Stand Up New York, Roy Wood Jr.’s, and Joey “Coco” Diaz

THIS COLUMN ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON theinterrobang.com

New Joke Night down at Fat Black Pussycat is always fun and the night I went Dave Attell showed up and kept the audience laughing constantly for an extended set. And of course, he came to the stage in his jacket and his backpack. Wil Sylvince is the MC and he did a back and forth with him from the stage occasionally asking him questions and his opinion on certain topics. Dave is such an amazing improviser and talked about everything from tattoos to the Royal Wedding. Others on the show were Adrienne Iapalucci, Sam Morrill, Matteo Lane, and Roy Wood Jr. who has so much going on. He told me he’s doing the Roxy Theatre with Trevor Noah, and is working on a pilot for Comedy Central called “Re-Established”, a buddy comedy about two probation officers handling their case load along with their personal life. Set in the South. He of course will be one of the probation officers. I can already hear the excuses of the cons on probation who will be trying to explain why they haven’t actually violated the rules of their probation. Aside from his duties on The Daily Show he’s also planning new episodes of This Is Not Happening, and is working on material for his second hour special which he plans to call No One Loves You, which he’s been working on for over a year. I asked him where he can run a whole hour and he said he runs 15 minutes on sets in the city and longer sets during the weekends when he’s on the road. This is a very hard working man! He said he likes to talk about race and likes to go places where race is an issue. He’ll be down at The Cellar this whole month every Wednesday night preparing for the special.

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David Koechner from The Office and Anchorman made a rare appearance in town headlining Gotham and I knew I had to be there. He’s really such a nice humble guy, and as soon as he saw me at my usual table he came right over to say “hi” and thanked me for coming, which was very nice of him to do. Charles McBee was hosting and Charles does a monthly Saturday night show in the downstairs lounge at Gotham called “The Friend Zone” where he invites friends from Comedy Central and Netflix to come and perform. David did such an interesting show. First of all the crowd was packed with his fans and as he hit the stage someone called out for a Bill Brasky quote which is a recurring sketch he did on SNL with Will Ferrell. He talks a lot about his family, his five kids and three dogs, and added a lot of his acting ability to his performance. He also mixed crowd work with a lot of storytelling, and did something I had never seen before. He left the stage and went over to each and every table in the club to test his theory that most men are with women that are better looking than they are. I’ve seen comics leave the stage before but never to tour the entire club. Luckily he knew me and skipped my table! (LOL) He closed his hour long set with some musical numbers in the character of a southern guy named T-Bone, southern accent and all, and accompanied on stage by a guitarist and it was fantastic. They were really dirty songs and on one of them he led the audience in the chorus of “Fuck you, Fuck you, and Fuck you too!” And they all sang along. It was a really great and very unique show.

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The powers that be over at Stand Up New York are working constantly to make that club not only “stand-up” but stand out from the other clubs by being extraordinarily innovative. Stand Up came out with what they’re calling the “Laugh Pass”, an annual membership for “the ultimate comedy fan.” For the very reasonable price of $99. a year, you get an amazing amount of things including access to see unimited shows, where you can literally laugth all night, no drink minimum ever, free drink upon arrival, free ticket to bring a friend to each show, preferred seating with this VIP membership getting you seated first, invites to special club events, access to live studio podcast recordings, in their upstairs studios, and as if that’s not enough you even get a bottle of wine within a week of your birthday, and advance notice when celeb comics are added, which in this club’s case is fairly often. Just about a week or so ago it was Craig Robinson doing 55 minutes, a drop in from Chris Rock, and then 2 visits from George Wallace who brought Jerry Seinfeld in with him the second time. The next thing they’ll probably do is send a chauffeured limo to your house to pick you up and have models escort you into the club.

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Comedy Juice is always good but it had an exceptional line-up this past week with Sasheer Zamata, Judah Friedlander, whose amazing Netflix special I finally got to watch thanks to Ron Bennington’s suggestion, Hari Kondabolu, Dan St. Germaine and Jamie Lee, who will be headlining Carolines very soon. If there was an award for style in comedy Sasheer would definitely win, and her hairdo was so cool you might have expected to see it in Wakanda. And then Chris D’Elia surprised the crowd with an extended set and got a huge ovation on coming out and on leaving.

