Doug Stanhope brings shock and awe to Nietzsche's Joseph Popiolkowski
www.buffalonews.com
04/18/08
Doug Stanhope is a study in contradictions. The comedian – probably best known as a former host of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show” – is equal parts recluse and transient. He holes up in the tiny U.S.-Mexico border town of Bisbee, Ariz., when he’s not crisscrossing the country doing stand-up. And his comedy is equal parts shock and awe. His irreverent and provocative bits make audiences recoil but hang on his every word. At 8 p.m. Saturday, the heavy-drinking libertarian performs in Nietzsche’s (248 Allen St.), with an opening act by Buffalo’s own Jack Topht. Tickets are $17 in advance or $20 at the door. The show is 21 and over.
So why Bisbee?
I needed a place to put my shit. It’s just a weird little town I found driving back roads a few years ago. When I moved out of L.A., I had to go somewhere, so this was it. Bisbee’s the perfect antithesis to the road, the chaos, the people everywhere and traffic. It’s 100 miles to the airport. There’s one traffic light between my house and the exit for the airport in Tucson, and it’s always green.
Is there any one record that got you hooked on stand-up comedy?
I listened to the usuals growing up, especially Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, who my parents would listen to, Richard Pryor’s “Live on the Sunset Strip.” I was as much influenced by my peers that were funny as I was by any stand-up comics.
Most of your stuff is pretty edgy and raw. Do you think people know what they’re getting into?
At this point, yeah. When I play rock ’n’ roll clubs, people have some idea. No one just wanders into, you know, Nietzsche’s because it’s their bachelorette party, as opposed to a comedy club where that’s commonplace. People know what they’re getting into. When you play comedy clubs, you end up in an adult Chuck E. Cheese for all occasions with people who think it’s all Jay Leno. Their disappointment wears on you after awhile.
You’re self-deprecating on stage.
I’m not a big fan of me. I’m not self-deprecating as a tool to make myself more likable. I just hate myself. You can never hate me more than I hate me. So in a strange and sad way, I’m untouchable on stage. Boo and heckle if you want, because you’re still never gonna hate me as much as I do.
Are you having a midlife crisis, or have you always felt that way?
I’m sure any midlife crisis I had was in my 20s. I’m not the kind of guy that’s gonna see Charlton Heston years.
What should the people of Buffalo expect at your show?
It might be the best night of their lives, or I might not be coming back ever. I don’t have any expectations, but you won’t be let down. It’ll be a weird night.
24 hour show just for you Not everyone is tickled by the breakaway Edinburgh Comedy Festival -
least of all comedian Doug Stanhope Mike Wade
June 2, 2008
The Times
One wealthy visitor to the Edinburgh Fringe this August will enjoy a full day of exclusive and unique entertainment - but only for a record ticket price of £7,349. That amount, which will be revealed in the official Fringe programme, will buy the ticketholder 24 hours in the company of the controversial American comedian Doug Stanhope. His show had been devised in protest at the planned Edinburgh Comedy Festival, which, Stanhope said, had been concocted by agents and promoters who have no discernible talent, other than making money for themselves.
“It's a middle finger to the whole stupid affair. You have a fantastic arts festival which is full of energy, but it's taken over by agents who are pariahs and leeches. Agents should be told to explain, 'What do you do? How do you earn your income? What is your product?',” said Stanhope, who in 2006 had a sell-out run at George Square Theatre.
The price of the day's entertainment is based on a calculation of the average sum that most comedians have lost after completing a three-week run in Edinburgh. Stanhope said that he envisaged a £10 deduction should a pensioner buy the ticket.
The move is the latest protest against the new Edinburgh Comedy Festival on the Fringe, which is which is being organised by the promoters of the “big four” venues - Assembly, the Gilded Balloon, the Pleasance and Underbelly. The Times disclosed two months ago that this organisation had circulated its own brochure seeking £1.8million in sponsorship and boasting that its festival would be “bigger than Glastonbury”.
The comedy festival's London-based PR company has revealed many acts - including Bill Bailey, Ruby Wax, Clive James and Ed Byrne - and has broken with convention by organising a media briefing before the Fringe programme is launched on Thursday, an event that has traditionally been used to publicise the line-up of the arts festival, now in its 62th year.
The comedy festival's credentials came under fire last week, when The Stand club revealed a bill of 36 productions, which, according to its backers, makes the club the biggest single comedy producer on this year's Fringe.
