Month: March 2025

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Caloroga Shark Media. Hi there, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Tonight in New York City at the Beacon Theater. It is the Night of Too Many Stars. John Stewart is your host.

Some of the performers Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Amy Schumer, Ronnie Chan, Alex Edelman, Susie Smond, Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Sherman, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, James Austin Johnson, and Sam Morrell. In a statement, creators Michelle and Robert Smigel said, we created a Night of Too Many Stars with our friends in the comedy world at a time when most organizations focused only on research for a cure. Seeing so many parents struggle to find appropriate services and schools for their children inspired us to create an event to support the vital programs and services that individuals with autism need right now. This was started back in two thousand and three.

Also back this week, the Boston Comedy Festival it’s twenty fifth year.

Congratulations to those guys. The lineup includes headliners Eddie Peppatonimo Phillips, My Michael Costa, Brooks Wheelan from Saturday Night Live. Remember Brooks Know Me Neither and Amy Miller, a bunch of stand up contests, a benefit show for comedians affected by the fires in LA, a diversity showcase, and a clean comedy show. Founder Jim McHugh says, every year we do stuff that works, and we do stuff that doesn’t, and we just keep rolling along. I love that sentiment fire call correctly.

Jim asked made me a judge at the festival a long time ago. I had babies and couldn’t go up to Boston to do it, but that would have been a lot of fun. The idea is to appeal to a wide range of taste. McHugh says, We’ve always had the feeling of whoever you think is the best comedian. You’re right.

The Boston Globe did a bit of a preview. The contest starts tomorrow. The idea is to showcase local acts, Jim says. The whole purpose of this thing we started twenty five years ago, was trying to get the industry to come here and see the acts. April third, the Funny Together Tour is Clean Comedy Providence.

Comedian Ronda Corey is joined by Bug Coulson and Mike Murray. Bug Coulson is a great name. Eddie peppatone also on the third at City Winery at two thirty pm. On the fourth at seven o’clock, a more reasonable time celebrating diversity in comedy. Your host is Beer with a Queer Jeff Klein.

Also a fun title, Emo Phillips on the fifth at seven o’clock. On the fifth, Daman Miller says, I think the most forty year old thing I do, though, is I have a special word for when I’ve had too much white wine and I want to get at a Fistfightchie headlines two shows with Courtney Reynolds, and on the fifth it’s the Boston Comedy Finals, where the final eight contestants will compete for the top prize in front of a panel of judges. Ryan Hamilton will receive Comedian of the Year. Seems like a really good festival, and the one over the weekend in Rhode Island also fantastic. Nice to see the comedy festivals back.

Somebody you may know started a comedy podcast six months before the pandemic, and boy in twenty twenty size stretching the New Republic seems to agree with me that everybody’s live with John Mulaney is an ambitious mess. They write, John Mulanie’s new Netflix talk show is filled with ideas that are funny in theory but only barely working practice, echoing some of what I talked about with zivin yesterday. How do you tell the difference between a talk show that reinvents the form so radically that it confounds the viewers’ expectations about what a talk show is and a talk show that just doesn’t work. The young man Philip who wrote this piece says, I wasn’t old enough to experience the nineteen eighty two Late Night with David Letterman, but I suspect that it did something like the former Letterman worked almost immediately. The Letterman was quirky, but it leaned into the it’s twelve thirty, the NBC bosses or asleep, No one cares.

Let’s just make ourselves laugh, which is kind of what Mlanie’s doing, but with a much brighter spotlight. This writer is wrong when he writes I imagined that the early viewers of Letterman’s Late Night initially he may have been confused about how the gap tooth Goofball was using the hour allotted to him. Nope, not at all right from the get go, even the initial opening credits for Letterman, let you know, it was low key. You know, over the years, the Letterman theme evolved into this big show busy theme by the time we got to the CBS version of it. But that initial version very very chill, and the understated vo no, no, no, this was not screaming showbiz.

This was screaming It’s twelve thirty and nobody cares. The writer says, I don’t yet know how to watch Mullaney. Mlaney opens with a monologue that is followed by pre tape bits of varying quality, occasional audience gag, celebrity guests on couches, and a musical performance. There are Johnny cars and Ed mcmh’s style exchanges between Mlanie and Richard Kind. I personally don’t know if Richard Kine was the right choice either.

I’m sure that’s an unpopular opinion, but I just said it. And there are lutterman esque absurdities, like the same old delivery robot that ranges freely around the set. That is true. This next paragraph is on point. There’s a kind of punk wonderment about shows like Letterman’s or Eric Andres throwing things at the wall to see if it’d stick.

As acidic as they are. There’s a hopeful spirit of formal exploration at work, but Mullaney show as a certain sourness, a deliberate lack of wonder that’s most detectable in his management of the panel portion. On one hand, it’s slightly funny to watch deliberately in Congress guests awkwardly squirm as they tried to offer advice to callers, uncertain what exactly they’re supposed to do. On the other hand, it kind of sucks to watch that good analysis there. Let’s stop off at gossip corner.

Shane gillis dating an Instagram model, Grace Brassel is building up her follower collection and people aren’t paying attention. On Instagram. Last week, she shared photos of the couple’s recent trip to the UK. They attended UFC Fight Night Edwards versus Brady in the O two arena. She captured one of her posts, drink fifty five Guinnesses and fifty five beers with my buddies in Europe that got a lot of attention.

One person accused her of being after Shane’s secret grilled cheese recipe. Another person wrote about Shane’s choice of hat, Shane hasn’t taken off that Eagles hat since we won the Super Bowl. All right, You’re not getting a forty five minute episode today. You got three in a row. We’re back to normal.

Andy Woodall has released a new album. It’s his seventh comedy album called Beach Brain. He says it is his silliest album yet. Andy says, my hope is it will appeal to like minded beach Brains. Have given Beach Brains a little taste of life by the water.

On the album, Andy explores the humor in second marriages, gaslighting, and buying toilet paper in Bulk. I am working with Andy’s publicist, have Andy on the show in a little bit. Yesterday you heard Jason Zennemann mention an Andy Kaufman documentary. The Guardian wrote about it. They point out Andy Kaufman constructed so many clever hoaxes to house this work that many assumed he must not have died young at the age of thirty five.

Can I tell you when I was at serious? I know I mentioned it every day. Sorry, it’s big chunkle my life and I am posting a comedy podcast. It’s relevant. I was having lunch with Andy’s brother, Michael Kaufman, now their sibling.

So Michael Kaufman obviously looks a little like Andy. And as I sat there letting my mind wander, looking at Michael Kaufman many years after Andy’s death, I started to wonder, is it possible I’m sitting here with Andy Kaufman. We had a cool idea for a broadcast at Sirius. So Sirius does these. They call them town hall, so you have a celebrity in like we did one with Bruno Mars, and you have a bunch of fans come up and the fans get to ask questions.

The Kaufman estate, led by Michael, was willing to announce Andy Kaufman town Hall, and I wanted to do a whole big put on of promoting this is the return of Andy Kaufman. They were on board. We had a press release drafted, and the Big Boss just didn’t get it. You know. I was planning on doing a live broadcast where we just dragged this thing out as long as possible, but again Big Boss didn’t get it, so it didn’t happen.

But I kept wondering is this actually Andy sitting here with me? The new documentary is called Thank You very Much, and the Guardian tells it’s it’s upfront about how alienating Kaufman could be to audience members, to casual observers, even a coworkers, while at the same time never framing his work as pure endurance tests. There’s a glee in his blurring the lines between reality and fiction, even when he does his best to hide it under voices or makeup. Thank You very Much doesn’t depend on the same old clips, and watching all this Kaufman footage emphasizes how inimitable the man was. Funny sentence here.

What’s more difficult to replicate is Kaufman’s dedication to his strangest whims. When Tim Heidecker passes away, it will probably not kick off a thirty year ambiguity over whether he’s genuinely dead. Thank You very Much is out in movie theaters in the United States. Out in Santa Monica, it’s the Bergamont Comedy Festival. The La Times covered it.

The lineup consists of ninety three percent female identifying BIPOC, LGBTQ, plus acts and other perspectives. Historically overlooked by gatekeepers and stand up. They spoke with Joe Stetler, who’s a third grade teacher who lives with an incurable cancer. Joel says, comedy has become away for me to sort it all out. My response has remained one of the few things I can control.

Storytelling and stand up given me a space to turn something dark into something meaningful, not just for myself but for audiences who know what it means to have life. Kick the door in among the highlights on Saturday, April fifth, an hour from Cameron Esposito with new material developed since she filmed her Four Pills Special. Four Pills will be coming out on Dropout on April eleventh. Oh, dropout is the old college humor. This article tells me now I know what it is, okay, and that is your comedy news for today.

If you skip the weekend for some reason, good stuff about Mitch Hedburg over the weekend. You might want to go back and check out both Saturday and Sunday’s episodes. If you are into Mitch Hebburg, meet you here tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Why there, Johnny macn no News Today. Today we celebrate the life of Mitchell Lee Hedburg. He passed away March thirtieth, two thousand and five, at age thirty seven. It’s hard to believe it has been twenty years.

Born in Minnesota, but finding his comedy voice in Florida clubs, Mitch Hedburg became a cult hero after his nineteen ninety six appearance on Letterman. If you’ve ever seen a broken escalator and thought temporarily stares, you’re keeping the spirit of Mitch Hedburg alive. I know personally my daughter will offer me frozen bananas regularly, just to tee up the joke. If I walk past a particular sandwich chain, I will say, did you know that ducks eat for free at subway? If I’m at a soda machine and they’re selling mister pib, I will take a picture of it and text it to friends and say, dude didn’t get his degree.

Mitch Heedburgh’s deadpan delivery, sunglasses, hiding his stage fright, his unmistakable cadence made him instant recognizable in New York comedy clubs and on tours across the country. Mitch passed away twenty years ago in Livingston, New Jersey, not too far from where I live. Today, Let’s celebrate the life and the career of Mitch Hebburg. My guest is Jason Zenneman from The New York Times. You guys know Jason, friend of the show and listener of the show.

Jason is a critic at large for the Culture section of the New York Times. He writes a column about comedy. You’ll hear me reference Jason probably three times a week on the podcast He is Fantastic. Two sections here. The first part is about Hebburg.

Then while I had Jason, I wanted to discuss some other comedy things. We recorded this on Wednesdays, so we didn’t talk about Taylor Tomlinson for example. That happened after we didn’t talk about milleniy episode three. So I just want to put that in context. Anyway, here’s friend of the show, Jason Zinneman.

So what was your entry into Mitch Hepburg. Did you discover him? Later? Did discover him? Like ten years ago there was kind of a head burgess sans with people quoting him on Twitter.

Where did you come into Mitch? This is embarrassing. Actually, I’m even I don’t want it. You started with the tough question, which leads me to an embarrassing confession, But I’m gonna make it because I think it illuminates something critical about Mitch Hedburg, which is I just found an email where I was talking to a friend only a little before I got the job as the comedy critic. So this is like twenty ten something like that.

So after he passed away where he mentioned Mitch Hepburgh and I said, oh, who’s that? So that’s embarrassing that I got this job without knowing who Mitch. I shouldn’t you shouldn’t hire me as they because I have now steeped in Mitch Heedburg. But I think what it also reveals, outside of my lack of qualifications, is that Mitch Hedburg was not that well known among non comedy obsessives, and there were many more popular comedians than Mitch Heedburg when he died. And it’s also a great reminder that popularity isn’t that important.

The people who are really have a lot of followers and a really big deal. Right now, the media thinks we have to pay attention to all of them. We don’t We Uh, there’s Mitch Hedberg is more well known now than he was when he died. And the reason is the same reason where great art is always that is one of the metrics for success is how you age what happens over time. Like there are a lot of people who are very popular right now who no one’s gonna care about after they die or you know, ten years after their work.

A lot of them, right. And there’s going to be some people who are, you know, not that popular, don’t have Netflix specials, who are gonna be like Mitch Hedberg where it’s going to be. Of course, you’re gonna know whom Mitch Hedberg is. And I think he was a person who the comedy cognizante knew who he was. Clearly I should have, but I didn’t.

And but when he died, but he did. He wasn’t like a massive star. And certainly, if you compare him to the person he’s always compared to in terms of influence, Stephen Wright, he didn’t have the mainstream breakthrough that Stephen Wright did. I think you can say they’re similar to Andy Kaufman, who has gotten more and more famous after he’s died. I think it’s fair to say he’s one of the most important and influential.

I think Mitch Hedbury Andy Kaufman are two of the most influential comedians in modern times, and neither of them were you know, top five ted Echelon in there in popularity in their time. I think you’re right. My audience will be sick of me telling the story. But real quick, I was at the car show, Jim brew was doing his radio show. Jim was a little frosty because the night before Jim had to do an extra hour because Mitch didn’t show up for a show.

I believe that was Mitch supposed to be opening for Jim Brewer in two thousand and five, which you know, if you say to somebody now like, oh yeah, Heedberg was opening for Jim Brewer, people like, what what are you talking about? But I think that’s a spot where Mitch was at and you talking about maybe you weren’t famili with him. I’m trying to remember. I think I have a false memory of meeting Mitch. I think Mitch was up and did Brewers show, and I can kind of sort of remember being in the back, but I don’t have a clear memory of meeting the guy because back when I was doing serious comedy, people came up every day, So you know, I don’t remember every time I met somebody I think I’m aligned with you there that Yeah, maybe he wasn’t as famous as the legacy.

So is this a James Dean thing? And I’ve talked about this with some other people. If is Hegberg still doing one liners twenty years later? Does that translate in the age of social media and feeding the Beast? And I got to go on TikTok, I know, and I’ll stop talking in a second.

I think in the Instagram era his stuff really popped ten years ago. You throw up a one miner, you make a cartoon of it, it was great. I’m not sure in the current Feed the Beast crowd work, Feed the Beast crowd work. I’m struggling a picture of Mitch Hedberg twenty five. I mean, maybe I’m naive, but I think he’d be doing well.

I think he’s just too talented, he’s too o rige. It’s interesting. Chat TV came out and there was a lot of discourse about can it replace comedy. One of the first comedians that AI nerds fed into AI models was Mitch Hedberg. And I was sent a lot of oh, look, hey, this AI can reproduce what Mitch Hedberg did, and I would listen to it and I would say, no, this can’t.

This is actually you think this is an argument fore I, And it’s the opposite. He’s that good, so I mean it’s academic kudos. It is like James Dean to some degree.

And then I think the legend of him grew because he died at what thirty seven?

Anybody who dies in their thirties there’s a certain glow about them that like a long career where you see them age and you know and us are fast. I mean Stephen Wright again is a good comparison. I think he’s had a fascinating career, but we’ve sort of forgotten a little bit. He was someone who I was into as a kid, and it was radical when I first lost he was a radical figure and I don’t think maybe people grasp that when they see him today. You know, Stephen again one of those comedians much like a Kinnison, much like a Dice.

The first time you saw me, you’re like, wow, this is different. And as I’ve been prepping for these interviews this week and thinking about right I don’t want use the word verses, but Right and Heedburg. I feel like Right performs material to the audience, whereas Hebburg was in it with us, especially because he would do busted jokes and be like, you know, hey, I got to punch that here. That didn’t work, and you know, it would just be like, okay, all right, yeah it didn’t work. You’re right, buddy, but I got your back, whereas I feel like Steven is just doing his thing on a stage, almost like a one man show.

This is actually one of my favorite subjects, which is it’s a real comedy nerd question, what’s the difference between Stephen Wright and Mitch Hedberg? And I’ve asked a lot of comedians because of course they’re, you know, very influential, both of them, and I looked them up a Bobcat golfway, as told he said, when you watch Mitch, you learned who he was, and you got you had some speculation over like who’s this guy voted for? Was his childhood with Stephen Wright? He did not let you in. I think you’re absolutely right, by the way about the performed material versus Jessel Nick, who was a huge, huge, right, you know, right was a huge influence on him.

He said to me, I think they’re compared to each other because they both told absurd, non secretars. Mitch Hedberg had the appearance of mentally fumbling around on stage looking for his jokes and figuring out as he went along. Right was deliberate, the sort of goes to what you’re saying. He was serious, He was not fucking around. Mitch just walked on stage from a party.

And of course he’s not using it as an insult. He’s saying that was the vibe he gave. Right just walked on stage from another planet. I think that I think that’s a pretty good explanation. But maybe if you’re just looking at it from a legacy standpoint, and this is gonna sound cold, but dying was a good career move because because.

You look at young comics. I mean, there’s a lot of comics I follow on substack who are often analyzing mulling over philosophizing about Mitch Hedberg. The one I want to shout out because I think it is a comic that your listener should also look up is Mike Kaplan, who has a great substack. He’s a huge Hedburg fan and he recently had a substack about him and he said this. He said, his jokes are songs infinitely re listenable, where so much comedy requires surprise to have his desired effect.

Hedberg’s has somehow transcended that. That is fascinating, and I think he’s right. You can listen to you know, an elevator can never break. It just turns into stairs, and even if you’ve heard it before, there’s still a pleasure in hearing it again. They are more like songs, and that’s very high praise, because once you take the surprise out of comedy, you take quite a bit out of it.

I think, you know what Mike does his sub sact is then he goes on to analyze some jokes. It looks at the philosophy of them. They actually have a depth to them, especially in how they kind of mix. And this is in part I’m influenced by Mike’s writing on this, like the ordinary and the metaphysical in a way that rewards sustained analysis and thinking. I never thought of that that it’s it is like music that I don’t mind listening to the stuff over and over and part of the production.

I think it’s strategic grow Locations is the one with the bass, which just gives the whole album a vibe and helps bring those one liners to life and that whole low key party vibe. Yep, I think that’s true. You got me thinking too about you know what if Island And when you pointed out Mitch was thirty seven, You’re trying to picture fifty seven year old Mitch Hedberg, you know, have the same hairstyle. It’s like when you try and picture eighty year old John Lennon and if you know, maybe looking more like Larry David. It’s just it’s so hard.

These people get fixed in your mind at a certain age. It’s true. I mean, what’s interesting right is and I don’t think I would get too much argument about this. His is the kind of comedy that doesn’t age in the sense that if you didn’t like it in nineteen ninety eight, you’re still not gonna like it. If you did like it, it still works now.

It doesn’t need a lot of context. It’s often based on logic. It’s based on playing with language, on the slipperiness of language. Often when people like every once in a while, I’ll have somebody say like, oh, I have like a teenager’s getting into comedy. What would you suggest in the list of people who I say, it’s Mitch Heberg.

Now, granted, maybe he’d evolve and he would become you know, he’d be talking about topical stuff, or maybe he would move in a personal direction or something. But my suspicion as he wouldn’t. We’ll never know. I’m hearing the base in my head and somebody going, I got aheaded to a single. Chat exactly exactly the amazing.

I think one thing about Mitch that during the soul searching this week that has revealed itself is he’s one comedian that appeals to all the camps, you know, the comedy seller people, the brick wall smoking cigarettes people, the la al d people, the blue collar guys. I think everybody liked and respected Mitch’s comedy. Well, okay, let’s I’m push back in that. So please please, I love this discussion. Go yes, I think you’re right.

But that’s in part because he died in two thousand and five before not just comedy but the world fragmented. Would everyone still love him so much if he was still around and he was, you know, toring either taking a side in these various culture war battles that we all know of. You know, I don’t know. I think what’s significant about him is that he’s at the head of an entire family tree of comedy that is incredibly legible to us today but wasn’t not that long ago. And you know, it’s taking a Taro, it’s Sheng Wang, it’s Todd Berry, it’s even Hannibal, It’smitri Martin, this kind of dead pen one liner surrealists like, Now, that’s the type of comedy.

It’s yes, he hung out with people as diverse as David Tel and Todd Berry. I think it deserves some credit. He has his work, and Mitch has shared some. Qualities, but I really think he helped invent a branch of esthetic comedy. And there’s still people who now are coming up who are like, Okay, that’s a legitimate I don’t need to be weird la clown or New York club comic.

There’s this other option, and if you’re good at it, people will respect you. And that’s true. I think that gets overlooked in a lot of the culture war stuff, is that people there’s club comics who think Chris Fleming is great, and there’s alt comics who think Bill Burr is incredible if you’re really good in fact, to be honest with you, not that this matters that much, but like I find that the alt people are easier to give up praise for someone who’s totally different than them in the club, same for the club people, because it’s less there’s less competitive, right. It’s the advantage of doing what we do is that we don’t really have a dog in one of the fights. We can actually call us balls and strikes more with more fairness in my opinion.

But so I think, you know, in the reason Mitch to take it full circle, the reason Mitch is sort of a safe harbor to praise is because he’s on the other side of life where I think he both seems very modern, but he never got on the you know, he never became joined the social media madness that was to come. So in the age of AI, there’s a YouTube page almost Beatle songs. The other day they released this George Harrison thing that they brought to life, pulling stems from different things. Absolutely incredible. So we’ve got enough audio of Mitch, and I know for a fact there at least was a notebook of Hedberg’s material that he never got to perform.

Lynn Shawcroft showed me the notebook. I saw it, if I’m remembering correctly, and you know, I don’t want to go all Brian Williams here, but I think at Sirius we did a special where some comedians performed some of those jokes one time. I think that happened. But anyway, the notebook exists and we have AI. Would you want to hear Ai Hedburg deliver those or.

No, oh boy, this is a George Carlin estate. Would not be for this, That’s for sure, that’s true. That’s I got to say. I’m not. But it’s his material.

So the Carlon Flink wasn’t Carlin’s material. This is Hegberg’s material. So I’ll give you an example on Netflix, the Churchhill documentary. I thought was amazing because they used Churchill’s books and had Ai Churchhill voice it, and I thought it really worked well. You still have the issue of timing performing the words of Mitch Hebburg is that the devil.

It’s a great question, and we’re really struggling with these issues, and it turns out that there’s so much more AI in our culture that we consume that we think it is. We found this out with the Academy Awards recently. It turns out the Bob Dylan movies got AI, and they all got in the idea of taking these regis stands of that AI is sort of moot. But I guess if we’re to take Mike Kaplan’s point, his jokes are like songs, I think I’d be fine for it as long as it’s labeled as such, and so it’s like a little bit like covers, and why not listen to it. I do think that there is a human element to delivery and to pace and to how he would that.

I’m open to AI having a positive impact on culture, but I’m more on the skeptical side among friends when we talk about this stuff. I have friends who are slowly using AI in ways that are not necessary but make their work a little bit easier. I’m a hardliner except where there are the few exceptions. But I feel like, unless you really need to use it, slippery slope. And I think the question would be who’s putting it together?

When it’s Paul mccurtney saying I think John might have done this, George might have done that. That’s one thing. If it’s some rando, that’s a whole other thing entirely. Last question on Hegberg that I want to ask you about a few other things is do you think he is more popular than he was ten years ago? I’m not talking about twenty years ago.

I feel like ten years ago he was in the zeitgeisten on the internet, and maybe we had better Twitter back then than we have now. I feel like he is starting to become a comedian of the past. A name that keeps popping to my mind this week is Richard Jenny, who was huge and nobody ever, ever, ever says the words Richard and Jenny in a sentence anymore. Are we starting to get away from Hebburg or is there more of a legacy here? I think you have a good point that Twitter helped him, because he really was perfect for Twitter.

But Twitter now is sort of a ghost town for comedy at least, so maybe he’s plateaued. But I don’t think he’s not like Richard Jenny. As I said, this Mike Kaplan thing was just like a week ago, and I think Matt Ruby had something on a substack about so he’s still cited and talked about the analog and I’m working on a piece right now. But Andy Coller is a quick thing on Andy Kaufman, and I don’t know what you think Andy Kaufman. I think Andy Coffin’s bigger now than he ever has been.

