, but I’m really good when I do travel. That phone stays away. You won’t find me like doing that at all. When I go somewhere, I am there to see something. Daniel, do you vacation to relax or for the adventure of it all?

He said, to relax and to spoil my wife and children. Thankfully, I’ve been forced to travel from a very young age because of my job. If I hadn’t done stand-up, I wouldn’t have gone to 90% of the countries I’ve gone to. I think it’s important to travel to learn. It gets rid of so much ignorance.

If you could travel with one famous person or celebrity, who would it be? He said, Gordon Ramsay. I feel like he would take me to good spots. He would treat with me and I wouldn’t have to sort out my accent or stop my swearing. Best gift to give a traveler?

Sloss said, a universal adapter. The number of times I go to a country and don’t remember the different plug sockets. And just for the record, every socket in the world should be a British plug socket. It’s the strongest, it’s the best, it’s the fastest. The most nationalistic I’ve become about my country is I go to Switzerland or Australia or America and I see your flimsy little wall sockets where nothing stays plugged in.

I have this hole right here. You hear that? That’s a shoebox under the desk where I record here in the studio. And that is filled with like a million international adapters. And that, my friends, puts a wrap on summer.

Tomorrow is the worst day of the year. So sad. And that’s also your comedy news for today. See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: David Letterman, Dan Rather, George Meade, Mayor Giuliani, Jerry Lewis

What’s in This Episode

• Comedy after 9/11 attacks
• David Letterman’s first show back September 17 2001
• Late night TV response to September 11
• WOR New York radio station coverage of 9/11
• 25th anniversary of September 11 2001

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mac. Let me do some house cleaning before we dive in today. So on Saturdays, I’ve been doing these deep dives, and today’s also a deep dive. And I’m aware today’s not a Saturday, but the calendar forced my hand.

Yesterday, I wanted to talk about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, and that was an episode yesterday that I feel came out pretty well. And today I want to talk about comedy after 9-11 because Friday is the 25th anniversary. And let me just table set before we get into it. I was in New York City that day. I was the assistant program director of WOR New York.

Our offices were on 40th Street and Broadway, so I don’t want to make it sound like it was across the street. But we had a large bay window in the main studio where the morning show was, and you could directly see the Twin Towers down there. And on that particular morning, I was editing some tape. It was about 8.50 something in the morning. And I noticed on the TV that there was a fire at the Twin Towers.

I walked down the hall. The boss wasn’t in yet. And I said, hey, let’s keep the morning show on the air. The Twin Towers are on fire. I remember a couple of minutes later, George Meade, who was the helicopter pilot who did traffic reports, he was in studio that day.

And he immediately said, I flew copters over the city for 25 years. It’s crystal clear out there. There’s no way you would accidentally crash into that building. And we know how the rest of the day went. I watched one of the towers fall with my own eyes while looking out the window.

The other one I saw fall on TV. I was running the board, even though that wasn’t my job anymore. But whoever was running the board that morning needed a bathroom break. So I jumped behind the board for 10 minutes. So all that growing up in New York City, dealing with the stress of that day.

Having staffers who we had sent down to the World Trade Center. I’d had one co-worker, Mara, we had sent her down to cover. We didn’t hear from her for like six hours. I happened to be in the lobby when she showed up and I gave her a hug and she looked at me like, and in modern times, I’d probably get in trouble with HR. She was like, what are you doing?

And I’m like, I thought you were dead. So I share all that because it shapes everything about me. And the weeks after September 11th in New York City were unlike anything before or since. It was very disorienting. Everybody knew somebody who was in those buildings that day.

Everybody knew somebody with a story of, oh, normally I would have been at work except I was sick or the train was delayed or I went to my parent-teacher meeting. Everybody knew a story like that. Everybody knew somebody. The late night shows went dark immediately. No Letterman, no Leno, no Conan.

News coverage ran continuously for days. That was the time when we first got the tickers on the bottoms. I mean, what would you even do on a talk show that night? I’ll tell you a story from the radio days. So I wound up in charge of the radio station all day, and I immediately gave the order.

It just sounds like, you know, you know what I mean. I was in charge. And I said, OK, don’t play any jingles. You know, the W.O.R. No jingles, no commercials.

Keep the air stark. As the day went on, I even told people, don’t even screen the calls. Just plop people down. This is just about raw emotion. Just let people talk.

And that’s what we did.

And then my overnight producer comes in and I’m like, OK, I’m going to me and…

So let me see if we all get four hours sleep. And she’s like, yeah. And I booked these guys. They do like phony phone calls. And I was like, what are you?

Are you insane? No. And I didn’t let her do the guess. I’m like, just just take callers. Are you crazy?

So, you know, how would you even do a late night talk show on September 11th in New York City, right? And I’m looking at the list. Letterman and Conan were in New York. Leno, I guess, was out in L.A. Those days.

You know, when there was a time, like, how is anything ever going to feel normal again? The first person back was David Letterman, September 17th, 2001, six days after the attacks. Broadcasting from the Ed Sullivan Theater, so about 10, 9 or 10 blocks north of where I had been on September 11th. The city smelled like smoke, and oh yeah, every surface of the city had missing person flyers. Do you remember those?

Have you seen this person? I mean, in those early days, we thought people were just missing, or they were somehow disoriented from the explosions, or they were going to somehow crawl out of the rubble. There were people lined up at the emergency rooms, just waiting for all the bodies to come in, and none of that happened. Nobody ever.. You know, there was none of that.

So you would see all these missing person flyers and it was just, oh, I can’t even. So there’s David Letterman and the band is there and Paul Schaefer’s there. Letterman walks out. He doesn’t do a monologue. He sits at his desk and talked.

He talked about being confused about what to do. He talked about his son. He talked about the city. This is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked. And I need to ask your patience and indulgence here because I want to say a few things.

