Suits from Turner Broadcasting were apologizing as fast as they could Wednesday afternoon when several devices (describe as "magnetic lights") were discovered around the Boston area. Officials thought they might have been some sort of terrorist plot. So they shut down the Charles River... and 93... and pretty much all of Boston.

The devices depicted the Mooninites (pictured at left), characters on Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force show, giving the finger. They had been placed in several cities by a marketing company called Interference Inc. The Boston cops said they've arrested at least one person, probably someone from Interference. We suspect that he/she is in a lot of hot, bubbly, stupid water. We also suspect that the folks at Interference who cooked up the plot, like many of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force viewers, are too young to remember 9/11.

Brett Clawson has died, from injuries suffered in an accident earlier this month. His myspace is gathering comments from friends and others.

Near as we can tell, he was 32 years old and based in St. Louis.

Can you believe that Jonathan Katz never released a CD before "Caffeinated?" (Available on Amazon.com) It hit the stores yesterday. We interviewed Mr. Katz (he's not really a doctor!) way back in August of '03! You can read that here. The answers are terse... in a good way, a Katzian way, not in the bad way.

TBS, who is staking it all on comedy programming ("very funny" is their tagline. No caps, which makes it... hysterical!), has launched what the folks in the biz like to call an "online comedy initiative," called Superdeluxe. (At least that's what they kept calling it in the phone conversations we had with the folks in Atlanta. It seems that way back in October, they were hot on recruiting us in some sort of an editorial capacity-- they wanted to pry the Halves of the Staff away from SHECKYmagazine to run their sparkling new comedy video juggernaut. We were all flattered and all, and we signed some sort of NDA (which is why we didn't talk about it until now), but the whole thing just sort of quietly and slowly (and agonizingly) disappeared. Only recently did we find out that it was launched. Very frustrating!)

Anyway, it's up and it's kind of a cross between YouTube and ComedyCentral.com or, as they put it:

...Super Deluxe is the premier spot on the Internet for top-quality comedy videos. Why? It's simple. We've got some of the funniest peeps in the comedy biz making exclusive clips for us. And unlike other video sharing sites, we specialize strictly in comedy.

It's the latest thing and it's hot and all the nets are doing it. As we posted in our Year in Comedy posting:

MySpace.com creates MySpace Comedy and YouTube is embraced by standup comics and standup comedy fans. And every other week sees the announcement by some huge media entity of their "online comedy initiative." HBO, TBS, Comedy Central, NBC and others have announced such initiatives where they will, to varying degrees, develop comedy programming and build a site that relies heavily on "user-generated content" and serve as high-tech hothouses for future programming.

It's our new catchphrase around SHECKYmagazine HQ-- "Adding hatefulness to emptiness!" Don't you just adore that? It's just one of the semantic highlights of this bundle of high-minded speculation on Sarah Silverman by Brendan Bernhard in the New York Sun ("See Sarah Swear")

Has there been more ink spilled on a comic in the last 13 months or so (with the possible exception of Dane Cook)? The folks at Rolling Stone, Slate, the NY Sun, New Yorker, et al, are in a quandary. On the one hand, they all have monster crushes on her (We dare you to cite one article that doesn't lead off mentioning Silverman's "wholesome good looks" or describing her as "beguiling" or "sexy." It's all rather unseemly!); on the other hand, they are alarmed that they find her funny. They invariably go on to try to analyze Silverman's humor in such a way as to assuage their guilt at having a good laugh at her vicious, sometimes racist, sometimes "ugly" (their word, not ours) humor.

In the Sun piece, we're treated to the spectacle of one critic (Bernhard) quoting another critic (an unnamed Slate critic) merely to mock his conclusions and go on to diss any critic who has ever said anything nice!

"Silverman is a prototypical ironist-- someone who says things she doesn't mean and (through more or-less subtle contextual winks) expects us to intuit an unstated, smarter message underneath. But what is that message? Does she, like Socrates, play dumb in order to make us smart? Or just to experience the cheap thrill of public racism? Every ironic statement, should, in theory…." Etc., etc.

Ms. Silverman has been called "the funniest woman alive" by Rolling Stone, which is enough to make one weep for women. But perhaps it would be more to the point to weep for critics.

Ouch!

Throughout his critique, Bernhard asks more questions than he answers. But he eventually decides that her approach is flawed... we think.

Ms. Silverman's specialty is to take false problems, like overdeveloped racial or gender sensitivities, and then make inhuman, "daring" little jokes about them — fake humor about fake dilemmas.

