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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello, I’m Johnny mag with your daily comedy. He’s just over a month until Trevor Noah will host the Grammy Awards once again. He told Essence, Can I be honest, it gets more and more stressful every single time because every Grammys is every artist’s most important Grammys. I don’t want to be the host who screwed things up when it’s Taylor Swift’s Grammys or when it’s Bad Bunnies Grammys.
I would say it’s probably one of the most stressful jobs I do because the night is not about me. My job is to keep it going and to keep a connection between the audience and what’s happening on the night. It’s a rewarding job, but man, it’s terrifying esen sasas Trevor. A lot of entertainers, when they reach a certain level, they get away from stand up a little bit. And you you’re staying sharp, you keep doing it.
What keeps pulling you back to doing stand up specials? Trevor Noah said, Man, stand up is a blessing. That’s the simplest answer I can give you. I don’t take stand up comedy for granted. I don’t take it for granted that I can put on a show and thousands of people come out to join me and laugh together and experience this collective feeling of joy.
I really, really really don’t take that for granted. So what’s important to me is appreciating that and remembering what it means.
Also, I think stand up comedy is one of the hardest art forms, and that it’s …
When you make music, you work with a producer, and you work with other artists, and you write together and you collaborate in the studio. By the time you put the song out in the public, you’ve got a good sessence of people have given you the idea that it’s good, and you have a collective to fall back on. When it comes to making a movie, it’s the same thing. But stand up is a crazy beast that nobody can team. You can be the funniest comedian today and you can tell a joke tomorrow and it doesn’t work the way you’d like it to.
I think there’s nothing more exciting in the creation of art than doing something like that. It’s immediate. Esquire spoke to Gary Golman about his first big break Gary did a tight five minutes it just for laughs in Montreal. In July ninety nine, he landed a two hundred and fifty thousand dollars development deal with Fox. He was going to be a sitcom star.
He moved to LA. The network paired him with a writer. Gary said, we sat around, we wrote a pilot, and then they said no thanks. The next summer he did another five minutes at a showcase in LA. Got a similar deal with CBS, again turned down.
The next year, similar deal with show Time, same result. Gary said, it was making a really good living, selling ideas based on my stand up for sitcom pilots that never got shot. It was so frustrating. In two thousand and three, Gary finished third on Last Comic Standing. His last Comic Standing twenty years ago, already Wow.
That burst of fame enabled Gary to sell out shows around the country for about six months. Then that died down. In twenty fifteen, he put together what he knew was his strongest set of material yet and included the abbreviating the State’s bit. He taped a special called It’s About Time, with full confidence it would finally deliver a bigger fan base. The producers had a hard time selling it and wound up on Netflix at a discount eight months later.
Glad to see Gary in his sendency right now. That last special is fantastic if you haven’t watched it yet, it was my number one special of twenty twenty three. It’s also world. Spoke to Kathleen Madigan years ago. She tried to be a flight attendant, but she was told she didn’t meet a height requirement.
I spent time with Kathleen. I never thought of her as particularly short or anything. Kathleen presumes the height requirement is because you have to be tall enough to reach the overhead bins. She said, they didn’t tell me about it until later. He made it through two other interview things.
I’ve worked in restaurants and waited tables. I would have been good at it, but they didn’t tell me that until the third interview, which I’m like, why couldn’t you have put that in the brochure at the beginning. Her current show, if you go See Your Live, includes greatest hits and some new material, and she said, sometimes I’ll do some throwback stuff only because that’s the kind of show I like to see. I like to see maybe a throwback here or too something from I just saw and that a bunch of new stuff, especially hunting Bigfoot, came out last February. Kathleen says there’s lots of bigfoots around.
Florida’s got one Michigan. There’s versions of him everywhere. She’s not scared of bigfoots, but she’s still scared of corporate gigs because a lot of people didn’t pay to be there. Kathleen says, a lot of them don’t know anything about stand up comedy, and it could go sideways. And I’ve had some that did.
There’s nothing you can do about it. And some of them are great. Some of them are like a normal crowd, but any comic would tell you it’s too dicey. But real life going on stage and clubs, She’s not afraid. I think it didn’t bother me because if you’re a bart tender, a survey, you have to walk up to strangers, you know, fifty times a night and go Hi, I’m Kathleen.
