Matt McCusker, who most people know as Shane Gillis’s partner on Matt and Shane’s secret podcast is also an excellent stand up. I think this is his first special. It’s a lot of fun. His style is so close to Shane’s, it’s so obvious these guys are super close friends. They’ve just been riffing with each other for a long time. They are different though, and Matt has a lot of great stuff about being a dad and marriage and modern life. It’s a lot of fun. A crowd pleaser.
Enjoy SPEED OF LIGHT
And if you’re in LA this Tues night , come to The Hollywood Roosevelt for another great show of The Hollywood All-Stars. Last weeks show was sold out and an amazing crowd. Come down and join us this Tuesday.
Okay, so two powerhouse specials dropped from the skies at the same time this week. One of them from Netflix, and the other from Amazon Prime. Sort of interesting too, one of them, Mark Normand, is something of a new guy that’s been around forever who’s just now becoming a nationally known above the thickets player. Someone I’ve been a fan of since I first saw him maybe five years back messing around on the internet. Back then he was doing bits during the pandemic, running around NY, putting his own stuff up on the web, just being his own guy. I wrote a piece on him in my book, Standupworld, and have always kind of sensed him getting to here. He’s always just made me laugh, right from the first time I ever saw him do anything, whether it was stand up or internet pieces.
OLD FASHIONED NEW FASHIONED
His act is an old fashioned one in a way that I like, in fact love. A throwback, where he just tosses the jokes. Slings them one after another, non-stop. Buddy Hackett. Flip Wilson, Shecky Greene. A modern take on the comedy version of a batting practice machine for one liners. He never stops shooting them out and never really seems to care what the audience is thinking. He likes when they laughs, but if they don’t, he moves on.
At the same time his work and his mode is so contemporary. It so pleasantly pops and screams of the current time he’s in. He’s completely of the moment. I think he has eleven or something podcasts going at any one time. He’s Joe Rogan adjacent, yet unlike a lot of that Joe-Ro squad, he would of, and was, making it without the Rogan roadway having opened up for him. He, Sam Morril, Joe List, and a group of shabby chic Manhattan comics had their own highway home, so jumping in with the Austin kids sometimes seems to be just another in a long line of ways Normand has figured out how to get free drinks. He doesn’t seem to need Joe as much as some of the others do which kind of gives him a special little shuffle. Charlie Chaplin as a 2023 stand up with a little bit of a drinking problem.
As far as this special. It’s good. It’s not his best. It is a true success though. Without a doubt. It’s nowhere near his Paper Tiger, or his Sticks and Stones or, Bleak to Dark, or anything like that. He wanted a Netflix special. Wanted to play in the big room, and he did it. Did it very well. He didn’t change his style. He didn’t stretch, didn’t even dig deep, most of the stuff is more or less a re-packaged version of other stuff he’s done on Out to Lunch and his half hour Netflix spot, which is fine, because as I said, he’s been underground in the subway world of the podcast gangs with hundreds and thousands of fans and this is about him now coming up top to play to millions of the surface dwellers. A lot of them haven’t seen him, so it was smart to go with his best moves.
I’M LATE FOR THE SHOW ‘OH NO!’
I personally wish he had dumped the cute opening where he’s running late to the show. I wish someone had told him how many guys did that exact thing in the 80’s and the 90’s and even how his idol Jerry did the billionaire version of it for Netflix just a few years back jumping from a helicopter or a jet or something into the river getting scooped out of the water and whisked in a speedboat to the show. I suspect though, as this was one of the earlier one of the specials where Netflix is paying these guys nothing, truly nothing, and giving them the specials back in two years, they’re probably giving them less notes. I do know if it was the Robbie Praw of a few years back who had spent real money and felt like he had the right to stick his nose in there, he would have given his ‘we don’t like any opening bits’ speeches. The truth is, he was right. I’ve come to understand it. ‘Get the damn thing going’. Luckily the ‘Ohhh, I’m late!’ bit was short, and true to Normand’s style the run was done and over quick.
(Note; If you want to see Classic Mark Normand, watch Mark Doorman. Normand The Doorman.) It’s still my favorite version of the guy and beyond his jokes, the best example of his voice as a comic.)
But watch his Netflix special ‘Soup to Nuts’. If you don’t have Netflix, use your parents account while you still can. You got about a minute. This will be a good one to go out on. He’ll make you laugh. He never fails this little tramp.
