Daily Comedy News Podcast Transcripts

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Full Transcript

Caalaroga Shock Media. Hi, Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. A Thunderstorm Edition. I was sitting outside writing the show and it started a poor and the inter lettermaned me, said, let’s do a thunderstorm edition. And look at that the rain is letting up just as I begin to record.

Let’s start on gossip Corner. John Mulaney and Olivia Munn flaunting their love, says The New York Post. You may recall last week there were some rumors that perhaps, possibly maybe they had gotten married. They were seen holding hands as they made their way through the arrivals terminal at JFK Airport. Neither Munn nor Malaney appeared to be wearing rings, though we’re told m’laney looked dashing in a dark jacket laid over a black button down shirt, pants and moccasins.

Olivia Munn was wearing an oversized black overcoat with a great top and lightwashed jeans. When Malaniy recently did his late night show, apparently the set was inspired by Johnny Carson’s Malibu home. Lany tells Vanity Fair. I wasn’t going for an off putting aesthetic or anything. The set was actually modeled after Johnny Carson’s house in Malibu.

A lot of brutaliss gold things, plus grapes. Glass crapes are wonderful. I knew I didn’t want a shiny black floor. I knew I didn’t want anything chrome. I didn’t want anything that look like Late Night A reality shows as they do now.

Jim Norton has a new album out. It is called Gender Reveal Disaster. He got up with. The La Times is a profile of Jim and wife NICKI. How did you guys meet?

NICKI said, I was nineteen years old living in Norway. I had my first apartment and I started speaking to this American online named Jim. I saw a video of him on YouTube. I didn’t know he was a comedian because he was talking more seriously. I looked him up rode to him.

I think he also saw me online, so I guess he liked what he saw. Norton said, I was delighted. She sent me a message because I did this interview where I talked about trans women. I’ve talked about it so many times and occasionally get messages, so we talked briefly. I looked her up and saw she was doing cam stuff, So we started talking more in Around two months later, I was like, why don’t you come visit.

That’s when she got rejected for a very minor marijuana charge. Nicky says, I thought I’d have no problem getting in the States papers and the guy goes, you’re a convicted criminal. You need a waiver for this. A waiver was a nightmare because you have to overcome all these things. That started a really crazy process f us Jim said.

It was insane. She never even got call at drugs. It was literally a text message that was read at the police station. It also made it much harder to prove that it was a small amount because it was never an actual amount. Because of that, it was seven months before we met, which is a lot of talking and facetiming.

Bill Burrd always told me to go overseas and they love me, but I would never do it. I finally did it to meet her, so I knew I liked her. After the first week in a Norway, I knew I really liked her. Nicky says, Yeah, he came to Norway, we hit it off really well. Three days after that I went to Amsterdam with him.

Jim was the first man to take me out in public. The only times was like, wait, is being openly trans in Norway not allowed? NICKI said, it’s allowed, but I feel like it’s a good country to be trans in. But I do feel that Norway, although very liberal, is a little bit more conservative for my parents. It was definitely weird.

It’s way weirder there than it is here in America. I have excess in my life, but being in Norway, it was never asked out in public. I’d always felt hidden away. Jim changed that whole world for me. The rain is letting up by the way, which is good because I’m kind of try out here.

TMZ had someone at the Stormy Daniel’s comedy show. Apparently Stormy joked on a whole bunch of different topics, from her porn career to her political allegiance, and despite her issues with the former president, Stormy says she’s still a Republican. Oh yeah. She talked about him too, reportedly calling him tiny, while also touching on her financial woes, including the six hundred thousand dollars a judge ordered her to pay Trump following the defamation lawsuit she claims her lawyer filed without her consent. I think I guessed right about something.

My memory’s foggy. The National Comedy Center has announced that Nate Bergatzy will headline the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival. He joins Jeff Ross and Nicole Byer. They were already performing. I feel like I did a story where they hadn’t announced the headliner, and I just felt vibes that it was going to be Nate.

I didn’t know anything, but all right, I guess my Spidery sent still works. Oh man, it just got like eighty five times as humid, still raining, and there’s thunder in the distance. But boy, it is sticky out here. Tickets for Nate’s show at the National Comedy Center go on sale Tuesday. Go to Comedy Center.

I was actually up that way over the weekend. Didn’t pop into Jamestown, but it was up in the Niagara area. Very very nice. Jimmy Kimmel, he’s taking his annual summer vacation. Martin Short will sit in tonight as the host.

The rest of the week is Meryl Street tomorrow, Selena Gomez Wednesday, Melissa McCarthy on Thursday. That sounds like a lot of work for the producers could at least get one person a week. I don’t know if you saw this. Martin Short as his character Jimmy Glick, which I have no interest in, sat in for Bill Maher and in character as Glick interviewed Bill Maher on Bill Maher’s own show. Danny Jealous announced to heal the film his third special at the world famous Roxy Theater on September fourteenth.

Both shows are seven and nine point thirty. As with these past specials, there’s a large concept at the heart of this one. It remains a secret for now. The general theme of the hours marriage and evolving as a humor over time. Previously, for an example, he did six parts which saw Danny deliver his first Hour over six nights at six unique venues, including a Jim barbershop, a surf shop, an art gallery, recording studio, and a comedy club.

For some reason, they’re making Spaceballs two. Josh gadd and Mel Brooks are producing. It’s Mel’s birthday this week. I know that because he’s one of the topics on five Daily Trivia Questions. A whole day of mel Brooks Trivia.

Five Daily Trivia Questions where if you get your shows, Oh, the rain’s picking up again at de tails of four spaceballs, two have not been shared. This can’t possibly be a good idea, right, Remember History of the World War Two came out last year and none of us cared this. Don’t do this. Josh gadd had boasted on Instagram just handed in a film script that I think maybe the funniest and best thing I’ve ever worked on. And I’m so freaking excited.

I Carmel’s getting a lot of headlines. He has a new book, T Shirt Swim Club Stories from Being Fat and a World of Thin People. The cover of the book is a kid at the beach. Carmel said he was inspired to used that image because he thought that anyone who was a fat kid would know that feeling. He said, when you go to the pool and all of a sudden, your big, fat body’s hang out there, and you’re like, Okay, now I’ll fix that.

I’ll put on a T shirt which immediately gets and clings to every curve of your Torso it’s a very silly, active desperation by children. During his eight years working with Cordon on The Late Late Show, he reached his peak weight of four hundred and twenty pounds. My blood pressure was two hundred over one hundred and something, and I was really unhealthy. When a doctor comes in and says, very seriously, you could die for this. That’s the kind of bloo pressure where you could have a heart attacker stroke.

But those are very realistic things that can happen. The idea of having to lose two hundred pounds, well, that’s like saying, oh hey, why don’t you build a rocket ship climb to the top of Mount Everest. He did not do things like ozempic. He lost weight the old fashioned weight, he says. He prepares meals in advance, weighs himself regularly check his progress, and engages in his frequent hot girl walks, a phrase coin on TikTok to describe a stroll.

However, had ozempic been available at the time, he said, one hundred percent would have tried it when I was four hundred and twenty pounds, I would have been wearing an ozempic half shirt, drinking out of an ozempic water bottle, roller around Hollywood advertising. I would have been the poster child. Our entire society is built around simultaneously punishing fat people and trying to make people as fat as possible. At the same time, it’s easier to get a cheeseburger than to get a salad. Yeah, dude, I love chop salads.

They’re like sixteen dollars, and then the world is cruel to the person who eats the cheeseburger. So it’s ft he has a message you’d like to tell his younger self. Go about your life and find the people who love you for who you are. Some people are gonna bully you, and most of the other people really aren’t thinking about you at all. Good advice from Ian Carmel and that it’s your Daily Comedy News Thunderstorm edition.

Is it summer, Yes, it is if you skip the weekend. Both episodes were an interview with Mike Chisholm. He is the host of the Letterman podcast. We nerded out about Letterman both days. And that’s it.

I’m trapped out here in the rain. I’d have to get soaked to get back on the house, and I’m going to continue to sit here under the umbrella, and I guess I’ll let up the show and schedule it. See you

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Today is part two of my interview with Mike Chisholm. He hosts The Letterman Podcast, which celebrates the incredible body of work done by broadcast legend David Letterman and company. On The Letterman Podcast, Mike highlights folks who work with Dave or were part of the show’s productions.

Today is a little more nerdier than yesterday. We start to geek out about some specific subjects, including Chris Elliott, who I adore, But we’ll pick up the conversation here with me talking about Steve Allen. I think another influence that maybe for younger people goes unrecognized is Steve Allen. I think there’s a tendency to go work backwards and go Letterman, Carson, Jack Parr, and you have a version of the Tonight’s Show in your head that starts with Parr and goes through Johnny and Jay. But the Steve Allen Tonight’s Show, if you watch clips of that, you’d swear you’re watching nineteen sixty two Late Night with David Letterman.

I think he even did a version of the Alka Seltzer suit unless I’m totally hallucinating. Yeah, No, Dave in the Serial Bowl, Dave in the Alka Seltzer suit and some of these things. But Dave has never shied away from the idea of saying that he was influenced by some of the antics of Steve Allen. The man on the street again, the razor sharp wit of talking to people in the audience and the coming up with these responses, that kind of thing. There’s no doubt that there’s a Steve Allen influence there.

This is where we bring up Don Giller and his might of what he has done with this insane collection that he has, what he has done. If you go onto Don Giller’s channel on YouTube, he’s got a seven part in. Every single part is like an hour and a half. It’s called the Talk I think it’s called the Talk Show Guest Series, and it’s in chronological order every single late night host or talk show host and every appearance that they made on any of David Letterman shows. So Parr is there, Steve Allen, is there, Dick Cavott, who’ve had on our show, he was there, and it goes through every single time he interviewed or had these people on the show.

And the cool thing about it because he does it in chronological order of each guest or each host, I should say it’s both their yes and a host in this case anyway, because he does it in that order, you see the evolution of Dave, and you see the evolution of Dave’s interviewing skills and his courage is his self esteem. Early on, when he’s interviewing some of these people, he is really you can tell he’s in awe of some of these folks.

And then as his experience and skill level increased over the years, you just…

And it’s a fascinating That’s comfort food for me, Johnny. Honestly, if I’m having a bad day of some sort and i need to vege on, I need to take some time and just recharge, I’ll go and I’ll watch those Those are absolutely astounding in their insight, but of course their entertainment value as well. Highly recommend them. But yes, Steve Allen huge influence, as was Tom Snyder, as Johnny Carson you could throw, as was Dick Cavot for that matter. You can see influence in Dave from a lot of these folks.

Jack Parr of course as well. I shouldn’t, but you see it today too, younger people influencing Dave as well in my next guest. And I just love this evolution that he has had. If you look at it that way, it makes it a lot easier. That change is a lot easier to stomach if you look at it as an evolution.

And where Dave is at right now, as far as I’m concerned, he’s top of his game. I saw him a couple of weeks ago in La too. I saw two nights during his three night run in LA I saw him interview Nate Bergazi and Tim Robinson from I Think You Should Leave on Netflix, and watching him talk to these amazing comedians that are hot as all ghetto right now and not just hang with them, but they’re hanging off his every word. It’s quite astounding to see that, to see him become our Johnny Carson right now. But the thing is, Johnny Carson left, Dave didn’t, and I’m so grateful for that.

Did you watch Malini’s show the first couple nights, especially the first twenty month, and it’s of Malini’s show I was like, twelve thirty days back, this is chaotic, this is crazy. I love it. That’s exactly what I thought it was too. I was down in La while that was happening, and I was trying my very best to try and figure out a way to get to the episode where Dave was on it. And I think I’m glad that Dave wasn’t on the first episode because I think that there was You’re right, there was some chaos there, but there was also some of that chaos that was like, Okay, is this working?

Is it not working? But by day three or four you’re like, okay, this is crazy. And it was very much like Late Night. But then you throw in the idea of having a group of people out there unscripted. No real it doesn’t feel like that.

A segment producer came out and said, Okay, we’re gonna go from here to hear other than the special guest who was the expert topic on, Let’s make sure we give them some time. But other than that, it seemed to be pretty free form. Yeah, it was. I loved it. I thought it was fantastic.

I know that there’s a lot of people who are scratching their heads because they’re used to seeing no offense to Falon’s Tonight Show. But Falens Tonight Show is pretty buttoned up, is pretty A to B two C A to B two C formulaic, and mullaney show was anything but that. Putting Richard Kind as the as the sidekick, Holy, that was funny. Richard Kind is always He’s always just made me laugh. That guy is just a He’s like a cartoon character come to life.

What a genius move throwing Richard Kind on that in those suits on as that and I thought it was very funny. And the cool thing about it is the response to it. At the beginning, I’m down in La as it’s happening, and I’m watching, I’m going online and reading these responses while I’m down there, like right before. I think one morning I actually talked about when we had breakfast down there and it was just watching the responses and people were like, what the hell is this show? And they didn’t like it at all, a lot of people, a lot of people were like really against it.

But since then, you’ve seen, like Mulaney just had an interview again the other day talking about are you gonna be doing more of these? Are you gonna do more talk shows because there’s this audience that’s clearly there, that clearly enjoyed the strangeness of it, and I believe one hundred percent you’re exactly right. It can be directly compared in many respects to Late Night with David Letterman. I’ve seen a lot of people with the take, and I agree with it. The move from Malaney is to do that four six times a year, maybe take it on the road like Conan.

If he were to start doing that on Netflix at ten pm Eastern every night, I think I’d wind up with the same place I wind up with eleven thirty day of like you know what, I’m gonna watch something else to night. I don’t really need to see m’laney, but I love the potential there. I want to spend a couple of minutes just nerding out about Chris Elliott and I Another thing, you realize the influence on Late Night on me. I won’t get into it here. My audience knows.

I have a recurring joke about Joe Coy and Taylor Swift that I have beaten to death to the point where it went from funny to not funny at all, and it’s now back to funny because you know I’m going to do it, and that I’m thinking of the Chris Elliott bits of Guy under the seats. We all know where this is going to go, and we’re all laughing and we’re all in on the jokes. But let’s do it the Fugitive Guy over and over. It’s the same setup, it’s the same payoff, but I couldn’t get enough of it. Let’s just start about Chris Elliott.

Chris Elliott is as far as I’m concerned, he’s an international treasure. He’s just and I say that because Shit’s Creek up here in Canada. Of course, we’re very proud of Schitz Creek being a Canadian production. And I was so happy to see him in Shit’s Creek. I was so happy to see Chris Elliot back.

Chris Elliott is just He is incredible and one of the most humble people that you’ll ever ever talk to. He and I have had conversations. He’s reluctant to come on the Letterman podcast. Doesn’t want to talk about some of the stuff he did back then because out of just Again, it’s so interesting how these people can be so self deprecating and not understand the influence that they make. But again, a few weeks ago, watching David Letterman and Tim Robinson on stage, Tim Robbins Dave asked him, do you have any questions for me?

And one of his first questions to Dave was can we talk about Chris Elliott for a second. And one of the things Dave said on stage was, at one time was probably the funniest human walking the planet, I think was what he said. And it’s true Chris was Oh was he good? One of the things that I love about Chris Elliott. And it seems to be this way behind the scenes as well, from everybody that I’ve talked to.

And I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school when we talk about Larry Sanders and how people say nobody was afraid of Larry. If there was one guy on the staff that was directly interacting with Dave and performing with Dave that wasn’t afraid of Dave, it was Chris. At least I don’t know if he was or not, but at least he came across like he wasn’t he was, He wasn’t afraid. To give it back to Dave, and really play with him. And if they’re hockey players, I’m not afraid to hit each other, They’re not afraid to throw an elbow here and there.

It was edgy and dangerous and unpredictable. It had that unpredictable nature to it, even in some of these canned things that were gonna happen that were quote unquote predictable. They weren’t like the guy under the seats, But what’s he gonna do next? Is there something that’s gonna be different or is it going to be just the same. And you didn’t know that.

That was the unpredictable part of it. And you think about the family, the draft. I the name escapes me right now. I can’t believe the name escapes me. But Chris acting with this acting troupe and the little sketches and skits that they would put on night Light.

Oh my god, do you remember night Light? Yes? Oh, when Chris would have his own show, that night Light with Chris show, the middle of Dave Show, his own show. Yeah, he knew late night show. This is night Light with Chris Elliott right in the middle of Late Night with David Letterman, And it seems like a new show.

Is beginning and Chris completely lampooning day, doing almost a caricature of the types of jokes he would do, and some of the things, Oh boy, was that good. Chris Elliott is a genius. He is amazing and I don’t even know if he knows how much of an impact he has made on people. Yeah, he is absolutely incredible. There’s a great clip on YouTube.

I’ll encourage everyone to seek out. They don’t even explain it, which is why it’s great. It’s Chris Elliott is in Paul Shaffer’s place doing a Paul Schaeffer impression, exaggerated, jumping up and down, saying things Paul would say, not even like trying to be funny. He’s just doing a dead on ish Paul. And they don’t even knowledge that really that it’s Chris Elliott.

They just go with it, and it’s amazing. That was the thing. When Norm MacDonald was on SNL. People remember him mostly for his Weekend Update, and but one of the things that Norm MacDonald did on SNL was he imitated Dave. And it was funny watching Norm do that because one of the things that he did, if you really look at it and deconstruct it, all he was doing was just trying to imitate exactly what Dave was doing, and it was really interesting.

It wasn’t like where you look at when Dana Carvey would imitate Johnny Carson. He would put in some surrealistic things, not just Carcinio, but some of the other things he would put in. He would throw in some things there that made Johnny a little bit more cartoonish or whatever. Norm didn’t do that with Dave. Norm didn’t do that with Dave.

Norm basically just acted the way that Dave did. But it was so ridiculous because only Dave can act the way that Dave doesn’t get away with it, and it was just very very interesting to see the takes on that. And I think Chris doing that with Paul is something very similar. Paul Shaffer has the most amazing, you know, unique presence, personality, delivery, wit character, because part of that is character of course for the show, and when somebody else just imitates it but dead on, I think that there’s something that’s funny about that. Doing this every day, sometimes I’ll go and I call them half ass impressions.

They’re not meant to be impressions. But if I’ll read a quote from somebody, I’ll try and to approximate their cadence, if that makes sense. And both Norm and Dave have an if you’re going to do a really lazy letterman impression my next guest, and just it’s that little uh. And Norm has that as well. Yes, there’s no question about that.

Someone once told the like, it’s funny when I do these things. Someone once told the it’s funny when I do these things. I just did one right there. I don’t have a lot of us and OZ many times when you and I are communicating back and forth, it’s not like that. But when I’m hosting the show, I have some of these little noises that I make and I want I watch Dave.

I swear to god it’s because Dave has them too. And it’s something that I think there’s a lot of people out there that are trying to be you know, there’s a lot of stand ups out there who tried to be Hicks for a long time, and I think that I think there are broadcasters out there that try and be Dave in their delivery somehow, because he’s got that Auschuck’s Midwestern not perfect, even though it is absolutely perfect. Delivery and like I just said it there that sometimes I’ll do that. But it’s funny. When I do these shows here, I don’t, but when I’m hosting, I do them.

And Norm I could not agree more. Norm had this relaxed style. There’s a little bit of Canadian in it for sure. Every once in a while I hear the Canadian in him come out. But I guess say this to you, Okay, So we’re talking Late Night Late Show Norm MacDonald.

Nor McDonald is one of the highlights of Late Show with David Letterman. For me, anytime that he was on it was an incredible thing, including when he lost Weekend Update. He was fired from Weekend Update in the season NBC pulls in and fires him. The very next day or the day that it happened. He is on Paddel at Late Show with David Letterman and they’re talking about it, and Letterman’s calling, oh, which exec was, it doesn’t matter one of the NBC executives that he knew, you know, calling him a quizzling and doing all these things, and it’s just it’s this, it’s beautiful exchange.

Watching that to me is a little bit of Late Night that was in Late show and Norm McDonald always provided that.

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And then you know, after when Johnny Carson retired, he had this moment with …

Middler sang the song to him Dave when he retired from Late Show. I think there were two moments that to me was like Dave’s Bette Midler moment. They were combined. One of them was a song that Adam Sandler hit. The other one, though, was Norm MacDonald’s last stand up set on Late Show with David Letterman.

Can you recall that? Do you remember that set? Have you seen that? Johnny? Yes, incredible might be the greatest stand up set on a talk show ever.

And you look at those two guys, the mutual admiration from two very interesting personalities. Dave had gone on record many times saying that Norm was his favorite comedian walking the planet at that time, and Norm absolutely worshiped Dave. And when he came in to do that set, was completely nervous. The scuttle but is the night before, whether it was at the Cellar, he he bombed a lot of it. He was walking around the theater all day trying to figure out what was going to go in that set, what wasn’t going to go in that set, and it was just for anybody out there who likes Norm MacDonald And maybe you haven’t seen that set in a while, go look at the last Norm McDonald’s set on Late Show with David Letterman.

It is absolutely picture perfect. Norm’s one of those guys that in death I feel like has been elevated in class that we all rediscovered him instead of taking him for granted. Another great rabbit hole to go down on YouTube is the insane amount of OJ jokes, which is what got him fired. But there are these thirty five minute compilations of just one liner is like Prince Charles has a new book. It’s called of Course OJ did it like just but like that for thirty five minutes.

Oh I know, and it is that same guy who ran NBC. I just, oh, I keep forgetting I don’t know why normally I can pull out these NBC executives like out of the back of my no problem. For some reason, it’s just eluding me right now. But yeah, he was apparently friends with OJ, and so the OJ jokes were just. But it’s so interesting though, because okay, that’s the case.

Here’s the thing that I was wondering about though Norm MacDonald targeted at SNL. But yet at the same time, Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, you know, has the dancing ETOs, and they’re making fun of OJ and the trial and the circus. They’re making fun of that stuff all the time. In fact, Late Show with David Letterman didn’t do that. Dave went on record as to say, I don’t find double homicide that funny.

They called me crazy, but I don’t find double homicide that funny, and they didn’t do what the finan should. And part of that is is one of the reasons why some folks believe that Leno surged ahead again in the ratings was part of that. So there’s a lot of irony there because he’s on NBC. Norm McDonald’s getting fired from a weekend Update, but Jay Leno, no problem. That’s the entertainment industry.

It’s easy to fire the part time or the producer, the host. Can we replace the weekend Update guy who’s one of a twelve person ensemble. Yes, can we mess with the host of the Tonight Show. That’s front page of Variety and probably the New York Times for six months. It just the rules are never equal.