Tommy Sheppard, proprietor of The Stand, said that his would be one of the majority of venues that remain outside the new festival. “That thing they've organised is not a festival at all. How can you have a festival when most of the comedians in the city are not part of it? It is an absurdity,” he said.
Stuart Lee, the stand-up comedian who wrote Jerry Springer: The Opera added his voice to the protests, saying that the comedy festival might make financial sense, but was “thoughtless and rude”. He added that comedians benefited from being part of a bigger event, rather than being pigeonholed. “Everyone I know, and I know the best people, feels delighted to participate in a festival where you get to be alongside people from different performance backgrounds. There's a lot that a stand-up can learn, so it's daft to bracket it off,” said Lee.
Charlie Wood, a director of Underbelly, defended the comedy festival and said that the revenues it generated would help to support other artforms. He was backed by the Australian comedian and If.com award winner, Brendon Burns, who commented on Times Online: “I'm a Fringe comic and will always proudly refer to myself as such, but Charlie's right. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is expensive. Very, very expensive. People should check the numbers before they go jumping up and down any time someone shows economical initiative.”
Stanhope remained unimpressed and said that, if someone were prepared to pay the asking price for his show, “I guarantee I will punch an agent in the face within the same 24-hour period.” Brian Hennigan, Stanhope's agent in Edinburgh, did not seem alarmed, and added his voice to the protest. “The problem with the comedy festival is that it is all about those venues, and not about performers,” he said.
In My View: Doug Stanhope by MICKEY NOONAN
August 20, 2008
It started out as a joke, because Brian [Hennigan, Stanhope's manager] knows I don't want to do the festival at all, ever again. I said I'd do it for ten grand, but only one show, one person, one trick. I don't know how he found those figures but he found that £7,439 was the average loss for comics. So we paid whatever it costs to put it in the programme, and it was worth it for the goof.
As for it selling; I don't see that happening any time soon. I've got two dates in Edinburgh now. I'm doing five weeks of European stuff and want to start it there.
A revolution at the Fringe wouldn't take much plotting. There are only so many big names that are going to draw people to the Fringe and those guys are losing money, too. Everybody gets hammered in Edinburgh.
I think they [other comedians] are all trained that that's just the way it is: a bad thing you have to take. I've always made money [at the Fringe] and it's because I'm with somebody who's reputable. I have a following, you have a room, then that's all we need.
Over in the States, I played a back yard - and we sold it out. We sold tickets online with Brown Paper Tickets. You don't even need the venue any more and MySpace and YouTube mean you can find people who are into you.
As for the "big four" and all that, I don't really know. It doesn't seem to matter: if the comics are going to take it, it doesn't matter if the "big four" venues are f**king them or whoever, because they're gonna get f**ked.
I'm sure a lot of it has to do with not knowing how to do stuff. It's easier to hire someone than learn how to do it yourself. Anyone in-between the comic and the audience - the agents, the press people and the managers; everyone who takes a cut - doesn't need to be employed.
Brian? Brian's not really a manager. He's my comrade. He's my Bernie Taupin.
Shock jock lasts longer on capital stage, but he's not all that funny Doug Stanhope, Button Factory, Dublin
Aidan Coughlan
September 06 2008
LAST time Doug Stanhope was in Ireland, things didn't go too well for him. The US comedian, who builds his act around audience reactions such as "Oh Lord, did he really say that?", lasted 10 minutes before being booed off and having his remaining shows cancelled.
What was said that night is now somewhat disputed, between Stanhope himself, the media reports of the time and accounts of those who were there. However, the gist of it was that Irish women were "too ugly to rape". And Stanhope wastes no time in diving right into the controversy by raising the subject again.
This time, however, things are a little different. The audience seems slightly embarrassed at the fact that Ireland was "the country that didn't get Stanhope", and so to compensate, everything the man says is greeted with hysterical laughter. Every profanity he shouts out, every reference to sex, every risque comment about a minority group, is howled at. The Irish, it seems, are keen to prove they're a great laugh after all.
But it's not that Stanhope isn't funny. His passages containing genuine, witty observations on human nature are superb. The instinctive obsession with sex, or even the somewhat old-fashioned passages about the differences between men and women, or the commercialisation of Valentine's Day, are all clever and entertaining. It's just a shame they're in the minority.