And believe me, sadly, I’m not going to be saying anything new. And in the past week, others have said what I will be saying here tonight far more eloquently than I’m equipped to do. But if we are going to continue to do shows.. I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes, and so that’s what I’m going to do here. It’s terribly sad here in New York City.

We’ve lost 5,000 fellow New Yorkers, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can see it. It’s terribly sad. Terribly, terribly sad.

And watching all of this, I wasn’t sure. That I should be doing a television show because for 20 years we’ve been in the city making fun of everything, making fun of the city, making fun of my hair, making fun of Paul. So to come to this circumstance that is so desperately sad, and I don’t trust my judgment in matters like this, but I’ll tell you the reason that I am doing a show and the reason I am back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani. Uh. Very early on after the attack and how strange does it uh..

Sound to invoke that phrase after the attack uh.. Mayor giuliani encouraged us and here lately implored us to to go back to our lives go on living uh.. Continue trying to make uh.. New york city uh.. The place that it should be twenty years we’ve been here in new york city we’ve worked closely with the police officers and and uh..

Firefighters And fortunately, most of us don’t really have to think too much about what these men and women do on a daily basis. And the phrase, New York’s finest and New York’s bravest, did it mean anything to us personally, firsthand? Well, maybe, hopefully, but probably not. But boy, it means something now, doesn’t it? They put themselves in harm’s way to protect people like us.

And the men and women from the firefighters and the police department who are lost, are going to be missed by this city for a very, very long time. And my hope for myself and everybody else, not only in New York but everywhere, is that we never, ever take these people for granted. Absolutely never take them for granted. David Letterman, whose whole persona was ironic distance, got emotional. Dan Rather came out as a guest.

He cried on camera. The face of CBS News, crying on a comedy talk show. And that’s what you did. You put two people in a room and you let the cameras run. Towards the end of the show, David Letterman said, if we’re going to continue, we must be allowed to be funny again.

He said it quietly, almost as a question. And the audience responded like it was the thing they’d been waiting to hear someone with authority say out loud. Not that everything was okay, not that the grief was over, that the laughing could come back without it being a betrayal that people had died. That permission, from a man who had spent 20 minutes being about as unfunny as ever been, was one of the more important things said in public in that specific week. Now, I don’t know if you can hear it in my voice.

The emotions are coming back. I’m going to take the break because I need to regroup. That same night, September 17th, 2001, Jon Stewart returned. That was the same night Letterman did. Letterman came back with grief.

Jon Stewart was grief plus anger plus the beginning of the political argument that he would spend the next decade making on The Daily Show about media failure and institutional dishonesty and the gap between what the country was being told and what was actually happening. John talked about his view from his apartment and how he could still see the Statue of Liberty after the towers fell. He talked about what the towers had meant, what their absence meant.

---

And then he made the argument that the view from his apartment told him that …

There was the show that existed before 9-11 and the show that existed after 9-11. Related, but different. Jon Stewart gave himself the permission to be serious about things that mattered. Saturday Night Live returned September 29, 2001, with a cold open. Lorne Michaels standing on stage with New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Time out there. The last 25 years have definitely changed Rudy Giuliani’s legacy, but in 2001, he was a massively respected figure. Out of the Letterman clip I cut, Dave did about two minutes just praising Mayor Giuliani. In my old basement in Long Island, I had a framed photo of Giuliani at one of the funerals, and the guy went to every funeral and it was just such a striking photo. I probably still have it in the back.

I don’t have it hung up right now in the new house. But if we can separate the Giuliani in our mind in 2026 from the one in 2001, this is Lorne Michael standing on stage with the mayor of New York City, surrounded by police officers and firefighters. Lauren looked at Giuliani and asked, can we be funny? Giuliani said, why start now? The audience laughed.

Paul Simon came out and sang the boxer. And we had begun the transition from before to after. The acknowledgement that the after was going to include comedy again. Bill Maher was on Politically Incorrect that same September 17th. A guest claimed that the hijackers were cowards.

Bill Maher said, whatever else you could say about the hijackers, cowardly wasn’t the right word. The timing was catastrophic. I even considered not even repeating this segment here 25 years later. FedEx and Sears pulled their advertising from the show immediately. Several ABC affiliates refused to air it.

ABC canceled Politically Incorrect in 2002. Officially, ratings, but the timeline made the relationship to that comment hard to deny. Then there’s Gilbert Gottfried. October 5th, 2001. It’s three weeks and three days after the attacks.

It’s the Friars Club Roast a Few Hefner being held at the New York Hilton. Now, let me jump in again, because I’m sure you’re picking up how raw this is for me. So as I set up the Gilbert thing, I’m like, let me pull the clip. Now, to pull clips, I do this five, six days a week on the podcast. I use a program called Audio Hijack.

And what it does is it hijacks the sound card. So if I play something, say, off YouTube, it grabs the audio. It hijacks the audio. I do this every day. Today, in the middle of doing this episode, I saw the word hijack, and I’m having that emotional reaction that’s coming out on the show today.

Anyway, it’s the roast of Hugh Hefner, and Gilbert Gottfried explained he wanted to discuss the elephant in the room, and here’s the joke. The room booed him. Not politely. Booed him. In the way a room full of comedians boos someone who’s gone somewhere the room isn’t ready to go.

Too soon? Too soon, 24 days after the attacks, in New York City, making a joke about flying planes into buildings. Too soon. Gilbert stood his ground and then pivoted. He started telling the aristocrats.

And he kept going. And by the time he finished his version of the aristocrats, the room was laughing. It’s textbook. Gilbert tested a line, found it too far for the room, and instead of retreating, he went a different direction in a way that gave the room permission to laugh without having to endorse the original joke. It’s so disconnected from 9-11, laughing at the aristocrats doesn’t feel like it’s laughing at the attacks.

