"Eventually, I believe, everything evens out. Long ago an asteroid hit our planet and killed our dinosaurs. But in the future, maybe we'll go to another planet and kill their dinosaurs." - CNN
Just got through reading Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin - hence the earlier post - which if you have a sense of humor I would recommend, no demand, you read as soon as possible.
At any rate, on with the excerpt....
Mixed reviews continued. At the end of my closing-night show at the Troubadour, I stood onstage and took out five bananas. I peeled them, pit one on my head, one in each pocket, and squeezed one in each hand. Then I read the last line of my latest bad review: "Sharing the bill with Poco this week is comedian Steve Martin...his twenty-five minute routine failed to establish any comic identity that would make the audience remember him or the material." Then I walked off the stage.
Be courteous, kind, and forgiving. Be gentle and peaceful each day. Be warm and human and grateful, And have a good thing to say.
Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike, Be witty and happy and wise. Be honest and love all your neighbors, Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant.
Be pompous, obese, and eat cactus. Be dull and boring and omnipresent. Criticize things you don't know about. Be oblong and have your knees removed.
Be sure to stop at stop signs, And drive fifty-five miles an hour. Pick up hitchhikers foaming at the mouth. And when you get home get a master's degree in geology.
Be tasteless, rude, and offensive. Live in a swamp and be three-dimensional. Put a live chicken in your underwear. Go into a closet and suck eggs.
"Senator Clinton, all the senators here, except Senator Obama, voted for the Iraq Resolution in 2002," began Maher, "saying that their decision was based on intelligence that they believed to be accurate at the time. In other words, George Bush fooled you. Why should Americans vote for someone who can be fooled by George Bush?" - Yahoo
It blows me away that it's been 15 years since Kinison's death. Children born the day he died are teenagers now. That's a scary thought.
An even scarier thought is the legions of people out there who have never heard of Sam Kinison - whether they were too young when he was around, or born after the fact. I'm not going to waste a lot of words here rehashing Kinison's career; you have the internet, start searching. Check YouTube, go down to your public library and check out Brother Sam by Bill Kinison, search Amazon for a copy of Why Did We Laugh?
Then you will understand.
As an aside, I came across a 2004 list of the Top 100 Stand-Up Comedians of All-Time as decided by Comedy Central. Most of the comics on my personal top ten are on it - with the glaring exception of Mitch Hedberg....bastards!
Also, the new season of Last Comic Standing debuts sometime next week on NBC.
And, finally, here's a small sampling of my runners up...
Runners Up: Paula Poundstone, Jake Johannsen, Ann Coulter, Richard Lewis, Bill Maher, Andy Kaufman (Who would have came in second overall, but he always claimed to be a song and dance man rather than a comic, so I figure I'll honor that), Steve Martin (First comedy album I owned was Wild & Crazy Guy - still have it.), Bobcat Goldthwaite...this list could theoretically go on forever.
Anyway what I thought would be a fun little list I would blast out in ten days has taken be forever to complete...I now return you to your unoriginal programming.
Along with Molliwogg, John, and Jenn, I saw Mitch Hedberg in some comedy club in Seattle I've long since forgotten the name of. It's funny, I love stand-up comedy, I just hate comedy clubs. Sure, they're the most intimate setting to see a comic, but every one that I've been to has the same cattle-call, cram-'em-in, two drink minimum mentality that annoys the shit out of me. Give me a mid-sized theater any day.
But it was a chance to see Hedberg - turns out, my only chance - so it was worth it.
A couple years before that I caught a Comedy Central half-hour special on Hedberg and was hooked. Alternately, a couple of years after that performance, Mitch died.
The funny thing about Mitch Hedberg is that you either loved him, or just didn't get it. I look at some of the comments on YouTube and there doesn't seem to be any in-between.