Now we're starting to feel sorry for the man.

Why all the ideological gymnastics over a bunch of jokes? When Slate speculates on whether there is an "unstated, smarter message" underlying Silverman's gags, we're astounded-- of course, there is! It's a joke! These folks are trying way too hard and it's because they've all been inculcated, at various institutions throughout their lives, with the P.C. message. They desparately want to/actually do find Silverman hysterical, but they've been led to believe that her jokes cannot possibly be funny. (And, of course, they would never use the term "hysterical," as its root derives from a time when we all thought the womb caused insanity in the weaker sex!)

So, they cook up clever catchphrases like "prototypical ironist" and "contextual wink" in order to find a way to proclaim her not just funny, but wickedly so... and politically correct in the bargain. It's a win-win!

Of course, we would argue that there is no greater example of a prototypical ironist out there than one Dan Whitney (aka, Larry the Cable Guy). But, for some strange reason, his contextual winks and his unstated, smarter message never sees the light of day in these august journals. Instead he, and his fans, are painfully literal-- such things as contextual winks are as utterly foreign to them as, say, bathing or the proper use of a fork.

Of course, they're startlingly similar, it's just that Larry chose to work flyover country, whereas Silverman took her humor to the streets of Los Angeles and New York.

The only reason either of these comics stands out, in a positive way or a negative way, is because many of their jokes, their approach, and in some cases, their subject matter have been virtually banned. By Political Correctness. The fancy folks at the colleges and the newspapers have declared them "outlaws," yet each has found a way to do the material in an acceptable way.

Writing for the Times, Chris Barton kicks off his sprawling assessment of the Los Angeles alt-comedy scene ("Amusing Asides", Jan. 25, Calendar cover story) with the obligatory trashing of the alternative to the alternative:

Hey, did you hear the one about stand-up comedy in L.A.?

Of course not, because stand-up died a horrible death somewhere around the time everyone started loving Raymond. Doesn't every comic here just want to get on TV anyway?

Well, believe it or not, no. Though there are still plenty of comics dreaming of that miracle sitcom gig and searching for the perfect head shot, stand-up comedy is enjoying a renaissance in Southern California. And it's happening far from the storied walls of the Laugh Factory, the Comedy Store and the Improv

Okay, so we have the schematic: Alt comics-- Good. Other comics-- Bad. Motivation of bad comics-- Evil (Money, fame, wealth, sitcom). Motivation of good comics-- Pure (Fun, cameraderie, entertaining twentysomethings who wear hoodies and stocking caps).

It's a tremendous piece of work if for no other reason than it provides readers a comprehensive listing of all the niche standup venues in the Southland. It should drive some folks through the doors of the comedy nights that have been produced by plucky comics like Brad Stewart and Jen Kirkman and Brendon Small. And, even though the author of the piece goes to great lengths to trash the "comedy clubs," the alt venues will act as gateway experiences-- the alcohol and marijuana to the heroin that is the Laugh Factory, Improv, Comedy Store, et al.

In thie piece, the regular clubs are the enemy-- The clubs have "rules and restrictions" (?), the comics only want a sitcom (horrors!) and the glasses clink too loudly. The alt venues are idyllic-- young, smart, idealistic comedians mingle with sweet, young, hip patrons in an atmoshpere reminiscent of Paris in the 30s or San Francisco in 1956. Of course, the reality is somewhere in between, but that wouldn't make for very good copy. (And it definitely wouldn't get on the cover of the Calendar section!)

We applaud the folks who start up these comedy nights. And, as is happening in Seattle and (we gotta figure) other markets, more stages/more stage time is a boon to comics young and old, famous and not so famous. We just wish the journos would find an angle where everyone seems decent and everyone is motivated by positive things. It can be done, and it can be entertaining if done correctly. We like to think we do that here on a semi-regular basis.

An article in The Stranger ("Don't Fuck Up" by Brendan Kiley) goes into great detail on the maturation of the Seattle alternative comedy scene. It begins with this:

There were four comedy clubs in Seattle in the 1980s: Giggles, the Comedy Underground, Laughs, and the Improv. It was the height of the standup comedy boom in America, and clubs everywhere were hopping. A lot of people were paying to see acts like Andrew Dice Clay and Gallagher. When the demand for acts began to outstrip the supply of comedians, producers pulled up inferior talent from the hacky rank and file to throw in America's face. The form's popularity took a turn. The country turned its attention to sitcoms and grunge while anachronistic dinosaurs like Carrot Top continued to flail around, to everyone's embarrassment.