JIM GAFFIGAN
The other stand up with a new special out is, Jim Gaffigan. Gaffigan is a guy that’s been around forever, this is his tenth special. I’ve never met him. We have a lot of mutual friends, and I have tons of respect for him, his work ethic and all he’s done. I can’t say I’ve ever been what you would call a ‘big fan.’ Not really. Not until this special. He always came off too much like, yeah, a hard worker, but more like he was doing stuff that I thought maybe would have been better in the Sunday Funnies than stand-up comedy. I was wrong though. What I saw over the years maybe was, for me, back then, too clean, but I also was gone from stand-up and removed from it in a self protective way, and when I was in stand-up I was so messed up that I never appreciated a guy like his work ethic, and the craftsmanship of an act like his, and A) it was why I was never all that good, and B) it was why what he was doing couldn’t appeal to me.
I have been going back these last couple years and watching his stuff. I’ve grown a healthy appreciation for what he does, for how good he is at finding humor in the thin air of life, then blowing it up into silly stand up balloons he uses to amuse, tickle and tease.
THE ‘I WISH’ METER
It’s ironic, for me, when I watch a comic, my only way to seriously judge a routine or the act is ‘Do I wish I wrote it?’ Do I wish that were my bit?’ For me, Mark Normand will regularly toss out at least ten jokes in an hour of stand up that I would go. ‘Damn. I wish I wrote that.’ Maybe more. The rest was great. I was glad the audience was laughing. Respected it. Knew why they were, but it was the ones that send the ‘I wish I wrote that’ meter into the red that told me how otherworldly the work was.
In Soup to Nuts it only was in the red once or twice. Once for sure for an abortion bit I’d heard before, but it is a fine joke. The rest of the special I respected, got, understood why it was made, done, told, yes, it was all good, yet the meter went off just a couple times. All in all it was fine work. A solid showing.
DARK PALE SET THE METER OFF
For Dark Pale, it was the opposite. I can’t think of too much stuff in Jim Gaffigan’s other special’s that I’ve wished I wrote, or coveted in any way, yet there are so many superlative bits in this special that I would die to have written and be doing now, regularly. This special is just the opposite than Mark’s. This is a lane change. A nice one too. It feels organic. Really from his gut. It is darker, Jim Gaffigan and there’s some seriously funny bits here that I can’t help thinking are only as a result of it.
Yeah, I like the joke slinging. I like it from being in the audience though. It’s what makes me laugh hard, but truthfully, what I want to be when I grow up (Ha!) is a great story-teller. A great usurper of my life. That’s what Jim Gaffigan is. What Pryor, or Cosby was, like Dane Cook did in Above it All, his last special with those great stories about making it in comedy. Like Burr did in Red Rocks. Like Theo Von is doing with his nutty take on the world, Gaffigan does it here beautifully.
He does a piece on a plane crash that made me howl. His stuff on his kids is better than it’s ever been, darker of course but realer, told with a wash of veracity that makes you laugh in an offbeat way. The balloon trip bit is a solid story so well told. (I do have to say, I saw him on Rich Eisen talking about taking his kid to hockey in the early mornings, and the gruel and grind that comes with that, and he said ‘I would really rather the kid just go into rehab one day.’ and it made me laugh harder than the stuff about the kids in the act. So true!)
I also want to say, I love the background set in this thing. It’s so evocative. There’s moments when you couple it with his dark, open collared tux, and you feel like you’re watching a long scene in a Thornton Wilder play.
This is a lot of fun for the opposite reason of Mark’s. Mark’s is great to see someone you knew would hit the stride he’s hitting, and to know how much he has ahead of him. It’s a well played ball in that he didn’t try to change lanes too soon. He trusted what he does. Gaffigan’s is different. It’s a sturdy legged veteran, still passionate somehow, still burrowed down, working it out, ten specials in, yet in a new gear, with some new inflections. More George Carlin than Kelly Monteith. He’s somehow found a way to hit the lower notes harder than he’s done before. Showing more teeth, but not snarling. It feels real. It’s nicely done.
Okay, enough on these two bozos! If you’re in LA and you want to see some serious clowns, come to a epic good comedy show at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel this Tues. night. August 1st.
And, if you ask nicely, I’ll do the six of seven of Jim Gaffigan’s jokes from Dark Pale that I covet, and maybe even the one or two from Soup to Nuts. Either way, come down! The Roosevelt is really one of the best workout rooms in LA.
