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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, once again, I’m Shredger’s surer, Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News, daily briefing on stand up comedy, comedians and the comedy industry. A sentence. The algorithm loves am I on jury duty that even survive long enough to see the Scrubs reunion? Who knows?
Hopefully you tune in tomorrow and my guest is Pete Holmes. If there’s no episode at all, uh oh, who knows what even happened? But while we’re all still together, Tonight on HBO, Chris Fleming Live at the Palace Chris, maybe off your radar. I like Chris a lot, but I will warn you this is not guy in front of a brick wall stuff. This is out there and I love it.
Chris Fleming Live at the Palace Well premiere at ten East and West tonight. But the knicks are on, man, So I’m not getting to this until Saturday. I need to catch up on my comedy specials. Boy, I got to dig in, I silliv and watch Cat or Tailor yet, And it seems that Friday night is becoming the night for the for lack of a better word, the weird stuff. This is when you put on the Chris Flemings and the Sarah Shermans.
This isn’t I don’t know, Mark Maron in front of a brick wall. This is the quirky stuff. Chris Fleming Live at the Palace, Filmed at the Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago. Chris Fleming bounds across the stage, good description, sharing his takes on masculinity, Congo lines, Trader Joe’s oreos, NPR, dog Breeds and more. You’ll see, trust me tune in.
Fleming said, I hereby decream my first HBO special will soon be available for you to consume. Please enjoy and feel free to dance along. Thank you and thank you HBO. Conan O’Brien is getting ready to host the Oscars. What’s today the twenty seventh?
There, we’re two weeks out from Conan O’Brien hosting the Oscars. Conan, have you started writing and rehearsing for the Oscars? Is a question you would ask Conan if you were with The New Yorker, and Conan would answer it saying something like, yeah, I started writing a while ago. Ideas are like RAF pilots in nineteen forty. You have to generate a lot of them, a lot of them fall by the wayside, and then some duor so.
We’ve been going for a while. We’ve got a great writer’s room, and I’ve already started going to clubs to try out material, which is really fun. It’s good to keep you in shape and get you ready. Apparently Conan doesn’t do Apple Fitness Plus like I sometimes do. Because if Conan did, and he did a cycling class with Tye, ty would tell him you stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready.
Write that down Conan. The New Yorker asked Conan, Hey, where does politics play a role in that kind of night? Conan said, it’s tricky. I’ve done political comedy over the years. Certainly, I’ve done two White House Correspondents dinners on Late Night.
We used to do lots of political comedy. We do it on the TBS show as well. It’s never been in the front of my comedy brain. I don’t think it’s what drives me. I, for better or worse, have a brain that scrambles things, loves cartoon imagery, and probably is influenced by old movies or literature.
As I am by Frankly Warner Brothers cartoons, and it all gets mixed around in my head. It’s very impulsive. I don’t know where my sense of humor comes from, but I know that when I do political comedy or make a political joke, it has to really resonate with me. And I can’t tell you what that is, but it has to feel true to my comedic voice, or it feels hollow. Hey Cony asked The New Yorker, does Trump feel funny to you anymore?
Conan said no. I mean, I’ve talked a little about this, and I’ve said I think he’s bad for comedy. Years ago, when I was at Harvard and working on the Lampoon, we’d try and think of magazines we could do a parody of. There was one magazine we always knew we couldn’t parody, which was The National Inquirer. If a magazine has as its cover Elvis Still Live, Mary’s Alien and they have a baby that’s a three speed blender, if that’s what the real magazine’s coming out with, you can’t do a comedic take on that.
It’s very difficult, or I think I’m possible to do. I do think Trump, if he were a magazine. It’s the National Inquirer. There’s a lot that’s so bombastic and outrageous and so unprecedented that how do you do. Oh, I’ve got a great Trump oppression.
I have him saying this, Well, that’s not crazier than what happened yesterday. So I don’t know how this is funny? Does that make sense? Send your letters to Conan O’Brien. The conversation turned to things like SNL or John Stewart or Trevor Noah.
Conan said, no, that’s a different thing. There are comedians and when they talk about Trump quickly get very angry. And I’ve said this before, but I think it’s possible to surrender your best weapon. Your best weapon is to be funny. And if it involves in a name calling, I mean, I’m all for people trying.
And when there’s a really good joke about the president or the administration, if there’s a joke about the right left and it’s a good one, I’m elated. I just think of the current climate. Things have gotten so stretched out. Think about that Dolly melted watch that it’s hard to find purchase. The New York here was curious, when does the network get involved.
That’s a great question, Conan said, there’s always some issues. I’ve been dealing with networks for most of my life, so they’ll be stuff and that’s when you roll up your sleeves and you start arguing. Back the New York he was curious, so you win, Conan said, yeah, oh yeah, you can win. You can also lose. Certainly, there are rules about what could be said and what can’t be said.