The entertainment business is not fair, Oh that’s for sure. And it’s funny how Dave can certainly point to that and how he was passed over for the Tonight Show. I maintain, of course it was the greatest thing that ever could have happened to him, because the industry was changing and he had such a reverence for that franchise that it was going to it was inevitable that the Tonight Show. Like people don’t understand that today, they don’t understand the dominance. I don’t know if there is a show in any form of entertainment right now that the Olympics might be the one of the only like certain big sporting events might be one of the only comparisons that might be apt.

The Tonight Show owned late night television. They owned it for thirty years. They owned it. They were dominant. There was no counter programming.

As good of a guy as Dick Cavot was and is to this day, love him. He’s one of my favorite broadcasters of all time. He could not crack The Tonight Show when it came to the dominance in the ratings, our Sineo flash in the pan in broad history, but was changing television. He started to for a little bit. But other than that, the Tonight Show was dominant.

Nobody had ever touched it. But at the time when Johnny retired, things were starting to dilute. There were more networks that were showing up. There was more things that were coming on to distract people or to put people’s attention elsewhere. And I just think about if David Letiman would have got that franchise that he loved so much, and it would have been on his watch that the industry would have changed and the Tonight Show would have lost its dominance, that would have been so sad.

But instead he got to be the guy that walks across the street to CBS, and he got to be the guy that started shelling this thing, lamparding this thing from across the street. And the fact that there was even a show that could even compete with The Tonight Show was astounding. It was unprecedented. Never mind the fact that they beat them in the ratings for eighteen months, when you could probably go really far down this rabbit hole when it came to the fact that CBS had a massive disadvantage from affiliates from they on paper should not have been able to beat the Night Show in the ratings, But yet they did it for eighteen months, and then the fact that they would go back and forth and be even competitive with them for thirty years. That was unprecedented.

It had never happened before. And I think if Dave was the guy in the Tonight Show chair where that happened, I think that would have really been a sad thing for him. But to be the guy that actually walked across the street with Johnny Carson’s blessing to do that, man, it was so much better that he got that show more worth Mike in a second, don’t forget. If you’d like this podcast, add free link in the show notes four ninety nine a month. Go to Calaruga dot com slash plus you can get this program and a bunch of others on the network commercial free just four nine nine nine a month.

If you’d like a National Donus chain T shirt, those are for sale in the show notes and subscribe. Please into my substack. It’s where I pontificate about the media in the written form. Mcteepod dot substack dot com. Link in the show notes.

Are you affectionate for Conan? I feel like I missed the boat on Conan, just because I was doing other things in the nineties. But I feel like once he found his fastball, Conan spiritually picked up the it’s twelve thirty, let’s just try stuff vib Oh gosh. Yeah. I love Conan O’Brien, I love Robert Smigel.

I would watch Conan at first again a little bit with with the John Mulaney thing you were talking about earlier. Okay, what is this Because my mind, of the four hosts that have hosted Late Night, You’ve got Letterman, You’ve got Conan, You’ve got Fallon, and you got Seth. I think Conan’s really the only one who wanted to take the spirit of Late Night but make it their own. Whereas Late Night may have had a little bit more of a sarcastic edge to it, Conan turned that dial down and turned up zany. But the creative stuff that they did, I did like him right at the beginning, even during the shaky times, the times where he’s getting week to week commitments for a show he’s about to be canceled, about to be canceled.

I liked a lot of the stuff that they were doing. I liked Andy. I loved the stuff that Robert Smigel came up with for them, and I thought that they were really inventive. It was certainly worthy of the title of Late Night in my mind. But the idea that he was making it completely his own to me was completely evident as well, which I respect the heck out of, especially now with the benefit of hindsight.

But at the time, I just really liked it. And I’ll tell you this because I really liked it. A couple of years into it, or maybe eighteen months into it, when Dave came back and Dave was a guest on that show, I was electric, Like that was as a fan. I was so happy the night that Dave came back on. He didn’t go on the Tonight Show on NBC No, but he did go back to Late Night, and then when Conan would start coming on Late Show, and then they would do things.

Do you remember the bit You weren’t watching Late Show, so you might not have remembered this. There’s a really cool moment where Dave took his stand by audience and sent them to the Conan O’Brien show. Oh now, they said a camera. They sent a camera. Oh it’s worth watching.

It is so funny and so he sends a camera with them, so there’s a stand by audience. You’re going to see Conan tonight. They bring them, brings them on the stage of the Insulimon Theater and says, hey, good news, we’re setting you to see Conan. Camera there and then you watch Conan, of course at eleven at twelve thirty, I should say, and you get to see the mirrored response Letterman show showing up. And it was just a beautiful little piece.

I wish. I can’t believe I’ve actually even said to a couple of writers, former writers for Letterman who now worked for Fallon, I’m like, why the heck don’t Seth and Jimmy do stuff like that? Like why don’t they call up Dave ask him if they can do elevator races they’re in the same building and bring back some of these old late night things in thirty rock. What if and you have team team Seth and team Jimmy and you do stuff like that. I love stuff like that, And Dave and Conan used to do that every once in a while and it was a really cool thing.

Yeah, I really liked Conan. During Late Shift two, when Conan went through his trouble Tonight. That’s my favorite run of Letterman of all time other than the last six weeks. The last six weeks was magic and perfect with his run up. But my favorite Letterman period in history.

I’m the host of the show. I love Late Night. I understand the people who love Late Night so much, But my favorite period in Letterman history was the time where Conan and Leno were going through their stuff at the Tonight Show, and every single night Dave on Late Show was just, oh, it was so great.

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And then he would have Kimmel on and they would talk about it and all of that…

That’s my favorite Letterman run in history is in twenty ten. Yeah, Dave unleashed. Maybe you could get a reunite the cast from the Late Shift movie, which if people haven’t seen, is probably somewhere on HBO Max. I love that film. I know they made fun of some of is it Daniel Roebucks prosthetics, But I thought that movie was fantastic.

It was really The Late Shift as a book is, in my opinion, one of the greatest. Even know Bill Carter when he talks about writing The Late Shift and the War for Late Night for that matter, The warf for Late Night is incredible and I highly recommend that one as well. But he wrote it like a thriller. He literally wrote it. Wrote this book that is the behind the scenes of late night talk shows and a lot of executive talk and contracts and stuff that would be considered boring by many.

He wrote it like it was a thriller, and it is a thriller. And so when the movie came out, if you watch Bill Carter’s first time he appeared on The Letterman podcast, he actually goes through the entire process of the movie being made, and it’s incredible because they had a writer and the writer totally didn’t you know. He wrote this fictitious scene of Dave and Jay drinking together. I think they’re having a beer together. Famously, Leno doesn’t drink and Letterman stop drinking.

And so the producers of the of the HBO guys come back to Bill and they’re like, what do you think of this? And Bill’s this is not my book. And so Bill ends up going and writing the screenplay and it gets made. So he tells that whole story when he he’s on the Letterman podcast. His first time that he was on the Letterman podcast, and we definitely talk about some of the things.

But you look at the portrayal of Helen Kushnik, incredible. She got nominated. Oh, Kathy Bates got nominated for an Emmy for that, And yeah, the prosthetics were interesting, a rich little being Johnny Carson now looking back at it, Okay, that might be a little campy. Yeah, but it was a really fun movie and I watch it. I’ll watch it every eighteen months still.

It is on up here in Canada. It’s on the HBO. We’ve got a thing called Crave that has HBO and Showtime and everything mixed into one. It’s in the archives there, and I’ll watch it every eighteen months or so. It’s a really fun movie.

There are some elements though that I’m not gonna say which writer, but there’s a couple of places where they truncate the culture of a behind the scenes of a late night television show where’s yeah, not even close happening like that, and things like that. But there are a lot of elements of it that are really fun and it does a good overview of the story. But it does not compare to reading Bill’s book. You can get a digital copy of the Late Shift now and Bill’s actually added some extra material semi currently, like within the last five years, I think, and it’s very good. I highly recommend it.

Yeah, both books are great opera plugs in for your podcast. Hopefully we turn some new people onto it today. One hundred and thirty episodes in, that’s a lot. We don’t have one hundred and thirty hours to kill. So if we were going to pick five, who do you want to point people towards?

Oh gosh, that’s hard, because Johnny seriously, Like last summer, for example, I had what we call the Summer Intern Series on and I had I think five interns, folks who literally interned for the show, and some of them went on to do some big things in entertainment and whatnot. I love them just as much as I love interviewing Robert Morton. You know. That’s the enthusiasm that I take to the show, This puppy dog type love and enthusiasm. So I really have a hard time choosing because I love them all, whether it’s the Obscure, whether it’s a guy who performed on stupid Human Tricks and he talks about his entire letterment experience all the way to somebody like Steve O’Donnell, legendary comedy writer.

But that being said, if I was to pick five episodes, I would probably pick Paul Shaeffer. I would probably pick Dick Cabott. I would probably pick Robert Morton. Early on, we had Steve O’Donnell on and I certainly hadn’t hit my stride, or if I have a stride now, I hadn’t hit whatever it is that I have now, but at that point. But I still I love Steve to this day.

He’s a good friend.

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And then another writer as well, Steve Young.

He’s been on multiple times. Steve and I are are friends now. He did the documentary Bathtubs over Broadway, and so I’ve had him on and we’ve talked about all sorts of stuff. We’re you gotta actually have him on. He just released a comedy album, and we’re gonna have him back on with a listening party with a few Letterman alum on there as well, and we’re trying to make the show to do some fun stuff with the show as well.

But those five episodes, probably Cabots is a talking to Dick Cavott, and I’m talking to a broadcaster here. So I don’t think it takes much to imagine the honor that was having him on the show. That was an incredible moment. When check he passed away, we did a tribute episode to him, and then the very next week, which is just me talking to camera for ninety minutes. Imagine that.

I don’t recommend that, but it was a special moment.

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And then the next week Alex Bennett came on and we talked about his connectio…

We’ve had some great moments on the show. It’s I’m really proud, and as somebody who suffered with imposter syndrome of a financial planner by trade when I was a little kid, if you had asked me what my dream John was, it didn’t exist. I wanted to be a ghostbuster. The job didn’t exist. And if you would have said to me even five years ago, Mike, one day, you’re going to host the Letterman podcast, I would have said, I would have looked at you like you had three eyes.

Like when Rupert g the owner of the Hello Deli, retired, I went up to New York and I spoke in the Ed Sullivant Theater in the Ed Sullvant Theater, the Worldwide Pants Thru in a party for him, and I got to speak at that party, and it’s are you kidding me? And I got to actually say some things that actually elicited an emotional response from an audience of about one hundred folks who worked for Letterman over the years. I’m so grateful and I can’t believe that this has happened. So I don’t know if people think the show is good or not good. I just know that it is one of the greatest honors of my life, and it brings so much joy to host that show, and the experiences I’ve gotten from it is just it’s unparalleled.

Are the bookings getting easier because they have a track record now, so you’re not some rando who’s going to do five of these and quit with one hundred and thirty and some people that the others have heard of? Is it the cool party to be at a little easier to get people a little bit of Colum, a little bit of columb It’s funny. There are some folks who gave me the absolute green light yes early on, and now they’re getting sheepish about it because it’s so funny because I just say, no, just come on, we just have a conversation, just would be you. But they’re sheepish about it because of a variety of different reasons. But part of it is the fact that, oh, you had Steve young on all these times, you had Steve O’Donnell on, you had more toy on.

What could I bring to this? You get some of that. Some of the heavy hitters were reluctant before and they’re still reluctant now, but there are a few who are coming around because of exactly what you said as well. So there’s a little bit of both. If you get Dave, is that good or bad?

No, that’s a great question. It’s good, absolutely good, There’s no doubt about that. But the show is not over because again, the Letterman Podcast is a celebration of the greatest body of broadcasting work in history, that of David Letterman and Company, and the company is equal, if not greater, to Dave. A Dave is a part of it, and that’s how we view this and Checky and I talked about that was one of the things about the show that we talked about. The guy who was on Stupid Human Tricks and at a life changing moment because of it, and got all these extra bookings and things because of it, and his life was changed because of that moment.

Is equally as important as if David Letterman comes on in how I present it now. Obviously having him on would be an incredible moment. It wouldn’t be the end of the show, though, because the show focuses on his body of work, and so I would love I hope to have him on. So far, I’ve had a polite no. I don’t think the door has closed forever.

The polite no is not what we do. I think if we get to a certain place, that might change. I also think if the beauty of serendipity comes into things and something happens where though just the right combination of events or doors open, it could happen as well. But it would be definitely be a good thing. You’ve been very generous with your time.

This has been awesome. We’re let me see, we are like twenty percent over what I even asked you for. So I will let you go and hopefully we can connect again somewhere down the road. But this was really fantastic. Anytime.

I will do this anytime and talk about this stuff for sure. I love it. You’re a fantast. Obviously you’re a pro. You’re a seasoned pro, and I appreciate this so very much.

It’s guys like you I wish I would have had a moment where I could have been given the permission to chase my dreams. I would have gone into broadcasting. I appreciate where you guys. I appreciate the skill set that you have. I really do, and I’m glad that you’re still doing it after all this time and not too jaded from watching this industry that you have been a part of that has changed in so many ways to where it is now.

I’m so grateful that you’re doing what you’re doing. It inspires me to do what I’m doing. Thank you so much, shawnny Oh, you are too kind. I hope you enjoyed that one. I love geeking out about Letterman.

I wish I had known about Mike when Late Night turned forty em back in twenty twenty two and we were kind of still in the pandemic and doing major filler some weekends. I think I did a month of Letterman back then. If you want to scroll back through the archives, maybe I’ll resurface those. I’ll put those in the feed as bonus episodes or something. Not today, maybe next weekend.

Let me think about that, all right. The Letterman podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and in the Facebook group Today Daily Comedy News podcast group. I have scheduled a few things, a couple of Chris Elliot things and some other stuff to check out. All right, hope you enjoyed that. I’ll see tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Yeah. My next guest is Mike Chisholm. He hosts The Letterman Podcast. Hi, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News.

I hope you caught my little lettermanesque tribute there. The Letterman Podcast celebrates the incredible body of work done by broadcast legend David Letterman and company. On The Letterman Podcast, Mike highlights folks who worked for Dave or were part of any of his show’s productions. People had an accounter with one of his shows, or are enthusiasts with relevant discussion points or memories pertaining to any of Letterman’s productions or endeavors. I’ve split this one up into two parts.

We did about eighty minutes ross. I’ll give you half today, half tomorrow. Here’s my interview with Mike Chisholm. I wear many hats, and when I look at my own stuff, For example, I host a comedy podcast, and as I explain, I know a lot more about comedy than most people, but the people that know more about it know a lot more than I do. So I was prepping for this podcast, I was like, all right, I know a lot about Letterman.

I’m a big letterman fan. Let me check out some episodes of Mike’s pod, and then I was like, oh, I’m out of my depth here. I can’t talk writers and producers. This guy knows his stuff. Props to you.

Where did the podcast come from? What gave you the idea? Oh? Man? Okay, So there’s a whole bunch of ways too that I can answer this question, because the answer, of course, has a ton of depth to it.

You know, it all really started. I mean, my love of Dave has gone ever since, you know, back to my first time. I can remember seeing the show. I was eight nine years old, and I remember the show that I saw, and the idea that adults could act silly was so charming to me. I had always attracted to broadcasters.

I love mister Rogers. Growing up. I’m a Canadian, so hawking it in Canada was always the thing to me. You know what. And it wasn’t Bob Cole and Harry Neil who called the play by play.

It was Dave Hodge. It was Ron McClean. I love Ron McClain. I liked pro wrestling, so Vincent man Agrilla Monsoon I loved broadcasters. It fascinated me And the thing about Dave is that he is not a pure comedian.

He’s got a razor sharp wit, no doubt, He’s a broadcaster. He’s a broadcaster in comedy, in variety. I don’t like using that word so much, but he’s He would take all of the chaos and things going on around him and he would almost treat it like he was a reporter. And I found that very charming. When Dave was going to finish his run on late night television in twenty fifteen, I knew I needed to go to New York and see him one more time that night.

I actually and you talk about this level of knowledge that I have, Yeah, I read all the books. I did my very best to try and learn as much as I possibly could about the show behind the scenes. But I had an encounter with Dave right before before the show that day April twentieth, twenty fifteen, where I was part of the Q and A that he did before the show that picked. That moment where he was looking back at Paul and using me. I like to say, he used me as a comedy speedbag was immortalized.

It was a picture of that moment was taken and put into the New York Times into the New Yorker, and just that moment was a seminal moment. After that, I became friends with some of the people who worked behind the scenes online. Became friends with some of the people who worked behind the scenes. And there’s a guy who you could see over my left. His name is Rich Sheckman.

That’s a picture from his memorial. Rick Sheckman was a They call him the film coordinator, but he essentially was an executive producer or a producer of Letterman for thirty two years. He and I became a really became very close friends. And I said, look, I’m a huge podcast fan and I’ve been waiting for the Letterman podcast to come out. I mean, as you know, there are these podcasts that do a deep dive on pretty much any subject you could ever want, and folks who are enthusiast if those subjects can enjoy the podcast, become part of a community, all of that stuff.

I was waiting for years for a Letterman podcast to come out. One never did. And so I said to Shaky, I said, look, I want to do this. I need a conciliaria, I need a Tom Hagen. Will you be that guy?

For me, he said, Michae, I’ll be that guy for you. He set up a couple intros for me, and the rest is an ongoing history that’s still being rewritten. So thank you for letting me spout off on that long winded answer. But we could I could give an equally long winded answer with other pieces of information that led to this podcast happening, and there’s just a lot there, So thank you for that. I was so excited.

I stumbled across the podcast. I had Mark Malkoff on from the Carson Podcast and he’s got a new one inside Late Night, And when I was doing that, I stumbled across this and I was like, Oh, I didn’t know about this one, And I’m so excited because for me, I’ve got what up to about one hundred and ten episodes or so that I can dive through now. I had no idea. I was psyched. I think episode one thirty comes out tomorrow.

Yeah, you know what, I get that a lot. I didn’t know that this thing existed. Yeah, you know, my savvy when it comes to getting it out there is almost nil. But I like that. People ask me all the time, you know what happens if Worldwide Pants that’s Dave’s production company, wants to scoop you up or something, and I heartily say, you know, if he’s the mothership, I’m just saying, beam me up please.

I like being indie. It feels like I’m an indie band, which I probably desperately wanted to be a part of. In the nineties as I was growing up, the indie music sometimes was cooler than the popular music that was out there being played on the radio. And I feel like there’s a little bit of that vibe with the show because I am so independent and I am I’m not doing anything to market the thing. I’m just letting it grow organically, and it’s on YouTube and Apple and Spotify, and there’s an audience, a genuine bonafide audience on each one of those platforms, and it’s a lot of fun growing this thing and letting people discover it organically.

It also takes the pressure off. Doing a podcast about David Letterman is a pretty high wire and there’s a lot of people with a lot of opinions, So being indie is fun. I think you’re smart there. Anytime something goes official, just top mind, like an unofficial Star Wars fans podcast is always going to be a million times cooler than the official Star Wars podcast, even if you get George Lucas the unofficial one. If it’s a fans podcast, you don’t have even if there’s no pressure from the official folks, there’s still If you’re doing the official Star Wars podcast, you’re not gonna get on and bash the Acolyte.

You’re just not gonna do that, whereas you might on the fans podcast. So I think you’re smart there. That said, if Dave calls, of course you’re gonna say, yeah, that’s the dream, Oh, it is the dream. And and I like the analogy with the Star Wars. Yeah, if it’s an official thing, Dave Filone’s gonna show up and he’s gonna have a list of five six things that he can talk about and an entire legion of things that he can’t talk about, whereas if he goes on something that’s a little bit more off the beaten trail, and I’ve had that.

I’ll tell you this with these staffers, Johnny, Like, seriously, some of these staffers, I think I got them on the show because we’re unofficial, because they’re also got that sort of punk rock kind of mentality, that indie mentality. They dig it, they groove on it. Now there are some also, though that’s a double edged sword. There are some who are like, so the reverence that they have for Dave and the company, you know, well, it’s not very many, but two or three people that said, but if you were officially, if you were officially affiliated with Worldwide Pants, we would come on. But we can’t out of respect because of that.

I respect that. But for the vast majority of them, I think you’re exactly right. I get a much looser conversation with people. And the ironic part about what you say, the unofficial Star Wars fans would bash the acolyte. Here’s the thing.

The Letterman Podcast is our tagline. It’s where a celebration of the greatest body of broadcast work in history, that of David Letterman and company. So we celebrate this stuff that show for thirty two years. They were miners. They would go down in the mine.

They put their little hats on and they would turn the lights on and they would go into the deep dark recesses of pop culture, of current events, and they would mine comedy and sometimes they would come out with diamonds bigger than their head and just amazing stuff. But guess what do they do. They just cast that diamond aside and they keep mining because there’s a show the next day, and our show is a celebration. So while you could easily go down the path of salaciousness or gossip or maliciousness or any of that stuff, I have chosen that our show will not focus on that at all. If things come up organically, okay, we might toss them around a little bit, but that is not the focus of it.

And I think a lot of shows that do deep dives into these topics enjoy going into some of the darker recesses of human behavior, and that’s just not something that I’m interested in doing. Because there were so many diamonds. I’d rather focus on the diamonds than the coal. I think you nailed it there. As you were speaking, I was thinking.

I talked to Malkoff. Then I had Jason Zinnemann on the York from the New York Times, and we talked about Letterman, and not once did I think about some of the gossipy stuff that Dave got trapped up in in the nineties or Zeros, and I haven’t even thought about this. When I think of David Letterman, I’m thinking about throwing stuff off a five story tower. And I think your stick is right. Let’s remember the good times and to do an episode on one of those other things.

Who cares? And I could tell that’s just why would you do that? That’s not what you do, and it’s we do live in a culture where clickbait is key, and if you can throw some gotcha stuff out there, you’re gonna get clicks, you’re gonna get views. The good news is I’m immune to that. I don’t care about clicks and views.

I care about putting out a show where I can have itches that I’ve had in the recesses of my mind for decades, scratched, and to talk about this stuff that I just love so much and these people that I love so much. Gosh, Dave made his producers, his writers, the crew around him a part of the show, and there was a secret to that. They made us all feel like we were part of a secret club. And as somebody who felt like it was in the club and gets to go and talk to the folks who were actually in the clubhouse, that is a great thing. You and you’ve probably born.

I’ve worked in an office for a long time. Certain that you’ve had a work environment where there are people around. Guess what, You’re going to see every type of behavior that is a known to man if you’re in a situation like that. I’ve also been part of a family for a long time. These people, a lot of them were together for multiple decades, and even the ones who weren’t won three, five, ten years together.

