Full Transcript
Caloroga Shark Media. I’ve got a great one for you today. My guest is Jason Zenniman, critic at large for the Culture section of the New York Times. Jason writes a column about comedy, and we talked comedy for the better part of an hour on his biopage on the New York Times dot com, Jason Wrights. I cover comedy with critical rigor and curiosity and explore how it reflects and influences the broader cultural and intellectual landscape.
I’m particularly interested in work that is innovative or unexpected, but it’s enough if it’s just really funny. My aim is to always capture the comedy scene in its complexity while translating it clearly for a broad audience. That is a theme that came up several times during this discussion. I just want to give you some notes on the recording here. So we recorded this on a program called squad cast, basically zoom for podcasters, and when you do that, you don’t quite get studio quality sound, and sometimes you get little dropouts.
The reason I’m bringing this up is I just want to be clear. There were three different points where I used a program called descript which has a feature called regenerate, where I used it to regenerate short phrases said by Jason. Nothing materially changed, The words aren’t changed. It just regenerated the wave so that it didn’t fade a little bit. Just want to be clear about that.
Also, when I use the script, it has a couple of neat buttons that I use every day on this podcast. One is remove retakes, so when I recorded every day, believe me, I stumble and I start over and descript has a one button remove retakes. It’s wonderful. There’s also a feature that I used on this interview, which is remove filler words, because when you listen to Johnny Max speak the way Johnny Mack does over the course of an hour, there are a lot more ums and you knows than you might get during a typical ten minute script that I’ve edited down. And there’s also a one button click called shortened word Gaps, which just tightens the pacing.
So I’ve used all those features on this interview. Nothing materially changed. But I just want to be clear that I did in a traditional podcasting way, nothing nefarious. I did edit the audio all right, And here’s my interview with Jason. I’ve been a fan of your work.
I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s not stupid. There’s a lot of stupid in comedy, and I don’t feel like you do takes. I feel like you write really thoughtful, smart pieces. And I’ve been quoting you in episodes for months and then the other day I freaked out.
I go, wait, what if his name is pronounced Zinoman? And I’ve said it wrong forty five times?
And then I actually checked.
I was like, anyway, So I’m curious about your approach as someone who just does off the top of his head ten minute podcasts and maybe a half assed written substack. I know how long it takes me to do that, so to appreciate what you’re doing for The New York Times.
Also, you’ve got to be putting out a ton of work.
First of all, let me say, if you call me Zinoman, I’m not going to complain the it’s like cinnamon, but I’ll take any reference. I’ll take any pr is good pr and the Zionoman sounds also always more like the superhero version of my name. But yeah, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. Although that makes it sound.
Sometimes it comes very easily, as I’m sure, and sometimes more work doesn’t always mean better work. Is one thing I’ve learned, and that’s one thing that’s evolved over the course of this. For instance, I would say when I started this job, I spent a huge I spend a huge amount of time most of my time going out to see shows clubs, and I still do that, but I don’t do it as much as I used to, and that has to do both with how comedies change, but also I think that I try to spend a little bit of time every week thinking about letting my mind roam and thinking of ideas, and then if I have a good idea, I try to find the right form for it that because so sometimes sometimes that’s a review, sometimes it’s an essay. Sometimes it’s a bigger piece and it’s a profile. And it’s funny like the things that I write in a in an hour or a half hour are the most popular, and the things that I sweat over, like I’m working on something now for months and no one cares.
I feel like I totally know that one yes, yes, and they’re sometimes they’re wrong, but they’re not always wrong. Sometimes you cannot trust you you. Let’s put this way. As I’m first a critic and I’m a big believer in something, I’m a big believer that your first impression isn’t always right, but it’s always important. So you have to be really sensitive to your first impression of something.
And it’s why people like Pauline Kal, who’s probably the critic who most inspired me as a kid. She would write she would go see a movie and go home write the review right away, and because she really valued that first impression, I’m happy to hear that you’re not clubbing as much as he used to. One of my guilt trips. I run Serious XM Comedy for ten years ten years ago now, but even then it was hard to go see shows because I was still expected to be in the office and be a manager from eight am until six call it. So to stay out till one point thirty in the morning doing shows was difficult.
I tended to rely on the people who were younger on my staff, and then to keep my knowledge fresh, I’d hit festivals and as I always tell this audience, if you go to a festival, don’t go see Chris Rock. You can go see Chris Rocks some other time, go hit all those smaller shows. That’s where the action is. I’m upset that Montreal is gone, or perhaps back or this new group that bought it, But no Montreal. This summer is a bummer.
It’s interesting to hear what you do, because I think that’s a very smart strategy. It’s I have taken the opposite approach, which isn’t necessarily better, which is that, if anything, I undercover festivals because I feel like a lot of the people you see at festivals I already see New York. But what that means is like comedians from other cities when they come through here, I make a point of trying to see them, or I try to go to La periodically to see that. But I miss things for sure, And there’s no question that you could. It’s funny.
