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Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Busy one today, busy few days coming up. I’ll talk you through all that after the break, Let’s get to the news. Andrew Schultz has taped a new pregnancy themed special called Life that will premiere on Netflix on March fourth.
Filmed at New York’s Beacon Theater, it is Andrew’s second for Netflix. The specialists billed as the comics most personally yet, he offers a look at the hilarious and humbling journey of trying to start a family. Breaking down the cast of IVF from pumping out samples, I appreciate you keeping that clean, a dodging emotional land mines. It’s raw, real, and will make you grateful. Your swimmers probably work.
Apparently the producers of Night of Too Many Stars must listen to this program because I told you the guest lineup I don’t know earlier this week, late last week, and I commented that they released the news on a very busy news day and it was going to get lost. And they must have heard me and done another kick, because on Wednesday, both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter announced this as if it hadn’t already been announced less I’m clairvoyant. I don’t know where I originally got the story from, but anyway, we’re pretending this is news. Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Amy Schumer, and Moore will perform at the Night of Too Many Stars comedy events on Monday, March thirty first at the Beacon Theater in New York City. John Stewart is your host, as previously reported by Daily Comedy News, Other performers include Ronny Chieng, Alex Edelman, Susie Esmond, Jim Gaffigan, Sarah Sherman, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, James Austin Johnson, and Sam Morrell.
The event will include a live auction to support initiatives for artistic adults. Event creators Michelle and Robert Smigel said in a statement, we created Night of Too Many Stars with our friends of the comedy world at a time when most organizations focused only on research for a cure for autism. 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. The Night of Too Many Stars was created by Michelle and Robert in two thousand and three after struggling to find effective education for their artistic son. The organization is dedicated to helping the five point four million autistic adults living in the US achieve their dreams.
Dave Chappelle will be honored with the NAACP’s President’s Award at the fifty sixth n DOUBACP Image Awards in Pasadena later this month. The President’s Award honors individuals for special achievement and distinguished public service. President CEO Derek Johnson said in statement, the President’s Award honors an unwavering dedication to community, and throughout his distinguished career, Dave Chappelle has consistently been recognized as a powerful voice for social consciousness. Through his unique ability to transform complex political issues into thought provoking humor, Dave has solidified his place as one of the most impactful voices of our time. The NAACP Image Awards will air live February twenty second from the Pasadena Civic Auditorium on be Et and CBS.
It’s been a busy week, and you get to talk much about Felipe Asparza, who had a special come out on Netflix on Tuesday. The folks of the Facebook group have watched it. I haven’t watched it yet. They’re calling it mid Icon versus Icon did just a fantastic, really great interview with Felipe. I’ll pick at it over the next maybe not even the next few days because it’s really busy.
I’ll explain that after the break, but I’m definitely gonna pick at it. But they asked really good questions. But we’ll start at the beginning. Felipe says, when I started doing stand up comedy, there was no social media yet, so I had to go to a library to look for books on how to do stand up comedy and write jokes. So I read a couple of those and checked out a couple of comedy DVDs and CDs that I took with me, with stuff like George carl and Paul Rodriguez and Rodney Dangerfield.
Remember Paul Rodriguez was pretty big. He’s become forgotten and I think some other later generation comedians stole his corner. But Paul was really big. He had a sitcom called Aka Pablo on ABC that I really liked. Anyway, it was stuff like George carl and Paul Rodriguez and Rodney Dangerfield.
I just went and consumed all that commed. That’s where I started learning how to write jokes. First time on stage was an open mic, and just like every other comic out there, I thought I did really well. I thought I did great, but it was just okay. Since I’d never done it before.
I didn’t know about timing, which is very important. I didn’t know that and was just talking through my jokes. I didn’t know where to do the punchline. However, after the first open mic, I went to a couple of stand up comedy classes that were very expensive even back then. They were like five hundred dollars.
They promised you a set at the ice House plus a five minute tape of your set, but I didn’t have five hundred bucks. I also didn’t have anybody who believed in me enough to give me five hundred bucks to join the class. So I went there anyway, and I sat in on the free one hour introductory class and they started teaching me how to write jokes on that first class. After that, I went to another one called Greg Dean, a stand up comedy course, and learn more stuff from there. That was it.
Then I hit my second open mic. It took a long time to figure out who Felipe was. There was a lot of trial and error starting out. A lot of people emulate a comic they love. For example, if someone in New York grew up watching Todd Berry, they might sound a lot like him.
On the West Coast, the people who grew up here might start sounding like Paul Rodriguez, George Lopez, or Carlo Smith Cia for a while. So they initially start finding their own voice depending on where they grew up. Man, I sounded like nine different comedians when I first started out. Look at me now, I have long hair and a trench coat. I’m in my Sam Kittison stage.
