Daily Comedy News Podcast Transcripts

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Featured: Pete Davidson, Colin Jost, Dave Chappelle, Conan O’Brien, Seth Meyers, Joe Rogan, Ron White, Chelsea Handler, Salma Hindy, Kate Berlant, Matt Rife, Matt Fraser

What’s in This Episode

• Pete Davidson and Colin Jost Staten Island Ferry comedy event
• SNL Season 52 cast announcement with returning members
• Dave Chappelle adds second Madison Square Garden show
• Chelsea Handler and Salma Hindy tour dispute over Palestine comments
• Kate Berlant HBO comedy special announcement
• Paranormal concerns over Annabelle doll at Warren Museum tourist attraction

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

One last time this summer before we put the cover on high, I’m Johnny Mac with a poolside edition of Daily Comedy News. Pete Davidson and Colin Jost had their Staten Island Ferry event. Colin Jost joked, can you believe the Coast Guard let you guys on tonight? Pete Davidson said, this is something we want to do for like five years, so thank you guys for coming out. Pete and Colin riffed off one another, joking about the ferry, the crowd, and the challenges of turning a ferry into a comedy venue.

Pete added, this is nice, the amount of crap that people have talked.

And then he added, suck it.

It was very warm. I was in the city that day, and it was pretty warm. Jost acknowledged it, saying attendees were feeling hot and boaty. Pete Dave. Hot and Bodie.

Hot and Nauseous. That’s a good name for the next comedy festival. Your performers, Matt Richards, Casey Shonima, Ronny Chieng, Jay Jordan, Paul Verzi, Mike Vecchione, and Caitlin Palufo. Richards cracked a OK joke. Two rich white guys bought a broken ferry.

Not sure how funny that is. I’m sure he told it better. Caitlin Palufo said, I went to Staten Island. I loved it. I never had that much fun in an above ground pool.

She later added, the dumber that has to, the acorns are attacking me. Yeah, there’s a ton of acorns here on the deck pool side. Oh, no, another one just hit me. I’m distracted. Caitlin said, the dumber the tattoo, the hotter the guy.

That’s why I love Staten Island. Dave Chappelle has added a second Madison Square Garden show. He will now perform November 7th on top of November 6th, part of the New York Comedy Festival. On Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show Tonight, a former Tonight Show host returns for the second time. It’s Conan O’Brien.

Meanwhile, Seth Meyers is back from seven weeks off. Late night with Seth Meyers, we’ll have Taylor Tomlinson, who used to compete against Seth at 1230. About 90,000 people will wind up watching that thing. SNL announced their cast, and boy, Johnny Mac was wrong about something. Almost everybody is back, including the five freshmen.

Ben Marshall, Jeremy Culhane, Tommy Brennan, Veronica Slowakowska, and Cam Patterson is back. I don’t know why. I don’t know what.. He’s all right as a stand-up, but I don’t see him working on SNL at all. The usual suspects, Kenan, Colin, Che, Mikey Day, they’re all back.

So are Sarah Sherman, Ashley Padilla, James Austin Johnson, Marcelo Hernandez, who can do one thing really well. We’ll probably see a lot of that. Andrew Dismukes and Jane Wickline. Boy, that’s a pretty good cast. You know, now that you look at it, you know, you’ve got the aces in Keenan, Colin, and Shay.

That’s reliable. And you’ve got Sarah Sherman and Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline as part of that cast now. And James Austin Johnson. You know, that’s a pretty good cast they have. Last year I didn’t think was too good, but the cast is good.

Joe Rogan had Ron White as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience. They discussed the president of the United States. Let’s listen. But, you know, Trump supporters are nuts, man. They’re rabid.

He represents something other than just a person to them. Oh, it’s Christ. Yeah. Well, he represents something, a leader that they wish they had, you know? Yeah.

Which is a real problem in our society in general with leaders. We look to them as if they’re something different than every other person that’s ever been a leader before. Like, this is the one. This is the one that’s going to save us. Send your letters to Joe Rogan.

Chelsea Handler in a little kerfluffle, as I pronounce it incorrectly. Comedian Salma Hindy has accused Chelsea Handler of kicking her off tour. I will let Salma explain it. I lost my position as Chelsea Handler’s opener after I spoke to her about Palestine. My name is Salma Hindy.

I am a Canadian-Egyptian stand-up comedian living in New York City. Beginning in 2022, I opened for Chelsea Handler on two tours, performed at her Just for Laughs Chelsea Handler Gala. And generally had a very warm, loving, sisterly relationship with Chelsea Handler to the point where she actually used to invite me to ride her private jet with her. October 14 of 2023, I messaged Chelsea asking her if she wanted to speak about the Palestine-Israel thing after noticing that two of her closest friends, Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, had posted some.. Disgustingly racist, dehumanizing posts toward Palestinians.

I texted Chelsea about it lovingly, to which she did not respond. Immediately the next day, I got taken off of three of the 12 upcoming tour shows. I was told that she had promised those dates to somebody else. Regardless, Chelsea and I did end up going on tour in December of 2023. We did four shows together in Canada.

After one of the shows, I spoke to Chelsea privately about Palestine at dinner. To which I found out that Chelsea Handler has actually been to the West Bank. And in her own words, she said it looked like the Arabs had their souls sucked from their faces. The clip is a little long, so I cut that short, but you can watch that online. Chelsea Handler responded to it and said, eh, that’s actually not what happened.

You quit opening for me and I have the emails from your agents. Your agent is full of it. I would never fire someone for disagreeing with me political on this issue. Handler then shared screenshots from her Instagram story to support her version. One message dated January 29th, 2024 appeared to show Hindi writing, Chelsea, something has now come up, but I won’t be able to do the remaining four shows anymore.

Wanted you to hear it from me. Thank you for everything. It’s been such an experience. And you’re right. It would have been wonderful stage time.

Very interesting there. Kate Berlant getting an HBO comedy special. It’s called Parmesan, I assume, unless she is pronouncing it Parmesan, but Parmesan, I guess. HBO, October 16th. Parmesan is described as a hilarious tour de force that skewers the many contradictions of modern life and the art of stand-up comedy itself.

Nina Rosenstein, big time HBO suit, said when it comes to Caperland, the comedy is everything. A look, a gesture, a pause that lasts a little too long. People are worried about Matt Rife and evil energy. The story, Matt Rife’s haunted Warren Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is drawing visitors from across the country and concern from paranormal believers. Who questioned whether Annabelle should be a major tourist attraction.

So interesting to me that there’s a controversy involving Salem, Massachusetts, right before October Halloween season. Boy, that’s weird. Now, you may know of Annabelle, the allegedly haunted doll, which became famous through paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. According to Ed and Lorraine, the case began in 1970 when two nurses believed an unseen presence had attached itself to the doll. The Warrens removed it and kept it contained, believing The doll was connected to a dangerous entity, now psychic medium Matt Fraser, worries that putting Annabelle in front of large crowds changes the situation.

Very interesting. He told the Daily Mail, Ed and Lorraine took them seriously and contained them for a reason. When you turn something that was once contained into an attraction, you completely change the relationship people have with it. Matt Reif enthusiastically promoted the museum’s expansion. He said, Matt Reif said, We’ve collected over 1,000 of the world’s most haunted objects and added them to the Warren’s already historic collection.

Fraser said, and now you’re taking Annabelle and bringing her together with an entire collection of objects that reportedly carry their own histories and energies all under one roof while thousands of people continuously walk through that environment? Every visitor brings their own energy with them, and whether that fear is grief, curiosity, skepticism, or even the desire to provoke whatever might be there. My concern is that evil energy loves attention, dark energy wants to be acknowledged, He wants people talking about it, challenging it, fearing it, and feeding it with their attention. I almost feel like he’s describing Amy Schumer, but I digress. Well, good news for the worst person who ever lived, Jay Leno.

Jay Leno’s law has passed. Governor Newsom announced last week he had signed legislation exempting classic cars made before 1981, model year 1981, from state smog checks that measure pollution levels. He also signed a bill to create a specialty license plate commemorating lowrider vehicles. The governor said these bills protect a treasured part of California culture, giving car owners a way to preserve these pieces of history for generations to come. The announcement was accompanied by a video of him touring Jay Leno’s car garage in Burbank.

In the video, we see the governor and Jay Leno walking past a 1957 Buick Roadmaster, a 1966 Chevrolet Corvair, a 1989 Bentley Turbo R, and some open-wheel roadsters and vintage British sports cars. Out on Netflix today, Party Down. Party Down’s not new, but it’s going to be new to a lot of people. There are three seasons of it. They did two seasons like over a decade ago, I feel like it was.

And then a third season, maybe like two years ago. But the cast is Adam Scott, Ken Marino, Ryan Hansen, Martin Starr. Martin is Homelander, right? Lizzie Kaplan, Megan Mullally and Jane Lynch. They are actors who are not really acting that much and making a living as caterers.

It’s a fantastic show. I feel like this is going to pop on Netflix, which is good because that’s a good show. Out on Netflix today, Nimesh Patel. His special is called By the Dip. Patel discusses the absurdity of parenting, the insanity of the Indian family, and the rampant corruption in Washington, D.C.

Send your letters to Nimesh Patel. There’s a new podcast out today called Petty Cases. The premise is put ridiculous arguments on trial. And let comedians decide who’s right in each episode. Willie and Steve preside over absurd, low-stakes disputes that would never make it anywhere near a real courtroom.

I had jury duty last week. The judge let me go. I appreciate that. I was home by 11 o’clock. It was very nice.

All right, so some of the comedians who will be stepping into the courtroom. Good list here. Bert Kreischer, Ron Funches, Morgan Jay, Frankie Quinonez. Let’s see, Caitlin Palufo gets a second mention today, and a bunch of, oh, Steph Tolev and a bunch of others. We’re told because Willie and Steve are stand-ups first, every case becomes a comedy set in disguise.

This keeps reminding me, and I never know how to explain it without hanging myself. When I was at Sirius, there was a judge who turned comedian, and we had um in a premise we called racist court And we could never figure out how to do racist court without accidentally being actually racist. But the idea would be if you did some sort of behavior, were you just being normal or were you being racist about it? And I really can’t explain it. But the gang, which was a diverse crowd, we all kind of got it, but we never figured out how to do it without just, you know, accidentally being racist, which was not the idea.

I asked ChatGPT to explain it. And it would be something like if we went out for, Chinese food and the waiter brought just the person of Asian descent chopsticks and the rest of us forks. Now we’ll try that person on racist court. Did they profile our Asian friend in this hypothetical situation? Like that kind of thing.

Just like harmless fun, but we could never figure it out. Josh Johnson’s been hitting comic shops from comicsbeat.com, which isn’t about comic comedians. It’s about comic books. We’re told last month Josh stopped off in Minneapolis and he went to Odd Mart. Which combines Indian alternative comics, zines, vintage items, local artist showcases, toys, and more.

They even host their own Saturday cartoon cabaret. Then he stopped off at Comic Book College in Roseville. That’s known as Minnesota’s longest-running comic book specialty store, going back to 1974. Then in San Francisco, he went to Comics Experience, Comics with an X. That was founded in 1989 and is now the oldest comic book store in San Francisco.

Josh Johnson commented on how unique and diverse its choices are and how to categorize books opposed to other comic shops. He said that sets comics, what is this, comics experience apart and makes things worth exploring. Next, Dr. Volt’s Comic Connection and the Nerd Store in Salt Lake. And Josh Johnson has been filming all this.

I wonder what he’s up to. The man puts out a lot of content. And that, one last time for this summer from Poolside, is your Daily Comedy News. There’s regular Daily Comedy News tomorrow. And every day, but we probably won’t be poolside as the pool guy’s coming and putting the tarp on.

And living here in New Jersey, it gets cooler out. So I’ll put the Hawaiian shirt away and sunglasses go back in the car. You have a great day.

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Featured: Kevin Hart, Chris Rock, Tom Cruise, Stav Stavros, Jim Gaffigan, Ted Alexandro, Jo Koy, Taylor Swift

What’s in This Episode

• Kevin Hart and Taco Bell’s Live Más Open golf competition
• Chris Rock on difficulty of being Tom Cruise versus president
• Stav Stavros on making one great standup special and podcasting
• Jim Gaffigan’s Notre Dame theater performance review
• Jo Koy’s new Netflix special and personal stories about his stepdad

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. If you’re a longtime listener, you know that I like to say that Kevin Hart is not afraid to work. He’s got another gig and he’s teamed up with Taco Bell. Yes, Taco Bell is giving nine lucky golfers the chance to bring back a menu item of their choosing. And who would you tap into this if not Kevin Hart’s?

Taco Bell announced they were teaming with actor Kevin Hart, interesting designation there, actor Kevin Hart to deliver the Live Moss Open on Monday, November 2nd. Prospective participants can earn spots through either participating in the Shot Shuffle game at top golf locations across the nation, or you can enter a free online sweepstakes to be among 100 selected to submit a video entry. Then nine fans will be selected to take part in the team golf competition. They’ll complete in foursomes with professional athletes, celebrities, and content creators. Okay.

Nine. All right. I see. Three plus one, three times. Got it.

Wait, it’s not Live Moss. I’m leaving it in. I can do the whole thing over. You guys can just throw stuff at the screen and be like, stupid idiot in the basement. It’s Live Moss.

It’s the Live Moss Open. I’m reading a script. It says L-I-V-E. Leave me alone. The Live Moss Open.

Qualifiers open until Sunday, September 27th. The CEO of Topgolf. There’s a new Topgolf in my area. I’ve been waiting for years for them to open it.

And now that it’s open, I haven’t had a free moment to go.

I forgot to catch a guy who’s up on jury duty. I’ll do that after the break. I’ve been so, so busy. Topgolf CEO David said.. Topgolf has always been about making golf more accessible and social, which is why the Live Moss Open is such a natural fit for us.

Together with Taco Bell, we want everyone to feel like they can be part of the game. Whether they’re picking up a club for the first time or have been playing for years with a chance to earn their way into the field and experience golf in a way they may have never imagined. No quote from Kevin Hart in this thing. That’s suspicious. You can usually get a quote out of Kevin Hart.

Chris Rock says it’s harder to be Tom Cruise than it is to be the president of the United States. All right. What’s the theory here? Chris Rock was at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mr. Fancy.

He told Entertainment Weekly. My theory is it’s harder to be Tom Cruise than president. There’s no system design that every four years we’re going to have a Tom Cruise. This apparently not a system where every four years we’re going to have. Never mind.

Tom Cruise. I don’t know what you thought I was going to say. I was going to say Tom Cruise. I was just agreeing with Chris Rock. I don’t know what you thought I was about to say there.

I didn’t say it. Star Wars Algae has told GQ, I want to make one great standup special. That’s the only thing I want to accomplish. I wonder if he feels this way about the recent one. I think I’m good at standup, but it doesn’t mean you’ve created a great special.

I think you can be great at standup and great live, and it doesn’t mean you’ve created a great lasting thing. There’s no testament one thing. And look, that might be naive, right? Maybe what’s going to be great is a body of work, right? But you want to chase that one undeniable special.

Now, why does Stavros still podcast? He says, it pays so much money, dude. I had to pay the bills. I see podcasts as the most blue-collar thing I do. It’s on a schedule.

We do it, we book it, and people depend on it. I like podcasts, too, and I’d be mad if my favorite podcast just stopped or if they were late a day or whatever. So it’s the most job-like thing I do. I’ve done it in a way where I’m like, oh, this is actually really fun now, but I would stop if I financially didn’t need to. Now, honestly, I like doing it.

The only reason I might stop is if I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m just wasting a lot of being funny on the podcast, which other generations would get to channel into their stand-up. I think there’s only so much of yourself you can give. Like, I do wonder, are we crappier at stand-up as a generation because we’re all podcasters? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a thing.

But I don’t perform. I’m just a podcaster. The Observer. That’s a Notre Dame newspaper. They went to see Jim Gaffigan.

They tell us the stage design was fairly standard for a stand-up show. Colored lights illuminated the back of a stage, populated only by a microphone, a stool, and the performer, Jim Gaffigan. Video boards were on either side of the stage, allowing people with, I’m paraphrasing here, cheap seats to clearly see the performance. I mean, I know we do this when we go see, like, the Rolling Stones, but if you’re going to see Jim Gaffigan and you have to watch the screen, what are we even doing? Just stay home and watch Netflix.