The Man on the Moon movie surely helped him. There was that renaissance there. I think the Kaufman Awards definitely helped when that was. That’s a little more visible than it is now, you know, I remember the earlier as Kristin Shawl for example, being one of the winners of that. But yeah, the Kaufman doc coming back.

Depending on what Bob’s Muda was doing on any particular day, there’d be a lot of Andy or no Andy at all. But I feel like Kaufman’s got a legacy. Sure, I think this Kaufman doc is very good, and I think you could point to figures like Sasha Baron Cohen, Nathan Fielder, the whole sort of trolling aesthetic, the sort of blurring of lines between real and fake. It feels like Andy Kaufman really anticipated a lot of what’s in the culture now in a way that gets him talked about, which was first of all, I think that Stephen Wright did get there before Mitch, which is relevant. I remember asking that Stephen right about Edburg and he wasn’t very expansive, but he did say something like, it’s nice that I was influencer.

You know, he made it clear that he was there before, and he’s not wrong. He’s not wrong. So yeah, maybe his legacy is not as fixed, but I still think he’s in the cannon. Anytime I look at a top ex comedians of whatever time period, you know, he’s clearly up there. We could spend a year debating what such a list would look like, but he’s definitely way up there.

Yeah, for sure. I would take a quick break, come back, and I want to talk to Jason about some other things. So I believe you were the Conan Marktwain Awards. Like I was a snuck in was the room. They didn’t give me a ticket, so I had to go as a plus one.

They rejected my offer for a ticket. I don’t know, it’s crazy. I thought it was a little crazy. Sorry, my brain just fried. It’s not like you’re some dude in a basement doing some dopey podcast.

It’s the New York Times. Well, they actually gave me this is probably two inside baseball to care about. But they actually gave it to a reporter from the Times, and they said they couldn’t give it to me because of they gave it to her, but they gave her two tickets, so we were like, all right, I’ll just go with her. All right, that’s good. So it turned out to be fine.

No one gave me any hassle where they were actually like, no yonder pouches. They couldn’t have been friendlier. It’s funny to bring up the under pouches because I haven’t seen really anything leak. But I guess it was a professional crowd right industry and the New York Times. You guys aren’t going to start bootlegging things on your phones.

They could have. It was actually I think it was mostly Kennedy Center people and subscribers, but the whole comedy industry was there. I mean, it was actually a great show. I gotta say it was. I’ll be really interested to see what they cut out.

But you know, Conan, for one thing inspires a lot of love and loyalty, and then people brought their a game. So it was probably the best comedy lineup I’d seen this year, and it was tight. I mean, I don’t know what they’re going to cut on top of the fact that there’s the whole Trump and politics of it all, but there. Was a lot of comedy nerds. Jay Leno got hit almost as bad as Trump, and that maybe worse.

There was one point when I think it was Kumeo had this fake ted talk where he pointed out that he had a bunch of people on the. Cover of Time and he had Hitler. Stalin caused me, these are like the covers of Time, and then he had Jay Leno jay Leno cover and I was like, that’s a hard one. But so there was that there was a lot there for comedy nerds to chew on poor Jay. I mean there was a time circa nineteen eighty two eighty three He’s coming out in a leather jacket and he was fairly edgy, and a frequent letterman guest that Jay is long gone, at least in the eyes of his peers.

It’s true. I am to be fair. Conan did not say a word about him, but I think his friends knew that he would enjoy going back over some of those late night worse from another period. It’s crazy that post late night talk show where at Pete Conan the Oscar is obviously a great look for him the podcast, but he’s more popular than ever and he’s not on late night. It’s an increase.

He’s that an incredible year. I feel it’s funny I did a big profile of him before this. I feel my timing was very good. I was lucky because then he got the oscars in the Twain and I felt like he’s he is having this moment, and I thought he really rose to the occasion. His speech was, you know, he had this tough call because he’s not a political comedian.

In fact, he told me he thinks Trump’s bad for comedy. Doing Trump jokes is not his instinct. That comedy is not going to make social change. If anything, he will have a backlash. And yet he’s put in this situation.

The Kennedy Center is now in an unprecedented move. The President has made himself the chairman of the Kennedy Center and gotten rid of the Democrats on the board. Seems sort of apolitical. Is now early political. Not mentioning it, people boycotting it would itself be a political gesture.

So how do you stay true to your principles? While responding to the moment a very tricky problem that I think he thread beautifully and ultimately made a very political speech, But it was all through this esthetic appreciation of Mark Twain, which. Is consistent with who he is. He is, like, you know, he’s a Harvard nerd, you know, a comedy nerd who really has read Mark Twain and chapter and verse that has opinions on it. And you know, it was an s seats speech but with a real hardcore political core.

And then it ended. I didn’t mention this in my piece, but the funniest bit I think was Will Forte at the end came out as Mark Twain and then roasted all the other previous Mark Twain winners. He said that Adam Sandler can’t read. He said that all and you know written by Conan obviously, or written by Conan and Will and then end it with this kind of really crazy, silly, surreal vignette with all these multiple Mark Twain’s almost like the Slim Shady video. That was a great show.

What a great run for a guy that you know, went from Who’s that? To is this late night show going to make it to Thursday? To being at the top of the game. Now, I’ll switching gears on late night and I’ll go first. We’re recording this on Wednesday, So unless you’ve got a secret time machine, we’ve only seen two episodes of Mulaney.

I think it’s not working. And as somebody who’s been in broadcasting for thirty years, I get what they’re trying to do. I get that they’re trying to do the chaos, but as a producer, they got to put a format on it. It’s too all over the place, and the caller segment has to go. My prejudice is completely in favor of what they’re trying to do, right.

I like chaos, I like experimental, I like original Letterman, I like Chris and it’s I think I like all the riffs. I like the ambition, I like the aims. So I tend to sort of grate in a curve. But then, for instance, if I was to rank the acts at the Conan Mark Twain Award, and there’s some heavy hitters on here, Milany is either one or two. It’s a reminder of how damn good he can be.

He was unbelievable in the show, and you’re like, that reminds you what he does well, and you watch him on that talk show and you’re like, he looks like he’s flailing half the time. So you’re right, the talk show thing isn’t quite working, and you’ve got all this talent. I hope, you know, if I’m honest. The original run of it, I was mixed on it too. I felt like there was a lot of things that didn’t work.

But let me also just defend him for a second and say, there wasn’t a good talk show in history that worked right off the bat Conan took, you know, a year to get his legs. Letterman took a while, So I think we should good give credit to people who are taking ambitious moves and who are messing with the form. And he’s no questions he’s doing that. I’d rather see someone Fay. Look, I’d like to see Magic Johnson or talk show.

It’s like a huge disaster is way more fun than another mediocre conventional talk show. Like the Jerry Lewis Talk Show. You ever watched clips of that one? That’s painful. But I think you’re right.

I think as an executive, you know, I’m sending mullany notes on the equivalent of Wednesday, So maybe maybe let him do five shows before I get in there. I mean, well, one thing I’ll say is that I saw a funny tweet from or the instagram of Chris Chris Gethard, who is again wants this to succeed, and he said something about like you got to get a new mic or something for the or let me help you with the sound design for the call in or something. So even people who are really rooting for this can see that like it could be, it could be a little more polished. Can you help me sort my feelings with Bill Burr? And I don’t even know what I want from you.

I’m not on the soapbox with Bill Burr’s going woke and I used to look at it that’s not at all how I feel. However, maybe Bill is over exposed right now. I didn’t love the special, and now every time I see Bill Burr appeared in the media, I’m kind of making what I call crinkly face and be like, I don’t know if I need a bird time out. I don’t even know what I’m asking you right now, But where are you in the Burr averse? I’ve heard you as I’m a religious listener of this podcast and I’ve heard you.

I’m not on the same page with you, and I would just remind you that there are most people don’t know who Bill Burr is, right, Oh yeah, see, I just heard a piece on him. It was interesting to me how many people is The New York Times I had to like introduce who Bill Burr is and why he’s important and so while on one level, yes, it seems like he’s overexposed, he’s everywhere, but to a lot of people, this is their introduction to him. And I know that you agree that he is great at what he does. And look, I think his stuff on Elon who else is saying that? Johnny?

I mean, who else? How can comedians of all people be quiet about this? Ridiculous? Like, you know, how can they not be tearing this guy to shreds? Right?

Like Bill Burr is actually doing what so many younger comics should be doing. I’m not even talking about Trump. I’m talking about Elon Musk and billionaires, right, like attacking from this kind of blue collar position. Or to watch him on Bill Maher, you know, or watch him on Jimmy Kimmel beither kind of free leagion or as I said, I did a piece on him, which I watched him in rehearsal going out the director. He think he’s being very true to his nature in that he’s not picking me any side, going after whoever’s in front of him.

Is the new Special his best special ever? No, I don’t think it is. I think it’s pretty much like it. But if you like what he does, I think there’s stuff there like. But like, for instance, my parents who have never that was their first special, they thought it was great.

I think you just helped me. You know what happened? The indie band I like is playing stadiums? Yes? Now, are you gonna see any the Ross?

No? I would like to, but I haven’t done anything about it. That often happens with Broadway and me. It took back to the future threat closing down for me to go, oh, we got to go. And my daughter’s a theater kid and knows how to get tickets to things, so I should probably do something about it.

Have you seen it? Is it good? I’m going on Tuesday. I saw a little bit in rehearsal and he is perfectly cast yep, and he can obviously do wonders with the language, and so I can’t wait. I mean, it’s a killer cast.

It’s one of my When I was a kid, it was one of my favorite plays, and so I’m excited to see him do it well. I appreciate you coming on today, as we remember in Mitch Heedberg, and always fun to talk to you about all things comedy, nopun. Great, always great being here. Keep up the good work. Thank you Jason for popping on today.

I’m not this good. I used AI to help me shape some of the words about Hebburg, and the AI nailed it here. Mitch Hedburg used to make us laugh. He still does, but he used it too, all right, See tomorrow

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. And I’m Johnny mag and this weekend not really comedy news. We will celebrate the life and career of Mitch Hedberg, who passed away twenty years ago this weekend. I’m even struggling how to get into the Show’s part of it is, I’ve heard various dates for when Mitch passed away. If you google it, it will come up as March thirtieth.

Some sources will say March twenty ninth. I’ve heard anecdotes where it was March twenty ninth and not announced to the thirtieth. I’ve also heard versions where it was the thirtieth and then not announced until April first, which made people think it was a prank. Personally, you’ve heard me talk about it several times this week. I remember being at the auto show with Brewer when we heard the news, and I just now went to look to see when we did the Auto show broadcast, and I can’t find it.

So we’ll just celebrate Mitch this weekend. Mitch Hedburg was born February twenty fourth, nineteen sixty eight, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Three albums, one of them posthumous. We’ll talk about that the first two strategic Grill locations, and Mitch altogether the posthumous one do you believe in Gosh? I have shared my story where I was sitting with Lynn Shawcroft and she had some tapes and I said to her, you’ve got an album here, and I connected her with Jack Vaughn at Comedy Central Records.

That’s where that came from. My guest today is filmmaker and Hepburg documentarian Jeff Siegel. Yeah, Jeff is an Emmy Award winning filmmaker and the director of an upcoming documentary about Mitch. I can’t wait. So I reached out to Jeff and I asked him, Hey, will you talk Mitch Hedburg with me?

And today I will share that conversation. So why Mitch Hedburg? What do your life about Mitch Heedburg? Wow? Why Mitch Hedburg?

That’s a loaded question because I’ve spent nearly five years piecing together his whole life story. My entry point to this was getting to meet Mitch at a very formative time. In my life. And it wasn’t just on one occasion, it was four different times. And it could always be dicey when you get to meet somebody who you really look up to, and I’ve never met anyone quite like Mitch.

He was one of the most sweet, genuine, incredibly kind, humble, hilarious, complicated people. He bundled up so many different things, all in this unique package. And I don’t think it’s just me who felt it, that this incredibly unique aura and desire to know more about him and this vulnerability it was all. There was just a lot of different things that you felt when you were around Mitch. And some of that came through from his comedy, from the records on TV and everything, But when you actually got to sit there with him and chat, even if it was just fleetingly, he made an impact on you.

And he definitely did on me.

And now I’ve spoken over two hundred people who were a part of his journey th…

It is amazing the effect that he had on people and continues to have on people, even though he’s no longer with us. Was he Midwester or nice? Was he stoned? Was he all of that at once? Or Hey, mister Hdberg, big fan, Nice to meet you.

What do I get back? First of all, I had driven without going too deep into my own personal story. He was one of those people. I discovered him like so many people on TV Comedy Central presents. At first, when you discover him, you’re just like, what is this?

The very first few seconds of being exposed to Mitch, just this isn’t another language. Most people aren’t dialed into that frequency, and it takes you a second to click into it. And once you do, boom, You’re in Mitch world and you will never see the world the same way again. You will always see it through his eyes. So I fell in love with him that way initially, you know, discovering him like so many countless other people.

But the next step was, obviously, I want to see this guy. People forget that. Twenty five years ago it was a very different world without social media and all these things. It wasn’t always easy to track these people down. So it took months of refreshing his remedial website to try to figure out, oh my god, he’s actually coming somewhere in a radius I can get to.

And I drove down with a few friends I was a senior in high school to Washington, DC to see him at the DC Improv. So that kind of set this up into more than just us going out for the night of five blocks from where we lived. We had to really make an effort to go track him down. We weren’t even old enough at the comedy club to fulfill the two drink minimum. We had to order mozarella sticks and chicken fingers.

But now knowing that was I think that was my first live comedy show ever. So it’s when you enter through that perspective you realize, wow, this is so different than what you might expect. Otherwise. We were in the front row so many comedy shows. I would never want to be in the front row.

I don’t want to be the victim of crowd work and all that stuff. But with Mitchell was so different. So yeah, after the show, we tracked him down and the venue cleared out, and we said, hey, we drove three and a half hours to see you. Oh man, you drove all the way down here just to see me. He was so humbled by that and surprised by that, and he shouldn’t be because so many people, I’m sure we’re doing the same thing, but you know, to us, he cared and he was concerned if we are you guys staying down here, do you have a place to stay?

You’re not going home tonight, are you? It was this very sweet Midwestern hospitality, like caring about and who were we? We were just a bunch of high school kids who happened to go to a show. But you could immediately feel that he was this sweet, charming, incredibly kind, nice kid from Minnesota that never left him. And at what stage in his career is this after a few Comedy Centrals He’s done Letterman and all that.

Yeah, I had no idea of his timeline until I started doing this project, but yeah, this was two thousand and two when I saw him, So he’s already he’s done a bunch of Letterman’s Comedy Central presences behind him. Nineteen ninety eight was really the big year when Mitch. Blew up and all eyes in the comedy world went to him and he was in Time magazine. They called him the next Seinfeld. You got a big development deal at Fox and that’s that was that kind of big moment.

But then it took a few years for him to really pick up, for the Comedy Central Presents, to go into heavy rotation, for Comedy Central Records to pick up his album, and then record a second album and to put those out. Those didn’t come out till two thousand and three. It was all those later years of his life when he was really picking up in popularity, and once those albums came out, it was like game over. Those things were huge, especially among college age kids. They were just being swapped left and right on campuses.

I’m sure we’ll jump all over the timeline, especially I have hedburg add As I’ve been prepping for all these conversations I’m having this week, I started to think about you just talked about it. When those albums were out, they were very quotable. I was part of the cult. If I walked up to a soda machine that was selling mister Pibb, I would take a picture and text my friend and just where I who didn’t get his degree, and we would chuckle about it. Ten years ago, on the tenth anniversary of Mitch’s passing, I felt like he was very much in the zeitgeist because of Twitter, and was either being quoted or people were quoting in his style.

Here ten years later, I’m not feeling that, and I’m worried that he’s starting to become forgotten. I was thinking about our interview this morning, and I think back to Richard Jenny, who was super popular, and you never hear anyone mentioned Richard Jenny. I don’t think Mitch’s zeitgeistniss has fallen that far, but I worry that he’s starting to become a comedian of the past. I certainly hope that’s not the case, and that’s why I’ve been trying so hard to get this kind of big project together to celebrate Mitch, to tell his unknown story, and really to introduce him to a whole new generation of people who may have not heard of Mitch and not discovered him. But the beautiful thing is that he is so instantly and forever discoverable, as Mark Maron put it in our interview with him, that he is just He’s one of those guys.

The evergreen nature of his material and the way he saw the world and processed it through his unique mind and put everything out there is that to this day, I think anybody could just pick up on him, see one or two jokes, and then absolutely fall in love. Maybe it’s anecdotal, but I have been talking to tons of people, and a lot of people are obviously connected with his story. But I feel like I’ve actually been blown away by the fact that he still remains so relevant, and even though so many people talk about how had he been around a few more years, living into the age of social media, his jokes, his material would have been so perfect for that, because obviously it’s these one liners, there’s short bites. But you know, I feel like I’ve found that even though he didn’t get to live into that era, and it’s almost poetic he was this guy. He feels from a different era anyway, and it’s almost poetic that he passed away before the whole world and the comedy world as well, but was upended by social media and just so many changes that we’re still feeling to this day.

But social media, I think has embraced what Mitch left behind. So even though he wasn’t around to put new stuff out those clips, whether Letterman appearance is Comedy Central, animated gifts, all kinds of audio animation that people have done for it, I think that there’s still a huge following that loves Mitch and is trying to keep him alive, putting him out there so that lots of new people can discover him and fall in love the same way. I was talking to someone else earlier today, And again I come at this as a big Mitch fan. I wouldn’t have stalked you if I weren’t a fan, and I was thinking in terms of modern social media and feeding the beast. I think at peak Instagram, taking a headburg one liner and putting a funny image to it was great.

I wonder now how he would feed the beast. Not really a crowd work comedian, and I broke it down and if he’s got a crowd behind him, he could say hey, nice hat and get a laugh because the crowd’s at your back. But he’s not a crowd work comedian. So would he be able to feed that constant beast that we have to feed in twenty five. I will never know, But like I said, I’m glad that we don’t really ever have to know that he could be himself on his own terms.

The big takeaways from again years of conversations with so many people are that Mitch was steadfast to do. Things his own way. He was willing. To swim up stream if he had to. He didn’t care if he was struggling to find his audience, to figure out his sense of humor.

In those early days, and nobody knows much about the early days of Mitch. It’s really a kind of an arcane thing, the origin story of where this guy came from. But he was so perseverant and so dead set on doing every single thing his own way. I don’t really think he would have necessarily bent and acquiesced into just trying to fit into the new mold just because that might drive the algorithm. I think he was going to do what he was going to do no matter what.

And I think that’s what part of what makes Mitch beloved and endearing to everyone, is that he was holy himself and not ever just trying to sell out to be something different. It’s interesting all the what ifs, and I’ll get back to reality in a second. But at the time of his passing, he was starting to really enter rockstar mode. And by why, I mean that just the crowds being raucous for him. Lyn Schawkroft told me that he was speeding up the act and it was bothering him a little bit because people were stepping on the lines.

It would have been interesting to see how he navigated that period where maybe we’re more into hey, it’s a party and Mitch Hedberg’s on stage, and that messing with the deliberate pacing and the timing is so key to what he did. Sure, if you look back to even the earliest stuff when he started, there was a distinct evolution of him finding his voice, and he used to be more long form in the early days, not rambling long stories, but longer setups to jokes, and slowly but surely those got whittled down because I think he just wanted to be more able to go into this non sequitor and throw whatever out and get through it, really boiling down these hilarious thoughts into these most efficient, compact joke delivery mechanisms, which is ultimately what he left us with, especially in those later years. But yeah, by the later years, I mean he got to the point where he was selling out theaters in an era where that wasn’t as common as it is now, again without social media and without a big network show or something that was very rare back then, and he did it. He built this following through very grassroots, onerous process over fifteen years as a stand up just crisscrossing the country, making it in small markets, not necessarily focusing on the bigger places. But really just city by city, club by club, booker by booker, winning people over slowly but surely.

And you know, by those later years, some of those last shows with thousands of people, they became very different than what the club shows were, especially with the college audiences. The last show I ever saw was a college gig, and it was a very different vibe than seeing him at the DC Improv. Unfortunately. I think a lot of the audiences were cheering him on and encouraging some of the more raucous stuff, and it did seem there’s a reason a lot of people have talked about him being this kind of rock star comedian. He certainly personified that rock star kind of vibe.

It’s interesting you say that. As I was thinking about there’s always the inevitable alignments of Stephen Wright style of comedy, and as I thought about it this morning, Stephen presents material at the audience and we take it in, and I felt like Mitch was part of the crowd. We were all in it together, and even if he busted a joke, he’d drop into the that didn’t work. Yes, we knew it didn’t work. He let us know.

He knew, and it was one big communal thing that we were in it. Absolutely. I think that’s such an important point in understanding Mitch. And yes, those inevitable comparisons with Stephen Wright again absurdist non sequitur. But I think the variable with Mitch, to your point, is this vulnerability, because he did exude that I’m up here, I’m telling the jokes, but you’re receiving the jokes.

But yes we are. It’s a symbiotic relationship here and some of his great moments, and to show you how quick and smart he was, even though some of these jokes, his famous ones were so refined and over so many years and turn into these perfect little gems that will stay relevant forever. Some of his greatest moments and showcasing how quick he was is when something didn’t work, or when he first walks on stage in a new venue, he often will break the ice with something that isn’t a joke of his, just off the cuff observation he did just for laughs nineteen ninety eight, which is the big moment when he was the bell of the ball he walked into the big gala there that was televised and his first joke was finally some Canadian television exposure. And it’s those moments show you that he was always thinking, always writing. Sorry to cut, but you just got to laugh out of me.

Now if we read the transcript, finally, some Canadian television exposure is not funny on the paper, but you nailed the delivery of how he would hang the word exposure and just he just he’s had that little touch and I think you just nailed you channeled it. Thanks again. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking of talking with people and obviously devouring and processing everything that Mitch left behind. So I think he’s rubbed off on me a bit and I’m honored by that. But yeah, to sum up what makes him great, and this is why you need to talk to so many people, And it’s so fascinating to triangulate Mitch from all the different perspectives of the people he crosspaths with in his life, from his family, from his close friends growing up, from the comedians he started coming up through, from the huge comedians who he broke out with, from the comedy industry, from people he was in romantic relationships with.

Everybody has a perspective on Mitch. And when the more people you talk to the more it fills in pixels and we can start to glean things about who he was. And again, everybody channels something different. It’s this look, it’s this delivery, it’s this manner of speaking, it’s the style of even the sense of humor of coming up with these jokes that, even though they might be in a non sequitor style. Some people equate him more as an alt comic, some people equate him more as No, he’s really in the style of Aborsch Belt Henny Youngman type, because it’s which group does he fit in.

He was embraced by everyone, and it goes back to something that’s come up a lot from people who went to high school with him. I’ve told me he was a little bit like Ferris Buehler back in that day, like he was gravitating in and out of all these clicks, but he wasn’t really part of any one of them. He was Mitch, and absolutely everybody loved him and still does. No he now you point that out, I think I talk about it on the show The brick Wall comedians don’t like the alt comedians, and then everybody gives the blue collar guys a hard time, And as I’m thinking about it. All the Camps liked Mitch.

I can’t think of I’ve never met a comedian bad mouth the guy. I haven’t heard a bad story about the guy. I haven’t heard anyone I roll as material. It’s only respect and love. And absolutely and that’s what’s so confounding, is how this person and can embody so many things and be beloved nearly universally.

Again, even his fan base. It’s it can be people of any age, any background. It’s not controversial, it’s not tied to any time and place. There’s some cursing in his jokes, but it’s all very wholesome. And I think what makes Mitch connect with so many people in such a wide swath is that there’s the vulnerability aspect, but there’s also just that he was so positive and full of love, and to me, that’s what looking back twenty years since his passing and we absolutely miss Mitch.