You get a group of people who are together like that, that are like a family, and in that work environment, you’re going to see every behavior known to man. The difference is in the offices that I’ve worked in, that stuff doesn’t get broadcast. You see it, it happens, but it doesn’t get broadcast out there. When you’re in something public, like a show like this, that stuff gets broadcast. And it’s one of the unfortunate things about entertainment, the entertainment business is that sometimes people are more interested in that than the actual product that comes out.

I’m just not one of those people. Let me ask you about twelve thirty versus eleven thirty versus. Now, this is I’ve been struggling with this, especially as I’ve gotten back into Dave, and I remember back in the eighties staying up till one thirty in the morning, four nights a week.

And then my godmother got me a VCR in nineteen eighty five, and then that sol…

But the amount of times I said, man, if Dave were on at eleven thirty, I would watch this thing every night. Then Dave moves to eleven thirty, and I lasted about a year and a half, and then I recently realized I didn’t watch most of the last twenty years. It’s like Howard Stern to me, like in that way that I consider myself a really big fan. And at some point the work stopped connecting with me. I don’t know if it was because I was in my twenties and you go out and you hang out in New York City and you’re dating people and you’re hanging out and you’re not watching TV.

But I also come back to the twelve thirty. We’re all in on this renegade thing versus eleven thirty. Now it’s an Armani suit and shoes, and it’s a little more. I always called it establishment letterman.

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And now we have this third period where again this guy that I love puts these…

So can you be my therapist here? What is wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s funny talking to You’d mentioned Zennman. I’ve talked to him, and I’ve talked to Bill Carter about this.

Bill Carter, of course wrote The Late Shift and The War for Late Night. Zenniman wrote, let him in the last giant of Late Night. Fascinating guy to talk to you. I’m sure you loved talking to him. I love talking to Jason.

Yeah. Just absolutely great, great guy, they both are. I think it’s part of it lays into where your formative years were. My formative years when I graduated high school, it was nineteen ninety four. Okay, so I watched I was right in my formative years, the cement very wet.

Yet there was still a measure of somewhat of intelligence and cognition that was there because it was at that time and place when Late Shift happened, when Dave moved, because it was a tumultuous move from eleven thirty to twelve or from twelve thirty to eleven thirty, I should say it was a tumultuous move, and folks who were that age, that was my formative years right there. I was already on team Dave and excited about what was happening, really fascinated by it. Dave was on the cover of Time magazine, he was on Rolling Stone multiple times. He was the biggest news story in entertainment around the world. Everybody knew what was going on because I was at that time and place Late Show.

For me, there was no problem. I completely understood the fact that Dave needed to go to a broader audience. I knew why I liked Late Night better than The Tonight Show. Whereas my dad was a Johnny Carson guy. I knew that I like that show better.

I also had this awareness that if Dave moved to eleven thirty, he would have to be more like the Tonight Show. In fact, Dave wanted the Tonight Show. He wanted to do that. He wanted to get a little bit more mainstream, but he couldn’t. In my mind, there’s a guy by the name of Don Giller.

If you go to Don Giller’s YouTube channel, he is the ultimate Letterman archivist. He has everything that Dave has ever done, and has put a lot of it on very thoughtfully and carefully put it on YouTube as compilations. And I asked Don about this very subject once because he is Don’s an older guy now and he has gone through the eras just like you have, and he competed to Mozart. He said, Okay, look, early Mozart is different than later Mozart, but it’s still Mozart all the way. And I feel the exact same way about Dave.

To be the therapist here, you don’t have David Letterman doing My Guest needs no introduction. My Next Guest needs no introduction, which to me is a phenomenal long form piece. You don’t have that if you don’t have Late Night with David Letterman where he’s throwing stuff off the building. When he was hanging out with Billie Eilish in the last season of Late My Next Guest, he’s doing go karts with her. So yes, he’s sitting down and having the intimate Tom Snyder and Tom Snyder of course a big influence on Dave.

He’s having these long form conversations with her where he’s really getting into and he’s talking with Phineas and he’s talking about these things, But then there are excerpts, and the excerpts are he doing go karts with her, or with Lizzo. He’s playing the flute with Lizzo, or he’s going out in Chicago, you know, for the places that Tina Fey went to when she was at Second City and eating this bad but very good food. And you’ve got these little things. Those are to me sprinklings of Late Night. They’re little nods.

They’re a little homagous to the stuff he would do on Late Night. But yeah, as he matured and as he grew, he knew he was appealing to a broader audience, and so some of the more subversive of some of the more weird stuff had to go in the back. But then you look at some of the stuff that they did on Late Show, like the stuff they would do with Alan Calter, for example, the announcer. You got Alan Caulter doing a mockup of a one in hundred collect commercial and he’s sitting there and then they’re combining it with Saving Private Ryan, the hot movie at the time, and he’s sitting there doing a one in harndred collect commercial with his guts hanging out of him because He’s part of a war zone, and it’s what the heck is this? So I think a lot of folks who loved Late Night didn’t necessarily look for those moments in Late Show where they were constant nods to the stuff that they would do in Late Night.

It was just done in a different way. I think the eleven thirty thing is on point. You’ll know this, But for younger listeners, there was a really cool, edgy comedian that was a frequent guest on Letterman and would crush and I will use the word edgy to describe Jay Leno. Sure, yeah, ye, just a great guest. You mentioned Tom Snyder.

I recently discovered it. It’s some sort of homebrew dock on YouTube about the Carson Letterman Snyder relationship. There. I feel like I missed the boat on Tom, and I want to go back and do a deep dive on Tom. But in that doc there were more clips than I’ve ever seen of the Daytime Show.

I have no knowledge of the Daytime Show because I discovered Dave with Late Night and maybe I saw the Daytime Show once. Do you have any command of that period of it. I’m on a mission to learn as much as I can about the daytime show that I can. I know our listeners here can’t see my set, but if you look behind me on my set there you’ll see a red folder with an Emmy on it. That’s actually that’s the Emmy.

Congratulations, you’ve been not nominated for an Emmy folder That was given out for the David Letterman Show, The Morning Show. And so you’ve got this show that showed up on Morning last It only lasted a few months in the morning time. It was ninety minutes long, and it was David Letterman doing the stuff that David Letterman did on late night television in the morning, and it was People were completely puzzled by it. And it was canceled unfortunately because of ratings and stuff, but still nominated for Emmy’s different, very excellent piece. Now, at that time, the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder.

Tom Dave loved Tom. Tom would host The Tomorrow Show. That was the show that did come on after Carson for a long time, and it was a long form conversation show. We’ve actually had his daughter, Anne Marie Snyder on our show and we’ve talked a lot. She’s busting her butt to get a documentary made about Tom because he is.

Many do consider him the greatest long form conversationalist in broadcast history. A lot of people have a lot of reverence for Tom, including David Letterman, and back at that time, there’s a whole bunch of irony that’s here. Tom Snyder was on The Tomorrow Show. He and Carson famously did not get along very well. And when Carson signed his I don’t know if this is last, but one of his last deals, which gave him a tremendous amount of power.

Johnny Carson arguably one of the most powerful men in show business when he was at his zenith. One of the things that he got was a lighter schedule, and then he also had command of the twelve thirty slot afterwards. Subsequently, the Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show was canceled, and Late Night with David Letterman slid in because at that point Dave’s Morning Show was canceled. Now there’s a pulpach ironies here. Dave was on the Tomorrow Show as a guest.

Tom loved what Dave was doing in the morning, all this crazy stuff.

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And then we find ourselves a few months later, or maybe a year later, we find…

And there’s the ironic part really heats up later on when Dave goes over to CBS gets the Late Show or Late Show with David Letterman. He also he basically took the same Carson deal and moved it over to a new network. So Dave had a tremendous amount of power at that point, including the twelve thirty slot, his company being able to produce the show that comes on after Late Show, and who do they hire as the first host of Late Show but Tom Snyder. And it’s a very interesting scenario at the time. You can watch the Larry Sanders Show, and you know, with Gary Shanling, which was on HbA at the time, they wove reality into that as well.

That show predicted that Dave would have Tom on as the guest after. There’s a whole bunch of rich, beautiful, organic human storytelling in the history of these things, and Tom is one of those guys where I hope that Annie is successful in getting this dock out, not just out, but like really out there. So a lot of people get to see the genius of Tom Snyder. But Dave is one of those guys. If you look at the press conference of hiring Tom at CBS, Dave said, look back in the day and this is the time without as you mentioned without VCRs.

About that, Dave said that he watched probably eighty percent of Tom Snyder’s show as they were broadcast. Dave is a huge fan of it, and I think you’re seeing echoes of Tom Snyder in what Dave is doing now as the elder Statesman of broadcasting. He’s doing the Tom Snyder thing right now. You name check to Larry Sanders there, I call it showbiz adjacent. For thirty plus years, my legacy career is radio, and I’ve book shows, and I’ve been a producer and I’ve done all that things.

I don’t think civilians realize how accurate the backstage stuff at Larry Sanders is. There’s a particular scene I was producing John Gambling in New York, and I guess it’s Gane. Grofflow’s character goes in and goes, hey, do you want to talk to Barry White? And he goes why to F what I want to talk to Betty White and I’m like, I’ve been there with the host who’s half listening. I’m like, so, just a fantastic show, Larry Sanders is.

It’s groundbreaking in so many ways. There are a few shows out there where you can look at shows that are on TV today that are effective, and then you can go back and you can find their ancestors that kind of broke the ground for that. Gary Shannling had two amazing shows that did just that.

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Now here’s the thing about Larry Sanders.

I was just talking with I’m not going to say who it was, but one of Dave’s high up writer slash producers, and we were talking about Larry Sanders. It is just a few weeks back. We were talking about this and he said, Okay, here’s the thing. Here’s the thing about Sanders. And most people, like you say they love Sanders.

Most people who worked for for Letterman like it was a big deal. Every I think it was Sunday night it would come on. They were so excited when Larry Sanders would come on. But there was one major difference that this person made and it was I think it was I think that this is a part of Larry Sanders that might have had to do with if they were putting in elements of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show into the fabric of the show. But they said nobody was afraid of Larry.

He said, that’s the thing he goes. This is where the suspension of disbelief got interrupted for me, was nobody was afraid of Larry. They could all go up to him, and they could these real moments like you just talked about the host that’s half listening and half not and whatnot. Yes, but they weren’t terrified of him. And there were a lot of folks who had a deep reverence, respect, and fear flat out of Dave and that wasn’t represented in Larry.

However, there are a lot of folks who say that was more the atmosphere of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, that there was a little bit more casualness there. So that was something that was really interesting about that. I was listening to your interview with Morty Robert Morton, and I picked up a hint of that early on the Oh let me go recap the show with Dave? Has this actually gonna go? I don’t know.

I’ve never heard of Dave’s reputation one way or the other. Is there a street rep for that? Was it scary to go talk to Dave after a show? The post mortems of and Dave has gone on record about this, and you can read it in Zinneman’s book, you can read it in Carter’s book. I’m not throwing any shade here.

Dave’s attitude towards himself and his performance. He some would say he tortured himself because his and it wasn’t about anybody else and screaming at other people or yelling at other people or getting upset at other people. It was himself. He would get upset at himself. And when a show wasn’t good, and again his version of a show that’s not good.

The standard is completely different than someone say like myself or you who are watching thoroughly entertained by things. And if there was a mess up of any sort, this would celebrate it because that was the tone of the show. But then he would go back and lamb based himself. And you had people there who were the support crew watching this guy that they love so much torture himself. The good news is that evolved as well, just like Mozart’s music evolved, so too did Dave’s attitude towards towards this, and over the years he developed an attitude where, you know what, if the show doesn’t go, well, there’s another show tomorrow night, and he would be able to reconcile that better than he could early on.

But early on, yes, there was a lot of times where and the cancelation of the morning show I think was a big part of that. I haven’t asked him that specifically, That’s something I would love to ask him, but I think some of that behavior towards himself was a flat out was flat out fear that they canceled me once they could cancel me again. We need to keep a very high standard, and I need the standard I need to have for myself needs to be the highest of all. Because I’m the host. It also the buck stops with me.

I get it back. Early in my career, I remember a conversation I had with my host. We had an hour that I didn’t like, and I might have slammed down the headphones whatever. I’m not on the air at this point. I’m on the other side of the glass, and she said to me, all right, relax, it’s just an hour.

And I go when I stop caring, change producers, and I totally get the mentality. Yeah, I feel the same way. Believe it or not, anybody who’s ever seen or heard the Letterman podcast. Believe it or not, I actually feel the same way. It may not look like it when you look at the product that I put out there, but I feel the exact same way.

There are times where I will look back at a segment with somebody or a line of conversation. A lot of the time it’s missed opportunity. A lot of the time it’s like, why the heck didn’t I ask them this? Why the heck didn’t I ask them that? Or that could have gone better, I could have put a better shine on this person or that person or whatever.

And I’ll just absolutely blast myself. But yet you’re exactly right. It’s caring, and I think there’s a certain amount of personal development that can be added to that emotion. Like my life motto is, don’t focus on the problem, focus on the solution. But if I could focus on the solution quickly as opposed to lamenting on the problem, I’m going to be more effective at that.

But yeah, I think the best shows i’ve ever watched that I’ve ever attached myself to say this with my wife all the time. My wife is an unbelievable cook. And one of the reasons that she such an effective culinary artist is because she has that intangible ingredient, and that’s love. She puts love into what she does. And I think that all of us can look out and we can see things from an entertainment perspective that are manufactured, and we can see things that are produced with love.

And you want the produce with love stuff. That’s the stuff that’s going to connect, that’s the stuff that’s going to resonate, that’s the stuff that’s going to stand the test of time. During that interview with Morty, I was quite surprised to learn, I don’t want to step on your story, how much of he controlled chaos Dave knew about in advance. That surprised me. Yeah, absolutely, this is something that if and when I have a conversation with Dave, I certainly want to go down that path.

Early on in the show, the head writer Meryl Marco and this might even this might have even been knocked off before Late Night started. I’m not exactly clear. I get different responses from different people about this. But one of the things that Meryl knew about Dave was that he had this razor sharp wit. That is just his reactions to things off the cuff are nothing short of astounding.

He is just a genius when it comes to responding to things. And he was like that when he was doing stand up at the Comedy Store as well. Heckler’s would be absolutely sliced and diced, and he would do it in a way. I said this on another interview recently. He was like Muhammad Ali.

He wouldn’t use vulgarity, he wouldn’t have to use anything. He would dance around it and he would His weapons were vocabulary and wit and cleverness. And he just was tremendous and Dave still is to this day. The exchange I had with him in the audience, I made him laugh, but which is one of the greatest moments of my life. But it was only a second long because a second later he came back with another thing that made the audience laugh even more, and that was Dave’s.

One of the greatest attributes that David Letterman has, beside his broadcast ability, is that razor sharp wit. So the idea of surprise the host was something that was let’s surprise the host, let’s land, but that was knocked off very quickly because Dave does not like surprises. He likes to know what’s coming, and so at some point early on, a kind of culture was built where it would look like it was a surprise, and it might have been a surprise to the audience. You think about the Andy Kaufman Jerry Lawler incident, things like that. There are things that might have been a surprise to even the crew, but Dave would be in on it, and Dave’s logic behind it was, Okay, if I can just show that same I think this is what it is, but this is what I want to ask him about.

I believe his logic was, if I can just show that razor sharp wit or that spontaneity, but I know it’s coming, I’ve got the best of both worlds because I could put the shine on whatever I want because I know what’s coming. I’ve got some control there. But at the same time, I can still use those abilities to show spontaneity, and certainly spontaneity was included in the show. It was a hallmark in my opinion, but Dave knew what was going on. For the most part.

I loved in the late night era the they would experiment a lot or just totally deconstruct the format. What’s popping in a mind is they did at least one episode from the back office. Let’s not use the set, Let’s give paul A Cassio keyboard, and let’s just do the show from the back I love that kind of episode. Yeah, and there’s so many examples of it. They did an episode on a plane flying from New York to Florida.

They did an episode on the back of a truck where it was trucks that were driving on an expressway or a parkway. They did a show there. They did a show, but they would They did that even into the late show era. They did shows when they were renovating the set and building the bridges, putting the bridges in to the set. There after the initial first late show set, they did shows in the lobby for a week.

They would fly in audiences from different cities. They would all sorts of theme shows that they did it during it was it Hurricane Sandy. I don’t know if it was Hurricane Sandy, but on one of the natural disasters that hit nor’easters that hit New York. They did shows without an audience, the inventive nature of and then they would take the show on the road. Of course, they’d go to Chicago, they’d go to la they’d go to San Francisco, they would go all sorts of places with the show in London, England, and so yeah, that was one of the things, many things that they would do to, as you said, deconstruct the talk show and do something similar but different.

I think I don’t know that there’s an example of a program that has done that better than David Letterman’s productions. And you see the influence in those of us who grew up on it. You know, I’m just some dopey podcaster now, and I’ll sometimes friend me too. I’ll do the show from I call it a pool side edition, and the real truth is it’s eighty five and Sonny out and I don’t feel like sitting in the basement, so I take it out there. But like the landscapers show up next door, and I keep going.

And it’s that Letterman influencing me though, Oh especially because it’s a comedy show. I’m not doing the world news, but I’m like, oh, I’m just going to shout over the landscapers and make a bit out of it. It’s so much fun. Yeah, I love whenever I meet somebody who has been influenced by Dave that way, where they want to take something a little bit askew and put it into the events of everyday life. I adore that, and to me, that mischievous nature of doing something just for the sake of doing it, really not even knowing why other than it tickles you inside.

I think if we did that more as a culture, as a species, I think we would have a lot more smiles on our faces. It’s so fun to just to do something a little bit odd. I do the same thing like for the first I don’t know how many episodes it was until it was I said I was gonna do it until somebody discovered it. A fan of ours so named Andrew discovered it. But I have in the bottom corner it’s a zoom.

I used the zoom technology to build the show, and in the bottom corner, says The Letterman Podcast with Mike Chisholm, I for almost one hundred episodes, I misspelled the word podcast and every word it was every episode. It was misspelled in different ways, and only twice did I have somebody catch it beforehand. But it didn’t get caught on camera. Bill Carter caught it. He takes me spelled podcast wrong, right, I’m like, oh, I do that on purpose, but it didn’t get out there.

And then this Andrew saw it and said, hey, he put it out there. Heyes, everyone ever noticed that Mike spells podcast wrong.

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And then at that point I started spelling it correctly because someone caught…

But and there are a little l of that sprinkled into the show where it’s just a joke that I find as a joke and if somebody ever catches it, great, If not, okay, that’s fine too, That’s awesome. I love it. I was a program director at a radio station Long Island. My midday guy ed till he’s on the air one day and he’s taking a phone call and he asked the caller where they are, and they’re at some diner and he goes, hold on, I’ll be right there, and he takes a cell phone and he starts hosting the show from his cell phone, jumps in the car. He’s on the Southern State park Way.

He’s playing it up. Hey, stupid driver goes to the diner, has a cheeseburger with the listener, comes back and finishes the show in the studio, and I thought it was one of the greatest three hours I’d ever been involved with. And my boss did not get it was like he was on a cell phone and it sounded lousy. I’m like, that was amazing. Are you kidding me?

Yeah, it’s okay. And I say to the director, Okay, are you kidding me? We can have the helicopter guy talking about traffic, but we can’t do something like it’s not like the listener. I think many times the viewer of the listener is treated like the lowest common denominator, and I don’t like that. I don’t like when audiences do that.

I gotta ask you this, What years were you doing radio in New York? I started professionally in November of ninety two at WOR, New York. I was there until April o two, had the station on Long Island for a year and a half. We ran out of money, and then I was at Serious for a decade. Okay, did you ever cross paths with a guy by the name of Alex Bennett?

I heard your name check Alex Bennett on the Morty episode. I Love Alex. Back in the day, Alex and I used to do a twenty minute non radio show in the hallway every day discussing Bush carry somewhere near the cubicles on the twenty third floor of Serious No. Thirty six four Sorry, and we would just talk. But it wasn’t the current political discourse where it’s you like the red team and I like the Blue team, so you’re stupid and they hate you.

The deal you can have meaningful discussions. And we were friendly and we did it every day, and we knew we were going to do it and just let’s get each other’s goats. And he is a great guy. Alex is a he’s been on this show. When I talk about Rick Shechman earlier, he was, he is and to this day, even though Shecky’s left us, now Rick Sheckman’s best friend, this show would not exist if it wasn’t for Alex Bennett.

And so Alex and I are friends. And he does a panel show weekly over Zoom and has since I believe he started in the pandemic. You know, he’s in his eighties now, but you can’t as when you’re a longtime broadcaster like that, you can’t turn it off. And so he started and GABNet. He started building GABNet and does shows he calls it The Ramble every night, but on Mondays, every Monday, he does this show at four o’clock Eastern and he brings on I don’t know seven eight people who come on, many of the more fans of his show.

I came on because of Shecky, because I got to know Shecky, And honestly, I think it was because Shecky was he was vetting me. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy Okay, I’m a crazy person, but I’m not I’m not a dangerous crazy person. I’ve just got I’ve got the good crazy. If that’s what it is, that’s the thing that makes me dive deep into the things that I love, whether it be Letterman or Star Wars or music or whatever. The things that I love, I dive into it.

But Checky was betting me, and so he said, Hey, why don’t you come on this show with Alex Bennett every Monday? And That’s what I would do. And that was one of the ways that he and I got together and got to know each other, and then as the show would progress, he and I would then start connecting via phone calls or video calls over the Internet. That kind of a thing outside of the show, but Alex Bennett, and to this day, every Monday at four pm Eastern, I try and get on that show with Alex. He’s just he is such a great guy, a legend.

And I like to say this, he paved the road that Howard Stern drove on. When you look at Alex back in the eighties when he was let go at one of his positions at wm I want to say it’s WMC, but I don’t think it’s WMCA, but one of them in New York if there were two thousand people out there the next day protesting, and Alex was that guy, he was the rebel rouser. He had a little bit of that. One of the reasons I think I like Alex so much is because he’s got some of that stuff that Stern has, that letterman has, that impish, mischievous behavior and just a great guy. And I dig that you and Alex know each other and now you and I have made that connection.

And folks, by the way, Johnny had no pre interview here. We did this organically. We came up with this revelation together. So it delights me to know and respect Alex and love to connect you guys. And it’s random because I, like I said, I discovered the podcast and I’m like, all right, let me do some prep here.

What five episodes can I listen today? And I picked Morty and I heard the random Alex Bennett. He also had a run in San Francisco, and he’s got a lot of all the big San Francisco comedians of that era. Robin Williams for sure comes to mind, but Alex legendary radio personality. Letterman reruns late night reruns I used to they used to mess around with them.