The truth is that there’s like a pool of performers in New York, and if you go often enough, you see them all and it’s changing, but it doesn’t change radically. It doesn’t change like the number of people changed. I still like to go, and I think I pick up things. I learned things from going. But now the thing is you could probably the most time efficient way is probably just to look at your computer and fillow.
Because everyone’s online and there’s so much material online, and a lot of consumers of comedy are first accessing comedy not from clubs but from a clip on a TikTok or Instagram. So that has to change. I feel like if the way that we have to have along with the consumers. Yeah, and for any content creator, no matter of the format. We’re all living in a headline world, right, So the easiest thing to write is why Joe Rogan, Shane Gillis and Nikki Glaser are something that’ll get the clicks as opposed to Hey guys, Jen Marco Cireesis awesome, Just it doesn’t do the same.
Uh. But CIESSI will contact you and be like, how come you’re not con righting about me? He’s fantastic Switching gears I wanted. One of the main things I wanted to talk to you about Dave Chappelle. It bothers me that he has seemingly chosen to turn his legacy into The second line in his oh bit is going to be something about the trans community.
And he’s so much better than what he’s done on the last few specials, which is Jason you know why I had you on today because of the trans And he slaps his knee and he mugs for the camera and he gets a laugh, and he’s so much better than that. And I don’t know why he’s dug in on that. To be curious to your thoughts, it’s a good it’s a good question. Look, I loved Dave Chappelle. I’ve wrote an ebook on Dave Chappelle eight years ago, searching for Dave Chappelle.
I grew up in Washington, d C. Where he’s from. I have I’m around. He’s a few years older than me, but I’ve been following his career since the since the eighties. I have a tremendous he’s incredible comedian.
His sketch show, I think people have now forgotten about it, but it’s one of the greatest comedies ever on television, and he’s one of the greatest. He’s one of the greatest stand ups. I think it’s his first specialist terrific and he still has a lot. I say all this as a way to be like it’s one of the I’m agreeing with you. And one of the reasons it’s depressing is that when we talk about Dave Chappelle, we tend to talk about these culture war things and because that’s what he’s put out put forth, and so why has he chosen to do that?
I think Gerard Carmichael made us ask the more question recently. My sense, if I again I’m just speculating, is that Chappelle always liked two didn’t you know? Prized? His freedom prize is independence he and I think I think the good faith, genuine interpretation is that when he did trans jokes and people said got offended or said, don’t you his first instinct is to then double down right, And that’s always been his first instinct. It’s been his first instinct through his whole career.
We can go chapter in verse. Even before he was famous. I’ve written back before his Chapelle show, he had a big falling out on his comedy on a ABC show called Buddies. I’ve traced this in ambols has served him in this case. Look, it may have served him well for his audience.
He’s still selling out, he’s still popular, but for his art, I agree with you. I think it’s kept him in a rut. And I’m still optimistic when I see a new Dave Chappelle thing. I hope he moves past it. But yeah, what’s interesting to me the last one came out is that I don’t even think it caused that much controversy.
I think people are just bored. Yeah, I imagine in your travels you’ve run into him. He’ll do sets and I’m being generous with that. He’ll he’ll take stage time and he’s not even really working out. He’s just talking to the audience when he does that downbeat, soft spoken Dave, and he’ll just come out with some brilliant things just to listen to that.
Maybe it an’t even funny and he’s got that there, and I just I’d like to just see him do something else. But to your point, Dave Sapelle announced his new Netflix special already. The conversation is going to be, is he going to bring this up again? And it’s I think he nailed it. It’s boring, It’s it’s predictable.
I mean, like, if you were to say, like, what’s the least interesting thing for him to do next, it would be to talk about that again. That’s the part of it which flabbergasting. I think that the thing the other issue might be is that he always had these two modes, which was doing like a stand up set with this with more traditional collection of jokes in his very idiosyncratic style, and what you described this like, he would go into go into clevit. He would be on stage for four hours. And there was something incredible about those sets.
He could go places that others could not. And I believe he got she fell in love with that, and there’s something indulgent about those and I think that’s true for not just in terms of the amount of time he’s spending there, but also they became very self serious. This bothers me less than other people. But I think another reason people got bored with him is that he seemed his material seemed less punchline driven. It seemed less about being funny and more about being profound.
And if he’s saying things that are profound and poetic, that’s fine, and maybe it’s better than fine, it’s great. But if he’s saying the same thing over and over again, that’s a problem. All right, new premise off all the recent protests that Jerry Seinfeld ran into, I find myself wondering what if Jerry went political? Now I know that’s crazy. He’s seventy years old, and it’s very easy to just write it out and go, hey, do you ever notice but what if Jerry showed off and went all in?
Could you ever imagine that in a million years? No? But I mean I would be interested. I think there’s another question which is similar, which is what if he went vulnerable or introspective personal? And I think there’s room for that.
I think that he I don’t think I think people would be interested in either in going political. I don’t think he wants to, and I don’t think he has to. I don’t even think he’s got to. Cut from the last interviews from him, he doesn’t seem like he wanted it to come out with any special ever again. And he wouldn’t need to.