It feels like laughing at something that exists in its own separate universe of comedy transgression that has nothing to do with what just happened. Gilbert found the room. As we went into the fall, there were also, that’s when I was producing Joan Rivers’ radio show, and that’s when the anthrax was hitting New York. That was like October, if I’m remembering correctly. So we’re not even done with 9-11, and now working in the media in New York City, opening the mail every day might get you killed.

The comedy cellar stayed open. The performers working at the cellar were working through something, not necessarily material, but through the grief and trying to find jokes that still worked in the new world. Something had shifted. Some comedians addressed it from the stage, others avoided it entirely and did their regular material. That in itself was a statement.

I remember it was weird at that time when people didn’t want to talk about 9-11. The first wave of comedians to incorporate 9-11 material into their actual stand-up acts did so carefully and mostly through the side door. Not so much here’s a 9-11 joke, but here’s a joke about airport security, or here’s a joke about the news. By the time Louis Black and David Cross and others were doing explicitly political stand-up about the war in Iraq, comedy had fully absorbed the event and was using it as subject matter rather than navigating around it. That brings us to this clip.

I’ll let Joe Rogan and Louis C.K. Take it from here. Louis C.K. Caught some grief for this upcoming joke. Giuliani, at one point in time, people thought he should be president.

After the way he handled 9-11. That’s right. Everybody’s like, he’s our leader. Yeah. And just because he walked down the street with a coffee and said, oh, boy, it’s rough.

That’s basically what he did. He didn’t stop 9-11. He didn’t solve 9-11. He didn’t save anybody. There was no one to save.

That’s the most up thing about that day is that there was no, you know, they had the hospitals were all ready and there was not like one. There was like nobody was injured. Were you living in New York City when that happened? Yeah, I was. I was not in the city.

The day before on the 10th, I flew to L.A. To pitch a TV show. Wow. And my wife was pregnant. And we were living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which was right.

I mean, it came out of our house. The towers were our view right out the door. And so she was there six months pregnant and whammo. And she called me. It was like 9 in the morning in L.A.

Or earlier, I guess. It was like 6. And she called me and she was just bawling. And I was like, what’s wrong? And she couldn’t say anything.

Partly I’m like, am I in trouble?

---

And then she says, turn on the TV.

And I saw these towers on fire and I was like, okay. It’s nothing to do with home. This is a big, it’s a world problem. Not a me problem. I’m pretty sure that’s not my fault.

No. No. Anyway, she handled it really well. Todd Barry, you know Todd, right? He called her.

She’s the one who told him what had happened. He woke up not understanding what was happening, and he was really scared, and called my ex-wife, and she calmed him down. She’s a good person.

---

Speaking of Todd Barry, I think this is actually the best 9-11 material that …

I’ve always liked this one. You guys want to hear my favorite September 11th story? I know, that’s probably not the way I should have phrased that. We’ll rewind that one. Want to hear my most bizarre September 11th song?

Is that better? I’m walking down the street. It’s smoky, it’s sad, it’s awful. I see a guy I know a little bit coming towards me. He comes within a foot of me, looks up, and he goes..

The new Mercury Rev album is out. Are you sure about that? Because I just watched the news, and I didn’t see that. Comedy works around the edge of the thing, finds the angle that allows the room to breathe, and eventually, when the room’s ready, looks at the thing itself. The room eventually did get ready, it always does.

That’s what comedy is for, and that Here’s your comedy news for today. See you tomorrow.

---

---

---

Featured: Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ed McMahon, Don Rickles, Sammy Davis Jr., Ralphie May

What’s in This Episode

• Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon history and legacy
• 1976 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis reunion on live telethon
• Telethon’s move from New York to Las Vegas in 1973
• Jerry Lewis’s film career and French critical reception
• Don Rickles’s relationship with the telethon across decades
• 44-year run of the telethon from 1966 to 2010

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

On Saturdays, I’ve been doing deep dives into single topics. Today, we will talk about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. I don’t know how well this episode is going to do. I’m doing this one for me for reasons I’ll explain after the break. But let’s dive in and start with the number that’s almost impossible to process in 2026.

In 1976, guess how many people tuned in to watch at least part of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day telethon? That number? 85 million. That’s more than the Super Bowl was doing back in those days. Now that’s 1976. It’s 50 years ago at that point, but that’s when I first got into the telethon.

We’ll get into that later. 85 million Americans tuned in to watch part of Jerry Lewis hosting a 21 and a half hour live TV event from Las Vegas, surrounded by a rotating cast of celebrities, raising money for kids with muscular dystrophy, smoking, visibly deteriorating in real time as the hours wore on, and occasionally doing something weird that it burned itself into the memory of everyone who saw it. The Jerry Lewis Telethon ran from 1966 to 2010. 44 years. Boy, it’s been gone that long already. I still miss it every year. I’ll talk about it after the break.

Almost every significant comedian of that era, 1966 to 2010, performed on it at some point. Some performed before anyone knew who they were. Some at the height of their fame. All of it was live. Some performed at three in the morning.

Like I talked a couple weeks ago about Ralphie May. I saw him in the middle of the night. To a casino audience that had nothing else to do. All of this was live. None of it was repeatable, and as a comedy document, the telethon captures something about four decades of American stand-up that no other archive can match.

All right, I gotta jump in a little. If you never saw this thing, it would come on at nine o’clock on Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, and it would go until six-something the next day. It never seemed to end at a regular time. In the 6 p.m. Hour, it would kind of Rap.

Jerry looked wrecked, destroyed. He’d been up for most of the 21 hours.

And then Tony Orlando here in New York would finish it up and maybe they’d ro…

But it would it would end at like six something. And over the years. So I got into this kid. Here’s why I was going to do this after the break. But let me do now.

So my dad was a bartender and my dad worked nights and my dad loved TV. But when he would get home in those days, remember TV signed off? If you were up at like midnight, one in the morning, they’d play the national anthem and TV would go off. There wasn’t younglings. There was no TV to watch.