That’s great. Listen to this. When I started off, I was deadpad. I was like Steven writer Mitch Hedberg, just a deadpan comic. I would sit there and tell jokes with no personality or facial expression.
Then I try to be a political comedian. I’d get the newspaper, I write a bunch of jokes about the Middle East. There was bombing and throwing rocks at each other, so I wrote this joke was totally bad. The joke there was piece in the Middle East this week. There were no rocks to throw.
I was also performing in very loud rooms where nobody paid attention. You really had a fight to do stand up comedy because those pieces were not suitable for stand up, but was suitable for picking up a girl and taking her home, getting stabbed, or getting your Harley Davidson stolen outside. This is a great stuff Icon versus Icon and I have shared it in the Facebook group Daily Comedy News podcast group. The La Times has a fantastic comedy reporter anyway, like twice a week they’ll write a really good piece about comedy. They caught up with friend of the show, John Marco Cirezi and the topic was social issues in comedy, and John Marco said, you can lose your fan base who might be influenced by your work by harping on social issues too much.
There’s a good comedian whose thesis is in a show was men, we need to do better. We don’t deserve points for being right. I don’t need to pay money and you don’t need to be lit and micd for an hour on that thesis. I was in South Carolina when I said Britney Griner was released from the Russian prison today. As a setup to a joke, some guy booed instead of being funny, I said, I should think it’s good when Americans are released from foreign prisons.
But why do that? I was preaching. I didn’t convince that guy to challenge his notions of who he doesn’t respect because of internal biases. You could achieve things with what you say, but if funny is not at the front, audiences are going to feel betrayed. Sometimes I want to come at the joke from the bad point of view or the good point of view for the wrong reasons.
I had one joke about how I ran into my old college roommate and found that they’d recently transitioned, and I was thrilled because I’d forgotten their name. I like that because you wonder, is that a pro trans joke? The La Times asked Joen Marco was he wary of doing his bit about Israel and Gaza. Jenmarco said, I saw people who were not speaking honestly or looking through a black and white lens about what was happening there, and that fueled my desire to write that. But there’s a safety in being Jewish.
When I make that jokes, I won’t be accused of anti Semitism. I could be righteous, but the punchline has to be subversive. I’m proud of those jokes because I felt like, even though I’m expressing a point of view, I think the joke itself supersedes it. Reuters is reporting that’s Russell Brand is being sued over sexual abuse allegations, in the first known lawsuit brought against him in Britain, after several women accused him of sexual assaults and inappropriate behavior. New topic.
Don’t read anything into my sequencing here. I’ll share with you how I prepped the show big stories. First, the Russell Brand thing is a newsy thing, and this final story of the first half has a fun end. So that’s why it goes last on the first half. So don’t read anything into why I went from that topic to this topic.
Okay, okay. The funny headline from the Times Tribune comedian Louis c. K to headline Holiday inn Scrantonese done more but you can’t go? All right? That was good clickbait.
I clicked on it. I was like, Oh, why can’t I go? Is he doing a private show? Nope? It was just that the show in the six hundred and fifty seat room sold out.
The general manager of the hotel is Corey, who said, it’s gonna be a great show. It’s gonna be awesome for Done Moore, especially someone coming to our local area who’s well known, very famous. Now I could have kicked that story, but what interested me is that Louis has been playing small rooms. He played there’s a room kind of close to where I live that honestly is like not a good comedy room. They get good comedy, but in terms of the physical structure, I don’t think it’s a good room.
I think it’s the second floor of a local restaurant that I had dinner with my daughter about three weeks ago. I was shocked that Louis was playing there was sold out before I knew it existed, and I don’t like to leave the house, like I probably could have somehow gotten in there, but I was like, eh, whatever. Anyway, the room in question, we learned rental fees vary depending on the date, the season, and what you’re doing, but the room generally cost around three thousand dollars to host an event. Tickets to CK’s show were cap at around four hundred. Let’s do some math here.
The prices were thirty five to forty five, so let’s do lazy math. Four hundred times forty is how much? Somebody help me sixteen thousand. You got to rent the room for three thousand, So it’s Louis making ten thirteen grand on the night to work out some material, presumably in a small room like that, because the same article tells us he’s playing mccurtiy’s in Sarasota that holds two fifty the Off the Hook Comedy Club in Naples, where Louis’s opening for Robert Kelly. Interesting that holds three point thirty.
Cek’s playing Youngstown, Ohio at the Funny Farm Comedy Club for one hundred people, and then the Funny Bone in Columbus for less than three hundred people. The Times Tribune caught up with Rich Voss, who seems to like this club Fas says, I have a good time there. It’s a good audience, it’s fun. I don’t have to get on a plane, he says. The show’s producer, who is local comedian Kevin Lepka, rents the ballroom from the Holiday Inn to produce shows under the name Scranton Comedy Club.