We adorn Mitch to this day. I really think the world needs more Mitch today. I think that, and thankfully he left so much that we can still share with people, especially in these times that are divisive, controversial, heated among so many people are just at each other’s necks about everything, and it’s just Mitch was so cool and can diffuse any situation, be friends with everybody, and just have everyone just take a deep. Breath and chill out and laugh. Laugh at the ridiculous.

That’s a thing that’s come up throughout this is his absolute love for absurdity and all things ridiculous. And even though he makes such a profound impact on everybody, it’s like, at the end of the day, there’s a value to being silly. He processed silly in such an interesting, smart way that is so unique and makes everybody absolutely fawn over him to this day. But at the end of the day, it’s just not taking things so seriously, being light, laughing at the minutia, looking at things through that unique lens, or take a. Quick break, come right back with more than Jeff Siegel talking Hedberg, you talked about leaving behind.

Last time, I was in a room with Lynn Shawcroft, and it might be twenty years ago now or no, it can’t be twenty, but it’s eighteen. She had Mitch’s notebook and there were jokes in there. We did a few specials when I was at serious comedy with Lynn involved, and if I’m remembering correctly. We did some sort of special where other comedians performed a few of those jokes. Now hopefully somebody didn’t delete the file and it’s sitting in a computer on sixth Avenue somewhere and that still exists.

But there is material out there not performed. But the thoughts of Mitch Heedburgh exist absolutely. This guy. One thing that’s come up from everybody is he was writing constantly from I don’t know the age of a year or two after graduating high school and hitting the road with his friends, before he started performing. He was just constantly observing processing writing.

There were so many things to Mitch and another. Thing that’s come up. There’s lots of material, of course, the jokes, but Mitch was creative in so many ways and a lot of people don’t get this, and a lot of people who are close with him, especially in the early years, really this is a point they wanted to make to me and make sure that people got that. While comedy is how he made it, he was an artist. He could draw the doodles.

His handwriting is a work of art to anyone who’s ever seen it. He copied the style that he learned from his dad, who was an architectural draftsman and wrote in the all caps, very angular, very artistic, fascinating way. I mean, everything he left behind is an artifact, photography, home videos, editing, all kinds of stuff. The first time he made any money doing comedy, he made a feature film that he wrote and start in with his longtime girlfriend and producing partner, Janna Johnson, and he would just do everything. They made music together.

He was so creative in so many ways, and so yes, there’s so much material, so many ideas that Mitch left behind, and we’re trying to incorporate as many of those as we can into kind of rebuilding his story from scratch and doodles and drawings that he did and getting them animated and all kinds of interesting stuff like that.

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Let’s talk about the documentary what makes you wake up out of bed and go this?

I’m going to make this Why Mitch Hebburg. The last time I saw Mitch was less than a year before he passed in two thousand and four, and I spent a little time with him was the Four Step and met him and it was at this college gig and the venue was clearing out and I went backstage and was in the green room and we were catching up, and I’m sure that this happened with countless other people. Obviously everybody loved him, and I’m sure he’s made time for other people. But when I was with him, like I said, Mitch made you feel like you were really special, like you were the only person he cared about at that moment. And we had a great conversation about film and filmmaking.

I was at film school at NYU at the time, and on the way out, the college had provided to catering. It was a big party sub and Mitch said, hey, man, I’m not going to eat that whole thing. Why don’t you take some with you? And he gave me this sandwich and just a nice gesture. I wouldn’t probably think too much of it, but to me at that moment, I left there driving home, eating this ham sandwich that Mitch had given me, and just thought, I need to know more about this guy.

I am fascinated. He is so many fascinating things. Yes, hilarious of course on the service level, but so much more than that complex enigma to some degree, and you just wanted to know more about him. So I was hoping to go on the road with him and film something for my NYU Senior Thesis project unfortunately passed less than a year later, but that planted the seeds over twenty years ago that I wanted to do something, and over the years I kept once in a while reaching out to someone or chatting with people and floating this idea. And we finished a documentary project that I produced four part series for Netflix in twenty twenty called This Is a Robbery.

And I had some time on my hands and it was COVID and I just dipped my toe in the mitchwater, and I said, I had a similar thought process as a lot of people, which is I love this guy, but I don’t really know much about him, and I want to know more. And I know that is echoed by so many people out there who just are dying to know anything more about Mitch. And so I started just piecing it together and put timeline and pulling out names and calling people. And it’s a slow process when you do that, but over the last four going on five years, it has slowly turned into this incredible thing. And I’ve been met with so much love and endorsements from so many people.

Along the way. I’ve gotten to know Mitch’s entire family, and not just no, but we speak frequently. I was texting with his dad earlier today. It’s an ongoing thing, and I’ve just been going across the country, connecting the dots, trying to invite everyone on board to finally celebrate Mitch, to tell his story, and to explore everything that made him who he was. And I have been blown away.

This has been the most meaningful project I’ve ever worked on. I have been humbled by the trust that so many people have put in me. Everything we found. And people have been sharing, It’s just it’s really special and unique. And even reconnecting old people who were part of Mitch’s life and haven’t spoken in decades through this process has been wonderful.

And the best part has been that so many people have told me how therapeutic it is after a long time to finally sit down and speak about Mitch. The tragedy never goes away, but after a certain. Point it’s a little easier for a lot of people to talk about the good stuff. And there’s so much good stuff. He was an incredible human being.

Again, so many things beyond being funny. But even in the later years when he was struggling offstage. The stories that we’ve found from a wholenother generation of comedians beneath him, who idolized him and adored him, And he would do absolutely anything for anybody to help them get their footing in the comedy world, making calls, putting them on the bill, giving them time, talking them up to managers and agents. He was just an incredibly great human being, and absolutely everyone who knew him, even briefly met him, felt that and continues to feel that, And the love for Mitch to this day is enormous. It sounds like you’re on a really good path putting these things together.

You would know better than I. But a lot of times when you put these things together, you initially get there, who’s this guy? He’s just trying to make money off Mitch Hedberg. So I imagine how the parents are part of of this, or the parents are friendly with you. You can speak for yourself obviously how much they’re part of it or not.

That goes a long way.

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And then I find with such projects it becomes the I call it the cool party to…

And if you have some people you can name drop? Oh okay, all right, We’re all doing this one. This is a safe space. This isn’t some sort of money grab. Can you speak to how that process has been are the Kenyans?

Are you seeing the snowball effect of Oh I talked to Maren, so someone else will do it? Absolutely if there’s so many different bins of people to connect with, Like I said, and obviously you want the big famous comedians and contemporaries who came up with Mitch, and someone like Maren or Stanhope or David Tell or Lewis Black who have so much direct crossover with him, obviously have a big personal aspect. But then you know, it’s also fascinating to talk to people who knew him a little bit, like Jim Gaffigan is in it, or bj Novak is in it. He’d never even met Mitch, but he speaks for the perspective of people who just view Mitch strictly from the fan point of view, and like what that means to people. I’m trying to triangulate it from all sides, from the people who knew him intimately well to people who just understand where he fits in this incredible pantheon of the comedy world.

And definitely the more people you get, the more you know. People are excited to be a part of it and realize that this is the chance to definitively speak about him. And everybody has something to say. Everyone has a great story about Mitch. There’s so much there, and it’s thrilling to finally accumulate all that.

And it’s going to be even better when we could finally put it all out and share it with the world. With this weekend being the twentieth anniversary of his passing. Just to get to the darker side of the story, do you have a sense of where people aware that he was struggling at the point in his life. I don’t personally know that answer. Yeah, the people who were a part of his life for a long time, especially going back into the era of his life where no one really knows much about, absolutely were aware that Mitch was having struggles.

It was a slow moving thing. People like me, People who were more peripherally connected, people like you. It sounds like fans who without social media weren’t necessarily hearing things or connecting dots back then. I don’t think they necessarily were aware. When I heard the news that Mitch passed, it was a complete shock to me.

I had no idea, But it doesn’t make it any easier when people, even though a lot of people knew that he was struggling with a lot of things, but there was this whole other, massive group who had no idea what was going on and were equally saddened when they heard the news. I remember we were floored. I was producing Jim Brewers radio show. We were at the New York Auto Show and Jim was doing a live thing in front of a crowd of people. Were there to otherwise see crowds, and Jim kept changing gears depending on who was in front of them.

Okay, there’s family people, I’ll do this, there’s adults, I’ll do that sort of material. And Jim was cranky that day because the night before Jim had to do an extra hour were because Mitch didn’t show.

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And then in the middle of our broadcast we found out why Mitch didn’t show, a…

We all felt terrible on several ols. First of all, that twenty minutes ago we were like, eh, that guy, and then just oh wow, somebody that we’re fans of has passed away or somebody in Jim’s case, somebody that had worked with had passed away. It was just I remember getting the call in the middle of the show. The general consensus was people being incredibly saddened and just devastated because of the impact he made. Everyone knew what a good guy he was.

Everyone knew where Mitch’s heart was. The silver lining to me, if there is any is that his story doesn’t end. It is ongoing, and we may have to be fighting trying to make sure to post enough stuff to keep Mitch relevant. But that’s what we’re trying to do on a larger level with the film. But he is still out there making people laugh every day.

People are discovering them every day, and so many people I’ve talked to talk about how connecting with people over their mutual love for someone like Mitch. It’s almost like the password at a speakeasy if somebody immediately responds to you there in the Mitch Club, and you know you’ve got a friend, and you can bring out what’s your favorite joke, and oh, this is mine. I always talk about his jokes to this day are like these bite sized nuggets of comfort food that are also incredible trading cards of oh yeah, I’ll take your escalator temporarily stares and I’ll raise you doughnut receip And it’s like everyone gets to have a favorite and everyone gets to share them. It’s wild even to this day. Anytime anything gets.

Posted about Mitch on any Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, any social media Twitter, whatever it’s called. Now, basically the comment section is just flooded with people putting the exact, verbatim quote of their favorite joke. It is truly a phenomenon. This is so rare, and I think people don’t necessarily compreh and how unbelievably special and rare it is for someone twenty years after their passing who is a comedian who again generally very tethered to a time and a place. And a style.

But this guy was totally uniquely his own and timeless. He will work in any era to anybody because he is a genuine, authentic person that people connect with on a very deep emotional level, which is hard for some people to believe when you just see they’re just these non sequitor, absurdist jokes. He’s not bearing his soul on the surface level the way someone like Mark Marin would. But yes, I’ve had this wonderful experience as my children went from being small to college age, and we would just about every Christmas head out to Hershey Park where they sell frozen bananas. And as the years went by, it went from me just doing a half assed Mitch impression to now my daughter will ask me, Dad, do you want a frozen banana?

And she’s just teeing me up to give her the line back, and it’s just one of those wonderful moments. Or we’ll be at a subway and I’ll just do a normal dad voice. I’ll be like ducks heat for free and subway, and it’s all these little things. The mister pib, the escalator and all these things just connected with a lot of us. It’s so universal.

It’s minutia largely right. It’s these everyday, most mundane things, but thought of in such a fascinatingly different perspective that is also hilarious at the end of the day too. And I think that’s what makes it so universal and still work to this day. Again, I’m steeped in this more than most, but ten times throughout my day going around, you just you see this or that and you think of Mitch. A few people have told me too.

They always say that tree is far away, which is his whole joke about mumbling some insignificant thing that ultimately someone keeps not hearing and then having to eventually say it too loud, And they’re like, it’s just these are such universal human things that I don’t think will ever become dated. The one that always pops into my mind is when I find myself too deep into an explanation and he has the weather related joke, and I just think to myself, I should have just said, yeah, that’s just right. As you’re going through I don’t want to ask the magician to show me all his tricks, but as you’re going through things, can you tease us? Did somebody have an old eight millimeter film in the toy box? Are there things that we’re all going to be like, ooh, I didn’t know that existed?

Absolutely, man, there’s so much stuff out there when you connect the dots that people have in their attics or their basements, or someone I just emailed today told me they just found a bunch of old, disposable, unprocessed film cameras from twenty five years ago, and it says Mitch on them and they’re about to get them processed. So it’s going around, obviously from his family and from so many friends. But yes, there’s a lot out there, and part of the process here has been trying to connect all those dots and find all this stuff, dig up this material that he left behind, and there’s so much stuff, and so much of it is so fascinating, especially when you put together the timeline of his life and one thing linking to the next thing, and then everything starts to come into focus a little bit more with Mitch and Yeah and the other as wonderful of all that old archival material is and will be to share. One of the most powerful things has been the interviews, especially with people. Who are really close with Mitch, who.

When they start speaking, you feel Mitch come alive, you feel his presence. A lot of people who aren’t famous. Again, there’s big voices in this film, and they’re wonderful, but some of the real breakout, stand out people are people you’ve never heard of, who have been waiting for twenty five thirty years to talk about this guy that they knew very closely and made such an impact to their world, and when they do, you can feel it. Are you and again, if you don’t want to give away the secrets, I totally get it. Are you telling a chronological story as their narrator saying when nineteen seventy four Mitch did this?

Is it just talk heads? Is it Mitch telling his own story where you can. All I’d say for now is a combination of all of those things will drive forward the narrative. We are trying to, like I said, sort of a three hundred and sixty degree view as much of Mitch as possible. But also I think it’s really important to contextualize him through people in the comedy world as he’s passing through all these different benchmarks of those last kind of decade or so of the analog years before the whole business was up ended, and working his way through the business trying to make it, and then also obviously the personal stories of everyone, and it comes forth so powerfully the impact.

That he made on everyone and what he meant to people. How far along are you in the process and when might we see this? We’ve been working on it for a long time. I don’t want to put an exact timeline on it, but we’re hoping at some point next year to be sharing this with the world. Let me take one more break and come back and ask you a couple more questions looking forward to this one as you’ve put this together, what has surprised you about learning about Mitch Hedberg, Like, we didn’t know that he played ice hockey, or he had nine cats, or what kind of stuff is coming out that we just don’t know about the guy.

Again, there’s a lot that most people don’t know about. What’s been so amazing to learn about is that there’s just so little is known on the surface level about him. It’s he’s so funny, he’s from Minnesota, he did lettermans. We know he passed away young, and he had addiction issues, but people really don’t know almost anything about him and his story, the origin story of this sort of superhero of Mitch Hedberg, because that’s what he is in the comedy world. He is beloved, so many people put him on that Mount rushmore with some of these way more prolific comedians.

And maybe he does not. Quite Carlin or Prior, but I think he’s absolutely as influential and beloved that the people that know him absolutely love him. So there is this whole story of this guy, and I didn’t know what we would find. Like I said, I knew it was from Minnesota. I didn’t know what happened before he blew up.

As a comedian. But his story is unbelievable. It is It is a guy who wanted to live that Jack Kerouac on the road kind of life, be out there, experience everything, found his love for comedy, figured out his calling, and then again stuck to his guns and never ever for a second of his life lived on anyone else’s terms other than his own. And he was. Willing to put in the time and the struggle and barnstorming America constantly on tour.

I won’t go into details of everything, but he has a absolutely captivating, fascinating story of his journey of getting to where he ultimately went. And one thing I’ll say is in later years, I don’t know if a lot. Of people know, but Mitch did a couple of ad campaigns voiceover work. One in particular was for this hockey team in Atlanta, formerly the hockey the Atlanta Thrashers, and there’s a great story that we talk about in there where Mitch is discovered and this team is not very good and it’s a new expansion team and no one’s showing up. The whole marketing message of trying to give to the hockey team and all the fans is even if the team’s not good, we got to show our love for we’re all in this together.

It’s very much in line with Mitch’s sense of humor, persona on stage and that sort of vibe gives. So he ultimately did this ad campaign in Atlanta for the Thrashers called Hockey Love, and you can find it online. It’s amazing and it’s just like this beautiful thing in Mitch’s voice and his sense of humor, and it’s all about showing the love. And the crazy thing was that the campaign. I talked to a bunch of people who were connected with it and they talked about how it was an radio campaign and when they played it, people would call in the radio station in Atlanta and request them to play the commercial again, which is these things don’t happen.

No one calls up a radio station requesting a commercial, but they did with Mitch. That’s how irresistible he was and still is to this day. And there’s a million other stories like that. There is a most interesting man in the world. Quality to Mitch where there’s just all these fascinating little things, and he was again constantly going all across the country.

One week he’s in Atlanta, another week he’s in Houston, then he’s in Boise, Idaho. And everyone who’s meeting along the way all have fascinating stories. I will say this as an ending note. A lot of people’s most interesting night of their life or wild story is like Tuesday night for Mitch. So he packed a lot into his thirty seven years, and I hope people can at least take solace in that a little bit that he lived every day and every second how he wanted to, and the vast majority of us don’t.

I think you just nailed it, and we’ll put the bow on it right there. I’m really looking forward to this thing coming out, just trad excited. Thank you for taking your time here today. I could probably talk to you about match for another two hours. There’s just something You’ve put it up my brain now and all the one liners are coming back.

Appreciate it absolutely. Thanks so much, John, I really appreciate getting a chance to come talk about Mitch. He’s Jeff Siegel. He’s working on a Mitch Hebburg documentary. I’m sure we’ll talk about it a lot as that comes up tomorrow on this program.

Friend of the show Jason Zinneman from the New York Times, and I will discuss Mitch Hedburg a little bit more. I will see you tomorrow. Until then, follow this podcast under p podcast. All right, you know what the NHL stands for, NaSTA hockey love. Like when the Thrasher score a goal and those giant fur Hills shoot flames twenty feet out of their mouths, you can feel the walk fall over.

You can be best hockey though, holar or when a player is sent to the penalty box to think about the wrongs he has done. That is the lead version of sending a kid to a time out, done with tough hockey love in town to marry out. Sometimes in between periods they have little tights hockey, little kids playing hockey in their little Thrashes uniform. They tried so hard and their parents are so proud, so full of hockey love, talking hockey. I wish I could go out there and play against them.

I bet I could kick some at. All. Right,

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Full Transcript

Caalaroga, Shock Media. Hey there, busy one today, I’m Johnny mag with your daily comedy names. Let me do the eight block and then I’ll tell you what’s going on long show today. Shockingly, I can’t believe this. After Midnight canceled by CBS.

It seems like it was a mutual decision. Taylor Tomlinson has decided to return to stand up. I saw this just after I put Thursday’s show to bed, and I was like, WHOA. Unfortunately I couldn’t jump in and make an edit. Sometimes I have to do other things, like prep what I had to teach at my college class on Thursday.

Warning, Taylor explains, I’m doing less stand up than I was before hosting After Midnight. I was on tour three weekends a month for years. So to take this job and I’m always gonna have to scale back a little bit, was a very difficult decision for me. I wasn’t sure if it was something I want to do or not, because stand up is the most important thing to me. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ll Last month, during a panel at south By, Taylor said, I’m doing less stand up than I was before hosting After midnight.

I was on tour three weekends a month for years, so to take the job and know that I was gonna have to scale back a little bit was very difficult for me. I wasn’t sure if it was something I wanted to do or not. Because stand up is the most important thing to me, It’s the most rewarding thing. I was very clear about that in the interview process. I was like, just so you know, this will never be my first love.

This show will never be my thing thing. Stand up is the most important thing to me, and as long as I can do both, I’d love to do both. Apparently she meant. In a statement, Taylor Thomlinson thanked Stephen Colbert, producer of the show, justa thank thee staff, and cru CBS says it will not come up with a new twelve thirty show. I don’t think that’s crazy.

I think it’s a different time, and I was thinking back even when Letterman was on, my godmother bought me a VCR and it was the greatest thing ever. I never watched Letterman live after that. In the early days before the VCR, in the summer, I would stay up until one o’clock in the morning He couldn’t even make it to the end of a Letterman even though I was a teenager during school. Forget it, watch a show twelve thirty, How’s that gonna happen? And Letterman wasn’t even on on Friday.

They had Friday night videos, so you couldn’t even stay up late the one day. But I remember the summer staying up waiting for Dave to come on at twelve thirty, which is how I wound up watching Johnny Carson. It was the thing you stared at to kill time until twelve thirty. No Internet, we had five channels. Totally different time guys.

I lived in Queens, New York. Queen’s New Work wasn’t wired for cable until nineteen eighty seven, So yeah, he stared at Johnny Carson. Eventually Dave came on. I digress CBS not coming up on the new twelve thirty show. I don’t think that’s crazy at all.

There’s also some industry speculation. Now will NBC react in tel Seth Meyers, Hey, thanks man Seth. If somebody says SNL, you might want to grab that gig. Unfortunately, as many as two hundred staffers could be affected by the decision do two hundred people work on After Midnight? Now, I get there were writers.

I get this, a support staff, somebody’s paying the bills, somebody’s building the sets, somebody’s booking the guests, somebody’s letting the crowd in, somebody’s editing the tape. I got it. Two hundred Yeah, that sounds like a lot. I worked on a TV show, Doctor Joy Brown had a syndicated talk show. Let’s say that was when I got my first computer and cell phone Circle ninety five ninety six.

That was an hour a day, five days a week. I could tell you we didn’t have two hundred people, but it was also a different time. The entire social media team was me, but there wasn’t much social media to be done in nineteen ninety five. It was more like going on O, going like AOL chats and stuff, trying to promote the show. I digress again.

Late nighter, watched the end of Colbert’s show and at the end, Steven said, this is the part of the show where I usually say stick around for Taylor Thompson on After Midnight. I really enjoy doing that, not just because I’m an executive producer on that show, but because she’s incredibly funny and I really liked that show. Unfortunately, After Midnight is going to end in June. I believe the show had been picked up for a third season, So this sounds like Taylor has changed her mind and wants to go back to stand up. That’s what Taylor said in her statement.

Colbert went on to reiterate what he had said in his press statement. According to Late Nighter, CBS just gave us a pick up for a third season, but Taylor has decided to return his stand up full time. And as someone who’s done this job for twenty years, I completely respect her enormously as a comedian, and I’m making a very hard decision on how to best use her time and talent. Colbert went on to thank CBS for their support. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you rarely have partners that good, Meaning CBS, you’d have to work on one of these shows like we do to understand all the time and effort the amazing staff After Midnight put into it, not only launching a new show, but also creating a new form of one of these shows for a late night time slot.

Are we going to pretend that Chris Hardwick didn’t do this already. Are we going to do that? Steven? Come on. It’s hard to try something new, and it’s rare for a network to say we’d like more of that.

I think this is a straight deal. I think Missus Taylor wanted to go back to stand up. But I’m not going to tell you that. My spidery sense isn’t tingling. So if I come on here Monday and I’m like, oh, I’ve got an update, don’t be shocked.

Did you watch John Mulaney this week? I haven’t. I don’t feel the need to watch it, which is a shame because I was so excited about it as I put together the show. No milany related stories are organically coming to me. If I type in John Mulaney, still kind of nothing.

I remember Pete Davidson was the guest and I typed in Pete Davidson, which surfaced something about mullaney. So I don’t think there’s any buzz on that show. As I speak to you, it is two twenty four pm on Thursday, and I’m going to type in Netflix top ten. I did this half an hour ago, so I know where I’m going here. But I’m gonna do it again quote unquote, live to you.

So my source here is Netflix. I’m on netflix dot com. Top ten shows in the United States. Number one Adolescents here, that’s really good. Number two the Residents, the guys at trivia we’re talking about that.

Three is Burt Kreischer’s lucky and so let’s stop there. You know, how do you define top ten? I don’t know. Streamer math can be a little wonky, and so you’ll see something like suits being quote unquote number one, but there’s a lot of suits. Like you could sit down and watch sixteen hours of suits, which might increase whatever metric they’re looking at, total hours viewed whatever.

Burt Kreischer it’s an hour, as is John Mulaney. So there’s a kind of sort of equal. It’s at least apples and a different type of apple. It’s not apples and oranges. So I’m comparing an hour of Burt Kreischer and an hour of John Mulaney.