There was the one that they rotated it three hundred and sixty degrees just for no reason. I remember, and I’ve looked. I can’t prove this in the internet. Maybe the story or maybe I hallucinated this. I remember tuning in one night and they had redubbed the entire show with merv Griffin revoice Dave, and I remember walking into the middle of it and being like, what is going on here?

Yeah, we need to this is a really good one. That we need to get the official Letterman channel to put back on there. Good call. I’m gonna now that this you’ve said this, I’ve got a message to them and say, hey, here’s a clip that we should throw on. Letterman reruns are tricky because there’s so many rights issues that are there, and then Worldwide Pants and Universal have come to an agreement.

So when you watch Dave’s YouTube channel, and by the way, anybody who fancies themselves as an enthusiast of David Letterman subscribe to his YouTube channel, but they’re putting clips on from those eras, and I think that it would be a very cool thing to revisit that there was the episode where the everything was in reverse, the reverse angle right. Any times that there was a camera trick of any sort. You saw this in Stupid Patricks. One of the things about Stupid Stupid Patricks at the beginning, or Stupid Human Tricks, was the advent of slow motion, and anytime that there would be something that was added to television, be it dubbing, be it fans, the camera trick or whatever, they would mess around with it and it was so fun to watch them do it and make fun of it. They just there isn’t a show out there that I think that poked fun at themselves, at television, at broadcasting, at culture the way that they did.

One of the things that Dave said to Tom Snyder early on was that nothing on television is sacred. And to me, that’s okay. There’s a young guy who’s got this morning show that’s crazy giving himself carte blanche to lampoon anything he wants. I’m super curious today the Dave that went through led the nation after nine to eleven in some respects, the Dave that went away and then came back from his heart surgery and there was some really major heartfelt moments. I’m very curious if the David Letterman of today would still say that nothing on television is sacred.

That’s the question that I want to ask him. So are you saying the Mirv thing did happen? I didn’t make that up. I believe it did. I now that being said, I don’t have it off the top of my head.

I haven’t seen it recently, but that does make sense. Mirv was Oh my gosh, was Mirv. Ever there’s a scene with Jeff Altman with Merv Griffin meowing like a cat that I remember. They used to make fun of IRV all the time. Paul would every once in a while throw the name MERV out there.

They used to They definitely used to make fun of MRVS. That sounds right to me, but I will dive onto this immediately after this episode here and see if that’s there. That does sound right, though, I just can’t recall the clip you mentioned Camera Tricks, and I saw Late Night many times I’ve recently been reliving. It was my fifteenth birthday. It had to be fifteen to get in, and my mother knew somebody at NBC and I got tickets on my fifteenth birthday and I went with my friend Sean.

And unless we’re conflating different episodes, we think that was the night Zippy the Chimp bit Sandra Bernhard and got cut out. But Zippy the Chimp was a good example of all right, let’s strap a camera to a chimp and let him rollerskate around in the studio and you just you hadn’t seen this before, and it was amazing, was mind blowing. Oh, you can do that so much fun the monkey cam. I’ve talked to Sandra on her show, and she’s aware and she has said, yeah, let’s do this. I haven’t jumped back on getting her on the show.

That’s a moment I want to talk to her about. For sure. You talk about Sandra Bernhard as a guest. And this is where a lot of folks who love Late Night and they call Late Night a superior show to Late Show, because you’d have some of these performance artists on and give them a podium, give them a platform and a microphone where they could just go and be as creative as they want to be, whether it’s singing, whether it’s an obscure type of comedy piece, whether it’s a monologue, whether it’s whatever. And Sandra, I think is a phenomenal example of that.

I really like Sandra Bernhardt a lot. I think she is a trailblazer in many ways. I think she gave her Like Vett Midler, I think did a really good job of breaking the mold of what women should be when it comes to a comedian or a performance artist or whatever. And her stuff with Dave on Late Night was magic. It was good on Late Show, but it trickled off because Late Show became more it had to be come more like the Tonight Show.

But One of the casualties of that is you saw less and less of the performance artists as opposed to the celebrities plugging a movie. And he did. Don’t get me wrong, the booking staff and Dave, they did try and keep that element in late show. But certainly, if you’re going to broaden the appeal and broaden the audience, some of these pieces that you’re talking about here, they have to be cut along the way. All right, more tomorrow with Mike Chisholm.

This helps me accommodate some travel ahead during the week. Mike did look into my MERV Griffin thing and here’s what we’ve learned, and they did dub an episode. You can find the episode on YouTube and I’ve shared it in the Facebook group Today Daily Comedy News podcast group. But it’s not nerv. The voice is in Merv’s ballpark like.

It sounds more like MERV Griffin than it sounds like me. But it’s not MERV. But they definitely did dub an entire episode. I didn’t totally make that up. Some other things to plug.

We’ve got T shirts, National Donuts Chain t shirts. Get one link in the show notes. You can subscribe for free to my substack. That’s where I pontificate about the media in the written form. Mickdypod dot substack dot com.

Link of the show notes And if you would like this thing, ad free calaroga dot com. Slash plus get this show and a bunch of others on the network. Four ninety nine a month gets you the whole shebang. No ads, all right, More with Mike tomorrow See then.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Shoenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Shane Gillis was on Hot Ones. You know what that is. That’s where you go and they feed you increasingly spicy wings while you answer some questions.

You know, that thing’s pretty popular. Probably heard of it. Shane explained where the name Beautiful Dogs came from. That’s the name of Shane’s most recent Netflix comedy special. He shared that it was a spontaneous decision made from one of his shows at Joe Rogan’s club, The Comedy Mothership in Austin.

The booker stopped him as he walked off stage and told Gillis that’s the name of the special. It’s Beautiful Dogs, and Gillis goes, all right, great, if someone names it few, it’s a lot easier than trying to be cool and creative. Shane Gillis is a favorite mediocre US president Ulics assessed Grant he failed at the beginning, that became a general at the end. It’s pretty sick. Gillis acknowledges how much of a loser Grant was while working for his father in law’s drug store.

The story continues on how Grant then became a clerk when the Civil War broke out, and by the end of the war he was commander in chief. I with Shane on this one. He said, how unimportant comedy special intros are. Just walk on stage, amen. I hate those specials that have the four minutes of I don’t know, green room stuff or walking backstage and with the camera falls down and says, just walk on stage.

Shane is absolutely right, exclaim dot ca a with a fun one for the last decade. Duff McKagan you know him from Guns n’ Roses. He plays bass. He has claimed that the Simpsons beer Duff Beer, is named after him. No it’s not.

Jake Cogan, is an original writer producer on the show, told TMZ it’s very weird that this Duff mccagan guy wants to claim credit for Duff Beer. He had zero to do with it, according to Duff McKagan, So I was Doff the King of beers. But this is nineteen eighty eight, nineteen eighty nine, and our management, I remember they called me and said some art house like cartoon wants to use your name as the beer, like a college arthouse cartoon. There weren’t any adult cartoons at the point, I didn’t know anything about branding or anything like that took off and they started selling merchant stuff. I never went after him, but I’m like, hey, mfrs.

You know, no, dude, No, it’s not named after you. Cogan says we named it Duff because it’s a synonym for butt, tushy, booty, and so on. It wouldn’t have been funny to name it after a rock star as Duff as a beer for people who sit on their fat ass all day, Excelain points out. Cogan said no one working on The Simpsons at that time knew any Guns N’ Roses member beside Axel Rose, a burn for McKagan, but a worse burn for Slash Entertainment Weekly. Uh put out a fluff piece.

A coworker of mine used to call it waxing your car. I don’t know what the point of this article was. It was just gushing. Executive producer Stephen Colbert says he’s long been a fan of Taylor. Thomson was thrilled when she agreed to host.

Colbert explains, when she was just starting out, the algorithm started feeding her to me years ago. I remember thinking, who is this special Woman. We then get a recap of Tomlinson’s career. She builds her career as a stand up comedian, winning fans with frank confessional Netflix specials, including this year’s Having On twenty twenty’s Quarter Life Crisis, but she’s since embraced the joys of staying up after midnight. Taylor explains, I think hosting is an entirely different skilled and stand up which is why I decided to take the job.

I wanted to try something new.

Also, you know, forty plus weeks of steady work that probably pays well.

Some internet rumors have her salary at three million dollars, you know, so there’s that, and plus her on network TV.

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And then you show up on things like the Tony Awards.

She was on the Tony Awards Sunday night, and people are like, I know who that is. You know, maybe if somebody offers you a twelve thirty show on a network, you say yes, Tomlinson said. I remember being incredibly nervous and feeling excited but also pretty overwhelmed. I don’t think I could have or would have taken a show like this without someone like Steven producing it. He’s been super generous with his time and advice.

I can’t imagine tackling something like this entirely on my own. Oh yeah, here’s ten million dollars. But the executive producer is I don’t know who’s someone horrible Marjorie Taylor Green. She’s executive producing it, and it’s ten million dollars. You.

In weird article, Late Nighter recapped a recent FYC event for John Mulaney’s Late Night show. Nick Kroll was hosting it. Nick asked writer Langston Kerman what their favorite pieces for the show were. Kerman revealed they had shot a tribute to LA’s many Kobe Bryant murals. Mlani explained, there were four hundred of varying quality, but then the lawyers got involved.

Oh, I’ve been involved with lawyers. They ruin everything. Mulleny explained, you can’t show an outdoor mural legally without compensating the muralist. We filmed like one hundred murals. We just thought they’re on walls.

The co executive producer, David Ferguson clarified, well, they’ll let you do it as long as you make commentary. Mlanie also mentioned one argument that didn’t work for the lawyers. John said, when the muralists put their name in the corner, you can’t go. We had no idea who did it. Our lawyers called it due diligence.

Thanks lawyers. Dean Cook is going to reteam with Greg Coolidge. You’re like, who’s Greg Coolidge? Well, he’s obviously the director from the two thousand and six lines Gate comedy Employee of the Month, which starred Deane Cook. How did you forget that film?

While this comedy duo is back, they’re working on an indie comedy based on the twenty eleven Blacklist script by Christopher Baldy. The film follows a man who, after hitting a major rut in his marriage, is convinced the only way to save the relationship is to have the ultimate night out with his male co workers. Dan Cook is fifty two, so I guess it’s kind of sort of The Hangover with a fifty two year old Dane Cook in the middle. Some more evidence of that seth Yankelwitz, who casted The Hangover, is casting for this one. Can’t wait for it, Dane says.

He sets to release another comedy special, this one called Gritty in Pink. Although there was not yet a date for that one.

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Also, he’s working on an untitled documentary chronicling his rise to comedy …

W Magazine caught up with Hannah Einbinder, and I like W Magazine because they mentioned her mother’s Lorraine Newman, who was on Saturday Night Live and is a founding member of the ground Links. It’s relevant. It doesn’t mean Hannah’s not talented. It just means, you know, people know Peo. People make a call.

For example, say I wanted to have the Pope on, I could go to vatic and Media Relations and be like, hey, my name’s Johnny Mack. I host a podcast. Da da Da da da. I’m not gonna get anywhere. But if I reach out to Deacon Mike, who talks to the Bishop, who talks to James Martin, who talks to the Pope on my behalf, I’ve got a shot.

That’s how the world works, you know. So let’s not pretend Hannah’s mother’s not Lorie Newman, and it didn’t help. Doesn’t mean she’s not talented. It helps. Before landing Hacks, Hannah said she was really enjoying stand up I love the art form.

I love storytelling and characters and straight up stand up comics, alternative comics, clowns, bur lesque. It’s just pure to me. Before I started acting, I was still a local comic. I had just started featuring for other comedians on the road. Being an opening act Hacks gave me the ability to tour on my own.

She was excited to release her special. There are some jokes that are months old. There are some jokes that are years old. It feels like a time consul this hour of my life artistically, and I’m ready to move on to the next thing. If you have been watching my next guest needs no introduction with David Letterman, you saw his interview with Miley Cyrus, who invited Dave to one of her family and friends shows.

Letterman apparently is one of the very few, if not only, straight men who’ve ever been granted entry. Miley tells him from the stage, it’s invite only, and it’s kind of like you got to be gay to get an invite. Letterman got to see Miley doing her interpretation of talking Head cycle Killer, which she describes as David Byrton does Johnny Cash doing Kylie Minogue Letterman said this was so good. As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking I might be gay. If you like David Letterman, listen to tomorrow’s podcast.

I’m talking with Mike Chisholm, host of the Letterman Podcast, and we talk Letterman for eighty minutes. I might even split into two ports forty and forty. You know, it’s a weekend. It’s a summer, all right. If you can make your way to Columbus, Ohio, it’s the Columbus Comedy Festival.

It’s the inaugur one August fourteenth through the eighteenth. Co founder Walker Evans says, we could be more excited to not only bring major headliners to Columbus from New York, LA, Chicago and beyond, but also highlight her incredibly talented local comedy scene. The multi day festival will be spread out at the Columbus Funny Bone, the Key, Columbus Performing Arts Center, Mad Lab, the Attic Comedy Club, the Nest Theater, the Hashtag Comedy Company, and Don’t Tell Comedy Columbus. Among the performers Michael Ian Black, Jason Banks, Tony Rock, Irene Two, Who’s Fantastic, Sam Jay, and there’s about fifteen more names on this list that you probably don’t recognize, but that sounds like a really good festival. The New York Times did a fluff piece for Lauren Michaels Lauren Hirsch.

On the byeline, Lauren Hirsch writes some jokes could have landed better, and Lauren Michaels is second guessing his choice to shorten certain skits. He’s likely to spend the weekend thinking about every detail. By Monday, he’ll find some degree of contentment until he has to do it all over again. The article points out it’s gotten harder since the pandemic because a lot of the live venues that served as farm teams for SNL have closed. Michaels is well versed in the challenges that New Star’s facing.

If you were the funniest kid in the class at your school and then you’re working professionally and everyone else in the room is that it can be upsetting or can be really stimulating. No one can handle the fame. Generally, we’re more tolerant of it because you know people are going to turn into a holes because it’s just part of the process, because no one grew up that way. Is Lauren going to sticker around. He won’t answer.

He says, I’m gonna do it as long as I feel I can do it. But I rely on other people and I always have. Josh Gondoman is taping his next special at the Bell House in New York tonight. A very funny comedian you should check out. Brooklyn based comedian Eva Evans is being praised for making a hilarious yet respectful joke about the LGBT plus community during a recent show.

A clip from her set was posted on Instagram by Don’t Tell Comedy. It has gone viral. The set is called dating a trans Man. Eva says, I didn’t know he was trans from his profile, but you know in person, I figured it out. But I didn’t give a hoot.

I’m too poor to have a phobia. As long as you identify as a man who’s paying this check at the end of this MF and meal, that’s all I care about. As long as your pronouns are zell and cash app, I don’t give an f about what else you got going on. And that’s your comedy news today. All right, Mike Chisholm and I doc Letterman tomorrow.

Have a good weekend. See you

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media not show for you today. Hi, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Jimmy Kimmel riffed a bunch of jokes about heat that I loved. It’ll be so hot in Maine this week the lobsters will be getting in pots just to cool down. It’s so hot in New York this week, the rats are wearing crop tops.

It’s so hot in South Dakota. Christine Olam’s dogs are shooting themselves. It’s so hot at mar A Lago. Donald Trump to ask Malania to be even colder to him. That inspired me to come up with It’s so hot that Joe Cooy made a Taylor Swift joke just to get an icy look from her.

It’s so hot that I bought some Jim gaffig and bourbon just so I had something to pour over ice. Stephen Colbert said scientists Warren heat waves will be longer and more intense and more frequent, So good news for Missus heat waves. New topic from Colbert. The Celtics won the championship. It’s nice for Boston fans to have something to celebrate.

Ever since Tom Brady left town, all I’ve had a root for is Bill Belichick setting the record for youngest girlfriend. Bostonians were out in the streets drunk and yellow, and then they found out they want a championship. The Celtics now have the most championships in NBA history with eighteen. It’s that kind of sustain excellence that lets everyone overlook their pipe smoking, chiley wielding, pot bellied stereotype mascot. Yeah, I’m not a fan of that one, Nor am I a fan of what Notre Dame is doing.

But that’s a topic for another day. Michael ian Black resurfaced his substack from twenty twenty three. I shared this in the Facebook group Daily Comedy News podcast group I’ll read at length here. Michael wrote, when a producer first contacted me about the possibility of appearing in the Louis C.K. Documentary, my initial instinct was to say no.

This was for a few reasons. The first was I didn’t want to make it appear as if I was making other people salacious stories about myself. Second, I’d already been burned once before by commenting about Louis. Third, I was kind of scared, not scared of Louis or retribution or anything just scared of sticking my head out of the sand and talking crap about a peer. It just felt kind of bad.

I suspect most of the other comedians they approached felt similarly to me. What’s the upside and dredging up an old scandal featuring one of these still most popular working comedians. Louis didn’t emerge unscathed from his notoriety, but he definitely emerged. He’s still playing massive venues. He won a Grammy a couple of years ago.

Louis C.K. Is doing fine, So I agree to wag a finger at him all over again. What was the point? Michael iam Black continues writing, In my case, the point was that I couldn’t live with my own hypocrisy. A couple of years before, I’d written a book about modern manhood called A Better Man, a mostly serious letter to my son, in which I’ve talked about what I believe it means to be a man.

In that book, I’d made the argument that all people have a responsibility to their own morality. If you believe something is the right thing to do, it’s always better to do that thing. As somebody who’s spoken up about the crappy things men sometimes do. I felt like it was my responsibility to speak up here, even though the man in question was a peer. I’ve known Louis for almost thirty years.

I wouldn’t say we were ever close, but we were friendly enough, and I always look forward to his sets, which were often bizarre and highly sexual. One riff that stands out in my memory was Louis pantomiming having sex with a raw chicken breast. It was gross but funny, and that’s how I thought of Louis, gross but funny. People probably don’t remember the radic nature of Loui’s rise through comedy. He used to make absurd short films.

I made by short. These are like ten seconds. He had a couple short lived TV projects before Louis hit on Fax. My point is it wasn’t at all clear that Louis was going to become the voice of his generation. It wasn’t clear that Louis would even have a career.

But he figured it out, meaning he figured out how to become Lewis c K. To his credit, he didn’t deny the charges against him. He admitted to them, saying I’ve brought pain to my family, my friends, my children, and their mother. I’ve spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.

Michael ian Black wrote, the long time didn’t last very long. After only a few months of exile, Louis dropped by I Think the Comedy Seller and did a surprise guest spot. The appearance drew the attention of the media. I wrote a series of tweets saying that while I didn’t necessarily care about louis fate specifically, I thought it was important that men embroiled in these bad but not illegal scandals figure out a way to work their way back, because if we’re going to make progress on this front, we have to find a way forward through some kind of reconciliation process, or else the larger movement will suffer because men will be unwilling to come forward. The backlash against me was immediate and intense.

I felt horrible about it, but I thought and still think that the essential point was correct. A lot more to this, but I’ll just leave you with this so odd Michael rode there was no upside in talking about it again, no point in rehashing an old scandal, no reason to be a boy scout. On the other hand, as I said, I would have felt like a coward and hypocrite for saying no, so I said yes again. I share the whole thing in the Facebook group Daily Comedy News Podcast Group. Hannah Berner will have a new special We Ride at Dawn Netflix July ninth.

The hour long special was filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia. You do have to slow down and say that I believe man. Hannah is excited to be finally able to air my hour to the world. This show and covers to different phases of my life, my mental health, my love life, pop culture, and even some politics. I like to make people question norms and make fun of everything, especially myself.

For some reason, they’re bringing back Everybody Still Hates Chris. This an animated take on the two thousands live action comedy Everybody Hates Chris. Chris Rock and Terry Crews are both back. It’s got a text from my daughter. She’s listening upstairs.

She just wrote talking about Hanna Burner’s Netflix special on your pod. I’m excited for that one. Yeah, stop listening. In Where Were We? On the show, Chris Rock plays the voice of adult Chris narrating stories inspired by his experience growing up as a skinny herd and a large working class family in bed Sty during the eighties.

Terry Crews reprises his role as Julius Chris’s father, who’s a gentle giant with a relentless work ethic and cheap The Daily Beasts caught up with Keith Robinson. They asked him how he’s feeling. He said, I’m pretty good. Then asked him if he’s sick of people asking how he’s feeling, and he said, not really. When I think of somebody holding a door for me and then having the nerve to say, take your time, what else am I going to do?

He was very excited During his special Different Strokes, he walks on stage with a cane and he gets a standing ovation from the audience, who included at Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer, Michael Chay, and Colin Quinn. He says, man I felt like the president of comedy. It felt great. That whole experience was unbelievable, and the fact that my voice held for two shows was like, oh wow, I’m doing this. John Stewart’s in a band.

The rest of the band are Rick Barry, Andy Bova and Jim Shovah. John Stewart is the drummer for Church and State. They played last Saturday as part of the North to Shore Festival in New Jersey. The Daily Show is on a mission to rescue two things it wants at democracy and dogs. They announced the new initiative in Dogcision twenty twenty four, Rescuing Democracy, I Love This.

The campaign kicks off tomorrow in New York City. There, the Daily Show is partnering with voter registration organization Headcount and rescue group Animal Haven. The event will feature pet adoptions, free giveaways, doggy swag, dog photo shoes, voter registration opportunities, special guests, and more. John and his wife Tracy run the Hawkhawckson Farm Foundation in New Jersey, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting healthy, sustainable, and kind living. After New York, in Dog Decision will hit Milwaukee and Chicago.

The Milwaukee event will be held on Sunday July fourteenth, Chicago Sunday, August eighteenth. According to the press release, Indogcision will then hit the road with Headcount, bring voter engagement opportunities to several adoption centers and cities across America. I encourage you both adopt from a shelter and vote. Saturday, my guest is Mike Chisholm. He hosts the Letterman podcast We’ll Be Nerdy About David Letterman.

That will be both Saturday and Sunday’s episode. Did you get yourself a National Donuts Chain T shirt? Yet? Link in the show notes. If you would like this podcast add free, go to Caliroga dot com slash plus add in the show notes, and if you would like to subscribe for free to my substack.

That’s where I pontificate about the media. Wednesday, I dropped a new essay about some podcasts that you should check out other than this one. Link in the show notes mckdeepod dot substack dot com. I found this one interesting. The Eagle Mountain Casino has announced that Paul Rodriguez will have a free show on Sunday.

Now, why is that interesting? Johnny Mack? Paul Rodriguez at the Eagle Mountain Casino. Eagle Mountain Casino, that sound familiar to you. That’s right, That’s where George Lopez recently walked off stage.