For the most part, Stanhope wades through a textbook list of "offensive topics" and throws them out one by one, to howling laughter from an audience who want to show off how unshockable they are. Genocide, mothers eating their young, the Down Syndrome child of Sarah Palin, are all poked at in the least witty way possible.
Of course, to criticise this will label you a prude who only enjoys family-friendly fun with clear-cut punchlines. However, the real problem is not that Stanhope works outside the comfort zone, it's that he lazily uses these topics as an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end.
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I've no idea why the writer of this piece calls Stanhope a 'shock jock' as he's not got a radio show. Anyway, I saw a clip of the Sarah Palin joke the other day - it was crass.
I sometimes wonder if Stanhope is actually scared of massive success (as opposed to just making a good income and travelling the world as he does now) so says stuff like it to ensure that he won't become a household name...
Doug Stanhope, Leicester Square Theatre, London (Rated 4/ 5 )
By Julian Hall
Wednesday, 17 September 2008
This is a man who once compared the workings of his mind to the chaotic sounds of a fairground, so it's a bit unfair to expect Doug Stanhope to gather his thoughts and theme his shows. However, it's fitting that for a former US presidential candidate (for the Libertarian Party, until financial rules imposed by election law forced him to quit) one discernible theme in this 80-minute show is leadership. His message is that people can be led politically (sexually and romantically, too), but that leaders cannot, in themselves, lead.
Stanhope will be voting Obama, but only as a casting director would choose someone "watchable" for a long stint on our screens. "If you need a leader, hire a dominatrix," he splutters.
Al Gore, Stanhope says, never gave the real answer to that inconvenient truth: that overpopulation is the major contributor to our environmental woes. But Stanhope is on hand to elucidate: "The only reason to have a baby in those places [Darfur] is to eat it." He's clearly talking about Third World overpopulation, but a heckler demands to know where he's coming from. "What's my point?" repeats the incredulous Stanhope. "Incentive-inspired eugenics." It's a telling riposte.
He's less clear on how leaders avoid talking about issues. There's a clumsy routine about Sarah Palin and her Down syndrome baby. It's a lurid section, and it can't deal with real concerns. "If they [the politicians] aren't talking about the issues, why should I?" the comedian pleads.
Rather than his usual dishevelled look, Stanhope looks boyish, wearing an ice-hockey shirt and appearing suitably buoyant. His exuberance may have run away with him in his Palin routine, but the vitality of this engrossing comedian ranges over more pressing issues for his countrymen, such as free healthcare. Americans, he says, are always delighted when something is free but free healthcare will only encourage the obese to tuck in even more heartily. Besides, it would be just another example of the false hope that Stanhope says "we [the US] give our kids freely", as opposed to the attitude in the UK, which is: "Here's a Guinness, you're screwed."
There's a sense that Stanhope likes the straight-talking attitude of us Brits. On this night, there's every sign that the feeling is mutual.
Q&A with Doug Stanhope www.courier-journal.com
9th March 2009
Doug Stanhope is a sorcerer in the dark art of stand-up comedy. Through over eighteen years of trial and error, he has managed to burn bridges with many comedy club owners and bookers with his decidedly un-mainstream material. Nowadays, he plays non-comedy venues, for example The Pour Haus on Saturday the 14th. As of press time, he is currently down south at a poker tournament with adult film stars. Somehow, he managed to find time to get to a computer and type answers to my inane questions. My questions are in bold font, his answers are in regular text.
After your Louisville show, your next stop is St. Louis six days later. Is it going to take that long to recover from playing this town?
Recover? I've been a constant state of terminal hangover since the late 90's. Recovery will come swiftly in my sleep one of these nights and will be permanent.
Is Bingo, your crazy baldheaded performance artist girlfriend, accompanying you on this tour?
Bingo picks and chooses the dates she wants to accompany me - usually it's in the cities where hot chicks from MySpace would fuck me if I were alone. She's savvy like that. Oh, and no, she has no concerns about my odds in Louisville.
Looking at your tour itinerary, I don't see any venues that can be considered "comedy clubs". What has caused you to avoid those establishments, when possible?
Comedy clubs tend to attract crowds who have no idea what type of act they are going to see and that can lead to serious disappointment or outright hatred with my act. If a club books acts like Dave Coulier and Michael Winslow most of the year, they will attract an audience that expects that shit. They tend to queer at rape or abortion material. Besides, I have a strong enough core audience who will show up wherever I play so I can charge less and make more by working rock n roll bars that dont have the overhead of a comedy club.