So again, one is adolescents, which again you might binge and watch all four the Residents you might binge and watch is there eight? I don’t know. Three is Burt Kreischer. Four is the Saint Patrick’s Day episode of Raw. Not this week’s the March seventeenth one.

That’s interesting. Five is Temptation Island Season one, six, Miss Rachel Season one, seven, Running Point season one, eight, The Walking Dead, Dead City Season one nine, Zero Day Limited series. That’s pretty good. I watched that. Ten Beauty and Black season one.

What did I not mention? Let me click on trending. Maybe it’s trending my source here, Netflix dot Com. I’m getting from them. Let’s see, they have not updated their page since March thirteenth.

I can’t help you, John, I’ve now clicked on what to watch. They want us to watch five chilling Stephen King adaptations you can stream right now. This page hasn’t been updated since March twelfth. I’m gonna click on shows. My source Netflix dot Com updated yesterday, meaning Wednesday, at eleven eleven am.

Million Dollar Secret. What to know about the players in their twisty new game Popular Now Adolescens, Temptation Island, the residents? What am I not mentioning? What word have I not said? That’s right, listener, Mullaney, I have not said the word mullaney.

There’s no buzz on this thing, even on Netflix’s own site. I don’t know what to make of it. I not here to bash John. You’ll hear me talk with Jason Ziddaman from The New York Times on Sunday’s episode. I have some thoughts about the show, but it’s not working right now, all right.

Pete Davidson was the guest this week, and since it’s Pete Davison, you have to ask him about his dating history. Lunel was on the cat Shore whatever they have on Malleniy’s show and says, I want to know the mistique. To me, you’re just an average guy, regular guy, but you continuously pull all these bad B words, right, so I don’t get it. I want to know the mistique. What I think for the researching for women across America is you should take me out.

Pete said, if that’s what it takes to stop this, yeah, Mulaniy jumps in, We’re going to move off Pete’s personal life. So I wonder if that was disgusted in advance. Lunelle said, I just thought I would shoot my shot, you know, because people want to know what is the mistike. Pete said, I don’t know. Lunell, like, you’re super fun, You’re a really good time.

Pete seemed too embarrassed to answer the question of burrent Lyny mulaney jumps in, he has a real mystique. You have a real electricity to you. Mlaniey argued that Pete Davidson is a wonderful guy, probably to go to bed with. Lunell said, I wasn’t tearing him down. I just want to know.

I want to say right now, I don’t want to sleep with you, I think, but I do want to go out. Pete said, Okay, that sounds fair. Maybe I will put eyes on that one now. I’m intrigued. An update from yesterday’s lead story.

Remember I tells you that the show was stopped at the Melbourne Comedy Fee Festival. Nothing funny here a man died during the show. The man was in the back of the theater. Other members of the crowd attempted to give him emergency care for about ten minutes before paramedics arrived. One audience member said it felt wrong to hear laughter from other folks in the crowd who were sitting closer to the stage and had no idea what was going on in the back of the venue of twenty nine hundred people.

The audience member said people started leaving on their own accord by groups in the second act, particularly as CBR was going on, which you could see and ambulance was there. He could hear defibllerator sounds from across the room. Lighting was dark, though still lighting off to see that a lady and man were interchanging doing chess compressions. Wow. One attendee told the Age paramedics had to commence their care in the dark using flashlights because the show was still going on.

It was the most disgraceful, disgusting thing I’ve ever witnessed. I don’t think I was the only person wondering if we were in some sort of dystopian parallel universe where we prioritized the show must go on over human life. Others at the show said up to three comedians kept doing their five minute sets after the man became ill. Wow. One audience member said it was only after a few people were leaving got up and were loudly talking or arguing with a staff member for leaning over and shouting at the comedian on stage to stop the show.

The paramedics were there for good fifteen to twenty minutes in the dark doing CPR before the show stopped. Someone from the dress circle yelled to stop the show. Another guy yelled, someone is dying. An audience member says lighting was dark. Though some comedians took to social media.

Dave Hughes wrote, all performers thoughts are worthy, family affected to hear. Big Lick added, sad news but correctly handled all round, Well done everyone and thoughts with those involved. I was in there. I don’t know what’s going on there. I also don’t know what’s going on with Nikki Glaser.

A couple weird headlines from thenews dot co dot uk that’s an Australian website. The headline Gwyneth Paltrow exposes comedian Nikki Glaser for wanting to f her ex Ben Affleck, subheading Gwyneth has called out Nikki Glaser for wanting to hook up with Ben. I paraphrase that a little bit this happened on the Goop podcast on Tuesday. Glazier would apparently find Ben on a celebrity dating app? Are there celebrit already dating apps?

I’ve never heard that before. As the story goes, when I used to be on RAYA or Aya, is this a thing? I’m sorry if I’m not up to date on celebrity dating apps, and you’re like jud everybody knows Raya. Raya is a private membership AI Google AI is telling me. Raya is a private membership based social network application for iOS known for its exclusivity and focusing on connecting individuals and creative industries, celebrities, and high profile figures.

It has a reputation for being harder to get into than the Harvard Business School. Really, hmmm, who knew about this? And was Nicky Glazer big enough no offense to get into the same thing with Ben Affleck five ten years ago? I mean maybe now, but really, how did she get in no offense? We’re that famous until six months ago?

Nikki? I digress again, Nicky had one. I used to be on ray A. Affleck would come across. Why is Ben Affleck on a dating app?

He can’t pull jicks? Really, I’m totally confused here, Adam my depth. Don’t want to talk about I’m a loser, fifty five guy hosting a podcast his basement. This has nothing to do with me. Well, I used to be on Raya and Ben Affleck would come across.

I would give him a very concentrated check mark yes, and like he never got back. Nicki also told Gwyneth about Andrew Garfield saying no to her on Raya, claiming I know for a fact, yet I’ve seen my profile. I wouldn’t match with him if he was interested. Gwyneth said that would have been a good one. He’s gorgeous now he regrets it.

Then the conversation went to a twenty twenty two interview where Glazier had first mentioned her quote unquote kinky thing of having her boyfriend sleep with other women. Gwyneth asked her about that and whether her boyfriend had ever fooled around with other women. Nicki said that he had. Glazier then admitted it was a competition thing for her. She likes thinking that he could leave and that she has to step up her game to keep him.

That brings us to Jimmy Fallon, where Nicki was on earlier this week. She talked about being on a zempic and said the shame is only from thin people who want you to stay fat. She said she’s a fan of both ozempic and plastic surgery. As for plastic surgery, there’s a stigma around getting worker investing in your beauty and doing all these procedures, and there’s maybe a little sadness to it, but I’m also kind of like, well, it makes my life better. People treat you better when you’re hotter.

It’s a sad fact of life. And everyone goes, that’s so sad. What do you love the way you were born? It’s like, well, why do you go to college? Why don’t you love the brain you were born with?

Why did you pay thousands of dollars to that institution. Sports Illustrated spoke to Jerry Seinfeld about the Mets. Yes Baseball season is back. S I mentioned some comedians known to like the Mets. Those include John Oliver, Sebastian Maniscalco, Brewer, Cybarell, Jimmy Kimmel, Kevin James, Hank Azaria, Chris Rock, plenty of pictures of Chris Rock and Yank It’s just saying, John Stewart, Ray Romano, Bill Maher who used to be a part owner, and Jerry Seinfeld also Johnny Mack, known Mets fan.

S I was curious, why so comedians are Mets fans. Jerry Seinfeld said, comedians are attracted to well drawn, outsized personalities. We don’t like people that officially go about their business. We like people that entertain you, and hopefully you go about their business as well. I became a Mets fan when I was just so entertained by the person and the color versus the Yankees, you know, orange and blue versus the depressing Navy.

Jerry said, the Mets had a lot of personality last summer. I mean twenty twenty four. Oh my god, if you’re a Mets fan of twenty four, your branded for life. That was so much fun, partly because of how unexpected it was, especially after the way the season began. Oh my, we are awfully long today and a lot to get to, all right, So that was the A block.

I’m going to quickly fly through the B block now and I’m going to cut some things. This weekend. I want to celebrate the life of Mitch Hedberg, who passed away twenty years ago this weekend on Tomorrow’s show. Jeff Siegel is an Emmy Award winning filmmaker. He’s the director of an upcoming documentary about Mitch Hedberg.

So tomorrow is just Jeff and I talking about Mitch Hedburg. Sunday Friend of the show, Jason Zenneman from The New York Times will stop by. We already recorded this on Wednesday. We talked Hedburg for a little bit, and then I asked him about some other topics, including Mulaney and Bill Burr. We did not get to discuss Taylor Thomlinson, and that news dropped after we were done.

Today’s show has a third segment if you’re in the Facebook group and feel encouraged to join us. By the way, I forget. When I was teaching my class on Thursday, I saw somebody want to join the Facebook group, and I loved that. Whoever it was, I love you for writing this, wrote I am a pornbot that immediately got improved. I also appreciate anyone who tries to get past my bouncers who understands how to answer what is your quest?

Anyway, if you’re in the Facebook group, you’ve seen Dylan post things. I wanted to talk to somebody who had actually seen Hedburg live. I never saw Hedburg live, but Dylan had so In the third section of today’s podcast, half an hour of Dylan and I talking about Hebburg and some other topics of comedy. As I mentioned earlier in the week, you know some stuff I’ve had to pull forward because I don’t have the weekend to put things where they should go, and other things I’m just pushing to next week. So let me just fly through here with the stuff that can’t wait.

From TMZ. Comedian Mike Laser got heckled by a Trump supporter in the middle of his act. The heckler called Mike a Q quotes jew pig, and this whole thing is on video. Mike was telling a joke about sitting at a corner with his wheed pen. He turned his attention to one of the crowd members and asked the guy, how can I help you.

The guy in the crowd said he wasn’t going to listen to some jew pig Mike Lazer. The comedian clarifies the slur of the guy, admits it and keeps heckling. Mike asked him to leave. The guy says he’s ordering a lyft, adding some more comments I don’t want to repeat. Mike tells the guy to order his lyft outside.

The guy responds, f you Jew. Then as the guy was leaving, he made a comment about supporting a political figure. This all happened at Lucky’s Born Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a Sue Falls comedy group, apologized to Mike, saying the Heckler does not represent the comedy community in Sue Falls and was a random drunk guy who might not even be from here. This weekend in Rhode Island is the Lil Rody Laugh Riots. Some good names Kevin Hart, Leslie Jones as he’sin sorry, John O’Hurley and Patrick Warburton you know them from Seinfeld.

Hannah Berner, Christa Stefano, Jonathan Vaness, Des Bishop and Ashley Gavin. Great. Great, great lineup guys. Oh wait, there’s more. I missed the other paragraph.

Josh Johnson, Melissa Vias, Senor Tone Bell, Sophie Buttle, Alec Flynn and Andy Woodhall. Wow. What a great festival. That is the Lil Rody Laugh Riot. That’s your b block.

Let me take one more break and then a full half hour with Dylan from the Facebook group talking Hedburg and other things comedy. We’re now on to the port of the weekend where we’re going to celebrate the life of Mitch Hedburg. I never got to see Mitch live, but Dylan from the Facebook group has, so I invited him on to talk a little bit comedy. So I was never able to actually see Mitch Hedburg. I think I might have met him early in the serious days.

I don’t actually remember, because it was one of those things where you just assumed the guy would be around forever. But I never actually saw him live. But you did, which is why I invited you on here today. So what was that like? How did you see him?

Did you know who he was? What was the night like, et cetera. I was familiar with him. I’ve always been a complete comedy geek. Just I watch everything.

I would watch Comedy Central in the early days and all the short attention span theater, every single thing I could get my I could have a chance to watch. So I was familiar with him. I saw him under probably just about the worst circumstances you could see a comic, because you’re in the football stadium with eighty thousand other people. It’s basically their Florida University of. Florida’s homecoming weekend called Gator Grau, and they would bring in two or three very big name comedians, and for this one it was Mitch Edburgh, John Pinnett.

And D. L. Hugley Beard Mix. And the following year they had Tosh and Hotel and Jim Brewer and and then the last year I was in Florida, it was Harlan Williams and Bill Cosby. They would have some pretty pretty crazy lineups.

But I was a member of the media at the time, so I had VIP seats so I could see it pretty clearly. But you would get thrown off in the stadium because the sound would go to the upper deck of the stadium, so you would hear them laughing like two seconds after the joke was told. There was like a reverberation back, so it would it definitely made the experience a stranger than typical comedy. Said, I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen a comedian in a football stadium. Heedburg destroyed.

He was tremendous. The joke I remembered is an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs, which obviously I do it terribly in the retelling, but that was the one that had me giggling days later and repeating it. Here we are twenty five years later, and that’s the one that I still remember. So he was great. He was so different from everybody else that you see people compare him to Steven Wright, and then you see other people coming up who have a Hedburg vibe to him.

But he was just such a one of a kind comic that you just generally don’t see these days. I’m having trouble imagining him in an eighty thousand seed arena, just because of so much of his act was about pacing and vibe, and I’m imagining drunks yelling out and it’s just not working. But you’re saying he crushed. He crushed. As far as I was concerned, I was sitting close so I could actually absorb it the people in the back, and I sat in the back when Cosby was there, and it’s different.

I mean, he came up, did his thing. It wasn’t like And it’s funny because you listen to podcasts and people will talk about I know, Dank Harvey played Gator Grawl in like two thousand and nine, and he was saying that it was the toughest atmosphere he ever played. It’s just because it’s so big, and like you said, people are screaming out random crap throughout the time, so it’s it would be very easy to throw someone off. I remember Dial Hugley was thrown off considerably when he went up there. He seemed in a rush to get off as quickly as possible.

But Panett and Hedberg were quite good in that particular setting. I remember Brewery talking about gator grawl, but at that time his closer was his ACDC bit, which is him singing ACDC with a band behind him. So you do that in an eighty thousand seed arena, Yeah, that’s really gonna work well as opposed to just Mitch doing one liners and waiting for the laughs. Just what a tough room for him. Yeah, I wish I’d had the chance to see him in a club.

I don’t even know if he was doing theaters at the time that he died. I saw something recently on him where Chad Daniels was talking about opening for him early in his career. Daniels has a great story about one of the jokes that he used was something that Daniels had said to him in a diner, you know what I like mashed potatoes, and he goes, you didn’t even a chance to guess, or something something along those lines, a joke that obviously Hedburg and Crush when told the way he would do the jokes. Yeah, I mean, I feel fortunate that I saw him. There’s so many other greats that I either never saw live or I only saw them in situations like the Seller where they’re doing fifteen minutes of practice or just working stuff out, because I saw Patrice and Giraldo that way, but I never saw them in a real setting where they’re actually doing an hour or anything like that.

So I feel fortunate that I was able to see Heberg at all, but I would have done anything to have been able to see him in a club. Yeah. I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, especially in the adjacent say it. I’m trying to avoid the word shadow of Stephen Wright, and I think as I compare the two, and clearly there are similarities. Steven is presenting to the audience, whereas I feel Mitch was in it with the audience and we’re all laughing at these jokes together, where Steven is just going, here’s a thought, you laugh, now, here’s a thought you laugh.

Now, Mitch is like riding the surfboard and they’ll do a bust a joke and get halfway through and be like, ah, that didn’t work, and it’s just it’s funny. As weird as Heedburgh was. I think people could relate to him a lot more than they could relate to Stephen Wright. And I love Stephen Wright. I think he’s a genius.

But Heedberg reminds people of somebody they know just where you know, the stone guy who lived in your dorm or something along those lines. Obviously not as funny as Hedberg was. But I think people could relate to him a little better than some of the others who he’s compared to. And I do wonder twenty years on what would Mitch Hedberg in twenty twenty five be. Is he still doing the stoner act one liners?

Is he twenty years older and doing longer chunks? Like the stylized comedians tend to be shooting stars and the brick wall comedians are the ones that tend to have the longer careers. I just wonder if he might have been Oh yeah, that guy from ten years ago. Now, when was the last time Stephen Wright did anything? It’s and again I’m not saying he’s not still capable, but I’ve honestly never if he’s touring.

I’ve missed it over the last twenty years because I would see him in a heartbeat if he came anywhere anywhere close to where I live. But I’ll hear him on He’ll show up on certain podcasts. I think he’s done Greg Fitzimmons’ podcast a couple times, and there are a few other guys who he I think he did Jay Moore’s podcast several years ago, but you generally don’t hear much from the guy at all. Like you said, it’s the twenty years later, it’s hard to imagine he would have been able. To sustain that for that period of time.

But I wish we would have had the chance to find out, just because you hate to see somebody be taken away from us who is very much in his prime at the time. So on Steven, I’ve been hosting the weekly comedy thing on Live one for ten years now. Somewhere in that ten year run he did release a second album. He has two, and I did see him in person. It’s got to be twenty years ago now, maybe fifteen.

And as much as I love Stephen Wright, his pacing, my brain was getting numb after an hour, like I needed the show to end. I couldn’t take it anymore. I think Steven Wright’s material works better in eight minute doses than an hour. As for Mitch, part of what we didn’t get to see was he was very much in ascendency and we were starting to get into rock star Mitch, meaning that crowds were just rabbit about him. And Lynn Shawcroft had talked to me about how he had to speed up his act at the end and it was throwing off the timing.

So it’d be curious to see what peak Mitch would have been like and how the act would have morphed during that period. It’s like, obviously they’re not similar comics, but the guys who rely on the quick, one liner, quick hits kind jessel Nick, And obviously I know jessel Nick is not a similar comic to Stephen Wright or Hedbird, but it’s kind of the line, punchline, quick hit stuff that’s a lot harder to sustain than the storytelling that I think Kreischer and Sigura and so many of the others are doing these days. I saw Shane Gillis a couple weeks ago, and his was very story based. I would think, while it’s not unthinkable to imagine that somebody would be able to do that for an additional twenty years. I think it would be a lot harder than just saying, oh, hey, this happened to me last year, and here’s the comic version of it.

I’m doing the mental exercise of Mitch having to feed the modern social media beast. And I could argue it either way. On the one hand, I don’t think of him as a crowd work comedian. But on the other hand, if you’ve got the crowd behind you, he could just and I’m going to just do an innocent slam of you here. He could be like, of course, because you’re wearing a baseball cap, and if the crowd’s behind you, as stupid as my baseball cap line is, if the crowds line you and that gets a laugh, the room is hey yeah baseball cap guy.

Yeah, like we got him. Good. Yeah. There are people like that who, like you see the ones who do the crowd work really well. I don’t see Hegberg obviously getting to the level where he is, because guys aren’t doing crowd work in theaters and you would like to at least think that he’s not doing the tiny clubs and if it can still come up with the one liners that he did from twenty years ago, then he might have been able to sustain it.

But yeah, it would be really interesting to have somebody who was like that to have the longevity that only the top guys really truly do, at least from a standpoint of not going from stadiums to theaters, to arenas to. The chuckle hut. Yeah, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened with that. Well, I’ve got you.

Let’s talk about some other things.

You’re one of the moderators of the Facebook group, which is Daily Comedy News podcast group. Thank you for keeping the porn bots away and for starting conversations regularly. I appreciate that at this point you absolutely watch more comedy specials than I do. There was a point, I think it was last week or the week before, where some thing relatively major came out and it was like nine am, and you hadn’t commented on it yet, and I was like, I hope he’s okay. Usually he would have watched this, but.

I was visiting my kid in college two weeks ago, so I didn’t see Bill Burr until like a week after it came out. For me, I’ve already Chelsea Handler came out at two am. This morning and I’ve already watched it. I that’s my background where it’s like I’m working, I have it on. I love specials, even bad ones.

I’ll trudge through. I do listen at one and a half time speed to be able to do something in forty five minutes. Rather than an hour. I know you have the issue of getting through. Sometimes it’s like you’re ten minutes in and be like, okay, I feel nothing.

I felt the same way you did about the Burr special, where twenty minutes in I was like, this sucks, and then after watching the whole thing, I was like, it wasn’t horrific, but it was clearly as probably as worst special as he’s put out. Granted that’s a high bar, but yet I’ve always been thankfully. My wife is a as a trooper. I drag her to comedy shows constantly, where sometimes it’s gonna be like, all right, you’re going to this one, and then there are a couple other words, Yeah, this one’s a little probably dirtier than you would care for. But she’s a trooper with that.

We don’t get great shows around here, but we have been pretty lucky up in Green Bay, getting Gatsy and Sebastian and Mark Norman is coming here in a couple months, and we’ve seen Gillis twice in the last year. We’ve been pretty lucky as far as that goes. But yeah, I love the Facebook group. I love the site, and it feels the need that I hadn’t found elsewhere. I had been looking for something where they’re constant updates.

I listened to the podcast first thing every morning, so it’s the perfect way to start today. So I really appreciate what you do. Oh thanks so much. A couple things you mentioned made me think of Jason Zinneman and getting to know Jason from The New York Times a little bit. Has it really helped me in some ways because one a lot of the issues where we talked about where I’ll get ten minutes in with special and bail, that’s on me, that’s not on the performer.

As I analyze this, I can understand comedians can go up and crush for a crowd. But I’m admittedly a comedy snob because I’ve spent so much time listening to so much of it, and especially the years programming the radio stations, you know, listening to everybody’s a material and the version of their a material that they chose to release on a comedy album. It fried my brains. So now if I get ten to eleven minutes into something and I’m not feeling it, there’s ten trillion things to do. When I grew up reasons I love baseball, there were five channels and the Mets were on every night, So I watch the Mets every night.

Now I’ve got infinite media. If I get bored, there’s eight hundred hours of Star Trek I can watch. So if your comedy special is not crushing it, I’m just out and do I profile specials. Of course I do. There’s not enough times talking to Jason and hearing him having also what I call Emperor of Rome syndrome, where you just sit there and go, oh that’s very funny, great callback, Yes that is hilarious.

Oh what a whitecrafted bit, but not laughing. That has been helpful to me.

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And then also for imposter syndrome.

I was listening to Marin last night, both the Nick Fune and the it was the other one whatever, and they’re all name dropping comedians and their clubs and talking about when they’re hanging out in Malaney twenty years ago and I’m like a fraud. But then Jason reminds me I’m not a comedian. I’m not trying to be a comedian. I’m just like a fan, just like you are. I just chose to pick up the microphone and start talking about it.

Chris Fleming, that was the other one. And it’s more me than the performers. The performers are getting up, they’ve sold tickets, they have to crush here. But when I’m watching a Netflix special, I could just really quickly be like, what else is there to do? It’s one of those where it’s yeah, and I think I threw this out there in the group.

It was like, what was the lastly truly great special? And I’m talking, you know, like because when people like, what are the best ones of all time? And I’m like, there are a couple of Carlins that I could list. Delirious obviously some I’m a prior’s prior probably has three that Chappelle’s killing them. Softly is when people are saying, oh, that Chappelle’s best special of any of the ones that have come out in the last five years, and you’re not even close just where So.

It’s like I feel very much like a snob as well. When the stuff is put up there, it’s I haven’t seen anything that’s on the line of bigger and blacker or killing them softly or what am I doing in New Jersey or a here and now, anything along those lines. The one that I remember where I was like texting my friends saying, you have to see this was gillis Is Live in Austin. Just because that one absolutely destroyed me. I was laughing so hard.

And even then, do I put that on the level of Bigger and Blacker or Chappelle’s best? No? Absolutely not. As much as I loved Ronny Chieng last year, as much as I enjoyed I know you didn’t like Schultz as much as I did. Even like the Ari Shafir won from this year.

I thoroughly enjoyed roy Wood. Same thing. Are they all time greats? No, they’re not. They’re good.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. But yeah, I want to see something that blows me away, and I haven’t seen anything like that. Yeah, I think only four or five years. I think we’re all chasing the drug that is the laugh that like really good belly laughed chuckle. And I’ve talked about this on the show and in the group, and I’m not getting any pushback.