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Okay, this special is so great. Geoff Asmus makes me laugh so hard. If you watch this special he’s going to be your new favorite comedian. If you like Dave Atell, Jeff Ross, Richard Belzer, or any of the comedians who I’m always writing about as my favorites, just joke slingers, this is your guy. I met him in Boston last year when I was just getting back into stand-up. We were both playing other clubs and got onto one of Josh Mandel’s shows in the basement of some bar, and he came down and really blew me away. I know he’s also a big Comedy Cellar guy. I just like how twisted he is. I don’t want to say too much about the special. Just watch it.
It’s non-stop one joke after the next, he’s been growing on Youtube with reels, in a short doc on him that’s damn brilliant that Tucker Brookshire did called ‘On the Road Again’. He recounts a turning point in it when after ten years one reel finally broke our for him.
GROWING UP CATHOLIC – THE GAME CHANGER
THE BEST JOKE
This happens to be the joke of his that I first saw that got me.
THE ONLY FUNNY WHITE MAN
He’s on the podcast tomorrow too. So we’ll talk about the special and you can hear his take on it so you don’t need to hear me talk much more about it.
Watch it. Then watch him on Standupworld, the podcast! More important, watch his special, then go see him live.
CHECK OUT WILL ON STANDUPWORLD PODCAST #32
Standupworld episode 32 avail right here on Twitter. Brand new format. @AsmusGeoffrey The new special is now up on YouTube and it's great. Also check out Full House Rewind on YouTube with @DaveCoulierpic.twitter.com/THPn9Zag8g
So I took a lot of incoming when I talked about another Netflix special that didn’t quite work for me —the 85 South special.
Now, don’t get me wrong, those guys are hilarious. Their off-the-cuff banter on the podcast is pretty damn good. But when it came to their Netflix special, it felt like they took a detour into improvisational hell. It was like they were just rolling with it, riffing their way through a show that should have been clubbed to death like a baby seal then shelved and re-shot once the guys wrote an act. And that’s where Segura comes in, armed with a well-crafted routine ready to beat a crowd senseless.
From the moment Segura struts onto that stage in “Sledgehammer,” you can feel electricity in the air. He’s firing on all cylinders, delivering punchlines like a Marvel Superhero. It’s as if he spent hours in a lab perfecting the timing of his jokes and the art of comedic precision. The guy is armed with a sledgehammer of laughter and he knows it. This is a special and he’s not taking any chances. He’s not making anything up. Not on this night. On this night he’s eating unleavened off the cuff laughs. He’s doing stuff he knows works and he’s out for blood.
Everything about the special is special. The production value, the lighting, the set design, his wardrobe, the whole thing—it’s like a visual feast for comedy lovers. Director Ryan Polito and his crew managed to capture Segura’s charisma and energy in a way that makes you feel like you’re part of the comedic revolution. There’s a reason it’s the Number one trending show on the platform all week. It’s not an accident. This was planned. A lot of work went into it and guess who did most of it? Tom Segura. He didn’t just let the director and the producer and Netflix and the promoter bust ass. He busted ass.
If you’re thinking wait, all comics that get specials work their asses off! You may be partially right. Not completely though. If they did, all of them would be this good. Bill Burr works this hard. I can tell you that with first hand knowledge. I’ve seen it twice in the two specials I directed and produced with him. Bill Burr understands like very few others what a special is. He works harder than anyone else I know. That’s how I know how good this one is and how bad some of the ones I’ve seen recently are. Marc Maron worked this hard on his recent HBO special. So did Marlon Wayans. The audience smells it.
When I was a kid, the first time I was doing stand up, I didn’t get it. I would get laughs, but I wasn’t that good. I didn’t put the work in. Jay Leno used to give me a hard time. We used to sit at his house and he’d lecture me. ‘You have no act, Binder. You just fuck around on stage. You make jokes with the curtains, talk to the audience, mess around. What jokes you do have you do the same ones every night and just throw them out there. It’s not an act. There’s no pace or energy to it. You’re not writing enough.’
He was dead on. Watch Sledgehammer. This is an act. He comes out and he’s performing. He’s putting on a show. He’s letting you in, revealing himself, yes, but he’s doing it as he’s performing a precise, well planned piece. At the end of the sixty one minutes you know one hell of a lot about him. About his life, his family, his kids, his mom and dad, his tour, and his friends. You know about him meeting and hanging out with Brad Pitt. But everything you learned was in well crafted, well worked jokes. There was no dead air. No lag. No lull. None. It all moves with a great flow.