Opening guest Ted Alexandro. We’re told his best material drew from his experience teaching middle school students the recorder, or as he called it, Satan’s little flute. We’re told nothing in his act was truly exceptional, nor was anything egregious. There’s a backhanded compliment. It’s did its job of loosening up the crowd for Jim Gaffigan.

You know, this isn’t good. The reviewer says, I struggled to hear the opening act at some points. This was due to several factors. One, his microphone wasn’t loud enough. Two people still looking for their seats and members of the audience were chatting with each other.

That is not good. Uh-oh, Ted, you’re getting murdered here. The lights were only at half level, which wasn’t as effective as full darkness. When Jim came on, the venue fixed the audio and turned off the lights. Hmm, conspiracy against Ted Alexandro.

We’re told Jim Gaffigan’s set was, quote, overall very funny, unquote. He began with some Notre Dame-related comments, including his prediction that the Fighting Irish would beat Rice at the football game. That turned out to be correct. He said American Catholics love three things, Notre Dame, alcohol, and serially, funerals. A decent portion of the set, minor spoilers devoted to anecdotes about the struggles of raising teenagers.

We’re told his delivery and content were similar to some of his previous material, but this time it felt more grown up, reflecting his current parenting stage. The LA Times caught up with Joe Coy. Now, if you’re like, Joe Coy, who is that Johnny Mac? He’s the guy that had the Netflix special recently, like last week on Tuesday. It’s pretty good.

I liked it. You don’t know who I mean? Let me remind you, one time Joe Coy hosted the Golden Globes and told a horrible, horrible, just viciously mean joke about Taylor Swift and You can understand why Taylor Swift was really mad at this one. As you know, we came on after a football doubleheader. The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL.

On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift. Anyway, the L.A. Times got up with Joe Coy and we’re curious how he stays healthy on the road as a superstar comedian. We’re told it’s just before 1 a.m. And Joe Coy’s outside.

Days before the release of his new Netflix special, he’s gone live on Instagram, standing on Sunset Boulevard next to the Laugh Factory. It’s late, but he spends a few minutes promoting the special and encouraging people to find the Netflix posters and take pictures of themselves in front of the Netflix posters. The LA Times was curious about the special. Joe Coy said, I opened up a lot. I got to talk about my stepdad.

Minor spoilers, that’s part of the closer, which is very, very good. Very good closer. There’s a whole story about my stepdad and what he meant to be being You know, a product of a divorced family, and then this stepdad came into my life, and that was the one thing I really, really needed when I was a teenager. So I talk about him, but it was also sad, because usually when I do jokes on my special, I retire the bit. It’s kind of like, you know, the end of the story, but I’m happy that it’ll live forever on Netflix.

And I don’t want to spoil any more of it, so I’ll skip ahead here. I want to get to the food part. Joe Coy said, I’m like down to one meal a day, basically. I’m not scraping my plate like I used to. But then again, I got to shut up.

I still drink coffee. And, you know, I guess that’s my unhealthy fix is coffee bad. I drink so much coffee. He says it’s not even a regular coffee. It’s got all the crap in it.

So there’s that. But we’re a lot of one little crutch yet. Yeah. Large iced coffee, caramel and milk out of the National Donuts chain. I’m there every morning.

Now I want another one. I think I’ve got a I think I got a Starbucks container. In the fridge. I might have a second iced coffee after this recording. Anyway, Joe Coy said, we’re allowed to have some.

It’s not just a coffee with a tomahawk steak and all the sides. My son is on a health kick and he did this on his own. He doesn’t drink soda because it made him feel weird. He cut bread because he knows that he was breaking out and getting rashes when he was eating bread. And there’s certain foods that he eats that he knows it gets very clammy and greasy.

So he cuts all that out. It’s crazy. My son, he’s like, you should get a salad, dad. So he’s my favorite guy to be on the road with because he keeps me in check. Now I want a salad.

But I have to record all these shows today because of a scheduling reason. So I don’t have time to go to Chopped. Plus, I love Chopped salad, but they’re like $ 18 now. I haven’t been going as much. Joe Coy said, I was really, really bad with morning food.

Back in the day, it was always a thing that you flew in on a Wednesday just so you could do morning press and the club would book, you know, at six in the morning and go on about four hours of morning news and radio and all that. It was disgusting. It was so gross. It was like an egg McMuffin, a cinnamon roll, Coca-Cola, and just coffee. And I look at my old pictures of myself back in the day and it’s like you could see it in my face, just all that crap.

I will jump in there. I produced morning drive radio for four months and put on 20 pounds and I’m still trying to lose that 20 pounds. Here’s why. I used to get up at 3.34 in the morning because that was the latest I could possibly get up and drive from Queens to Times Square where I worked at WOR Radio. I had a parking pass.

I could actually park on the street. I had a press pass. So even the city that never sleeps, even at four in the morning, sleeps. And I could get from my house in Queens to Times Square in 13 minutes between four and five in the morning. Anyway, I was just always exhausted.

And then around seven in the morning, maybe 630, the guy that ran the board, this guy, Bobby, would go cheeseburger. And we would get a cheeseburger and fries at 630 in the morning just to get through the day. Now, That wasn’t breakfast. That was fourth meal because around seven 30 in the morning, the morning show team would get like bagels and stuff. So yeah, even though I just had a cheeseburger and fries, let me get a bagel with butter and some more coffee because I’m always tired and miserable.

And I got up at three 30 in the morning and I hate life and I just need to eat. So I feel you, Joe Coy. I digress. He says, I really was a road dog. So it was like, I lived on the road.

That’s all I knew. I was happy to be on the road. Give me the chicken wings for dinner. Amen, brother. Joe Coy and I could be friends.

I mean, you know, he did make that horrible mean joke about Taylor Swift. I would never do that. But other than that, we could be buddies. He loved the road. Give me chicken wings for dinner.

Give me some beer. Let me tell some jokes. That doesn’t happen anymore. Now it’s like, do you have any more coconut water and some hummus? We’re out of hummus.

I asked for celery sticks, you guys. The funny thing is, I’m not even trying to be funny right now, said Joe Coy. Back in the day, it used to be like this big metal bucket just filled with ice and 24 Coronas. And chicken wings and onion rings. And I’d walk into my green room and I was the happiest man alive.

That sounds perfect, to be honest. If I see that in my green room now, I start yelling at somebody like, get this out of here. And I’m like, no one’s eating this. It’s bad for you. A lot of good stuff from the LA Times.

We’ll save some of that for the weekend. So I had to do this section over. I started doing the podcast to camera. So if you want to see what the basement looks like, you can find the episodes on YouTube now. I’m posting them a little later, about 11 a.m.

This is still, in my mind, an audio podcast, but I’m trying not to be a Luddite. And I just looked down. So now I’m looking at the bottom corner to make sure the timer is actually running because I did the second half of the podcast, which fortunately wasn’t that long. And the timer had stopped. I don’t know what happened.

Sometimes the mic kicks out and it, I don’t know. I’ve been really crazy lately. I had jury duty last week. I was freed by 11 o’clock. The judge let me go, which was nice, but that kind of gummed up my Tuesday.

And then Thursday and Friday, we had the big podcasting conference in New York city. So I had to do last week, basically five days work in two, maybe one, uh, which was a little tough, but we should get back to normal now. Plus I am challenging myself to do the video stuff, which, uh, At first, it was taking me like four times as long. Now it’s maybe an extra 10 minutes. So if you want to see what the basement looks like, the basement looks like this, and it’s not very exciting.

And I’m not good at video. I know that. You don’t have to flame the comments. Be like, you’re bad at video. I know I’m not good at video.

That’s why I wasn’t doing video, but I’m trying to figure it out. So that’s a whole thing going on. Late Nighter has the late night ratings for August. Now, whatever I cut and pasted here, I didn’t grab Kim Holm, but the Jimmy Fallon show, it’s called The Tonight Show, starring Jimmy Fallon. I don’t know why I called it The the Jimmy Fallon show.

That’s not what it’s called at all, John. Anyway, they averaged 1.54 million total viewers down 1% from July in the 18 to 49s. They had 186,000 adults. CBS is airing Byron Allen stuff. There are 767,000 of you watching it down from July, but up in the 1849s to 93,000.

At 1230, different Byron Allen thing has 483,000 total viewers up 2% month to month, and they’re getting 60,000 adults 18 to 49. 12.30, make 12.30 great again. Seth Meyers was in repeats. Repeats averaged 701,000 total viewers, and in the 18 to 49s, a very podcast-type number of 89,000 adults. Not a great number. Gutfeld, he thinks it’s a late-night show, but it airs at 10 o’clock in the East, which makes 7 in the West, which is not late night at all.

But if you’re curious, he had 18 to 49, 180,000 viewers, and overall 2.71 million viewers. I’m going to guess they’re not getting a lot of teenagers watching Gutfeld, so old people watch Fox News. Wanda Sykes was on Z-Way’s podcast. The topic turned to the Riyadh Comedy Festival, which Wanda, I guess, didn’t do or was offered. She told Z-Way, did I turn it down?

I don’t even know if it was offered. She then added, I’m a black gay woman. What am I going to do? I like my head on my body. It fits.

Last year, Wanda Sykes had told Variety, I’m a black gay woman. I have no business there. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with the treatment of the LGBT community. But then again, I think Jessica Curson went and she was going to talk about being a lesbian. I guess that worked for her, but I wouldn’t.

The Toronto Guardian has a nice weekly segment where they talk to local comedians. One of them is Sam Sferrazza. We’re told Sam’s style is best described as acerbic, ranty and angry, though joyful. Makes a list, too. Fueled by a sharp eye for the absurdities of the world from U.S.

Foreign policy. Hey, watch it, Canadians. Watch it. OK, watch it with the jokes. To the humiliation ritual of eating your yogurt before airport security, Sam channels outrage into comedy that cuts with precision and lands with glee.

Who are your influences? They include Maria Bamford, Chelsea Peretti, and Lady Gaga. Favorite comedian growing up? She said, I think the only comedian I watched growing up was Ellen DeGeneres. Anyway, too bad she was really mean to people.

It’s because of her that I promised to be a bitch up front. Great joke. Favorite comedian right now? Meg Statler. Favorite pre-show ritual.

The ritual begins when I decide what to wear, which is always fun because most comedians dress like slobs. So I look really amazing next to them in the green room. By the way, jury duty. I was like Pierce Brosnan and I wasn’t dressed that nice. I had on like a nice fleece.

But so what some of these people wear, it’s like they’re hosting a podcast in the basement in the light blue T-shirt. You know what I’m saying? Yeah, that. She says, I write down my set and then I debate if I should bring the notebook on stage. Eventually I do.

And I convince myself it doesn’t make me any less of a pro. Because one time I saw Sarah Silverman perform and she checked her notes the whole time. All right, Sam, what’s your favorite bit you’ve written? She spoils her own special here. So don’t get mad at me.

This is in the Toronto Guardian. You could have read this on your own. If you want to be spoiled by Sam’s for us is closer. You can bail now. But she says, I have a bit about trans kids in sports.

I’m proud of it because it shows how utterly stupid the debate is. Basically, I make the argument if we’re going to exclude trans kids for so-called valid reasons, I think we should exclude straight kids from the arts because they’re bad at it. All the arts. Most art is queer. Straight people only know how to mimic queer people to be creative.

You all are a hack. She says it’s the last joke of her new special and her closer. That special artistic intent is out on YouTube if you want to check that out. And that is your comedy news for today. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Featured: Chris Rock, Stavros Halkitis, Nick Mullen, Eric Idle, Jay Pharoah, Adam Sandler, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones

What’s in This Episode

• Chris Rock on how fame has changed since Bring the Pain
• Stavros Halkitis discusses leaving Cum Town podcast
• Cum Town podcast origins and success story
• Stavrios Halkitis launches Stavis World Studio after leaving podcast
• Eric Idle on Monty Python conflicts and breakup
• Failed 1999 Monty Python Final Crusade project
• Monty Python 2014 O2 Arena reunion shows
• Jay Pharoah on his Jay-Z impression and comedy role

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. Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Variety caught up with Chris Rock and they reminded him, bring the pain is when you truly became a celebrity. What has changed about your experience of fame from then to now? Chris Rock said it used to be about getting free stuff and how you’re basically on the third date with anybody you date.

They’re like, I know you. You’re at least on the second date. You skip a date just by being famous. When people come up to me, it used to scare me. Now I realize you’re making somebody’s day.

I try to ask them at least one question, like, where are you from? As simple as that. And they’re like, oh, I had a conversation with Chris Rock. I’ve learned to accept this is who I am. It’s like basketball.

If you’re seven feet tall, you can’t get mad at people asking if you play. I try not to think about fame, but it could be a lot worse. You could be infamous. So I accept it. It helps me get work.

Stavros Helki has had a profile in GQ. He says his workplace hazard is a bunch of guys that look like him stop him when he goes to get pails. He says most of the time I actually really like it. The only time it’s tough is if you’re having a bad day. I remember one time I just made an attempt to get this girl back.

We were talking. She had started dating somebody who was fresh. And I was like, I think I might have a little window to get back in here. Maybe I can grab the cheese before the trap hits me. And I gave it my all.

We’re getting oysters. I picked a beautiful restaurant. I’m making my pitch. I’m like, let’s be together. I messed up so bad.

She hits me with a, no, absolutely not. Are you out of your mind? I tried to do this. You’re just a piece of crap who can’t accept love until it’s gone. And that messed me up.

And I’m walking home to keep it together. And some guy’s like, stop, my boy. And I’m like, come on, I’m crying, dude. I’m heartbroken with a belly full of oysters. I got to make a video for your friend.

You want me to set the fantasy football order for your draft this year right now? Dude, I can’t do that for you, man. So that’s the only time it’s a problem. Most of the time, like I said, I live a hysterical life. And on a regular day, if I got to say hi to a couple of people, that’s nice.

I actually like it. Then he talked about the end of the Comptown podcast. He said, I thought we would do eight episodes. I was doing it to appease my buddy, Nick. At the time, he was like, let’s do a podcast.

I was like, dude, podcasts are over. Marin did it. In 2015, it kind of felt like that first wave of podcasts had crested. Little did we know. I think the year we started ended up a whole bunch of other things we launched.

We launched the Doughboys, Pardon My Take, Blank Check, and I’m sure I’m missing a ton. Those are just the ones in my world. Nick was right. No, of course, I didn’t think it would work. It was one of those things where it was like, yeah, who gives an F?

We can buy a Zoom and three microphones and see what happens. And it ended up being wildly successful beyond anyone’s dreams. I think what people liked on an immediate level is just that it was recreating the middle school cafeteria table. It’s like three dumbasses saying insane stuff to make each other laugh. It’s like, how funny can you get inside the intimacy of a real friendship and once you have buy-in and trust each other?

The funniest jokes are to make saying the most effed up things, because how far can you push it when the other person still knows you’re a good person? That’s kind of the joke. And if you’re really good friends with someone, you can say insane stuff. Now, we happen to broadcast that to people that don’t know us personally at all, and I think that was the ultimate appeal. It was really funny as hell.

I mean, Mullen is one of the best in terms of riffing. Nick Mullen is a savant on podcasts. We were making so much money, and I quit. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was getting a check for, I don’t even remember, like 40 grand a month or something.

Let’s do the math on that. Times 12, that’s 40. That’s half a million dollars a year. Not bad. If nothing else happened in my career but that, I still would have considered it a success.

You don’t get to that level in comedy most of the time. I was working clubs. I was basically doing my initial dream, but I realized exactly what I wanted. And as much as I love Nick and as funny as he is, it was his show first and foremost that And I did feel like a support player, which now I’m happy to do in these broader contexts because it’s stuff I’m interested in, like movies or whatever. But I didn’t want to be the second guy on a comeback when I was 45.

And so it was a really scary thing to do. I just paid for my first special out of pocket. Nobody wanted it. So I did it myself on YouTube and I lost 50 grand on that. I had to spend another 50 grand on the Stavis World Studio after that.

And so it was a really scary moment after leaving. But it was like, great. It had to end. I mean, that’s the other thing. That’s a young man’s game.