Who are some of your favorite comedians working today?
Sean Rouse, Louis CK, Dave Attell, Brendon Walsh, Gary Busey, Glenn Wool - I could go on.
When you last played here in 2007, someone in the crowd yelled "Joe Francis!" and you replied "Joe Francis. He's an asshole. You'll never meet him." Do you have any good Joe Francis asshole stories or was he just an in-general douche?
I remember that guy. What a dick, yelling out at my show. For shame. Joe Francis is worse than your average douche. He's pure, unadulterated evil. As the black midget says to Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa "Your soul is dog shit and everything about you is fucking ugly." I say the same to Joe Francis.
I know you are a Libertarian, but you endorsed Obama after the Libertarians nominated Bob Barr. How the hell could they do that? Do you have any suggestions for the LP cultivating legit candidates instead of ex-Dems and ex-Reps?
I think they'll have to completely change the name of the party to distance themselves from the buffoonery that was the Barr/Root ticket. Our best hope would be to have an independent candidate like Jesse Ventura or the like who runs pragmatically on basic libertarian principles without having to carry the baggage of the LP.
I've never seen a picture of you with a full beard, which puts you at odds with most Louisville men. Can you grow one in time for the show?
Beard? You mean Bingo? How dare you. I'm not gay. I just have some curiosities.
What can the audience expect at your show? Also, what do you expect of them? Ideally or otherwise.
They can expect someone to yell out random names from my past only to be berated from the stage. They can expect me to be drinking quite a bit and they can expect life-changing knowledge from a prophet who can see into the future. They can expect to meet the person of the dreams who will lock eyes with them from across the room. They can expect the world only to have all those expectations drained out of them yet again. But they'll still have a great night because they're used to that kind of shit from this awful, unjust life.
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I'm impressed that the Courier Journal didn't feel the need to censor any 'bad' language in this interview. Respeck!
DOUG STANHOPE Doug Stanhope talks shock and is an inveterate potty-mouth -- but the dude's smarter than any of us. --Libby Molyneaux April 11, 2009
laweekly.com
L.A. WEEKLY: Why are you so popular with British audiences?
Beats the fuck outta me. They definitely have a better appreciation for live entertainment and more patience as an audience and I suppose that stems from having really shitty television. Once they have 300 channels and DVR they will become chatty, short attention-span bores like American crowds.
If this Wikipedia is to be believed, you live in Bisbee, Arizona -- why?
Wikipedia is not to be believed, especially mine. It used to say I was a cast member of The View and born a hermaphrodite. But I do live in Bisbee, AZ. I can't tell you why. To make it big, I guess. Plus, I have a wall of stolen clocks as a collection and Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time, saving me a lot of trouble every six months. L.A. got to a point where it wasn't worth living there despite the free money they'd throw at you every year to do shitty projects. I'm a stand-up and that's all I want to do right now. There's no reason to live someplace you loathe.
What religious group hates you the most?
Christians get most air-time in my act but none are less retarded than the next. Alcoholics Anonymous might be the silliest in that they tell agnostics to invent your own god and then bow down to it. If you can't tell that the religion you invented is fake, maybe drinking isn't your worst problem.
What about you would most surprise your fans?
At home, I hang around with neighbor Dave talking about weed killer. I know the folks at Safeway by name and watch a lot of Wife Swap and Intervention . I'm producing a documentary about a local Bisbee guy trying to become the NFL's oldest rookie.
Is Obama joke-proof? Have you made fun of him yet?
He's not inherently funny -- he doesn't inspire comedy. His election diffused racial tension almost immediately so far as standup is concerned. But the role of government in our private lives is so completely out of control that it doesn't matter who sits in the throne, those issues will always be omnipresent. Omnipresent. Like I'd ever use that word in a bar conversation. Pompous douchebag, fake intellectual wannabe. I probably misused it anyway.
I think you might be a comic genius -- comment?
Oh, I'd say I am without question a genius -- until they come up with a stronger word, which I should really be working on inventing. I think I can be good at what I do, which is narrow in scope, attractive to a limited audience and like most standup comedy, will be as timeless as organic mayonnaise in hot tropical sun. But for now it's fun.
What's the most intoxicated you've ever performed?