He wouldn’t need to see any people forget. But he came up at a time when everyone didn’t need to release specials, and he didn’t. He for most of his career he didn’t release specials, and he could and he did just he did obviously did just find Some people think that he has gotten more political, but I’m with you. I don’t think he. I don’t think he has.
I thought I found all the backlash of the popsarts movie bizarre. I liked it. I thought it was this is a silly movie. We’re having fun, my friends are in it. Want you to turn your brain off for ninety minutes.
And people seemed like mad that that movie even exists. It was weird. I know, you mean, I think some people were mad about the interviews in which he said things like, you know, the PC left and the were ruining sitcoms or whatever. But yeah, there was the initial response from some I think one film critic called it the worst movie of the decade or the year or something, and I was like, that made no sense to me. That made zero How you could that there’s something going on outside of the screen to think that a movie with that ambition and also that amount of there’s plenty of talent on screen there is the worst movie.
And it’s not funny. I say ambition, a low ambition. It’s not a movie that’s swinging for the fences. Yeah, it’s not like he made some bro dude version of Oppenheimer and missed the politics of it. It’s a pop starts movie.
Yes, it’s a popp bar. It’s it was a it’s a bizarre response, but I that’s the age we’re living in, right that, I think the more hyper hyperbole you you mentioned if you put Joe Rogan in the title against a lot of hits. The other way to get it is to have a more extreme point of view. Right, all right, we’ll take the break here back with Jason Zenimann after this the rest of Tom Brady, I feel like it. It cuts through, seems to have done well.
Did Nicky Glazer step up in class? Did Tony Hinchcliff step up in class? Or these now names that the civilians would know? Actually, let me sidebar there. This comes up a lot.
There are a lot of really popular comedians. But if you and I walk down the street and grabbed one hundred people in New York City and said, hey, Andrew Schultz, what are we going three for one hundred, I think you’re right. I think you’re right. Yeah. No, you’re putting your finger on a big phenomenon of the moment, which is like, what does it mean to be a famous comedian?
In twenty twenty four, Andrew Schultz played Mason Square Garden, right, And there was a time when that was like hardly anybody, hardly nobody had played Masters for a Garden, but he’s played massots for Garden, and as you said, I think most people don’t know who he is. But I think that’s not just a question of comedy. That’s a question of the culture in general, which is that it’s so fragmented, it’s so balkanized that you as long as you have very passionate fans in your niche, you can sell a lot and be very successful even without being widely known. I think it’s also answers the previous question, which is the wiser everyone so worried about Jerry Seinfeld. All the people who became famous in that generation have a kind of fame that’s way bigger than the kind of fame you get now, with the exception of Taylor Swift, if you manage to get famous.
Even Drogan, I think, is an example of this where Rogan likes to protact like he’s anti establishment, anti mainstream media. But I have this sort of pet theory that the difference between his fame and Tim Dillon Andrew Schultz, who will never be as famous as Joe Rogan, is that Joe Rogan was on Fear Factor, and Joe Rogan was on news radio and he hosted a after Bob Costas left. Later he or he had an NBC talk show for a second. Though, that’s a bigger fame than these podcast fames that you get now. It’s a kind of fame that reach which is a much broader demographic than you reach out.
I must have a race from my brain. There was a Joe Rogan late night show. I did a piece a year ago. It’s now it seems already maybe longer than that seems very dated. When Daily Show was doing rotating guest hosts, and I was making an argument for how this might not be a terrible idea to do permanently.
This is before they announce John Stewart, which is a better idea, but are once a week. But although I guess they still do, I guess they are to entertaining guest hosts around with John Stewart. And I was looking around for precedent, and I realized that in the late nineties NBC did this after maybe an some of the details wrong, but it’s in my story. After you know a letterman, and they had a crazy series of people who I like hosted for a week than a week, and among those people were Joe Rogan and he had he interviewed and eight people he interviewed. It was a similar version to his podcast, but it was on NBC and I was really shock it.
I couldn’t find any versions of it online, but I nailed it down that had happened. I found it on an old like TV guy those things. Oh wow, You’re gonna send me down a rabbit hole, and I didn’t forget. I will circle back to my Nikki Glaser question, but now I’m like three questions deep. I just had Mark malcoff on and he retriggered my late night obsession.
And I spent the week watching YouTube videos. And somebody made this homebrew thing about the Carson Letterman, Tom Snyder trifecta, and I just I’m back into that whole move. And I know you wrote a Letterman book. Can you explain to me why I worship twelve thirty Letterman lasted a year and a half at eleven thirty Letterman after spending a decade going man. If only I didn’t have to stay up till one thirty in the morning, if only Dave were on at eleven thirty, I would watch Dave every night, And then a year and a half into it, I don’t know if it was just I was in my mid twenties and going out and doing things people do and not watching late night TV.
