The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Dat Phan (you remember him, the Vietnamese-American kid who came out from nowhere — well, actually out from under his desk and his job working at the Improv — to win the first season of Last Comic Standing) finally got another chance at primetime TV. So what does he do? …
Will Ferrell is a really nice guy. Looked me in the eyes during our introduction a couple of weeks ago at the Ritz, delivered a solid handshake. Enough to unnerve a lesser civilian. But after a playfully simple opening question, we were off and running in a discussion to promote …
Comedy Central had Brian Kiley guest blogging on its site the week before his half-hour stand-up special aired on the cable network that spring. It wasn’t Kiley’s idea. "They made us do it. There are certain things you fantasize about before you start your career…but there are other things that …
Some comics really try heard to stay in character. Dan Whitney does all of his interviews as "Larry the Cable Guy" with the Larry accent and persona. Same goes for Sacha Baron Cohen as "Borat." Bobcat Goldthwait, on the other hand, rose to fame with a unique vocal delivery but …
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 …
Bill Burr recently had his own HBO half-hour special, and I wanted to know what he meant in a MySpace blog posting about moving 20 minutes from the end of his set to the front. "Early in my career, joke order was really important, because you had no idea what …
Mike Birbiglia spent most of the past week at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge, Mass., workshopping a new one-man show that he’s calling "Sleepwalk With Me." On Saturday, he even took an hour before the club opened to meet with any and all local comedians who had questions for him …
Louis CK had just gotten finished with his controversial appearance on The View when he got on the phone with me to talk about his new HBO show, Lucky Louie. The View’s female panel took him by surprise with their stinging criticism. "All of a sudden, I’m watching life and …
In 2006, Alonzo Bodden was the unknown winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and here is what he had to say about the aftermath of that (this is all before he came back in 2007 to be a judge on the show). Ant, who never came close to winning on …
Nick DiPaolo sometimes give off the impression of an anti-comic, or perhaps a rather extreme example of the comic’s comic, playing to his fellow comedians more than he does his audience. When I talked to him in June 2006, we began by talking about his online home, which, at the …