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Caloroga Shark Media. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. I’m gonna jump right in today. I’ve got a guest in the first half. Then we’ll take the break, and then i’ll tell you a couple things on the comedy front.
Andy Woodhole has a new album. It is called Beach Breen. It is his seventh comedy album. And here’s my conversation with Andy. I was checking out your podcast and I loved that you went all inside baseball on the recording of the album.
You told a great story about working in crowd laughter. I’ll lead you, but I’d love for you to tell that story to my audience because I’m increasingly suspect of what I hear as laughs in Netflix specials. I’ve got an ear for it. Short story on me. I programmed serious XM comedy for ten years, so I sat at a desk listening to comedy.
Rou Oh yeah, well, hey, thanks for playing me all those times. I’ll come back and we’ll talk about that a second. So for you know, ten years, I’m sitting there all day listening to the stuff, so I kind of know how audiences react, and I will hear stuff on some of these Netflix specials, and I’m like, no, no, no, no, So could you just tell the anecdote that I’m sharing from your podcast. Well, what I think you’re talking about is I did a recording called Live from Elkhart, which you can find, and I only had one shot at it. Sometimes you have multiple shots, so if you don’t get a joke right, you can pull it from the next set, but this one I had one shot at it, So any mistakes I did, I would just say, hey, I’m made a mistake.
I have to do that joke over. I hope you guys don’t mind.
And then so I flubbed this joke.
You know, I said a wrong word here, a wrong word there, left something out, and then I did it right, and the audience clapped like I had just finished playing Freeberg or something. It was an insane reaction.
And then when we went to the editing, it doesn’t mean any sense that this jok…
That was a moment where I said, you have to take some of this laughing and clapping away because it seems fake. It doesn’t make sense. Are you running into clapter with audiences? I feel like that’s something that’s crept into the last ten years. There was one I don’t want to throw anybody on a bus, but I was watching one comedian who is fantastic and he did this whole chunk and the audience clapped, and I’m like, I don’t I don’t think that’s what you’re supposed.
To do there, folks. No, I don’t get a lot of it because I don’t think that I am writing that type of joke. And if there’s anyone that doesn’t know what you mean by clapter, it’s when a comedian will say something that the audience agrees with and they will clap. It’s more right then it’s funny, and it’s you know, it engages audiences, and I don’t know, I suppose has its place, but that’s not what I attempt to deal in. What made you decide to go within audio album?
I appreciate it, you know, in the year of the Netflix special, the YouTube special, and I still program comedy radio for Live one, it is great to have, you know, an old fashioned album. Sure, sure, well it’s not that. Let me give the most smart sounding decision. I guess, rather than everyone is putting out specials. There’s all these specials that look amazing, they’re highly produced, there’s million dollar budgets.
I am still basically a one man operation. Even though I did do this one with a comedy record label called Blonde Medicine, that are fantastic and they’re putting out great comics and you should check them out and listen to everyone whose album they produce. But a million dollar production buzz it wasn’t in the cards for me. So I thought to set my apart. I do something different.
I do the audio album, which is how people have been finding my comedy for the whole time I’ve been doing comedy is through things like Serious and Pandora and Spotify, And as far as the video, it’ll just be on YouTube and it’ll just be a straight shots of camera. It’s I didn’t want to go halfway, you know. I could have spent a lot of my own money and I had a higher production value, but it wouldn’t look as good as a Netflix special, and so I decided it is what it is. This is a side of the club, and if you want to see me doing it, you can see me doing it on YouTube, but otherwise it’s it’s audio. It’s so interesting to me that you say that as a comedian, because one of the things where you’ve been struggling with in podcasting is this whole Hey, you gotta be on YouTube, you gotta make a video podcast.
And I’ve struggled with it. Yeah, because for my audience who were watching this on YouTube, this is what the show looks like. This is what me recording the podcast looks like. It’s not very interesting. I’m fifty five years old.