But twelve thirty Letterman is my north star. Eleven thirty Letterman, okay, And then he’ll put out something on Netflix and it takes me three weeks to watch it. What is wrong with me? It’s so funny that you asked me this question today, because you and I are identical on this point. And just today somebody sent me a podcast in which it was the guy who’d wrote that was the Letterman podcast, Mike Chris Som, and he said, oh, I mentioned you on a podcast, and he was on a podcast with somebody else, sorry to be on a podcast talking about another podcast, but my name came up and it was asking I guess the podcast?
Hast said, how do you press him when he was on your podcast about why he focuses so much on his late night twelve thirty show and not on his CBS show, And there was a kind of there was a they were upset, both of them because they both really there. They both liked the CBS show. And it made me wonder for a second, because I putting aside me for a second, I think to people who are younger, who maybe didn’t grow up with that show, the CBS show means more. But I’ve watched both as an adult, so my opinions on them are not just like nostalgic. And despite what they said in this podcast, the reason I didn’t is because I agree with you that from nineteen eighty two to ninety three David Letterman on NBC made some of the most brilliant talk show comedy and most innovative talk show comedy ever that really created a sensibility, invented all kinds of forms mainstream to sort of irony.
That is really significant, that deserves that will be here to your point about legacy, that will be the lion’s share of his legacy. Now, his first couple of years in the CBS Show are probably arguably the more popular and were more covered more because of the late night wars, and some of them were quite good, and they were periods in the CBS show that were better or worse. But in my opinion, the NBC show was vastly more ambitious and better than the CBS show. Now that again, there are big exceptions to certainly his response to nine to eleven and many other ones. He still was David Letterman.
He still was doing great work. But and my book is essentially a book length answer to the question of why right. If you want to know why, that is by my book, Letterman Last China Malee. And part of it has to do with him, Part of it has to do with the network, but a lot of it has to do with what’s around him and the writers around him, and the relationship between the writers and Letterman and all that. I would say that you were just smart and discriminating, and that’s that’s why I think what attracted me to it was the whole twelve thirty vibe.
And once Conan found his fastball, he’s had the same vibe of maybe this bit isn’t working, but I know it, you know what, we all know what. Let’s just stick to it and left together with it.
And then you go to eleven, which is a different animal, and you have to wear …
I’ve always called it establishment Letterman as opposed to the twelve thirty, Like we’re off our game tonight, we got forty seven minutes left whatever, yep, yep, yep. No. I think it was clearly a bigger, more show, busy show in a big theater where the previous show was intimate, and it felt like conspiratorial between the viewer and Dave, and it was going backstage and doing all these fourth wall breaking things. It was very different there was It was a very I would make the argument that it was the things that really made him unique. The new version of CBS was going directly against.
That doesn’t mean that he was totally different. He still had some lot of reverence. And I think what’s interesting that you bring up what he’s doing now. It’s remarkable if you would have told me, the young version of me who loved his late night show, that Letterman would be now doing a show in which he interviews famous people and is incredibly complimentary and gushing about all of them and solicitous. What made him really stand out as an interviewer in the eighties, and you can just go and look at the press on this is he adopted a kind of almost hostile, if not skeptical, attitude towards the celebrities who came out and promoted, and that was part of his appeal.
So it’s interesting he’s I don’t blame him, you know, but it’s quite a one eighty. The next rabbit hole I want to go down is trying to track down clips of his daytime show. Until I watched that Homebrew doc this week, I had no idea that Patricks or viewer mail were leftovers from the daytime show. I’ve barely seen clips of that. It’s incredible, it’s incredibly out there.
There are yeah, yeah, yeah, if you go on YouTube, there’s They’re not all of them, but a huge number of them. And he and Meryl Marco a lot of the great stuff from the Late night if not most of it, were established in the Morning Show. And they had Andy Kaufman as a maybe his most one of the most brilliant appearances ever was on the Morning Show. There’s incredible Steve Martin appearance they did. I’m pretty sure they definitely did stupid Patrick’s first in the Morning Show.
I think they might have done viewer mail, a lot of the man on the Street stuff. Hal Gurney, the director started with him on the Morning Show, started there. It was the wrong time slot, but they were trying things there that it was the blueprint was established there and just when they figured it out, they got canceled, and I think that that’s what was the secret sauce to the show is that by the time that they started on late night, they had a much better sense of what they wanted to do than they would have if they did have the morning show. When I recently watched Mullaney, I went for a whole ride here. So, just to catch you up on my resume, a big chunk of it, I worked in talk radio w or New York and did a lot of phone screening, which is relevant to what I’m setting up here.
As I was watching Mulaney, my initial reaction was, oh, my goodness, twelve thirty Dave is back. This is so loose and goofy, and I loved it.
And then I started screaming and this is arrogant.
Somebody needs to produce this thing. And my sticking point was when they went to callers, because as a call screener, I can tell you civilians cannot take tell a story. And I’m screaming at my TV saying Jerry Seinfeld is sitting there. I could have hosted that when hey, Jerry has that movie going and then shut up for ten minutes. I would did you enjoy me?