I think people are nodding an agreement that right now we’re getting the same face as doing the same specials. So yeah, we know what Bil Burr is gonna do. We know what Bert Krascher and I like Burt’s special. We know what Birt’s gonna do if Sigora drops, we know what Sigora is going to do. When you mentioned the last great special, what came to my mind was Natalie Palomides Nate, which was just different and out there.

And I tend to like the alty stuff a little bit, but that one was one where I watched it I was like, oh wow, that was different, and I evangelized for it. I haven’t even seen that one. I’m gonna have to check that out right away. I fully respect your opinion on it, and yeah, I love ones that are interesting because it’s all go searching for stuff where it’s okay, this isn’t I’m not the target audience here, but I still want to see Hannah Einbinder’s One woman Show would have been one of my favorite things that I saw last year. I would have told you were crazy, but that was one that I couldn’t get out of my head after watching it.

So it’s I’ll go watch stuff even intentionally be like, all right, I’m probably gonna hate this, but I don’t like criticizing something unless I’ve seen it where it’s like uh oh. Earlier this year I watched that was at Chelsea. There was some redneck special. It’s the one I have Lois rated. I actually gave it an f was like Pontoon something.

It was like, okay, it was just too painful for anybody to sit through. And this Stefano, who I generally like, his special was horrific. I mean that thing that was an embarrassment. Did you ever watch Gringo Poppy by Brendan shab and they bring it up on Rogan or Tim Dillon brings it up a lot on his podcast. Is probably like one of the worst comedy specials actually put out on a I think it was a show.

I don’t know if a Showtime or. Amazon Prime or something like that, but it’s one of those ones you watch and you’re just like Hugh and I think the Stefano’s was probably worse. Yeah, that’s when you’re I can’t even believe Hulu put this out, but occasionally you see stuff like that. So what’s your top specials of the year so far? I have schult Swan roy Wood, I think I have second, Ari Shaffir third, and then I have Kelsey Cook fourth and Bert fifth.

I was thrilled that you liked the Burt one because I’m biased. I sat next to Bert on an airplane like twenty years ago when he was early in his career, and we talked like we were best for three hours, and so I always feel like I’m biased. But I’m never gonna sit here and say, oh, He’s the greatest comic of all time. But he brings out the giggle factor with me, which is not easy to do and just where you’re like okay, and I don’t consider him like the lowest common denominator comic, but I will laugh at stuff and I’m like, oh mad, I can’t believe I’m laughing at this. He just does it for me, and I think it’s very genuine with him, and I love the stories about it.

My kids are similar ages to his kids, so I can relate to a little bit of that. Even though he has daughters, I have sons. But I just genuinely like the guy. I was thrilled that his latest special is getting I think people are basically saying it’s probably his best special, which I think it probably is. Yeah, I’ve just found it fun now.

It definitely spoke to me also, a fifty something married dad, So I have that connectivity there, and I think, again the Emperor of Rome, I can break down comedy and I can see the matrix and what Burke did there was thing that actually happened, exaggerated for effect it step two you really ramp it up and go over the top, and then maybe the tag is something that didn’t actually happen. But the basic premise there, you know, as a married man in the fifties, got what he was talking about, even if he told an exaggerated version of it, right, it was colorful, even if some of the details weren’t real. The basic premise spoke to me. And I think that’s why I connected with that special and found it very, very entertaining. I find him genuine and like you said, obviously I’m not going to sit here and say, Okay, this.

Is exactly how it happened. I’m not that naive. But there are other ones where you watch and you’re like, Okay, there’s no way in how that happened. And with Bert, I. Have no problem with something being exaggerated for comic effect.

I have no problem with people making up stories. But I know there’s that fine line the has simonaj line. And I like Hassan, but I thought the criticism of him was over the top a few years ago. But at the same time, I don’t know, I get it on some level, But yeah, I love Bert. I took my whole family to see him a couple of years ago and they all walked out of there.

That was a fun show. Where again, nobody’s gonna say he’s the greatest comic of our era, but that was a fun, fun show. So sometimes that’s all you can realistically hope for. I’ll ask you one more than I’ll let you go. If I had a golden ticket, I can get you a seventh throw center for any living comedian.

Who do you want to go see? Mullany? No question? Really, Yeah, I’ve seen most of them, even at granted I only saw at the Cellar. Actually I’ve never seen Rock, but I would rather see Malani right now than Rock.

Trying to think of the other big ones who I haven’t seen. I saw Chappelle when he was working out, killing him softly, so I’ve not seen him recently. I’ve seen Sigura, I’ve seen Burt multiple times. I’ve seen Gillis multiple times. Mulaney was here three years ago, like right after COVID, and I don’t there was a reason why we couldn’t go.

But I’ve been kicking myself since then, especially since he’s only blown up. This is the one that he was like straight out of rehab, and I loved his last special, especially like when he I’ve not seen his TV show yet. I watched almost other than sports, I watch nothing live. I’ll go back and watch. I’ve heard it’s not very good.

I don’t know if that was just from listening to your podcast. Yeah, I know other people who are huge Mulleney fans who are like, just doesn’t do it for me. I think I would like to see him in a regular late night structure. I would love to see him take over for Kimmel retires or any of these guys walk away. Like to see him even if it’s in a standard network format.

I think he could play to that. But it honestly blows my mind that, in my opinion, the best current touring comic couldn’t even get on air it on SML during his time there, because he was by far the best writer they had. Yeah, he’s the one who I would do anything to see at this point, because not so much that there aren’t others that are great. But I’ve seen Seinfeld, I’ve seen Burr, I’ve seen Jim Jefferies, I’ve seen Jim Norton. All of the ones who.

I’m not saying are currently great have been great at some point. And Mulanie’s the one who I’ve not seen. You’re smart about Mulaney. In my career, thirty years in a media now thirty five maybe something like that. When in doubt, you put a format on something, when something’s not working, you put a structure on it.

You put a gimmick, you go, okay, we’re going to do five questions with Dylan and you just that way. There’s a structure to it. If you analyze even my Dopey show, there’s a structure to it. I usually put the eight comedians in the front and as we get back towards the end, Now I’m talking about something happened at a Mumbai comedy club. That’s not going to lead.

There’s a structure to it, and I think you’re right that if Mulany were actually put in a box, it would be stronger. I think they’ve leaned a little too much into the chaos. You’ve heard me talk with Mike Chisen about Letterman that as uncontrolled as it seemed, it was controlled, and David didn’t like surprises. He just presented it as chaos. I think what we’re seeing with Mulaney, especially in those caller segments, which absolutely have to go, it’s actually chaos and not working well.

You don’t want a radio show type thing. It’s television. You’re watching it. Even as someone who listened to Stern for twenty five years, as soon as you would go to the phones, I’d be like. All right, what else is on?

Just where I don’t need to have some idiot call up and ask Artie why he’s so fat or something like that. But yeah, seeing. Him in Okay, you’re gonna come out, you’re gonna do a monologue, You’re gonna do this. And I wonder if Mulaney would find that to be too boring. But it worked at the Daily Show, It worked at every place.

That’s done it, and he’s a better comic than any of the ones who are doing late night right now, and I like quite a few of them, but there’s nobody out there now who. I feel like I need to watch every night. I do make a point of listening to the podcast version of The Daily Show, especially when Stewart’s doing it on Monday night, because I do still think he’s probably the best out. There now that Conan’s not doing it anymore. Kimmel lost me a couple of years ago, and I was the biggest Kimmel fan for ages and it’s not a politics thing.

I could really. Cares to any of these people’s support, but it’s just not as funny anymore. And like Seth Meyers, his Corrections podcast is my favorite thing that he does. It just absolutely kills me. I listen to that every week.

That’s fantastic. But yeah, I would love to see what Melanie could do in a Kimmel type format. He nailed it with Howard, even Pete Howard, there was a structure. Six o’clock hour was the Hey, what everybody do last night? Just yes and maybe talk about office politics.

Seven o’clock get the extended family in here, make fun of the interns, make fun of the boss. Eight o’clock was the guest. Nine o’clock was the news. There was a format, same thing every day. Yeah, and it was yeah.

I mean it was funny because I grew up in California. One of my high school friends, his brother was going to school in NYU, and he would mail back audio. Cassettes of Stern each week. You got to hear this guy and my friends. That was funny, and I’m like, yeah, give me the tape.

So he’d give me the tape. I had my dual cassette recorder. I would record my own copy and I would listen to it over and over again until the next tape came. I was hooked on that until the show started to suck. I listened to Anthony a lot.

I never really got into some of the other stuff. But yet, like Opie and Anthony, I thought showcased comics better than Stern ever did. Sure, and there really weren’t that many comics that or I should say big comics that were showcased or became big because they. Were on Stern. I know Dapala was on a lot and Kennison was on a lot early on, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that they became famous from being on Stern.

While there’s a long list of comics that you could say, but they went next level because of going on Opie and Anthony the same way a lot of these comics have gone to the next level by going on Rogan these days where where I mean. Like Ari was the one who I always thought he’ll never graduate to theaters because he’s too controversial. Even he’s gotten to that level. You see where Gillis was. Two years ago and where he is now, and I think a lot of that is due to one, he’s fantastic.

Two going on Rogan almost once a month definitely helps him. Doing the protect our Parks has shot him to the next level. Mark Norman, who is pretty dirty for to go to the theater level, I’m seeing him in the theater in two months. I think he’s a genius too. It just absolutely destroys me.

I think he’s another one who I think is one of the best working. Simmarill is another one who I have not seen who I would really love to see but haven’t. Had a chance yet. If he comes to Wisconsin, he only goes to Milwaukee. If he came up here, I would go see him in a heartbeat.

I think all the guys you mentioned we’re just seeing the pushback, not even about Cancel culture PC culture. I just think everybody has taken a step back towards. You know what. We’re all friends, and we make fun of each other. And if you and I hung out every day, I’ve got quirks, You’ve got your quirks with bunch each other’s chops about it.

That’s what’s friends do. And I think that’s coming across in a lot of the comedians you just mentioned that it’s dude, we’re just out having a good time. Don’t analyze every sentence that said. And sometimes a joke is just a joke. Yeah, it’s really unfortunate that.

It’s one thing when somebody comes out and says something really stupid and then they apologize for it a day later or something like that. It’s another thing when you’re pulling stuff from twenty thirty years ago and saying, oh my god, Jimmy Kimmel did blackface, but Jimmy Fallon did. Okay, if you want to say, hey, I regret doing this twenty years ago, fine, I get it. But even some of the comics who consider themselves woke these days. And I’m not saying I don’t mean this as like a knock, but Sarah Silverman or pat Oswalter, some of these people, they’re like, yeah, if you listen to my stuff from twenty twenty five years ago, I use all the words that we’re not allowed to say anymore.

It’s like everything changes. But I think we’re seeing less and less of that considering the show I just saw where it was because I saw Gillis when I was in Colorado and Big Jay was there. Although Big Jay, who I generally loved, was horrible. He was just clearly up there basically like sleepwalking through it. But Dan Soder was tremendous and the other guy, and they were talking about cancel culture where they’re saying, this word’s coming back, this word we probably won’t hear again.

You can imagine which one that one was. But you’re basically saying this word’s coming back, this word’s coming back, and it’s yeah, it’s like just because of the way it’s And again I’m not saying it’s okay to use. I try to avoid using the same words in my when my daily life obviously, but I don’t cancel culture on any level because it’s Look, if. You don’t think something’s funny, don’t watch it. The same thing that is the same criticism with Stern.

Hey, if you don’t, if you’re offended by what he says, change the channel. I changed the channel on Stern because I thought I didn’t like. The direction he was going. I’m not going to sit here and say should be taken off the air, because if he still has an audience, then he should be allowed to address that audience. Yeah, I’ve written on my substack about it.

I’m not going to sit here and say that I didn’t laugh at a lot of things Stern did in the nineties that Stern himself has distanced himself from guilty is charged. Laughed at the most a different time. That’s the thing that I hate that he has two channels that are fully dedicated to his stuff, and all of his best stuff is gone. He doesn’t even play the nine to eleven show anymore, which blows my mind because that was something that I felt so connected to because like on the day that happened, I sat in my car and listened to it because everybody else went the news and Stern stayed on the air, and I just sat there and listened to it NonStop, and then I listened to it again that night when they replayed it, and it was so brilliant. And he’s even distancing himself from that.

So I find that to be sad, because as somebody who loved him for so long, and again, I don’t expect the sixty five year old to do bout bongo fiesta. Like I understand people evolving, When people who had been guests on his show for twenty years, he just randomly just basically shuts the door on them, We’re not having them anymore. I thought it was very sad that Gilbert wasn’t on during his final days. The whole thing with Arty was basically what closed my door on Stern, just like I absolutely loved Artie and thought he brought the show to another level, but so many of these comics and people who he had on. That he just basically ditched.

That never sat well with me. Poor I already worked with him a few times. Great guy in real life. But I remember we were at one of the comedy festivals and I’m going back a bit, maybe it was the Vegas one, and I said to Mark, my serious host while watching Already Live, Igo, if we wake up tomorrow and he’s dead, not going to be shocked. He was just out of control.

He’s got demon’s good guy, good soul, but boy, the demon’s got him. I saw him on one of the Stern showcases, and it was a painful show because you’re sitting there watching Richard and sal doing something that masquerades a comedy. And I think Yuko the Clown. Might have been there where I’m sitting there going oh God, like if Artie wasn’t coming up, I think it literally went like stuttering John d’ pallo and then Arty, so it was like, Okay, I just got to get through stuttering John. I generally like stuttering John, but as long as I can get through stuttering John, I’ll be fine.

Through to Pollo and Arti and Da Paolo is a genius.

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And then Arti came out, and there are comparisons to Chreischer, although Kre…

And but like you said, if I’d woken up the next day, and they said he already didn’t wake up. I would have been like no, shock there. It’s not like Hedberg where you’re like no, although I did not know that, and I’ll be curious to hear you. I’ll be curious to know if it was close to them, knew how bad his drug habit was. I get the sense that they did the same thing with Giraldo, And obviously nobody was stunned when Patrice died, but I still didn’t make it any less sad, just because you always hate seeing these comic geniuses taken from us too soon.

Yeah, and it happens to so many. All Right, ten minutes ago, I asked you one last question, So I’m going to let you go. You won’t have to listen to this episode because you already know what we said. But I appreciate you. Thank you for taking care of the Facebook group as one of the moderators.

Appreciate you coming on. I think we’ll have you back. Just I like talking to comedy and talking about comedy with people, and it’s fun to just drop one of these in. Yeah, I appreciate everything you do. I’d been looking for something like it for a long time.

When I stumbled on it, I was like, this is exactly what I want. You do an amazing job. And I listened to a ton of podcasts, so it’s like, when I start my day with yours, that’s. A pretty big compliment. Thank you.

Also, tonally try to do it as a morning show. I’m not a yellers screamer, so I think it’s easy on the years at seven thirty in the morning. It is one of the pro designs of it. It drops at the perfect time and it’s the perfect length for like first thing in the morning. Be like, Okay, I got and I listened to double speed, so I got seven and a half minutes for a perfect way.

To start the day. But I really do go to the National Donuts chain every morning. It just it tends to magically work out that my drive to coffee hits. Usually I hit the parking lot right as the show gets to the commercial break, and then I listen to the rest on the way home. But I do listen, not that I’m a narcissist.

I listened to see if I made a production error, because every now and then I make a production error and then I try and catch it before everybody else does. No, I get it, and yeah, one of many shows that I listen to, but it’s definitely in my daily routine. That’s a long episode of Daily Comedy News Tomorrow. Jeff Siegel, documentarian, We talk about his Mitch Hedberg documentary and celebrate the life of Mitch Heedburg. Sunday, jason’s ineman friend of the show from The New York Times, We also talk Mitch Heedburg.

See you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hi Ley Hoe. I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Rough start down at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It was the opening night Comedy All Stars super show twenty eight hundred people at the Palace Theater in Saint Kilda and it was halted just three acts in.

One audience member posted on Twitter. According to Chortal, something happened in the dress circle at the Palace Theater in Saint Kilda during the third Comedians act that the Comedy Gala show was paused and now canceled. We’re told there was a medical emergency within the audience upstairs. The festival said they will be in touch with all ticket holders. The festival runs from now through April twentieth, over one thousand performers, one hundred and thirty international acts and six hundred and ninety shows, one hundred and eighty two stages, one hundred and thirty three venues.

Some folks you may have heard of Julio Tore wh Is Danny Boy, Rhys Darby, Mark Watson. I’ve talked about him a few times on the show Eliza Slessinger’s heading down there. Some of these shows include the Annual Great Debate, the Aboriginal Comedy All Stars, and the Asian All Stars Gala. I’ll start to pick away at that a little bit next week. Part of that is because this weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, I’m going to focus on Mitch Hebburg.

Mitch Hedberg passed away March thirtieth, two thousand and five, and I’m a big fan of Mitchell. With the twentieth anniversary, we’ll’ll talk about Mitch this weekend. So the net effect of that from putting together show is some stuff that might normally go to the weekend is getting pulled up into Thursday and Friday, and some other stuff into Monday and Tuesday. But we have a month for me to play random auzzie comedians that you might not know. A one name you do know is Colin Jost.

The folks at the Cornell Sun caught his show. He told the Cornell students, it’s great to be at Cornell. Isn’t it so great? If someone’s like, where do you go to school? And you’re like Ithaca and then you don’t have to be like Ithaca College.

That got a good laugh from the hometown crowd. Joe said I’d like to tell you something inspiring for all the people majoring in a hotel administration. My aunt came here to study hotels, and now she stays in hotels. The Atlantic at a lengthy piece about married comedians, and we learned about the kraziers, who have two rules when it comes to jokes about missus Leanne Kraser. One is Bert can talk about her as long as it’s not mean, and he can talk about Leanne as long as it’s really funny.

Bert says, she’s yet to vito a joke. Sometimes she eggs him on. One time, Leanne farted during sex and said, you’re going to talk about this on stage, aren’t you, to which he replied, can I, And she goes, you have to. If it’s happened to me, it’s happened to other people. Bert says, I did it and it murdered.

In the same piece, Jim Gaffigan suggested that comedians traveling is a release valve. Jim said, maybe me traveling is helpful. It’s like she doesn’t have to deal with me. In some ways. My stand up is my golf.

Back to Bert, he spoke to the other times about the evolution of comedy They were curious, has anything changed since he started? Bert said, oh, f yes, you have no idea. There used to be a thing called a closer. A closer would be something you’d put at the end of your act because you were done, and then Netflix showed up and now audience will decide your closer for you. They were bored, they were done, and it turned out the majority of specials only got about thirty minutes of viewing.

Oh so it’s not just me interesting all right? Yeah, I don’t make it all the way to the end of a lot of specials, Bert said. One comic said to me, I actually can still tell my closer because no one watched the whole special, So I’m still using my closer on the road. I had this great closer about ziplining with my wife. It was in my special Secret time.

It’s like my favorite chokee with my whole set. Why would I put it at forty eight minutes? I have it closed up my special. Why wouldn’t I put it at twenty two minutes? So that if you’re telling me you’re only going to watch thirty, then I put it at twenty two.

If you just watched my closer. This is fascinating. Bert says, we got the notes back and forth from my twenty eighteen special and Netflix was like, your rate of retention was through the roof people that started your special, ninety five percent of them watched the entire thing, and that had never happened. As somebody who looks at completion rates for all sorts of things, from podcasts to some of the radio projects I’ve worked on, just seeing YouTube completions ninety five percent is insanely high. Burt says, Literally, they brought us in for a meeting.

They’re like, what did you do? And I said, I talked to some comics. You did specials here, and no one watches their own specials. I just put my clothes twenty two minutes. Literally.

Netflix said to me, is it cool if we give your special to other comics? And I was like, yeah, tell them what I did. So for this special, I had a really great joke that was like that, I think it’s the phone sex joke. That little chunk was really great and it said four minutes and twenty seconds, and I’m like, nice, I knew that I had closure. I could go nowhere else but the end the story about my dog that had passed away, so I was like, dude, that belongs.

At the end, Bert said, I think I was in Utah and I told the story about my dog and I saw dudes crying in the audience, and I was like, well that was weird.

And then I got so much feedback on social media.

They’re like, Birch Show was amazing, but that dog story, man, that killed me. Man, it was hilarious. We just put our dog down. That kind of stuff and stand up. You know, some comics look to the edgy of stuff for that stuff’s going to be like clickbait from me.

I look for the stuff that kind of brings us together and makes us all feel the same or equally as good about our broken parts. And I just thought it was a good bit to include in the special. Slaves wrote about the Bill burnaissance. I don’t know where I am with Bill right now. I listened to that Terry Gross interview and I came away liking Burr less and I’m not on like a Burer got woo kick.

I don’t know if it’s the overexposure or maybe being exposed to more off stage Burr, but I’m not feeling it right now. Slate Road If you’re looking for a snapshot of Bill Burr’s worldview, I recommend listening to the interview for NPR’s Fresh Air. That’s the one I was just talking about. Slate writs Burr’s current renaissance is not the result of a pivot on his part. If anything, it’s a sign of how much the popular culture has shifted around him, taking on a more popular sheen sake of both politically correct niceties and billionaire worship.

Burr’s superpowers a comedian has always been his ability to concoct a frothy exasperation that, when aimed in the correct direction, can have an exfoliating effect on the mind. Somebody had the thesaurus out, continuing thesaurus wise. The impact is most cathartic when burd employs that ability on the listless bourgeois. Can we speak English please? I’m educated.

I have a master’s degree, so it’s not like I’m uneducated, but nobody actually speaks this way. You think I’m kidding here. Let me read verbatim from Slate after his recent MANGIONI apologia picked up steam. A twenty seventeen clip from a Burr appearance on Conan resurface, driffing on Nesley’s attempt to privatize America groundwater, Burr, in a Mangionian turn stop. Whether you like it or not, a lot of people in America relate to Burr’s disposition.

Can you imagine an American voter who holds some shall we say, problematic views on pronoun policing or the me too movement while also harboring a very material sympathy for a Luigi Mangioni, someone who is anti woke but believes the housing crisis has got out of hand. Of course you can. They are legion the crowd, Facebook walls and Instagram feeds. They’re invited into our living rooms for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And they’re also the exact type of citizen that has been legislated out of the Democratic Party.

Bill Burr is their avatar. And the question becomes whether the next phase of liberal culture, for better or worse, will be shaped in his image, One primal scream at a time, woo all right. Tree Crowder in the La Times said, had the election gone the other way, he was planning on trying to pivot, not completely away from politics, but to doing just general comedy stuff. Online that wasn’t political. I do some cooking videos and stuff like that here and there, but then with the election going what it did, it just feels like, what else am I going to talk about?

All my favorite comics talked about real stuff, social cultural issues or whatever. So I always want to do some of that without being too overtly going completely after just one side or one political party. I have a chunk in there about making fun of the idea of white supremacy, talking about a very serious subject, but in my opinion, it shouldn’t offend anyone but a white supremacist. If you’re conservative but you’re not a white supremacist, it shouldn’t bother you to hear me make fun of white supremacy. And so that’s kind of how I try to think about it.

The l eight Times was curious about Trey being more liberal than most families in the rural South. Tray said, my wife and a lot of my friends are liberal people from small southern towns. Pretty much every single one of them is what I call the blue sheep. They’re from a typical southern conservative family, and they’re like the wacky liberal at the table. He discusses how his uncle is gay, and how growing up he didn’t go to church.

My dad didn’t send us to church because they’re very homophobic. My dad ran the video store in this tiny little town and was like, you know, in a David Bowie and David Lynch and foreign movies and stuff like that. So I’m pretty much just the way I was raised to be. It just happened in a very odd place for that to happen. I feel bad sometimes because a lot of people will ask me for our advice on how to deal with it, are crazy, insane maga relatives, and like I said, I almost feel guilty about it because I’m like, I don’t have any of those.