Uh-oh. Wait, he was 45 and he says, podcasting’s a young man’s game? Uh-oh, somebody tell the guy in the basement doing Daily Comedy News. He says, Sandler’s At a Medium Pace is one of the funniest things of all time. Okay, now as a known Adam Sandler, not hater, but like I don’t find Adam Sandler funny, I do like At a Medium Pace.

It is a funny song. He says, we made some awesome dumb BS, the stuff that I would have loved when I was 14. We made that and that’s cool, but you don’t want to be that guy forever. Apparently Adam Sandler does though. See, that’s the thing.

But I think the relationship can go in different ways. Nick comes on my podcast all the time. I’ve had Adam on. I’d love someday to collaborate on something when it makes sense. But in that context, no, I don’t think that podcast could have gone on.

Jay Farrow told WTOP, I think it’s our job as comedians to make people forget about their problems or forget about the problems at all, or just laugh about their problems so they can forget about the pain. He talked about his impression of Jay-Z. He says, Jay-Z loves the impression. He calls me fake Jay-Z every time he sees me. Jay Farrow warns, if you go see him, don’t sit up front.

If you don’t want me to get into your browser history, you shouldn’t sit in the front. That’s great. Let’s bring us to the Monty Python War. I’ve been enjoying this because I love some drama. Eric Idle speaking to The Telegraph.

He talked about the various pythons. They started with Graham Chapman, who passed away at age 48 back in 1989. Idle says, if you think of John Cleese as the father.. Graham Chapman was the mother. He could be horrible when drunk and vicious, certainly to me.

And then once he stopped drinking, I think he saw me. The whole process of him being ill and dying was very emotional for everybody. You know, he was lovely. Then in 1999, a 30-year reunion was set to happen. It fell apart.

Eric Idle at that point, a TV interview said, I realized we would never agree on anything ever again. That sunk his idea for a final Monty Python movie, which was called The Final Crusade. In which a group of grumpy old knights reluctantly agree to carry King Arthur’s ashes to Jerusalem. I’d be curious to read a script of that. Then they talked about Spamalot.

We learn that a significant rights royalty is paid to the pythons as a group. Eric Idle gets the biggest share. He says, I think I have more business sense. I think they’re not very good at it, a lot of them. But then one of the producers of the original film sued for a share of the pot.

Then there was a legal battle, and the fees from that created the 2014 Python reunion at London’s O2 Arena. That was a one-off show that sold out in 45 seconds, so they did four more. And those sold out in an hour, and five shows became ten. But that’s most likely it. Terry Jones died in 2020.

And then there’s John Cleese’s comment from 2024 on Twitter, which read, We always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently that the truth has begun to emerge. People thought that was at Eric Idle. Cleese claimed it was about the others, too, and he was joking anyway. Eric Idle said, I think it might be what he secretly feels. We’ve been good friends from time to time.

There are things I’m grateful to him for, seeing I was funny, putting me in a show, and then being supportive of me many times in his life, and then suddenly deciding, I don’t know what happened. I felt it happened during COVID, and I called him up, and he was getting more and more angry. I don’t know. It’s like they all got angry about Spamalot, and you go, excuse me, I made you all a million effing dollars each. When you pay that back, we can talk.

Obviously, one likes to feel that you’re not vilified unjustly. I don’t read what they say, and sometimes someone will say, there’s another clip. Eric Idle’s proud of his own comedic chops. He was the only one who wrote without a partner. He said, it’s harder, but I still write by myself, and I don’t think Cleese can, actually.

He always has to have a partner. The famous Monty Python veto is no more. It is an ex-veto. It used to be, unless everyone in the room thought a sketch was funny, they wouldn’t do it. Idol says that was removed under dubious circumstances a few years ago.

They have three votes. I have one. They don’t have board meetings, or at least they don’t tell me about them. That’s not great emotionally, but I can live with that easily. You mean I don’t have to go in a room and bicker with those folks again?

I think it’s sad and horrible, though, particularly given it’s against me. It’s like, what did I do wrong in the last 20 years for you? He has determined not to become a bitter. He said, I’ve known many, many comedians, so many funny people. And on the whole, they become sweeter and sweeter.

But I think some get grumpy. Death makes them very anxious, especially if they were more narcissistic at times in their lives. It’s hard for them to let go of what they once had, which was sometimes a masterful control of comedy. I feel like he’s talking about one person in particular. Eric Idle’s not a fan of looking back.

He says they could have done a world tour after the London shows, but Michael turned it all down. I think that was fair. You shouldn’t be forced into doing things you don’t want to do when you’ve gotten older and you’ve got more interesting things you want to do. I think regret is not a useful emotion. I say as you get older, you either get old and better..

We’re old and bitter. From the Chicago Reader, this is some Sunday kind of stuff if you’re relatively new to the show. You know, sometimes I’ll pre-tape a weekend, perhaps right now. We do some of the more esoteric stuff on Sundays, especially in the second half. Chicago Reader took a look at how comedians eat before and after going on stage.

Jordan Wilson likes to caffeine and carb load. Yeah, that makes sense. He said, Today I woke up, made my quad shot oat latte. Then for lunch, I had a jerky stick and a plain bagel. I really like raw dogging bagels.

Often I have two bagels for lunch, just raw. And four slices of wheat toast to the face. It’s good carbs. For the past 13 years, he’s been performing as half of a musical comedy duo with Bobby Sullivan. During this interview, Sullivan was eating salted pistachios and chasing them with his second Dr.

Pepper of the day. Sullivan said, I mostly don’t think about food. But on this particular day, he said he’d eaten a lot for a performance day. Four rice cakes slathered with peanut butter, followed by a Jersey Mike sub with barbecue chips. Wilson chimed in, I don’t think about food much either, except is when this is going to give me diarrhea.

Yeah, that would be bad if you were on stage. He adds, I’ve definitely had spicy Korean barbecue before a show and felt gurgling.

And then I’m like, I got to tell the audience, but there’s nothing they want …

Cynthia Levin says before show she might eat half a baked potato at home or part of a veggie burrito in the car. Most of the comedians for this said they try to go for bland and protein rich. Protein bars factor heavily as does chicken bake or a chicken Caesar wrap. Ashley Lusk explains you don’t want a full stomach. You don’t want anything to hold you back or weigh down on stage.

Dan drees recalled wolfing down a bag of flaming hot cheetos before set then he sweated through his set with bright red fingers and that is your comedy news on a sunday we’ll see you tomorrow

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Featured: Dane Cook, Bobby Kelly, Jay Davis, Gary Goleman, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy

What’s in This Episode

• Dane Cook’s rise to commercial success in 2006
• Dane Cook’s pioneering use of the internet and MySpace for comedy
• Dane Cook’s platinum albums Harmful if Swallowed and Retaliation
• Retaliation album chart success and cultural impact
• Dane Cook’s HBO documentary series Tourgasm in 2006
• Comedy industry’s skepticism toward Dane Cook despite mainstream success
• Accusations of joke theft against Dane Cook

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. Hey there, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. On Saturday, we’ve been doing deep dives on single comedians. And today I want you to close your eyes and imagine it’s 2006. You’re in Manhattan.

You’re online outside Madison Square Garden. Someone a few spots ahead of you is playing music off their phone. Your friends behind you are quoting movies back and forth. And 20,000 people just like you are about to pile into Madison Square Garden to watch Dean Cook. Not a rock band, not the Knicks.

Dean Cook. A stand-up comedian who pretty much nobody in the comedy world will admit to respecting. A guy who’s been publicly accused of stealing jokes by one of the most respected writers in the business, if not one of the most respected people. We’ll get to that. Critics have been dismissing Dean Cook as a frat boy with a microphone for two years at that point.

And he was about to sell out Madison Square Garden. Hi, I’m actor-comedian Dane Cook, and I’m hosting the season premiere of SNL with The Killers. The Dane train’s coming to town, and The Killers are in the caboose. Toot toot! In 2006, Dane Cook was the most commercially successful stand-up comedian in America, and almost everyone who mattered in comedy couldn’t stand him for it.

It was this whole weird thing between what the comedy world thought of Dane Cook and what the actual world thought of Dane Cook. Quite excited that our next guest is making his network television debut with us tonight. He can be seen in Boston at the Comedy Connection on October 3rd and 4th. Please welcome the very funny Dane Cook. Dane!

Thank you very much. Yes, I am very, very excited to be here. I’ll tell you a little about myself. When I was a little kid, I was a terrible speller. I could not spell, so my mom and dad tried to help me out.

They got me a little helper, a little friend, a little aid. They got me a little red box called Speak and Spell. You remember Speak and Spell? No, no. They shouldn’t have called it Speak and Spell.

They should have called it Speak Like the Devil. Remember the voice? Hey, I owe you. No, no way. That thing was evil.

That thing used to wake me in the middle of the night. Play with me. Dean Cook grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of six kids in a Catholic family, and started doing stand-up in Boston in the early 90s before moving to New York and then L.A. Grinding the clubs the way everybody grinds the clubs, doing the thing that takes years to produce anything visible and then mostly produces nothing at all for most people who tried. He was working.

He was getting better. He wasn’t getting famous.

And then he did something that no comedian had really done.

He took the internet seriously as a tool for building a direct relationship with an audience. He built a website, DaneCook.com. He funded it with $ 25, 000 of his own money, reportedly, which is a hell of a lot of money a quarter century ago, pulled from savings and retirement accounts, and launched DaneCook.com as an interactive platform where he could post content, interact directly with fans, and distribute his material outside the traditional club-to-album-to-television pipeline. This is like before iPhones and YouTube, right before that. Other comedians mocked Dane Cook for that.

The mocking was pretty direct and pretty widespread. The idea that building a website was a legit career strategy was not a popular one with the comedians in the early 2000s. The way you did it? Clubs. Then maybe late night, maybe you get an album, Comedy Central, something like that.

Dane Cook’s website was seen as a symptom of someone who didn’t know the rules rather than someone who would correctly identify that the rules were about to change. Then Dane Cook built a MySpace page. You forget how huge this was. By the mid 2000s, Dane Cook’s MySpace had over one and a half million friends, which was different from how the algorithm works today with passive followers. You know, these were people who had sought him out, added him as a friend and were engaging with content Dane Cook was putting out directly.

Dane Cook was answering emails. He was posting bits. He was building the kind of direct audience relationship that music was going through with Napster and file sharing, and the comedy industry hadn’t yet fully absorbed this as a concept. Dean Cook wasn’t waiting for someone to tell him he was ready. He was building an audience that would make his readiness self-evident.

His first album, Harmful of Swallowed, came out in 2003 and went platinum. Not immediately. It built slowly through the website, word of mouth, college campuses. The one that broke everything open was Retaliation in 2005. It debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 on the main chart, not the comedy chart, not the little charts, the main one, number four overall.

It was the highest charting comedy album since Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1978. It went double platinum. It was being quoted in dorms and cars and cafeterias across the country in a way that comedy albums really hadn’t done in quite a while. The Kool-Aid bit, the friend who’s the bad luck guy in every group, These were bits that college kids in 2005 could recite from memory the way previous generations like me could recite Monty Python and Eddie Murphy. The comedy world watched this happen and responded with some version of, that’s not real comedy.

I was running SiriusXM comedy in those days, and with the comedians, if you weren’t standing in front of a brick wall or smoking a cigarette outside the comedy cellar at midnight, you weren’t doing it right. Then there was Torgasm in 2005. HBO. Yeah, HBO, and this is HBO in its heyday. Dean Cook takes three comedian friends on a 30-day college tour.

Do you remember who the friends are? Wait till you hear who one of the friends are. I had forgotten who one of the friends are. I always think of Bobby Kelly, but there’s somebody who’s a bigger star than Bobby Kelly that was on this thing. I’ll tell you in a second.

Dean Cook takes three comedian friends on a 30-day college tour, films the whole thing. HBO turned it into a nine-episode documentary series that aired in the summer of 2006. The story is what the tour looked like from the perspective of the other three people on the bus. Robert Kelly, Jay Davis, and Gary Goleman. How does it feel to be.

Back in front of the cameras? I don’t feel any better than I did the last time I was in front of the cameras. I am insecure and vain and concerned that they’re going to make my nose look bigger than it really is. You ever drive by one. Of those things on the side of the highway and tell you how fast you’re going?

You know those things? You pay attention to them, man? You do? Can I tell you something? You don’t have to anymore.

I’m going to set you free. If you look very carefully, there’s a similar gadget in your dashboard. Think about that. Gary Goleman, the guy from The Great Depression, touring with Dean and Bobby Kelly and Jay Davis to Orgasm. In 2005, Gary Goleman had come off Last Comic Standing and had given him momentum and he was grinding.

I’m disappointed in the milk people and I hate Pepsi. Yeah, I used to be fine with Pepsi. I was like, okay, you’re there too, Pepsi. If I’m in a jam, I’ll use Pepsi. But then Pepsi started with this new campaign, the new advertising campaign.

Pepsi, it’s the cola. Oh, really, Pepsi? You’re the cola. Really? Pepsi, you just get to call yourself the cola.

You’re about as much the cola as rhubarb is the pie. Pepsi. You know it’s not the cola, because if you go home tonight and there’s an answering machine message on your answering machine, call me back, it’s the cola. I’m calling back Coke. He signed on to Tourgasm because he and Dane had been friends since the mid-90s when they met on the Boston scene, and because when HBO says, hey, HBO documentary, you don’t say no.

Now, from what I read, when Gary said yes, he didn’t know that the tour was being shot on spec, which meant no network deal yet, no budget beyond what Dane himself was funding out of his own pocket, the bus, the cameras, the whole thing. Dane’s money, Dane’s gamble. Goldman said years later he had no idea anyone was ever going to see the footage. Dane was filming it either to sell it to his fans on the website or sell it to a network. And by the time the tour ended, he was, in Goldman’s own words, the flavor of the decade.

Boy, that is a great description. People going crazy to work with Dane Cook, HBO buying the footage, the whole thing becoming a real TV series. Goldman described the experience as miserable. He left the tour partway for reasons that were never fully explained, then came back. The show labeled him, quote, the conflicted Gary Goleman.

Goleman eventually got the Great Depression. Robert Kelly built his own podcast and live career. Jay Davis worked the clubs. What they need to. Do is name these hurricanes after someone mean, scary, somebody you don’t like.

They should name the next hurricane after my ex-girlfriend. Yeah, they should call it Hurricane Bitch. Dane sold the footage to HBO and played Madison Square Garden. That’s basically all four trajectories you could have had right from that tour. HBO then gave Dane Cook Vicious Circle, a stand-up special filmed in front of 19,000 people at Boston’s TD Garden in 2006.

An arena, not a theater, not a big club, an arena, a stadium, Celtics, Bruins, huge. Dane performed in the round, the stage in the center, the audience surrounding it on all sides. Dane Cook sold out Madison Square Garden twice on the same day in November of 2007. That was before, like, everybody was selling out Madison Square Garden. That was a big deal.

He was only the second comedian to do it, the first Andrew Dice Clay in 1990. Now that we’ve mentioned Andrew Dice Clay, the comparison is worth noting because it’s not a flattering one in the cool kids of comedy. Dice Clay was another comedian who sold a lot of tickets to an audience that didn’t overlap with the critics and industry insiders who decided who counted. And although their material’s different, Dane Cook occupied a similar structural position. Massive commercial success, simultaneous with near-universal critical contempt from within the industry.

Dane Cook, nice to meet you. Excellent to be here. Everything has to be perfect for Dane Cook. I had Jesus up last week. There were sun chips waiting for me when I got here.

They knew that I loved sun chips, and they were there. This channel, Raw Dog, plays stand-up all day. I love your stuff. I know. I know.

You listen to Raw Dog? I do listen, yes. People love comedy. How many times? The first, second, third, fourth time.

Yeah. But we have bits in the computer that we have, and they don’t change unless you send. Us new ones. Right. Well, new ones are on their way.

Speaking of which, segue. Little gifties. You’re a huge movie star now, but you’re never going to quit stand-up. I can’t stay away, man. I love it.

Comedy is addictive. You can’t quit, right? No matter how big of a movie star you become, you can’t not go on. If I drive by a comedy club on the way back from set or whatever, and I don’t stop, I’m like, I could, try out that new bit that I ended up trying on, like, you know, the craft service guy. Because that’s what you end up doing.