I self describe him somewhere between Troll and George Clooney. You can pick, but you know, I’m not a sexy, hot chick in her twenties where everybody’s gon be like, oh, let me just randomly click on this thumbnail. It’s a guy with a dumb backdrop and doing comedy headlines. So you know, I love that. I don’t.
I don’t love, but I appreciate that you’re going through the same kind of struggle of I can’t keep it with a Netflix budget, like I explain, and I also teach a college class. If I’m Andrew Schultz and I have a big time politician, and I’ve got a couch set up and a three camera shoot and proper lighting and a PR team. Yeah, or videos awesome, but a guy in his basement it’s really hard. Sure. Yeah, low production as well.
YouTube was supposed to be. That’s what I think it was for a while. What it was supposed to be, and now it’s it’s great and those things are great, but now it’s no longer as much do it yourself unless you want to just watch someone’s AI edited video, which I I don’t. Yeah. Yeah.
For the album Beach Breen, I was intrigued by the cover. I’m a Beach Boys fan, and there’s definitely whoever put it together, and maybe you, hopefully you, because it’ll make a more interesting conversation. Definitely went for that nineteen sixties album cover Vibe. The fonts are right, the colors are right. Where the where did the album cover come from?
Well, I’ll take partial credit for the album cover. A lot of the credit goes towards the good folks over there at Blonde Medicine, because this is the seventh time I’ve put out an album and I have never had a photo of myself on the cover because I always felt like when the guy is on the cover of the comedy album. You know, he’s making a face. Like I hate that. Oh my god.
Yes, I didn’t know. You know, I never quite felt like what my face on a cover. So everyone I’ve done up until now has been an illustration, and I wanted to do an illustration again, and people at Blonde Medicine kind of pushed back a little bit, and they said, we think you’ve never had your face on the cover of an album. I think it’s time to put your face on the cover of an album, especially because things I’ve done in the past that have been really popular. I look much younger, I don’t have a beard.
You know, people have a hard time even recognizing me from my own self from ten years ago. So they convinced me to do that. So there was a photo shoot, which was uncomfortable because it’s in public. It’s not like you’re in a studio. Because I wanted to do it at the beach, so people are taking photos and I actually ran into this guy that I was just like a guy I casually say hi to walking my dog at the beach, and he saw the whole photo shoot and then asked me about it.
It was incredibly embarrassing and yeah, I don’t know. I had the idea to set on the beach. I wore the outfit because it’s an outfit my wife bought for me. I agree that I think it has a cool like beach boys vibe, But I can’t take credit for the outfit. That’s I just could rested by the woman that loves me at the time in my life, and I’m great with it.
I like living that life, and so she gets the credit for the outfit. They get the credit for deciding to do a photo shoot, and I believe they also have a graphic designer in house that did the final design. But the photo on the beach with the beach stuff was was my idea? Is that Santa Monica? It is Santa Monica.
Yeah, so you just. Walk out over there to a photo shooting, go. Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. I walked from our apartment to the beach. I did a photo shoot in public, like I’m an Instagram model, and I was spotted by an acquaintance and it was incredibly embarrassing.
And yeah, anyone that’s had to get their photo taken just knows it’s a little embarrassing to have, you know your photography, giant camera, they’re inches away from your face. They always seem way closer than they need to be, and it’s embarrassing in a studio. So I did mine publicly. The thing that caught my eye, and you can make fun of me in the schoolyard, and I know you agree to do this interview so that we could talk about the cover for twenty minutes. It is the Igloo cooler and I have one of those in red, but mine is from nineteen seventy six, and I know that because there’s a bi centennial sticker on it that either my mom or I put on in seventy six.
And as I was just thinking about this interview, I’m like, I’m hitting the beach with a forty nine year old cooler. But it works. Yeah, it’s a great cooler. I think my wife and I liked it because of that kind of retro design and Easter egg on the album cover. That cooler is the first thing we ever bought together as a couple.
We pitched in I think twenty dollars each and bought that forty dollars cooler. And if you zoom in tight, there’s a sticker of my older specials on the cooler. Oh nice, and you’re going to have. Century sings there? Yeah, I hope, so, I hope.