Sophie Budle told What’s Up Newport. It’s an interesting time to be a Canadian living in the United States. I had a gig once in Canada performing for the Canadian Navy, and honestly, they didn’t really seem tough, and so I’ve been offering that up to Americans they can just invade by sea. It’s so ridiculous that Americans are siding with Canada, which you know, you wouldn’t think that would help. I’ve always been really influenced by American comics.

I’m on the road with Taylor Thomason right now. She’s a big influence on Mete, Nikki Glaser, Bet Stelling, Sarah Silverman, tons of female comics. I’ve always looked up to them. Mitel Lane talked to The Windy City Times about growing up in Chicago. What do you remember most?

I love this, Mateo said. I remember the corner of Clark and Addison, across from Wrigley Field. It was just a parking lot with a taco bell and maybe an Irish pub, and that was that. Then I came back after the Cubs won the World Series and was like Woodfield mall, apartments, hotels, restaurants. I’m asking, what the hell is this?

But I didn’t hang out off the Red Line until I was twenty one and old enough to go to bars. I was hanging out in Jefferson Park in places like the Irish American Heritage Center because that’s where all my friends lived in the city. The Windy City Time said, it’s interesting when you said an Irish bar, because they are about three thousand of them in Chicago. Matteo said, I’ll never forget my friend Carrie. We were driving and it was on Clark and Addison.

There was a sign reading new Irish Pub coming and she said, yeah, that’s just what the city needs at Irish Pub. Amy Schumer has shared an update on her use of weight loss medication. She was singing any praises of Manjaro and then commented on the British royal family and said, that’s all I have to say. I’m not gonna talk any stuff. I’m not gonna stir the pot.

But why don’t we have to call Kate Middleton Kate of Wales. Random. By the way, if you want to keep up on the royal family, I rate for the podcast Palace Intrigue. We talk about the Royals seven days a week. It’s a lot of fun boy that Megan markles a lot of fun, a lot of Glazier will host the twenty twenty five Webby Awards.

It’s the twenty ninth annual ceremony in New York City. May twelfth. Johnny Carson would have turned one hundred years old this year. This Year’s Great American Comedy Festival is celebrating Johnny and who her to honor Johnny Carson with then Yakov Samirnoff and Soviet Union Johnny Carson honors you. Yakov will do Saturday, June fourteenth, your headliner on the thirteenth, James Austin Johnson.

The festival kicks off Thursday, June twelfth with the traditional family comedy Magic Show. All three shows I’ve mentioned are at seven o’clock at the Johnny Carson Theater, Great American Comedy Festival dot com. That new show, The Studio on Apple TV Plus is getting amazing reviews. Slate called it the best new comedy of twenty twenty five, and they warn us the Studio is not casual second screen watching. The episodes move fast and demand close attention from the viewer, with throwaway visual jokes cramped into the corners of the frame Simpson style.

I will get to that tonight. And I say that definitively because Thursday night is the night I watched The Pit that is, the medical drama on Apple TV Plus. Last week’s episode was amazing. So while I have the Apple TV Plus on, I’m sure I watched the Bit and switch over to that one unless my wife decides it’s one of the we watch this together show, in which case I’ll get to it. In about seven months.

I caught up in some podcasts Mark Marin had on Nick Fune. Nothing really interesting there, but I will recommend Mark Maron. With Chris Fleming, they talked about bombing the Boston comedy scene and show sequencing, specifically, you don’t want to go after Bobby Kelly. Apparently that was a very good listen, and Chris Fleming is a comedian I hope has a good year and deserves more people to know what Chris is up to. As I mentioned before, I listened to Bill Burr on NPR and came away going, I don’t know about that, just wanted to share with you guys.

I had been noticing a couple websites that used to be pretty I want to be positive, they were really great websites, The eight hundred Pound Gorilla. I’ve noticed since January first, they’ve kind of slowed down their comedy coverage other than the stuff that they’re promoting internally. They had bought out the Laugh Button website, so that’s kind of a loss.

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Also, the Intero Bang has pretty much gone dormant.

I don’t know what’s up with that. Who does great coverage The New York Times, And I’m not just saying that because friend of the show Jason Zenneman. Obviously I’m a huge fan of Jason, but some other people write comedy pieces in there as well. The La Times at least once a week has a major headliner and they do a great job. Latenighter dot com is a great source and also von yu Land that covers the Boston comedy scene.

You should check that out. All week we’ve been talking about Indian comedian at kunaal Comra. You may recall he had made a joke about one of the local politicians at a statement released on Monday, commerce that he would cooperate with the police and courts for any lawful action, but will the law be fairly and equally deployed against those who have decided that vandalism is the appropriate response to being offended by a joke. I bounced this from yesterday because it got a little busy. The Sprung Comedy Festival has kicked off in Silver Spring.

If you’re in town tonight at seven o’clock. Improbable Comedy presents Funnier than Fiction in a partnership with Story District. Funnier than Fiction feature storytellers presenting their funny stories about real situations that are so ridiculous you just have to laugh. Six or seven comedians on that bill. Tomorrow at five pm The Originals All Native Comedy, Improbable Comedy has gathered Pan Indian talent from New Mexico, New York and the DMV to delight and entertain you.

Seventy five minute show. Friday Night, Daisy Comedy Night, and boy, whoever wrote the copy you tried too hard. They listed some comedians that wrote they will bring spice and laughter to the stage. Just don’t. At nine o’clock.

Also Friday, Law and Order Comedy turns laughter into law as attorneys, former criminals, and law enforcement bring hilarity to the often not funny criminal justice system. Saturday’s Science Comedy Night, I like what these guys are doing. These are very different shows hosted by science journalists and stand up comedian Kasha Battel, And Sunday Is Comedy as a Second Language, a live interactive show featuring the stand up comedy as immigrant and first generation performers. Nice job there on that one, and that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it.

They might like it too. Don’t forget this weekend doing Hebburg stuff. See you tomorrow,

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. I am warmed up. I just did about a forty minute discussion with Dylan from the Facebook group, which is Daily Comedy News podcast group feeling courts to join. He had seen Mitch Hedburg live, so I wanted to talk to Dylan about Mitch Hedburg, and then we wound up talking comedy for another half hour after that, so we’ll run that later in the week.

My plan this weekend is to have two specials about Mitch Hedberg, who passed away twenty years ago on Sunday. But let’s start with happier things, or maybe not if you’re Nicky Glazer. She’s a little worried about making political jokes. She told reporters on the red carpet at the Conan thing, like you’re just scared that you’re gonna get docksed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke.

It’s like a real fear. So it’s unfortunate that that’s true. But I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t think about that sometimes Ago, Oh God, can I just say, I hope they’ll know. I can be up on the gallows and say I was just joking. I’m a comedian.

I hope that’s a defense. Did you see the whole thing with the leaked war plans? Via text ver Das got in on this. This from the Hindustan Times, your home for comedy news. On Instagram, Vir shared a series of messages he received from a person who referred to themselves as Donald Trump.

In the exchange, the sender aka Donald Trump called ver Vivek. The Exchange, DJT writes, bro, we’re planning another assault you in Vir text back, I’m sorry, who is this? The sender responded, Trump Baby. Then an invite comes in. You want to come watch some drones this weekend?

Elon’s ninth kid bailed. We have a spare share in the situation room, Via writes back to DJT, No, sir, this is verr Das. DJT writes, what the f is a Verdas. You’re a brown dude. You’re not Vivek.

The exchange then says, there’s two effing me any of you, man. This is why I need Vivek. Furdasan jokes that Vivek’s number might be above my name and your contact list. Quote unquote, Trump writes back, Wait, you’re a comedian, you have a podcast. You have forty eight hours to leave the country.

Mega Das signed off, Yes, sir, no sir, and I’m a stay funny bit. Whatever’s going on there. Don Al Rawlings did a really a fantastic interview with Baltimore Positive dot Com the subject Elon Musk. Remember that time Elon showed up at the Dave Chappelle show. Donell told that story.

We did the show in San Francisco a few years ago. At that time Chappelle, I’m not gonna say it was friends, but you know, I’d be in conversation with Elon and then he’d come to shows. And I think Elon had an idea of wanting to do stand up, but I don’t think in front of a twenty thousand seed arena is a good place. And this was right after he laid off all those people in San Francisco. He went on stage and they booed the hell out of him.

And you know, there’s an iconic catchphrase I use on Chappelle’s show, which would have been perfect for Elon. I was like, yo, you gotta say it. He said say what, and I said, you gotta say I’m rich. But then he said it and he butchered it, and I said, no, you gotta say like yes. He didn’t get it, and that was the end of his comedy career.

Godfre E tells Fox News that the word racist is worn out and used too loosely. Godfrey says people accuse him of being racist for jokes in which he mentions the race of a person. They go, you’re racist, and I go, well, I can’t be. I didn’t stop you from going to school. I can’t be a racist.

Just because I talk about a racist doesn’t mean I’m racist. You see what I’m saying. If I go, well, white people do this a lot, White cops do this to black and it cuts off there, they go, you’re racist. No, they’re racist because they were stopping me, stopping frisking black people. Godfrey says, the critics are mad just because I’m telling you the truth.

I’m just describing a white person. You know, racist is when you stop people for buying houses. You can’t come in our neighborhood. You know, you can’t have this job because of the way you look, that’s racism. It’s an actual institutionalized method to stop people from progress just because I go, oh, there’s a white guy, there’s a black guy.

It’s not racism. I’m just describing. You see, there’s a difference. It’s a thin line. Godfrey says sometimes people say to him, stick to comedy, not politics, and I go, well, politics affect me, I pay taxes.

What do you mean stick to comedy because they’re mad at my opinion. So many people are moist nowadays. Moist is a fantastic word. Comedian Charlie Barns is involved in somebody Else impersonating Charlie. Charlie told Contact six, a news organization, if you get a DM from me asking for your favorite fishing spot, that could be legitimate.

However, in March, a six year old woman thought she got a message from Charlie on TikTok. She asked about his upcoming shows. The scammer offered to get her tickets. Then the scammer suggested they move the conversation off TikTok. She was told she needed to get a fan card to get backstage access.

To get one, she had to put five hundred dollars on an e gift card at Walmart, because you know that’s the system. You buy a comedian an E gift card at Walmart for five hundred dollars, and then you get to go backstage. By the way, can I tell you all, backstage is boring. Nothing happens backstage. Whatever you think is happening backstage, even at rock shows, is boring.

I will tell you a story. When I was at the old place, so you can all drink, I was in what I called the Springsteen Mafia. I got to know the Springsteen camp a little bit. So one time I got to go backstage at Giants Stadium. I think it was the old stadium, might have been the new stadium, doesn’t matter.

Right after the Springsteen concert, so I go back and there’s Bruce and the guys, and what do they do. They go, all right, Steve see tomorrow and they get in their cars and drive home. That’s it. There’s no party, there’s no babes, there’s no drugs. I mean, I’m sure to Guns n’ Roses show in La thirty years ago, stuff was going on.

But you go backstage with Larry the Cable guy and Jeff Foxworthy, they’re just sitting there having a beverage, and by beverage I might mean glass of water, perhaps a beer, and just kind of talking the way friends too. Anyway, backstage overrated. Definitely don’t pay five hundred dollars on an e gift card at Walmart to get backstage. Charlie says, have a lot of empathy for people because it’s getting harder and harder to decipher what is true and not true online. One red flag in the case the scammer’s TikTok name was Charlie Burn’s one twenty seven’s official account is Charlie Brenz.

He shares, if there’s any numbers behind my name on any of these things, that’s a no go, which reminds me John m’laney is raising money for charity. Send money to John mlani on you three, four or five at no kidding. The woman that says the scammer got to you friendly, calling her my dear and saying, I guess I’ve been around and waiting for you. She wrote back. Why in the world would the world famous Charlie Brenz tap the brakes of the world famous I’m not even sure I’m saying his last name correctly.

World famous is a little little exaggerated there. But why in the world would Charlie reach out to a complete stranger and sweet talk I got news, Reela. If you think comedians are reaching out on social media and sweet talking women, you’re not paying attention. Lisa Schiller is with the BBB serving Wisconsin. I assume that’s the better business bureau.

Lisa says, I think the thing with celebrity impersonation scams is people want them to be true. They’re going to ask for payment and an untraceable method such as a gift card. See, she’s not funny there. She should have said untraceable method such as a walmart E gift card. The laughter is always in the details.

You got to add the details. So I’m going to modify her quote. They’re going to ask for payment and untraceable methods such as a walmart E gift card or a litable card or wire transfer or cryptocurrency. Sure you can come backstage to send me one hundred thousand dogecoin. Jeff Dunham stepped and it let’s head on over to Gossip Corner.

He was in Rochester, New York, and the audience turned on him. Why Dunham said, I got booed when I didn’t know what a garbage plate was. Somebody had asked the question, dear Peanut, have you ever had a garbage plate? Peanut made a joke and I said, what’s a garbage plate? And people were liking sense that I’m in Rochester, New York.

I didn’t know what a garbage plate was, so we sent a runner out to get one. Now, if you don’t know what a garbage plate is, and I only do because this came up on the show at some point, I feel like Paton Oswalt or somebody was randomly in Rochester. This has come up before. The runner went to the garbage plate originator, Nick Tahoe Hats on West Main Street. You know the place, but it had closed for the night.

Then the runner went to Dogtown on Monroe and got a junk yard plate, which done him dug into. During the Facebook live feed. Before opening the container, he commented about how good it smelled and said, I apologize right now to Audrey, my wife, who looks out for my health, because I have a feeling this is not that. So what was on it? Macaroni salad, home fried potatoes, meat, sauce, mustard, onions, a hamburger, and a hot dog.

He said, I don’t know where to start on this thing. Gee whiz, this looks good. This is every vegan’s nightmare. He had a taste and said, I get it now. Now I know why the audience was angry with me for not knowing what this is.

This is savory. It is delicious. The mustard and the onions, and the hamburger and the hot dog and the potatoes. Yeah, how can you lose? So I took the break there because I got out on a funny note with the garbage plate story.

But here are some items that normally would be in the A block, but I just split it for pacing. Kevin Hart never afraid to work. He’s got a new movie for Netflix. It is called seventy two Hours. It stars Kevin Hart as a forty year old executive.

Kevin Hart is forty five, so he’ll be forty six by the time this comes out. He’s outrageously playing a forty year old executive who hopes to save his fleiling career by joining a group of twenty somethings on a wild three day bachelor party after he’s inadvertently added to their group text. So I guess picture the hangover, except Kevin Hart’s on it. You know what the Netflix algorithm A’re gonna stick it in front of everybody. We’re all gonna watch, including me.

Yeah, it’s gonna work on your Netflix. Chelsea Handler. By the way, it is ten fifty eight on Tuesday, and I’m recording this early because earlier this hour I caught up with Dylan from the Facebook group. You’ll hear me tell it. But I said to him, Igo, there was a day last week where you hadn’t watched one of the specials yet I was worried about you.

He has already watched Chelsea Handler, which, as I record this has been out for like four hours. It’s morning and he’s already watched Chelsea. I have not gotten to it yet. Chelsea till the l eight Times. The point of her special was who were you before the world really besmirched you?

When you were untouched and unscathed, when you haven’t had your heart broken or been disappointed or experienced a big tragedy yet, who were you? Then? That’s really the essence of who you are. As for herself, and she also has a book she said, I’m at a place in my life where I try not to put that kind of pressure on myself. I wanted to make sure that even if it wasn’t number one, that’d be grateful and gracious and not be so competitive with myself or with others.

To find out that it was number one when I’d accept it might not be was the best news. I’m so proud of myself for never falling into getting married or having a baby when I know these things aren’t natural to who I am. I am valuable without a husband. I’m a queen with or without a husband, and so are all women. I firmly believe that.

And she speaks truth here in this next chunk. When you hate your fifties, you return to who you are. You start caring a lot less about what people think, and you’re also much more present. Amen and Amen. The past is not a preoccupation like it was in my twenties, worrying about what I’d done, if I’d said something to embarrass myself.

I do that a lot less. I do that less often, so there is less to be regrettable about. One piece of advice that I have taken a heart. It’s from Kylo Wrenn, you know the bad guy from the Star Wars sequels. But he’s got a line of dialogue which is let the Past Die.

And I think it is great advice album. Can I signbar? So I was in Ireland last week. This is related to stay with me, nothing to do with comedy, but to do what I just talked about. So I went up to Belfast and I took what’s called a black cab tour, so I was driven around.

My family and I were driven around by a man who had grown up during the troubles, and he showed us the neighborhoods and they still to this day locked the gates between the Protestant neighborhood and the Catholic neighborhood at ten pm. And he showed me how the fence is right up against the Catholic side. So if you’re on the Catholic side and he wanted to throw something over the fence to hit the Protestants, well, the Protestant houses or like forty fifty feet back from the fence, so you really don’t have the angle to throw such a thing. Whereas if you’re on the Protestant side and you want to lob something over the fence. It’s pretty easy to hit the Catholic side, And it was just the whole thing was powerful.

I was honestly choked up for like the entire hour and a half tour. But one thing he said was, you know, was never about religion. It was just about economic stuff and they’re leaving it behind. And he explained about the gates. He goes, it’s not a great solution, you know.

I could see that you might think it’s strange because it’s working for us, and it works fine. Another thing I heard a lot over there was how the Irish feel about the British, which is totally different from how Grandma felt about it. Their attitude is, you know, what stuff happened one hundred and fifty years ago. Let the past die. Get back to the show, John Okay.

Chelsea Handler enjoys hosting the Critics’ Choice Award and says, I love making fun of celebrities and getting drunk with them afterward. It’s kind of the perfect evening for me. Now, will she get a talk show again? In twenty twenty five? The easiest way to get a late night talk show as a woman is to get the creators of hacks to write a fictional story about it.

John Mulaney shows on tonight your guest Pete Davidson, Lunel Macpacker, Henry Winkler and a funeral director and music from Mannequin Pussy. And that is your comedy news for today. If you join the program, tell a friend about it, they might like it. To see you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Calorouga, shark media, pull on Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. The stories came out for Conan O’Brien as he accepted the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. Some of those stories included Adam Sandler, John Mulaney, and Sarah Silverman. David Letterman was the one to hand the actual prize to Conan O’Brien, And let’s listen to what Conan had to say, and take one guess who he’s talking about here. Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money obsessed many of the Gilded Age, and any expression of mindless American might or self importance.

Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the world. He loved America a bit new it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote, Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it. All right, Conan, that’s all good and well, But how about the man. Some of you might be thinking, what does this have to do with comedy.

It has everything to do with comedy. Everything the comedy I have loved all my life, Comedy that is self critical, deflating, and dedicated to the proposition that we are all flawed, absurd, and wallowing in the mud together. Twain is funny and important today because his comedy is a hilarious celebration of our fears, our ineptitude, and the glorious mess of being human. When we celebrate Twain, truly see him for who he was, We acknowledge our commonality, and we move just a little closer together. A few weeks earlier, Donald Trump had ousted the longtime president Deborah Rutterer and board chairman David Rubinstein from the Kennidy Center.

Cohen and said, thanks for the people who invited me here a few months ago. Deborah and David. Honestly, I don’t know why they’re not here tonight, and I lost Wi FI in January. I guess they’re stuck in traffic. And a special thanks to all the beautiful people who have worked here at the Kennedy Center for years and who are worried about what the future might bring.

My eternal thanks for their selfless devotion to the arts that got a standing oh jumping around. John m’laney said, it’s an honor to be here at the Kennedy Center, or as it will be no next week. The Roy Cohne Pavilion for Big, Strong Men who Love Cats. M’laney tagged it with congratulations to my friend Conan O’Brien on receiving the twenty sixth and final Mark Twain Prize. Will Ferrell said the whole thing was a distraction because I’m supposed to be shutting down the Department of Education.

Stephen Colbert did a bit with spicy chicken wings and joked in light of the new leadership of the Kennedy Center, all of these are right wings, and a couple of them are truly insane. ConA never backs down. Case in point, when he accepted the More Twain Prize, this was a very different place. And today they announced two board members bacher A La Sad and Skeletor Asad is the former dictator of Syria and case shunot hip. On the cultural references there, I wasn’t David Letterman said, I’m not historian, but I believe history will show in the history for all time.

This will have been the most entertaining gathering of the resistance ever. Nikki Glaser, on the red carpet before the ceremony, said, I think it would be insane not to address the elephant in the room. It’s in the air tonight. This night is about Conan, but it can be both. It seems like Nicky has quite been accepted into the cool kids club right She’s at every event now.

I wonder who her agent is. She’s got the right people managing her career right now, and she’s nailing it visible but not too much. She needed to tap the brakes and did. Sarah Silverman said, I just really missed the days when you, Conan were America’s only orange A hole Martin short via video, There’s no more fitting recipient getting the last ever Twain Prize here at the Robert F. Kennedy Center.

The whole thing went two and a half hours layer on Netflix May fourth. It opened with a spoiler, the Masturbating Bear. Vulture observes that might have sent a message of resistance when Conan stepped down from the Tonight show. He was initially told he didn’t have the right time to the various characters creating during his NBC years, including the Masturbating Bear. The bear was followed up by Robert smigelas Triumph, declaring thanks so much for coming, and also shame on you for being here.

That should cover it. Yes, also appearing Bill Burr, who needs to disappear for a while. Andy Richter, Uh oh, yep, that’s it. The Mark Twain Prize is canceled because Andy Richter appeared one hundred percent. This was the last Mark Twain Prize.

Write it down. Andy Richter kills shows like ten Beginley in a Wet Dream, Tracy Morgan, Cameil Non Jehanny, and Reggie Watts. Non Gianni noted that Conan’s name is mentioned on the Internet ninety three percent of the time when people talk about Simpsons writers, even though Conan only has a writing credit on three out of the seven and eighty one episodes. Camille joked the names of the Simpson episodes the Conen wrote are March Versus the Mono Rail and two other episodes. Sandler talked about when Conan got twelve thirty, everyone was going, who’s gonna be Who’s gonna be?

Right When they said Conan, I swear to God, everyf and guy, every comedian, there was no jealousy. We were like, f yeah, he’s the best man. We love. You’re faster than all of us, You’re nicer, than all of us, and I’m so happy this life was yours, buddy. The night ended with Conan O’Brien singing Rocking in the Free World with Adam Sandler on guitar.

Sure why not? The UK Daily Mail used the headline Woke comedians target Trump as they roast Conan O’Brien at the Kennedy Center. I mean, I don’t know is David lettermand woke is Adam Sandler. Woke is Adam Sandler. Funny is Andy Richter.

Funny is Andy Richter? Woke Chelsea Handler is this week’s Netflix special. It is called The Feeling. I did sit down and watch Bert Kreischer’s special. I liked it a lot.

It’s just funny. It’s no great takeaway, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just jokes. But I was laughing. I think part of it, especially his opener as a man in his mid fifties, I get it.

I know what you’re joking about there. So that was a lot of fun for me. It is currently softly the best comedy special of the year. It’s the first one all year, and it’s already more twenty fifth that I will put in the top tier. Really, really don’t have much yet.

My list right now is top tier Bert, nothing else of the middle tier, Roy Wood, Ari Shafir and gab Iglesias, and then my didn’t make It is quite long, including Schultz, rosebud Di, Stefano Lopez. It was just a horrific I might have to start a worst Specials of the Year list. Li’s a trigger, which was fine. Eliza and Bill Burr and I’ve talked about this recently. I think that is not so much me being a cranky.