You’re on a set. You start, like, you’re jonesing for stage time. Right. Anytime there’s a little crowd. I tried to relate just now to being on a set just now, by the way.

I just want to make a point. Yeah, I’m on set all the time jonesing for stage. Sorry. Tell us about the movie. You play a dentist in this movie.

Yes. I had the weirdest question. Yeah, no, no. Were they like, were they like, we’re looking for an actor for this movie who wants to play a dentist. We like Dane Cook, but we got to see his teeth first.

Well, no, but I am a method actor, so I actually went to dental school. It’s been. It was an exhaustive six month process. Six months. Phoenix Online must be like an online dental school or something.

In 2006, the AP ran a piece that was asking a question. Is Dean Cook actually funny? Jim Brewer, who at the time was hosting a daily show on Sirius Satellite Radio for the Raw Dog Channel, of which I was the boss and the guy that brought Jim Brewer in. That was called Jim Brewer Unleashed. And Jim gave the AP the quote they wanted.

He said, Everybody kills this guy. Not one comedian comes on my show and says I’m happy for him, which is weird. They can’t stand this poor guy. Brewer’s show had comedians on it constantly. Working stand-up comedians, touring comedians, people embedded in the actual circuit.

Yeah, like everybody did Brewer’s show back in the day. That was a big show. Prior to Howard coming to Sirius, Brewer’s show was actually the most listened to thing. Jim’s read on the consensus in the community was not the read of an outsider or critic. It was from a comic.

Jim acknowledged that Dane Cook was a tremendous performer. He separated the performance question from the material question and the character question. But Jim said a lot of comedians were upset because they feel this guy has snatched a lot of material, which bundled the aesthetic objection and the ethical objection. The Comedy World’s reaction to Dane Cook in 2006 wasn’t about the jokes. It was about the success, the success that came out of the Comedy World’s permission or endorsement.

It came from a website, a MySpace page, and college campuses rather than, you know, brick walls and cigarettes. The comedy world was watching somebody bypass its gatekeeping entirely, doing it at a big scale, and then getting accused of joke theft. My wife and I were thinking of having a baby, and I’d like to have a kid, because you can name your kid anything you want. I like that part. I’d like to give my kid an interesting name, you know?

Like a name with no vowels, maybe, you know? Just like, P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P. Just like 40 F’s, that’s his name. Go clean your room, you know, something like that. I’ve been thinking about kids.

I want to have like 19 kids. I think naming them, that’s going to be fun. Whatever the names that you come up with, that’s exciting right there. You get to both decide, hey, do you want to name that? No, I don’t like that name.

It’s like a little game you try to come up. I already have names picked out. I don’t even know. First kid, boy, girl, I don’t care. The first one that comes out, I’m naming it.

I think it’s beautiful. It’s feminine, but strong at the same time. Time for bed. The joke theft controversy around Dane Cook centered on comparisons between bits on retaliation and material that had appeared on Louis C.K. ‘s 2001 album, Live in Houston. Specifically three bits, including one called Itchy Butts, I’ll clean that up, where the similarities were specific enough that Louis C.K.

Publicly wrote in 2005, the year Retaliation came out, OK, this kid is stealing from me and making a lot of money. C.K. Said he wasn’t going to do anything about it. He wasn’t going to go to court over a bit called Itchy Butt, which is a very funny sentence and a principled position. But the accusation was out there and it landed in a comedy world that was already looking for reasons to get rid of Dane Cook.

And it became a defining part of how Dane Cook’s career was discussed for years afterwards, Dane denied it consistently and vehemently. Dane’s version was, the similarities were coincidental. Parallel thinking comedy is more common than people outside the industry understand that two comedians working similar life experiences will sometimes arrive at similar places without any contact between the comedians. Yes, parallel thinking happens. The comedy world knows it happens.

It happens more than audiences realize. But three incidents on two albums by two specific comedians is, you know, a math problem. What’s fascinating about all this is it sort of got resolved on television in public. In 2011, Louis C.K. Called Dane Cook four years after the accusations and asked if Dane Cook wanted to put it to bed in an episode of the TV show Louis.

Dane Cook said, yeah. The scene in season two, episode seven, is one of the more unusual pieces of television that comedy has ever generated. C.K. ‘s character, Louis C.K. Goes to meet Dane backstage at the arena Dane is headlining that night, and the two of them start talking about the accusations. In some dialogue that CK wrote and Dane Cook agreed to perform.

I don’t think that you saw me do those jokes and said, I’m going to tell those jokes too. I don’t think there’s a world where you’re that stupid or that. Bad a guy. I think you saw me do them. I know you saw me do them.

And I think they just went in your brain. And I don’t think you meant to do it, but I don’t think you stopped yourself either. And that’s why I never felt the need to help you not be hated by a lot of people. You know, the one thing that like really just gets to me is the whole thing about, um, people saying that I stole the joke about the itchy asshole because I get an itchy asshole a lot. So for you to think that you’re the only person who got an itchy asshole in America, I mean, like that’s, that’s bullshit.

You should try a natural laundry detergent. What? Cook later said the call from C.K. Aston to do the episode was a relief. It was so old hat.

It was pretty boring. And he was getting tired about getting asked about it. C.K. Said he didn’t think Dane had stolen from him knowingly. He thought Cook got some of his jokes in his head and got sloppy and that he’s a good guy.

The comedy community largely accepted it and moved on. The Internet did not because the Internet doesn’t move on from anything. And here we are today rehashing this.

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And then there’s the thing that puts Dane Cook in the news right now.

The brother. Between 2004 and 2008, Daryl McCauley, Dane Cook’s half-brother who had grown up in the same house, apparently was stealing from Dane Cook. Not skimming, not creative accounting, but doing withdrawals of $ 20, 000, $ 50, 000, $ 100, 000 at a time from Dane Cook’s accounts. We’re told there were forged bank statements, checks written to himself. It was discovered and resulted in a total theft of at least $ 12 million.

Dane Cook believes the actual number is higher and some is still unaccounted for. Funny Money, the Dane Cook story, takes a look at this. It will debut September 29th. McCauley was ultimately arrested in 2008 and charged with stealing $ 12 million from Dane Cook. While acting as his business manager, he pleaded guilty to larceny, embezzlement, and forgery in 2010 and was sentenced to five to six years in prison.

He was also ordered to repay the $ 12 million to Cook. Dane Cook describes him in the documentary as a person who spent time pretending he was something he wasn’t, which is a pretty remarkable sentence to applaud your own half-brother. The timing of the theft means it happened during the exact years of Dane’s greatest commercial success. The arena tours, double platinum album, the HBO deals, the garden. When we watch this thing on September 29th, we’re not sure if it’s a closure document or a reopening of a wound.

There’s an unresolved ending. The brother who took the money and vanished. Makes the story feel unfinished rather than settled. So how does Dane Cook fit in the comedy conversation in 2026? Strangely to me, he’s not in the regular rotation of names when people discuss the greatest stand-ups of his era.

Like if we look at the first 26 years of this century, I think I rate him a lot higher than most of the comedy snobs would. The critical consensus that formed against Dane in the mid-2000s was never fully reversed. There’s the joke theft controversy and, you know, the whole like, oh, it’s just a MySpace comedian kind of thing. His film career, which looked like it might do pretty well, the guy was a really nice-looking guy, a lot of charisma, funny, super popular, filling out arenas, did okay. He was the most talked-about comedian in 2006, and we don’t really talk about him now.

What shouldn’t get lost is what he did, the thing that everybody ripped him for. He looked at the internet in 2001 and understood it was a machine for building direct audience relationships outside the industry’s permission structure. He built one and worked it at a scale that nobody’s predicting. And it made people uncomfortable for reasons that had much to do with jealousy as with aesthetics. I mean, you know, you look today and you see like a comedian like I’m just a random name, Tom Segura, publishing outside the system.

And everybody goes, oh, great. Dean Cook did it first. Jim Brewer said it. Not one comedian comes on my show and says I’m happy for him. The comedy world was not happy for Dean Cook.

It’s funny. You live long enough and you become the thing you hate. The other brick wall comedians might want to look in the mirror. That’s your comedy news for today.

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Featured: Carlos Mencia, Chris Rock, Robbie Hoffman, Joe Rogan

What’s in This Episode

• Carlos Mencia tax evasion charges and new tour
• Carlos Mencia on joke-stealing allegations and internet cancellation
• Carlos Mencia’s therapy journey and self-reflection
• Chris Rock on Los Angeles and the nature of fame
• Robbie Hoffman on comedy boundaries and non-binary jokes

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Carlos Mencia did a really interesting interview with the San Antonio Current. You may recall that Carlos Mencia was recently charged with 12 felony counts of tax evasion in L.A. County. Mencia pled not guilty to all counts.

He disputes the allegations. He told The Current, I’m not a victim. Let’s move forward and see where this train goes. At the end of the day, my work will hopefully be what people will remember me by. Well, that’s a whole other conversation.

Carlos named his new tour, Keep Me Out of Jail. The current was curious, is that your way of taking control of the narrative? Carlos said, you know, everything today is some kind of manipulation. Up until 2007 or 2008, I started getting popular and I started getting a lot of hate because of joke stealing allegations. I wasn’t ready for all that to come.

Even since then, my business has dropped way more than the average career. Since then, I’ve been treading water like a little duck. So when I was charged with tax evasion, it was almost welcomed. The current was like, why’d you welcome that? What happened?

Carlos said they came up with a new tax task force in Southern California. I was expecting that at some point I’d go to a comedy club and get a phone call from my agent saying, listen, you’re not going to get paid this week. California is garnishing your paycheck or some stuff like that. And I’d be like, oh, no. All right.

Time to take care of that. I grew up poor when my family was really crunching for money. My mom and dad would put all the bills on the table. The pink ones were the ones we had to pay. That was the way I dealt with my taxes.

Inevitably, you’re going to have to take care of it. And so I’m taking care of it. Two things there. So do you remember like when Chappelle’s show blew up, Carlos was like the replacement and they treated it like it was, you know, a new season of Chappelle. Basically, it was same kind of set, same kind of vibe.

Like he was really up there into the joke stealing thing. Carlos Menzelia is still one of my favorite lines ever. So the current was like, it sounds like you want to take responsibility, but you also pled not guilty to the charges, right? Carlos said, I never evaded. I filled out my 1099s everywhere I went.

I legit didn’t have enough money to cover my bases. I knew this would happen, but within the next couple of weeks, all those tax years are going to be filed. Once those tax years are filed, there’s no more evasion. It’s kind of like they’re accusing me of murdering somebody, but the person is still alive. I’m just going to have to pay whatever fines and then it’ll go away.

At the end of the day, they did the right thing. Hmm. I’m not an expert in tax, but I’m reading that and I’m like, huh? Yeah. OK.

Hey, I trust you, Carlos. The current said, you’ve said in the past that you’re the first person the Internet has ever tried to cancel. What do you mean? Carlos said, that’s me, bro. Like, legit, everybody thought the joke-stealing allegations would go away, but there were some factors that nobody considered.

I’ll weigh in here. Like, the joke-stealing? First, it was being driven by Joe Rogan, somebody who had a platform. So when Joe drove her repeatedly, the story got bigger. I’ve met Carlos Mencia.

He was very nice in person, but when I met him, he wasn’t saying that he didn’t do the joke-stealing. So I don’t know if this is revisionist or I haven’t read enough of the article, but, like, I was in the room with the guy. Like, he wasn’t saying that that didn’t happen. He was very apologetic and whatever that was, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, it’s probably more like 20 at this point. But as he said, so when Joe drove over repeatedly, the story got bigger.

I was told to let it go and not address it. It wasn’t what I want to do. So I said, okay, I disagree with you, but I’ll do what you guys want. I paid a lot of money to a lot of people for that advice and it was 100% wrong. The current did a good job here.

They were like, all right, if you could go back, would you defend yourself harder against the allegations? Carlos said, no, I wouldn’t, but for a different reason. I wouldn’t defend myself because if I did, I wouldn’t have learned that I’m not a very sensitive person. I would never have been able to understand bullying. Go online.

You can see that they tried to attack me for everything, from my name being Carlos.. To the fact that I’m not Mexican, to stealing jokes. I don’t remember anyone, I don’t remember anybody being upset or making comments about his name being Carlos. I do remember being surprised to learn that he wasn’t of Mexican ancestry because we used to do like a comedy World Cup kind of thing, you know, and we would pitch comedians of whatever ancestry against other people. So I think Louis C.K.

From the top of my mind is of Mexican ancestry.

And then Is Carlos from Honduras?

I’m doing this from memory. The editor chimed in here that Carlos Mencia’s birth name is Ned. And yes, he’s of Honduran ancestry. See, my brain still works. But I don’t remember anybody being like, your name’s not Carlos.

I don’t remember that. Anyway, Carlos Mencia said there was a lot of stuff they tried. It was concerted effort. When that occurred, it took me a long time to realize that if somebody thinks you’re a jerk cleaning it up, F that person. But if everybody thinks you’re a jerk, you’re probably a jerk.

The current nailing it again. Are you saying that you were a jerk, D-word, but didn’t realize it? Carlos said, yes, it took a decade of therapy for me to realize that. One of my best friends said to me, you can be a effing a-hole sometimes and you don’t even know it. I had to deal with that and really look within.

I’d say from 2010 to 2020, that was the journey I was on, trying to find myself in that respect. I think having to deal with tax evasion allegations now is the culmination of all that. In a way, it’s liberating because I’ve been waiting for the shoe to drop. Really, really fascinating stuff there. Chris Rock spoke to Variety about his relationship with Los Angeles.

Chris said, it’s weird. I just bought a place there. In parentheses, it says assumes a snobbish effect. So Chris must have said, I just bought a place there. So I went here in L.A.

I love parts of it. I always say the average movie studio like Paramount. What’s in Paramount? Does cameras, sound equipment. What do you do with that?

Can you really steal that stuff? There’s more value at the average Home Depot than at Paramount. But Paramount’s got armed guards. Why? Because they have dreams in there and people will do anything to get their dreams.

Chris Rock is so grounded. I’ve appreciated reading this article. He said L.A. Is a complicated place, man. Fame’s a complicated thing.

I’ve seen the switch in my lifetime. It used to be that everybody wanted to be great, a great singer, great actor, great comedian. Now it’s just fame, and the greatness is almost assumed. I mean, you’re always going to be at it at some point if you don’t have the goods, but L.A. Is the mecca of that.

It can be beautiful, it’s got the best weather in the world, but it also attracts an underbelly that people want to pretend doesn’t exist. Wow. Robbie Hoffman says she’s still figuring out what topics, if any, are off-limits. She caught up with NPR. She has taken heat for some of her jokes, including jokes about the non-binary community and dismissing the use of they-them pronouns.

Hoffman told NPR, I like to cope and explore through jokes, and I feel like I should be more able to do that than, say, some of my counterparts. I feel like if I can’t talk about it, who can? Hoffman describes herself as, quote, somebody who’s clearly in the queer space, who cut my breasts off, who could be they them at the drop of a hat. I think it’s fair if they’re mad about it. I also think it’s fair for many of us to laugh at it.

And I feel like I want to talk about the stuff that I know and experience day to day. She talked about her first standup performance, which she described as brutal. Hoffman said, I went to a club where I was living and I said, what is the best place to bomb? She only made it through one minute of a five minute set. But said, it was good, even the one minute I did.

I’ve never been the overnight sensation, overnight success. I’ve always been the slow and steady, keep at it. She was asked if she would host a late night show. Robbie Hoffman, 12.30, make 12.30 great again. Seth, goodbye.

How about Robbie Hoffman at 12.30? That could be interesting. She says, I’d be excellent. Call me. I’m on board.

Stavros Halgias did the Maria Bamford questionnaire for Vulture. Some of the questions were, what did you have for breakfast? Is it your usual? Stavros said, I was running late to a podcast and I had a chicken sausage, egg, and cheese with a green juice from a bagel and juice place that happened to be right where my friend’s studio is. I was really pumped about the chicken sausage.

I find pork sausage a little too heavy, unless it’s in brat form and coming right off the grill, but they didn’t divulge it was maple flavored. Real problem, put a damper on the entire breakfast experience. I want my breakfast sandwiches purely savory. Stavros tells us I tend not to eat breakfast because I’m regressing to all my worst habits currently, so I basically don’t eat until I’m starving. Then I order an obscene amount of takeout and one giant meal.