At least that's the story Seattle's comedians and club managers tell. It sounds probable, and it contains a whiff of protest: that standup doesn't have to be painfully bad, that it can be good, that, perhaps, we're due for a comedy renaissance.

Hey! We think Kiley may have stumbled onto something resembling the truth here. Aside from the cliched slam of Gallagher and the inaccurate characterization of the cream of 80s comedy as nothing but Gallagher and Andrew Dice Clay (which ignores dozens, nay hundreds, of tremendous comedians) and the gratuitous (and hackneyed) poke at Carrot Top, we might actually agree with the author's summary of the Comedy Bust. (Of course, it was told to him by Seattle's comics and club owners, so there's every possibility that they're merely regurgitating that which they have read in the pages of this magazine!)

You would think that the term "alternative comedy" would be as irritating to its practitioners as "grunge" or "adult contemporary." Naming something seems halfway to killing it, but most of the alt-comedians use the term unflinchingly, even if they aren't sure what it means.

Indeed! We hear that even Janeane Garofalo has disavowed the term. Perhaps this is alt-alt.

Or, (and this is far more likely) they are more media-savvy than anyone gives them credit for and they use the term as alt-weekly bait-- which seems to have worked. This is at least the third time in a couple months that the PROK/Mirabeau/Laff Hole gang have garnered press in Seattle. Terms like "alternative" are like an aphrodisiac to the alt-stained wretches!

Read the whole article if you want a thorough account of a major comedy market in a state of flux! We especially liked reading about Mainstage (which Both Halves of the Staff will be co-headlining next month!) and we also were morbidly fascinated by the plaint of Giggles proprietor Terry Taylor, who explains the slow-motion wreckage of his venue on everyone but himself.

Terry Taylor, who owns Giggles, offered a less charitable outlook: "Alternative comedy is just people who can't get booked in clubs so they have to go out and make their own nights," he says.

Nice!

People who "have to go out and make their own nights?" Sounds very Shecky-like to us. Take note, all you comedians in other markets-- read "Don't Fuck Up" three times, print it out, memorize certain passages and recite them to yourself when next you feel compelled to merely bitch about the local booker who is ruining your scene.

An article from the U.K. is making the rounds (It was forwarded to us by FOS Peter Berman.) that contains details from the trial of six terror suspects arrested two weeks after the London bus attacks in '05.

The contents of the rucksack of one suspect has captured the fancy of the press and the British public-- along with deodorant, clothing and an 11-lb. bomb (made from hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour!) was a copy of "Meet The Fokkers."

Berman, who has toured Afghanistan more than once, got it from an acquaintance in the military. Apparently, all are puzzled that a terror suspect, toting a bomb onto a London subway, would also be lugging around a DVD of a Ben Stiller movie (which, btw, was decidedly not a bomb)! We must admit it is puzzling. We're also rather surprised that a bomb can be made from hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour! (But then again, who would've thought that folks could put someone'e eye out with Mentos and Diet Coke?) We hear that onion kulcha makes a damn fine wound dressing in a pinch.

Robert L. Jamieson Jr., writing for the Post-Intelligencer, tells of turmoil in the PacNW, specifically of a mini-revolt among the Seattle comics.

A tiff in Seattle's comedy scene is pitting the owner of the well-established Giggles club against comics who say the way the venue is run is nothing to laugh about.

Their biggest beef is what Rodney Dangerfield famously riffed about -- respect, or lack thereof.

The delicious part comes at the end, when Jamieson introduces the wildcard, comic Beka Barry, who, with a partner or two, is opening the Mainstage Comedy and Music Club, across from Key Arena.

It will be a radically different landscape once Mainstage opens.

(Full disclosure: The Male and Female Halves are the co-heads the opening week of the venue. We'll be there February 8,9 and 10 and we look forward to it. We haven't played Seattle proper in quite some time. And it'll be doubly exciting since we're opening up a new club. There should be quite a bit of excitement in the Seattle media.)

From all indications, Barry isn't blowing smoke. We expect to be treated like rock stars and we expect the operation to be run in a professional manner. And, of course, we expect to deliver the "killer shows" that Barry speaks of in the P-I piece.

Of course, we'll keep you posted.