So I find the booking of Paul Rodriguez curious. We’ll see what happens there. Dave Chappelle’s going to do outdoor shows again in Willow Spring, Rings, July third through the sixth. Pre sale tickets today ten am. General public sales tomorrow noon ticketmaster dot com.

This will be a cell phone free event, meaning you’ll have to do those yonder pouches. Ticketmaster warns you if you need to use your phone during the event, return to the distribution tent at the entrance. Anyone caught using a cell phone during the show will be immediately ejected. Gabe Iglesias did get the Key to the City of Long Beach. Gabe tell the audience it’s not something that you strive for as an entertainer.

It’s like I’d love to have a TV special or I’d love to do a movie. Those are the things that at the back of your head, but acknowledgment that’s not something I expected. Some of my biggest accomplishments, clearly like today, have been here, and some of my biggest heartbreaks I’ve had situations that happened to me over the years that happen here, and you have to take the good with the bad. Gabe dedicated his Key to the City to the memory of Sam Rubin. D KTLA news entertainment anchor Gabe said, he was one of my biggest supporters in comedy and entertainment.

I always covered my specials, he always covered my sitcoms. He was a really great human being and I just want to thank him. And that’s your comedy news for today. If you enjoy this program, tell a friend about it. They might like it too.

And again, if you’d like it, ad free Calabroga dot com, slash Plus, check the show notes. See you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. I like this joke from Seth Meyers. Tesla has reportedly paused cyber truck deliveries due to an issue with their windshield wipers. Apparently, when you turn them on, you can see all the people laughing at you.

I like that one a lot. Nicky Glazer versus the two Bears one cave not too bad, and I enjoy a kerf fluffle. Bur Kreischer and Tom Sigora were discussing the roast of Tom Brady. Krayscher wondered, if you’d put Andrew Schultz in Nicky spot, would everybody be talking about Schultz and not Nicky. No one’s really talking about how great Schultz was.

Three hours in, this m effort goes up after everyone wing this GD thing dry and still crushes. I mean, I’m not going to say the GD word. I’m trying to book the Pope. Deacon Mike’s on it, Dacan. Mike tells me the Pope doesn’t speak English to and I texted him back, I go, I don’t care book him.

All right, let’s break apart Krascher’s comments. No one is talking about how great Schultz was. I mean, people like me pointed out how great Schultz was. The thing is, if you flip their order, yes, Nicki would be more buried in the special. There definitely is comedy fatigue, right, You’re not laughing as hard two and a half hours in as you were in the first half hour or so, So that’s definitely a thing.

But also Andrew just doesn’t have the it factor Nicki does. I’ve described most of my career as shobiz adjacent, but I’d like to think I’m fluent in it and some people have it and you can’t teach it. I do not have it. But Nicky’s got just a little bit more than Andrew in that total package, as they call it. Nicki handled the critique quite graciously.

She was on the Zach Sang Show and said, I was a little disappointed in Chryscher’s comments, but they did have a point. Where you go in the lineup does absolutely matter, and I’m so grateful I went up earlier because people had the energy to pay attention. Well, said well played. Does she think Andrew would have received more publicity in her spot, She said, yes, but I also think they would have been talking about me in his slot too. Nicki said she felt no backlash until quote till that moment of like, well, would we be talking about her if this timing would be different?

Why even bring that up? Doesn’t that kind of rob me of something? I just don’t like to see people talking about me, especially my friends. Tony Hinchcliff said to Bert and Tom, the Brady Roast was a comedy up until you guys started. Then you guys got to really change the tone a bit, got to make everyone appreciative of laughter.

Yeah, they kind of ate it. So before I saw that story, I was going to open up today on the Soapbox. Here’s my question every day, and I’ve got one here. There’s an article comedians can’t say anything anymore, cancel culture, blah blah blah. Who is actually saying comedians can’t say anything anymore?

Like? Who? Who were the people that are saying that that we’re reacting to every day? Nobody? Julia Luis Dreyfuss was on Kars Swisher’s podcast That’s the one where West Coast elites taking their electric cars to upper level democratic insider things while flying in private jets and spending millions of dollars at Fancy Dinners.

That podcast, Julia said, there’s a lot of talk about how comics can’t be funny. Now, I think that’s bs physical comedy and intellectual comedy and political comedy. I think has never more interesting because there’s so much to do. It’s a ripe time. Comedy is risky and it can be offensive, but that’s what makes it so enjoyable.

I personally don’t buy the conceit that there is an impossible time to be funny. Maybe some people aren’t laughing at your jokes, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be made. The Guardian went to see Jerry Seinfeld in Australia. They gave him four stores out of five. The headline Jerry Seinfeld Live Review, crotchety comic is still at the top of his game.

About ten minutes into the Australian premiere of a show, Jerry asks the perth r Acea Arena, what else is annoying in the world today? Besides everything? The Guardian writes, this throwaway line could easily be the catchcry for Seinfeld’s sardonic brand of comedy, which parodies the minutia of daily life. He rants later in the evening. I hate Tee.

I hate it. He doesn’t understand how hard life is. All these names, Darjeling, cam Emel Jasmine. What am I in a whorehouse in the Bayou? If you’d like to see Jerry Seinfeld and you’re in Australia or I guess you could travel there.

He’s there until this weekend. Then he’s in New Zealand twenty four through twenty sixth June. Next topic, I’m confused by this. Apparently the Lost Culturista’s Culture Awards were held in Brooklyn on June fifteenth. Check your calendar.

I only heard about this on Tuesday morning. Bowen Yang’s in the press all the time. Last year, the Lost Culturista’s Culture Awards had tremendous buzz. This year, no buzz. I only saw one recap of it, and that was in Vulture, which is behind a paywall, I believe.

And even so I went through the paywall, I’m like, oh, I’ll pull some stuff out and I’ll tell the listeners about it. And there was nothing there that interested me to share with you. So I don’t know what happened to Las Culturista’s Culture Awards. The air has gone out of that balloon, unless you’re like a coastal elite who writes for Vulture, and then you think it’s the greatest thing ever. Interesting choice to host the twenty twenty four NHL Awards, They’re going with comedian and quote impressionist extraordinaire Matt Friend.

Matt Friend’s a better impressionist than I am sure, but I’m not sure he’s extraordinary. His impressions are okay. The Awards at the Fountain Blue, Las Vegas, Thursday, June twenty seventh. They’ll be on ESPN. Matt gave a quote, which is growing up.

All my heroes were hockey obsess comedians. Really, who were the hockey obsess comedians? I want to list hockey obsess comedians. Hmm, Dennis Leary question mark was Bill Hicks at Boston brus Oh did you go there? John?

I did. I am so thrilled, boy, I’m punching today. I am so thrilled to join the list of my heroes like Will Arnette and Keenan Thompson as host of the NHL Awards, especially as someone who grew up a Chicago Blackhawks fan during the dynasty. I’m so grateful to Steve Mayor, Michael Dempsey and Gary Bettman for the opportunity to fulfill my lifelong dream of hosting the Golden Globes of Hockey. Relax.

I’m not gonna do the tailor bit. However, I’ll win them over when I debut my Gary Bettman impression. Who’s Steve Mayer? He apparently is the NHL Chief Content Officer and senior EVP. He gave a quote which is, we can’t wait to be back in Las Vegas to celebrate the best players in the NHL and cap off a monumental season for the league.

Vegas has a unique energy. We’re thrilled to have Matt Friend join us his host this year. Matt is a versatile comedic talent unlike any other, and we know the show will be in great hands unlike any other. Is doing a lot of work there. I’m not making friends today from the press release.

Friend has risen a fame on social media in recent years as a master impressionist. What spawn on takes of everyone from Jeff Goldbloom to Romney Malick to Timothy Shallamay, I better pull a clip for you, guys. You’re like, what is John talking about? Hold? On.

But I will tell you I am killing this dinner harder than Christinome kills the puppies.

Moving on place.

Even Bernie has something to say, mister Trump, you have no idea what the ordinary experiences every day Americans are. I am concerned with battling the ruthless dictators like Vladimir Putin? Can we all agree on that? Can we all agree? Even Mitch would agree with that?

Right now? Mitch, Well, let me begin by starting what a privileged idio is. So that he did, I Midge McConnell face, which helped a little bit. But I don’t know. Let’s see what else we have in this bio.

Friend has arisen a fame on social media in recent years as a master chrissionist, with spot takes of everyone from Jeff Goldbloom to Romney Malleck to Timothy s Sheella May Anyway, Mad Friend hosting the NHL Awards, JB. Smooth and Susie s Men were on the rap. JB’s not sure Curb is over. He says, it’s almost like a little bug in me because I always feel like there’s still stories left unturned. That dude right there, he’s hilarious, like how do you say you’re not coming back?

Susie said, We’ve been out to dinner a few times since we wrap where something’s come up and he’d be like, ah, that would have been a good episode. The brain is always working, but I just feel like he’s done. Susie s men emphasized She’s not Susie Green, but if she gets bad customer service, I can go Susie Green on them. But I also raise teenagers, and I would say at least once a month for each of my kids, I went Susie Green, I’ll hear myself and I’m like, oh my god, I’m her left over from last week. Take Natar Tike.

Natara was on with Colbert a bit of a set up here, gotta be honest. Colbert asked her how Pride Month is going. She said, I’ll be honest, it’s a little weird. And luckily Colbert randomly asked her about Pride Month because she had a story ready, which was about her kids. They’ll be eight this month.

The school six minutes away from our house, and at minute three we were in the front seat of the car talking about something gay and our son Finn leans forward and says, you’re gay. I was so stunned because we’d lived together for eight years and I’ve been gay the whole time, even prior, and we’ll continue to be so I was like, yes, we are. We realize that even though there are pictures of our wedding day at home and they have two moms, that doesn’t know that they mean what gay is. Perhaps she thought he was the butler. This week got on this very podcast.

Mike Chisholm is my guest. He hosts the Letterman Podcast. We’ll do a deep dive on Letterman. I’m gonna split that up into two parts Saturday and Sunday, as we did eighty minutes raw. Check out my substack where I pontificate on other things media mcdeepod dot substack dot com.

Link in the show notes. We have merch. I was thinking to you guys as I went to the National Donuts Chain this morning and I got one of these. This one needs some more ice, but we’ve got National Donuts Chain shirts now link in the show notes. And if you would like this podcast commercial free, also a link in the show notes.

For ninety nine a month, we’ll get you this ad free. Check it out from Sue Falls Live You’re Home for comedy news. Stephanie Springer is part of Mom’s Unhinged. She says, if you’re a mom, or have a mom, or have a friend who is a mom, you know it’s not all wine and roses. And even if it is, it’s probably a box of wine to keep in the garage refrigerator.

And while there are no roses, it’s car seats covered in vomit, a screwl drop offline that brings out the worst in you and everyone else, a field trip, permission slip nobody can find, and staying awake to make sure your teenager drives himself home safely. Springer ran into Andrea Vall, founder of Moms Unhinged. Andrea was gracious enough to take the risk of putting me on one of her shows the first year of my stand up career. The audience is women and moms who are like, let me laugh because these jokes are meant for me. And as a comic, you get to be on stage with these women, and that is changing narratives.

That is what happens when women really amplify each other’s strength and creativity. This show sounds like fun. Vall said, I started Mom’s unhinged to showcase amazing mom and comedians. Too often comedy shows are male dominated, it’s difficult for mom comedians to get on shows. Vall said, we wear a lot of hats.

Also, I didn’t realize the kids want dinner every day. From Deadline, micro Budget is a comedy feature about an aspiring director who recklessly moves himself and his nine monthsregnant actress wife from Iowa to La to shoot a low budget indie movie and sell it to a streamer. This stars Bobby moynihan, Chris Parnell, and Maria Bamford. That said, none of them appear to be the leads. The mockumentary skewers the world of show business and the depth sum moniacal tours will sink in pursuit of their vision.

The revival of Fraser is bringing back familiar faces. Bob Bulldog Briscoe and Gil Chesterson, Fraser’s former co workers at the Seattle Radio Station, will appear on the Fraser reboot in season two. No details in how they come back to Fraser’s life. This is fun. The Suresy Fall Classic Hockey Game has been announced.

Our second hockey story of the Day. Stars from Shoresey versus NHL alumni and select cities. This Fall benefits local charities. Tickets go on sell Friday. The Suresy Fall Classic November sixteenth in Boston, November seventeenth in Toronto.

And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program and you’d like it, add free a link in the show notes. See you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. John Mulaney and Olivia Months secretly get married. Hi, I’m Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. Okay magazine says John Mulaney was wearing a wedding ring and a now deleted Father’s Day post. Hmm, I’ve seen the now deleted image and he is indeed wearing a gold band much similar to the one that I wear because I’m married.

Hi, Doggie, Sorry, my old dog came to visit. I thought you were napping. We have to go out. I’ll tell you about Millennia a second. Sorry, where were we When the old girl comes by and gives you the face?

You gotta take her out. Why don’t you make an edit, John, because that’s not fun. I like to let you into my life here anyway. John m’laney posted a photo of himself with his son, Malcolm, who’s now two, and folks noticed a wedding band on m’laney’s finger. We’ll keep an eye on that.

Here’s a question for you. Is Jerry Seinfeld bad at handling Heckler’s I’m gonna play a slightly longer than clip here, which I have edited in places for pacing, but I think there’s evidence that Jerry might not be good at handling Heckler’s Jerry was in Sydney playing the Kudos Bank Arena. A Heckler yelled out from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Here’s Jerry Seinfeld, queen a genius l He’s they’re gonna start munching about three seconds. I will try and get all of your genius accounts and be all from you.

You’re really did up here. We’re all we’re all on your side now because you have made your points so well and in the right venue. Do you come to the right place or a political conversation. Tomorrow we will read in the paper Middle East one hundred percent solved thanks to man at the Kudos Arena stopping to comedian. They stopped him, and everyone in the Middle East went, oh my god, let’s just get along.

We can’t do that because I know there are problems here with indigenous Aboriginal people and the white They have problems here. So maybe to solve that, I will screw up Tim Jeffries in a show in New York. If this works, that will work. You have to go twenty thousand miles from the problem and grow up a comedian. That is how you saw World Issue.

I feel like he was waffling there. The Jim Jeffries line is really good, but it took him two minutes to find that line. And you would think at this point Jerry would have a good heckler retort in his pocket, as he’s been heckled several times now at Palestine. So I don’t know. Maybe you know, everybody’s got a weakness.

As Jerry would say Superman as his kryptonite. Maybe hecklers are the way you defeat Jerry Seinfeld. Jerry appeared to be in great spirits as he was walking around Sydney’s Central Business district. I shared photos in the Facebook group, which is Daily Comedy News podcast group, and Jerry’s surrounded by at least three bodyguard looking type guys, and I was wondering, like, can Jerry Seinfeld in a baseball cap not walk around Sydney? Is he really going to be recognized?

Maybe the paparazzi stalks his hotel, who knows. But you know, sometimes if you see famous people when you’re not expecting them, you don’t recognize them. So if I were in Sydney, I wouldn’t be thinking like, oh, there’s Jerry Seinfeld. I’d probably walk right past the man in the baseball cap. Jerry was dressed in a long sleeve shirt and blue jeans.

He also wore a dark blue cap and had on a pair of white sneakers with red accents at the heel. Several of the Catholic websites have shared more details about the pope’s meeting with over one hundred comedians. Julia Louis Dreyfus said the meeting with the Pope was a wonderful experience, calling the Pope a lovely man who was obviously doing the best he can and I appreciate that. Jim Gaffigan said it was all comedians, So it was like a meeting of every poorly behaved kid from church and they stuck them all in a room. They thought it would be a good idea.

Everyone had ants in their pants, everyone was excited. Then it was like there’s a bunch of funny people in a room, So you know, it was like ADHD cranked up. Conan O’Brien said, most of my career has been me saying why am I here? It happens again and again and again when I’m at the White House. Anytime I’m in one of these situations, always the same like why am I here?

I don’t belong. I think that’s how a lot of us felt. We’re all looking at each other thinking something’s wrong. We’re in this beautiful, beautiful space in the Vatican, and for some reason they let comedians in, which is always a mistake. Stephen Colbert said he spoke to the Pope and broken Italian, telling of the Pope that he had done the English reading of the audiobook of his memoir Life.

Colbert tells the story, I got the craziest call from my manager. He goes, Baby, I hope you’re sitting down, because you’re not gonna believe you just called. I got a call from the Vatican saying would you be the person to read the Pope’s audiobook in English? Colbert said, I’d love to interview him, but I really want to do a cooking segment with him, because he talks a lot about cooking. Evidently he makes a great Tordellini and broto.

They asked Colbert why he thought the comedians were there. I still don’t know why comedians are here at the Vatican. I’m very grateful that we are. Deacon Mike, the guy that didn’t hook me up with an invite to this, sent me a text over the weekend explaining, James Martin SJ. Remember the whole thing where it’s like, I don’t think there’s a comedian James Martin, there’s a father James Martin SJA.

Well, apparently father James Martin SJ was the de facto chaplain of the Colbert rapport.

Also, because it’s Hollywood and everything has to be related to everything e…

Everyone’s in Apple Baby. James Martin is the editor at large of the Jesse would run America Magazine, where Janine Gaffigan has a column. Nothing’s ever pure, everybody always knows some there’s always a hook up. I’m sure it’s a coincidence. Gaffigan said he and Colbert were approached by organizers and asked to come up with a list of names of other comedians who might be willing to participate.

L Axwayan’s why I didn’t get an invite. Jim Gaffickin was like, you know, the guy that’s been ripping my bourbon for a month, I’m gonna invite him, to which I would say, Hey, Jim, remember when you weren’t that popular and I had yall serious, and then you stopped returning calls once she had some fame. I mean, this wouldn’t go well at all, Jim said. They were like, we don’t want anyone to do material, and we were like, then you can’t invite any comedian. Comedians are silly, but they’re also very sincere, and you know, they’ve got a healthy ego.

So it’s like, the Pope wants to meet me, why not? It was cool. Gaffigan described the Pope as very approachable and said being a Catholic comedian is the most punk rock thing you can do, is be a comedian that even admits they believe in God.

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And then to be Catholic, you’re like asking for trouble.

What about those non Catholics that were invited to this thing, Jim? It was universal. There was warmth, there’s openness. Even with the exceeding amount of problems that have existed and will exist. It was amazing.

Jim points out even non believers are familiar with figures like Moses and Abraham and the fossils. It can be a unifying thing and that even someone who’s agnostic or an atheist can embrace the comic idea. He notes that his own religious material is not making fun of God or making fun of people that are a certain belief. It’s making fun of humans. Sometimes I’ll see a clip, but it’s like an atheist organization that’s using my material, and I’m like, all right, that’s an interesting take.

So it’s just like human stupidity that’s behind most of my material. Conan O’Brien described the post as a really kind man, and it’s joked that he sat down at a beautiful chair. I want a chair just like that. It’s the chair I deserve. He said.

His handshake with the Pope was quick. It’s not like Santa Claus where you sit on his lap and he tell me you want for Christmas. You can’t do that. I was about to say I want to sled for Christmas, so I want a basketball, and they said no. It was so quick.

There’s a wonderful experience of being the Vatican. See this. It was quite extraordinary. New Italians are doing something right. This is amazing.

Will Conan O’Brien joke about the Pope of the future, I’ll have to think about that. I think the Pope has a good sense of humor, so we’ll see what happens. E WT and News caught up with Stephen Colbert, who said, the connection between faith and humorous in the back of my mind all the time. I mean not in the front of my mind. In the front of my mind is what the joke is.

But a certain point in the back of my mind you have to say, do I want to tell that joke? And does that go with everything else that you are besides the comedian, especially doing political satshi are You’re kind of dancing around with a knife in your hand a lot, and you want to be careful with what you cut. So it’s lovely to hear the Pope acknowledge that there’s a value in that for people’s hearts, and it made me think a little bit harder about how I want to use it. Jim Gaffigan brought his wife and kids. Michael Gaffigan said, I’m going to brag about meeting the pope.

That’s so cool, Jim told his son.

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And now you have to become a priest much like me.

Deacon Mike John Oliver wasn’t there. He was hosting Last Week Tonight and updating us on the thing with the bakery. You remember this thing I told you about last week where Dacing’s Bakery was trying to buy some new equipment that Oliver had acquired, and he said he would give it to them if they put his face on a beer shaped cake. Remember that bit. Well they did, and they’re selling the cakes for eight dollars and donating the proceeds to a local food pantry people’s place.

John Oliver said, I love everything about that cake bear. It’s wide open eyes, pleading, munchm munch bites out of my butt right now. I love the little pause, the little nose, and that each bear basically looks like it’s wearing a John Oliver Halloween mask. They made those bears so fast. The guy apparently woke up to a text about our show at three in the morning, a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

And by ten am the bears were ready on sale and even had honored my request that day that to be given an enormous butt and their Facebook post announcing them saying they have dog all caps and just like that, Facebook is good again. Coming up on Saturday, I’ll speak with Mike Chisholm. He hosts the Letterman podcast. We talked for about eighty minutes. I might cut that up into two parts, but uh, you know, so far, the Saturday interviews are getting a pretty good review.

Maybe Deacon Mike can hook up the Pope. The Pope likes comedy. I’ll talk to the Pope for an hour. I can be respectful. I’m a Catholic.

Come on, Deacon Mike, if you want to read me pontificating about various things, including music and podcasting. I have a substack. It is free. It is mcdeepod dot substack dot com. That’s in the show notes.

Also in the show notes. Would you like a National Donut Chain T shirt? They came out. They’re pretty snazzy. Link in the show notes.

And if you would like this podcast and a bunch of others on the network, ad free four ninety nine a month gets you to that this like twenty something shows man five bucks no commercials. Pretty good deal. Link in the show notes. Let’s hit gossip corner. Pete Davidson did two shows at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night.

Earlier in the day, shoppers in Uptown saw Pete Davidson and several friends walking around the stores. Pete visited North Street Records, Graham Cracker Comics, Waiting Room Records, and Mother Murphy sounds like a cool town here. Luke is the manager at Graham Cracker Comics and said one of the customers was checking out with me and said, is that Pete Davidson. Simpkins hadn’t noticed because the store was busy at the time. Right exactly, Jerry Seinfeld can walk around Sydney at a baseball cap.

You’re not expecting Jerry Seinfeld in Sydney. He described Pete Davidson as laid back. He was pretty chill, honestly. I was like, anything I can help you with? Pete Davidson said, no, I’m just hanging out in a comic shop.

I’m doing really good. Pete Davidson did buy a rare comic, Hannah Barbera’s Laugh Olympics number one from Marvel Comics Group. I wonder how much that’s worth. Let’s look remember the Laugh Olympics. That was awesome.

I was always reading for the really Rottens to win. You either know what I’m talking about. You’re like, what is John babbling about? All right? Laugh Olympics?