I found the one-way intermittent fasting doesn’t work. We will skip the comedy stock market today. Why, Johnny Mac? Because today I’m at the podcast festival. We love the comedy stock market.

I do, too. But here’s the deal. This is the week of the big podcasting conference. So right now I’m in New York City at the podcasting conference. I had to tape this episode in advance.

So I don’t have enough knowledge of what happened during the week for the comedy stock market. We’ll get back to it next week. Matthew Broussard spoke to NOLA.com. He talked about his heritage, which is Cajun and Jewish. He said, those two groups don’t get along very well.

Quoting Broussard, here’s how much Cajuns hate Jews. They design all their food so Jews can’t eat it. Every dish is either shellfish or pork. All of it. Shrimp creole, crawfish etouffee, jambalaya, boudin.

You know how not kosher boudin is? It’s made up of ground pork wrapped in pages of the Old Testament. And he says, it’s delicious. Good tag. He says his father continued to speak to his brothers in French, but he wasn’t that proud of Cajun culture.

Matthew said the only Cajun presence we had in our house was Adam Sandler’s character in The Waterboy. That was deeply offensive to my father. He hated that guy. You go, Mr. Broussard.

I’m with you. One of his hobbies is exploring using City Bike, which is the New York City bike share program. He says his tracking feature shows that he’s hit 1,700 of the city’s 2,500 bike stations. That is impressive. He’s trying to hit them all.

He says mathematically, it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve. It’s called the traveling salesman problem, plotting the minimum route between a bunch of different nodes, whether it’s 20 or 100. It becomes mathematically impossible. Even with computers, the amount of time it takes to compute is incalculable. And speaking of Adam Sandler, Travis Kelsey spoke about Adam Sandler on Travis’s podcast there.

You may recall Adam Sandler was the officiant at the Travis Kelsey-Adam Sandler wedding. Travis said he’s just been the effing best person on the planet. And from the Toronto Guardian, they do a regular look at local comedians. Today, it’s Dustin Searcy, who describes his comedy style as a blend of silliness, sarcasm and passionate storytelling. Who are your influences, Dustin Searcy?

Great list here. Mr. Bean, Daniel Tosh, Dave Chappelle, the genie from Aladdin. That’s Robin Williams, isn’t it? And Terry Crews from the Old Spice commercials.

I love that list. Who’s your favorite comedian growing up? Robin Williams. Now it tracks. Favorite comedian now?

He said it varies day to day, but right now a YouTube video of Larry David getting mad at a parking lot gate because it won’t accept his credit card, causing him to hold up traffic. So Larry David. I also always drink a club soda with lime. This is fun. What’s your favorite bit you’ve written and why are you proud of it?

When I was in grade three, my teacher was trying to teach us the word synonym. And to make her and the class laugh, I kept pronouncing it cinnamon. With slight variations, not the most creative joke, but I committed 100%. After a couple of minutes, I had her in tears, which I was very proud of because I had a massive crush on her. She was hesitant to consider a relationship because of the age gap.

She was in her early 20s and I was in my 80s. The way to her heart was making her laugh. Sadly, we never dated. And that is your comedy news for today. What’s on tomorrow’s show?

I don’t know because I taped this a week ago. Did I mention I’m at a podcasting conference? See you with something tomorrow.

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Featured: John Mulaney, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Matthew Rhys, Jean Smart

What’s in This Episode

• John Mulaney’s Emmy Awards monologue about lead actor in drama category
• Stephen Colbert wins final Emmy for The Late Show
• Stephen Colbert appears on Jimmy Kimmel Live post-Emmys
• Colbert shaves beard on Kimmel’s show per bet with wife
• Captain America shield transferred from Late Show to Kimmel’s set
• Emmy winners in comedy and animation categories
• Johnny Mac’s theory that Bob’s Burgers is a comedy hoax

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. I’m going to mix and match here. I’ve got to catch up on a couple of things. I had jury duty, so I’m a little behind. Stephen Colbert was on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, but there were also the Emmys to talk about.

Let’s start with the Emmys because everybody’s raving about this clip from John Mulaney. And for good reason. It’s a little long. It’s a touch naughty. But here’s John Mulaney at the Emmys.

All right, what a wonderful Emmy weekend this is. This, it’s these couple days where you find out just how much you mean to your billion dollar streamer. We love you, we want you to know how important you are to this storytelling family. Can I get a plus one? You get out of here.

This is the best part of the night, lead actor in a drama. This award is for the guys. Just men being men. Finally, something for the fellas. And what a, what a crop of prom kings we have.

They’re not soft like the dad on Bluey, no. Guy’s a joke. Since the creation of television, men have been historically unrepresented. For the first three years TV existed, there were no men on it. It was just beauty contests and children talking to hand puppets until the early 60s, until a man walked out and said, enough, my name is Fonzie and the president’s been shot.

But let’s talk about these bros tonight, these sweat hogs. Some of the men in this category do method acting, and some do regular, less annoying acting. But no matter what, when these fellas hit their mark, they know all their lines. Why? Because they started looking at their sides earlier that morning.

These men, excuse me, these men give it all in every single take, unless the coverage is on the other actor and then they might bounce early, but that’s okay. And they can play anything, these nominees, not just doctors. They can play a cop or an FBI agent or a secret agent and then that’s it, no other examples. I believe it was DJ Khaled who said, real men don’t go down on their wives, but, But these nominees know that that is BS. They know there’s often less pressure on them if they do that first.

You know, I was shooting down Barham last night at 90 miles an hour, and I was reminded of something I read in actor Frank Vincent’s 2006 book. A Guy’s Guide to Being a Man’s Man. And I do want to note this copy is from the Glendale Public Library. If you don’t mind, I’d like to read a passage from the book right now, and then in a minute we’ll get to this. Let me see here.

Okay, and I’m reading now. A man’s man can be wearing the best clothes, drinking the finest wine, sitting with the most beautiful woman in Las Vegas. If he doesn’t treat everyone around him with respect and class, he’s not a real man’s man. He’s just a jabroni in a good suit. Stephen Colbert did win in his final year.

The Late Show was nominated alongside The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Saturday Night Live. The Emmy goes to The Late Show starring Stephen Colbert. I just want to point out that if you like the comedy tonight, my old writers wrote it tonight. Ariel Dumas, my head writer, is the head writer of tonight’s Emmys. Thank you so much on behalf of the over 200 people who threw themselves at this show for 11 years to try to do the best show they possibly could for you.

The thing about these late shows is that besides being a really good steady job is that they require so many people that they’re a fantastic incubator for young people to come in, to learn to work professionally on a deadline, in cooperation, in collaboration. And that is the future of our business that we have to look after. I want you to know I got some great news. They are all tech avail. Hire them, they will make your show better and they will make your day easier.

I want to thank so many people in this room. Over the last 21 years, I’ve interviewed at least a thousand of you. Thank you for coming on to talk to this idiot. I want you to. Know that you were the perfect guest.

This segment went great, and I’m sorry I forgot to play your clip. But of course, there can only be one favorite guest, and that is my wife, Evie McGee. Thank you, darling. Thank you. For being my only crew and my only guest during COVID and my only audience and the only audience I really care about.

Yours is the laugh that I want for the rest of my life. I love you. And I want to say to the audience, thank you so much for watching. We hope you enjoyed the show. We had a great time doing it for you.

That’s it. Thank you. We’ll catch you all on the flip.

And then on Tuesday night, Stephen Colbert stopped by the set of Jimmy Kimmel…

Last night, our first guest capped off a tumultuous year with a shiny new Emmy for a show that was so popular they had to pull it off of television. From Rivendell by way of Gondor by way of Mordor, please welcome to late night television once again, Mr. Stephen Colbert. People still do this. People still do these shows.

It rarely happens that way, though. Look at that. Like a shark in the ocean. This is where you belong in a late night television studio. I don’t know.

Congratulations. Thank you very much. Not just to you, but to your whole staff. You guys won six Emmys. Seven, actually.

Seven Emmys. Seven Emmys, yeah. Oh, wow. Seven Emmys, yeah. I thought it was six.

Nope, it’s seven, but thanks. I’ll take one of them away from you. Anything to make you happy. Thank you for having me back. It’s great to have you back.

Late night TV. I remember it well. Do you? Many fond memories of this. Do you?

Do you think about it ever? Nope. I will say. I have an opportunity to not think about the news every day, and I took it. You took it, yeah.

Later on in the interview, Kimmel asked Colbert if CBS had called to congratulate him on the seven Emmys. Colbert said, I’m not familiar with that organization. Ouch. Colbert had promised his wife that he would shave his beard if the show won an Emmy. It did win an Emmy.

Kimmel volunteered for the job. And by the final segment, we saw Colbert looking kind of like he used to when he hosted 1135. Kimmel said, now I recognize you. On the set of The Late Show, there was a Captain America shield given to Stephen Colbert by Marvel. When CBS dismantled The Late Show, Colbert said he wanted to send it to Kimmel.

On Tuesday night, Kimmel brought the shield out and asked Colbert if he could install it permanently on the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Colbert said, it’s your shield, man. Kimmel put it over to the producer’s well in front of the audience and affixed it to the wall per late nighter. Kimmel said, I want to be able to see it when I’m doing the monologue every night. Kimmel said, the shield is on the wall for all time.

Or at least how much time we have left. We’ll see what happens. I don’t think Jimmy Kimmel’s going anywhere. Back to the Emmys.. Did I say Oscars earlier?

I might have said Oscars. Emmys. It was the Emmys. Best Actor in a Comedy Series, Matthew Rhys for Widow’s Bay. Best Actress in a Comedy, Jean Smart for Hacks won once again.

Animated Program, the winner, South Park. But the nominees included Rick and Morty, The Simpsons, Smiling Friends, which is something on Adult Swim, Star Wars Visions, and the Bob’s Burgers hoax continues. Now, if you’re new to the show, I’m going to ask you two questions. One, have you ever seen Bob’s Burgers? You haven’t.

The other is, have you ever met anyone who has seen Bob’s Burgers? The answer there is also no. I understand that Kevin Burkhart tells you coming up after the big football game, there’s an all-new Simpsons followed by Bob’s Burgers, but you’ve never actually stuck around to see if Bob’s Burgers actually airs, have you? No, you watch Sunday Night Football, and I’m here to tell you there’s no such thing as Bob’s Burgers. I understand that you’ve seen merch.

I understand that they do interviews talking about it, but this is one of the great comedy hoaxes of all time, a Kaufman-level event. Categories continue to be confusing. Widow’s Bay, that’s the horror comedy, comedy in quotes on Apple TV. They won 14 Emmys. That beat last year’s 13 from the studio, also from Apple.

They had 19 nominations overall, including the top prize where they beat out Abbott Elementary, clearly a sitcom. Hacks, OK. Margot’s got money troubles. Nobody wants this. And The Bear, which is clearly not a comedy.

I don’t know why they keep nominating that. And they insist on saying it’s a comedy. It is not. They also beat out Only Murders in the Building and Shrinking. Hey, you know who was there?

Marcelo Hernandez. They’re going to try and make Marcelo Hernandez a thing. And here he is at the Emmys. And, you know, he did his thing. Hello, it’s an honor for me to be here.

It’s my first time at the Emmys, and I get to present, so I just want to take this opportunity to say hi to a few people I. Might not be able to say hi to later. I don’t know what parties I’ve been invited to, and I don’t know what parties you have been invited to, so just very quickly, I would like to say hello to Harrison Ford. Hello, hi. You are a legend, man, and a real inspiration to me, and I would like to invite you to have dinner at my house.

Yes, no pressure. I want to say hi to Zendaya. Hi. You’re a beast, and you’re amazing, and I saw you, and I wanted to play it cool, and I’ve decided I can do that. So I would like to invite you and Spider-Man to have dinner at my house.

Yes, what’s up, man? I would also like to say hello to Oscar Isaac. Oscar, you are so good in beef, man, and you are also Hernandez, like I am, so we could be cousins, you never know. And I will see you at Christmas. I will cook you whatever you want.

And lastly, I want to say. Hello to Matthew McConaughey. When I was younger, my Cuban tia mi chichi, she said, Marcelo, if you’re working very hard, one day you can hang out with Matthew McConaughey first. And I’m basically doing it. So that is my little spiel.

John Oliver was out and about on red carpets. And for some reason, they asked him about turning 50. He turns 50 next year. When I saw the story, I’m like, is he like 50 this week? No, he’s 50 next year in April.

All right, John, in April, when you turn 50, what’s the plan? He told Live from E, it’s definitely going to involve a keg stand. Today in New York City, it’s not only the big podcasting festival where you’ll find me. Tonight is the Ferry Show with Pete Davidson and Colin Jost. I tried to get tickets.

There was a small window every day last week at around 3 p.m. Where you had to go to a website. And I would remember around 447 and be like, oh, yeah, Snapple Ferry thing. Yeah, I should check that out. And I did not get tickets.

So I will have to find something else to do in New York City tonight. As I’ll remind you, I’m from New York City, and I have a place in New York City, so I won’t have any problem finding something to do. I would have gone to this if I got a ticket, but I’ll be okay missing it out. It does sound like fun. Pete Davidson and Colin Jost are turning their ferry into a floating comedy club for a one-night Snapple event.

It branded the Snapple Island Ferry, which is such good branding that I’ll actually say the sponsor name. You may recall Pete Davidson and Colin Jost purchased the ferry at auction in 2022 for $ 280, 000. Seemed like a good idea at the time. They’ve hosted a few events on the vessel, including Tommy Hilfiger’s 2025 New York Fashion Week show. Well, tonight, the Snapple Island Ferry is a one-day-only free comedy club.

You never know. Last minute tickets might show up. The website is register.snappleislandfairy.com if you want to take a flyer there. I have now made other plans. I bet they get some pretty good people to show up.

I’m sure they’re going to want to make an event out of it. Here in New Jersey, Kevin Hart spotted with Henry Cavill. They are filming Untitled Spy Movie, which might have a title. They were seen outside a private home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Netflix says the movie is still untitled, but the chairs on the film set had the title The Serpent and the Snake.

There’s a graphic showing the outline of two spies with guns drawn, although some people think The Serpent and the Snake might be a placeholder title. We’re told Kevin Hart was wearing a Joy Division t-shirt, plaid pajama pants, and slides with socks. Henry Cavill wore an all-black ensemble of elbow patch, jacket, and jeans, sat on a motorcycle. So it sounds like this is going to be typical Kevin Hart product with a capital P. So we’ll have Henry Cavill looking like handsome and cool and suave and James Bond-ish, and then Kevin Hart will do his wacky Kevin Hart thing.

I mean, we’ve seen five million versions of this, but Kevin Hart is like a billionaire, and I’m recording a podcast in the basement, so he’s right. All right, tomorrow on this program, I pre-taped it last Friday, so it’s a little generic, I’ll be honest with you. There’s no comedy stock market tomorrow, but I had to tape that one a week ago. Then on Saturday, the weekend deep dive is Dean Cook. You got that Dane Cook movie coming out in a bit.

So I thought it was a good time to take a look at Dane. Sunday’s episode is a normal episode with timely news. I did watch Chilkoi’s new special. Now, it’s funny. As soon as I hit play on it, I’m like 15 seconds into it.

And I jump in the Facebook group, Daily Comedy News podcast group. And I write, I’m so distracted by his veneers because I was so distracted by his straight, white, shiny teeth. I couldn’t stop looking at them.

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And then about a minute in, minor spoiler, Jokoi has a whole chunk about the …

And I was like, oh, OK. So I’m wondering if they kind of put the spotlight on the veneers to set that up. A pretty good special. I’m not sure how much I laughed, but it’s one of those that I call really good company. And, you know, I’m a comedy snob, et cetera, et cetera.

I think the closer is really strong and has a good emotional punch to it. So definitely stick around for the end. Nice special by Jokoi. It is in the top tier of specials in what has been a bad year for comedy specials. We’ll have to see if there’s a strong fourth quarter.

Many years there are. And, you know, Netflix all of a sudden goes, yeah, bang, bang, bang, bang. Here’s a bunch of stuff we hadn’t previously announced. You know, they’ll drop a Chappelle special on New Year’s Eve. They did that one year.