Saturday night is the final night. Catch A Rising Star has been on the second floor of Resorts for two years or so. They've been doing one show a night, seven nights a week, Sunday through Saturday. Atlantic City slims down to two comedy clubs (at the Borgata and the Trop). The Catch chain slims down to three clubs (Providence, Princeton and Reno).

Musical director/house emcee Lonny Sarao can be contacted via his Myspace.

According to Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in New Yorker, Steve Scully, a senior executive producer of C-SPAN, and the president of the White House Correspondent's Association (and the man who booked Stephen Colbert into last year's dinner), has decided on Rich Little as this year's entertainment, "because Billy Crystal charges too much money" We're pretty sure Scully was kidding.

Little, who had a variety show on television in the nineteen-seventies, appeared on Letterman not long ago but hasn't had much other television work in recent years. "My agent tried to get me on Maher's show, but I was told that Bill said, 'That Rich Little is a pretty funny guy.' He didn't want to take the chance that I would be funnier." Little said that he does not find Maher and his ilk terribly funny. When asked to name a young comedian he admired, he responded, "Robin Williams. He's just off the wall."

We're pretty sure Little isn't kidding.

Goldberg also reports that Little's website contains a list of 169 impressions. Of those 169, 115 are of people who are dead. And 112 of those sound suspiciously like Rich Little doing an impression of Johnny Carson.


And, in case you're wondering, "Maher and his ilk" includes every comic under the age of 60. Robin Williams excluded, of course.

We got profiled in the Neighbors section of the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer. Rusty Pray is the byline. It's a nice hit, and it coincides with our upcoming weekend at Rascals in Cherry Hill, NJ, this Thursday through Saturday. Color photo on the front page of the section, and a B&W pic accompanying the text inside. If this doesn't pack the house, we don't know what will!

However, there are two big, fat problems.

One was in the 13th paragraph, where The Male Half of the Staff is quoted thusly:

Then came the 1990s and the bottom dropped out of the comedy club business, a development many industry observers attribute to comedy shows on cable television.

"Why pay for stand-up when you can see it for free?" McKim said.

Beware of the reporter who doesn't use 20th century technology, like a tape recorder. We did utter the above sentence, but we were characterizing the logic of the folks who put forth the exact opposite of our argument! We have always maintained that the "Why pay for standup..." position was one of the most boneheaded on the planet. Now, thousands of Delaware Valley Inquirer readers are treated to the spectacle of one of the editors of SHECKYmagazine uttering that which is 180 degrees from the magazine's editorial stance. It's like the Pope quoted as saying that he's a little skeptical about this God thing. (Although TMHOTS hastens to point out that he's no pope. And he's reasonably certain that Pope Benedict XVI couldn't scrape together a decent ten minutes if his life depended on it.)

The other big, fat problem is the pic. And "big" and "fat" are appropriate modifiers in this case. The Female Half of the Staff in particular is profoundly unhappy with the way the pics turned out. She likens them to those tabloid shots that they run of Britney with a screaming headline that reads, "Time For REHAB?" She wonders how, since she has dropped 25 lbs. in the last two months, can she look 25 lbs. heavier than before she dropped the 25? (For those scoring at home, she's look at a net photographic weight gain of 50 big ones.) We are guessing it was the wide angle lens. We spent an hour at Rascals last Tuesday smiling gamely and alternately giggling and grimacing through the session, which had to have resulted in hundreds of images. We're stunned that those two pics made it into the publication. Somewhere along the way, we theorize, we must've pissed off the photog. We now understand why celebrities insist on photo approval. (And don't go thinking that we're always complaining about bad photos, that we're never happy about anything that anyone snaps of us. We run all kinds of pics of us in these pages-- the good and the bad. These two are particularly hideous, though!)

If this sounds like two people complaining while getting a hit in a major American daily, it is. The Female Half is "mortified" by the pic. And it is painful to see eight years of crusading blunted by a misquote. Fortunately, we have the magazine to set the record straight.

Allow us to think out loud for a minute. (Which, when we get right down to it, is what blogging is all about, no?) We were recently alerted to a mention of standup comedy on a blog. The blogger, a writer by the name of Al Shipley, runs a blog called Narrowcast and he got a coupla tickets to see Jim Gaffigan at the Lyric in Baltimore. Afterward, he scurried home and wrote a 189-word review of the show.

It got us to thinking about things like how to go about getting press, how to approach the alternative press and what benefit there is from getting reviewed. And then we considered the blogosphere (the alternative alternative press!) and we thought: Is it not a great idea to court the bloggers? Wouldn't it be a good thing to attempt to get the attention of bloggers for the purpose of getting reviewed and getting the name out there?

