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Re: CDR: BJ Novak / Jerry Minor / Jen Kirkman / Marc Maron / Paul F. Tompkins??
Jerry Minor, sporting a loud plaid suit, fedora and fake mustache, took the stage and nailed Steve Harvey with a brilliant impression. He got the voice, the exaggerated eyeball-rolling, the chronic mispronunciation of names and the generally obnoxious attitude that typifies Harvey's schtick. With smooth jazz playing in the background, Jerry reenacted the last ten minutes of an average Harvey morning show, in which he starts by giving blessings but winds up cursing both his fate and his more successful friends. He closed with some plugs for the previous performers (again mispronouncing their names), and added comments to many ("Bob Odenkirk: they should get him on Mad TV... He'd turn it into Odenkirk TV!"). After reporting who would be at the Comedy Union or wherever else, "Steve" got to Sarah: "Sarah Silverman will be fucking Jimmy Kimmel later tonight." (CDR, M Bar, 1.27.04)
Jen Kirkman performs the rare feat of doing very personal comedy without giving the feeling that she's in a therapy session unloading her baggage onto the audience. She has straight jokes, but the stuff that sticks with you is the family anecdotes, which combine hilarious impressions of her mother and father with bizarre situations to paint a picture of Jen's youth that is as funny as it is distinct. Jen remembers (and who wouldn't?) hearing her mother yell at her father, in a vaguely Brahmin accent: "'I just cahn't take it anymore! You put one window-shade down and leave the other one up, it's like we're living in a haunted house!' My question is, what kind of lame-ass haunted house did my mother go to as a kid? Was there a werewolf who didn't use a coaster on the coffee table?" There are light overtones of a religious upbringing in Jen's act, as when she relates the day she decided God was asleep at the switch: for a school recital, she went in dressed as Mozart, and not only did no one in her family think to warn her of the ridicule she might face, but her mother actually said, "Oh yes, wear the powdered wig and the frilly shirt, it's great." Jen chose this day to ask out the coolest boy in her class, and he responded, "Is Jen asking, or is Mozart?" Kirkman's clever retort? "Jen-zart's asking you out." Not all of Jen's material is strong (I can't figure out why she opened with the story about her first attempt at comedy, which ended before it began as the drunken emcee pulled down his pants, noticed his penis sticking out of his underwear, and then pulled them down as well... although, the punchline about the riot that ensued -- "I guess when guys see a live penis, the only thing they can think to do is punch someone" -- is funny), but her stage presence certainly is. If for no other reason than to prove that there are as many different types of female comics working today as there are male types, I hope Jen gets a chance to perform on TV. (Conan Showcase, M Bar, 4.5.04)
BJ Novak, as I might've mentioned earlier in the thread, is planning on getting a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for "cliché." He noted that "triple threat" is an odd name for someone who can act, sing and dance, because that doesn't sound very threatening. BJ then told a story about his sister being sexually assaulted when she was younger, but the guy never went to jail because his sister wouldn't testify. Just recently, BJ was at Disneyland and saw the guy on the "It's a Small World" ride. Then BJ rather abruptly ended his set and challenged the audience to a game: he wanted to prove that truth was not stranger than fiction as everyone said. The problem was, everyone was too tired to think of good examples of truth, which was a pretty vague request to make of any audience, let alone one that had been up all night watching comedy. I can't remember the examples BJ finally got (one was probably the show itself), but he proved his point by simply adding a hundred to whatever was in the example, thus fictionalizing it and making it stranger. Good joke, bad time to try it. Given how funny BJ is, this set was a bit disappointing, but who can blame a comic for not bringing their best in the four o'clock hour? In fact, I'm still baffled as to how the other comics managed to do as well as they did. (CDR Anniversary, M Bar, 10.1-10.2.04)
Paul F. Tompkins started to bust out the new classic "Stromboli" joke right off the top, but Doug interrupted and led Paul on a tangent about how annoying street jokes are, and how people who think they're good at telling jokes really just drag them out for way too long, over-embellishing the details with pointless color. "There's a reason Bazooka Joe is only two panels," Paul concluded, which made me cry with laughter. Anyway, then he did the Stromboli joke, which is still funny but maybe didn't get the usual response because of the preceding tangent (I wondered if the audience thought Paul was guilty of his own pet peeve while spinning the yarn -- if so, they were wrong, but for whatever reason they didn't explode like M Bar did at the same material last week). After some more banter with Doug, Paul fled on a big laugh and made way for more. (The Benson Interruption, Comedy Central Stage, 3.16.05)
I missed Maron's set because AST crashed a bunch of times and I lost a lot of recaps.
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August 19, 2009, 2:04 PM
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