So we’ll see what the fourth quarter brings. But so far, it’s been a pretty lame year for comedy specials. I’ve been enjoying the heck out of Tires. I caught up last night. There was an episode where they went to a party.

It’s episode three of the new season. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. It was very funny. If not, I won’t spoil it at all. Steve Gerben is one of the Tiresers.

He apparently is known as the King of Westchester Golf. He says the nickname is a joke created by Shane Gillis after Steve Gerben broke 80 for the first time, scoring a 79 on 18 holes of golf last year. Gerben said, I thought I’d get my friend to start videotaping it in case it happened on the 18th hole, and then I did it. So Shane saw the video and was making fun of it on his podcast, calling me the King of Westchester Golf, while he downplays his claim to the throne. Steve Gerben does play golf every week in the Philadelphia region.

He says, I can’t see myself leaving the area. I really love it here and it’s home.

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Also, given how I feel about golf, suburbs make way more sense.

It’s just scratching the right itch for me. Now, this is interesting. The fictional Valley Forge Automotive Center is named after the real life automotive business that Steve Gerben’s father had. He sold it in 2011. Steve said, I remember after season one, my dad was on the boardwalk and he saw a Valley Forge auto shirt in one of the stores and he was like, this is insane.

Because it’s the company he had for 20 years, and then it’s gone, and now we brought it back in a way. That’s kind of nice. Now, Gerben’s been friends with these guys for a while, so while Shane became a bit of a, I don’t know, shooting star for Shane, but clearly, you know, a top comedian, I think if we had to rank the active comedians right now, Shane probably a two, unless you want to put him at one with Chappelle. He’s had quite the year. I’ll remind you, he’s sold 70,000 tickets at a stadium.

Anyway, the thing Gerben said he had in his back pocket was a script for a show based on experience working at the tire shop. He initially wrote it 15 years before Tires premiered on Netflix in 2024. It has been picked up for season four, which is great. And let’s do one of those Toronto comedian things. The Toronto Guardian does these where they check in with comedians from time to time.

Evan Dubois, a Toronto-based comedian, blending traditional stand-up with comedy songs, visual gags, and creative bits. Who are your influences? He said, Biggest? Definitely Bo Burnham. Others include Demetri Martin, Mike Birbiglia, Flight of the Conchords, and Pete Holmes.

That’s a good mix. His favorite comedian growing up? Mike Birbiglia. Oh my goodness. I was well into my 30s when Birbiglia came along.

Growing up, you were into Mike Birbiglia? I feel so old. Oh my. Evan Dubois says, I always loved how his shows were structured to have stories based around a central theme. Favorite comedian right now is Bo Burnham.

Inside his special is one of the best things I’ve ever watched. Pre-show ritual? He tunes his guitar in a corner so he doesn’t bother anybody. And that is your comedy news for today. Tomorrow, generic-ish episode that I recorded a week ago.

You know, I hook you up. It’s as if I pre-taped a weekend episode, which I openly do. So it’s, you know, it’s at that level.

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And then Saturday, Deep Dive with Dane Cook.

Sunday’s normal. Monday’s normal. Have a great day.

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Featured: Taylor Swift, Nikki Glaser, Dave Chappelle, Howard Stern, Chris Rock, Joe Cojoy, Conan O’Brien, Adam Sandler

What’s in This Episode

• Taylor Swift reportedly upset with Nikki Glaser over wedding guest comments
• Dave Chappelle announces arena tour including New York Comedy Festival
• Howard Stern’s HBO deal and SiriusXM channel termination
• Chris Rock jokes about Taylor Sheridan Yellowstone role
• Joe Cojoy Netflix special filmed at Stockton Arena
• Joe Cojoy to receive Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2027

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Well, we kind of knew this was going to happen, huh? Hi, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Taylor Swift is reportedly livid with Nikki Glaser. Nikki, I told you, you shouldn’t have said anything on stage. You blew it.

This comes from Shooter Scoop, which is a pretty gossipy website. I’m familiar with it. We use it on the Palace Intrigue podcast as a source, and it tends to be gossipy, and it tends to have unnamed sources. But per Rob Shooter, Nikki Glaser didn’t just break wedding etiquette. She exposed the one thing Taylor Swift never wanted anyone saying out loud.

Sources tell Naughty But Nice that Taylor Swift is livid after Nikki Glaser publicly admitted she attended Taylor Swift’s wedding despite barely knowing the couple. I think barely knowing is even exaggeration. Like, that would be like me saying I barely know Taylor Swift. Had they even met before? Insiders say she wasn’t alone.

One of the unknown insiders tells Naughty But Nice, Taylor is furious with Nikki, but the worst part is that it’s true. There were famous people at that wedding who barely knew Taylor. Yeah, we knew this. This is not as everyone could tell. And some had never met her.

Yeah, she doesn’t know these people. Nikki said publicly what everybody was whispering privately. On stage, Nikki Glaser had said, I’m a huge Swifty, probably the biggest Swifty that was at that event. If you’re a Swifty, you’ll understand. I got the text inviting me to the wedding.

I never thought in a million years I’d get invited. I don’t even know them, but I got invited. Yeah, because you’re like the it’s a comedian right now and your agent and your PR team is getting it done. They got the invite. We all know how this works.

It’s not like Taylor said, how about Nikki Glaser? Somebody in Hollywood put this together for you. We know how this works. The source says the joke going around is that Meghan Markle knew the celebrities at her wedding better than Taylor knew some of hers. For Taylor, that comparison is absolutely mortifying.

A wonderful story, which makes a great crossover story with the Palace Intrigue podcast. I’m the writer on that one. We talk about the royal family and a lot of Meghan Markle seven days a week. So check out Palace Intrigue wherever you get your pods. The insider said Nikki made the wedding sound less like a celebration and more like celebrity casting.

Yeah, that’s what it was. It was a wedding experience. Officiated by Adam Sandler at Madison Square Garden. That’s what this was. Some guests don’t have Taylor’s number.

They attended her wedding, then went right back to being strangers. Yeah, no kidding. Dave Chappelle has announced an arena tour. Pretty exciting. One of the dates is at the New York Comedy Festival.

Carolyn Hirsch, who founded it, said Dave is one of the defining comedians of his generation, and without question, one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time. To have Dave close out his tour by opening our festival is spectacular. So this is The New York Comedy Festival stepping up. This is a whole other level. I’ve commented about the New York Comedy Festival.

The lineup so far had been underwhelming. But no, yeah, Dave is the ace. Yeah, it just took a step up in class. It’s a short tour. October 20th in Nashville at the Bridgestone Arena.

The next night in Charlotte. Then on the 23rd of October, Toronto. Then back down to Louisville, Kentucky. Down to Austin, Texas on Monday, October 26th. I wonder if we’ll get a Kill Tony appearance out of Dave Chappelle while he’s in Joe Rogan land.

Wednesday the 28th, Houston, Texas, and then Friday, November 6th, Madison Square Garden as part of the New York Comedy Festival. That’s great. Howard Stern is allegedly puzzled by fans being frustrated. A source told the U.S. Sun that Howard Stern reads everything and then everything is in all caps the second time.

And Howard wants to control what’s being reported. The source notes that Howard was apoplectic over the negative reaction to the news of the sudden termination of his archival channel Howard 101. And that his show would now broadcast just one day a week. Stern also doesn’t get why staffers laid off would be disgruntled. So, look, I’ve said this in the past.

Howard paid me the compliment of my career when I met Howard. He told me that the Raw Dog channel at Sirius was a great-sounding radio station, and for one of my radio heroes to tell me that a station I was in charge of sounded great means the world to me. Howard is now 72 and he’s been making reportedly $ 100 million a year for 15 or so years now. Or is it 20? I think it’s more like 20 now.

So he doesn’t need the money. It’s time to put your feet up and he doesn’t want to totally walk away. So he’s doing the show once a week from the house. So, yeah, you don’t need a second channel recapping three hours of programming for there’s 168 hours in a week. What do you want Howard 101 to do all day?

And if you’re doing three hours down from 20 or 15 or 12 or whatever it’s been over the years, unfortunately, people are going to get laid off. Now, as for this new HBO show, I saw the promo for it and I thought it looked like the opposite of cool. I’ve talked about this in the past. Howard Stern in his heyday, I don’t know, let’s pick a random morning in 1993, would hate Howard Stern of 2026. The current Howard Stern is everything the young Howard Stern hated.

The new show on HBO Max, again, the promo looks so lame. Is according to the source, Stern’s method of holding up the middle finger to Sirius XM. An insider told the Daily Mail, Howard’s in a really good mood with his new HBO deal. He feels like it’s a big middle finger to all his critics who either want him done or think that he’s done. We will see.

Chris Rock says, if Taylor Sheridan’s got a job for me, I’ll take that job. He joked he could become the black guy on Yellowstone. That’s a great joke. He didn’t stop there. He imagined playing a black landowner who owns property and has white slaves.

Now, that would probably get a lot of attention. The comedian then joked that he encouraged Taylor Sheridan to make an entire show around that idea. I would watch that. Joe Coy’s new special’s out on Netflix. He got a cover story from the Vogue Philippines edition.

I didn’t know there was Vogue Philippines, but there is. Joe said it sucks because once this special drops, I have to say goodbye to these jokes. I’ve been attached to them for so long. When it comes to approaching his specials, he says he wants them to reflect the newer version of himself. And for his routine to evolve the same way he has, he has to try new things on top of the previous special.

One of his favorite things about the new special on Netflix is the arena, Stockton Arena. You see, Stockton was once home to the largest population of Filipinos outside the Philippines. In the early 1900s, young Filipino men came to California to work as the primary agricultural workforce harvesting crops in the Central Valley. Jokoi said some of the migrants that were there a long time ago faced a lot and dealt with a lot of racism back then. We understand that what happened was bad, but now we have to realize that it’s not going to be repeated anymore.

We just sold out an arena. Behind me is the Filipino sun. Jokoy also said, He also described his career as a long journey with many challenges. Now, you may recall one of the challenges was one time he hosted the Golden Globes and just told this horrible mean joke about Taylor Swift. As you know, we came on after a football doubleheader.

The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL. On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots. Of Taylor Swift. I swear. There’s just more to go to.

Sorry about that. In 2027, Joe Coy will be honored with a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He said, I can’t wait for that day to happen. Dreams come true, baby. Conan O’Brien getting political.

He is now the face of a fundraising campaign for the State Plus Local Election Alliance, a political action committee that puts money into low-profile state and local races involving the officials who oversee elections. Conan O’Brien put out a few videos, and one he said, if anyone appreciates something unsexy, it’s this guy right here. So when I heard there’s a group that only backs the unsexy races, county clerks, election boards, local courts, I thought, finally, my people. These are the offices that decide whether your vote gets cast, counted, and certified. In another commercial, Conan made fun of the idea that anyone would turn to him for guidance on politics.

Conan jokes, I must have Conan’s political advice as a thought that has never crossed your mind, and it shouldn’t have. Yet here we are, because I just learned something smart and I want to share it. Margaret Cho seems fed up with the way things are going these days. She says, we are being taken over by the richest people in the world, but the one thing they cannot afford is jokes at their expense. I want to fight fascism with everything I have.

Jeff Ross had a birthday and got roasted by Jim Carrey, who went on social media and wrote, 61 years ago, a boy named Jeff Ross came into the world. I don’t want to say he was an ugly baby, but when he was born, God made his mother sign an NDA, and nothing’s changed in that regard. In fact, it’s gotten worse. I’ve seen better-looking heads on cystic acne. His spirit animal is a blobfish, a pale, misshapen bottom feeder that makes you laugh just looking at it.

But he’s not just funny-looking. In many places around the world, people find his brand of humor highly toxic, except in Japan, where his jokes are considered a delicacy. But there’s no denying one thing, Jeff. You are funny. You’ve spent your whole life making people laugh.

If only it were on purpose. If only they were laughing with you and not, you know, at you. Jim Carrey added, Of course I’ve been half-joking this whole time, but before I sign off, I’d like to say one thing that’s sincere and meaningful, Jeff. In the time it takes you to make a wish and blow out your candles, I will make millions of dollars in passive income. I will deal with the Emmys tomorrow because I had to record this one on Monday because the nice people of New Jersey invited me to take part in the jury system on Tuesday.

And I don’t know at the time of this recording if I’m available on Tuesday. We’re sitting in a courthouse where you really can’t record a video podcast, so I had to tape this one in advance. We’ll get to the Emmys tomorrow. Catching up for the weekend, SNL UK was pretty good. If that had been an episode of SNL US, it would have been the best episode of last season, so..

You know, I really liked it a lot. It was the probably the best SNL UK they’ve had, period. Here only, you know, one episode in a season two. There’s not a large body of work, but I felt like they found their voice. The news guys got a lot better.

They have totally borrowed the the joke where you put something up on the screen behind you and you go so and so seen here. Insert punchline. They use that joke, I think, three times during the news, but it worked perfectly. If you want to dive on clips online, there’s a sketch involving King Kong that I won’t spoil. That was pretty good.

Your host was Jeff Goldblum and an artist named C-MAT, who I’m a fan of. Actually, I’m a fan of C-MAT’s, was the musical guest. SNL UK, you’ll find it on Hulu and the clips tend to show up on YouTube. A comedian branded Australia’s King of Dark Comedy got some backlash after he did some September 11th jokes. Don’t do this.

Julian Wood posted a video on his Instagram page where he’s seen approaching a stranger sitting on a bench. He asked the older man, excuse me, if science has flown us to the moon, where has religion flown us? The punchline into the Twin Towers. So that’s bad enough that he then opens his jacket to reveal a fake bomb strapped to his chest. He says, it’s actually the 25th anniversary of 9-11 today.

Did you know that? Well, I’m not a scientist, but I am religious. It did not go over well on social media. One person said, stop making jokes about 9-11. I lost my uncle on that day.

Another person said, do you really think this is funny? Another comment, I have good humor and some 9-11 humor is funny if made appropriately, but this isn’t funny. One more said, I just unfollowed you. You’re a disgrace to society and your family. In better news, we now know who will be on Kunk on Cinema, the upcoming newest episode of Philomena Kunk’s documentary series.

The BBC says Philomena Kunk, played by Diane Morgan, who some podcasters have a crush on. We’ll be asking experts all the hard-hitting questions about the history of cinema, with a list of contributors that includes Michael Bay, Benedict Cumberbatch, and others. The three-part series will uncover the invention of the camera to the new wave filmmakers of the 60s, right up to the entrance of CGI and AI. Philomena Kunk will attempt to demystify it all while sitting in lumpy seats with stale popcorn, asking herself, where did cinema come from and why, what does it want, and what can it tell us? No date yet, but it will be on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland..

Netflix and that is your comedy news for today see you tomorrow

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Featured: Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Shane Gillis, Jalen Brunson, Dakota Johnson, Joe Coy, Theo Vaughn, Morgan Wallen, Meghan Trainor, Patton Oswalt, Weird Al Yankovic

What’s in This Episode

• Stephen Colbert guest appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live
• Jimmy Kimmel returning to Brooklyn Academy of Music for week-long residency
• Monty Python reunion ruled out by Eric Idle, conflict with John Cleese
• The Office UK revival unlikely per creator Greg Daniels
• SNL Season 52 premiere with Jalen Brunson as first host
• Shane Gillis hosting SNL third time on October 10th
• Joe Coy releases sixth special ‘Blue in the Face’
• Theo Vaughn appears in Morgan Wallen concert pre-show video
• Drunk History new episodes launching on Comedy Central YouTube

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Big guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live tonight, Stephen Colbert. His first late-night guest appearance since leaving The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May should be all kinds of interesting, so I’m looking forward to that one. Kimmel also announced he’s coming back to Brooklyn, as he did last year and I think the year before. He’ll be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starting Monday, September 28th through Friday, October 2nd.

Kimmel told viewers, this is a big thing. I’m very happy to announce that once again, we will be bringing our show, all of it, every one, every bit to Brooklyn, New York. We’re returning to Brooklyn for a week of shows from the Brooklyn Academy of Music with an all-star, big-time lineup of guests later this month. If you’re looking forward to the Monty Python reunion, forget it. Eric Heidel said Monty Python is dead.