Gaffigan, of course, is a pretty big name and, as such, he has been getting ink in the MSM on nearly every stop of his recent tour. But the rest of us, who aren't as high-profile as the Gaffigans or the Regans or the Blacks of the standup world (and who aren't as likely to get a hit in the major dailies), might consider comping the occasional blogger at a show here or there. Publicity is publicity, right?

When compared to mainstream writers, bloggers are a bit more accessible. And most entertainment writers at major dailies are pulled in so many different directions that they rarely pay attention to standup. Bloggers, on the other hand, pay attention to whatever they want to, without any input from editors (and they have a larger, nearly inexhaustible, newshole!) and they might actually welcome being treated like "real journalists" (and we don't mean that in a bad way).

The downside is that, in most cases, their "circulation" is a fraction of even the smallest newspaper. But, they might just have a narrowly-focused audience that perfectly matches the demo that we as comedians can benefit from.

(Of course, we're bloggers, but we have an editorial policy of not reviewing standup performances. Occasionally, we'll write something here or there, but it's never a review in the traditional sense.)

We don't recommend that anyone seek mentions solely in blogs, to the exclusion of all other forms of exposure. But it's becoming clear that blogs are slowly asserting themselves as legitimate sources of news for significant numbers of people out there and we'd be goofy to ignore it.

According to the (low-bandwidth) UPI obit, Ron Carey was also "a former stand-up comic, (who) broke into films playing a cab driver in 'The Out of Towners.'" The Male Half recalls that Carey's Officer Levitt was the Barney Miller character that made his old man laugh the hardest. Carey's was a subtle performance; he had a way with a take and he used his round face to maximum effect.

National Public Radio has, for the second time in a couple of weeks, turned its attention to standup comedy. This time, they've noticed a resurgence in the New York in "New York Sees a Comedy-Club Renaissance" by Mike Pesca.

With so many venues, it's possible for a working comedian to fill up a weekly schedule by making the rounds-— and even make some money doing it. A good, but unknown, comic can earn $1,000 a week just by playing the city's clubs.

We haven't the bandwidth to listen to the entire report, but the text on the front page of the report manages to indulge in at least one timeworn cliche.

Even with all of these venues, comedy can still be a soul-crushing profession. After all, you need to get that humor-fueling discontent from somewhere.

Yeah... that humor-fueling discontent is what it's all about, dontcha know. (And "soul-crushing" has become a alterna-hack phrase that makes us cringe!)

There're a handful of links to past comedy-related pieces that might be of interest.

We're in our new SHECKYmagazine HQ now... a scant 1.25 miles and one municipality away from the old HQ. We did the move over nine days, using our 85 cubic feet of space in the SHECKYmagazine Wagon and the help of a few friends-- with a short trip to South Carolina in the middle of it all! We're profoundly exhausted, our thumbs are virtually useless (!) and The Female Half of the Staff has a fat lip, slightly blackened eye sockets and soreness in her front teeth from stumbling and hitting the wall face-first while carrying two sock drawers. (Had the wall she attacked been plaster instead of drywall, she could very well have lost teeth or been knocked out cold!) Especially nice, since we had our pictures taken yesterday for our upcoming feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Jan. 21 is the publication date).

We're posting this at 31 Kbps, since we're forced to use dialup until our DSL transfers to our new address. (Once again, we can't believe we put up with this ancient form of internet access until August of 2005!)

Some moving advice: Always move the dumbbells first! If you leave them until last, you'll regret it-- you will lack the energy to move them in the late going! Indeed, the only objects left in the old apartment are a lonely pair of dumbbells in the second bedroom/office. And what is with the thumb soreness? The Male Half remarked that his hands, fingers and forearms haven't been this sore since he can't remember when. To which the Female Half replied, "Not since you were single!" Nice one!

It's off to WalMart for shelf liner and cup hooks!

Can't post long... making the transition between apartments... we can say that we had the pleasure of meeting David Lee Nelson this past weekend while we were gigging at the Greenville Laff Trax club. Nelson was in town (his hometown, Greenville, SC) in anticipation of the upcoming appearance of The Skinny White Comics show at downtown Greenville's Coffee Undergound tonight and tomorrow night and the subsequent run of the SWC at the Charleston Comedy Festival later this week.