If you put on channel two at three in the morning, there was static. There weren’t things to watch. One of the reasons younglings like me even knew about Johnny Carson was because your choices at midnight might be the second half of Carson, an old black and white movie, and nothing. The channels actually played the national anthem and signed off. Channel 2, New York.

So my dad, who loved TV, but was working when TV was on, would get home and there was nothing on. So he didn’t get to watch TV except Labor Day because this thing went 24 hours. So he loved the Labor Day telethon, which is why I’m doing this today. I’m indulging myself. He’d make himself a bowl of like fruit and he would sit there and smoke Lucky Strike cigarettes and probably drink a Rheingold or a Schaefer and watch this thing.

And there was a time when the guest would be the ilk of Frank Sinatra. But by the time this thing was wrapping down in 2010 and my father was long gone, this was a relic. I mean, I would watch this thing and have the memories of being a kid and be like, oh, even though I’m a kid, I understand that Frank Sinatra is a major star. And by like the 2000s, it was like, who are these people on this show? It just had become such a relic that I couldn’t stop watching it because it was amazing.

Jerry Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in Newark in 1926 into a vaudeville family where show business was the household language. He developed a comedy act by 12, miming to phonograph records. One would say he was the Sarah Cooper of his day, founding the physical vocabulary that would define everything that came later. He met Dean Martin in 1946. They paired up.

Dean as the suave, effortlessly cool singer. Jerry Lewis as the manic, rubber-faced kid who couldn’t hold himself together. They were enormously successful, and then in 1956, they split up, and they barely spoke for 20 years. Jerry went into films, The Bellboy, The Ladies’ Man, The Nutty Professor, movies where he functioned as his own director, in ways that French critics took seriously while American critics were dismissing him as a clown. Yeah, remember that whole thing that the French loved Jerry Lewis?

He received the Legion of Honor in France in 1983. The telethon began in 1966, broadcasting from a single New York station, Channel 5 here in New York, at least. I’m not 100% sure about it, 1966, but by the 70s, it was definitely on Channel 5, raising over a million dollars in its first year. By 1973, the telethon had moved to Las Vegas, which was the decision that made everything more entertaining and more revealing. Vegas in the 70s and 80s was still Rat Pack territory.

Entertainers staying up all night was recent mythology, and the telethon fit naturally into an ecosystem built around performers doing things at 3 in the morning that wouldn’t happen anywhere else. And again, remember, I’m watching in New York, so if Ralphie Mays popping on at 3 in the morning Eastern, it’s only midnight in Vegas. Not absurd, right? The show moved to LA for a little bit, then back to Las Vegas. The co-host, Ed McMahon, co-hosted 38 times.

So that gave it a little weight, right? Because he had Carson’s sidekick there with Jerry Lewis, so it made it feel more legit. Frank Sinatra would come on. Sammy Davis Jr. Appeared.

Now, by 1966, the Rat Pack wasn’t really a thing anymore. That era was becoming mythology, but the people were still around, and Jerry Lewis was genuinely of that world and genuinely friends with those people, and the telethon was where those friendships could be visible without it feeling like promotion. Then there was the 1976 event. I feel like I saw this live. I feel like I was watching this.

I feel like they did this on Monday afternoon. I might be making all this up. Frank Sinatra walks out and surprises Jerry Lewis.

---

And then behind Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin.

It was the first time Lewis and Martin had been seen together in public in more than 20 years. Cameras running, live TV, no script. I have a friend who loves what you do every year. And who just wanted to come out. Would you send my friend out, please?

Where is he? Would you send him out here? Come here. Break it. Up.

What is this here? Break it up. I think it’s about time, don’t you? Thank you. I think it’s about time.

Thank you. I don’t know. How you been? You know, it seems like we haven’t seen each other for 20 years. Well, you know, there was all those rumors about our breaking up, and then when I started the show and you weren’t.

Here, I believed it. Don Rickles is the comedian whose relationship with the telethon deserves its own look. Don did enough appearances across the decades that the MDA later compiled a dedicated episode of just Don Rickles on the telethon for their highlight reel series on streaming. Both Don and Jerry came out of the same entertainment ecosystem. Las Vegas showrooms, the Rat Pack, Orbit, the world where insult comedy and Jewish comedy and Italian-American showmanship existed in close proximity and fed each other for decades.

Don Rickles insulting Jerry Lewis on live TV in front of a Las Vegas midnight audience was two people from the same world doing the thing the world did. Jerry, it’s such a treat for me to get up early, to be here for this wonderful, wonderful occasion. I mean, I know the children, and I know the problem, but I say from my heart, really, I’m so annoyed with you. I really am. I was never a fan of yours.

You know that. And yet, you’ve asked me to come, and it was very sweet of you to ask me. Ed wanted me to come, but he thought I had a bottle of booze in my hip pocket. But you I’ve never liked. You know that.

But, and look at you today. You’re the same age as me, only on you it shows. Everybody’s Sammy. They all told you you look handsome. You look wonderful.

Look at your neck. You can tell your age right away. The neck hangs a little bit. You know what I mean? In a year, you’re going to be on a fence going, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah. The insults were real enough to be funny and safe enough to be affectionate, which is Don Rickles exactly. It worked because everybody in the room, the audience, the TV audience, Jerry, understood the difference between an insult that draws blood and an insult that says, I know you well enough to do this. Don Rickles was at his best not doing material. He was best at responding.

At a telethon at three in the morning with a depleted casino audience and a host had been awake for 16 hours was a great canvas for that approach. Don Rickles didn’t need a good room. He needed a real situation. Now you might be like, Johnny Mac, all right, enough with the 1960s. Well.

