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The Shark Deck. Hello, I’m Jenny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. He tweet from Joe list My new special premiers tonight ten Eastern. You’ll find that on Joe’s YouTube page.
Also on Peacock tonight, Chris Fleming’s Hell premiers.
It looks like the guys at SNL are not expecting the writer strike or the actor strike to end anytime soon. Colin Jost and Michael Chay are playing at Radio City Music Hall of Note. It’s on a Saturday, October fourteenth at eight o’clock, so I guess that they don’t plan on doing SNL that night. Theol Vaughan was on Tom Sagora’s Two Bears podcast and they started talking about Matt Rife. Sagora said, he’s a funny guy.
I mean, he’s a funny dude. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen the clips. They’re all viral, and it really knows like he’s fun working a room. He’s just good at that.
So it’s unique. It’s a unique thing where he’s authentically being himself. Yeah, he’s both good looking and he’s quick and witty and funny, and it all just works. Most dudes that look like that aren’t funny and THEO tagnet with and most that look like that are women. Congratulations to Dave Chappelle, who made the Hot one hundred Billboard chart not for comedy no.
Chapelle debuted on the Hot one hundred alongside Robert Travis Scott. A collaboration with musician Young Lean titled Parasale is number fifty three on the chart. It is Chappelle’s first time on the Hot one hundred. Congratulations Dave. August eighteenth is Brody Steven’s day.
Some comedians are remembering Brody today, Mark Marin, Dean Cook, Jeff Garland, the scholar brother is Dean Delray, Craig Gasson Moore. At the Comedy Story benefit Comedy Gives Back ten thirty Tonight, Vulture caught up with Paul F. Tompkins, who quit stand up for a while. They asked him if it was a deliberate decision. Paul said, absolutely, it was a despair.
My last special which is called Crying and Driving, which I recorded in twenty fifteen. The special I did before that was called Laboring under Delusions. That was for Comedy Central, and I was really proud of it and really enjoyed doing it, was paid very well by Comedy Central to perform the thing. When it came time to do my next hour, which was three years later, I went to Comedy Central and they offered me literally one ten of what I had made for the previous special. I remember talking to my agents saying, man, this deal really sucks.
I don’t know if I should take this. I’m sure I probably use the word insulting or something. And my agent said, well, on the other hand, they’re the only ones making an offer, and I couldn’t disagree with the logic of that. So I swallowed my pride and I put all the money into the special. I didn’t make anything from that special at the time, and I said, I’m just going to make the best special that I can do.
And that was it. It came and went. It aired on Comedy Central. I don’t know who watched it. I was told for the last one I did, the numbers were pretty good, you know.
One as the assumption in showbizz from what I’ve seen, and I keep distancing myself from it. But this is common to a lot of people. I know. I’d see other people and be like, the idea should keep going up and up, and up. So I had not only plateaued, but now I was going back down.
There was a feeling of Wow, people just aren’t interested. In the intervening years, I had gone from wanting to be a guest on a talk show to wanting to host a talk show, and I was unable to make that happen. I did a pilot for Comedy Central, and then after the pilot was told directly by the head of the network, you kind of come off as old fashion and stuffy, and that’s not what our audience wants. You made some casting decisions with the guests that hurt I think, and I was like, ah, you saw every step of the process. You’re not seeing this for the first time as the finish pilot.
You know all the stuff I did. It felt really brutal to me. If you’re not going to pick it up, that’s fine, but this is literally a personal attack saying the audience doesn’t like you. You can say it didn’t go well, I can fill in the blanks myself. Wow, this is really really brutal, port Paul.
He continues, but that was a real real turning point to me. Then having the special happen a couple of years after that and have nobody be interested in it. I thought, this is the one thing I always thought I had, which stand up. I was always successful. I had some stature in the world.
Now I’m realizing I don’t have that stature anymore, and there’s not really a big market for the kind of thing I do. So I was finding joy and doing improv and working with other people and leaning on this other sort of life thing. But I couldn’t go back to stand up. It hurt too much. It really hurt.
There was a period pre pandemic where I tried to make myself go out and do sets and I just wasn’t feeling it. I was just going through the motions of doing it, but I wasn’t connected with the material. I wasn’t connected to the audience, and it felt bad. It was really alarming, Like this isn’t how it feels, this is really weird. I don’t like this.