We chatted in the Crowne Plaza lobby (while the Eagles flamed out on the TVs behind the bar) and found out that Nelson, who currently resides in NYC, produced the Skinny tour and it features Isaac Witty and Amy Schumer. We also found out a lot about the Spoleto Festival, which we were only vaguely aware of up until Saturday night. (We were also totally unaware of the Charleston Comedy Festival!)

We noticed the ad for the SWC dates in the local alterna-rag and were delightfully suprised when Nelson popped into the house. What he is doing, in producing this comedy show in various alternative venues and fests, is a verrrry Shecky thing to do. Click on any of the above links to find out more!

We've had it up to here with McDonald's and their latest ad campaign-- Any size coffee for 69 cents. You've seen the multiple television spots, many/all of them national buys. You've also heard the saturation radio advertising. "Any size McDonald's coffee for just 69 cents," they all say.

Do you think we can get a cup of McDonald's coffee for 69 cents?!?!? NO!

The Male Half is the only member of the staff currently drinking java and he has gone into at least a half-dozen McDonald's since the promotion began-- in all different parts of the country-- and each time they look at him like he has three heads. What the hell is going on there? Sure, the ads say the offer is valid "at participating locations only," but since when do any of these franchises not participate in nationally-advertised campaigns? Not only are they not participating, but they claim to have zero knowledge of the campaign!

Has anyone else experienced this?

Madonna, hodling forth on the Rosie O/Donald Trump fight, said the following (and we're paraphrasing, but only slightly):

I think if every standup comic were penalized for saying something politically incorrect they'd all be hanging in the public square.

Madonna? Going to bat for standup comics? Our world is upside down. Madonna gets it.

It was a brief clip on a TV news show. We'll try to find it online and link to it.

Roger Friedman of Fox News is reporting that Rosie O'Donnell is leaving The View. Actually, Fox News is reporting that Roger Friedman is reporting that, but the truth is merely that O'Donnell, whose contract is up in June, probably won't renew it. No huge story there.

How this leaves The View for the rest of the TV season remains a mystery. O'Donnell isn't going to quit, and Walters can't fire her without ABC's approval-- and she won't get it. The show is already lacking a fifth correspondent, and without O'Donnell-- who replaced Meredith Vieira — it doesn't have a marquee name as moderator. Of course, we'd love to hear what Joy Behar is saying off camera about all this.

The protracted and public pissing contest between O'Donnell and Donald Trump has spiked the daytime talker's ratings. Significantly, the show stars two comedians (O'Donnell and Joy Behar) but is about as funny as... a show that doesn't star two comedians!

Sorry for the late notice, but the Male Half of the Staff is featured in an interview on All Things Considered on National Public Radio. Check your local NPR affiliate for airings. (It'll be on the NPR website tonight at "approx. 7:30 PM ET." Update: Here's a link!)

Correspondent Elizabeth Blair spoke to T.M.H.O.T.S. (who scurried over to the Philadelphia studios of WHYY-FM, the NPR outlet round these parts) on the subject of the Jay Leno/Judy Brown lawsuit. Not sure how much of the 15 minutes or so was used by Blair, but it should be interesting to hear.

And, for all you Delaware Valley WHYY listeners who heard the interview and want to know where you can see Brian McKim and Traci Skene perform locally, make plans to attend one of their five shows on January 25, 26 or 27, at Rascals in Cherry Hill, NJ! Hop onto the Rascals website to check out the showtimes, make reservations or purchase tickets!

And the media blitz continues: The Male Half will also be doing "The SHECKYmagazine Report" on WICC 600 AM, Bridgeport Connecticut's Dependable News & Information Station! He'll be on The Brian Smith Show at 6:35, with guest host Johnny Rizzo! It'll be spirited conversation about all things comedy.

We've bought the tickets, so there's no turning back! We're actually going to visit Los Angeles next month. (Folks in L.A. think we already live there. And some L.A. folks think we live in N.Y. And all the New Yorkers think we live in L.A.!) We're at the Comedy Club at the Riv FEB 12 through 18, so we'll cross the desert on the 19th, beginning a weeklong debauchery in sunny Southern California! (The Male Half has a spot at the Comedy & Magic Club on the 22nd, but other than that, our calendar is open.) We're always seeking spots and we'll be seeking invites to crazy events-- excuses to hang! And, of course, we'll be blogging the entire time... if we ever get our laptop back from the Everex Custome Service Center in Fremont, CA! (We packed it off in mid-December and haven't heard from it since!)