Fast forward to 1995. You know who did the show? Jerry Seinfeld. The telethon was still kind of operating at the high end and could get Jerry Seinfeld, an A-lister, appearing not to promote himself, He already had the top sitcom, but because the telethon was significant enough that people came. Let me tell you how you can improve your show.

You know what the trouble is? I got to tell you, Jerry, it’s very important that you understand that with comedy and You have to be the rooting interest. Yes. Right. You stand too damn tall.

Too tall. Yes. You should crouch a little like this. That’s good. Okay.

Good. How does it feel? Is it comfortable? It feels shorter. Yes.

You could make a fortune from this. They would know you in every country in the world. Really? All around the world? Yes.

I mean, right now you’re just local, but you could be very good. I would love to go statewide. During the 80s, Billy Crystal, big star, appeared regularly. Crystal was what the telethon needed during prime hours, skilled enough to read the room, warm enough to fit the charity, funny enough to justify the airtime. In earlier days, Jackie Gleason would come on.

Then in 1997, Jimmy Fallon performed stand-up on the telethon. He was 22 years old. This is a year before Jimmy Fallon joined Saturday Night Live. He was taking classes at the Groundlings, hadn’t landed anything. Somehow, he got a slot on the telethon.

That’s what this show was, especially as we got into the later years. Who’s this James Fallon kid? Who is he? Why is he on? Hello, my name is Jimmy Fallon, and welcome to the auditions for Troll Productions Incorporated.

Remember, we’re looking for a star or celebrity to sponsor our new line of Troll Dolls and our new series of commercials. So let’s start the auditions. Thanks for coming. First up, Mr. John Travolta.

She’s like, thanks a lot, I mean, I swear to God, this news is so weird over here, right? I mean, like, who does his hair? Like, his hair’s so frizzy, I mean, like, you know, like, you guys probably get some, like, anti-freeze shampoo or something to freeze. Him, right? We talked a few weeks ago about Ralphie May showing up.

Seeing Ralphie May in a casino showroom at two in the morning before people knew his name was a specific memory that people like me hold on to clearly, and I played the clip. I won’t do it again. Go back and listen to, it’s like three weeks ago now. The Ralphie May episode. I played the clip there.

And you can hear the audience not knowing how to deal with this guy and Ralphie winning the room. The telethon put comedians in conditions that revealed something about them that normal contacts don’t. Midnight to six in the morning on a Jerry Lewis telethon was its own ecosystem operating by different rules than the primetime portion of the show. The big guests were gone. The network affiliates were running reduced staffs.

Jerry Lewis had been doing this thing for eight or ten hours, smoking continuously, running on whatever combination of adrenaline and who knows what else got him through the night. And into that context came comedians whose agents had gotten on the slot because exposure is exposure. You were doing material at four in the morning to an audience that had arrived at a casino and stumbled into a free show. Right after a video about a child in a wheelchair and right before another desperate phone appeal for money. The whiplash was the entire experience.

A comedian doing tight, constructed stand-up material right after a tear-jerker video segment. You had to reset the room in your first 30 seconds. If you can’t do that, the next five minutes, long, awkward. By hour 15 or 16, Jerry Lewis was no longer performing in any controlled or calculated sense. He was on camera, exhausted, wired, smoking, completely invested.

He would cry. He made jokes that didn’t work. He didn’t care. He moved on. He argued with the production team in front of the camera.

Again, this is all live. Did I mention he smoked? In 2007, he said a gay slur on camera. Live TV. He apologized.

In another era, that might have been handled quietly, but by 2007, the show was in decline. Donations were falling. Affiliates were dropping the show or only airing part of it. Couldn’t draw the celebrities anymore. A lot of the people he had been friends with were gone by then.

And in 2011.. The MDA informed Jerry Lewis he had completed his run. He was 85 years old and had raised $ 2. 5 billion for them. Let’s remember it like this. It’s hour 18, and there’s a guy in a tuxedo who hasn’t slept.

He’s standing in front of a tote board in Las Vegas, smoking and doing whatever he needs to keep the thing moving for another hour. For charity. That’s your comedy news for today.

---

---

---

Featured: Ricky Gervais, Frank Caliendo, Jay Leno, John Mulaney, Leanne Morgan

What’s in This Episode

• Ricky Gervais dismisses knighthood as meaningless
• Frank Caliendo reveals John Madden wanted to sue him over impressions
• Jay Leno took pay cut to keep Tonight Show crew during NBC cuts
• John Mulaney recalls attending Georgetown with Ivanka Trump
• Leanne Morgan discusses late-career success and mainstream comedy preferences

Questions Answered in This Episode

---

Full Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain spelling and/or transcription errors.

May the weather gods be kind and may there be a beach day in your near future. Hi, I’m Johnny Mac as we make it to the end of summer and the final weekend with your Daily Comedy News. Ricky Gervais was asked about knighthood. You know, the Brits, they do that whole knight thing. Would Ricky Gervais accept a knighthood?

He dismissed the honor as meaningless and remarks shared on his YouTube channel Ricky doubts the offer will ever come his way. Oh, no, no, no, no. You have no idea. I am the writer of Palace Intrigue, a daily podcast about the royal family. If they want people to stop talking about Meghan Markle, they’ll take a picture with you.

These royals don’t worry. But Ricky doubts the offer will ever come his way. But acknowledge he would have accepted it without hesitation for one reason. That reason, if my mom was alive, I’d definitely do it. Mom is no longer alive.

Would I do it now? Do I care? Does it matter? It doesn’t matter. If it was close to my house, I might.

He sounds like me. Oh, I have to go all the way downtown into London to Buckingham Palace to get knighted. Sounds like a lot of work. I mean, I wouldn’t go into New York City to get knighted. I think he’s right.

We do it in the suburbs. I digress. Ricky described himself as neither a committed royalist nor an opponent to the monarchy, likening the institution to tourism and calling a knighthood so irrelevant. But he said one thing might sway him. Oh, I might do it to annoy people.