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Ross Everett made a name for himself as a YouTube star with millions of views and subscribers, so when I got invited to see his one man show at The PIT I decided to go and check it out. It’s called “Stop Stopping The Unstoppable” and I got the idea that it was a motivational type show, but I wasn’t really told any of the details. I also didn’t realize he was doing it in the persona of a guy named Dale Thorhammer. I was coming from another event that ended at 8 P.M. and his show started at 8. The surprise came when I got there a little bit late after the show already had started and made my way to my seat which was saved for me of all places, in the very front row. He noticed me and made a comment that made the audience laugh by saying, “You’re a hard guy to miss!” But he went on with the show. The woman next to me was taking notes throughout the show which made me think he was a real motivational speaker especially when he came out with lines like “It takes a powerful person to take a step towards changing their lives and an even more powerful person to guide you.” but then I noticed something strange about the way he was acting. And he would say things like “ Live a powerful life that I can take credit for” and he started removing articles of his clothing while making certain points. It wasn’t until almost the end after he instructed us to start massaging our neighbors and the girl behind me started massaging my shoulders, that someone whispered to me that it was a parody and then it made perfect sense. I think it was even more fun because I came in late. It’s such a unique show and the audience loved it. Afterwards a bunch of us went to a bar to hang out and I got to talk to Dale about Ross Everett. He described the show as a parody of personal development of which he did a lot over the years, and he said it’s an homage of love to those who do it seriously, like Tony Robbins. He studied clown work in France, and also describes the show as “personal development work wrapped in idiocy.” He had done some stand-up and sketch comedy in LA where he’s from, but said that everything changed for him after he went to clown school in France, the same one that Sacha Baron Cohen attended. He said that other comics noticed the change in him after he came back. He developed the character of Dale Thorhammer over the year and a half he was developing the show, and says it’s a character that’s part of him that he represses and doesn’t allow himself to be. He’s gearing up for a six week run at The Marsh Theatre in San Francisco starting June 22nd, and was thrilled to be able to perform it at The PIT. He stopped by the Comedy Matters office a few days later for us to shoot a cool video which will be up very soon.

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Marty Dundics of The Weekly Humorist has been producing comedy shows at the hip and trendy Mailroom down on Wall Street, so I popped in to see what was going on. He preceded the show with a writer’s networking event which was cool getting to meet other writers for different publications. On the show the night I went was Adam Mamawala, and Neko White who went on first because he had other shows to do uptown. Neko is only 25 but is celebrating 11 years in the business already. Do the math! He started at 14. He said the only club he hasn’t passed yet is The Cellar which he hopes to do in the near future. And he says he’s still shocked when young guys his age ask him for advice cause even after 11 years he still feels like he’s so young. He summed it up by saying, “We’re all fighting the no’s until we get a yes!”

And I had a great convo with comic Keenan Steiner who talks about himself as a “sneaky gay” about how even gay people can be confused by the number of genders people are claiming, and how at one time in his adult-hood he went out with girls but realized later on that he preferred men. It was a lengthy in-depth conversation that we both appreciated being able to have so openly, in this day and age when so many people are offended by so many things. I think the difference is showing respect for people’s proclivities.

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I’ve been catching up on Showtime’s hit “I’m Dying Up Here”. It’s a show I love especially since meeting Jim Carrey and the cast at last summer’s Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal. But I saw my buddy Joey “Coco” Diaz playing a tough character named Taffy in a few episodes and I asked him what it was like being on such a great show. His answer was “All I can say is that it was a blast doing the show. From Melissa Leo to Brad Garret to Erik Griffin everybody is on point and it was a real honor to be on it with them.”

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Tom Cotter dropped by Stand-Up New York to do a set and told me he’s a regular on Tom Shillue’s show on Fox News Radio and this week he’ll be a guest on Anthony Cumia’s show on Compound Media. I was telling him how there are very few people left who tell real jokes like he does and how that was what allowed him to be able to get in so many jokes in 90 seconds when he did America’s Got Talent. We came to the conclusion that his specialty in telling jokes was misdirection, which is an art form unto itself and makes the jokes even funnier.

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My last story is one of synchronicity which I love. I had left an event in Times Square around midnight, and was just wandering around. For some reason I decided to cross to the other side of Broadway, the side where Carolines is and as I was waiting to cross a street I noticed a guy in a polka dot shirt who seemed to be waving at me, but in the light I couldn’t be certain and I didn’t want to wave back and find out that he had actually been waving to someone else. That has happened to me and it’s embarrassing. When the light changed and we walked towards each other I saw that he was indeed waving to me. It was my buddy Tamer Kattan who had just come from opening for Maz Jobrani at Carolines. They were there all weekend. He told me what a special guy Maz is. The reason I say it was sycnhronicitous is that he was leaving for LA the very next day to live there and be part of Levity Entertainment Group as the Director of Brand Marketing and Relationships. Levity bought up all the Improvs and they want to make sure that as Levity grows that “the integrity of the brand stays intact.” He said they as a company love everything that Budd Friedman created and they want to make sure that in every club they open that “the soul of what Budd created is still there.” And then he told me that when he was looking up info about The Improv he came across a video of me performing there, and actually remembered some of what I said on stage. THAT is really cool. What was even cooler was that as we were talking people came by who were at the show and kept complimenting him on his performance, and asking for photos. And then after that happened a few times a couple came along and the guy said to me, “Are you Jeffrey Gurian?” And when I admitted that I was he said “Loved you with Patrice on Black Phillip” and that really made my night. People still listening and learning from what we put down on Black Phillip back in ’08.

And with that I’m OUT!!!

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