Chappelle on AI, Michelle Wolf’s Comedy Origin, and David Cross on Writing on Stage

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Featured: Dave Chappelle, Michelle Wolf, David Cross, Pete Holmes, Sam Harris, David Spade, Chris Rock, Hannibal Buress, Seth Meyers, Charlie Kirk

What’s in This Episode

• Dave Chappelle on AI and automation replacing human thinking
• Michelle Wolf’s comedy origin story from finance to HBO
• David Cross on writing jokes on stage and button-pushing comedy
• Pete Holmes discusses parenting and work-life balance in comedy
• Sam Harris purchases David Spade’s Beverly Hills estate for $32.3 million
• Comedy special releases: Tamson Kelly and Brendan Ayers

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Caloroga Shark Media. Hi there, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Dave Chappelle was speaking to PBS News and said, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and we were laughing about how no one would really know what to teach a kid now. What skill sets are going to matter ten to twenty years from now. Is the world becomes automated and everything’s just changing.

I don’t know if anyone needs to think anymore. The machines are doing all the work for us. It’s AI, it’s quantum computing. Just seems like thinkings for poor people. He quickly added, it’s a joke, by the way, but he did get a little more serious and said, no one reads books anymore.

It’s just so different from when I grew up. Amen. Michelle Wolf told her origin story. I got a job at bear Stearns in the summer of two thousand and seven, a couple weeks after two of their hedge funds failed. I was not there at the start of the financial crisis.

I jumped on the sinking ship and it’s sink too big to fail, not bear Stearns, just the right size. It was more two thousand and eight, all the banks were failing. Some friends of mine came to visit. We went to a taping of SNL. I’ve always been a big fan.

I was like, out of the people do this? How do you get here? She found out the entire cast had started an improv so she signed up for a class. I’d work at the bank during the day and then go to an improv literally in my heels and skirtsuit. I would do improv looking like a business lady.

She and some comedy minded friends started writing and sharing five jokes a day with each other. Posted some of them on Twitter in case you’re looking for them. She says they were atrocious and long since deleted. She started doing open micers and then shifted to a part time job, and then her plan. I was like, all right, I’m gonna slowly do less and less work until I get fired and I left my financial career in the dust.

By twenty fourteen, she was writing jokes for Late Night with Seth Myers and for comics like Hannibal Burs. Hannibal recommended her to Chris Rock. She wrote for Rock for some of the stuff at the twenty sixteen Oscars, her first comedy special Nice Lady was for HBO in twenty seventeen, The White House Correspondents Dinner in twenty eighteen. Is there anything she considers off the table? Quoting Michelle Wolf, she said, I think there were jokes where the level of difficulties a lot higher, Like if a white person’s going to the nword on stage, you better have a joke that’s so good that everyone’s like, all right.

The level of difficulty for that is extraordinary. A lot of people are like, I’m gonna try it, and it’s like, why, why do you want to try it so bad? People think they’re being edgy when they’re just being stupid. Start trek carew in your pat As Walt said, you really have to fight for the space to observe and withdraw and watch both other people’s behavior and pay attention to your own. Because it’s entertainers especially now have less and less non performing time.

It feels like in order to be an entertainment of the arts, you got to be shooting content for your insta, shooting stuff for your TikTok. You’re performing authenticity. So now authenticity is becoming something that drains you. It’s gonna be really interesting to see how that affects not just comedy, but anything where you have to observe life and then reflect it back in a unique way when so much of your energy is now being taken towards promoting yourself so that people look at the stuff when you’re saying that you’re observing reality. He works with a notebook.

I’m very old school. I have a notebook. I use the classic composition notebook with a speckled black and white cover. My notebooks are a combination of me writing the beginnings of jokes as best I can. I can’t sit and write jokes, he says, something I’m going to try to do for the next album.

What I do is I have an idea. I just kind of work it out on stage over successive nights, and then it becomes a joke. My notebooks are all jotted down ideas and clippings of things like a picture from a magazine or name I’ve heard I think artists call them a morgue, where you collect pictures and images of things that might inspire you or something later. So he just collected altogether. It’s a weird combination.

David Cross says, I do not sit down and write jokes. I’m just not good at that. I do all my writing on stage. Cross says, I’ve done plenty of stuff that is, for lack of a better word, button pushing. He was asked if that’s fun for him.

Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t if it makes a set that night memorable and interesting and potentially dangerous. I mean, it’s live. That’s part of the fun of doing a live show. During one show, he let the audience know that his routine was a work in progress and said, by some miracle, all this will turn into a good set, a really good set. Once the set is together, he’ll take it outside of a basement of cool people in Brooklyn and bring it to maybe a less discerning audience in Kansas or whatever.

There’s a difference between Kansas and Brooklyn, which I think we can all agree on. On this particular night, Brooklyn liked an extended bit about Charlie Kirk. He got groans for a Holocaust joke involving the Nazis co opting Santa Claus. We are told another joke quote, boy was I mistaken about what a rape kid is? Unquote got a healthy, delayed laugh but one about Beast Reality elicited only a middling response.