It's our first trip to Los Angeles since August '04 and that trip was all too brief!

Send us an email!

To promote next Sunday's premiere of 24, in which she plays "computer genius Chloe O'Brian," Mary Lynn Rajskub is interviewed in yesterday's Parade.

I like playing non-mainstream clubs. I've even played laundromats. Mostly small clubs-- almost underground stuff.

Of course, most Parade readers probably think she's joking about the laundromats. She's not. Hollywood is famous (notorious?) for presenting comedy shows in the least likely places-- like laundromats.

Jordan Carlos (or "Stephen Colbert's Black Friend," as he is known to hundreds of thousands of Colbert Report viewers) guested on the op-ed page of the Washington Post on Sunday ("My Schtick? Being Black").

Carlos (pictured below with his white friends Brian McKim and Adam Devine at last year's Just For Laughs festival!) takes the occasion to talk about living at the intersection of black and funny and explains how he got the Colbert gig.

How did I get to be Colbert's on-air compadre of color? Simple. One day a friend of mine who happened to be a producer for the show called and asked me to come and have my picture taken with Colbert. He explained that it was for a segment they'd be airing that night in which I would play Colbert's black friend. With zero prospects and a gnawing fear that they'd find a replacement, I streaked over to the studios on New York City's West Side, where I was quickly introduced to the man himself, Stephen Colbert. We took the picture and my producer friend showed me out. The joke has since become a running gag. I had hoped to parlay it into a job; instead I got a lot of MySpace "friends." These experiences didn't leave me feeling good, but they did make me think more about being black. Better late than never, I guess.

Carlos also tells about how he inquired as to the possibility of getting one of those juicy correspondent gigs on the The Daily Show and being told that the show "tried a black guy once, but it didn't work out." Ouch! Eerily similar to the story that nearly all minorities hear-- The Female Half recalls a variation on this exchange on countless occasions over the last 20 years: "We had a female comic in here once... two years ago, I think it was... She stunk out the joint!" To which she replies, "Oh... I guess you haven't had any men come in here and stink out the joint. And (motioning in the direction of the Male Half)... I see you're still booking men in here!" Sigh.

As for the Colbert producer's explanation for the dearth of African-American correspondent's in their lineup, his statement is as much a testament to television's cowardice/timidity and lack of vision as it is a testament to any racism. (Having read this, however, we advise all black comics to immediately send a package to The Daily Show, whose producers, after having read the quote in the Washington Post, will no doubt make a point of hiring at least one African American correspondent by Monday, which, coincidentally, is Martin Luther King's birthday. It's a win, win, win! Sometimes the timidty/lack of vision thing can be worked to one's advantage!)



NOTE: An earlier version of this post confused the Daily Show with The Colbert Report... not once, but twice! It has since been corrected. Thanks and we apologize for the error.

From comedian Amy Anderson comes the following solicitation:

I’m currently working on a new radio project that gives exposure to female comedians. I need content asap! If you fall into one or more of the following categories please help out:

1) you’re a funny chick

2) you work with funny chicks

3) you know other funny chicks!

Here’s what I’m looking for:

- CD/audio recordings of female stand up comedy

- Must be PROFESSIONAL quality recording/engineering for play on national radio

- Selected bits will be between 1:00 to 1:10 in length-– if you can flag some samples that you think are particularly worthy, that helps-- remember between ONE MINUTE and ONE MINUTE, TEN SECONDS

- Bits must be terrestrial radio CLEAN-– i.e. no cursing, explicit sex, drugs, etc. I can do a bleep here and there, but it sounds better w/o

PLEASE send your CDs to me! I want to put as many women comics in the show as I can – we deserve and need the exposure and I’ll need lots of content. Snail mail to this addy:

Amy Anderson
8581 Santa Monica Blvd #130
West Hollywood CA 90069

Feel free to email if you have any questions or concerns! ALSO, please forward this and pass around to the funny women you know– especially ones with recordings! Thanks for your help and here’s to a GREAT 2007!

Amy Anderson
www.AmyAnderson.net
www.MySpace.com/amyandersoncomic
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1757537/

Comedy Central is having a Standup Showdown in which they serve up the top 100 comics-- "100 COMICS. ONE TITLE. THIS TIME, IT'S FOR THE HONOR." No word on what it was for the last time!-- and exhort the site's visitors to browse through them alphabetically and vote for a favorite.