Lee? I really think something’s there. I’d like to see more of it just and maybe this is counter to my whole twelve thirty Letterman argument a little more focused. Oh, I’m with you. I really enjoyed it because I like novelty, and I like experimentation, and I like things that are different.
So I was tiggled by it. And just like you it Fello. There are bits of cable access, there are bits of we just with super famous people. There are bits of Lettermen there. But it was interesting the incongruity between the critics reaction, which was pretty glowing, and normal people’s action, which almost most people who I talked to loathed it or found it unwatchable, including I should say, I’m not going to name it, but it was on my Facebook page.
People who worked for the first Letterman show the wow that And I think the reason for that is one is what you’re saying is that like he indulged a lot. There was a lot of dead air. There was like having the call in go on while you have these other people on the show. It was the thing that made it exciting, which is like anything could happen here is also what made it can make it tedious, and if it was on for a month or a year, I think that would have been more clear that that would become People are now saying, oh, we should do it full time. And I saw he did an interview where he was like, I’m intrigued.
But I think that this was great for a week during a Netflix festival where they could get every star in the world on it and it was a lark if they if it was a permanent thing, I think its flaws that you’ve enumerated would be more clear. Yeah, I wear many hats, and in my career as a podcasting executive and bec as a programmer, it’s serious. I would explain to people talk to me about show twenty three, because even I can call in some celebrity favors and I can book a great week of shows just for myself. What happens when it’s week forty seven? And to your point, Jerry Seinfeld’s not in town.
Who are you talking to? Who’s the guest? Now it’s back on the host. They’ll sample for the guests, they will come back for the host. Is the way I teach that what let me ask you what how the call in aspect what works in that?
What do you have to do to make that? Because obviously that was a huge part of popular culture for a long time, that you now that was one of the things about that Lenny Show that I was like, oh, I it’s interesting that he’s doing this. It’s not quite working. But not only was that on talk radio, but Larry King used to do it. It’s so, what’s the secret of that?
And how come there’s not more of it? Callers are diminishing returns, so the call screener needs to So if I’m interviewing, Hey, Jason, what do you want to talk to John about? And I have to get it out of you, and then I have to really try and coach you and go Okay, when you get on, don’t bother saying Hi, don’t say thanks for taking my call. He knows we really appreciate it. I want you to open up, and I just want your first sentence to be hey, da da da da da da da da.
Now, I’m still on a tight rope because you might get on the air and be like, hey, thanks for taking my call, and it just drags everything to a halt. Unless you have a really good caller, you just want to take their initial point and fade them out, and you don’t need them other than to facilitate a discussion. Point that said, back in the day, there were regulars who knew how to do it, but most civilians can’t tell a story interesting. Interesting, Okay, no, that makes sense. Saturday Night Live, turning fifty will Lorne Michael stick around.
I’m looking at this and going take the victory lap. You’re eighty eighty one years old. It’s not going to get any better. I don’t see anyone going. Season fifty two was great, Lauren.
I think you got to get out here. People who know him, like Seth, seem to think he’s gonna stick around. What do you think? The short answer is, I don’t know. But as you say, the people who are closer to it than me think he’s sticking around, and the people who know him better than I do think he’s sticking around until he can’t do it anymore.
And it’s such a hard thing to replace him. I think, much harder than people realize that. I don’t think, And God knows, no one’s going to push him out, so I can. I guess we’ll still be, but who knows, we’ll see Look We’re all gonna have to be thinking and writing and talking about SNL next year for a year a lot more. Let’s not do it now because we’re all gonna have to do it next year a lot.
Will Ferrell Tina Fey in the top thirteen SNL get ready for all there’s people who got it are gonna have to watch every episode of all fifty years. We’re gonna have to write lists. There’s gonna be there’s a book, The Lorne Bio is finally gonna come out next year. Wow, by bye, Susan Morrison from New Yorker. That’s probably like the most anticipated comedy book of next year.
And I imagine that will be a big doorstop with all sorts of comedy dirt in it. Even if it wasn’t the fair V anniversary, that would be week a big source of conversation. Did you say this thing? I’m sure you did with Kimmel and Letterman developing a talk show for Lunel. I just saw that before I jumped on with you.
That’s like a real life Hacks episode. I looked it up. She’s sixty five, and when I watched Hacks my initial reaction and they addressed it was like, they’re not going to give Deborah Vance a show at her age, and here we are living a Hacks episode. Yes, I did see that. Well, I’ll believe when I see it, and I and but I think, why not.
I feel like she’s one of these people who’ve been around for a long time. I think I saw her open for Kat Williams at Barclays a little while ago. I just saw her pop up in a movie from like the nineties. Anyways, I think she so, yeah, she’s paid her dues. She deserves a show, just like just like Debora Vance says, all right, three hours ago, I asked you if Nikki Glaser has stepped up in class.
I think yeah. I think that she was probably the big winner of the Netflix weekend. I think, although it’s funny, I think there’s one what was interesting about her week is she was the star of the roast on Netflix and then she released a special on HBO Max on Max and which raises the question why didn’t Netflix have that special? And I do think that that points to another issue, which looking to the future, which is is are these other streamers going to start to eat into Netflix’s territory and the fact that they didn’t have Nikki Glaser, which they did have her previous special, and she clearly is still figure on their streamer. Was interesting to me.