Again, this may seem like no big deal. As if it doesn’t need to be said. Watch some of the other specials out there right now. It’s not the norm, and where it is the norm, these are the stand outs. Shane Gillis’s special, like I said, the best of the George Carlin specials, Bring the Pain, From Bleak to Dark. I don’t think you see any of the great specials with any crowd work or even B+routines, the best are all cut to the bone, and all have a flow and some version of a theme. You watch closely you can get the sense that there really aren’t segueways needed because the bits lead into each other organically, as they’re all of a piece.
Watch Paper Tiger and notice how the whole special feels like a concept album in that basically it’s all about men and women. It’s almost all some version of dealing with relationships in the modern world. It’s done in such an intelligent way that you don’t know Burr’s done it. Jumping back to his parents relationship, the future with robots, the present with the MeToo stuff, it’s seamless. He doesn’t need segueways. You don’t even notice the shifts. Segura does the same thing here. It’s what Richard Pryor did with his early albums.
That’s what I mean by having a flow. Building an act. You take it for granted when you see it done right. You don’t even see the scene changes when it’s laid out well. And when it isn’t done right? You laugh, but you never get lost in an hour show. You watch it in pieces if you finish it at all. You move on feeling, ‘yeah, that was funny.’ but you don’t you think of it as a piece of art that you want others to see as well. A great stand up special is something you can’t wait to tell others to watch as a favor for them. A gift you want to bestow. A special, a set, a show can have a great title, amazing lighting, be mic’d crisply, but if it isn’t about something, if it isn’t always moving forward, drawing you in, telling you stories and making you want to understand the world this comic comes from like Ari Shaffir’s Jew, then it can be funny, it’s just can’t be special. It won’t be, …Wow.
Segura’s also wonderful here because he’s happy. He’s proud of himself and his art. He knows he’s doing a good job. He’s enjoying himself. He’s not rushing. He stops here and there and just smiles to us. Nods.
‘This is good stuff, huh?’
This is a nice piece they took out that he threw up on Youtube about his neighbor and buddy, Ted Cruz.
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Last week, I wrote a piece on Roseanne not being a Holocaust denier on Theo’s podcast. I stuck up for her, saying that she was being facetious. I guess I was wrong. I received some serious blowback and was told to do some digging by people who apparently are a lot smarter than I am. They claimed to have evidence that she had been a Holocaust denier for years, with reams of receipts showing old Roseanne to be hating on Jews, and even on Blacks. They made me feel like a simpleton. So, I asked them to point me to these receipts because I had rushed to judgment and was too quick to defend Roseanne and Theo.
One person, who goes by the name MINDOG, (Mindog on Youtube and. Twitter) and claims to be something of a Roseanne expert, called me a bastard and told me to look into her old tweets. Another person, JANE DANE, a multiple email writer with too much time on her hands, told me to read “any of the many” articles about Roseanne’s anti-Semitism and even mentioned a photo of her posing as Hitler baking cookies in an oven. She called me a “pathetic creep” and reminded me of how bad “Mind of the Married Man” was (a show she apparently watched every week).
Since they seemed to have more or less accurate information about me, I assumed they must be right about Roseanne as well. But when I did the research they suggested, all I found was a long history of Roseanne being an ardent supporter of Jews, Israel, and even someone who watched the Nuremberg trials with her mother as a child, and was deeply disturbed by the atrocities. I found evidence of her own sense of guilt over her past mistakes, dumb tweets, and the apologies she sent out to people she had offended, including George Soros and Valerie Jarrett. It seemed like she was incredibly hard on herself and genuinely wanted to make amends, even though she kept making more mistakes, telling jokes that didn’t land or making unfounded comments. But she was always sincerely a Jewish woman who strongly stood up for her people.
As I said last week, is she a little nutty? Yeah, so what? She’s a comic, an artist. If she hadn’t been a Trump supporter, most of the people criticizing her would simply walk past the comments without a second thought. That’s the truth, and that’s the real problem. We all think our opinions are correct, so much more grounded and well founded than those of others, but guess what? They’re not. We don’t know anything. None of us do. This is God’s world, and we’re just passing the time. The truth will unfold. However, as Americans, we damn well better be open to others having opinions different and opposed from ours.
At worst, Roseanne made a dumb Holocaust joke that didn’t land. I still believe she was talking about the 2020 election and that’s what offended people. But if it was the Holocaust that caused the anger, as my good friend, another comedian, argues, then it’s even worse. He claims we can’t allow people to make Holocaust jokes, to dress as Hitler giving out cookies. This will just trivialize it all and it has to be stopped. I say bullshit.