They only list the top 20 on the front page, one must dig, click and scroll to find the other 80.

At blogtime, the top twenty were:

Cook
Hedberg
Caliendo
Benson
Mencia
LaPorte
Koplitz
Gaffigan
Reep
Black
Francisco
Galifianakis
Attell
Martin
Swardson
Sykes
Regan
Bailey
Arnez J.
Phan

It is a good thing that we are able to list them by last name only and be confident that, in most cases, most readers will know to whom we refer.

Just in case anyone wonders, The Male Half and the Female Half are not driving folks to the site for personal gain. We are not in this contest; as we are not among the top 100 comics in the business. (However, if we were, the Male Half would be sandwiched between Steve McGrew and Carlos Mencia. The Female Half would land between Jim Shubert and The Sklar Brothers. Do you think that Comedy Central would allow write-in candidates? Hardly likely.)

In keeping with the spirit of multiplatformicity, fans can text their votes in, via their mobile phones. (Ask your mommy and daddy if you can vote, as each vote costs $0.99!) And, just in case you're 14 years old and you have all the time in the world, contest architects have restricted the voting-- "Remember, you can only vote for one comedian a day!" they warn sternly! And, though it isn't readily apparent, there is a deadline-- Voters are advised to watch a marathon countdown "all day long" on Sunday, January 28, in which Comedy Central will present the top twenty vote-getters.

Not sure why Universal would want to change it, but...

On August 13 of 2005, we posted about how Joe Carnahan was greenlighted to direct "Smokin' Aces," which, at the time, was supposed to be about "an FBI agent supervising a manhunt for a standup comedian (Piven) who has decided to squeal on the mob."

Well, the movie comes out at the end of the month and now Piven plays a magician. A "sleazy" magician.

Apparently, the director isn't all that shook up about it. He tells CanMag.com that the script that you can download there represents the one that the studio originally approved, but overall, he sounds upbeat.

Still, it makes no sense to change the character from a comic when comedy has never been hotter. But, we suppose those studio execs know what they're doing, right? We downloaded the script. No comic. A magician. Where'd Dark Horizons get the idea that the main character was a comic? Perhaps when the script was bouncing around H-wood. Maybe the way to sell a script these days is to pitch the main character as a comic... yeah, right!

"Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized and Dismissed," is a collection of humorous essays about getting canned from Tim Allen, Harry Shearer, Bob Saget, Paul F. Tompkins, Dana Gould and others. The book was inspired by Gurwitch's own experience of being layed off by Woody Allen.

The book will be a movie-- after a short theatrical run, it will pop up on Showtime. (See the trailer here.) Variety describes it as "A free-wheeling, first-person documentary." Who doesn't enjoy a delicious story about getting shitcanned?! (Of course, it must be told long after the sting of termination has subsided. Otherwise, it gets scary and the folks listening to the story start to make sure they have a clear shot to the emergency exits!)

Below is an excerpt from Bill Maher.

When I was twenty-nine, I was hired to do a talk show. I had just done a series called Sara with Geena Davis and Alfre Woodard, and by then I had done some Tonight Shows and so I had some heat on me, as agents and managers say, so King World and Motown (now there's an axis of evil if I ever heard one) called me in and they said, "You're the guy." I remember vividly in the meeting they said, "We want someone fresh and new. We don't want Robert Klein or David Brenner."

We worked for a few weeks writing sketches, some of which were pretty good, but they put me with Dinah Shore's producer, and I didn't have the clout to fight it. I didn't even know what a producer did. I figured his name was Fred and Johnny's producer's name was Fred--well, I guess you gotta have a guy named Fred.

We never shot the show. We did a test shoot, one test shoot. We should have been doing a hundred test shows--that's what we did when we started Politically Incorrect-- but you take a twenty-nine kid, and yeah, he's not that good.

After they canned me, I turned on the TV one night and there was Billy Preston, who I had rehearsed with as my bandleader, with none other than David Brenner. I just thought, "Oh, they kept the bandleader."

Is Bill Hemmer toasted? (We think he just proposed getting a $2,000 hotel room with Julie Banderas!)

And when did Carson Daly start looking like Jimmy Neutron?

And that Christina Aguilera dance/music number was totally squaresville!

And Dick Clark blew the countdown again... he's just not the same since the stroke... we don't wanna be cruel about it, but they shouldn't be asking a stroke victim to countdown.

Happy New Year from us to you.

We look forward to the rest of 2007.

Thanks for a tremendous 2006.