Maybe I would. All the people that would be really annoyed, that would just tip the balance. I like that. It’s my favorite. If a knighthood meant like it did in the olden days, I could ride around on a big horse with a sword, I’d take it.

He then playfully hinted that maybe an offer had been made And noted if he had turned one down, he would have kept it quiet to spare anyone embarrassment. He said, for all you know, they’re calling me all the time and I’m going, nah. Frank Caliendo was on the Sage Steel pod cutting to the chase. We learned that John Madden wanted to sue Frank Caliendo. Let’s listen to Frank Caliendo tell the story on the Sage Steel show.

I have cut this down for pacing. The Kelsey podcast was the biggest one I heard where John Madden didn’t like me forever and he wanted to sue me on something. And he called Charles Barker and said, we got to sue Caliendo. He’s like, come on, man. Every time he talks, he makes us money, man.

So it was this interesting thing where Charles came up and told me about that. He’s like, you know John Madden wanted to sue you, right, man? I’m like, what? And he tells me the whole story. And I would never tell that story out in public because I didn’t know if I had permission from Charles.

He told me that in confidence. I’m like, I’m not going to tell somebody that, even though it probably would have been good for me to tell it. I held onto that story for like 10, 15 years.

And then Charles just told it recently on a couple of podcasts and people lik…

I’m like, yeah, I’ve been holding it as a secret for 20 years. It’s, it’s crazy. Why did John Madden want to see you? Uh, there were some commercials I did and he probably was, I did myself indemnified. I was like, I don’t know if I could do them or not.

And it was like doing like a Madden kind of thing. And I did a video game that was a similar, I took it away more on the video game. It wasn’t John Madden. I probably talk like this a little bit instead of just like that. So he was, he just didn’t like anything I did.

And Charles didn’t care. I mean, Charles was not the type of, he doesn’t care. He’s like, he’s like, do whatever. But he also got to know me and know me, knew me as a person. Madden just stayed clear.

But again, those football coaches can be really weird about that stuff. The video game in question. So it seems that Madden’s issue with Caliendo was about him using the impression in commercials or video games. Caliendo did a Madden parody in the 2008 video game Blitz of the League 2. Run a sweep, throw long, maybe dry hump a cheerleader or two.

I don’t think Madden was all that wrong about that. Now, while I was making the rounds, a few clips showed up on my radar. I don’t know when this is from. This is Jay Leno on the Adam Carolla podcast. Not sure when it’s from, but visually, Jay looks younger here.

If I had to guess, this clip is probably like 10 years old. Who knows? Maybe Jay put on some weight, and it’s from earlier this week. Anyway, let’s listen to Jay Leno tell Adam Carolla a story, and then you tell me if Jay Leno was the worst guy who ever lived. When I was doing The Tonight Show, I probably..

I was making $ 30 million a year. It was ridiculous. Okay. And NBC said, well, we’re going to have to cut half the crew. You know.

So we had a big meeting. I said, all right, but show of hands, how many feel I should take a 50% pay cut so we can keep everybody? Well, I got outvoted. Boy, I got screwed on that one. But really, I.

Already have $ 15 million. I’m doing pretty good. I never thought I’d get this far. And you know something? They were the best crew for the rest of the days.

You know, everything was always terrific. It was a union crew. Everybody made a good living. You know, guys would come up and show me the car they bought or the house they got around the corner or whatever it might be. And it didn’t cost me anything, really.

Because I had plenty of money. I was making plenty of money. Doesn’t sound like that bad of a guy. I can see why Conan O’Brien and David Letterman might be a little annoyed with him. More so Conan than Dave.

Dave should just be mad at NBC execs or Dave should just be mad at younger NBC Dave who didn’t play the game. Jay Leno did. I digress. Another clip. John Mulaney was on Larry King.

That’s definitely not from earlier this week because Larry King passed away. When did Larry King pass away? Larry King passed away in 2021, and there was that pesky pandemic. So this clip’s probably at least seven years old, and John Mulaney, his chin is a little thinner in this clip. You know, he’s filled out over the years.

You know what I mean? His face is much more filled these days. So here’s a young, skinny John Mulaney talking to Larry King about working with Ivanka Trump. Yes, I did. She went to Georgetown?

Yeah, we were both freshmen at the same time. You remember her? Yeah, she was in my Euro Civ class. Where we studied pre-Renaissance Europe. Was she good?

She was very nice, a good student. And we all smoked cigarettes, so I’d see her out on the patio. Oh, really? Oh, do I get sued for that? She smoked.

You know you smoked, Ivanka. And we all smoked out on the patio. She was very, very nice. And she left after one year, and I thought, well, that’s the last I’ll ever see of her. Little did I know.

Eric went there, too. Leanne Morgan sounds quite grounded in my kind of people. She told USA Today, I’m going to the grocery store. I go to Costco. I’m still doing my laundry.

I love doing laundry. I feel like everything’s the same. I really do. She is now 60 and talked about having success later in life than some people do. I couldn’t sell 12 tickets and now I’m doing arenas and that’s crazy.

And then the television part, even though it’s hard and I had to learn a lot and I’m still learning a lot, it still feels right to me. It feels like I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’m thankful, but it’s just bigger and sweeter than anything I dreamed of. During a recent appearance on the Women of Joy show podcast, Leanne Morgan said that women want quality content, but without women in their panties shooting bows and arrows and all the things like that. Honest to goodness, I think in the secular world, I think a lot of people don’t want to see all that, and I think they’re in a bubble out there.

And they think people want to see that, but they’re not in the middle of the United States. I talk to my college students about this all the time, and I go, there’s this whole thing out there called America, and on the coast, you don’t live in it. Morgan recalled telling the director that a southern mother of four.. Wouldn’t curse in front of her children, she said. The mother wouldn’t talk like that in front of these children.