Pete Holmes had a conversation with Vulture about his seven year old daughter. He said, it’s like talking to someone who owns a horse, if you’re going to talk about your horse for five hours, and make sure the other person that you’re talking to also owns a horse. Meeting people without kids typically don’t want to hear about kids. Pete Holmes says, why would someone need to swashbuckle and keep private hours. I’m more in the camp of if I could do this job at noon, I’d love that.

I briefly did It’s talk show after conon O’Brien on CBS, and I loved it because the shows were always at two o’clock in the afternoon. That was proof positive that some people visiting Burbank will still laugh at stand up comedy even if it’s being delivered at two in the afternoon. I’d be done at four o’clock, go home, have an early dinner, and being bet by nine. It was the best on Gossip Corner in Touch magazine reports that podcaster Sam Harris has purchased David Spade’s former Beverly Hills estate worth thirty two point three million dollars, David Spade had money? What does Spade have money from?

Like? SNL doesn’t pay that well? Call up Spades, IMDb? Where does he have money from? Polis Academy four an appearance in Coneheads.

He played Scuzz in the animated movie Racing Stripes. How does this guy have money? I gotta ask Ai? Hold on hey, I says, movies like Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Jodurt, and The Emperor’s New Groove paid well and some generate residuals. TV was probably his biggest paid a On Just Shoot Me, he reportedly earned up to three hundred thousand dollars per episode in later seasons, How Long did Just Shoot Me?

Run? And On Rules of Engagement he reportedly earned about one hundred and fifty thousand per episode, but that didn’t run long. Podcasting, he has co hosted the successful Fly on the Wall podcast with Tana Carvey. Sure, and the podcast is doing well. And believe me, he lives well.

But that’s not like crazy money. All Right, Just Shoot Me ran on NBC from nineteen ninety seven to two thousand and three. All Right, I guess he’s got Just Shoot Me money ran for seven seasons and produced one hundred and forty eight episodes. All right, so if he was making three hundred grand, so he’s making a million every three episodes towards the end there. Okay, just shoot me if you need something to watch today on YouTube, it’s Tamson Kelly’s Hot Tity Bungalow comedy special.

You can ask her about. The title also Outsiday Brendan ayres a debut comedy special alive and well you’ll find that on the eight hundred pound guerrilla streaming service Guerrilla Comedy Plus told you about that one on Friday. I like the name of this company, Joke zero. It is a distribution company. They’ve announced they’ve acquired Isabel Higgins.

On a String and On a String will be in theaters starting on the eleventh of September. Boasting a ninety one percent critics score in Rotten Tomatoes stemming from a successful festival run. It’ll get a week long theatrical run exclusively at the Quad Cinema, New York City before expanding into other markets. On a String follows a Juilliard training violist as she navigates the New York City freelance classical musician scene, playing gigs that often draw her into the personal lives of strangers, all while living with her oddball family’s NYC apartment. Nice job by Comedy Versus Cancer, They’ve raised two point seven million dollars for blood cancer research.

The event was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. New York City is having quite the summer huh. This year’s show featured appearances from Britt Goldstein, Hasan Minhaj, Zoner garg, Nick Krohle, and others, and from The Toronto Guardian. They have their series where they check in with local comedians, Let’s Check In with Brea Habert. Bret describes her comedy as confessional things you’d only tell a priest to your doctor, but instead I’m saying them in front of a group of strangers in a dimly lit basement and getting paid and drink tickets and chicken wings if I’m lucky.

Influences interesting. Listen here, Christopher Guest, Monty Python, Bernie Mack. See you didn’t think I was gonna say Bernie Mack After Christopher gust and Monty Python, Bernie mac Kilda Radner, Norm MacDonald, Beth Stelling, Michelle Wolf, Tina Fey. Favorite comedian growing up. I loved Amanda Bines growing up.

Favorite comedian right now. I’m really enjoying great list here. Josh Johnson, Chris Fleming, Llowe, Radcliffe, Jeffrey Asthmas and Maddi Wiener pre show ritual a crisp diet Coke with a lime wedge, Scroll my notes app and question why I didn’t just go to law school. She’s promoting her debut album, Big Naturals. You’ll find that on Comedy Records, and she also hosts a late night stand up show at Comedy Bar called ghost Orgy.

You’ll find her at at Uncle Brea on Instagram and TikTok. And that is your comedy news coming off a holiday weekend. You know how the show works. I’m not trying to kid you now. Hopefully this week we’ll have some controversies.

I’m keeping an eye on this whole office thing with Gervaise and the others. I told you about that last Thursday. Hopefully they mix it up and we’ll have something to talk about. We will see. So we want to do so you don’t miss an episode.

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Podcast is a little slower than that, but you know by three thirty in the morning you’ll have the show Eastern time. Oh, which reminds me I’m supposed to be reminding you. If you would like the program without commercial interruption, what you do is you go to Apple Podcasts. There’s a better there. It says uninterrupted listening.

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Probably not. I know there’s a couple of people who do these, A couple people who work overnights who appreciate that when the show shows up on their phone the middle the night. And I appreciate you guys listening. But anyway, if you want the show commercial free Apple Podcasts undert Listening, thirty day free trial, try it out. Maybe you like it.

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