by Gary Gulman told me that watching Dane Cook’s Tourgasm has been an interesting contrast to his prolonged exposure on NBC’s Last Comic Standing two years earlier. "Some of it has been relevatory, and some of it has been fun, like watching a home movie. Luckily, I was not the focal point of conflict like Robert (Kelly) and Jay (Davis). They continue to have their flare-ups."
"I think that with Last Comic Standing, I was on my best behavior the whole time because I knew everything I said would be on camera. (With this), there was no concrete, ‘Hey, this is going to be on NBC in November.’ This was done on spec."
As for this season of LCS? "I watched it until April Macie got knocked off, and I’ve been boycotting it since then," he said. April Macie? Oh, right. His girlfriend at the time. She made it onto the Queen Mary docked cruise ship, but lost out in the first head-to-head-to-head challenge — this year the comics performed in threes, perhaps to speed the eimination process along? "April is featuring at the shows. As an added bonus!" he said. "After Tourgasm ends, I have a one-hour Comedy Central special coming out. They never gave me a half-hour, so I ended up holding out for a whole hour."
Gulman grew up in Peabody, Mass., and went to Boston College, so performing in Boston always changes his set list.
"It was strange, because when I was living in Boston, I wasn’t doing local stuff," he told me. But now the silly things get inside his head. "So when I hear the Giant Glass commercial 16 times an hour on (W)EEI, I think the people have become immune to it. Like it’s background noise, it’s on so much. But I hear it. Or I hear everyone is doing their own furniture commercials, so it’s easier to notice it. People appreciate the local jokes. They think I’m making it up on the fly, but I’ve put a little bit of thought into it…a lot of it in the observation is the punchline. The Bob-o-pedic speaks for itself!" Really? "Oh, my god. Mrs. Bob with her mime routine?"
Since it was summer, we talked about handling the heat. Gulman said he preferred Good Harbor in Gloucester over the closer-to-home Revere Beach. "I can remember in high school, that’s where the IROC-Z parade would start and finish. They’d just go around and around. It was terrific…I don’t know why we would go up there…we weren’t what they’d call Guidos. We weren’t, maybe part of it was anthropology, part of it was potluck, thinking we could meet a girl. How were we supposed to think we’d meet a girl, driving around? Sometimes guys could do that, but when you’re leaning against a 1979 Cutlass Supreme, there’s not a big draw there."