The director said, you know better than I do, Leanne. Do what you think is best. So I think they think in their minds, oh, everybody’s talking like this, everybody wants this, but I don’t think the majority of people do. Or not in the South, especially when you’re portraying Southern characters, or anywhere, really. She explained in her family, growing up, no one used swear words, and while it’s okay if someone else wants to use it, she doesn’t care for them herself.

The Verge caught up with Emily Canelon. She’s been a guest on this program. She’s got a new special, The Introvert. And in the special, Emily talks about joining high school friends to go bra shopping. So she was telling a version of the joke in San Diego, where she filmed the special, and her punchline, which she told better, was, It’s weird shopping for something you can’t fill yet.

It’s sort of like if the Padres went shopping for a trophy case. Yikes. Ouch. Padres fans, take that one to the face. Catalano says, I use whatever sports team is not good at the city.

Oh, come to Queens and talk about the Mets. This is funny. In The Introvert, spoilers, she tells a story about wanting a Theragun massage gun for her birthday. Dad misunderstood, thought she wanted an actual gun, but what he bought her was a Hitachi magic wand. Don’t Google that.

Or if you do, you’ll have to explain to your loved ones what you were looking up. And the answer is, I was just toasting a podcast in the basement. I don’t know what you think I’m doing. Anyway, Emily unwraps the gift at a restaurant dinner. And she’s pretty sure she and the waiter were the only ones who knew what a person might use the Hitachi magic wand for.

Don’t Google it. I’m telling you. Don’t Google it. I know you’re curious. Don’t.

She says, Dad knows what it is now. But adds, but I never talked to him specifically about that joke. That is hilarious. Another random story that I collected for today’s episode. Back in 2025, Bill Burr poked fun at former SNL cast member Kevin Nealon as the two hiked through the woods together on an episode of Kevin Nealon’s Hiking with Kevin.

Wilbur pointed out that Kevin Nealon isn’t quite the nice guy he appears as, telling Nealon, I find personality fascinating because people think you’re a nice guy and you’re not. What you do is you draw information out of people, you find out what they’re good at, and then you crap on it.

---

And then when the person reacts to it, you turn around and put it on them.

It’s very toxic. Very toxic. I feel like there’s a bunch of women I used to date watching this right now going, yeah, that’s exactly the Kevin Nealon experience. That’s funny. This is interesting, too.

Bill was talking about never knowing how good you are as a comedian. He said, it’s hard to tell how good you are as a comedian, right? You don’t know. People say you’re good or whatever. What does that mean?

Does that mean they think you’re good? What if they want some work on the road? You have no idea. I always wish someone could just pick up a guitar and play at the level comic I was so I could tell where I was. This weekend on the schedule, I’m going to do two deep dives, not because I want to to pre-tape.

It’s because there are things I want to talk about that are tied to the calendar. Saturday’s deep dive, I don’t know how popular this one’s going to be. Sometimes I do an episode for me. I want to talk about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Tail-a-thon, which if you’re a certain age, you remember. And for me, I have a personal connection with my father with that one.

So I’m going to talk about the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon tomorrow through the lens of stand-up comedy. Then on Sunday, I’m going to talk about 9-11. It is the 25th anniversary of 9-11 in 2001, coming up one week from today. And I thought we’d talk about that through the lens of comedy. So two deep dives over the weekend and a normal episode on Monday.

It is Friday. It is time for the Comedy Stock Market. Comedy stock market. Thank you burt reynolds voice of the comedy stock market every friday we take a look at the comedians we treat them like stocks we try and buy low and sell high and make some money on the comedy stock market i’ve got three recommendations now four recommendations for you this week and they are all positive Johnny Mac you haven’t been selling anybody lately are you in a good mood or something no i’m not in a good mood summer’s over i i whatever Move on, John. Okay, we’re going to buy more Stavros Halkias, and I think we’ve bought him three weeks in a row, but he’s just great in everything, and he’s got a new special coming out on Netflix on Tuesday, and just everything seems lined up for Stavros, so let’s get in before the casuals, and we’ll buy a little more Stavros.

Okay, then on the 15th, there’s another special coming on Netflix. We’re going to buy Joe Coy. Again, it’s Comedy Stock Market. Buy low, sell high. I know not everybody loves Joe Coy because he one time told that very mean joke about Taylor Swift, but we’re not going to play that today.

People didn’t like him hosting the Golden Globes. But, you know, meanwhile, he’s out like playing SoFi with Gabe Iglesias. But I don’t think the casuals are hip to Joe Coy. So let’s buy low on Joe Coy. Let’s also buy more and more and more and more Shane Gillis.

I know it’s like buying Apple stock, but your Apple stock goes up. So does your Shane Gillis stock. This guy can’t lose right now. Let’s cash in on that. And here’s another buy low.

I was doing some research for the podcast that you’re listening to right now. On Netflix, September 22nd, they are going to start airing all three seasons of Party Down. Now, if you’ve seen Party Down, you know Party Down is fantastic. But most people have never seen this show about a bunch of underemployed actors working as caterers. The cast, Adam Scott, Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen, Martin Starr, Lizzie Kaplan, Megan Mullally, Jane Lynch.

Did you hear me? What a cast. Party Down comes to Netflix September 22nd. Let’s get way in front of that before the casuals discover Party Down. So we’re going to buy Party Down, buy Shane, buy Joe Coy, and buy Stavros Halkias.

That is your comedy stock market on a Friday. The LA Times has been recommending cool shows you could go see in Los Angeles. One of them, Not Enough Comedy at Reserve Venice. And we are told Not Enough Comedy provides so much comedy that it’s full service. Do you have an awesome room?

Its team will travel to you. Hosted by Phil Cohn. Each show features a mix of familiar names and comics still making their way up the L.A. Stand-up scene. They have a growing presence in Venice.