Number one came out March tenth, nineteen seventy eight, cover price at the time thirty five cents. Back In October, an issue grated nine point six by the comics people went for seventy dollars. In June of last year, one with only a nine point two went for one hundred and thirty five bucks. I’m amazed Pete even knows what this is since he was born in nineteen ninety three. One of the customers asked, are you Pete Davidson.

He was like, I don’t know, Maybe again Jerry walking around Sidney, Hey you Jerry Seinfeld? No, and you keep walking. Maddie and Anna work at waiting room records. Maddie said, we were both kind of like, wait a second, and I prepared myself to ask a random guy if he was Pete Davidson. So I’m like, this might be a stupid question, but are you Pete Davidson.

Pete Davidson said, I might be again, Jerry. You’re walking down the street in Sydney, Hey, are you Jerry Seinfeld? I might be, and you keep going. As Pete walked in, Anna heard him say I’m gonna do some damage here. Apparently Pete Davidson spent around one hundred dollars on CDs and VHS tapes.

Colton is the manager and co owner of Mother Murphy’s. He said he treated Pete’s group like you would any other patrons of the fifty six year old business at one eleven and a half West North Street. They’re just regular guys that ever really thought more about the fact than there are a few guys and they want to come hang out and take a look at some cool stuff. Pete wound up buying a few tapestries that have a three D effect when special glasses are worn. Derrick Gaines, who opened for Pete Davidson, bought a custom handmade denim jacket that he talked about on stage.

Later that night, Gaines wore the jacket during his set. Pete Davidson wore a custom made Bloomington Fire Department hockey sweater given to him by the Fire Department.

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Also on Gossip Corner from Atlanta Black Star, remember Rob Schneider went of…

Well Ari Spears came to Will Smith’s defense. Ari’s jumped in on the comments on Atlanta Black Star’s Instagram post about Rob Schneider, saying, I don’t like the fact that Chris Rock kept talking bad for years about that man’s wife. Spears wrote, that’s not who he really was or is. Like most humans, just to come to the pressure of being in a horrible situation with a woman that he loves driving him crazy, and he had a breakdown. In Long Beach, California, Today, Gabe Iglesias gets the key to the city.

He’ll also do a show at the Long Beach A Terris Theater. Tickets fifteen dollars. If they’re still available, you can request one from your city council member’s office while supplies last. To me, that sounds like a lot of work. It’s just easier to spend fifteen dollars.

In a statement, Gabe said, I’m honored to be recognized by my hometown in this way, and I’m proud to be able to support Long Beach’s youth. At the same time, if you’re a kid growing up in a tough situation, you might not believe that there’s a whole other world out there waiting for you. But there is. I’m proof of that, and you can be too. Out Today on Netflix, Outstanding a Comedy Revolution, a documentary examined sand Up from the nineteen fifties through today, features Lily Tomlin, Billy Eichner, Joelkimbooster, and many others.

It examines how LGBTQ plus comedians sharpened their wit amid a struggle for equality.

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Also appearing in archival stand up performances and interviews, Sander Bernh…

And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, you’d like without the commercials link in the show notes. Babe, see you tomorrow.

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media very very robust one today for a Monday, and especially a summer Monday. Hi, I’m met Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. The trailer for the documentary about Louis C.K. Is out. I’ll play it for you in a second.

The Daily Beast reviewed the trailer and they say it opens with footage of fellow accused predator Charlie Rose describing the comedian as philosopher king in the mold of Lenny Bruster, Bob Dylan. Yeah, there was a time there when c K was absolutely being compared to George Carlin. Pre cancellation Sorry Not Sorry is about c K’s ongoing and largely successful attempts at to come back after getting canceled in the fall of twenty seventeen. I’m not sure he’s all that canceled. Did he lose gigs, Yes, but he also can sell out the Garden, so he’s not that canceled.

But the Daily Beast tells us Sorry Not Sorry gives the woman who first spoke out against him a chance to tell their story with a little more time than some of the media coverage gave them. The documentary premier the Toronto International Film Festival. It will hit theaters and video on demand on July twelfth. I’m not sure how wide of a released this is going to get in the video on demand bothers me is a little strong, but I’d like more people to see this, and video on demand means you’re gonna have to go out of your way to be like, oh, yeah, this even exists.

And now that I know it exists, I want to throw some money in its direction.

I wish this were just streaming on Netflix or something so it could be more widely discussed. Let’s play the trailer here a little longer than I usually do for an audio excerpt, but I think you need to hear. I’m going to play most of the trailer. I’ll chop it a little part where there’s just some music and a slight warning for language here as they describe the things that Louis was doing in colloquial language, comparisons to Lenny Bruce, comparisons to Bob Dylan, comparisons to being a sort of philosopher. Can Jesus.

When I said I wanted to work with Louis C.K. I should have been more specific to like how it all panned out. Most female comedians quit because just a series of indignities that they have to suffer their entire life, because you’ve been socialized in this world where men get to treat women, howrder they want. If he’s done this stuff and he’s denied it, we just thought, well, let’s see how much of a story there is there. We got the sense that there were going to be other women.

They were told to keep quiet. People are scared. They want to be on his side for work. He didn’t use the word sorry, but he wrote a whole essay explaining that he knew he did something wrong. He got caught.

The man got caught. I was like, well, the fact that I thought it wasn’t my problem is the problem. Like, that’s exactly the problem Luis did. What was all rough? I don’t know how do we deal with this?

How do we welcome people back or not welcome people back? Usually white men get away with the stuff that they do. You know, he’s coming back, right. He started to do more touring, and they started to sell out. Everybody lives with a certain amount of hypocrisy, And this is the amount that I’ve allocated for myself making fun of the Victims is still good for business.

Women are hurting and feel like they’re crazy because everyone is letting all these predators back. Not only did he get away with it, he’s like rubbing it in all of our faces. Director Caroline Suh says, while Louis C.K. Certainly lost a lot in the process, he still has a lot of fans. You don’t really know or care about what happened.

I think you could say that a lot of women are canceled because before they even get a chance to do something, Because, as we try to show in the film, building or having a career after something like this happens can become more difficult. In an already difficult field like comedy, it can be easy to just focus on Louis and what we think should or should not happen to him, But the film shows that Louie’s behavior was an open secret for a long time. I think we also need to look at the role we play in these kinds of stories and whose careers we work hardest to protect. John Mulaney spoke to The Rap about his late night show. M’laney did a lot of press late last week.

That makes me think something’s up somebody’s laying the groundwork for something. M’laney told the Rap the best thing about everybody’s in la is we didn’t have time to learn. There was something great about not learning. I wouldn’t want to lose that, but I don’t know how you wouldn’t lose that. I’m a big fan of late night talk shows, panel shows, lots of things like that.

It was fun to do our version of it. We were very conscious we were gonna have people on that I really wanted to talk to, and some of them might not be TV savvy or might not have done much media before, but they were the core of the panel. To me, they were the whole reason to do a show. The extra fun of it was that every big comedian was in town at the same time. Mlaney describes himself as a pretty curious person.

Malani liked this compliment from Jerry Seinfeld, who said, this is so much fun. Eline says, I was really happy that he was much much more interested in hearing calls from people about coyotes than talking about comedy or his movie coming out. And same with John Stewart, same with everyone is he opened to another late night esque show. M’laney said, oh, totally. I’m open to so many things now.

John praised some fellow comedians that he wanted a spotlight, including Langston Kerman, Pat Reagan, Robbie Hoffman, and Cole Escolo, whom Alaney called one of the best solo performers I’ve ever seen anywhere. On the comedy industry, m’laney says, the scale’s bigger than it’s ever been. That doesn’t mean there weren’t stand up comedy superstars for forty fifty years even longer, but the sheer amount of comedians touring larger sized theaters is probably the highest it’s ever been. Yeah. I got into that over the weekend with Jason Zinnemann about somebody like Andrew Schultz plays the Garden.

There was a time when if a comedian even played the Garden, never mind sold it out, it was a huge news. Rob Schneider in the news again he called Will Smith an a hole. Schneider was on the Kyle and Jackie o Show where apparently he called Will Smith a liar and a complete utter fraud. Actually there’s a typo in the article, or maybe not Will He may have called Will Smith a layer? Is Will Smith a place where a wild animal, especially if fiercer dangerous one lives.

You’d have to ask Rob Schneider. Perhaps he’s a layer or a liar. I don’t know. Schneider said, it’s a deep dark thing to do that in front of all those people, and to a really legendary comedian who’s literally the best comedian of our generation. You wouldn’t have this whole wave of comedy that came after if it wasn’t for Chris Rock.

He kicked open the doors, Schneider said, I’m reading verbatim here. I’m not sure the second half of the quote makes sense, but the same article said Lair Will as a douchebag. The thing is, that’s how politically correct the academy is that they were so caroly, because if I would have done that, they would have been hauled off to prison. Thinking that should have said that Rob Schneider would have been hauled off to prison if he slapped someone who knows so much news about Late Night, like five stories in a row, let’s run through them. Jimmy Fallon has renewed his deal with NBC.

He will host the Tonight Show through at least twenty twenty eight. If it ain’t broken, Don’t fix it. NBC suit Mark Lazarus, in a statement, says, for nearly thirty years, Jimmy Fallon has brought laughter into the homes of millions and charmed audiences from the stages of thirty Rock. It’s been a privilege to witness Jimmy at the helmet of the Tonight Show, and we’re thrilled to see what innovations and the incredible staff will deliver in the years to come With the network, Jimmy Fallon said, for nearly thirty years, I’ve brought laughter those of millions and charmed audiences from the stages of thirty Rock. It’s been a privilege to be at the helmet of this night show, and I’m thrilled to see what innovations me and the incredible staff will deliver in the years to come at the Network.

No, I’m not changing my quote. Tell Mark to change his. That is amazing love. It may recall fallon faced allegations of creating a toxic workplace at the Tonight Show is detailed in a Rolling Stone story. We’ve made that go away.

We’re back to Hey, it’s Jimmy Fallon. Don’t ask questions about that other stuff. Seth Myers is losing his band now. Like many others, I reacted and said, Seth Myers has a band. Apparently there’s a band called the eight G Band that is a quote signature element of the Seth Myers program.

Now. To be fair, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Late Night with Seth Myers. I’ve seen clips, I don’t think I’ve ever actually watched it. Apparently had a band they’re leaving. Eli Jenny, the keyboardist of the HG Band, told Vulture that the trio was informed in recent weeks that the band would cease to be a regular part of the program.

Do two budget cuts, Jenny said. In the end, NBC was adamant about where they wanted the budget to go to. It’s not just the ben there’s a whole crew that works with the man, so there’s a lot of people employed. I think this was an easy way for them to cut the budget. Easy’s not the right word.

Smart move by John Stewart. He’s going to host two live episodes of the Daily Show following the two presidential debates, the first one on June twenty seventh, the second on September tenth. The Daily Shows also going to go on the road for both the DNC and RNC conventions. Trevor Noah did live debate coverage in twenty sixteen. He did not do so in twenty twenty.

There was this pandemic. I don’t know if you heard about it. It’s unclear if the live episodes will mean that John Stewart will work two days those weeks, or if you’ll take Monday off and just do the Tuesday. John Stewart was the guest on a podcast called The Town. That’s a good podcast if you’re until this Hollywood business stuff, and he talked about what happened over there at Apple.

John says, has things went along and I did a bunch of other projects. I started having this idea in the back of my head about the sort of difference between whether in climate when it came to the institutions and the media and all these different things. And the Daily Show had always been a little bit more about the weather, you know, we were kind of every day in there. And the genesis of the problem was what if we looked at it more as climate systems, what causes the weather? How did these things arise?

And I felt invigorated again by it. There’s something about changing the perspective and looking at it from the slightly skewed place that felt revelatory to me and kind of excited me again. That was the Apple Show.

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And then Apple said, would prefer you not do that?

And then I said, oh, no, no, no, but I’m excited again and they were like, yes, we are less. So got news for you, John apples right here and so you know, we had some disagreements about the direction of it, the tone of it, and the subject matter, et cetera. Yeah, if you listened to John’s new podcast, Apple’s right yuck it up, John Stewart said, And when you’re working for a company like Apple, there are a lot of factors to take an account, like when you work for a corporate entity, that’s part of the deal. Like even in Comedy Central, the dealer is I get to do what I want until they think it’s going to hurt their beer sales or whatever it is they want to sell. And that’s the deal we all make.

Nobody is owned a platform. And when you’re in somebody’s house and they want you to take your shoes off, you take your shoes off. You go to somebody Else’s house. Taylor Solison has been renewed through the twenty twenty four to twenty five tDCS and Amy Reisenbach is a CBS suit who said Taylor is a gifted comedian who brings a unique voice, energy, and plenty of riz to Late Night. I learned riz as a real word thanks to the show.

It’s the little things. I’m glad. She added that because I was going to totally rip that quote. A. Ratings for the show overall are lower than what James Corden was doing.

However, we’re told it’s a solid ratings performer in eighteen of forty nine, and again, if you factor in budget, probably makes more money. Who knows from the Vatican News, your home for comedy news, the comedians were over there at the Vatican on Friday. I wasn’t there. Deacon Mike, who knows a lot of bishops. I’ve seen Deacon Mike talking to bishops.

They clearly know him. So you know, he might not know the Pope, but you know it’s people who knows the Pope. Did he hook me up with an invite to the Vatican? He did not imagine what this episode could have been. Instead, I’m playing Louis c.

K Trailers, Thanks Deacon Mike. The Pope said, because laughter is contagious, can break down social barriers and create connections. Vatican News tells us. The Holy Father went on to highlight another miracle of comedians, the ability to make people smile even when tackling serious issues. The Pope said, I can’t believe I’m saying.

The Pope said, I don’t think that’s ever come up on the show before, other than last week. The Pope said, you denounce the excesses of power, give voice to forgotten situations, highlight abuses, point out inappropriate behavior, but without spreading alarm and terror, anxiety or fear divine wisdom. Practice your art for the benefit of none other than God himself, the first spectator in history. Remember this. When you managed to bring intelligent smiles to the lips of even a single spectator, you also make God smile.

We can even laugh at God, just as we play and joke with those we love. But the Pope pointed out this must be done without offending the religious feelings of believers, especially the poor. Continue to cheer people up, especially those who find it hardest to look at life with hope. Help us with a smile, to see reality with its contradictions, and to dream of a better world. So more coverage of this event.

Remember I mentioned I didn’t think there was a comedian named James. There might be a comedian named James Martin, but that comedian was not invited to the Vatican. It was indeed, Father James Martin sj as I suspected, but he was on the list of comedians. Don’t know why, doesn’t matter. According to reports in the media, Jimmy Fallon was seen larking around the front of the audience hall before proceedings got underway.

He was reportedly quickly he told to take a seat as the Pope was about to walk through the door. Conan O’Brien described his meeting with the Pope and said, well, it was brief. He spoke in Italian, so I’m not quite sure what he said. It was quick. Had a wonderful time.

If you took the weekend off, Hey, in the Northeast, the weather was gorgeous. I don’t blame you, but go back and listen to Saturday’s episode where I talked to comedy with New York Times critic at Lord’s Jason Zenniman. I think you’ll like that one a lot. The upcoming week, I have already corded eighty minutes or so before the edit with Mike Chisholm, who hosts the Letterman podcast. We got all nerdy about David Letterman, so that’ll be coming up on Saturday.

A nice benefit for me is I can take the transcripts from these things and put them in the sub stack. I do a substack where I write about the media, sometimes comedy, but often not comedy. For example, music Monday and Wednesday is what I’m listening to, which is podcast recommendation. So it’s not a comedy newsletter. But if you’d like to subscribe to that for free, link in the show notes.

But it’s mickdepod dot substack dot com and it’s free and want you just sign up and delead all the emails. At least that way, I’ll be like, hey, I picked up some new followers, and I’ll feel good about myself. And I don’t know if you read it or not, but I’ll be like ooh followers.

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Also link in the show notes.

Caloroga dot com slash merch my business partner Mark he got all creative and he made some National Donuts Chain T shirts. Don’t you want one? They’re pretty snazzy. I’ll be hawking those as we go forward. But National Donuts Chain A T shirts available in the merch store.

Link in the show notes. If you’re on a podcasting two point oh app this podcast supports value for value. If you want to throw some Satoshi’s my way. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. If you would like this program ad free, also a link in the show notes.

Boy, those show notes are pretty busy today. Calor roga dot com slash you can get this show and a bunch of the others on the network. Four ninety nine a month gets you them. Commercial free comedy recommendation. You probably heard me over the weekend say I had not yet watched Connor O’Malley Stand Up Solutions.

I didn’t lie, but I had taped it before I watched it. I have seen it. It’s pretty good. It’s on YouTube. I liked it a lot.

Connor O’Malley stand Up Solutions A recommendation from me. Spoilers for season four of the Boys. I’ll give you a second here. If you watched the Boys. Yet that’s what I’ve been watching all weekend.

That’s why I’m behind on my comedy specials. Again, as tends to happen. Plus, I was outside all weekend. It was so nice. All right, there was a cameo in the Boys, and I’m about to spoil it.

Will Ferrell, hilarious has always made a cameo in The boy is that they’re making a movie about a train who’s kind of sort of not quite the flash. In the movie within the Boys, Will Ferrell stars as a train’s coach who warns a train against throwing aways talents to sling yayo from gangbangers. I’m sure we’ll delivered it in a much funnier way than I just did. Hello, I’m not sure. Coach Will Ferrell says, you can either outrun this life or you can outrun yourself into an early grieve.

The director says, Holy f We’re not going to beat that. That was effing perfect, literal tears. Who’s happy they spent two weekends at the Compton Youth Center. Now, Will Ferrell, as Will Ferrell says, I’m not giving off too much of a blind side vibe. Am I The director says, as if that’s a bad thing.

Wait what does that smell? Everyone? Stop? What does that smell? Is that you?

Will Ferrell spawns hilarious as always, I had falafel for lunch. The director then critiques a train. According to showrunner Eric Kripke, one of the scenes with Will Ferrell did not make it. Kirk Ke tells the Rap as you can imagine, these guys are world class improvisers. We have so much film on them riffing and trying different things.

At one point they make out there’s just so much material there that we couldn’t use it, but hopefully in the special features of deleted scenes, because they have a lot of really good stuff. As I just mentioned, I haven’t seen Hannah Einbinders special yet, but the Rap did, and they said, the reason she looks so confident in her day you stand up special everything must go because she’s been working on the joke since twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen. There’s no comedic comparison to what Einbinder does. On one moment, she leans into a round of tried and true dating jokes, only to subvert them at the last minute. Spoiler as a bisexual woman Einbinder has dubbed men idiots and women annoying.

The next she pretends to be the moon, making use of the thick red curtain most other performers would ignore. The joy of Einbinder’s new special is you never know where the comedian’s going to go or what to expect from her punchlines, but you always know that the journey will be interesting. That sounds good. I want to check this one out. They asked her favorite pieces of comedy.

Hannah said, Oh my god, it’s so hard. I got to sound super interesting here, gotta be Niche. Probably The Mighty Booshe, which is a wonderful character driven sketch show. The Brits are like, yeah, we know the answer, Like, what’s the Mighty Boosh? I think it’s on Hulu.

It’s a good show. Check it out, Hannah. What comedians have been impressing you lately? She says, Michael Longfellow. I think he’s the most brilliant, succinct, distinct comedic voice that I’m aware of.

He’s so original and so funny and whipsmart and I look forward to seeing his special and that he’s your comedy news for today. To you tomorrow,

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Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media. I’ve got a great one for you today. My guest is Jason Zenniman, critic at large for the Culture section of the New York Times. Jason writes a column about comedy, and we talked comedy for the better part of an hour on his biopage on the New York Times dot com, Jason Wrights. I cover comedy with critical rigor and curiosity and explore how it reflects and influences the broader cultural and intellectual landscape.

I’m particularly interested in work that is innovative or unexpected, but it’s enough if it’s just really funny. My aim is to always capture the comedy scene in its complexity while translating it clearly for a broad audience. That is a theme that came up several times during this discussion. I just want to give you some notes on the recording here. So we recorded this on a program called squad cast, basically zoom for podcasters, and when you do that, you don’t quite get studio quality sound, and sometimes you get little dropouts.

The reason I’m bringing this up is I just want to be clear. There were three different points where I used a program called descript which has a feature called regenerate, where I used it to regenerate short phrases said by Jason. Nothing materially changed, The words aren’t changed. It just regenerated the wave so that it didn’t fade a little bit. Just want to be clear about that.

Also, when I use the script, it has a couple of neat buttons that I use every day on this podcast. One is remove retakes, so when I recorded every day, believe me, I stumble and I start over and descript has a one button remove retakes. It’s wonderful. There’s also a feature that I used on this interview, which is remove filler words, because when you listen to Johnny Max speak the way Johnny Mack does over the course of an hour, there are a lot more ums and you knows than you might get during a typical ten minute script that I’ve edited down. And there’s also a one button click called shortened word Gaps, which just tightens the pacing.

So I’ve used all those features on this interview. Nothing materially changed. But I just want to be clear that I did in a traditional podcasting way, nothing nefarious. I did edit the audio all right, And here’s my interview with Jason. I’ve been a fan of your work.

I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s not stupid. There’s a lot of stupid in comedy, and I don’t feel like you do takes. I feel like you write really thoughtful, smart pieces. And I’ve been quoting you in episodes for months and then the other day I freaked out.

I go, wait, what if his name is pronounced Zinoman? And I’ve said it wrong forty five times?

And then I actually checked.

I was like, anyway, So I’m curious about your approach as someone who just does off the top of his head ten minute podcasts and maybe a half assed written substack. I know how long it takes me to do that, so to appreciate what you’re doing for The New York Times.

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Also, you’ve got to be putting out a ton of work.

First of all, let me say, if you call me Zinoman, I’m not going to complain the it’s like cinnamon, but I’ll take any reference. I’ll take any pr is good pr and the Zionoman sounds also always more like the superhero version of my name. But yeah, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work. Although that makes it sound.

Sometimes it comes very easily, as I’m sure, and sometimes more work doesn’t always mean better work. Is one thing I’ve learned, and that’s one thing that’s evolved over the course of this. For instance, I would say when I started this job, I spent a huge I spend a huge amount of time most of my time going out to see shows clubs, and I still do that, but I don’t do it as much as I used to, and that has to do both with how comedies change, but also I think that I try to spend a little bit of time every week thinking about letting my mind roam and thinking of ideas, and then if I have a good idea, I try to find the right form for it that because so sometimes sometimes that’s a review, sometimes it’s an essay. Sometimes it’s a bigger piece and it’s a profile. And it’s funny like the things that I write in a in an hour or a half hour are the most popular, and the things that I sweat over, like I’m working on something now for months and no one cares.

