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The Shark Deck. I’m Jenny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Esquire Middle East spoke to Mark Norman about touring. Mark said, I’d just like to work, but I always forget about the little things. You know, people say you want to do Nashville.
I, oh, I’d love to do Nashville. I love Nashville, I love the club, I love comedy. But then you forget that it requires packing a bag, getting an uber, going the airport, flying there, landing, getting none of the ruber. I always forget about that part. I always say yes to everything.
And then I realized, oh my god, I want to kill myself. I’m hungover and now I’m in a baggish claim and I want to vomit on the floor. But I still get to do the Nashville show. It’s kind of like a lady. You’re like, oh, I’d love to sleep with this lady.
Then you realize you got to meet your parents, are getting married, and you have a kid. You know, you just want to kill yourself. All right, Mark, what do you do on a day off? I’d kill for a day off. Well, I actually like stand up.
I’d like to chill out all day. I’m a big walk guy. I think walking is highly underrated, So I’d walk around the city with a podcast going, maybe do a couple pull ups on some scaffolding, have a nice lunch with the wife, and then write some jokes and do some comedy. Comedian Norman Freeman getting some push back after posting videos of their character Obese Betty, in which Freeman performs in a fat suit. One of the video shows Freeman struggling to get the fat suit in a pair of pants, another shows the character eating, and a third clip shows them drinking alcohol.
All three of the videos one viral one has almost five billion views. In a TikTok boasted last week, plus sized fashion influencer Munat’s ab Duels says that she can’t believe people are still making jokes like this about fat bodies. In her TikTok, she asks was that fat suit really necessary? What year is this? Some of the commentators suggested that Abduel should lighten up.
Others agree that Freeman’s video was hurtful. Oh My Julily was speaking of the Metro on a related note and said, we all need safe spaces, but we have to be very careful what we say with cancel culture, and there are a lot of people who come to be offended. They all want to go viral. They know they’re cameras. In the live arena, we have to be a little bit careful what we say, so we don’t want attract nutbags.
But also in the live arena, anything can happen. Lots of stuff is hap in my career, and you have to sort of roll with it. It teaches you to live in the moment. But if comedians are feeling unsafe, if that’s something that should be addressed. Nate Brigatsy was on Dave Ramsey’s podcast and talked about how he knew when he made it.
Nate said, I worked at Applebee’s in comedy. When I got to the point that I was making just as much as i’d been making an Applebee’s that someone who knew go to college or anything, I was like, all right, I’m making just as much as I would make, you know, thirty grand a year, whatever it is.
And then you slowly have little check marks we can be like, all right, I woul…
After the Netflix specials released, we took a pretty big leap where you go to theaters and the audience is there to see you. You gotta have new material. You got of all this new stuff. They’re there to absolutely see you. He’s still amazed at his success.
He says, why would I get any of these awards? I don’t think I deserve any of the stuff. It’s wild and hard to take in. When it happens, it’s pretty surreal. I’ve done stand up for twenty years.
It’s all gradual. I always say, either make it at twenty or forty. No one makes it in the middle, so you either get lucky and get plucked. You have to go out and grind it. The Guardian asked Dean Baptiste who inspired you when you’re first starting out.
Dean said, the most inspirational comic for me when I started was Chris Rock after seeing Bigger and Blacker. After that, I would say that the list is now endless, as they’ve been able to draw inspiration from all over, from Dave Chappelle to Katherine Ryan, to David Mills to Sebastian Maniscalco. There’s inspiration to be found anywhere. Any bugbears from the world of comedy. Dean said, I didn’t like the point in comedy about five years ago, where good comedy shows were measured by how many harrowing, tear jerking stories they included.
Comedy is supposed to be the endeavor of using humored, irrationalized traumatic experiences.
Also nepotism.
If art isn’t meritocratic, and then I don’t see the point. Just make your rich kid get a job, please. Any pre show rituals, yeah, water and using the toilet. My body likes to cleanse itself before telling dirty jokes. Best heckle.
I used to have a bit where I’d asked the audience what their last meal would be if they were on death row. One audience member replied, your penis Suffice it to say, I had no comeback for that aggressively delivered compliment. The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Eric Appell about Weird You Know the Al Yankovic documentary. Appell had worked on the original twenty ten Funnier Die Fake trailer, which starred Aaron Paul as Al Yankovic. After years of hearing from fans they wanted a real movie, Al reteam with a Pell to produce a full length version.
Bell says this was one of three or four fake movie trailers that I made. My thinking back then was if I can make these fake movie trailers that potentially fool people into thinking they’re real movies, real movies they’d want to see, then maybe somebody will let me actually direct a real movie. I remember right after the trailer came out, emailing Aaron Paul and Olivia Wilde, and the three of us were like, this should be a real movie. I remember bringing it up to Al the time and him kind of laughing it off as a joke. When Al emailed me out of the blue in twenty nineteen, I’ve never responded to an email faster.
The two of us got coffee the following morning, and I immediately started brainstorming ideas for a real movie. It was nice that we weren’t actually telling the true story of weird Al. I had to do zero research. I took what I knew from being a fan of Al’s. I think quiet it’s such a great partnership is because maybe he’s a little more joke forward than I am.
I direct mostly comedies, but I wanted to make sure that the movie is enough heart and the emotional beats were really earned. A good example is the Pablo Escobar sequence. In our very first meeting, Al said, I’d love it if I became an action hero like John Wick and Hawaiian Shirt. Maybe I go up against Pablo Escobar. He had just finished all of Narcos.
We had to figure out how to get Pablo Escobar in this crazy sequence. I’ll really wanted it to come out of the blue. It was my job to justify why we had a plant a couple Pablo Escobar references in early The audience will still never see it coming, but we had to know that Pablo Escobar exists in the world. At the end of the day, there’s nothing in the movie that we didn’t both agree we should be in there. All right, I’ve been talking about Fringe strife all week.
Will the Guardian kind of suggest the Fringe is doing just fine? They write Fox office income is said to be back up to immediate pre COVID levels when the Fringe reached its zenith of bloat, and that’s with programs significantly smaller than in twenty nineteen. Shells are selling, which tends to inoculate everyone involved from artist venues agents in the pr folks. Of course, the downsides haven’t disappeared. A queer sketch group from the US called Alphabet Soup or sequestered beneath a Second World War base in the absence of anything affordable above ground.
One of them told an interviewer staying at a nuclear bunker is crazy. Something long and traditional in American culture is fearing the Russians and I don’t wake a day without thinking of putin. Maddie Smith is out on tour. You may know Maddie from MTV’s Wild and Out. Originally from Buffalo, Maddie is known for her quick wit and cutting roosts.
Maddie opens for Bert Kreischer and Theo Vaughan. You’ll find it tonight in Philadelphia, then heading the Grand Rapids, Portland, and a bunch of other places. Maddie Smith Comedy dot com and there you can stream and download her album, which has the wonderful title Another Sexless Night in Queens Been There. That’s your comedy news for today. Follow this shover free on Apple podcast, Spotify YouTube, where we get your shows.
You left see tomorrow