The Academy is rules. I mean, everyone has rules. And I love this. You explain this. This is so great, Conan said, once you’ve leted in New York for a period of time, you come to this awareness that, oh, everything ultimately isn’t your co op.
They have their rules. You could say, hey, but on this other award show, I got to do this. Let’s say I’m living and I’m making this up. I’m living at one seventy two West eighty ninth Street, and they’ll say this is the Drake Building and you live here at the Drake Building. Yeah, I do.
What I’d like to do is put in my kitchen window. No no, no, no, we don’t let people alter the windows here at Drake. And you’ll say, well, okay, it’s funny because when I lived over at the Malcolmore and they’ll say, yeah, we know that’s the Malkilmore. I’ll say, well, I once did the People’s Choice Awards and they’ll say, oh, we know that’s the People’s Choice Awards. They don’t have standards.
Their windows and their kitchens are hard. Good stuff. I have to listen to. That’s a full podcast on the New Yorker. I think it’s called The New York or Radio Hour.
Have it in my I seriously have two hundred hours of podcast queed up because of the snow. I had a shuffle for two hours on Monday. I had to shuffle again on Wednesday, just nightmare. Taylor Solinson got the wax Job cover story out of the Hollywood Reporter. Now, I found it odd that the cover story came out Wednesday instead of Tuesday, which is when her special came out, because usually those things are at the same time, neither here nor there.
I just found the timing interesting. Like all Hollywood Reporter cover stories, it was very favorable and they wrote it’s not hyperbole to call Taylor Thomson a wonder kin. In her twenty she became a top grossing touring stand up, was tapped to host a late night’s show, and developed her own material more than plenty of her peers will over a lifetime. She started at age sixteen and told THHR Now I’m thirty two and I’ve been doing this half my life. It’s crazy to think about.
They asked her, there’s a moment early on in Prodigal Daughter where you say your team was nervous about you leaning too foreign to religious material. What’s the deal there, Taylor said, my team has never given me notes creatively, so that’s a little bit of an exaggeration. When we’re doing like the tour name Save Me, and they arn’t work for the tour where I’m wearing crosses and stuff, I think they were just like, well, Cake, we make it clear to people that it’s not all that and that we’re not just bashing religion the whole time, and we’re not. But I understand once they saw the hour, they got it. Their job is to think of it more like from a marketing perspective, so they were doing their jobs.
If you go back and watch my other specials, all of my jokes about religion are coming from a very wounded place because of the way I grew up a lot of resentment towards a lot of things that I was told and taught growing up in church. I had to work through a lot of that. She talked about her first sets at age sixteen, a lot of jokes about going to prom and being a loser and feeling ugly, and observational stuff about my family. Obviously I had no life experience. A lot of the jokes I were doing was apologizing for how young I was, because I could feel it was making people nervous for me in the audience, which I think is completely I’d be nervous if a sixteen year old god in stage was like, I’m a comedian.
I think I was pretty self aware and maybe that was a strength of mind back then, but obviously I was not good. People always ask about starting in churches because it’s a weird Oargin story, and for years I was embarrassed of it. Part of the growth in this new hour is me talking about a way as grateful and appreciative as opposed to ashamed and embarrassed. There is a lot more there. You can read it in the Holodaporter.
I’m gonna hold on to some of it for next week. In case I find myself on the OJ trial and need to pre tape a lot of these episodes. I’ll tell you, though, as somebody who does this every day, it is better to have too much content than not enough content. I can assure you of that. Earlier in the week, I thought this was fun.
Drewski went to Indianapolis, where he caught up with Mike Epps, who suddenly is in the news three times a week after never being in the news. I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe Mike EPP’s got new pr people they were hosting auditions for It Could Have Been Records. Drewski’s Could Have Been Records is a popular comedy music label parody series, sometimes featuring celebrity guests, say Mike Apps. Drewski plays a record exec where auditions aspiring singers, rappers, and dancers, and even quote unquote signs some of them to the label.
That’s a good Time. Tonight’s in Tampa. Sam Morrill will be taping his new comedy special That’s at the Tampa Theater. The Netflix comedy lineup all of a sudden got a lot clearer. They made a few announcements.
Derek Stroup will have his first full length special, Nostalgic, which is produced by Nate Pergatzy’s Nateland Entertainment that’ll be out Tuesday, March tenth. In Nostalgic, Derek Stroup dives into his experience being a nineties kid in rural Alabama and everything that comes along with it, from partying with friends to board games and printal relationships. The special was taped at the Lyric Theater in Birmingham, Alabama. We’re told while Stroop is indeed a waffle house enthusiast, he’s not your average slow talking Southerner, known for his detailed stories and over the top energy with the cadence of an angry auctioneer. He’s set to make his third appearance next month on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, and he’s also in that Nate Brighatzy movie The Breadwinner.