He calls that guy a hustler in the good sense he promotes. Well, he does all the promotion. You gotta be thankful to have somebody that’s promoting wants to see it go well. They asked Vas about Louis C.K. And Vas said, Louis who.
Here is the plan for the upcoming shows. Tomorrow is my preview of SNL fifty. I decided to do it tomorrow. So the big TV show is on Sunday, but the musical show is Tomorrow night, plus four seo reasons. I like people to actually hear the material I write.
I wanted to give it some life, so I figured out, let me put it out on Friday. So Tomorrow’s episode, which I’ve already recorded, I deliberately recorded tomorrow before today because I wanted to do this presell. Here is a preview of what to expect on the various SNL specials this weekend. I will comment on an article that discusses the top fifty sketches of the twenty first century, and I kind of lost my mind at the article.
And then the USA today had the top fifty SNL performers of all time and I’m s…
So that’s tomorrow show. If you don’t like Saturday Night Live, take a day off. But if you need something to listen to on Friday, I’m the guest on the Letterman Pod. You may recall earlier in the week David Letterman went on Jimmy Fallon. I got all excited, so i reached out to Mike from the Letterman Pod.
I’m like, hey, can we talk about this for ten minutes? Well we wound up talking for an hour, So Mike has that as his Friday episode on the Letterman Pod. That’s also a video podcast, so if you want to say just how handsome I am and boy ladies, be prepared. There’s nothing more exciting than two middle aged dudes in zoomboxes having a conversation about comedy. So that’s a video podcast the Letterman Pod.
Mike also puts out an audio version of that. If you want to grab that on Friday. That will be the audio on this podcast on Saturday. So again Tomorrow SNL Saturday, Mike Chishom and I talking comedy, including Letterman four about an hour, and then Sunday will be a normal episode, Monday will be a normal episode, and then on Tuesday I’ll react to all the SNL stuff. The SNL fiftieth Special runs Sunday night from eight to eleven.
Could I record at eleven pm on a Sunday night? I could, But I think we’ll all get a better show out of it if I wake up on Monday and just collect everything, because they’ll be after party stuff and reaction stuff. So I’ll do that all on Tuesday. Okay again, Tomorrow’s SNL Saturday is Mike from the Letterman Pod. Sunday and Monday normal Tuesday SNL reaction while we’re doing homework type stuff.
It’s been so busy. I wanted to pick up on that piece I played from Gaffigan and Tom Papa the other day where they were talking about the possible comedy bust. I’ve heard Papa mention that a few times now. He’s got his ears on the ground. He’s out there doing it.
I’m a guy in a basement recording a podcast. I find it interesting that Tom Papa is worry that comedy is slowing down. His premise, As he explained, it is that it seems like big comedians are pushing tickets harder than they’ve had to in the past. I mean, there is a lot of comedy out there. You’ve got obviously the weekly Netflix special, You’ve got the monthly Hulu special.
But you know me, maybe you guys are hurting the cause and there’s no reason to go out and see somebody because you can just sit at home in your comfy chair and watch. You know, there’s more than one special to day, right was a decider who kept track of that. You know, say there’s four hundred on YouTube in a year, three hundred and sixty five. How much comedy you gonna consume? So Papa might be onto something there.
And he also talked about how just everybody is in their own little silo now, you know, so maybe Papa is right about how comedy’s getting siloed and the audiences aren’t crossing over. There’s obviously the Austin bro dude scene. There seems to be the axis of clean comedy, which is Papa, Gavigan, and Seinfeld. They are Nates adjacent, they are Brian Reagan adjacent. You know, maybe we could do the Clean Comedians World Tour.
I don’t think Jerry or Gym would need to do that, but you get what I’m saying there. There’s kind of that lane. There’s the Alt scene, there’s the Atlanta scene. Most of the conversation it gets swept up in the bro dudes and the video podcasters. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting.
So we’ll see if things slow down. Because I shuffled everything. This story would have been in Saturday’s podcast, but let me just remind you on Saturday. Joel Kim Booster is the host of the twenty twenty five Writers Guild Awards. Those are in Los Angeles at the Beverly Hilton.
Spent a lot of time yesterday about that Peter Kay garlic bread battle in Metro. Jacob Hawley writes under the headline I’m a comedian, Here’s where Peter Kay went wrong. Jacob writes, in a smaller venue, Peter K could have dealt with it better. The free speech culture war has infiltrated our comedy shows, with the Man from Manchester claiming that he was treated like a terrorist for being asked to leave at Peter k gig after he repeatedly shadowed the words garlic bread. The man told The Daily Mailey couldn’t understand why he was being removed and is now demanding an apology from Peter Kay himself.