I've been pretty lazy when it comes to blogging lately. Partially because I've been busy with life off the web (is there such a thing anymore?), partially due to a 48-hour crusade to rid the world of as many vodka-cran's as my liver would tolerate. But it's high time I finished this goofy little top ten list so I can move on to other things.
So Chappelle's number three, which by default makes him number one of the current crop of comics out there. Obviously Chappelle has hit the point in his career where everyone and their mother knows who he is and what he does, so I'll spare you the recap. Suffice to say though there are few comics out there that can make me laugh until I cry, and Chappelle is one of them.
Sex with Monkey's (above) is one of favorites - one of a hundred. It's rare a comedian can pull off a joke about a subject as touchy as AIDS and not come off cruel or disparaging to any particular group or lifestyle, but Chappelle pulls it off brilliantly.
"The overall theme for me is social satire because my setup is information. I start with the person making a dopey statement like former Senator Rick Santorum saying that gay marriage and homosexuality are a threat to the American family. Then I tell the real story: How is this a threat to the American people? It's a prejudice to believe that. It's the same thing as remarks about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies during Passover."
"There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice."
Along with Louis C.K., I'm a Johnny-come-lately to Lewis Black - what can I say, I rarely watch the Daily Show. I've been jonesing for a political stand-up ever since Dennis Miller went off the deep end. (What the hell happened there anyway? I can handle the change in politics but at least keep the humor, his last stand-up special felt like a recital of random Republican talking points...sure any audience will applaud when their views are being catered to, but where were the laughs? Further proof joining the Republican party lowers your I.Q.)
"You don't want another Enron? Here's the law: If you have a company, and you can't explain, in one sentence, what the fuck it does, it's illegal!"
Not to bring up Louis C.K. again, but I like Lewis Black for many of the same reasons - chiefly their ability to reinvent the wheel. There's a ton of political comics out there - always were, always will be - but it takes someone special to make it funny instead of just depressing. Off the top of my head I can think of only two - Bill Maher and Lewis Black.
Another reason I'm drinking Black's Kool-Aid is he's the first comedian since Kinison that can pull off rage without looking hokey or more angry than funny. Most comedians I've seen lately who attempt to pull off any kind of anger or aggression either look like their reading off cue cards or seem more like Michael Richards during his meltdown. To turn a real emotion like anger into comedy - and as a result getting your audience to think, turning it back into anger - is a rare gift.
"Hey, suck a bag of dicks!" ...And with those few words, Louis C.K. blazed his way to number five on my top ten comics list. I've only recently become familiar with C.K.'s work - caught him on a few late night talk shows and thought he was pretty funny, but when I saw his HBO sitcom, I just wasn't digging it.
That all changed when I tuned into Comic Relief late last year.
After what seemed like a hundred hours of mostly tepid comedy, Louis C.K. opened his act with the bag of dicks and within a few seconds blew every comedian who came on before him away. (As you may have guessed, his material is not safe for work, so if I were you, I'd watch the video above later, or at least wear headphones.)
It's funny, comedy about married life is pretty standard and tired, but hearing Louis C.K. talk about the saddest hand job in America brought tears to my eyes...the man has managed to reinvent the wheel and the world is a better place for it.
At any rate he had a special a few months back on HBO and given the cyclical nature of cable television, you should have plenty of opportunity to see it again down the road. Check it out, you'll be glad you did.
I saw Chris Rock on some television show a while back talking about how no one believes he's 42. Had I not heard it straight from the horse's mouth - and double-checked against imdb in case he was just having fun - I wouldn't have believed it either. It would seem no matter how old Rock gets, he will forever remain in his early-thirties...I could think of worst fates.
Rock's in my top-ten for one reason - the Gun/Bullet Control routine, probably the funniest and most spot-on piece of stand-up comedy ever documented on film. Without that bit, he would probably hover around the number 11 or 12 spots. Would I pay to go see him? Repeatedly. Other than the Gun/Bullet Control piece do I recall parts of his act while walking down the street and break into spontaneous laughter? Not as much as some of the others on this list.