Did she raise the thoughts? Yeah, I think so. But she’s been steadily building for a while. You could her reality show is doing well. She has an incredible First of all, I think I find her very incredibly consistent, amazing work ethic, talented in a lot of different ways.
She’s somebody who I think could go in a different direction with a special, could be more. She’s so on talk shows she’s so good and so revealing and so introspective, and on specials she is sometimes, but she’s usually just like a killer joke, just an incredible joke teller. I feel like if you could sort of merge those two things, she’d have a real blockbuster. It was a weird week of press. She crushed so hard on the roast, there was no buzz on the special.
It was very strange. The special kind of came and went and people were still talking about the roast. I think that’s partly us to do with just Netflix and alsoasts that roast guy. So, although I don’t know, maybe you can know more than I, but I felt like I saw conflicting reports about the ratings. That’s another example of something that was like an hour too long that if it was not live, there’s no question it would have been edited down an hour and would have been better, and probably I would assume it would have got higher ratings.
But I saw some reports that I got crazy ratings. I saw others that Cat Williams got better ratings. Now who knows but the but I don’t. I think her special didn’t do worse because of that roast. I think because it’s like you’re saying before, there’s still a ton of people who don’t know Nico Lasers right, He’s a tremendous and successful stand up comedian.
But that that rose still raised her profile because it was a thing that everyone was talking about and it was trending for days. So ratings wise, I think I saw what you saw the first weekend, that more people watched Kat quote unquote live than the roast. But I saw something last night that vague numbers here, two hundred and thirty nine million view’s eyeballs whatever the Netflix metric is on day one, but it held that number all week, so it seemed like it had legs off the buzz. I think part of Nicky and you brought up Netflix versus HBO, HBO Max, HBO Max. They’ve goofed up the brand.
So this week Hannah Einbender has a new special. Normally HBO specials come out Saturday at ten pm, and Hannah is this out on a Thursday.
And then I started wondering, so is this not an HBO special?
Did she get a Max special? And what the heck does that even mean? And does it matter? And it’s just it’s confusing. Most civilians aren’t gonna care.
But I just looked at it and I’m like, so is this special? Somehow? I don’t mean this is dig but like lesser, it’s not the equivalent of a Saturday night HBO special from back in the day. It’s a Thursday Max special. I don’t know.
They’ve confused me. Yes, No, I think they that. I think they’ve given up a lot of the prestige of their brand. That said, or that’s said, and clearly like they’re that the company is not doing well. They’re going to lose Charles Barkley and inside the NBA that are in debt.
Right that said, all right, let’s try to defend them a little bit, which is that what I think they’re trying to do, which is the smart move that they can’t compete with Netflix in terms of money and in terms of scale, And now you’ve got Hulu coming in which is going to have a big special every month, and they’ve already signed up people like Gaff again and Savashia Mescalco. What what Max is doing, I think is trying to get the kind of slightly ardier dar Carmichael, Julio Torres, Hannah Einbeinder. They’re not going for the biggest mass appeal in a way that I think is consistent with their traditional brand writ large, but it doesn’t mean the same thing that it did in the seventies when they had the whole market it to themselves, or the nineties when they had Chris Rock and it was like a major events. Those days are gone, so now the big events tend to be on Netflix. So what do you do if you’re a secondary streamer?
And I think they have a decent strategy, and that’s I think what I like. I agree with your point that it’s a mess and confusing to be a consumer of comedy these days and to fight where everything is and I think in a couple of years is going to look different. And what I hope it looks like is that each of these platforms has a personality, has a style, and people who want that can go there right what it will probably be will not be. That will be a mess. So that’s why I like the fact that h that Max, even though it’s not Friday, seems curated in a specific taste.
Well they had even in this century, maybe not for comedy, but for drama shows that they could have thrown this conversation on Sunday night at nine pm and people would have sampled it and assumed it was prestige. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not, but we would have gotten the goodwill off the first episode. People would have tuned in. That’s true. That’s true.
No, it’s interesting. I didn’t realize about that Hers was coming out on Thursday. That’s I wonder why.
All right, let’s take one more break here.
Don’t forget you can get these shows add free. You know, four ninety nine a month gets you this and all the other things on the network. Link in the show notes. Go to Calieroba dot com slash plus check it out. Maybe you can help me sort my feelings here.
I’ve been struggling with this one. As close as I’ve gotten is special versus hour. So every comedian tweets out, hey, check out my new special on YouTube. And if we graph everything out, at one end, I don’t know, there’s Carlin at Carnegie, and at the other end there’s I happen to have a still camera at the Chuckle Hut Tuesday night at ten pm, and everyone’s using the word special, and I have got a new special. I don’t even know what I want from you, but help me not everything is a special that.