You know that the why that I think Kevin James must have turned down? So that’s more tenth than hey. The next week, Mark Norman, He’s got a special yeah titled None Too Pleased Mark Norman March seventeenth on Netflix. In None Too Pleased, Mark Norman turns married life, fatherhood, and hot button topics into rapid fire punches in this witty free for all where nothing is off limits. Yeah, Norman has a good joke in the trailer, which is here in the copy.
I went to pull the trailer, but it’s naughty. It’s too naughty for this. But the good opening joke there is Mark Norman say, I actually got caught going to strip club recently by my wife. I don’t know how she caught me. I only talked about it on four podcasts Comedy stock Market.
Thank you, Bert Reynolds, Voice of the Comedy stock Market. If you’re a new listener, every Friday, I give give you some recommendations for buying and selling stock in comedians. Now, the premise here is we’re not saying someone is good or bad. We’re looking for the value. Just like in the actual stock market, you try and buy low, sell high.
That’s what we’re trying to do here now this week, you know, for all my curmudgeony negativity, I’ve got six buy recommendations and no sells. What got into me this week? Is it the jury duty? Is it because Scrubs is back? Who even knows?
Here are the recommendations. Let’s buy some Conan O’Brien. Now, John, everybody knows about Conan O’Brien, I know, but nobody’s been thinking about Conan O’Brien, and the oscars will suddenly sneak up on people and Conan is going to crush it. So let’s buy some Conan O’Brien. Let’s buy some Pete Holmes because he did this show.
I think hopefully, hopefully he recorded it yesterday and you will hear it tomorrow. You’ll find out tomorrow what happened. Let’s buy some Pete Holmes. Let’s buy some Chris Fleming. Chris Fleming on HBO tonight.
I’ve got a good feeling about this one. But Chris is a little out there, just warning everybody. We gotta buy some Max Amini. Remember that guy. That’s the guy that I saw was selling out the garden and I was like, who’s that.
Well. In the last week Friend of the Show, Jason Zenneman for The New York Times wrote a big piece about Maximedi that I think was subheadline something like the biggest comedian You’ve never heard of, something like that. I’ve had to kick that a couple times this week. I have it in the script right now for Monday, and then like a day or two after Zennemann wrote about it, Deadline wrote about Maximini. So there’s something in the air, and Max’s people are getting the word out that he’s getting a time at bat.
So let’s buy some Maximini before everybody else figures it out. Although apparently a lot of people other than me have figured it out because he’s selling out the Garden without me mentioning him. Let’s buy some Mark Norman. Yeah. Norman is a really solid comedian.
He hangs out with the cool kids. He’ll have a Netflix thing, which means Rogan will have him on. I mean, Rogan has him on all the time. But I feel like Mark Norman’s been in the on deck circle for next up for quite some times. So let’s load up on Mark Norman.
I got a feeling this Netflix special will push him into the mainstream. And I didn’t originally have this one, but I just added it only I kind of liked that story. I just told you about Derek Stroop, and I’m like, all right, the Nate Berghetzi thing, Yeah, okay, so let’s buy some Derek Stroop. So that’s your comedy stock market for this Week by Conan, by Pete Holmes, by Chris Fleming, by Maximini, by Mark Norman, by Derek Stroop, No sells this week. Look at Johnny Mack being all positive.
You know what else Johnny Mack did? He didn’t put any stories in the second half of his script. There’s supposed to be another storier here too, because we do comedy stock Market and then we do other things. What are you gonna do now, John? I guess I could pull something out of the Saturday script, especially if hopefully that’s going to be Pete Holmes got this whole Robbie Hoffman thing that’s too long.
Do I have anything quick in here? And I can tell you I have a Jim Brewer story, but my voice is too shot to get into that. How about Jackie Kasan? She caught up with the Shepherd Express. She said, while growing up, I wanted to act.
I think I certainly played a lot of What If FONSI was on the Starship Enterprise and acted out all the parts. I vaguely remember answering that I wanted to be a lawyer, or teacher or forest ranger. When asked, I went to U. W. Madison and there was a comedy club we went to it went to the open mic three weeks after seeing the show, and I was hooked.
She then told the story I told the other day about heckling Sam Kinneson. As for comedy right now, she says, it’s crazy out in the world, and there’s two kinds of comedy I like seeing now. One very open about the things we’re all living through, mostly to relieve the pressure, and it make people know that they aren’t alone or crazy. The other is just normal driving, family, food and relationship material, which is just the kind of fun comedy that you can just keep writing no matter what the situation. She’s got that new special out this week, Altercation, so there’s plenty for you to watch watch Jackie Caason, Pete Holmes, Taylor Tomlinson.
If there was one other this week, what’s the other one? I don’t know. My brain is full. Okay, Now, hopefully tomorrow you tune in and Pete Holmes is the guest. If Pete Holmes is not the guest, that meant I have jury duty.
If there’s no episode at all, that means something horrible happened. So come back in the morning and we’ll all find out together, What the hell happened, See you then,