Roseanne would actually rank higher if she hadn't been so inactive until relatively recently. I vividly remember her first appearance on the Tonight Show - remember when appearing on the Tonight Show meant something?. She did a routine about the differences between a fat mom and a skinny mom. The main difference being, and I'm paraphrasing here, when you have a problem the skinny mom will try and get you to exercise and talk out your problems, something like that while the fat mom will bust out a gallon of ice cream and by the time you're done with your sugar-high, you've forgotten all about the problem.
Her television series, Roseanne, is still one of my favorite shows ever - a close third to Northern Exposure and Twin Peaks respectively - and thanks to syndication, I can still see it daily. The show is just now starting to get the respect it deserves. Roseanne herself made a good point on Larry King a few years back, the Roseanne show was the last of its kind. Since then there haven't really been any shows portraying blue-collar people, it's been replaced by the young, the rich, and the perceived rich - My Name is Earl being one of the few exceptions, but even that show, as great as it is, is built around the premise of the main characters winning on a lottery ticket.
A while back - a long while back - it was said that Roseanne secured the rights to develop an American version of AbFab. I'm not sure if that was true or not - although Patsy and Edina did show up on one episode of Roseanne once - but if she still has those rights, that's something I'd really like to see.
Like Roseanne, I remember Drew Carey's first stand-up appearance on The Tonight Show like it was yesterday. What really stands out was a bit about being the only person at his class reunion that still looks exactly like his yearbook photo - horn-rimmed glasses and all. Shortly after that appearance, the Drew Carey Show made it's debut and, again, I was instantly hooked. A show with one of my favorite comedians (Drew Carey) set in one of my favorite places (Cleveland), it was kind of hard to go wrong. I always felt a lot of people looked down on the show - unjustifiably - but it's interesting to see its influence in some of the more popular shows today, chiefly Scrubs. There may have been singing and dancing numbers in shows before TDCS, but it was my first exposure to it. Who's Line is it Anyway was also pretty good, but with the addition of that show they reached a serious over-saturation point and I think both shows suffered as a result - if only the same thing could happen to the seemingly infinite supply of cop shows out now.
I couldn't find any actual stand-up by Carey on youtube, but I did find this skit on the horrors of cooties.
On any other list, Cosby would hover somewhere in the top five, but most of the comics I'm into are either a) inspired by Cosby, or b) inspired by those who were inspired by Cosby. I'm a product of the 70's and 80's (incept date: 09.20.1971) so I had a healthy dose of Fat Albert, The Cosby Show, and Jello pudding commercials during my childhood. The funny thing is, outside of a few appearances on the Tonight Show, I didn't have that much exposure to Cosby's stand-up until probably my early-twenties.
An even worse crime, I hadn't been exposed to Noah until probably seven years ago or so. Of course now it's one of my favorite routines of all-time, I just wish I would have discovered it a lot sooner.
I'm a stand-up comedy junkie - with rock-n-roll festering in yet another slump, stand-up comedy is one of, if not the only, avenue left for performance art. I could rant for hours about the homogenization of rock-n-roll but all you need to do is look at the Billboard charts or turn on the radio and see for yourself.
At any rate, I thought I would compile a list of my top ten favorite comics - with the exception of the first three slots, this list is subject to change according to whim.
And without further adieu...number ten, Henry Rollins.
Sure, Rollins bills himself as a "spoken word" artist, but for the sake of argument I'm including him here. I've seen Rollins stand-up spoken word live twice, each time I've laughed myself to tears. There's serious (read unfunny) material in his act as well, but that the beauty of single-mic action, just as the best rock-n-roll communicates directly to your naughty bits, the best stand-up hits you on multiple levels.
(Of course, the best I could find on youtube was a bit on scallops which, while funny, isn't indicative of his act. Check out a cd or dvd to get a better idea of his material, you'll be glad you did.)