I think it’s just people are on their fifth or sixth special and it’s a bit been there, done that, heard this before. We need some new voices in comedy. Bert went on Grace O’Malley’s podcast Disgraceful and told a story about how he went to text his daughter Georgia. The text wrote, I love you more than anyone will ever love you in this entire world. The problem he has two Georgia’s in his phone, his daughter Georgia and the host of my favorite murder, Georgia Heart’s Dark.

He explained, Georgia, my daughter has saved her name and my phone as Georgia, my favorite daughter Georgia Hardstark is saved on my phone as Georgia my favorite murder. I sent that text to Georgia Hartstark. She wrote back, Oh God, I’m reading this crying. Think it was for my dad. How sweet this is.

I have to tell you have the wrong number. Now. I don’t know if that story is the least bit true, but it is funny. Tomorrow on John Mulaney Show, Pete Davidson, Lunel mac Packer, Henry Winkler, a funeral director in music from the band Mannekin Pussy. But when Yang on his podcast was asked how much he was allowed to add lib on Wicked, Yang said, I was daunted by the biblical precision and just the passion everybody was bringing to it.

But we’re all in over our heads except for director John Chew. He was the only person that needed to be above water with it and steer the ship. The rest of us were out to sea. Yang thought she would prank him by asking him to improvise after scripture takes. Yang also talked about imposter syndrome on SNL, revealing it was only when he took LSD on vacation that he could imagine himself.

On the show, said I was like I don’t think I can do this me being on the show. What is that going to look like? That’s going to feel crazy. I was on the beach, That’s where I took the LSD, and then I got over that idea just by watching sketches on my phone of Bill Hayter’s Stephan. I hallucinated myself as Stephan.

I was like, Oh, I see it now, And I got to tell Bill that James Cordon’s neighbors are annoyed with him. Eighteen complaints have been filed about a proposed den that James wants to build at the bottom of his garden. The neighbors are worried that it might make the noise from Cordon’s property even worse. One neighbors said of the Cordon family, one of the plays that drums, which can often be heard in my terrace and occasionally inside my flat even with the windows closed. Bill Maher’s podcast had on Andrew Schultz really really good discussion there, good takes from both of them on the current state of politics as it put together the show today, the international crowd is really talking about an incident at a MAMAI comedy club.

A mob violently ransacked, said club, and the building has been partly demolished after one of India’s most prominent comedians did a satirical song about a local politician. The Guardian tells us Kunal Comra has a reputation for his cervic comedy. He often pokes fund at political figures. He was at the Habitat Comedy Club in Mumbai Friday night and did a parody song about Ekneth Shindey Hope I pronounced that correctly, the second most powerful figure in the local state government. The song referred to the Deputy Chief Minister as a guitar, which apparently means traitor that upset the leaders of one political party.

On Sunday night, about twenty members of that party went to the Habitat Comedy Club and began to smash it apart, throwing chairs, tearing down posters and breaking the lights. A few ers after the attack, Commra went on Instagram and posted a photo of himself holding up a copy of the Indian Constitution captioned the Only Way Forward. Some local ministers claimed that the comedy club was illegal. A demolition team from the local council arrived at the venue on Monday and began demolishing part of the building on the grounds that had been illegally constructed. In a statement Monday, Habitat said it was shocked, word and extremely broken by the recent acts eventandalism targeting us.

We’ve never been involved in the content performed by any artist. They are shutting down until quote, we figure out the best way to provide a platform for free expression while putting ourselves on our property in jeopardy. In Happier news, Saturday Night Live is teaming up with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is an exhibition called SNL Ladies and Gentlemen Fifty Years of Music. The exhibit places visitors in a recreation of Studio eight h.

The experience mirrors the flow of the show, beginning with the cold open and moving into the home based stage where the host announced the musical guests. The exhibit also features costumes and props from SNL, including wardrobe from the Blues Brothers, The Famous in a Box Sketch, and the Sweeney Sisters. Musical guests wh would be represented include Blondie, Rundy mc mick Jagger, Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter, and Billie Eilish. The exhibit opens May twenty third at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. On Amy Poehler’s new podcast, she told a story about winning Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals Women of the Year title in twenty fifteen.

She said the ceremony consisted of sniveling eyes roasting me. One person said to Amy, you’re the poor man’s Tina Fey. The kid said it right before I went up. Amy said, I gave him the figure, which everybody was shocked about. And I don’t know if it was the right of me in a guess, but I go fu.

Kyle Mooney is now Kyle M. He’s moving on from that whole comedy business. He has a serious album. In a YouTube video, he says, I don’t want to be a clown anymore. I don’t feel like I’m a character.

I’m not a sketch. I think that’s what most people think I am, but I’m not. His debut album has every genre of Western music. Kyle M explains, I sing every song, played, every instrument. That’s all there, rock, country, R and B, dance.

I promised this is art that’s earnestly me. I promise there is nothing comedic about the Kyle m Project. He should deem up with Adam Sandler and out in La. Vulture Is Guaranteed is a new bi weekly comedy show at LA’s Lyric Hyperion Theater. Good lineup tonight.

Emily Knalano previous guest on this program, Naomik Peragin, Yes here Lester and Robin Tran. That’s a good show. Still catching up from the trip, Let’s see what I haven’t told about? Katherine Ryan announced she’s been diagnosed with skin cancer for the second time. She said in two thousand and four, she had what was described as a golf ball sized lump removed from her inner thigh.

This time, tess have confirmed her mold to be early melanoma. Ken Jung may return to sitcom world. This would be a sitcom inspired by former California Senator A. Barbara Boxer. Fox is developing How Can We Help?

It is set in the tenth District of Boston and follows newly elected congressman and local stain removal tycoon Jimmy Choi as he causes all kinds of messes for his intrepid staff, none of whom voted for him. Can I send you guys a note right now, don’t bother, don’t make that not a good idea. How’s that Dennis Leary show going, by the way, right? Whatever? Okay, you’re such a hater, Johnny Mack.

That’s it for today, see tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media, No Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. I am psyched for today. As I put it together, there were different names in the news, which was just so refreshing for me. And as I so searched about that, I started thinking about Bill Burr and how has Bill Burr gotten us to a place where it’s like, you know, Bill, you need to disappear for three months now. You’ve heard me say this in the past about like gaffing and needed to tap the brakes, and he has.

Jim took my advice right. We haven’t heard from Jim in a bit, but Bill needs to go away for a little bit now. It’s just so weird. I’ll talk about Conan tomorrow as I don’t have the information as I record this in the middle of Sunday afternoon, and often I don’t record on Sundays, so it’s nice and the news cycles a little different. I’ll start with The Times of London, the Sunday version of The Times, and they had a profile with Jimmy Carr, who explained how to get a laugh.

I think Jimmy might actually be my favorite living comedian. I try to see him whenever I can I always find his shows excellent anyway, Jimmy says, to get a laugh, you do the opposite of what is expected. So someone who doesn’t do physical comedy doing a pratfall is funny. It’s the thing about jokes being the sudden revelation of a previously concealed fact. Every joke has two stories, and the first story sets up an assumption that turns out to be erroneous.

It’s the same structure whether you’re doing clever wordplay or falling over that’s really smart, obviously. Jimmy, a top top comedian the Times, was curious why music vidues are struggling and stand up seems to be thriving. Carr said, because comedy clubs deliver week in week out. What do you want from a night out? A couple drinks, something to eat in a great laugh.

But I think about comedy as a function in society is that it opens up the window of what you can and can’t talk about, not just edgy topics. Even if you do mainstream observational stuff, the audience go, oh, we can complain about life a little bit. It gives you permission to have conversations you wouldn’t otherwise. It’s like you put on magical glasses and see everything in a slightly funnier way. It was an interview with a comedian, so of course you know you can’t say anything anymore.

The Times phrase that is are there things people used to find funny they don’t anymore? Car said, I think there’s a broader church now than ever before. Britain’s Got Talent last year was won by a clown act. There’s mine too. Comedy feels much more open.

It’s weird. While ITV and the BBC were fighting over a Saturday night ratings, YouTube just stole their lunch and streamers are stepping up to Netflix has done a tremendous amount for stand up though. I did realize the other day that Jeffrey Dahmer has more Netflix specials than I have. It’s an interview with a comedian, so we’ll talk about getting canceled. Jimmy explains, intention is important with me.

It’s clear what the intention of the evening is. But the way you can get reported is if you’re shouting jokes through someone’s letterbox at nine am. I subscribe to the benign violation theory that jokes are benign violations. You take a violation to matter how extreme, but make it benign by joking about it. Jokes can be a way of making sense of stuff.

Think about how we use humor in our lives when something terrible happens, never mind on stage. There’s a lot of laughter around grief, death, and disease. There’s a real functionality to it. It makes something okay. It’s slightly playing with fire, but you don’t choose your sense of humor.

It choos you. It’s like sexual taste. Some like it’s spicy. Others prefer milder stuff. But you don’t fake a laugh.

And Jimmy talked about clapter, quoting him exactly. I have this thing I call clapter where an audience are just applauding clapper, not laughter. I watch out for that because that’s just people agreeing with you. Too easy. It’s too easy to say Trump’s a dummy.

There’s nothing in that. But also, I don’t want it just to be a shock and inhalation of breath and a nervous laugh. It’s got to be a belly laugh followed by an intake of breath. It has to be the right way around, because shock is nothing. It’s got to be funny first and foremost good stuff there.

Chris Gethard had a note for John Mulaney again, I haven’t seen episode two of M’LANEI yet, but I’m seeing mixed buzz at best. Some people are like, Okay, it’s quirky, but I’m not seeing anyone saying it’s great, which is a shame. Some people are comparing m’laniy show to what Chris getherd it used to do on his show, and Chris tweeted, I really love Everybody’s Live, and I’m probably more fascinated at its existence than anyone on earth, and I wanted to succeed on a massive scales. So please, guys, let’s get John an in ear monitor for the phone calls, and just let me know if I can help in any other way. As somebody who has produced a lot of talk radio over the years, I can tell you and I screen calls better than anybody in the game.

I challenge all of you. I will screen calls better than you. I’m really, really, really good at it, and i will tell you after the first sentence out of the caller’s mouth, it’s diminishing returns and you have to prep the caller and go Okay, surely when you get on, make sure you tell host you know, hey, I just wanted to say that I think blue umbrellas are stupid. Just get right to your point and then from there it’s diminishing returns and John is putting civilians on the air live and that’s why it’s a mess. So I’ll give the same note from I did from the LA series.

Stop doing the segment. It doesn’t work. That said, I don’t think Millenni cares that. He just wants to do this quirky, weird show and Netflix is paying for it whatever. Steve Byrne talked to Fox News Digital thanks to dr who shared this on the Facebook group Daily Comedy News Podcast Group.

I had just put together the show and then popped on Facebook really quickly because I wanted to tell you guys. This week I’m speaking to Jason Zinnemann from the New York Times. He’s going to be one of my guests about Hebburg. But I want to ask you guys anything you want me to ask Jason while I have him, So if there is something, throw it in the Facebook group. You’ll see the post there.

And I just put together the show with the Steve Burn thing, and I saw dr had shared the interview, so we’re thinking of each other. Thank you for sharing it. Steve Burn told Fox News Digital Hollywood today it could do a better job allowing comedians to be funny. I fear that my kids are growing up in a generation that isn’t going to have those kind of like communal jokes or communal scenes, or all these cultural references that we all grew up with. One hundred percent on that, and I think that’s just gone.

Burn said, Hollywood’s not making comedies, They’re not taking chances. Comedians were never selling out arenas to degree we have multiple comedians out there that are now arena acts. That’s because Hollywood has failed in terms of filling the void with comedies, and so people are getting their fixed in arenas. That’s interesting, right, because you’d like to go out for a night and back in the day, you’d be like, oh, well, Bill Murray movie, thanks for the fifty year old reference there, John, you know what I mean. But we don’t do that anymore.

And I guess it gets back to what Carr was saying earlier. You know, it’s nice to have a night out. I went out with the boys on Saturday afternoon to watch them college basketball. I had just spent a week in Doublin of the bars every night, and I want to see my friends. And we sat there and we had a beverage or two and some food and stared at sports and it’s nice.

It’s nice to go out, you know what I’m saying. Yes, Burn said, I think if Hollywood was smart, they let some of these guys go for it and not be too restrictive in terms of like, obviously, what Bill Burr has done, what Shane Gillis has done, those are blueprints. Obviously there’s a desire for someone to let them take that into a narrative form make films. Burn finds the entertainment industry progressive and left as a whole. I think that’s why people are leaving traditional outlets to go to your mom’s house or Rogan’s podcast, because they’re getting their fixed from these other mainstream elements that you know, pretty much only primarily support people that agree with them and play in their same sandbox.

I think you gain stand up is the greatest job of the world. The fact that you could take something relatable or something you just pull out of the ether, and you bring it to a roomful of strangers and elicit just a single emotion, which is laughter. This is nothing better than that. Steve burns favorite comedian, Brian Callen makes me laugh like nobody else. He’s so smart, so gifted, so talted, and he just genuinely makes me laugh.

Joe Gatto released a statement after a woman accused him of sexual assault in a TikTok. Joe said he had quote used poor judgment unquote in the past, but quote wouldn’t assault anyone unquote. The TikTok users said she had met Gaddo in twenty twenty three, when she was nineteen. Her claim is that she began texting him after approaching in a restaurant in hopes of getting a free ticket to the show. She ledges Gaddo gave her a pair of tickets, and they continued to text.

She claims they eventually wound up in a hotel room and some stuff happened. She didn’t go into detail what occurred. I’m not pulling my punch there. She didn’t share it. In one of her subsequent posts that day, she wrote, I got sexually assaulted by Joe Gatto.

The Impractical Joker. Gaddo issued a statement on Saturday which reads, iveeu’sed judgment and as a result, have violated the trust of the people I love most. But anyone who knows me at all knows full well that I wouldn’t assault anyone. Working on myself is an ongoing process, and I’m now going to take some time away from the public eye to focus my energies where I need to. Joe had left The Jokers in twenty twenty one.

At that time, he cited issues in my personal life and announced that he and his wife had been splitting up. In an Instagram post, he wrote, sorry in advance for the long and more serious than usual note below, I just wanted to let you all know I’ll no longer be involved with Impractical Jokers. Alongside my friends. I’ve devoted a decade in my life to building the franchise and couldn’t be prouder of what has been accomplished. However, due to some issues in my personal life, I have to step away.

Bessie and I have decided to amicalle port Ways said how I need to focus on being the best father and co parent two or two incredible kids. Rob Schneider has suggested that Kate McKinnon’s presidential election called open. The one where she’s sang Hallelujah as Hillary Clinton was the end of Saturday Night Live. Schneider told Glenn Beck, I hate to crap on my own show when Hillary Clinton lost, which is understandable. She’s not exactly the most likable person in the room.

And then when Kate McKinnon went out there on SNL and the cold opening and all that and started dressing as Hillary Clinton, she starts playing Hallelujah. I literally prayed, please have a joke at the end, don’t do this, Please don’t go down there. There was no joke at the end, and I went, it’s over, It’s not going to come back. He then talked about the late night hosts, specifically Kimmel and Colbert. You could take the comedic indoctrination process happening with each of the late night hosts and you could exchange them with each other.

That’s saying, you know, it’s not interesting anymore. Andrew Schultz sold Dak Shephard the secret to Trump’s success is that Trump doesn’t sound rich. Schultz said, that’s what people don’t like. Technowledge. Trump doesn’t sound rich.

When he talks, he sounds poor. Schultz continued and said the face of the Democratic Party should not be like a fourth generation trust fund neppo baby who’s never had a real job, like telling working class Americans what they should do. Trump talks like he’s from the neighborhood. Schultz talked about a press conference where Trump was asked and what happens if Russia doesn’t do the ceasefire? What will happen?

And then he goes, what if someone drops a bomb and it blows on your head. That’s how Frank from the neighborhood would answer a question. So he communicates in a way that is super relatable to these people, despite his life not being at all relatable. Jeff Dunham told Fox Trump’s win is a weight off comics back so they can get back to joking around. He says, you feel like you can now joke about the things we used to joke about.

Dunham calls comedy one of the last forms of free speech, and the fact in the past few years that was trumped on tromped. That’s not a word that I’m familiar with. I’m getting what it means from the context. Clues it’s an interesting word to use, especially when we’re talking about Trump. Let’s see.

Oxford says, Trump is an informal North American word that means trudge or stamp on, an example being Larry took a step forward and trumped on his wrist. I feel like I’m going to hear from people from other parts of the country who were like, don’t you know what trump is? We didn’t use trump in Queens anyway, Dunham says, to me, a comedian takes it to the line. He knows his audience, his or her audience. You’d take it to the line and you may step over it a little bit.

So to me, I’ve always believed that if I’m offending three to five percent of the room and that’s the entertainment that everybody else is laughing the hardest. That and that’s why to keep coming back, because they’re hearing stuff they don’t get to hear anywhere else. Some of Dunham’s characters include Jose Hallapeno and a Command the Dead Terrorist. But speaking of Jeff Dunham, when I was programming serious that, Hey, you guys can drink. I know you guys are like stop to Bowood Road, series.

It’s kind of relevant to what we do here at the show. But in the aunts, Jeff Dunham was huge. We had the Daily Request show and Dunham would get requested every day and you know that’s a ventriloquist on the radio and people couldn’t get enough of the characters. Dunham said, Well, when it comes with characters, you know, inventing the characters responding what’s going on. Like I said, it’s responding what’s going on in society and what I think the audience is to laugh at.

And then it’s literally coming up with tops because the subject matter that people can relate to say, with the character, they have to be relatable. And people, as you know, accuse me of having stereotypes of my characters, like yeah, that’s the point. You’ve got this grumpy old man, he’s a grumpy old man. You’ve got this redneck, you know, borderline white trash. People understand that, and then they expect a certain kind of material and a certain personality and it works for you.

It’s just like a sitcom. I don’t disagree with anything he said there. People need to lighten back up. It is nice to see the sea change. We can goof on each other and still be friends.

It’s wonderful. So yeah, Walter dressed up like Trump and then he dressed up like Biden. With the videos, he talked specifically about Ahmed, which he said was his response to nine to eleven. Dunham said he refused to play it safe with the character, stating at the time he decided, I’m not going to go to Hawaii or Alaskar or someone in California try this. I’m going to go to where it counts, and I was booked at a club called Bananas Comedy Club, six miles from ground zero.

He introduced the character as Osama bin Laden at the New York club. It was like God took a vacuum and sucked all the air out of the room. However, he recalls, as soon as he brought out the funny looking skeleton puppet and ned lived, the character is infamous I kill you catchphrase. The show could not have gone better, Jeff says, I mean it couldn’t have gone better, and just went from there. Jeff is not happy with the States of California, telling Fox I feel this beautiful state has been politically run nder the ground and it’s unfortunately because it’s one of the most beautiful dates in the country.

The La Times profiled Trey Crowder, Isn’t this fun? We’re talking about different people today, the headline too liberal for the South, too redneck for La. The La Times asked Trey about his liberal positions on politics. Tray said, people are definitely bummed out and feeling weird. The response has been pretty positive after the shows and whatnot, because I do talk about politics a little bit, but then I also talk about a whole bunch of other things that have nothing to do with that, and it’s a welcome distraction for people.

It’s take it a little bit of what they expect, but then also a little bit of diversion at the same time. But when I’m actually talking to people off stage, that morale generally is not super high right now. I’ve never really believed the comedy changes too many people’s minds or anything like that, but I do think it can serve an important purpose when it comes to things that are too hard for some people to talk about or think about. Comedy just kind of takes the edge off that, So I do think that can help and be important.

Also, people find it relatable, but I don’t think there’s too many comedy con…

Ali Wong was seen with Bill Hayter at a Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco, Turtle Tower. Thinked Wang and Hater for stopping by the Financial District restaurant. They posted on social media’s great food and even better company. We’re thrilled to be back in San Francisco and so grateful for all the love and support. A huge thank you to Ali Wong and Bill Hayter for stopping by this week and showing love to our small business that truly means the world to us.

One grew up in San Francisco and named Turtle Tower is one of her favorite restaurants of the city back in twenty nineteen. Cameron Esposito has announced a new stand up special, Four Pills, will debut on the streaming platform Dropout on April eleventh. I’m not familiar with drop Bell. Let’s see what they got. I feel so refresh today talking about other things.

Let’s saye dropout, independent, ad free, uncensored comedy. Oh, I should befriend these guys. I’ll reach out to them after we’re done recording here, maybe it’ll be nicer to me than the Hulu publicists. Girl Ah Cameron’s Posito special guys the audience on a surreal journey through the ups and downs of her bipolary disorder diagnosis, with detours to talk about marriage, divinity, school, and one extremely unlucky dog. Oh Cameron says, when you do this job, the number one thing people say is, I don’t know you can do that job.

Stand up is my biggest fear, and I’ve always said, well, it’s just because it’s not my biggest fear. Nice job by Michael Blaxon. He donated ten thousand dollars to his old high school, John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia. He graduated from there in nineteen ninety. Blackson said, I tried to tell these kids every time, listen, man, you could be from the streets, but you don’t have to be in the streets, you know, and you have to think about ways of getting out of the street.

And hopefully I got to them today. Sometimes they need people like me to come talk to them. And I hope a lot of other people will go to their alma mater and talk to these kids and give them hope. Robert Smigel has released a lost TV Funhouse from two thousand and three. It had been abandoned in the middle of production.

The topic was George W’s invasion of Iraq. In it, they depict Bush attempting to take down a hive of honeybees. Smigel posted on the Triumph YouTube channel too many people the idea of liberating the civilians while killing thousands of them and destabilizing the region. It seemed hollow, especially with Dick Cheney’s conflicts of interest regarding the valuable oil resources there. So we started to make a TV Funhouse cartoon marking the endeavor tune Bush, voiced by Robert smigels in the Oval Office, presenting alternative programming that Americans can watch to avoid the stress of war coverage, specifically a show called President Bush’s World of Adventure.

In it, George W. Presents the Honeybee as an international threat who attacks innocent people. He teams up with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld remember those names, boy, taking me back here to take down the root of the problem, the dictator Queen Bee. Dick Cheney reassures viewers it’s not for the honey Smigel explains why it never aired. Within a few weeks, Bagdad fell and any skepticism about the war was drawn out by the majority, energized by the civilians taking down Saddam’s statue.

So I hesitated, concerned about taking on the prevailing wind, we bailed on finishing the cartoon the only time that ever happened. It’s not our funniest and it would a shirly bomb with an audience at that time. But yeah, it doesn’t feel great. I backed oubt And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it.

Hopefully they would like it too. You know, you could share an episode. This is a pretty good episode. You share this one on social media many ways. With the show.

You could sign up for Calaruga dot com slash plaz for five bucks a month. You get this show and a bunch of the others on the network, add free if you’re on Apple podcast clik met banner that says uninterrupted listening. You can also buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Daily Comedy News, and I have big news on the coffee front. The national donut chain Pistachio yeah, you know, my go to is caramel, and I like to mix it up because you know, you get the same thing every day for months and years, it gets a little boring. I do really like the butterper can, but as an old guy now, the butterbercn and kidney stones seem to go hand in hand, so I don’t mess with that.

But the pistachio is delicious and so far not causing kidney stones. Hello from old Man Mountain. I know, as I remind my kids, I was twenty once I met up with a friend in Dublin that used to hang out with me in the nineties. So it was interesting to see my kids meet someone else who like new stories from when I was their age. It’s like, yeah, I went out with my friends on Saturday.

I mentioned that earlier in the show, and we had a couple of beers and what were we talking about. We talked about something about health that was just like so old man, and I’m like, listen to us, old funny buddies. It happens kids, It will happen to you too. Right now, there is some nine year old kid who’s gonna hate your music. Yeah, all right, I’ve acee tomorrow,

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Johnny Mack and I missed you. I’m back from Dublin and I’m back live, back in the mix. I had actually pre taped today to give myself a break coming back off the trip. But I want to catch up with you guys.