They do a show monthly. The next one is September 19th at 6.30 p.m. Tickets will run you $ 32. 67. How about right after you left at the Vinyl Room? We were told Imagine Deaf Comedy Jam, hosted inside a speakeasy of an iconic music venue.

Right after you left is a summertime event thrown by seasoned comedy bookers Chris Burns, Sarah Mello, and Sean Dickens. The glowing bar is decorated like a DJ lives there, with shelves of classic records, ghetto blasters, plush couches, upscale food and craft cocktails. Comics who have come to the stage include Donna Rawlings, Eliza Schlesinger, Morgan Jay, Josh Johnson, and Cam Patterson. The show is seasonal, but it’s Tuesdays at 8 o’clock and runs until September 22nd. The promoters plan to come back in December, so go see it while you can.

How about Wrong, an effed-up game show at the Elysian? Tagged as a 50% comedy show, 50% game show, and 100% effed up, it draws on the past to lean into a comic’s darkest humor while welcoming playful banter. After each comic performs their crudest humor, the show then turns into a discussion where panelists try to guess the missing words of an old social media post the producers dug up from the pits of the internet. They do this one monthly. The next two are September 24th and October 22nd.

Tickets are $ 18. 90. How about Queer Roast for the Straight Host at Beaches Tropicana? This comedy show invites queer comics to roast street comics in between stand-up sets and dares. Monthly, $ 10 presale. You have to subscribe on their sub stack to find out the dates.

And Papooses and Punchlines offers a place where Latinx performers, along with comics that belong to other underrepresented groups, can joke about the immigrant experience in the U.S. And the absurdities of the American dream. Multiple shows per week. Tickets are $ 9. 75. Oh, I’ve got one more.

I miscounted there. Vermont at Beverly Station. The monthly show’s essences do not fit in with the rest of the programming you’re likely to see at the Improv. It’s the comedy show equivalent of the Misfit Kids at the Cafeteria. That’s also why it works.

It gives traditional stand-ups license to get weird, and the weirdo acts a chance to find their people. The next one is Sunday, September 27th at 7pm. Check the Improv calendar for future dates. The Academy of TV Arts and Sciences has announced that I Love Lucy will receive the inaugural Legacy Award. This will happen at the 2026 Creative Arts Emmy Awards Night 2 on September 6th.

You may have heard of a show called I Love Lucy that starred Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. The Chicago Tribune did a nice piece about Joan Rivers a few weeks back. I held on to that for today. Joan passed away September 4th, 2014. From a heart attack during a medical procedure at age 81.

Now, one part I don’t agree with this. They are saying, just as Rodney Dangerfield’s legacy has been tarnished and his artfulness diminished by the movies of his late career, I don’t agree with that at all. So has Joan Rivers’ memory been sullied by the red carpet antics and what many considered the nastiness of her last decades? I don’t agree at all. If you’re a longtime listener, I knew Joan personally, been to Joan’s house, worked with Joan when she had the radio show, WOR.

I know Joan Rivers. But they add there’s good reason that on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2017 list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.. You know what? I should dust that list off just to see how it looks 10 years later. I’m going to click on that right now.

And we’ll do that on one of the weekends. Joan Rivers ranked 6th on that list, just below Chris Rock, but ahead of Jerry Seinfeld. How do you feel about that 10 years later? Born Joan Alexandria Malinsky in Brooklyn on June 8, 1933. Maybe we’ll do a deep dive on Joan Rivers one weekend.

In 61, she came to Chicago, joining the cast of The New Second City. Female comics were rare at the time, as one writer put it then. Women in nightclubs were either audience members or cocktail waitresses, but Joan Rivers worked tirelessly, sometimes paying Rodney Dangerfield to write jokes for her. One night after she bombed on stage, Lenny Bruce, her comedy hero, sent her a note, You’re right, and they’re wrong. Her first appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, February 17, 1965, in the quote-unquote Death Slot, At the end of her routine, Carson said on air, God, you’re funny.

You’re going to be a star. You know what? This is good stuff. We’ll do a deep dive on Joan. Look at that.

Just on the fly. Just came up with two ideas for a weekend stuff. Let me tell you about Joe Lysette. He’s got a new show out today. The Lysette Arms, live on Channel 4 in the UK, Friday nights at 10 o’clock, starting tonight.

The headline, though, Joe Lysette addresses his sexuality after becoming a father for the first time. When he announced he even had a girlfriend, some eyebrows were raised. Known for his off-the-wall elaborate pranks, there were some fans that suspected that it was a stunt. He was on the podcast Happy Place and said, Lots of people were surprised when I had a child with a woman because they were like, But you’re the gay man. You know, I never said that I’m gay because I’ve never been gay, but because I’m camp and I do innuendo and all those sorts of things, people have this idea of what that is.

On stage, I kind of played on these things because they’re funny ultimately, but how much of that is filtered into what I actually am? And it’s the stage persona the same as me. You know, these things sort of oscillate a lot. On his new show, he opens up an East London pub for just an hour a week on Fridays during the duration of the live episodes. For the show to happen, he had to become fully accredited with a license to serve alcohol and underwent a training course and exam to obtain a Level 2 award for personal license holders.

In each episode, Joe will be accompanied by a celebrity pub manager on a trial shift. Joe said the live performance sector, if you want to call it that, is under great threat and the pub industry is as well. And I think anything we can do to celebrate our British boozers is a good thing. Because, yeah, they provide a watering hole. And as I’ve said, I do think they’re really good for society at large.

It’s good to have a public house where the public can come in and mingle with one another. It’s good for people who are lonely. It’s good for people who need to connect with their community. The Lysette Arms, Channel 4 in the UK, Friday nights, 10 o’clock, starting tonight. And that is your comedy news for today.

All right, two deep dives over the weekend. Jerry Lewis, and then we’ll do 9-11 on Sunday. Have a great weekend. Again, I hope the weather gods are kind.

---