So I just went where the joy was, and coincidentally where the money was good money for doing an improv podcast. And it’s an ongoing process. I don’t know if I’ll ever do is Special again. I’d like to, but knowing would have to be self funded. Not my favorite thing in the world.
They asked him how he feels doing stand up now. Paul if Tompkins said, I feel like it’s coming back to me, and the more I do it, the more comfortable is becoming. Right now, the feeling that’s coming back is the duck below the surface of the water kind of thing. I’m lucky that I’ve always been able to project a certain amount of confidence regardless of what’s happening internally. But I’m getting back into it.
It’s coming back and the enjoyment of doing it and the feeling of connection. Wow, the Daily News saw the Shark is Broken. I was all excited for the Shark is Broken. That’s the stage play about Jaws kind of sort of. The Daily News says the show doesn’t deliver much at all.
Ouch Not only is the low stakes script dull and pedestrian, but the characters change not at all, despite the premise of three wild men sitting in a boat and not waiting for goodo but for sharks at Spielberg. The Shark Has Broken had its origins at the Edinburgh Festival, and in that context it no doubt was a good campy laugh, especially for an audience that had followed Shaw’s pregaming example, but it makes for thin Broadway gruel alas with a ninety minute running time, a straight up point of view, and a series of behind the camera recreations of a situation that already has been much dissected and discussed. Yikes. Playbill wrote about the Fringe and said, this comedian can’t speak, but he’s making audiences laugh at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. After a rare neurological condition caused Alex Gibbon lose his ability to speak, he turned to comedy.
He tells Playbill over email, from what my doctors have told made my brain is structurally fun, but it’s sending the wrong signals to my body so effectively, I’m like a Windows update with a pulse. His current show is called Fat Femine Crippled, with the help of his rebel voice on his phone, which is a British woman, and his mobility scooter that he named Miscarriage, Gibbon responds, never underestimate the power of a wide range of facial expressions. He’s made it his artistic mission to destigmatize being both disabled and gay. He admits, far too often the stigma is suffocating. I felt either too disabled to be in queer spaces or too queer to be in disabled spaces.
This is often backed up by the fact that a lot of queer spaces like gay bars and pubs aren’t accessible and the staff aren’t friendly. For my show, what I do is I prerecord all my jokes. It takes several hours per set, but it’s worth it. I typed them up six at a time before turning them into MP three files to press play and pause while on stage for communication during my shows. It’s quite hard for me to go off script in general, so I try to avoid it.
The main time. I stop us for hecklers, mainly because I downloaded famous TV meme type sound bites that many people will know by ear. I can choose whichever suits best to the heck at the time, which both shuts them up and gets them laughed at. And from The La Times, Courtney Perusso’s one woman sex Robot Clown Show, I just want to say sex robot clown show again The La Times. Sorry, it’s a leggy blonde emerges from a smoke filled stage, domineering in a black PVC bra, thong, fishnet stockings and six inch thigh high platform boots her proclamation, my name is Vanessa five thousand and I am here to destroy humanity.
Just kidding, I’m a sex robot. She’s performing Vanessa at US at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival throughout August, after which the show will turn to LA after performances. She encourages people to DM her with ideas or thoughts. She said, many people have written her on Instagram and the performer has used selected suggestions from strangers. I’ll get feedback from everybody, but you have to know who to listen to.
She was inspired by Natalie Palamedes. Have you seen Natalie’s work? If fanastic? Palamedes suggests that prusso study clown, a form of experimental comedy that’s been gaining ground in LA over the past ten years. Amy Poehler produced Palamides special Nate on Netflix twenty twenty.
Go watch that It’s fantastic. Last year, Palamides performed clown with Chelsea and Hillary Clinton on their Apple TV show Gutsie. Clown is distinctive for its lack of a fourth wall, meaning performers look at, react to, and speak with the audience throughout a performance. It’s a highly visual and physical art. While clown can have loud, out, their vulgar, shocking, and gross out moments, it also welcomes vulnerability and beauty, often as a balance or counter.
Peruso explains, I think I can get away with moments of sincerity, or we’re letting people look at me as I am, because I’m also disrupting and looking really stupid. That’s your comed eies for today. Follow the show for free on Apple, podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your shows, and I’ll see you tomorrow.