I feel like I totally know that one yes, yes, and they’re sometimes they’re wrong, but they’re not always wrong. Sometimes you cannot trust you you. Let’s put this way. As I’m first a critic and I’m a big believer in something, I’m a big believer that your first impression isn’t always right, but it’s always important. So you have to be really sensitive to your first impression of something.

And it’s why people like Pauline Kal, who’s probably the critic who most inspired me as a kid. She would write she would go see a movie and go home write the review right away, and because she really valued that first impression, I’m happy to hear that you’re not clubbing as much as he used to. One of my guilt trips. I run Serious XM Comedy for ten years ten years ago now, but even then it was hard to go see shows because I was still expected to be in the office and be a manager from eight am until six call it. So to stay out till one point thirty in the morning doing shows was difficult.

I tended to rely on the people who were younger on my staff, and then to keep my knowledge fresh, I’d hit festivals and as I always tell this audience, if you go to a festival, don’t go see Chris Rock. You can go see Chris Rocks some other time, go hit all those smaller shows. That’s where the action is. I’m upset that Montreal is gone, or perhaps back or this new group that bought it, But no Montreal. This summer is a bummer.

It’s interesting to hear what you do, because I think that’s a very smart strategy. It’s I have taken the opposite approach, which isn’t necessarily better, which is that, if anything, I undercover festivals because I feel like a lot of the people you see at festivals I already see New York. But what that means is like comedians from other cities when they come through here, I make a point of trying to see them, or I try to go to La periodically to see that. But I miss things for sure, And there’s no question that you could. It’s funny.

The truth is that there’s like a pool of performers in New York, and if you go often enough, you see them all and it’s changing, but it doesn’t change radically. It doesn’t change like the number of people changed. I still like to go, and I think I pick up things. I learned things from going. But now the thing is you could probably the most time efficient way is probably just to look at your computer and fillow.

Because everyone’s online and there’s so much material online, and a lot of consumers of comedy are first accessing comedy not from clubs but from a clip on a TikTok or Instagram. So that has to change. I feel like if the way that we have to have along with the consumers. Yeah, and for any content creator, no matter of the format. We’re all living in a headline world, right, So the easiest thing to write is why Joe Rogan, Shane Gillis and Nikki Glaser are something that’ll get the clicks as opposed to Hey guys, Jen Marco Cireesis awesome, Just it doesn’t do the same.

Uh. But CIESSI will contact you and be like, how come you’re not con righting about me? He’s fantastic Switching gears I wanted. One of the main things I wanted to talk to you about Dave Chappelle. It bothers me that he has seemingly chosen to turn his legacy into The second line in his oh bit is going to be something about the trans community.

And he’s so much better than what he’s done on the last few specials, which is Jason you know why I had you on today because of the trans And he slaps his knee and he mugs for the camera and he gets a laugh, and he’s so much better than that. And I don’t know why he’s dug in on that. To be curious to your thoughts, it’s a good it’s a good question. Look, I loved Dave Chappelle. I’ve wrote an ebook on Dave Chappelle eight years ago, searching for Dave Chappelle.

I grew up in Washington, d C. Where he’s from. I have I’m around. He’s a few years older than me, but I’ve been following his career since the since the eighties. I have a tremendous he’s incredible comedian.

His sketch show, I think people have now forgotten about it, but it’s one of the greatest comedies ever on television, and he’s one of the greatest. He’s one of the greatest stand ups. I think it’s his first specialist terrific and he still has a lot. I say all this as a way to be like it’s one of the I’m agreeing with you. And one of the reasons it’s depressing is that when we talk about Dave Chappelle, we tend to talk about these culture war things and because that’s what he’s put out put forth, and so why has he chosen to do that?

I think Gerard Carmichael made us ask the more question recently. My sense, if I again I’m just speculating, is that Chappelle always liked two didn’t you know? Prized? His freedom prize is independence he and I think I think the good faith, genuine interpretation is that when he did trans jokes and people said got offended or said, don’t you his first instinct is to then double down right, And that’s always been his first instinct. It’s been his first instinct through his whole career.

We can go chapter in verse. Even before he was famous. I’ve written back before his Chapelle show, he had a big falling out on his comedy on a ABC show called Buddies. I’ve traced this in ambols has served him in this case. Look, it may have served him well for his audience.

He’s still selling out, he’s still popular, but for his art, I agree with you. I think it’s kept him in a rut. And I’m still optimistic when I see a new Dave Chappelle thing. I hope he moves past it. But yeah, what’s interesting to me the last one came out is that I don’t even think it caused that much controversy.

I think people are just bored. Yeah, I imagine in your travels you’ve run into him. He’ll do sets and I’m being generous with that. He’ll he’ll take stage time and he’s not even really working out. He’s just talking to the audience when he does that downbeat, soft spoken Dave, and he’ll just come out with some brilliant things just to listen to that.

Maybe it an’t even funny and he’s got that there, and I just I’d like to just see him do something else. But to your point, Dave Sapelle announced his new Netflix special already. The conversation is going to be, is he going to bring this up again? And it’s I think he nailed it. It’s boring, It’s it’s predictable.

I mean, like, if you were to say, like, what’s the least interesting thing for him to do next, it would be to talk about that again. That’s the part of it which flabbergasting. I think that the thing the other issue might be is that he always had these two modes, which was doing like a stand up set with this with more traditional collection of jokes in his very idiosyncratic style, and what you described this like, he would go into go into clevit. He would be on stage for four hours. And there was something incredible about those sets.

He could go places that others could not. And I believe he got she fell in love with that, and there’s something indulgent about those and I think that’s true for not just in terms of the amount of time he’s spending there, but also they became very self serious. This bothers me less than other people. But I think another reason people got bored with him is that he seemed his material seemed less punchline driven. It seemed less about being funny and more about being profound.

And if he’s saying things that are profound and poetic, that’s fine, and maybe it’s better than fine, it’s great. But if he’s saying the same thing over and over again, that’s a problem. All right, new premise off all the recent protests that Jerry Seinfeld ran into, I find myself wondering what if Jerry went political? Now I know that’s crazy. He’s seventy years old, and it’s very easy to just write it out and go, hey, do you ever notice but what if Jerry showed off and went all in?

Could you ever imagine that in a million years? No? But I mean I would be interested. I think there’s another question which is similar, which is what if he went vulnerable or introspective personal? And I think there’s room for that.

I think that he I don’t think I think people would be interested in either in going political. I don’t think he wants to, and I don’t think he has to. I don’t even think he’s got to. Cut from the last interviews from him, he doesn’t seem like he wanted it to come out with any special ever again. And he wouldn’t need to.

He wouldn’t need to see any people forget. But he came up at a time when everyone didn’t need to release specials, and he didn’t. He for most of his career he didn’t release specials, and he could and he did just he did obviously did just find Some people think that he has gotten more political, but I’m with you. I don’t think he. I don’t think he has.

I thought I found all the backlash of the popsarts movie bizarre. I liked it. I thought it was this is a silly movie. We’re having fun, my friends are in it. Want you to turn your brain off for ninety minutes.

And people seemed like mad that that movie even exists. It was weird. I know, you mean, I think some people were mad about the interviews in which he said things like, you know, the PC left and the were ruining sitcoms or whatever. But yeah, there was the initial response from some I think one film critic called it the worst movie of the decade or the year or something, and I was like, that made no sense to me. That made zero How you could that there’s something going on outside of the screen to think that a movie with that ambition and also that amount of there’s plenty of talent on screen there is the worst movie.

And it’s not funny. I say ambition, a low ambition. It’s not a movie that’s swinging for the fences. Yeah, it’s not like he made some bro dude version of Oppenheimer and missed the politics of it. It’s a pop starts movie.

Yes, it’s a popp bar. It’s it was a it’s a bizarre response, but I that’s the age we’re living in, right that, I think the more hyper hyperbole you you mentioned if you put Joe Rogan in the title against a lot of hits. The other way to get it is to have a more extreme point of view. Right, all right, we’ll take the break here back with Jason Zenimann after this the rest of Tom Brady, I feel like it. It cuts through, seems to have done well.

Did Nicky Glazer step up in class? Did Tony Hinchcliff step up in class? Or these now names that the civilians would know? Actually, let me sidebar there. This comes up a lot.

There are a lot of really popular comedians. But if you and I walk down the street and grabbed one hundred people in New York City and said, hey, Andrew Schultz, what are we going three for one hundred, I think you’re right. I think you’re right. Yeah. No, you’re putting your finger on a big phenomenon of the moment, which is like, what does it mean to be a famous comedian?

In twenty twenty four, Andrew Schultz played Mason Square Garden, right, And there was a time when that was like hardly anybody, hardly nobody had played Masters for a Garden, but he’s played massots for Garden, and as you said, I think most people don’t know who he is. But I think that’s not just a question of comedy. That’s a question of the culture in general, which is that it’s so fragmented, it’s so balkanized that you as long as you have very passionate fans in your niche, you can sell a lot and be very successful even without being widely known. I think it’s also answers the previous question, which is the wiser everyone so worried about Jerry Seinfeld. All the people who became famous in that generation have a kind of fame that’s way bigger than the kind of fame you get now, with the exception of Taylor Swift, if you manage to get famous.

Even Drogan, I think, is an example of this where Rogan likes to protact like he’s anti establishment, anti mainstream media. But I have this sort of pet theory that the difference between his fame and Tim Dillon Andrew Schultz, who will never be as famous as Joe Rogan, is that Joe Rogan was on Fear Factor, and Joe Rogan was on news radio and he hosted a after Bob Costas left. Later he or he had an NBC talk show for a second. Though, that’s a bigger fame than these podcast fames that you get now. It’s a kind of fame that reach which is a much broader demographic than you reach out.

I must have a race from my brain. There was a Joe Rogan late night show. I did a piece a year ago. It’s now it seems already maybe longer than that seems very dated. When Daily Show was doing rotating guest hosts, and I was making an argument for how this might not be a terrible idea to do permanently.

This is before they announce John Stewart, which is a better idea, but are once a week. But although I guess they still do, I guess they are to entertaining guest hosts around with John Stewart. And I was looking around for precedent, and I realized that in the late nineties NBC did this after maybe an some of the details wrong, but it’s in my story. After you know a letterman, and they had a crazy series of people who I like hosted for a week than a week, and among those people were Joe Rogan and he had he interviewed and eight people he interviewed. It was a similar version to his podcast, but it was on NBC and I was really shock it.

I couldn’t find any versions of it online, but I nailed it down that had happened. I found it on an old like TV guy those things. Oh wow, You’re gonna send me down a rabbit hole, and I didn’t forget. I will circle back to my Nikki Glaser question, but now I’m like three questions deep. I just had Mark malcoff on and he retriggered my late night obsession.

And I spent the week watching YouTube videos. And somebody made this homebrew thing about the Carson Letterman, Tom Snyder trifecta, and I just I’m back into that whole move. And I know you wrote a Letterman book. Can you explain to me why I worship twelve thirty Letterman lasted a year and a half at eleven thirty Letterman after spending a decade going man. If only I didn’t have to stay up till one thirty in the morning, if only Dave were on at eleven thirty, I would watch Dave every night, And then a year and a half into it, I don’t know if it was just I was in my mid twenties and going out and doing things people do and not watching late night TV.

But twelve thirty Letterman is my north star. Eleven thirty Letterman, okay, And then he’ll put out something on Netflix and it takes me three weeks to watch it. What is wrong with me? It’s so funny that you asked me this question today, because you and I are identical on this point. And just today somebody sent me a podcast in which it was the guy who’d wrote that was the Letterman podcast, Mike Chris Som, and he said, oh, I mentioned you on a podcast, and he was on a podcast with somebody else, sorry to be on a podcast talking about another podcast, but my name came up and it was asking I guess the podcast?

Hast said, how do you press him when he was on your podcast about why he focuses so much on his late night twelve thirty show and not on his CBS show, And there was a kind of there was a they were upset, both of them because they both really there. They both liked the CBS show. And it made me wonder for a second, because I putting aside me for a second, I think to people who are younger, who maybe didn’t grow up with that show, the CBS show means more. But I’ve watched both as an adult, so my opinions on them are not just like nostalgic. And despite what they said in this podcast, the reason I didn’t is because I agree with you that from nineteen eighty two to ninety three David Letterman on NBC made some of the most brilliant talk show comedy and most innovative talk show comedy ever that really created a sensibility, invented all kinds of forms mainstream to sort of irony.

That is really significant, that deserves that will be here to your point about legacy, that will be the lion’s share of his legacy. Now, his first couple of years in the CBS Show are probably arguably the more popular and were more covered more because of the late night wars, and some of them were quite good, and they were periods in the CBS show that were better or worse. But in my opinion, the NBC show was vastly more ambitious and better than the CBS show. Now that again, there are big exceptions to certainly his response to nine to eleven and many other ones. He still was David Letterman.

He still was doing great work. But and my book is essentially a book length answer to the question of why right. If you want to know why, that is by my book, Letterman Last China Malee. And part of it has to do with him, Part of it has to do with the network, but a lot of it has to do with what’s around him and the writers around him, and the relationship between the writers and Letterman and all that. I would say that you were just smart and discriminating, and that’s that’s why I think what attracted me to it was the whole twelve thirty vibe.

And once Conan found his fastball, he’s had the same vibe of maybe this bit isn’t working, but I know it, you know what, we all know what. Let’s just stick to it and left together with it.

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And then you go to eleven, which is a different animal, and you have to wear …

I’ve always called it establishment Letterman as opposed to the twelve thirty, Like we’re off our game tonight, we got forty seven minutes left whatever, yep, yep, yep. No. I think it was clearly a bigger, more show, busy show in a big theater where the previous show was intimate, and it felt like conspiratorial between the viewer and Dave, and it was going backstage and doing all these fourth wall breaking things. It was very different there was It was a very I would make the argument that it was the things that really made him unique. The new version of CBS was going directly against.

That doesn’t mean that he was totally different. He still had some lot of reverence. And I think what’s interesting that you bring up what he’s doing now. It’s remarkable if you would have told me, the young version of me who loved his late night show, that Letterman would be now doing a show in which he interviews famous people and is incredibly complimentary and gushing about all of them and solicitous. What made him really stand out as an interviewer in the eighties, and you can just go and look at the press on this is he adopted a kind of almost hostile, if not skeptical, attitude towards the celebrities who came out and promoted, and that was part of his appeal.

So it’s interesting he’s I don’t blame him, you know, but it’s quite a one eighty. The next rabbit hole I want to go down is trying to track down clips of his daytime show. Until I watched that Homebrew doc this week, I had no idea that Patricks or viewer mail were leftovers from the daytime show. I’ve barely seen clips of that. It’s incredible, it’s incredibly out there.

There are yeah, yeah, yeah, if you go on YouTube, there’s They’re not all of them, but a huge number of them. And he and Meryl Marco a lot of the great stuff from the Late night if not most of it, were established in the Morning Show. And they had Andy Kaufman as a maybe his most one of the most brilliant appearances ever was on the Morning Show. There’s incredible Steve Martin appearance they did. I’m pretty sure they definitely did stupid Patrick’s first in the Morning Show.

I think they might have done viewer mail, a lot of the man on the Street stuff. Hal Gurney, the director started with him on the Morning Show, started there. It was the wrong time slot, but they were trying things there that it was the blueprint was established there and just when they figured it out, they got canceled, and I think that that’s what was the secret sauce to the show is that by the time that they started on late night, they had a much better sense of what they wanted to do than they would have if they did have the morning show. When I recently watched Mullaney, I went for a whole ride here. So, just to catch you up on my resume, a big chunk of it, I worked in talk radio w or New York and did a lot of phone screening, which is relevant to what I’m setting up here.

As I was watching Mulaney, my initial reaction was, oh, my goodness, twelve thirty Dave is back. This is so loose and goofy, and I loved it.

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And then I started screaming and this is arrogant.

Somebody needs to produce this thing. And my sticking point was when they went to callers, because as a call screener, I can tell you civilians cannot take tell a story. And I’m screaming at my TV saying Jerry Seinfeld is sitting there. I could have hosted that when hey, Jerry has that movie going and then shut up for ten minutes. I would did you enjoy me?

Lee? I really think something’s there. I’d like to see more of it just and maybe this is counter to my whole twelve thirty Letterman argument a little more focused. Oh, I’m with you. I really enjoyed it because I like novelty, and I like experimentation, and I like things that are different.

So I was tiggled by it. And just like you it Fello. There are bits of cable access, there are bits of we just with super famous people. There are bits of Lettermen there. But it was interesting the incongruity between the critics reaction, which was pretty glowing, and normal people’s action, which almost most people who I talked to loathed it or found it unwatchable, including I should say, I’m not going to name it, but it was on my Facebook page.

People who worked for the first Letterman show the wow that And I think the reason for that is one is what you’re saying is that like he indulged a lot. There was a lot of dead air. There was like having the call in go on while you have these other people on the show. It was the thing that made it exciting, which is like anything could happen here is also what made it can make it tedious, and if it was on for a month or a year, I think that would have been more clear that that would become People are now saying, oh, we should do it full time. And I saw he did an interview where he was like, I’m intrigued.

But I think that this was great for a week during a Netflix festival where they could get every star in the world on it and it was a lark if they if it was a permanent thing, I think its flaws that you’ve enumerated would be more clear. Yeah, I wear many hats, and in my career as a podcasting executive and bec as a programmer, it’s serious. I would explain to people talk to me about show twenty three, because even I can call in some celebrity favors and I can book a great week of shows just for myself. What happens when it’s week forty seven? And to your point, Jerry Seinfeld’s not in town.

Who are you talking to? Who’s the guest? Now it’s back on the host. They’ll sample for the guests, they will come back for the host. Is the way I teach that what let me ask you what how the call in aspect what works in that?

What do you have to do to make that? Because obviously that was a huge part of popular culture for a long time, that you now that was one of the things about that Lenny Show that I was like, oh, I it’s interesting that he’s doing this. It’s not quite working. But not only was that on talk radio, but Larry King used to do it. It’s so, what’s the secret of that?

And how come there’s not more of it? Callers are diminishing returns, so the call screener needs to So if I’m interviewing, Hey, Jason, what do you want to talk to John about? And I have to get it out of you, and then I have to really try and coach you and go Okay, when you get on, don’t bother saying Hi, don’t say thanks for taking my call. He knows we really appreciate it. I want you to open up, and I just want your first sentence to be hey, da da da da da da da da.

Now, I’m still on a tight rope because you might get on the air and be like, hey, thanks for taking my call, and it just drags everything to a halt. Unless you have a really good caller, you just want to take their initial point and fade them out, and you don’t need them other than to facilitate a discussion. Point that said, back in the day, there were regulars who knew how to do it, but most civilians can’t tell a story interesting. Interesting, Okay, no, that makes sense. Saturday Night Live, turning fifty will Lorne Michael stick around.

I’m looking at this and going take the victory lap. You’re eighty eighty one years old. It’s not going to get any better. I don’t see anyone going. Season fifty two was great, Lauren.

I think you got to get out here. People who know him, like Seth, seem to think he’s gonna stick around. What do you think? The short answer is, I don’t know. But as you say, the people who are closer to it than me think he’s sticking around, and the people who know him better than I do think he’s sticking around until he can’t do it anymore.

And it’s such a hard thing to replace him. I think, much harder than people realize that. I don’t think, And God knows, no one’s going to push him out, so I can. I guess we’ll still be, but who knows, we’ll see Look We’re all gonna have to be thinking and writing and talking about SNL next year for a year a lot more. Let’s not do it now because we’re all gonna have to do it next year a lot.

Will Ferrell Tina Fey in the top thirteen SNL get ready for all there’s people who got it are gonna have to watch every episode of all fifty years. We’re gonna have to write lists. There’s gonna be there’s a book, The Lorne Bio is finally gonna come out next year. Wow, by bye, Susan Morrison from New Yorker. That’s probably like the most anticipated comedy book of next year.

And I imagine that will be a big doorstop with all sorts of comedy dirt in it. Even if it wasn’t the fair V anniversary, that would be week a big source of conversation. Did you say this thing? I’m sure you did with Kimmel and Letterman developing a talk show for Lunel. I just saw that before I jumped on with you.

That’s like a real life Hacks episode. I looked it up. She’s sixty five, and when I watched Hacks my initial reaction and they addressed it was like, they’re not going to give Deborah Vance a show at her age, and here we are living a Hacks episode. Yes, I did see that. Well, I’ll believe when I see it, and I and but I think, why not.

I feel like she’s one of these people who’ve been around for a long time. I think I saw her open for Kat Williams at Barclays a little while ago. I just saw her pop up in a movie from like the nineties. Anyways, I think she so, yeah, she’s paid her dues. She deserves a show, just like just like Debora Vance says, all right, three hours ago, I asked you if Nikki Glaser has stepped up in class.

I think yeah. I think that she was probably the big winner of the Netflix weekend. I think, although it’s funny, I think there’s one what was interesting about her week is she was the star of the roast on Netflix and then she released a special on HBO Max on Max and which raises the question why didn’t Netflix have that special? And I do think that that points to another issue, which looking to the future, which is is are these other streamers going to start to eat into Netflix’s territory and the fact that they didn’t have Nikki Glaser, which they did have her previous special, and she clearly is still figure on their streamer. Was interesting to me.

Did she raise the thoughts? Yeah, I think so. But she’s been steadily building for a while. You could her reality show is doing well. She has an incredible First of all, I think I find her very incredibly consistent, amazing work ethic, talented in a lot of different ways.

She’s somebody who I think could go in a different direction with a special, could be more. She’s so on talk shows she’s so good and so revealing and so introspective, and on specials she is sometimes, but she’s usually just like a killer joke, just an incredible joke teller. I feel like if you could sort of merge those two things, she’d have a real blockbuster. It was a weird week of press. She crushed so hard on the roast, there was no buzz on the special.

It was very strange. The special kind of came and went and people were still talking about the roast. I think that’s partly us to do with just Netflix and alsoasts that roast guy. So, although I don’t know, maybe you can know more than I, but I felt like I saw conflicting reports about the ratings. That’s another example of something that was like an hour too long that if it was not live, there’s no question it would have been edited down an hour and would have been better, and probably I would assume it would have got higher ratings.

But I saw some reports that I got crazy ratings. I saw others that Cat Williams got better ratings. Now who knows but the but I don’t. I think her special didn’t do worse because of that roast. I think because it’s like you’re saying before, there’s still a ton of people who don’t know Nico Lasers right, He’s a tremendous and successful stand up comedian.