So. So you talked about the royalties from digital play, which is a nice thing. I’ll tell you a story is so, when I first started It’s serious, the initial reaction from the comedians was you’re stealing my material. Da da da da, And then people realized they were selling tickets off it. But then I was backstage with Ron White, who found out what I did for a living, and he was very happy to meet me because he had gotten a nice significant check with I think at least five zeros in it.
So that guy rid of a whole like you’re a stealing armt. Well that was because we had blue collar radios that we were playing every fifteen minutes. But you know that that money’s nice there. I wish more people would put out audio. Uh huh, yeah, well I think do people not always put out audio as well as video?
I would think that every Netflix special has an audio version? Is that not correct? So then the Netflix thing is one of my pet peeves that again on the Soapbox, I personally wish Grammys would go to audio things and not Netflix specials. I think we oh yeah, Emmys for a Netflix special. So what Netflix will often do is they’ll take something like Chappelle and they’ll put it on vinyl and they’ll sell it in the cool record store in Portland, and there’s one hundred copies of it.
But technically it’s an album. But you know something, if you wanted to get you know, Dave Chappelle’s most recent special on a CD to drive around in your car. That’s not a thing anymore. I don’t know if you can get anyone. I mean even this one that I made that’s audio only.
I don’t think you can get a CD anyway. Oh he lives along. I don’t know. I I don’t have a CD player in the car or the computer. I’ve probably got one in the back somewhere.
But I sold CDs for a little bit longer than I should have, probably because the reason I stopped selling it because this is an easy thing to sell. After the show CD and the amount of people that just want to tell me they didn’t have a CD player got to an amount where I decided to stop selling that. You don’t want to embarrass yourself and be like, hey, I’ll scan a QR code and it’ll download. Yeah, And then I did that for a little while. I did that.
I did do that for a while, and it wasn’t that it was embarrassing. I felt that I wasn’t giving people something. You know, it was like a paper and then I had like higher quality kind of plastic ones, but I still felt like, you know, if someone wants to buy something after a show, they want something, and the QR code, although it gets you to the album, and it works, and that’s how people do things because things like Spotify and Pandora and serious are so popular and those albums are available for free, especially you know, the streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music where you can click and listen to it straight through whenever you want. I think you just weren’t getting something when you did the QR codes, and I was sad to see the CDs go because now I have to lug around bags of T shirts to show after shows. And so.
You talked about your look changing over the years. Sometimes when I’m on the back end of stuff, I’ll pull up a Naperghetti album and I’m so used to him with the salt and pepper hair that when I see the younger version of him on an album cover. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s what you look like. I mean, we all get older. You did one of his Nateland showcases.
How is he? How was that? How’s it working with that crew? They’re really Yeah, they’re very cool. I think they’re doing a neat thing in comedy because comedy has transitioned to this online model, you know.
I mean still like Netflix and Hulu now and other streaming services will be putting out specials and that’s great and people are finding comedy like that. But comedy used to be on Comedy Central and on late night TV spots, and that’s where you would find new comedians. And Comedy Central used to always have a show that would showcase people you haven’t heard of. I think there was Premium Blend, and then the one I did was called Live at Gotham, and I think there was one after that, like Adam Devine’s House Party or something like that, and it was this cool place where you could see a little taste of someone you’ve never seen before, and that person didn’t have to already have a million followers to be in that position, and that has gone away. The TV has gone away from that, and so I think the coolest thing that Bargatsy is doing is through his own record label, production company whatever, he has recreated that show where he’s introducing the world to comedians that are funny and otherwise don’t have a platform other than you know, the platform that we all have, or we can put things on our own.
But I think it’s cool that he kind of picked up that ball, that premium blend Lavigotham ball and is rolling with it. And that’s what Nyland it is, and of course it’s a Bargatsi products, so everything is squeaky clean over there too, if that’s what you’re into. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I’m no prude. I like my share of the swear words.