It’s very fuzzy these days. Right, here’s my glass half full version. I feel like it’s the best of times, the worst of times. There’s more specials than ever now are more releases than ever, and the goods part of that is the funniest comedy out there. Doesn’t tend to be the most famous people for totally boring reasons.
They have other things to do then work on their jokes, right, They’re busy, right, So the people who tend to be have the most worked out jokes are the kind of mid career comedians who have trouble getting a Netflix deal, right, and now they have a place and an outlet to release their stuff YouTube, right, so you see people like Nathan McIntosh who or the next one I saw is Renon Hirschberg, or who has one coming up soon, Liz Meal. These weren’t a time where these people. Now you can see their stuff not only as eavy as you can see the stuff in HBO, but easier. And I think that’s a good thing. And I don’t want to stay oither and that’s not special.
And this is special because not only is it not true that they’re worse there, in many cases they’re often better. But two, it’s like, cool, what’s the point in policing these genres? I do think we’ll look back and we’ll say, man, there was more bad comedy then than ever, but there’s also more great comedy than ever. It’s harder to find the good stuff now because there’s so much of it. And that’s part of our job is to be like, hey, like, all right, everybody knows Joe Rogan and the Roast and all this, but that’s not really the best comedy.
Nobody who knows comedy thinks that’s the best comedy. That’s increasing to the point that we started with it, which is like all right, how have our jobs shifted? We’ve got to cover the big stuff because that’s what people want to read, and that’s important. But I think we have an increasing responsibility to be like, Okay, let’s look at what’s going on in these on YouTube tube, on TikTok, etc. And find the good stuff.
You’ve been incredibly generous with your time. Let me pick your brain and I’ll let you go about comedy snobbery when I ran serious comedy. So I’m sitting at a desk five days a week, got the radio on from May to six. All I’m hearing is the best stand up comedians performing their best material that they’ve pressed. And it fried my brain.
And I call it the Emperor of Rome syndrome. So if I go see a show, I don’t laugh. I am now a psychopath, but my brain is analyzing and going, oh that’s hilarious, and I’m thinking it just in the manner I did. Oh that’s really funny, Oh great callback, Oh wow, this is an awesome set. Has doing what you do?
Has it fried your brain? It’s a really good question. The short answer is yes, that when it becomes your job. First of all, if you see comedians in the back of comedy clubs. They don’t laugh right the way regular people do, and it’s no different than people like you and I who do.
Often you’re not the best audience member. One weird phenomenon of my job is I feel bad sometimes I think something’s funny, but I don’t laugh, and I know it makes me a bad Sometimes I fake laugh, just like if it’s if I’m in a small room where the laugh really matters, or having someone stonefaced is like going to disrupt the proceedings, like I’ll fake laugh, which I’m not as convincing as a fake which comes up ridiculous. You do what you do. But so I do think that it’s a danger of the job, which is you, and it’s something you have to be aware of and you have to factor in because you don’t want You want to be in touch with both your honest reaction to something and also what how the ordinary consumer receives the stuff. I like it’s self justifying, but I tend to think that the advantages of being experienced and well versed in comedy and knowing the vast site of the history of the form and seeing enough to know what’s good versus bad must ambitions is not what didictable, what’s cliche?
All that stuff outweighs the negative of becoming of not laughing quite as much. And I also will say this that like the moment when you aren’t excited about seeing something, the moment when you get cynical or jaded about comedy is when you when I’ll quit. So that’s something you got to always be kicking the tires on, or I have to be kicking the tires on which I do. Have you ever run into I ran into this early in my career, not so much lately, but hey, you’re not a comedian. How come you’re doing this and all this?
And I was explaining, like, I don’t play guitar, but I can recognize that Eddie van Halen’s pretty good at it. Like I’m not claiming to be a comedian. I’m a dude in a basement. Or I was a radio programmer. I don’t know.
Yeah, that doesn’t bother me the If anything, I consider it a benefit of plus because uh uh, in the fact, you’ll never find me doing the gimmick piece of oh.
And then I went and tried stand up and I bombed, and I learned how much I res…
Comedians are good at what they do, and what I do is quite hard as well, And it also looks easy, right, Just doing comedy is easy or looks easy, but is actually incredibly hard. Being a critic covering an incredibly diverse, complicated field is and then translating that into prose that both the expert and the casual fan can understand without limiting the complexity of a nuance. That’s very tricky, and that’s enough of a challenge for me. And I actually tend to think that not being a comedian helps me in that job, besides the fact it reduces the conflict of interests and keeps your independence, etc. But I think that it’s a fundamentally different skill set.
And so when people say, oh, you’re not a comedian, I said, that’s right, I’m not a comedian. Yeah. Sorry. When I was programming the stations, and I still program for Live one, I wanted to make sure I was coming in at civilian eye level, and the civilians are listening to Jim Gaffigan. You and I can go to a club and be too cool for school and deep dive.
But it’s the same thing I brought up nine times, But play the hits. No, You’ve got to look. I don’t understand people who do it my job. I know there’s some of them who say this, and I respect a lot of them, or I respect all of them who it’s hard. There’s a hard job.