If I could remember, then I couldn't have been that fucked up. The only times I remember that I was super out of control were in shows that didn't matter (to me) where I wasn't the headliner or it was a showcase 15-minute spot at an L.A, comedy club, etc. Times where it was gonna fuck up people's entire night. I'm sure if I sat here long enough, I'd pull up some memory of someone telling me I'd never be back.
You won the Strathmore Press Award -- who else has won that?
Nobody. It was an award invented at the Edinburgh Festival by people who thought I deserved the Perrier Award when I hadn't performed the required minimum performances to qualify. It doesn't matter. All awards are just somebody's opinion, no different than the hate mail from some shithead who thinks I suck for whatever reason. But it's something for Wikipedia to take the place of the bullshit.
You also said you'd like to end your career with a "End of the World" concert on 12/20/12 -- the eve of the purported end of time according to the Mayan calendar. Is that still your plan?
I don't know if it will be the end of my career but we're certainly gonna put on a fucking monster show down in Bisbee with only a very limited amount of tickets and one hell of an after-party at the house. Fuck the mess, it's the end of the world. And if it's not, I'll be selling the Mayan Calendar Part II on Amazon the next day.
Anything else you'd like to tell L.A. Weekly readers?
Your coffee is getting cold and you've been taking up that seat for two hours. Maybe she meant she'd meet you at a different Starbucks.
Did you hear the one about the tsunami? The modern Lenny Bruce talks to Lynn Crosbie about why he finds natural disasters, 'brain rape' and overpopulation so darn funny
LYNN CROSBIE
April 25, 2009
theglobeandmail.com
'Expect the worst!" This is how Toronto's Annex Wreck Room is billing Doug Stanhope's arrival tonight for the first Canadian show in a gruelling, months-long tour that will also see him hit Montreal in July.
Who is Doug Stanhope? According to him, "I am a comic, a drunk and lover of losers. Losers have the best stories and all the empathy. I am old and soft in the middle. I think I'm the oldest guy on MySpace. Touch my belly. Go ahead, touch it. I am a road pig, I travel doing standup of a cruel and unusual sort, feeding on chaos in a world where adrenalin seems to be a controlled substance."
Stanhope, 42, is also a libertarian of the most demonic order, one who uses scabrous humour to express his loathing of organized religion, the psychopharmaceutical industry, capitalism, anti-drug and smoking legislation, abuses of justice, immigration policy, the prison system, pedophilia (he has published a book about baiting and hooking pedophiles online), and anything else that hinders or deforms the individual human spirit.
This description barely scratches the surface of the man who ranks among standup geniuses Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks, yet, as Robert Chalmers of Britain's Independent newspaper once observed, Stanhope has a "perverse indifference to fame."
I interviewed Stanhope on his cellphone about a week ago, briefly, while he stood outside his Los Angeles hotel to have a cigarette. "How's the tour going?" I asked. "The tour?" he replied incredulously. "It's been going for 19 years."
Several days later, we spoke again. He was lying down in a New Jersey hotel, steeped in "filth, stewing in my own excess with a notebook and a mini-recorder, watching Fox News, looking for ideas. "You almost pray for another tsunami," he says, "instead of more news about the economy. Or pirates. I'm leaving that alone."
Will he be talking about Canadian politics at his Toronto stop? "No," he says flatly. "Do you know who our prime minister is?" I ask. "No. I don't care!" he barks, then expounds on his theory of "brain rape" - about all the useless information we are forced to assimilate every day, leaving us incapable of remembering anything of value.
So I don't get a spoiler, but he says he will be doing new material in Toronto. The problem is that his rabid fans (recently, a kid ran onto the stage and dropped a bag of coke on his stool, under the spotlight) always record him and jam the results on YouTube. The result is that new material becomes old within hours of each show.
"People will leave," Stanhope always says of his incendiary shows. His only film performance to date is in The Aristocrats (a film in which a variety of comics perform the same vulgar joke) and his version actually manages to shock - an incredible accomplishment, in context. On a car trip with two friends, years ago, I played Stanhope's CD Sicko, and was told to turn it off or be ejected myself.
Those who stick around, however, may expect an evening of raunch and blue-black mayhem, tempered or rewarded by the acuity of his sociopolitical analyses. One of his better-known bits, for example, about abortion, is on one level an edgy, hilarious take on an aborted fetus in heaven, its pinched face filled with rage as it confronts one of its parents for having a good, long time down there. On the other hand, when the bit peaks, it is a vicious and stunning indictment of anti-abortion advocates.