But I remember the first time I met Foxworthy and this is we’re putting together blue Collar Radio, and he was explaining to me. He said, I used to you know, work the same way as everybody else. And he held his hands like this kind of close together, and he said, and then I stopped cursing, and I picked up the kids and the grandmothers and he stretched his arms and that was his whole mindset. You know. I think the the art of working clean is if you don’t notice it, you’ve nailed it.
I totally agree. I don’t. I mean, I have been clean for several years now as far as my stand up, and I don’t necessarily like advertising the shows as clean shows because I think that comes with kind of a stigma of boring. If you tell me, do you want to watch this clean comedian? I don’t, but I will watch someone like Ryan Hamilton who is clean, and then you don’t.
It doesn’t even hate you tell somebody brings it up. Oh yeah, he didn’t curse. Oh yeah, And that’s what I hope people are saying after they listen to this new album or the last couple albums that I’ve made. And I think there’s an effect too if you were mostly clean and a well placed swear word, that can really just you know, punch a joke for affect, you know. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that too.
It really uh yeah, it’s fun to have one curse in the set. Yeah, nobody’s mad about one curse. You can curse once and people won’t say that it was filthy. I like your podcast. It’s nice and easy on the ears.
It appears to be an actual backyard and not a set because. You guys are cold, it is and we are cold. Sometimes it is. It’s Tommy Johnigan’s backyard and it’s comedians hanging out. We each bring different topics.
We have some recurring segments and honestly, my favorite thing is those are two of my best friends, Tommy and Alex Stone, and doing the podcast gives us a reason that we have to get together at least once a week, and it’s pretty great. Is everybody good about holding to the schedule, because that’s one of the pains of doing a podcast with somebody else, you know, Oh, I’m not around well. You know for sure? Yeah, for sure. There’ll be times when people are busy and we’ll have people fill in, or just two of us will do it when we can.
But I would say for the most part, we’re able to always get together and we usually record on Sunday or Monday, and we usually don’t decide until sometimes Sunday afternoon when it’s gonna. Be About two weeks ago, you did that Rhode Island, that Rhode Island Festival Roady I think it was called. Oh yeah, Little Roady Comedy Festival. There that looked like it was awesome. How was that?
It was very cool? You know, they put together such a cool, very cool festival, and it was great for the comics. My only regret is that I could go for the whole thing. I was just kind of in and out. I was only able to make it on the day for my show and then I left the next day.
But yeah, they put together amazing an amazing thing, and it is just so fun to be involved in something with people that care about comedy and love comedy, because you know I do. I love I love stand up. I love doing stand up. I feel so lucky to get to be doing stand up. And sometimes you do a show and it’s all about how many tickets did you sell?
What was it that? Why? Bye bye? I don’t know who even knows what I’m saying. And these people just genuinely love stand up and you can tell that by how they put the shows together and how they treated the comedians.
At a festival where we have more time, do you go see other people’s shows or is it more about hanging with the. Yeah, for sure, I are to do yeah, yeah, because somebody, you know, we’ve been doing comedy for a long time, so uh, you know, any given festival, you’re gonna know some people, be friends with some people. There’s gonna be some people that you will become friends with if you have a chance to hang out with them. And there’s usually hangs after the shows or like events during the day, and plenty of time for people to get together that are often on the road, and you know, just ships passing in the night. I guess you know you’ll see You’ll be at a club and you look at the poster like, oh, this month, they’re having three people that I love.
I wish that I could say hi to them, But you’re just not at the same place at the same time. You know, everybody’s got their favorite work friends, and when you’re a comedian, they’re usually spread across the entire country on any given night. So when you have a chance for people to be in the same place, it’s it is special. It’s very fun. How are you feeding the beast these days on social media and up burning material?
Are you doing crowd work or how you handling that nightmare? I will do. I mean, I do crowd work in my act, but it is not set. It is not like and now I’m getting my crowd work clip. I have.
You know, it’s organic. And I don’t always take the sets I wish that I did, because I often will have a moment where I think, oh my god, that was the most amazing moment. That would be such a good clip, but I didn’t record it, and then I have to convince myself that is my integrity of the art form that leads me to not record everything and to let some things live in the only place that they will ever be seen at that show, in that moment. It’s integrity. It’s not laziness.