As a working comedian, you might expect me to be instinctively on the side of k that I was cheering him on as he irige security to kick the heckler in the face and calling him a nasty thing. I’m paraphrasing this whole article here, but I’ll be honest on my own tour. When I’m playing the venues of a couple hundred and still flogging spare tickets on the day, I can only empathize so much. Many will see my name is the writer on this piece and think who. But that’s the point.
I see comedy at the sharp end, and that’s why I’m offering this perspective. While most of you have never heard of me, Peter Kay is selling out hundreds of shows at venues that host twenty thousand people. Hey, Americans, do you know who Peter Kay is? I don’t either, and I host this thing he’s apparently playing the twenty thousand people? Who is he?
Now? Say he’s not good? I’m just saying he’s got no presence in the States. There’s a silo back to Jacob Pauley. So actually, while I should be backing my fellow comedian, I have much more in common with the bruised and Feda Heckler than I do the creator of Phoenix Nights, though I like to think I wouldn’t shoot catchphrases in front of two people, never mind twenty thousand.
When I go to the kind of venues Peter k play is like the O two Arena in London. I go as a punter rather the performer, but truth be told, I don’t really go at all because taken from a stand up, live comedy doesn’t really work in those rooms. I’ve seen some of the best comedians the UK has ever produced suffer in large venues, struggling to deal with an audience of adoring fans if derived drunk thought that they were helping their hero by shouting out their favorite bits, then putting the comedian in the tricky position of having to ask someone who essentially stop enjoying themselves so much. As comedians, it’s our job to make you laugh. So that’s a pretty hard thing to tell someone and whether he likes it or not, garlic bread is Peter Kse’s thing, his hit, his equivalent of Paul McCartney playing Hey Jude, and yet, as he put in a statement, being used to disrupt his particular show, the Heckler is a huge fan, likely shot out hundreds between tickets, travel and drink, and his crime is what exactly, excitingly shouting out his favorite punchline.
That’s why they’re both right in their way, but also why I believe it’s the circumstances that’re the problem. If this worth three hundred setter venue K could have acknowledged it, properly, made eye contact with the blokes, shut them down and moved on. In a venue this size, with people constantly getting up and moving and the distance between stage and audience making it impossible to properly engage, you can’t fix a situation like this. And in an era where most people watch stand up comedy through the prism of viral crowd work clips on TikTok and Instagram, it’s fair to assume that a lot of people think this is the point of a comedy gig BINGO, let’s go along today, I’ve got another international controversy for you. Vir Das said, while there should be a debate on what’s good comedy, there should also be discussion on what constitutes good journalism.
He weighed in on controversy surrounding influencer ran Vir A Labadilla. Alabadilla recently faced backlash for controversial comments on parents and sex during his appearance on the YouTube comedy show India’s Got Latent. Apparently the media has jumped on this. Vir Does on an Instagram slammed the media’s approach, calling in a bunch of irrelevant mainstream media anchor is bordering extinction, coming together to take down new media that gets a million more views. Whether you like the new media or not is irrelevant.
That’s also what’s happening here. And while we debate what good comedy is, please debate what good journalism is and the news that they should be doing, the questions they should be asking and who they should be asking them to. A good artist will take their feedback head down, mouth shut, maybe all follow either way. The consequences of your comedy and your career and audience are pretty instant. That’s a natural process.
Comedian Sammy Rena says he’s removed all of India’s Got Latent videos from his YouTube channel. Rena, Who’s Got the popular YouTube show, said the comments made by rand ver A Labadilla had become too much for him to handle. And one more. Seth Rogan gave an interview to Esquire. He pushed back against the notion that comedy is now harder to pull off.
I saw some people on threads say maybe ask a comedian about that, Rogan said. The complaint the comedy is harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint. Maybe it was too easy before, and why should it be? Why shouldn’t it be hard? I like that my job is hard because I’m trying to do something that requires a huge amount of resources in people’s time and energy.
What do you wish you could say? What do you feel has been taken away from you? It’s always funny when people are like, oh, they could never make the Diversity Day episode of the Office today, you could still watch it. I’m constantly meeting teenagers who love Super Bad and who think it holds up. None of them are like, how dare you have said that?
Hey, Seth, why don’t you try and watch every episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Why don’t you try and watch every episode of community. Things are pulled down. My friend Rogan says, don’t even worry about Trump being president again. It’s not like we sit down like, all right, new President, what movie do we write?
I assume that’s what Adam McKay is doing, but it’s not how we choose and what we’re going to work on next. All Right, busy day again Tomorrow, SNL preview Saturday. Mike Chisholm normal episode on Sunday. Interesting week here right, a couple of short episodes at the beginning of the week, and now all these long ones. Tomorrow’s is long, Saturdays is even longer.
This one’s long. Good stuff. Join us in the Facebook group Daily Comedy News Podcast Group See tomorrow