Such is the fate of the alternative modern comedian: He suffers from what author Will Kaufman calls "irony fatigue," that is, the tension that arises when a deadly serious social critic is also funny, and can therefore never be taken seriously.
It was Stanhope who told me about Kaufman's book, the first time we spoke, when I accused him (like other, infamously and deathly serious comics) of spending his spare time highlighting passages in Matthew Arnold's critical essays and frowning in thought, and of not being the drunken maniac he presents onstage, night after night. He was, in fact, soberly reading a book of 1960s slang, looking, as always, for material. "They used to call stomachs 'meat bags,' " he told me.
In spite of his persona (stark-raving) and having been described by one journalist, as "a feral, aggressive man," Stanhope is, one-on-one, exquisitely polite and affable, if razor-sharp and so lurid as to be obscene. "I can't write that," I whimpered on many occasions, as he tossed out remarks about the upside of "incentive-based eugenics."
He was joking - and he wasn't. Overpopulation is one of Stanhope's greatest ecological concerns, one he mounts as a diatribe against, say, white trash, to whom he would like to offer, in exchange for voluntary sterilization, tickets to a Ted Nugent show or a case of Sunny Delight. "We keep inviting people to the party and the keg is dry."
When I compliment him on his satirical skills, he informs me that it doesn't matter what he says. When you look back at someone like Lenny Bruce, he tells me, he is "still relevant. The topics never change. Comics keep repackaging the punchlines but they have not made a single bit of difference and they never will."
On the tragicomic note (Stanhope describes Bruce as having effectively killed himself begging to be taken seriously), I ask him why so many gifted comics are bedevilled, often coming to terrible ends. "You only think this because the tragic ones stand out," he says.
That's what he says, but his own excesses (or "excess in moderation" as he calls it in his act) and his dark fatalism speak to his place in the Mitch Hedberg/ John Belushi/ Sam Kinison tradition.
Whom does he admire? Dave Chapelle, Ricky Williams, Kurt Cobain: Men who had everything, saw how "empty" it all was and "gave it the finger." His fans? "Sad, fat men." His groupies? "I told you. Sad, fat men."
His favourite joke? A sweet sort of Zen koan about a farmer holding pigs up to reach apples in an orchard. His reputation? The modern, gnarlier Byron: mad, bad and dangerous to know. His dream? "Never to suck."
So why not do as the venue announcement demands, and come out, "eat your young, and spend the nanny money on beer."
Doug Stanhope known for biting cultural commentary PHOTO BY BRIAN HENNIGAN
By John Staton,
StarNewsOnline.com
August 5, 2009
For nearly two decades now, stand-up comedian Doug Stanhope has been shocking, offending and delighting audiences with his profane pronouncements. And while Stanhope has built a base of fans who love his raw persona, there's something deeper there. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called his act "some of the sharpest and most biting cultural commentary you'll see in a comedy club." Stanhope is performing Tuesday at City Stage in downtown Wilmington, and the StarNews caught up with the surprisingly well-mannered comic recently for a quick interview.
So, you're recording a CD at your City Stage show. I miss the days of comedy albums. Do people still listen to those?
Yeah, I think everyone's just downloading them onto iPods now. I can't keep up. I'm hittin' that age where I hit my technological wall.
You're 42, right?
Yeah, and it's an ugly 42. It doesn't get any better, either. This isn't some curve that you get around.
What are your thoughts on the state of stand-up today?
I think it's actually a lot better than any time I've been around in comedy. There's just a lot more original and unique acts. When I got into stand-up comedy it was 1990 and it was just at the death of the comedy boom. There was just a million Jerry Seinfelds and Paul Reisers and whatnot. They were pretty much clones of one another. I don't know if this will turn into that, where everybody is a Patton Oswalt, but it's a good time to do comedy.
Who are some of the best stand-ups working today, in your estimation?
I think Louis CK is probably the best working right now ... I've never broken it down (as to why), only because that tends to ruin comedy, but for what he does, it's inventive ... Dave Attell is always, any comic will say he's probably the best joke writer out there. There are so many guys out there that you wouldn't even know that I would count amongst my favorites. That's why the Internet is so fantastic, because (unknowns) don't need to count on Comedy Central to become known. You send out a link and people can have a fan base who have never been on TV or had to suffer through a week at a Funny Bone.
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