He has ruled out any sort of reunion, specifically with John Cleese. 83-year-old Eric Heidel has a new book and posted on social media. Today’s my publication day in the UK. I hope you like and enjoy the book I spent five years on. This is what I’m doing. Python is dead.

One fan urged one last hurrah. Eric Heidel in a separate Twitter post said, no thanks. There was a suggestion that he’s fallen out with John Cleese over opposing political views. A fan asked if they could see past their political differences. Eric Idle said, Unfortunately, it’s much worse than that, but I’m not going to say as it’s very boring.

That’s interesting. He then further went on with this cryptic remark, Wow. All right. What about a partial reunion? What if we got the other guys and left Cleese out of it?

I mean, to be fair, there’s a whole season of the Monty Python TV show without John Cleese. Would you perform with just Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam and leave Cleese out of it? Idol’s single word answer? No. Interesting.

Now, you may recall back in 2024, they were fighting over money. Eric Idol complained that Monty Python’s revenue had dried up. At the time, he wrote, Python is a disaster. Spamalot made money 20 years ago. I have to work for a living.

Not easy at this age. He had blamed Terry Gilliam’s daughter, Holly, who has managed Monty Python’s business affairs since 2014. Idol suggested that, you know, maybe she wasn’t that good. Cleese wrote back on Twitter at that time, during that fight, I’ve worked with Holly for the last 10 years, and I find her very efficient, clear-minded, hardworking, and pleasant to have dealings with. Michael Palin has asked me to make it clear that he shares that opinion.

Terry Gilliam is also in agreement with this. I would hope so. It’s his daughter. Cleese also said that he and Idle always loathed and despised each other, but it’s only recently that the truth has begun to emerge. It’s unclear to me if he was joking or not.

Eric Idle last summer described his relationships with the surviving pythons as ranging from poor to terrible. They don’t talk to me. I haven’t seen them for 10 years. That’s awful. I had the pleasure of working with them.

It was the Monty Python.. I got to check the math here. 40th anniversary, I guess. We did the 40th anniversary radio station, which was great. We got to work with all the Pythons. We got to use their music library and their clips, and we put together this wonderful Monty Python radio station.

I wonder if I have a clip on my computer. I will look for it. Somewhere I have some audio from that radio station. I just look for it. I don’t have it on this computer.

I work with two different computers. I think it’s on the other one, but I’ll try and pull that out one day. Another reunion you’re not getting is The Office, The Office creator Craig Daniels I mean, let’s be fair, the Office UK creator Greg Daniels told Variety, we don’t need to find out what all the characters are doing. It seemed like people liked the ending, and you’re just risking a lot by opening it up again. Saturday Night Live will be back for season 52, and the first guest host is New York Knicks superstar Jalen Brunson.

That’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait for this, and it’ll be on soon, September 26th. You may recall Jalen Brunson led the New York Knicks to the world championship last season. So it should be another great season. October 3rd, hosted by Dakota Johnson.

Then the big one, the real reason I’m telling you about this, aside from rooting for the Knicks, Shane Gillis will be a third time host on October 10th. People are already getting mad about it. People are already saying if Shane hosts five times, they should end the five timers club. Look, Lorne knows that, well, Lorne wanted Shane on the show. Lorne kind of had his hand forced, and I think this is Lorne’s way of being like, hey, everybody, the network blew it here, not me.

So Shane will host on October 10th.

Speaking of Shane, he was spotted in Green Bay’s Black Iron Bar and Grill.

Apparently Shane was there on September 6th. According to a social media post, Shane Gillis was accompanied by friends and fellow comedians Tommy Pope and Chris O’Connor. They both star in Tire’s The bar says our Buffalo Wings are officially Shane Gillis approved. It is believed Shane was in the area because Notre Dame, of which he roots for their football team, played at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, so that all makes sense. You know what’s out today?

Joe Coy’s Blue in the Face. It is Joe Coy’s sixth special. Filmed before a sold-out crowd at Stockton Arena, Joe Coy’s New Hour seems him relive a wild dental disaster, recount getting fired from McDonald’s and celebrate his veteran stepdad, You may recall one time Joe Coy told this horrible, horrible, mean joke about Taylor Swift. Let’s listen. As you know, we came on after a football doubleheader.

The big difference between the Golden Globes and the NFL. On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift. I swear. There’s just more to go to. Sorry about that.

If you went to see Morgan Wallen on tour, prior to the concert, there was a pre-show video, and that featured Theo Vaughn. We learned a little about how that happened. There was a podcast episode of In the Trenches with Spidey Smith, and Morgan Wallen’s creative director, Justin Clough, was on there. Justin shared how it was an easy decision for him and Morgan Wallen. He said, we’d just gone through a couple different people, and I think we all just mutually agreed Theo was right.

He says as soon as Theo Vaughn put the headset on, he was in character. Justin says, dude, it was so funny. Dude, he put the headset on. He was like, you know, when he got there to show up, he immediately went to character and he just started walking around talking to random crew guys. He had the headset on, the clipboard.

He’s like, step it up, brother. Come on, brother. Keep it going. The guys were like, what the F? He was so funny, man.

Back today, Drunk History. We’re getting three new episodes starting today on Comedy Central’s YouTube channel. Now, that’s interesting. Why not on Comedy Central? It’s on the YouTube channel.

The first of them chronicles Madonna’s performance of Like a Virgin at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards. Meghan Trainor plays Madonna in this one. The other episodes take on Francis Perkins. You know who that is, of course, the unsung architect of FDR’s New Deal. I think everyone knows that.

And the third episode, two men’s lifelong battle to make the world’s largest ball of twine. Now, interesting to me, the cast of the season includes folks like Colin Hanks, who was really great on Silo. Patton Oswalt, and Weird Al Yankovic, who happens to have a song, I think, called The World’s Largest Ball of Twine. He’s got a song with a title at least similar to that, so I imagine Weird Al’s in that episode. While today on the 800lb Gorillaz YouTube channel, Cameron Esposito’s Four Pills.

Also out today, Vanessa Gonzalez has her comedy album, Momona, via Special Things Records. It will also air on Hulu. Vanessa is a Texas native. She took the stage in front of an eager fan base in Austin to record the follow-up to her outstanding debut album, My Birthday’s Tomorrow. In this hour, Vanessa explains just what a mamona is.

She also talks about the witches in her family, a memorable church repeat, and what the world thinks of the Lone Star State. Vanessa Gonzalez was named one of Variety’s Top 10 Comics to Watch in 2022 and Best Stand-Up Comic in Austin by the Austin Chronicle in 2017, 2022, and again in 2023. Not bad. If you’re in Los Angeles, what are you doing? Go see Chris Fleming and Friends at the Largo.

It’s a little pricey, but it’s Chris Fleming. Who should be hosting Late Night with Chris Fleming on NBC at 1230? Make 1230 great again. Why are we wasting time with Seth Meyers? Let’s make it great again.

Letterman, Conan, Chris Fleming. Yes, yes. In Chris Fleming and Friends, the high-energy comedian delivers the most fine-tuned stream of consciousness comedy you’ll ever hear. Fleming’s trademark physicality makes the show original, exciting, and borderline bouncing off the walls. He tests out new material..

But the concept is already refined enough to be as taped as special. Tonight, 8 p.m. Tickets are $ 50, which isn’t cheap, but it is. Chris Fleming, you should go. And that is your comedy news for today.

See you tomorrow.

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Featured: Sam Morril, Cat Williams, James Tallarico, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Seth Meyers

What’s in This Episode

• Sam Morril’s Netflix Special ‘Incorrect in Incorrect’ September 29th
• Cat Williams memoir ‘Nine Lives, No Wives, and Sixty-Nine Concubines’ book tour
• Jimmy Kimmel FCC controversy with James Tallarico interview
• Stephen Colbert’s blocked Tallarico interview on CBS
• Jimmy Fallon Sunday Night Football special editions
• Chris Rock on financial discipline and avoiding overcommitment
• John Mulaney bookstore recommendations impact
• Seth Meyers seven-week vacation from Late Night

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

Hello, I’m Johnny Mac with your Daily Comedy News. Sam Morrill will have a new special on Netflix September 29th. It is called Incorrect in Incorrect. Sam Morrill tackles his worst one night stand gone wrong. The dark humor of infamous assassinations, his bizarrely unorthodox war against rats and more.

Let’s listen. You ever watch one of these new big budget movies and it just turns into a game of like, how long can this last versus me checking my phone? It’s not long. Some $ 500 million movie. I’m like, damn, turns out I’d rather watch a guy power wash a sidewalk on TikTok.

This cannot bode well for the future of entertainment. I like that trailer a lot. Incorrect is Sam’s second special for Netflix. He did one in 2022, same time tomorrow. Before that, You’ve Changed was on Amazon and the Comedy Central special’s Positive Influence and I Got This and his self-produced Up on the Roof in Full Capacity.

Cat Williams’ Book Tour. Did you say Book Tour? Yes, Cat Williams’ Book Tour. He’s got a memoir. It is called Nine Lives, No Wives, and Sixty-Nine Concubines.

That is a title and a half. In Nine Lives, No Wives, and 69 Concubines, Cat Williams offers perspective on how he survived Hollywood without losing ownership of his money, his voice, or his peace. He reflects on the experiences behind his refusal to fail, offering a rare look at the thoughtful, spiritually grounded, and deeply committed father behind the comedian. We’ve got a kerfuffle with Jimmy Kimmel Live. I’m not entirely sure what is happening as I’m recording this, but he was supposed to have on Texas State Representative James Tallarico.

Now, you may remember that name. Tallarico was a guy that was supposed to be on Colbert’s show, and CBS was like, yeah, we’re not airing that, and Colbert put it on YouTube. Well, guess what happened? On Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that his interview with Tallarico.. Who happens to be running for Senate as the Texas Democratic candidate, would not be aired on over-the-air broadcast, instead would be shown on YouTube.

Kimmel explained the decision came out of concerns that a politically motivated FCC has continually threatened ABC station licenses. I’m going to jump in here. Censorship. Not cool. We need to speak about these things.

The statement, out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, My interview with James Tallarico will not air on television. It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV. So what he is saying is we are afraid to let political candidates speak. Not good.

In February, Stephen Colbert was told that he couldn’t run his interview with Tallarico. At that time, CBS lawyers had barred Colbert from airing the interview in a preemptive bout of FCC pressure over the agency’s push to apply its equal time rule. Quoting Jimmy Kimmel, I’ll be interviewing James Tallarico under unusual circumstances. You know, for a lot of years, for the whole 20 plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all. Just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, etc.

Etc. I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself. I interviewed Donald Trump when he was running for president in 2015. And at that time, when he was the one sitting next to me, he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show hosts interviewing candidates. In fact, he was very eager to come back for another interview, which he did just before he became the nominee in 2016.

But for some reason, and I can’t seem to figure out what the reason is, something has changed now that he’s president. His FCC threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations. Based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings, it would seem they don’t like. Jimmy then added, make sure you’re registered to vote because that’s the most important thing you can do.

Meanwhile, over at the Tonight Show, NBC has scheduled four special Sunday ed…

Those will follow Sunday Night Football. The first is September 27th after the Rams vs. Broncos. Guests include Sylvester Stallone and Luke Bryan. That’s a pretty good guess.

Now, I’m not going to be up that late on a Sunday night, but sure, why not? Then three more, November 8th after Bucks-Bears, November 15th after Steelers-Bengals, and January 10th after the NFL’s final regular season game. We won’t know that matchup until the final week. Chris Rock seems pretty grounded. This is more from that Variety cover story from last week.

Rock said, I’ve been lucky. I’ve made some money. I’m not swimming in it. I’m not on jets all the time. I don’t own a boat.

But I always tell people, your monthly nut, that’s your religion. You think you’re Catholic? How much are your bills? Because if you can keep your monthly low enough, you can say no to things. I don’t own a car.

Yeah, I have a place in New York and L.A. But I don’t even have a doorman. I live on a normal block in both places. You can ring my bell. It doesn’t say rock on the bell, but you can ring my bell.

And I do this purposely so I don’t have to do things I don’t want to do. There’s meetings I don’t want to have to take because I keep my expenses down. He explains the problem with most people in Hollywood. They’re spending if-come instead of income. If-come will ruin your life.

More from the grounded Chris Rock. You have your career and you have your life. And they intertwine from time to time. Not everybody makes it. Some people are just dead who you loved.

And there’s people who didn’t make smart decisions who now don’t get to express themselves, which is really not cool. Everybody doesn’t get to make the movie they wrote, so I don’t take it for granted. And I always say the worst thing that can happen to an artist is not that you’re washed up. The worst thing that can happen is you’re not washed up and no one wants to hear you. That you’re actually still good and you’ve worn out your welcome.

I’ve seen it happen to other people where, and I’m not going to say who, things just got so complicated. Look out, Eugene. That’s a website and your home for comedy news. They talked about John Mulaney stopping by a bookstore. Seth is a bookseller at J.

Michael’s Books, and earlier this year he helped pick out a stack of eight books for John Mulaney. Seth said, Mulaney didn’t receive that degree of attention because he was John Mulaney. Celebrity or not, he was one of the best readers I’ve met in this bookstore. In terms of interest and curiosity and desire, he was an extraordinary customer, and he clearly had read a lot and was really, really sharp. Mulaney documented his reviews on Instagram with the hashtag MulaneyReads.

One of the books, Ethan Rutherford’s North Sun, was one of the books Seth selected for John Mulaney. The author then gave credit to Mulaney for a pop in sales. He said it would have happened if he hadn’t walked into your shop and somewhere there hadn’t taken the time to recommend it to him and put it in his hand. If someone in the shop hadn’t enjoyed the book enough to recommend it in the first place, it makes me so happy to think about it and it’s deeply meaningful. More so than whatever strange wave of the algorithm poured over the book.

On Gossip Corner from WOKQ, they tell us about a month after Adam Saylor, the great dramatic actor, was spotted grabbing ice cream from Sawyers on the Pier, another famous New Hampshire face popped up in the Granite State. Who was it? It was Seth Meyers, part of his seven-week vacation, I guess, from late night with Seth Meyers. Make 1230 great again. Please give the show to somebody like Chris Fleming.

Perhaps Gianmarco Ceresi would be a good host at 1230 as well, because Seth Meyers isn’t, let’s just face it. Nice guy, but, you know, Letterman, Conan, Seth. And I know Jimmy Fallon was in there for five minutes, too. But no, no, no, no. We need somebody.

Make 1230 great again. That’s all I’m saying. Anyway, so apparently Sandler has been hanging out in New Hampshire and Seth Meyers. And I think for the unfunny comedy rule of three, Marcelo Hernandez should go up there and just walk around doing his what is the character? I can’t even think of the you know, the one thing he does well, that thing.

He can just do that anyway. Why was Seth Meyers there? What was he doing? He popped into Wicked Joyful, a collectible shop in Manchester at the end of August. Wicked Joyful shared a Facebook post showing Seth Meyers visiting.

Apparently, Seth Meyers got a toy, a Joe Montana figure. Go Niners. All right, maybe I do. Maybe Seth Meyers is really awesome because I’m also a Joe Montana fan. I’ve got somewhere here in the studio.

It’s kind of buried right now behind all my various equipment, but I’ve got a little Joe Montana statue. Maybe Seth and I could be friends. Russell Peters told MetroTimes.com he doesn’t need comedy right now because the world’s funny. He needs it because the world is messed up. He says, for me, it’s necessity.

People seem to think as messed up as the world is right now. For some people think artists are immune to that. For the most part, I’m an empath. So I feel everything. And when everything else is effed up and I’m feeling effed up, too, I got to get it off my chest.

If you go see him, he won’t be that political. But he said, I may have some points in there. But the bottom line is, I just want you to laugh and forget about all that for one minute. Russell, do you think humor can make people less prejudiced? He said, I don’t think it makes them less.

I think it makes them go, oh, wait a minute. We’re laughing at the same thing right now. How the F do we have something in common? And it makes them stop for a second because their biggest fear is having something in common. Or maybe their fear is they don’t have anything in common.

They come to that realization. Well, no, we found a middle ground here. Let’s work from there. Is it going to work for everybody? No, but it’ll have an effect on someone somewhere.

Russell’s been at this for 30 years now. He said life was very different 30 years ago. Was it better? It was simpler, that’s for sure, but does simple mean better? We’re literally opened up to the world, so we’re taking opinions from everybody that shouldn’t have an opinion on your own situation.