You have to be able to be comfortable with that, or you quit w camout. Bell tells the San Francisco Chronicle he plans to get his act together and return to comedy it’s been a five year hiatus, but he’s got a new show. W Camal Bell gets his act together See what he did There, an eight show stand up residency at the Bakery Studio in Berkeley. Each hour long set will showcase new material inspired by current events in his own life. Delimit Engagement kicks off January twentieth, then every Saturday night through March sixteenth.
Howie Mandel spoke to the Press Enterprise about how he got into comedy, and he said it was by seeing a show called Candid Camera. Remember that show. The show is great, how he says, I love pranks and things like that because that’s the most relatable, real kind of comedy there is. It’s fun to do it, to be part of it, and it’s relatable because you can watch it and laugh and think what would I do? Or I’d never believe that, or what if I was in that situation.
It’s just real. We used to watch TV and everything was scripted, and now reality TV, YouTube and TikTok are just real people doing real things, aren’t they. Hidden Agenda Prank is the reality TV of comedy. He talks about the things have changed. There was only one place to go to If you were going to make a living in comedy, it had to come to La and get on at the comedy store.
That’s where maybe somebody was producing TV or film would see you and give you an opportunity to change your life. Today, you could sit in your underpants or your bed in Oklahoma and get one hundred million people seeing what it is you do, and you can actually monitize that and make a living and a career out of it. Look at Matt Rife, a very funny guy who was having a hard time, and so we saw him do CrowdWork on TikTok. The snow Jam Comedy Festival will be coming back, but it’s its final year. That makes me sad.
But there’s a reason. Snow Jam returns to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for its eighth and final year January eighteenth through the twenty first. It’s mission to celebrate comedy in snow while enriching the community by supporting nonprofit organizations in South Dakota. This year’s headliners included Timmy Williams from The Whitest Kids You Know and Sean Jordan from The Late Late Show. Dan Booblitz, Junior Friend of the Show, and Dan and I were texting on the side that think I’m going to do another episode where Dan and I just chat about comedy for an hour or so.
That’s got to clear my schedule and find some time to spend with Dan. But Dan’s said Snowjam Comedy Festival started as a joke and it lasted eight years, which is longer than we thought it would. It’s bitter sweet knowing this is our last year, but it’s better to go out on a high note and leave the crowd wanting more. If you want to check it out, and I’ll talk about it as it gets a little closer Snowjam on comedyfestival dot com. The Guardian spoke to propcomics Bill O’Neal has a solo show called The Amazing Banana Brothers.
It chronicles the pointian attempt of two stuntman brothers to slip on the most banana peels. Bill says, I have this illusion that I’m in charge of what’s going on, but there are all these bananas on stage and there’s sort of landmines waiting. I’ve gotten good at throwing myself around, but every once in a while, one of these suckers sends me crashing to the ground. That reminds me when I did the marathon in November. They were pretty late in the race, like miles sixteen Ford.
They were giving out bananas and people were throwing banana peels on the ground. When you run a race, it’s normal you grab your water and then you just throw your cup and the volunteers clear it up. So you’d go through the rest station and it’d be a mix of water on the ground and banana peels. I had a walk through these things. I mean I had to walk through them anyway.
It was miles sixteen seventeen twenty five and I was exhausted. But I’m like, this is not a good idea. Bill O’Neil’s show requires eighty fresh banana skins for each show. He says that adds up to a lot of peeling and cleaning. Weeks after doing the show at London Soho, theater staff found and aaron banana lounched in the ceiling.
In Lucy McCormick’s show, the stage is so submerged in tomato puret Confettian wine the audience helps her clean up. In the debut show by Sketch duo Grubby little mits, a thousand ping pong balls right down on the audience. Rosie Nichols is in that sketch dew and says, we want our show to be on the line between theater and comedy. Props play a really big part in that. So for Bill O’Neil’s Banana show, part of the challenge again, he’s only using the peels.
What do you do with the banana part of the banana? He had two thousand bananas? What do you do with them? They contacted the Edinburgh Zoo, they couldn’t take them. Eventually they found local businesses making smoothies and deep fried bananas.
O’Neil said, there were shows where my shoulder would pop out and I was writhing around trying to pop it back in. Just another thing that keeps it exciting, all right. If you want to go see the Amazing Banana Brothers that shows in London at the Soho Theater starting tomorrow through the thirteenth, And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the show, tell a friend about it. They might like it too.
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See you tomorrow.