But my audience, my primary audience, is the reader, and there I don’t see. The comedy world is not my community. I’m a journalist who’s working in my and my audience is the reader. I have obligation to be fair to the artists, and I know I hear from them, and I know I want their respect as I want anybody else’s respect. But I do think it’s important for people, just as I think it’s important for comedians to see their audience their primary audience, not they’re only audience, their primary audience, as they’re people sitting in front of them are watching their special that I have to think about what the reader wants first, and when I get away from that, I think I could run into problems.
So yeah, I think there’s room. People have different points of view on this, but but yeah, it’s funny because I’m a critic, but I’m also a reporter, so I talk to comedians interview them. I learn a lot from that that helps me understand what they’re trying to do. There’s value in that, but there’s also value in independence and distance, and you sometimes can see and you know, comedians frankly understand this better than other artists because they’re often critics of whatever social conditions, politics, whatever, and they can often diagnose something more perceptively than people in the newscan because they have or journalists can because they have a little more distance. So distance can be an advantage as well, and it keeps you out of the fights.
There are enough to name particular names. There are comedians who do really well and aren’t respected by the brick wall cigarette smoking crowd in the village, and I will name names. I worked with the blue collar guys. Larry, the cable guy, Dan is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, unless Jeff Foxworthy is in the room. They are awesome people, and you know, I’ve been backstage with them, and Larry would write Jeff a joke that just didn’t work for Larry’s act, and Jeff would write something a little naughty and pass it back and forth.
And they’re not They’re just trying to make people laugh. They’re not going, oh, Larry the Cable Guy, this is high art, like it’s just jokes, and some of that, especially in New York, that bitterness about somebody else’s success would get fatiguing. You know what else, Larry the Cable Guy is good at what he does. I’ve when I wrote about them, I made a point of I went to Beaumont, Texas to see that tour. I didn’t I wanted to go to like there, and I watched all of them, and Larry, I believe, came last.
And I think that was the right move because he’s a he’s a killer, and he is an incredibly dense, punchline rich set. Not every joke is great, but if you don’t like it, another one’s coming down the pipe fast. You know, it’s not like the hippis obviously brand of comedy, and it’s a character driven comedy, which it feels there’s it’s you don’t see it quite as much in the clubs as he used to but anyways, the Yeah, I think it’s the kind of journalism that I do, and not everyone has to be like this, but I try to have Catholic tastes. I try to meet artists where they are. That doesn’t mean that everything is equally good, but I think that’s part of the fun of the job is seeing people of artists of wildly different genres, aesthetics, ambitions.
That’s what makes this fun to follow. I love that you went to Beaumont when I first put together Blue Collar Radio. The first time I met them, I went to see a show. The show was a Nashville and I specifically asked them, please don’t vip me. Put me in the upper deck with the civilians.
And I sat there and I paid attention, and I was just trying to take the vibe in. And I always remembered the two things that got big applause where y’all ever been to the Walmart? A mention of Jimmy Buffett and a mention of Elvis, And I factored that into my programming. Whereas the Raw Dog Channel was if it were a person, maybe it would be Bill Burr and a real fu in a rock and roll kind of vibe. And blue Collar Radio was god Flag country veterans, straight people by acker barrel, straight down the middle, and it did tremendously well.
Yep, yep, No, it’s true. And that’s one of the great things about stand up is that you’ve got all these regional forms that are that do well. Sometimes I worry that the internet’s sort of flattening that out. And I wrote a story last year about how the internet is the Internet hurting distinct local scenes because there used to be like Boston at a specific aesthetic that you could have SA San Francis, which was different than San Francisco, which was different than DC, which was different than Nashville. But now since everyone is in the same room together online, this idea of oh, the comedians and my senior are the only ones I know coming up is obsolete?
And is that going to stand off the edges of local difference? And I don’t know some people I talked to, some people in various local scenes who suggest that’s happening. And there’s so much out there. We’re nearly an we’re in and we’ve really only talked big comedians’. We haven’t talked alt, we didn’t talk improv, we didn’t talk sketch.
We didn’t talk one person shows like somebody like Natalie Palamini is just doing amazing work. There’s just so much out there. I just saw her new show, which, I’ll be honest with you, I was like, how can she top Nate? But I saw her new show which at the Netflix Festival in la and it was the best thing I saw there. It wasn’t finished, but it was thrilling.
Hard wait to see it when it’s done. It’s basically like a rom com where she plays both She plays both parts of this romance, and the physicality of it is incredibly inventive. I’ve neversed anything like it. Yeah, the whole clowning scene is boom. That’s just great.
Jason. You’ve been very generous with your time. I hope you’ll come back down the road when there’s an excuse for me to ask you to come on again other than just hey man, want to fill an hour for me. But this was fantastic thing. This was incredibly fun.
Thank you for asking, and it’s great to have a conversation with someone who knows their stuff. He was fantastic. I enjoyed the heck out of that, and he was very gracious with his time on this program. Tomorrow a look at the best comedy specials of the year so far. See it then