There’s so much going on and I miss you and I do like doing the show. So today I’ll take a minute here and kind of catch up on stuff I missed during the week. It was keeping an eye on stuff. It was like, oh, it was pretty busy. Tonight.

Tonight, Conan O’Brien receives the Mark Twain Prize for Comedy. You talk about that in a second. I have not yet seen Bert Kreischer’s special. I did watch Bill Burr right before I hopped on the plane, not feeling it Bill. So I was thinking about this.

I haven’t really liked any how many specials this year, and I was thinking about it, and I’m like, all right, you just like cranky and I’m not cranky. I think what’s going on is that everybody who’s released so far this year is on like their fifth or sixth special, So like, all right, yeah, Bill, I know what you do and Gaba Glaciers. Yeah, I know what you do, et cetera. And I think it’s that that comedy needs some new voices out there. I think the big streamers are putting the same people in front of us over and over and over again.

You know that’s the algorithm, right, You put up a special and people watch it. And I haven’t seen Burt. Maybe it’s the best special year. I haven’t seen it yet. But you put up Bill Burr and people watch it.

You put up whoever I’m not here to bash, and you have people watch it. And I just think maybe it’s the comedy snob in me, or maybe doing this every day or the fatigue, but I just feel like we need some new here. I’m also getting the vibe that the buzz on The Laney Show is pretty bad. I haven’t seen episode two yet, but I’m not seeing glowing reviews that this is the greatest thing ever. That’s kind of surprising to me.

So we’ll get into all that, but let’s start with Conan O’Brien. He receives the Mark Twain Prize for Comedy tonight. They’re keeping under wraps who the lineup is, so that should be pretty interesting. I’ll catch up on the on Tuesday’s program. You know, I don’t have tickets, so I can’t even stay up late Sunday and tell you what happened.

I’ll have to have others tell us what happened. I’ll tell you about that on Tuesday Show. This is the first major ceremony asked at the Kennedy Center since Trump took control. The media is curious whether or not anyone will take shots at Trump at the event. We’ll keep an eye on that.

That should be pretty interesting. Kapy McGarr, who co founded the Twain Prize, calls it one of the cornerstones of the Kennedy Center. Peter Marx from The Washington Post calls it the Nobel Prize for comedy. Wow. The Mark Twain Prize started nineteen ninety eight.

Year winners Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, Carl Reiner. Whoopy Goldberg was the fourth in Wow. That’s just of all the people you could honor, Whoopy Goldberg fourth. That seems way too early. No offense, Whoop bey, but way too early.

Bob Newhart, Lily Tomlin, Lauren Michaels, Steve Martin, Neil Simon, Billy Crystal, George Carlin not until two thousand and eight, and it was posthumous two thousand and nine. Bill Cosby rescinded in twenty eighteen, Tina Fey, Will Ferrell Ellen, Carol Burnett, Jay leno, Eddie Murphy in twenty fifteen, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Julia, Louis Dreyfuss, Dave Chappelle in twenty nineteen, John Stewart in twenty twenty two. I guess we had a COVID gap in there, Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, and now Conan O’Brien. Conan was not their first choice. Apparently they wanted to award it to Catherine O’Hara, who originally accepted.

O’Hara then declined the awards. Some speculated that was because of the presidential election results. Her manager, Mark Gerviritz told The Washington Post it was nothing more than a scheduling issue. She had to decline way before all the crazy Trump stuff happened. They scrambled and then picked Conan just two months before the ceremony and much later than usual.

My spidey sense is tingling. I hope everything is okay in the O’Hara family. But if this thing is scheduled months out, Like if you came to me today and said, hey, you’re gonna win the Comedy Podcast Award it’s in August, Like okay, I’ll block out the date and I’m definitely not gonna go. Yeah, and then be like, oh no, I want to go on vacation week. I would just move my vacation.

I don’t know. Maybe some of the families getting married, or grandma’s not feeling well. I get it. There has been a lot of Conan press. He will return to host the Academy Awards next year.

That is good. He also revealed an opening that got cut, saying the Academy refused to let him put clothes on an oscar to lay it down horizontally. On his podcast, Conan said the Academy refused to let them put clothes on an oscar. The bit would have been, we’re fighting about things couples fight about. At one point, I thought, wouldn’t it be great if it’s just on the couch.

Let’s lay it on a really big couch and I’ll be vacuuming and say, can you at least lift your feet or could at least get up and help load the dishwasher. I want to do it, and they said no, no, no, that can’t happen. One of the people from the academy came forward and said, Oscar can never be horizontal, and that blew my mind, like wow, this is like the thigh bone of Saint Peter. This is a religious icon. Conan wanted to put an apron on the statue to depict it as a housewife serving Conan O’Brien some leftovers.

The academy said, no clothing on Oscar. Oscar is always naked. There was also a plan for an opening to the Oscars. The bit would have been Conan’s gonna goof on all the movies. It starts with Me and Wicked and I’m all green, finishing defying gravity or one of those songs, and I finish it, and then you cut to the next thing, which is gladiatdord claning, clang with swords, and you see that I’m a gladiator, but then you notice I’m still green.

And then you go to conclave and you see people voting with their ballots and one of the hands is still green. Conan said the whole thing was that the dye wouldn’t come off and we had to shoot it in one day. Conan was also at south By Southwest talking video games with Blizzard Entertainment. Conan was interested how entertainment companies now treat video games seriously. Conan said, what I found fascinating to me is that when I started in show business a long time ago, I was trying to get as many people as possible in a superficial way.

Now it’s about me trying to get to fifty million people with people who are really paying attention to what I’m doing. It’s less horizontal and vertical. Conan talked about visiting South Korea. They’re screaming kids, and it was because we found out later on a lot of it was through the gaming videos. You think, more than ever, we need this connectivity.

There’s a way that people connect through video games. There’s something that’s special and unique. He added, I want to be in the next Diablo. I want to be a demon or necromancer. My wife when we met, thought I was a necromancer.

If I’m in Diablo, people get to decide if I live or die. Very quickly, the boss of Blizzards said, we’ll get the writers on this all right. Vulture had a big piece backstage with John Mulaney, and apparently Netflix agreed with me that the guest list for week one was a little light. Malaney talked about the mix of weird guests and said, I can protect myself by acting like we just think it’s weird, and that way you can’t criticize it in the same way whether something’s good or people like. It is so ephemeral, they could possibly predict it with data that have more hits.

I don’t mean Netflix, I mean everybody. In the profile, we learned that Mullani is contemplating a stage version of his twenty nineteen documentary Now episode original cast album co Op. Can you hear the dog barking? I gotta keep recording today, dog, I got stuff to do. It just got back from Dublin.

You should know that Millenne’s going to tour again in August. He says he enjoys doing everybody’s live, but we’re not looking to stay on for thirty years. Mulani starts talking to the writers in this profile and said, we just had the funniest call with Netflix. Apparently, when Netflix learned the premier’s guests would include Fred Armison and Joan Baiez, they were worried that the show hadn’t booked talent that would make the premiere buzzy and exciting. Mulaney describes an unnamed executive saying, this is not the show we sold.

It was great to see someone kind of apoplectic, like, oh, honey, do you know what you bought?

And then they go, we don’t even understand what this rundown means.

I’m like, yeah, you think you’ll feel better when I explain telescope murder. If I walk you through that it’s a body double parody. We feel better about the spend. Writer Langston Kerman asked what name would actually be big enough. M’laney said, no, one knows.

He has a hard time imagining a potential view who has no interest in a millenniy show then changes their mind after they hear like someone’s got Tom Hardy to be a guest. Watch you a book, Taylor Swift, and watch what happens. That’s the thing about the show. It’s not like, oh, this is awesome. It’s great, but it’s not good.

The Week two guess where Nick Krol, Ben Stiller and Quinta Brunson, Like I said, I haven’t watched it Yet Splinter wrote to a review saying they think the show is more of a nice to have than I gotta have for John Mulaney at this point in his career, They write, Mullaney has intentionally or not given us a bit of unique counterprogramming and an indirect mind slash heart slash soulsaver. They then discuss a famous political figure who takes up a lot of media attention and then tag Mullaney might spare your sanity with one hour of meandering conversation about ghost helicopters and aquatic luxury living. For that reason, it’s hitting in the right way at the right time. Right, I have to catch up on that one story that I really wish I had been around for on Gossip Corner, Tracy Morgan throwing up at the Knicks game. How much fun as we get back into live shows here, you know what I mean?

Here? On Daily Comedy News, TMZ Sports has learned that Tracy Morgan is planning to go to another Knicks game as soon as he can. Is he busy? I mean, the next play like three times a week doesn’t seem that hard. In case you missed it, In case you were out drinking in Dublin every Night.

Tracy Morgan was hospitalized on Monday after a bad bout with food poisoning caused him to throw up all over the MSG floor during a Knicks game against the Miami Heat. The Garden has made it clear they’ll welcome him back with open arms whenever he’s ready. Fifty Cent gave him the business and posted a graphic photo and commented, Damn Tracy, wtf going on? Bro too much Branson koonyak lol. Tracy, in a statement on Instagram said, thank you for all your concern.

I’m doing okay now and doctor say it was food poisoning. Appreciate my MSG family for taking such good care of me. And I need to shout out the crew that had to clean that up. Appreciate you more importantly, the Knicks are now one to oh when I throw up on the court, so maybe I’ll have to break it out again in the playoffs. Nicks one sixteen Miami ninety five.

Bill Burr was on the View on Thursday. Can you think of anything less cool for Bill Burr to do? Why is Bill Burr going on the view? Our view viewer is going to be like, Oh, I really like this Bill Burr personally, He says, what is that booking? Why did you do that?

Bill? I’m trying to do synergy. No Hulu, Yeah, Hulu is Disney is ABC. That’s what that’s about. Okay.

In the industry, we call that a car wash tour where you go on everything owned by your corporate overlord. So that’s what that is. That’s Hulu ABC making him do the View. It’s just a stupid booking for Bill that it’s just dumb. He doesn’t belong there, seems missus.

Bill Burr agrees with me. He told the cast of the View, my wife’s freaking out that’s coming on the show. She’s like, who the hell booked you on that show? You say all this dumb stuff about women, don’t go on that show. Joy bay Are asked Bill Burr, is there anybody getting your eye up these days?

More than usual? But replied, the nerds. The nerds are on the politicians, all these tech nerds that want to build robots because they don’t know how to talk to hot women. They’re gonna take over the world. They’re literally gonna replace us.

We’re like Beta right now, and they’re coming out with the VCR, and I think Elon’s got the rockets going because they realize it’s other art’s out there and they’re gonna trash this one, so they don’t have any concern for it, and they’re gonna move on that next the Earth, and you know everybody’s gonna be standing down here with their blue and red ties going, wait a minute, I was on your side, and they’re just ready to leave. Sounds like Bill was trying out a new chunk on Troy Bahar. Bill was also on The Tonight Show telling Jimmy Fallon billionaires are not happy having a billion dollars. Why does Elon musk dressed like he just got out of a hot topic. I’m so sick of that guy trying to rewrite his origin story like he was Matthew McConaughey.

Pulling into the High School Times profile Bert Krascher as part of the media campaign around a special The Time said to Bert, congrats, I’m looking more svelt these days. Bert said, sadly, I’m still morbidly to the Obyese. That’s the craziest thing about the BMI scale. Have you looked at yourself on the BMI scale? My first time I ever did it was a long time ago on a podcast when Sigora and I were fat shaming each other and we were so morbidly obese.

Even at my skinniest, I’m morbidly abyese. I only work out so I can party. I look at the guys who party and don’t work out, and that kind of bumps me out, and I go, hey, man, not allowed to do that. That’s not the way it works. Every dad avenue growing up, if they had beers, they were very active.

Maybe they have drinks on a night out, but in the morning they wake up and go play basketball, go fishing in the morning. My dad ran marathons, so it got ingreened in me. If you’re gonna go out and have fun and party, then you got to pay the tax. In the morning. I’m still fat, and I work out really freaking hard.

I just bench three hundred and twenty five pounds, but I’m still just doing it so I feel better about myself when I wake up in the morning and I’m like, last night was a long night, but I’m gonna go work out. I got a canary in the mine, and that’s my wife, Leanne. There have been times when she’s been like, all right, let’s pull it back two years ago in July. She was like, I think we’re gonna pump the breaks on this one.

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And then I didn’t drink for like three months and I lost fifty five pounds by…

She’ll be like, have a glass of wine. Don’t be a fool. We’re only in Venice once it’s snowing. Let’s have a drink, have some champagne. My wife won’t let me be a teetotaler and won’t let me be an alcoholic.

The only times is curious does he run wife jokes past her before he does them on the stage, But it says, no, I just write them. But you gotta remember I still do stand up the way I did when I was a kid, where you just write stuff and say it and if it didn’t work with the audience, then you stop doing it. But it works for the audience, you figure out the tax on your family, and you’d be like, are you guys cool with this? But you gotta find out if it works first. So I just tried them all and then she came and sought a few times, and there was a little process in this one because I wrote material on the road, and I told it so much and it was an aggressive tour that I kind of lost the smile in it.

So the material specifically, if you can’t tell them joking, if you think that I’m mean, or if I lose the little and her words Rascal in it, then all of a sudden, it’s mean jokes about women. But if you know that I’m a loving husband who adores his wife, then it’s okay. And my wife, my producer, and my director were all like, we just want to make sure we see the smile in it. That’s really smart. So then I think we achieved it.

In the special. My wife edited it. She edits all my specials, top to bottom. I’m gonna be honest with you. I look at like the first five minutes, then if I like the first five minutes, I watched all special.

But the first five minutes is what I’m really specific about. Streaming is like grabbing their attention right away and saying, don’t leave, don’t go anywhere. I know even a million options, a lot more to that. That’s in the La Times. Let me back up.

The Malaney thing is in Vulture. You definitely want to catch up on that one. That was a really good read and I just barely skimmed it. What else happened? Brett Goldstein announced a special for HBO.

It’s titled The Second Best Night of Your Life. It will debut sometime in April on HBO. In a statement, Brett said, I’m so excited to do my first special, not on TV but on HB FINGO Nina Rosenstein, Executive vice President of HBO program and gave this extremely cool quote. We all know Brett as an incredibly gifted writer and actor, but his roots are in stand up. He has a razor sharp, dark sense of humor and is the perfect combination of British gentlemen and cheeky troublemaker.

And did you catch this one? A Russian commedie and apparently was arrested while trying to leave the country after he was publicly denounced for allegedly mocking war wounded serge A Zeitzev leads a public movement called Call of the People, said comedian Artemi A. Stannin made jokes mocking an invalid, especially our soldier who lost his legs in the special military operation that crosses all boundaries of morality and ethics. Austintin, in an online interview, apparently deny the accusations and said there was not a word in the joke about the Ukraine War. On Tuesday, Investigator said in a statement that he had been arrested on suspicion of inciting hatred and debasing human dignity, an offense that carries a jail term of up to six years.

That is your comedy news for today. Good to connect with you all again. I have no travel whatsoever planned, so you shouldn’t have any pre tapes for a little bit anyway. Later this week, well, my voice is to upbeat here, you can tell him a little frazzled. I’ve just got home from Dublin and flew and jumped in and did a podcast.

Next weekend is the twentieth anniversary of the passing of Mitch Hebburgh, So I’m working on two special episodes for next weekend. But the rest of the week should be normal, and I’ve got plenty for Monday and then Tuesday we’ll talk about the Conan thing. So I’m gonna stop babbling and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Ari Shafir caught up with Fox News Digital and tell some stories about the dark years starting out in La. Ari said his early days learning the ropes in West Hollywood’s Comedy Store were the dark years. It was evil.

We were like doing crazy stuff. We had like gambling rings in the back. People would be hooking up in the back. It was just like crazy stuff would happen there, drug use and it was awesome, but there was no crowd. Every two weeks would have a show where there was just no show because nobody showed up.

But because of that we got used to failure. Ari said, it’s harder to break in in La compared to the other big comedy cities. It’s so disheartening. The open mics, the little level stuff is so crappy. It’s so crappy that almost all my funny friends like failed out.

There’s no positive feedback ever. It’s just terrible. Eliza Slessenger is going to be down in Sydney and at Sydney Fest. She caught up with The Sydney Morning Herald and explained her morning I have a strict tied of two cups of coffee and at least nine hours of scrolling in the morning before even talk to my children. I try to remember how much of this is not real.

I think, especially in the past few years, you’re an idiot if you think what you’re being fed is based in any kind of reality. She does like social media. It’s allowed more international fans to discover her work. She had just recently played some dates in Japan. Eliza said, at its finest, social media has a connective tool.

The Internet is a credible thing, but at its worst, the way most of us experience it, it’s our sugary demise. If you go see her at Sydney, she’ll be doing her latest hour get ready, and she enjoys the up for anything energy of Australian crowds. You guys love a good time. Anyone who’s ever gotten drunk while in Australia knows this. You’re like tropical British people.

I’m really looking forward to coming back down Under, though please note I did cringe when I just said down Under. I sound like such a tourist. Gabeglacias talked about one approach to his comedy which is nobody wants to hear about you having a good day. They want to hear about the struggle. Gabe collects watches.

He also is known to collect cars and Marvel memorabilia. Neil E. Times is curious where does the drive to collect stuff come from. Gabe said, that comes from not having stuff. When I was a kid, I always wanted this, this, and Mom’s like, now, we can’t afford it.

So when I got in a position where I could get those toys that I wanted as a kid, I made sure to do it. I figured out I don’t have any crazy habits. There’s no drugs. There’s just nothing that’s like, you know, I’m spending money on. So I’m gonna buy the toys.

I’m gonna buy the goodies, the collection from Marvel. That comes from me being a fan of the brand. I love Marvel. I watched DC, but I’m pretty one sided on that one. I even got offered an opportunity to be in a DC film, and I turned it down because I’m like, I’m gonna be a hypocrite if I do it.

That’s crazy. Gabe. First of all, I wonder who he would have played in a DC film. And that’s crazy, dude, that’s like really crazy. You should have said yes, game said, I’m gonna hypocrite if I do it.

As far as the buses go, my first car was a sixty eight Volkswagen Bus. Many years later, I got my ex her first car back. I said, you know what, I want to get my first car back. I got one, and the guy who got me the car, I said, if you want another one, let us know. And I was like, well, if you come across something to cool, let me know.

And it kept going and going and going, and now the whole building’s full. I recently got a free car from Volkswagon because they found out about the collection. They came down here and said, wow, you aren’t battinate about our product. Gabe’s grateful that he still has his career. He says, this career as a shelf life.

It’s not supposed to last this long, and I feel very fortunate that I’m still able to do it. And the fact that we’re still going up it’s insane to me. So I’m enjoying every day and I want fans to know that I feel lucky and I’m grateful. And if this goes away tomorrow we can all say we did all this. Felipe as Sparza also spoke to the La Times and said, I think as a comedian, you can make a joke about anything you want, but you got to be prepared to take the consequences of your words.

You can’t forget that part. One time, early in my career, I was asked to do a clean comedy show and I didn’t cuss, but he did some jokes about racism and religion, and I said the wrong thing, and it ticks some people off, and the microphone was cut off. And I had a lot to do with the content, not necessarily the cursing. But it’s important as a comedian you know the audience, especially when you get hired for private or corporate events. Now though, if I’m hired when he do shows, people know when you you get what you get.

If you know my shows, you know I’m gonna make jokes about drug, sex, marriage, race, religion and more. I’m gonna use vulgarity. But it’s a stand up comic. I’ve evolve from a one liner to comedian that tell stories, and it’s some really dark stuff, but I find it all funny. I don’t like to be too political.

But I do touch on immigration and race somewhat in a soft way to make people laugh. For instance, in one joke, I noticed how white people don’t work all month at their jobs then send money back to Scotland or Ireland. White people don’t have immigrant relatives from Germany or Belgium showing up the door with blankets saying they need a place to live. If I get people to laugh at some of the topical jokes, that’s a good thing. One thing we proved in this last election is you can’t put Hispanics and Latinos in the same category anymore.

We’re not all the same brown people. There are some Mexicans that want other Mexicans and Central Americans deported from the country. It’s insane. But overall I try not to take the angle where I come out saying all whites are racist and kill all white people, because that’s not really funny. There really isn’t a joke there.

I try to make little jokes about the topics and get people to laugh. Trenmarco Ciresi, a friend of the show, described how his comedy has evolved. He said, coming up, I worked at a club in Times Square called ll that no longer exists, Thank god. Yeah, John Marco’s not kidding there, you know, wasn’t the greatest New York City comedy club, just saying a lot of the crowd was not paying attention for some English was their second language, some were drunk or just noisy, and he had to cut through all that. So your jokes had to move quick, and he tried to really pop.

I got a lot of skills out of it, but the turns and twists had to be so sharp, they were less true and relied on being a little extra dirty or edgy. It was tough to build a world or tell a story. Now that I could tell a story of paint more of a picture, the punch line’s more meaningful. Explained it. In his newest work, He has a joke about feeling suicidal and having a friend who’s suicidal and explains if I’ve done that in at ten minute club set, people say, dude, I just want to have a good Friday night.

What are you doing? But my fans know my point of view and like darker things, so I can explore these topics. But almost every comedian, even the greats, gradually get worse. One factor is performing for your fans who like you and will laugh even at a failed joke, you lose the fear about keeping their attention and having to write something so sharp. Stand up is it’s a tricky art.

For him, you can feel like a try hard. In the beginning. You could have accused me of being too theatrical without the jokes to back it up. I got labeled as two to one man show at one club, which was frustrating. But for me, it’s pretty natural.

When attention is thrust upon me, a flamboyance emerges. I’m trying to lean into that without exaggerating it, always asking how can this be funny and serve the storytelling? As my stages literally get bigger, I look at the real estate and think, after use it for something, what can I use the stool or the mic stand for in a way that doesn’t feel overly choreographed but still adds a dimension that a lot of comics in the generation above me veered away from. Gary Owen thinks we’re in a golden age of comedy. He says, you don’t need the machine anymore.

It used to be when I started, you needed a producer or director or somebody to see something in you to put you on something. Now, as long as you got your phone, you can record anything you want. If you can put any stand up clip you want out there, you never know what’s gonna go viral. That brought the conversation to Matt Rife. Wife’s a guy.

You post something on TikTok, goes to bed, wakes up the next morning and it’s like, seventy million people saw this joke, and he’s like, what happened? I think you got more comedians right now, selling tickets, doing theaters, doing arenas. Comedy clubs are packed. You see Andrew Schultz, you see Shan Gillison. The way they’re pushing the envelope, you could see this is what we want.

We want to go into these rooms and be uncomfortable. We want this dark humor, and nobody’s taking it personally. Chelsea Handler was on Zack Shephard’s podcast and said she did not want to break up with Joe Cooy, but felt like she had no choice. She explained, I felt like it was a decision between having a relationship and being full honor, choosing myself and my sanity. Sanity is an overstatement, but I would have compromised my own value system.

That’s interesting, She explained. What I thought was a mature, healthy relationship and what he thought was a mature, healthy relationship with two different things. I know have had to compromise everything I stand for, and I wasn’t willing to do that. We had a couple instances where it was obvious that we had different ideas about togetherness and the amount of time would spend together in the expectation of me as his girlfriend, which to me were very outdated, old fashioned and not gonna work. The biggest takeaway from that relationship was that I was able to be in love in a vulnerable, mature, healthy way, and that when I realized it wasn’t going to work out, I was able to end it in a healthy, mature way and not divulge all the stuff and the ugly that might have happened in between, because I didn’t want to focus on that.

Chelsea said, Joe Cooy got me to point in my life where I needed to be reminded of my strength and my power of who I am, and he reinstalled that in me because I had kind of lost interest in my work in the job and that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it. They might like it too. See tomorrow.