That’s how I feel about it. And I don’t worry about burning material, not even a little bit, not even not even a little bit. I have this new special beach Brain. I’m going to put a clip of every joke that’s on it on the internet, on real, on TikTok. Every single part of it will be a clip.
At some point. I think I’ll probably repost them. It’s a numbers game. I think I’m not the first person to have this point of view. I don’t think, but I think Louis c.
K years and years ago, invented the I have to throw out this hour. I’m doing a new hour, and I think it makes sense if you are that level of famous where when you put something online, twenty million people see it. But for me, for a lot of people that are forcing themselves and making a big deal of not burning material, I think you can put jokes on the internet. Whoever sees it is going to see it, and then if they come to the show and they see you do the joke, I don’t think anyone’s going to be furious and demand their money back. In fact, more often than people telling me I already heard that joke on the internet, which has been never will complain that I didn’t do their favorite joke that they saw on the internet.
Are you running into helpful audience members who want to be the crowd work? And no, I’m not, no more than no more than before you know. I mean there’s always a rowdy audience member from time to time, and as far as yeah, I know you’re talking about, like some comedians are saying, these crowd work people are ruining comedy audiences because now comedy audiences want to be a part of the show and are trying to be a part of the show. And that’s that’s something I haven’t found to be drue. I think people still genuinely do not really want to be talked to during the show.
They want to hear jokes and laugh. It’s the reason why it’s hardest to see the front row at every comedy club because they don’t want to be talked to. There was just a big thing in the UK and a theater a pretty big comedian had to throw out two people from the same show because they would not interrupting and he had to full stop and get security. I mean, it’s it’s got to be hard to get the room back after that. Yes, yes, that would be.
I mean. The one thing that is good is that in the situations I’ve been in where people had to be kicked out, they were such a disturbance that by the time they do kick them out. The thing that’s not hard about recovering is people are happy because I’m if any if someone’s getting kicked out of my show, it’s not because they pissed me off and I’m like, get this person out of here. If someone is kicked out of my show, they are being such a disruption to the other people that paid the venue, is like, we need to remove these people or else. Twenty people are going to complain so often when someone is escorted out, there will be a huge round of applause and the comedian will be like, hey, aren’t you glad those jerks are gone?
And the show rolls up on. What’s coming up for you in the next couple months? What can we look forward to? Well, I am on the road for forever. I got lots of shows coming up.
You can see them all at andy Woodhall dot com. Please watch the new special Beach Brand on YouTube or listen to it wherever you want. The difference between I should say this is the difference between the YouTube version and the difference between the audio version, is the audio version is edited because things need to lead live and make sense as single jokes. If that If that makes sense. Sure, So when you edit a special together, I take any crowd work that happened out for the audio version, I take out mistakes, I take out this and that little things, and I thought a fun way to do the YouTube which would maybe hopefully set this apart from other people posting on YouTube is I don’t take any of that stuff out.
So it’s like seven minutes difference in time the audio version and the YouTube version of mistakes and references and crowd work and natural, organic moments that only happen when you see live comedy. That’s on the YouTube thing that’s not in the album version, because you know you programmed Serious, there’s not going to be a track of guy drops his glass. That’s a waste, you know, for no one that anyone that wasn’t there. That’s not additive to the show. So also pro tip for all comedians putting out audio albums, make your tracks about four and a half to five minutes long.
Those ninety second tracks, we don’t schedule those. Oh that is great tips that you could be giving out all those things that I have been told, Yeah, four to five minutes. What else? I think comedians listening would love to hear that, because I’ve been lucky enough to have gotten these tips from people like you, or maybe even directly from you through a third person, of what you need to be thinking about when you’re editing stuff together in hopes of getting play on Serious. So, yeah, so you want, as you alluded to, you want each track to be a complete Chunk’s not the right word, you know, I’m saying a complete thought.