But that that rose still raised her profile because it was a thing that everyone was talking about and it was trending for days. So ratings wise, I think I saw what you saw the first weekend, that more people watched Kat quote unquote live than the roast. But I saw something last night that vague numbers here, two hundred and thirty nine million view’s eyeballs whatever the Netflix metric is on day one, but it held that number all week, so it seemed like it had legs off the buzz. I think part of Nicky and you brought up Netflix versus HBO, HBO Max, HBO Max. They’ve goofed up the brand.

So this week Hannah Einbender has a new special. Normally HBO specials come out Saturday at ten pm, and Hannah is this out on a Thursday.

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And then I started wondering, so is this not an HBO special?

Did she get a Max special? And what the heck does that even mean? And does it matter? And it’s just it’s confusing. Most civilians aren’t gonna care.

But I just looked at it and I’m like, so is this special? Somehow? I don’t mean this is dig but like lesser, it’s not the equivalent of a Saturday night HBO special from back in the day. It’s a Thursday Max special. I don’t know.

They’ve confused me. Yes, No, I think they that. I think they’ve given up a lot of the prestige of their brand. That said, or that’s said, and clearly like they’re that the company is not doing well. They’re going to lose Charles Barkley and inside the NBA that are in debt.

Right that said, all right, let’s try to defend them a little bit, which is that what I think they’re trying to do, which is the smart move that they can’t compete with Netflix in terms of money and in terms of scale, And now you’ve got Hulu coming in which is going to have a big special every month, and they’ve already signed up people like Gaff again and Savashia Mescalco. What what Max is doing, I think is trying to get the kind of slightly ardier dar Carmichael, Julio Torres, Hannah Einbeinder. They’re not going for the biggest mass appeal in a way that I think is consistent with their traditional brand writ large, but it doesn’t mean the same thing that it did in the seventies when they had the whole market it to themselves, or the nineties when they had Chris Rock and it was like a major events. Those days are gone, so now the big events tend to be on Netflix. So what do you do if you’re a secondary streamer?

And I think they have a decent strategy, and that’s I think what I like. I agree with your point that it’s a mess and confusing to be a consumer of comedy these days and to fight where everything is and I think in a couple of years is going to look different. And what I hope it looks like is that each of these platforms has a personality, has a style, and people who want that can go there right what it will probably be will not be. That will be a mess. So that’s why I like the fact that h that Max, even though it’s not Friday, seems curated in a specific taste.

Well they had even in this century, maybe not for comedy, but for drama shows that they could have thrown this conversation on Sunday night at nine pm and people would have sampled it and assumed it was prestige. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not, but we would have gotten the goodwill off the first episode. People would have tuned in. That’s true. That’s true.

No, it’s interesting. I didn’t realize about that Hers was coming out on Thursday. That’s I wonder why.

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All right, let’s take one more break here.

Don’t forget you can get these shows add free. You know, four ninety nine a month gets you this and all the other things on the network. Link in the show notes. Go to Calieroba dot com slash plus check it out. Maybe you can help me sort my feelings here.

I’ve been struggling with this one. As close as I’ve gotten is special versus hour. So every comedian tweets out, hey, check out my new special on YouTube. And if we graph everything out, at one end, I don’t know, there’s Carlin at Carnegie, and at the other end there’s I happen to have a still camera at the Chuckle Hut Tuesday night at ten pm, and everyone’s using the word special, and I have got a new special. I don’t even know what I want from you, but help me not everything is a special that.

It’s very fuzzy these days. Right, here’s my glass half full version. I feel like it’s the best of times, the worst of times. There’s more specials than ever now are more releases than ever, and the goods part of that is the funniest comedy out there. Doesn’t tend to be the most famous people for totally boring reasons.

They have other things to do then work on their jokes, right, They’re busy, right, So the people who tend to be have the most worked out jokes are the kind of mid career comedians who have trouble getting a Netflix deal, right, and now they have a place and an outlet to release their stuff YouTube, right, so you see people like Nathan McIntosh who or the next one I saw is Renon Hirschberg, or who has one coming up soon, Liz Meal. These weren’t a time where these people. Now you can see their stuff not only as eavy as you can see the stuff in HBO, but easier. And I think that’s a good thing. And I don’t want to stay oither and that’s not special.

And this is special because not only is it not true that they’re worse there, in many cases they’re often better. But two, it’s like, cool, what’s the point in policing these genres? I do think we’ll look back and we’ll say, man, there was more bad comedy then than ever, but there’s also more great comedy than ever. It’s harder to find the good stuff now because there’s so much of it. And that’s part of our job is to be like, hey, like, all right, everybody knows Joe Rogan and the Roast and all this, but that’s not really the best comedy.

Nobody who knows comedy thinks that’s the best comedy. That’s increasing to the point that we started with it, which is like all right, how have our jobs shifted? We’ve got to cover the big stuff because that’s what people want to read, and that’s important. But I think we have an increasing responsibility to be like, Okay, let’s look at what’s going on in these on YouTube tube, on TikTok, etc. And find the good stuff.

You’ve been incredibly generous with your time. Let me pick your brain and I’ll let you go about comedy snobbery when I ran serious comedy. So I’m sitting at a desk five days a week, got the radio on from May to six. All I’m hearing is the best stand up comedians performing their best material that they’ve pressed. And it fried my brain.

And I call it the Emperor of Rome syndrome. So if I go see a show, I don’t laugh. I am now a psychopath, but my brain is analyzing and going, oh that’s hilarious, and I’m thinking it just in the manner I did. Oh that’s really funny, Oh great callback, Oh wow, this is an awesome set. Has doing what you do?

Has it fried your brain? It’s a really good question. The short answer is yes, that when it becomes your job. First of all, if you see comedians in the back of comedy clubs. They don’t laugh right the way regular people do, and it’s no different than people like you and I who do.

Often you’re not the best audience member. One weird phenomenon of my job is I feel bad sometimes I think something’s funny, but I don’t laugh, and I know it makes me a bad Sometimes I fake laugh, just like if it’s if I’m in a small room where the laugh really matters, or having someone stonefaced is like going to disrupt the proceedings, like I’ll fake laugh, which I’m not as convincing as a fake which comes up ridiculous. You do what you do. But so I do think that it’s a danger of the job, which is you, and it’s something you have to be aware of and you have to factor in because you don’t want You want to be in touch with both your honest reaction to something and also what how the ordinary consumer receives the stuff. I like it’s self justifying, but I tend to think that the advantages of being experienced and well versed in comedy and knowing the vast site of the history of the form and seeing enough to know what’s good versus bad must ambitions is not what didictable, what’s cliche?

All that stuff outweighs the negative of becoming of not laughing quite as much. And I also will say this that like the moment when you aren’t excited about seeing something, the moment when you get cynical or jaded about comedy is when you when I’ll quit. So that’s something you got to always be kicking the tires on, or I have to be kicking the tires on which I do. Have you ever run into I ran into this early in my career, not so much lately, but hey, you’re not a comedian. How come you’re doing this and all this?

And I was explaining, like, I don’t play guitar, but I can recognize that Eddie van Halen’s pretty good at it. Like I’m not claiming to be a comedian. I’m a dude in a basement. Or I was a radio programmer. I don’t know.

Yeah, that doesn’t bother me the If anything, I consider it a benefit of plus because uh uh, in the fact, you’ll never find me doing the gimmick piece of oh.

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And then I went and tried stand up and I bombed, and I learned how much I res…

Comedians are good at what they do, and what I do is quite hard as well, And it also looks easy, right, Just doing comedy is easy or looks easy, but is actually incredibly hard. Being a critic covering an incredibly diverse, complicated field is and then translating that into prose that both the expert and the casual fan can understand without limiting the complexity of a nuance. That’s very tricky, and that’s enough of a challenge for me. And I actually tend to think that not being a comedian helps me in that job, besides the fact it reduces the conflict of interests and keeps your independence, etc. But I think that it’s a fundamentally different skill set.

And so when people say, oh, you’re not a comedian, I said, that’s right, I’m not a comedian. Yeah. Sorry. When I was programming the stations, and I still program for Live one, I wanted to make sure I was coming in at civilian eye level, and the civilians are listening to Jim Gaffigan. You and I can go to a club and be too cool for school and deep dive.

But it’s the same thing I brought up nine times, But play the hits. No, You’ve got to look. I don’t understand people who do it my job. I know there’s some of them who say this, and I respect a lot of them, or I respect all of them who it’s hard. There’s a hard job.

But my audience, my primary audience, is the reader, and there I don’t see. The comedy world is not my community. I’m a journalist who’s working in my and my audience is the reader. I have obligation to be fair to the artists, and I know I hear from them, and I know I want their respect as I want anybody else’s respect. But I do think it’s important for people, just as I think it’s important for comedians to see their audience their primary audience, not they’re only audience, their primary audience, as they’re people sitting in front of them are watching their special that I have to think about what the reader wants first, and when I get away from that, I think I could run into problems.

So yeah, I think there’s room. People have different points of view on this, but but yeah, it’s funny because I’m a critic, but I’m also a reporter, so I talk to comedians interview them. I learn a lot from that that helps me understand what they’re trying to do. There’s value in that, but there’s also value in independence and distance, and you sometimes can see and you know, comedians frankly understand this better than other artists because they’re often critics of whatever social conditions, politics, whatever, and they can often diagnose something more perceptively than people in the newscan because they have or journalists can because they have a little more distance. So distance can be an advantage as well, and it keeps you out of the fights.

There are enough to name particular names. There are comedians who do really well and aren’t respected by the brick wall cigarette smoking crowd in the village, and I will name names. I worked with the blue collar guys. Larry, the cable guy, Dan is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet, unless Jeff Foxworthy is in the room. They are awesome people, and you know, I’ve been backstage with them, and Larry would write Jeff a joke that just didn’t work for Larry’s act, and Jeff would write something a little naughty and pass it back and forth.

And they’re not They’re just trying to make people laugh. They’re not going, oh, Larry the Cable Guy, this is high art, like it’s just jokes, and some of that, especially in New York, that bitterness about somebody else’s success would get fatiguing. You know what else, Larry the Cable Guy is good at what he does. I’ve when I wrote about them, I made a point of I went to Beaumont, Texas to see that tour. I didn’t I wanted to go to like there, and I watched all of them, and Larry, I believe, came last.

And I think that was the right move because he’s a he’s a killer, and he is an incredibly dense, punchline rich set. Not every joke is great, but if you don’t like it, another one’s coming down the pipe fast. You know, it’s not like the hippis obviously brand of comedy, and it’s a character driven comedy, which it feels there’s it’s you don’t see it quite as much in the clubs as he used to but anyways, the Yeah, I think it’s the kind of journalism that I do, and not everyone has to be like this, but I try to have Catholic tastes. I try to meet artists where they are. That doesn’t mean that everything is equally good, but I think that’s part of the fun of the job is seeing people of artists of wildly different genres, aesthetics, ambitions.

That’s what makes this fun to follow. I love that you went to Beaumont when I first put together Blue Collar Radio. The first time I met them, I went to see a show. The show was a Nashville and I specifically asked them, please don’t vip me. Put me in the upper deck with the civilians.

And I sat there and I paid attention, and I was just trying to take the vibe in. And I always remembered the two things that got big applause where y’all ever been to the Walmart? A mention of Jimmy Buffett and a mention of Elvis, And I factored that into my programming. Whereas the Raw Dog Channel was if it were a person, maybe it would be Bill Burr and a real fu in a rock and roll kind of vibe. And blue Collar Radio was god Flag country veterans, straight people by acker barrel, straight down the middle, and it did tremendously well.

Yep, yep, No, it’s true. And that’s one of the great things about stand up is that you’ve got all these regional forms that are that do well. Sometimes I worry that the internet’s sort of flattening that out. And I wrote a story last year about how the internet is the Internet hurting distinct local scenes because there used to be like Boston at a specific aesthetic that you could have SA San Francis, which was different than San Francisco, which was different than DC, which was different than Nashville. But now since everyone is in the same room together online, this idea of oh, the comedians and my senior are the only ones I know coming up is obsolete?

And is that going to stand off the edges of local difference? And I don’t know some people I talked to, some people in various local scenes who suggest that’s happening. And there’s so much out there. We’re nearly an we’re in and we’ve really only talked big comedians’. We haven’t talked alt, we didn’t talk improv, we didn’t talk sketch.

We didn’t talk one person shows like somebody like Natalie Palamini is just doing amazing work. There’s just so much out there. I just saw her new show, which, I’ll be honest with you, I was like, how can she top Nate? But I saw her new show which at the Netflix Festival in la and it was the best thing I saw there. It wasn’t finished, but it was thrilling.

Hard wait to see it when it’s done. It’s basically like a rom com where she plays both She plays both parts of this romance, and the physicality of it is incredibly inventive. I’ve neversed anything like it. Yeah, the whole clowning scene is boom. That’s just great.

Jason. You’ve been very generous with your time. I hope you’ll come back down the road when there’s an excuse for me to ask you to come on again other than just hey man, want to fill an hour for me. But this was fantastic thing. This was incredibly fun.

Thank you for asking, and it’s great to have a conversation with someone who knows their stuff. He was fantastic. I enjoyed the heck out of that, and he was very gracious with his time on this program. Tomorrow a look at the best comedy specials of the year so far. See it then

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Full Transcript

Callaroga, Shark Media, Jumarrow on this program, Jason Zinneman from The New York Times, and I talk comedy for an hour. That one is really good. Check that out. Sunday, Dad’s treating himself to Father’s Day. Will take a look at the best specials of the year so far.

Some leftover jokes from the week. Seth Myers really crushed it. He made fun of Trump’s rally last week, saying on Sunday, Trump held his first lard’s rally since his guilty verdict, where he laid out a detailed policy plan to tackle the nation’s challenges. And I’m just kidding. He screamed about teleprompters, batteries, and sharks.

More from Seth, former President Trump told the crowd he was sweating like a dog, and he was immediately shot by Christynam. Trump is no longer allowed to associate with convicted felons, sorry, other convicted felons, Seth said, you know who. This is really bad news for his family. Now he’s gonna have to spend more time with them. Alanie is so worried about this, she’s probably gonna knock over a liquor store.

And broad Daylight just so she can have a rap sheet. Jimmy Fallon said things got off to a rough start when Trump offered his parole officer one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Some Asian American organizations have asked bud Light Netflix to drop Shane Gillis as a representative of their brand because of his insensitivity and hurtful remarks towards the Asian American community. The groups include the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Los Angeles, the Japanese American Citizens League Greater Los Angeles, the Anti Asian Hate Coalition of Southern California, and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. The founder of the MANAA says, we’ve gotten beaten up long enough.

We got second tire to this. Try saying the N word and see what happens. If you comedians think we’re being unreasonable, do the substitution test. Substitute Asian with black or Jewish and see if you feel comfortable. If you feel uncomfortable, maybe you shouldn’t have done it against us.

He notes, some native born Asian Americans say it’s comedy. Just try to laugh it off and give excuses for it, and they’re giving permission for more of that kind of treatment. In episode three of Shane Gillis’s Tires, an Asian father and daughter come in and speak Mandarin Chinese, and later the owner in tires Will also speaks passable Mandarin. There are no attempts to speak pretend Chinese. In the same episode of Tires, Shane Gillis imitates Japanese but sounds more like a grunting Samurai than somebody speaking Japanese.

From Fox News, Bill Burr called out the hypocrisy of liberals during a show at u C Berkeley last weekend, reportedly telling the audience that he effing hates them. Oh no. According to Fox, burd told the audience, I oftn’ hate liberals. It is believed he was referring specifically to white liberals. He also had some comments about people who put Black Lives Matter signs on their windows without taking any actual actions.

Burr apparently said, it’s like, if I tell you my great grandmother Germany had to knock it off Nazi sign. If you run in a white person who says they’re an EmPATH, run the other way. Burr said, such people like making other people suffering about themselves. Keith Robinson’s special came out on Netflix on Tuesday. It’s called Different Strokes.

After suffering two strokes, Keith was able to make it back to the stage. He tells The Philly Tribune, I wasn’t gonna quit doing something I love so much. I always wanted to be a comedian, and I intend to continue just doing that. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he chimes, don’t forget to say South Philly. I loved making people laugh and love to watch all the comics of the day, although I didn’t have to bring that all together.

One day, a friend of mine gave me a song by a gospel singer that talked about why we should stop just dreaming and doing something to make those dreams come true. While reading the Want Ads, that’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a while. While reading the Want Ads, I saw an ad for a gig at a comedy club and decided to give it a try. In nineteen ninety three, he was on Ed McMahon’s Star Search. Remember that, when’s the last time you thought of that.

He did not win, he did make it to the finals. Keith says that was a great boost to my ego. It always wanted to be a comic, and at that point I felt like I had made it. I think comedy and making people laugh is the greatest job in the world. I have the freedom to say anything I want to say.

In fact, I could say my comedy is my drug of choice. Actually I get high on comedy. Well, Deacon might let me down because I’m here in the basement and not at Vatican City with one hundred comedians. Thanks, you know, it would have been nice to cover. Could have asked Jim Gaffigan about his bourbon.

I’m sure he would have loved talking about it. Anyway, the Pope’s hanging out today with Fallon and Colbert and Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock and Whoopy Goldberg. What did I say the other day, like sixty seven comedians from Italy that a burgeoning Italian stand up scene that we don’t talk too much about. The Irish Times wrote about it and they said, we imagined the crack in the Vatican green room time out, time outsime out. If you are not familiar with the Irish slang crack, neither was I.

In the early nineties, when I was hanging around with a lot of people from Ireland, they were like, hey, you want to go get some crack, and I’d be like, no, again, this is New York City. In like nineteen ninety three. Crack was crack cocaine to the Irish, crack cr a I c is good to fun. So lest you think the Pope is doing crack with Stephen Colbert, he is not. He may be having crack with Conan O’Brien, or perhaps drinking father Time bourbon with Jim Gaffigan, and just even the Pope losing all his coolness.

I digress. The Irish Times wrote about some of the irishm going, not some of them, all of them, three of them. Ardell o’hanlin. You know him from Father Ted? Have you ever seen Father Ted?

Father Ted is fantastic. Art All fronted a documentary this year about the crisis in the priesthood. He said, I have renounced my God and my religion, yet I still ask a Catholic priest to come along and baptize my child. Am I a hypocrite? In interviews he said at one point he thought of joining the priesthood himself, but it was not a real thing for him.

Tommy Tiernan is open about his faith and speaks about going to Mass regularly. Deacon Mike’s gonna like today’s episode. You know, Deacon Mike, this episode could have been really about Catholicism if somebody had hooked something up just saying Tyrnean says, I’d probably love to go to Mass every day if I could. Actually, it’s funny where you end up. I would consider myself pro choice and Catholic.

So that’s a constant negotiation between the independence of your mind, the realities of your heart, and a man made organization that is the church. But the experience of being at Mass, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know all the prayers, but I love it. It’s a community thing. I think.

Eric Idol’s got a new one man show called Always Look on the Bright Side of Life Live. It starts on the West Coast this September. Written and performed entirely by Eric, audiences will be treated to never before seen sketches, original songs, jokes, and the humorous wisdom that comes with being a living legend. Tickets go on sale today ten am local time, September fourth, Santa Barbara, then San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Salt Lake at Denver, Phoenix, Santa Fe La nine to twenty seven in San Diego. I gotta stop waiting five days to watch John Oliver so that I know what’s going on.

Apparently, Oliver extended a challenge to a Kingston bakery, and the bakery responded with a new line of cakes bearing a photo of John Oliver’s face on edible candy paper. Peter Dasing is the co owner of Dacing’s Bakery and Restaurant in Kingston, says we’re really speechless here on the June second episode of Last Week Tonight. All right, I’ve had a week and a half to watch it. I’m behind. Apparently, in a segment highlighting the downfall of Red Lobster, John Oliver announced he had purchased all of the contents of the Red Lobster chain’s Ulster County location through an online auction and recreated the Red Lobster in his studio.

Soon after the Red Lobster closed, Eric posted a note on the front door asking to buy a flat grill and convection of an if available, and later learned that John Oliver had already bought it all. Oliver made the Dazing’s an offer. The good news is we’re willing to buy those items for you on one condition. All I want return is a baked good with my face on it on sale and your bakery specifically a cake bear with my face on it. I want to be a cake beer, Oliver said, I don’t like cake bears, Ifing love cake bears.

Dazing’s cake decorator, Jenna Ice is her real name, Jenna Ice. That’s amazing, Jenna Ice says, I can’t believe this is real life right now. I thought it was hilarious. Had me laughing pretty good. The cakes are selling for eight dollars.

All the proceeds will go to People’s Place food pantry in Kingston. A representative from last week Tonight expected the grill to arrive this week. Gabriel Iglesias back on Gossip Corner in Santa Antonio, out for food again, this time at Garcia’s Mexican Food. He apparently hung out with the owners and had some tacos a lot less fun. A court in Indonesia has handed a comedian a seven month prison sentence for blasphemy.

Aulo Rochmann made a joke about the name Mohammed. The comedian was imprisoned after being reported under a blasphemy law that carries a maximum sentence of five years. The law forbids anyone from making statements at odds with one of Indonesia’s six official religions, or trying to prevent someone from adhering to one of those religions. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said the defendant admitted and regretted his actions, behave politely at the trial, and the defendant has never been convicted. The aggravating factor was the defendant’s actions have disturbed society seven months.

It seems there’s a brew haha going over in the UK at the Latitude Festival. It is a music festival. Apparently some comedians performed there as well. Some celebrities will be there. David Takovny, Rick Astley, Duran Duran Keen.

On the comedy side, comedians Sophie Jucker, Grace Campbell and Alexander Hadow have pulled out of Latitude Festival and protest over sponsor Barclay’s ties to the Israel Hamas War.

Also pulling out Joanne McNally and Alexander Haddo, both comedians.

McNally sat on social media. I’m no longer doing Latitude. I was due to close the comedy tent on the Sunday night, but I pulled out last week. I’m on the old artwork, but I haven’t been listed on the site since I pulled out a week ago. Jason Signs is performing at the Lyric Hyperion Theater in La.

He tells the story of falling through a skylight onto a flight of stairs and shares the realities of being a paraplegic in Hollywood. His show is called The wheel World. The comedian shares his struggles with grief, adapting the changes in wheelchair accessibility, accepting limitations in his new body, his wheelchair bound TV rolls, and altering his perception of sex and manhood. Tonight at seven thirty, If you’re out in La and then is your comedy news for Today again? Tomorrow Jason Cinnamon and I for an hour Sunday Best specials of the year, Little Father’s Day, Foot off the Gas.

But Tomorrow’s really awesome. I’m dealing straight. Tomorrow is awesome. Sunday is you know Sunday filler. I’ll let me feel it this summer.

See you tomorrow.