We need more critical thinkers. People are looking to be led now. People aren’t leading anymore. I can see when I’ll do a joke. I look at the people’s reactions.

They look for somebody else to laugh, and then they laugh. They negate their own instincts. My job in my head is to make you make a peep, not me. I’m going to do whatever I can to make you make the sound, and you look guilty when I’m really the guilty party here. And that is your comedy news for today.

Have a great day.

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Featured: Wanda Sykes, Aziz Ansari, Margaret Cho, Elaine Boosler, Reggie Watts, Freddie Prinze, Russell Peters, Amy Schumer, Phyllis Diller, Bernie Mac, Gary Shandling, Roseanne Barr, Sam Kinison, Tig Notaro, Patton Oswalt, Janine Garofalo, Patrice O’Neill, Sarah Silverman, Woody Allen, Dick Gregory, Robert Klein, Redd Foxx, Rodney Dangerfield, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor

What’s in This Episode

• Rolling Stone’s 2017 list of 50 best stand-up comics evaluated nearly 10 years later in 2026
• Controversial inclusion of Aziz Ansari in top 50 comedians of all time
• Reggie Watts’ inclusion on list amid recent cancellation
• Gary Shandling’s legacy and underrated career impact
• Tig Notaro and Patton Oswalt’s Star Trek involvement criticism
• Eddie Murphy’s Richard Pryor influence debate
• Dated assessment of Amy Schumer and Roseanne Barr’s legacies

Questions Answered in This Episode

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Full Transcript

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

A little different today. I’m doing this one on the fly. So recently I was recording an episode and I referenced Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time, which was published February 14th, 2017. And I haven’t looked at this. I’m doing this cold.

I just thought it’d be interesting together to go through this list and see how we feel about it. Nearly 10 years later. I don’t know how this episode is going to go. We’re doing this on the fly here. Back in 2017, Rolling Stone said, and coming up with our version of a comic canon, we weighed artistic merit, technical proficiency, and sense of timing, quality of their written material, their delivery, and degree of influence, and often their sense of what makes something anything funny.

No disrespect to the foundational figures who shaped the earliest incarnations, but this list tiptoes past some of the early craftsmen, and focuses on the unique voices who have helped push stand-up forward in more recent days. These 50 stand-ups best embody what we’ve come to expect of our modern-day comedians. Okay, so that’s fair. So that eliminates, you know, do we have to talk about Mark Twain or Bob Hope or anybody? So we’re doing modern stand-up.

Now, I don’t know where Rolling Stone considers the line. It’s usually around Lenny Bruce or very early George Carlin is where that line is drawn. At number 50.. They have Wanda Sykes. Now I have to see some more names, but initially I’m looking at this and going, Wanda Sykes is in the top 50.

Now we’re just starting. I don’t know who’s not on this list, but already 10 years later, I’m like, Wanda Sykes? 49. Aziz Ansari. How do you feel about that 10 years later? That’s crazy talk, isn’t it?

Again, I don’t know who’s on the list or not on the list yet, but Aziz is crazy to have him as one of the top standups of all time. That’s nutty. 48. Margaret Cho. 47. Elaine Boosler. Now she has become forgotten.

Rolling Stone wrote, imagine the prototypical female comic of the 1980s. Big hair, suit jacket with shoulder pads. I like the shoulder pads. And sleeves rolled up. The brick wall behind her.

You’re imagining Elaine Boosler. At a time in which women comedians were not talking about sex, Boosler addressed it head on. 46, Reggie Watts. I mean, really? Reggie Watts? One of the top 50 stand-ups of all time?

Nine years ago? Are you insane? Plus, he’s a little canceled right now. Crazy, crazy, crazy. 45, Freddie Prinze. He’s forgotten.

Do you even know who this is, younger listener? The reason you might not is because the charming, mustached kid had nothing but potential, but he got caught up in 70s drug culture and had problems dealing with a dizzying rise to fame after sitcom Chico and the Man took off. Freddie died by suicide at age 22. He only had one album called Looking Good and one early HBO special. But yeah, he was huge for five minutes there.

Number 44, Russell Peters. Top 50. 43, Amy Schumer. I wonder where she’d fall on a list in 2026. 42, Phyllis Diller. Somebody you don’t hear much about right now. 41, Bernie Mac. 40, Gary Shandling. I should throw him in the deep dives as well.

He’s become forgotten. I’ve got to add to my list here for the deep dives. Hold on. I’m going to hit pause on the recording and leave myself a note. Note has been left.

I forgot how much I liked Gary Shaling. I feel like Gary Shaling has gotten summarized as just a guy that hosted Larry Sanders, or maybe you remember he was one of the two permanent guest hosts of The Tonight Show. He was in rotation with Jay Leno there. There’s definitely an alternate universe where Gary Shaling got 1130. Rolling Stone in 2017 wrote, watch any of Gary Shandling’s specials.

They recommend Alone in Vegas and you’ll see a charming neurotic burying Una’s looks in his failure with women in an attempt to let the audience breathe easily. He told GQ in 2010, what I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn’t realize it’s funny until they’re driving home. Number 39, Moms Mabley. I am ignorant about Moms Mabley’s career, so I will not comment on whether that is a good pick or not. 38, Roseanne Barr. Times change over a decade, don’t they? 37, Sam Kinison.

Sam was a shooting star, man. When he was hot, he was hot, but I’m not sure he lasted long enough. 37 probably feels about right to me. Rolling Stone wrote, It’s being a little kind, actually. He would occasionally acknowledge why he never groused about the evils of men. Because a man never broke my heart.

A man never made me want to drive my car into an effing wall. 36. Daniel Kitson, who I’m ignorant about. Fusing stand-up and theater into carefully structured solo ventures, this British comic scrutinizes bits of his biography while contemplating bigger issues, the nature of time, memory, and individual perception. I don’t know anything about Daniel, so I can’t judge. 35. Do you hear the reaction?

Okay, in 2017, somebody at Rolling Stone.. Thought of the top 50 comedians of all time. That Tig Notaro was number 35. Star Trek ruiner Tig Notaro. No, no, no, no, no. 34.

Another Star Trek ruiner, Patton Oswalt. All these comedians went on to ruin Star Trek. 33. Wow. Here’s a name. Janine Garofalo?

When’s the last time you thought about stand-up comedian Janine Garofalo? 32. Patrice O’Neill I have shared on this podcast. I did not enjoy The Man’s Company. He loved to F with people, and when I’m working, I just try and be professional, so be professional back, dude. The comedians love Patrice O’Neill.

I did not enjoy the man, so I am biased here. He’s number 32. 31. Sarah Silverman. Almost top 30 of all time. I mean, Sarah’s nice and all, but I mean, you know what?

The more I think about it, her last two specials have been great, and I’ve had them above my top of the year. All right, maybe I got to reevaluate Sarah Silverman. Maybe that’s not crazy. 30, Woody Allen. And when I said Woody Allen, you kind of went, ugh. Yeah, so it’s hard to judge Woody Allen’s career.

I wonder if Mr. Cosby’s on this list. So let’s just move on. 29, Dick Gregory. I’m under-familiar with Dick Gregory. Rolling Stone told us since breaking out while working at the Playboy Club back in the day, Dick Gregory has been at the forefront of the fight for civil rights in his comedy and in life.

He was jailed at Selma, shot during the Watts riots of 1965, ran for president in 68, and always, always brought the struggle to the stage. Confronted by a southern waitress who told him, we don’t serve colored people here. He said, I don’t need colored people nowhere. Bring me a whole fried chicken. That is funny.

Dick Gregory, number 29. 28, Robert Klein, another one of those pioneers of 70s comedy whose name you don’t hear, but gotta respect the work. Do you like observation on autobiographical stand-up, asks Rolling Stone. You have Robert Klein to thank. When he recorded his first special for HBO in 1975, the very first stand-up concert the premium cable channel ever aired, He enjoyed his linguistic freedoms and said it’s subscription and then dropped an S word. But Johnny Mac likes to keep it clean.

Rolling Stone correctly says Robert Klein’s rhythm would highly influence comics like Jerry Seinfeld. Highly influenced. Doing a lot of work in that sentence. Red Fox at number 27. If you’ve never listened to Red Fox comedy, it is a wonderful wordplay.

And we’ll take the break into number 26, Rodney Dangerfield. We’ll come back. We’ll look at the top 25 of Rolling Stone’s top 50 best stand-up comics of all time from 2017. We continue. It’s Rolling Stone’s 50 best stand-up comics of all time as written in 2017.

At number 25, Eddie Murphy. If you’re old like me, you loved Eddie Murphy until you got a little older and realized it was all just a Richard Pryor cover act. It was still funny. It’s still great. But it’s a Richard Pryor cover act.

Rolling Stone writes, in his magic moment, Eddie Murphy saw stand-up comedy transform into rock star art. The SNL breakout star strutted, preened, and doused the audience in sex like Let It Bleed-era Mick Jagger. That is a good comparison. Listen to the crowds in the films Raw and Delirious. They’re not at a comedy show, they’re getting lit at a party in which pants might be optional.

Some of Murphy’s Act from those days hasn’t aged well, but certain bits like the one about the ice cream man will remain evergreen. Yeah, you listen to some of that stuff and it’s like, oh, times have changed. Number 24, Eddie Izzard. 23, Don Rickles. 22, Jonathan Winters. I never got or enjoyed a Jonathan Winters. I feel like that picks too high. 21, Bob Newhart.

Number 20. Okay. Now, I’m going to say a name. If you’re a long-time listener, you know I love this person. A decade has gone by, and I feel like this is way too high because the body of work just isn’t there.

But you know that I love. Number 20, Mitch Hedberg. They write jokes like, when I was a boy, I laid in my twin-size bed and wondered where my brother was. Or, Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read. Only gave you a sense of Hedberg’s wonderful efficiency.

He also paid a high degree of attention to syntax. And while some of his jokes bordered on dad material, he’s a hippopotamus, just a really cool potamus. But it was all just a way for him to show his audience that they should be looking through the groovy, rose-colored lenses he had on, seemingly all the time. His hit-to-miss ratio was off the charts. He was great, but there’s just not the body of work there that the others have.

Number 19, Albert Brooks. Rolling Stone wrote in 2017, back when he was a stand-up, Albert Brooks was as interested in how comedy works as whether it worked. His record Comedy Minus One was just half a routine with lots of dead air for you, the listener, to perform the other half with the lines printed in and an insert provided. That’s insane. 18, Kevin Hart. And they were saying this 10 years ago.

Interesting pick. 17, Bill Burr. I would guess over the past decade, Bill Burr would move up on such a list. Sixteen, Billy Connolly. Fifteen, Stephen Wright. Fourteen, Andy Kaufman.

That’s an interesting pick. They wrote, even if Andy Kaufman hadn’t wrestled women for the Intergender Wrestling Championship, hadn’t created abusive, overly hacky, alter ego Tony Clifton, and hadn’t took his entire audience at Carnegie Hall out for milk and cookies, he would still be a legend. An audience-baiting bit of performance art Hoffman’s career was the country’s first major introduction with what’s sometimes called anti-comedy. 13. Bill Hicks. I’m sure Dennis Leary would agree.

You don’t hear much about Bill Hicks these days. 12. Robin Williams. Some people have accused Robin Williams of being a comedy thief, but the man knew how to perform. 11. Steve Martin. Now, this is one of those interesting things of, you know, you hang around long enough and people forget, but Steve Martin was a rock star comedian in the 70s.

You listen to the material now, and you’re like, what? But back in the day, okay. Ten, Mort Sahl. Okay, Rolling Stone is being artsy here. They said, when Mort Sahl was playing the hungry eye in San Francisco during the 60s, he brought a new informality to weighty issues.

Casually clad in red cordigan and button-down shirt, a newspaper folded under his arm, he riffed on politics in a way no one had heard before. All right. And into the top nine, I guess. We’re already into the top ten. Back in 2017, Rolling Stone has, at number nine, Dave Chappelle.

I think Dave might rank higher these days if we were to redo the list, and that is high praise. Eight, Bill Cosby. Again, Rolling Stone wrote, his legacy is beyond tarnished now, but without Bill Cosby, there would be no Richard Pryor, no Dave Chappelle, no Louis C.K. As a comic and storyteller, he advanced the art of stand-up by leaps and bounds. If we just judge the work, absolutely.

If we judge the man, it’s a lot more complicated, but here we are judging the work. Someday Bill Cosby will pass away, and I will tell you a story. Number seven, Jerry Seinfeld. Now, a decade later, would Jerry have moved up or down? Probably slightly moved up.

I feel like Jerry’s just more and more revered as time goes on. And I think 10 years later, he would absolutely move ahead of number six, Joan Rivers, who is starting to become a little forgotten. Five, Chris Rock. In 2017, they had Chris Rock ahead of Jerry Seinfeld. Would you rank them that way these days?

I don’t think so. There was a time, probably 15 years ago, at the Las Vegas Comedy Special, I saw Rock and Seinfeld on back-to-back nights at Caesars in Las Vegas, I think. And that was the order. Rock, and then the next night, Jerry. I walked out of Chris Rock going, wow, that’s stand-up comedy at the top.

And then I saw Jerry the next night, and Jerry was even better. So I would have to flip the ranking there. I am not dissing Chris Rock, but I would move Jerry up. Four. Louis C.K.

It’s 2017. When was C.K. Canceled? John, you host the show. You tell us.

OK, the infamous New York Times, Louis C.K. Is accused by five women of sexual misconduct. Article came out November 9th, 2017. And this article came out February 14th, 2017. OK, so about eight months or so.

You do the math. I didn’t do it. They had Louis C.K. As the fourth greatest all-time stand-up comedian. Now, we haven’t said Pryor, we haven’t said Carlin, we haven’t said whoever they have at number three that I’m obviously forgetting.

But back then, when he was number four, Rolling Stone wrote, the tall redhead had been working comedy clubs across the country for decades, making his bones along with countless other stand-ups. But somewhere around the time, he called his four-year-old an a-hole and imagined his wife giving him a favor, the saddest favor in America. The next level artist we now know as Louis C.K. Was reborn with a vengeance, starting with his 2007 special Shameless. He turned a guy slinging penis jokes and absurdist one-liners into a guy slinging penis jokes and rigorously honest stories about his life and those closest to him.

Since then, CK has challenged himself to deliver on an unprecedented scale. The self-deprecating social critic has crafted many hours of new material, one almost every year, and let the material go after recording it. In these specials, he not only mapped the mind of a lazy, horny, gluttonous dude who happens to be a dad, but a culture of entitlement, which everything is amazing and nobody’s happy. This is what a comic genius looks like, wrote Rolling Stone eight months before Louis C.K. Was canceled.

Number three, Lenny Bruce, which leaves the big two. And on any list, you can flip the order around. Depends on your personal preference. My personal preference is the opposite of how Rolling Stone had it. George Carlin at number two.

And Richard Pryor, obviously, I didn’t even have to look. Would be number one on the list. They wrote, at his Acme, which was caught on tape and specials, including live in concert and live on the Sunset Strip, Pryor was untouchable. Won’t argue with them. It’s a personal preference once you get that far.

And that is a look back at Rolling Stone’s 50 best stand-up comics of all time from 2017. Now, just off the top of my mind, if we made this list today, I didn’t say words like Mulaney would probably be pretty far up these days. Bregazzi right? Not even on the radar 10 years ago. We had a list with Wanda Sykes on it, but no Nate Bregazzi 10 years ago.

Would you have Sebastian Maniscalco on a list? I’m not doing research. I’m just going off the top of my head. Is Nikki Glaser on a list of these days? Jim Gaffigan, not on the top 50 on a list that had Wanda Sykes and Margaret Cho and whoever else I didn’t like at the bottom of the list.

No Jim Gaffigan. Now, Jim won’t call you back, but he should be on the list ahead of Aziz Ansari. He won’t call you back either, right? Yeah. So these things change.

And if we make a current list, I’m sure it would be a lot different. And I’m sure you’re screaming in your phone right now going, John, you totally forgot about so-and-so. Again, I’m just doing this off the top of my head. Anyway, a fun little diversion. And that is your comedy news for today.

I’ll catch you tomorrow.

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