So at a beginning and an ending to the individual track, Like I said, the ninety second, they’re too short. Anything over seven is too long. Because you want to keep things moving, having a clean version definitely helps. That was the thing when I first took over programming, the Clean Channel was way harder than the Naughty Channel because there just wasn’t the material and the stuff that was there was you know, lame or God’s Squad comedians that it just didn’t have the coolness factor. So we wound up playing a lot of New Heart and Cosby and you know, then the Cosby Library became something that you know that so if you’ve got a clean version of something, that’s very valuable.
And somebody told me once when I was recording albums, because I’ve always skewed clean, and there will be like one or two just you know, adult jokes on the album, maybe one or two curses, especially in my older albums. And you know, it was somebody in a position like yours that told me, you know, think about doing it all clean and you wouldn’t have to make a big difference because we get like ten to one submissions for the dirty channels versus the clean channels. Was it still about that ratio or is that totally off? I think I wish it were ten to one. I mean, like if you put out a clean alm or Nate puts out a clean Apple, Gaffigan puts out something that’s clean.
He has kind of at least on his album work. He cursed a little more on his early work, but I think the last few have been straight clean. That is just gold. Like you know, a listers, I can immediately schedule that’s exactly what you want. It’s interesting.
Last question for me, who’s out there that might be off the audience’s radar, Funny people that we should know about. Well, I don’t know if they’re off people’s radar or not, but I always well list my friends. Pat McGann is doing great. You can see if you’ve seen Sebastian Maniscalco in the last couple of years, you probably saw Pat McGann opening for him. He’s so funny.
I have a friend Mike Cronin who is very funny that’s opening for me this weekend. Check him out. He’s doing a YouTube series right now about making one lash push to become successful as a comedian, just like one last shot at it, which I think is pretty compelling and I’m jealous. I didn’t think of it, and I think, hands down the funniest comedian that I’ve never seen, not kill that. People maybe don’t know about a guy named Kevin Boseman out of Chicago, and he just is lights out funny.
You gotta see his live show. He never he always kills. He always kills, no matter the situation. And yeah, that’s that’s the guy I always say. You want me to name a comedian you should check out that’s not famous.
Check out Kevin Boseman. Super awesome. Ho’m glad we got to catch up today. Appreciate you coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me, John, and I appreciate it.
Thank you. And I don’t want to ignore the final night of the Moontower Comedy Festival. If I counted correctly, they have thirty nine shows on their website. I won’t mention them all. We’ll talk about headliners and some of the catch my eye.
Zarni Gark four o’clock show at the Paramount Theater. That might even be too early for me. I mean, I like to go to bed early, but would be done at five thirty. Big Jay Okerson special screening at the State Theater, also at four o’clock today. What is this clicks on link to read.
I assume this is a special screening of his upcoming crowd work special Them They, because that’s what the cover art says, and apparently Them They is out tomorrow on YouTube. You learn something new every day. Industry types might like the panel who books that at five pm. You’re invited to join us for a panel tailor to address the burning questions comedians often Pounder, We’ve assembled a dream team of industry experts. It does not tell us who these industry experts are.
John Kablakani’s back at five point fifteen, James Austin Johnson at the State Theater. At seven, David Nihill listed as a headliner. Shelf Help Thompson Theater at seven the Moon Tower, all stars are Saheb Singh, Austin Nassa and Amy Miller. At seven o’clock at cap City, A friend of the show, John Marco seven to fifteen, Creak in the Cave, Big Jay working today. At eight fifteen he’s at Vulcan doing and evening of crowd work.
Pete Holmes, He’s fantastic. If you’ve never seen Pete goc Pete live, there’s an opportunity if you can make it to Austin by nine thirty pm. He’s at the Paramount Theater doing the PG thirteen tour. Janine Garofolo haven’t seen her do comedy in a long time, stand up comedy. That is nine thirty at the Thompson Theater.
That’s pretty cool. And a bunch of other shows to round out the festival.
And now I get to delete the tab and get back some real estate on my Safari br…
And that is your comedy news for today. Hope you enjoyed Andy again. His album is called Beach Brain and it’s streaming and there’s an audio version. And I will see you here tomorrow.