That kind of thinking leads to cancellations and ostracization. In another twenty-five years, maybe even less, it could lead to jail time. And after that, we’ll be in a place where drawing anti-Holocaust cartoons in a small newspaper justifies sending a hit squad up the steps to kill everyone on the staff as a strong message. Jewish Fatwas on any comic who finds any of this funny. Mel Brooks got off easy. The next fucker will pay!
Canceling Roseanne, Theo, or any stand-up comic for anything is a bad joke. Don’t do it. God bless Elon Musk for airing Theo’s episode, and fuck you, YouTube. Fuck you. You take everyone’s money, wield all this power, and think you have the right to censor us? I was just on a friend’s podcast, and they got all hush-hush when I teased about vaccine jokes because they didn’t want to be demonetized. Fuck you, YouTube! Fuck you Google. I can’t wait for you to become MySpace. Don’t mess with Theo Von or anyone else. Just take the money and shut the fuck up. No one cares anymore about what you think is misinformation or disinformation. Just take the money and shut the fuck up, or we’ll come up with better platforms, and you’ll become MySpace. It can happen. Fast.
And no, Roseanne is not a Holocaust denier. She’s a standard issue nutbag. So what? So is your sister.
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She thinks no Jews died in the Holocaust? I mean why believe that? Why not just keep trying to make us believe that the World Trade Center buildings were wired in advance to collapse like stacks of pancakes? I mean, do people have that much time on their hands? How bad does Roger Friedman at Showbiz 411 or Room 222 or whatever his sad little website is called need the click bounce from Drudge that he got to start this new forest fire under Roseanne’s ass all over again?
People are saying, “Listen to the whole interview with Theo Von, it vindicates her.” She doesn’t need vindication. You can listen to the truncated one Roger posted to know she wasn’t saying, “Zero Jews died in the Holocaust.” Not at all. It’s damn clear she isn’t saying that. She’s using that as an ironclad, unimpeachable truth to poke fun at something she sees as maybe not seen as so firm and certain: the 2020 election. That’s most likely the heart of the new round of heat.
Yet, ‘they’ just think it’s a better, smarter, more incandescent thing to go after her for. ‘She’s a Holocaust denier.’ ‘She’s evil.’ ‘She’s out of her mind.’ ‘She has to be stopped.’ ‘She shouldn’t be allowed to speak.’
THE REAL STORY
She’s a comic. She was messing around with another comic. That’s the real reason to take her down again. She’s an election denier. And she was being one in a world populated with storm troopers that are poised to jump on anyone that isn’t on their team who say or do anything they think they can exploit. Good one, Roger. You know damn well what she was getting at. Good one, folks that bought Drudge. Good one to all the others that jumped on her this time.
Theo Von thankfully came out in defense of Roseanne.
CAN’T STOP STUPID
That didn’t stop the foolish and the feeble minded. YouTube still took the episode down. Largely thanks to a professional defamer like this guy; Ronald Lauder, the head of the World Jewish League of over-reactors, or whatever Jewish board of whatever he’s the head of, who issued the following stupid statement:
“I am calling on both Apple Music, and Spotify to remove this content from their streaming libraries immediately, for as long as Theo Von’s hateful voice is carried on their platforms, he is in league with those who wish harm to Jews the world over.”
Yeah, sure, Theo Von is in league with those who wish harm to Jews all over the world.
YOU EVER LISTEN TO THEO?
He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He probably doesn’t even know what a matzo ball is. He’s got no gripe with anyone. He likes Roseanne because she’s a stand-up. That’s his tribe. She makes him laugh. Roseanne is a great comic when she’s knuckles down and wants to be. One of the best. Was this funny? Maybe not. She was on a podcast, talking about what her truth is. She doesn’t see the 2020 election as having been real. Get the F over it! I don’t see the Gore election as having been real. I’ll whine about it every chance I get.
Hillary Clinton and her back up band were saying Trump was illegitimate his whole term starting ten minutes into the damn thing. They spent the whole time leading up to his inaugural trying to do everything they could to get the election annulled, started a fake Russian campaign on his administration with illegal misinformation that Clinton paid for, and when he was inaugurated they burned the city up, smashing shit to pieces calling themselves the ‘resistance,’ then lived up to it for four years. So don’t memory hole us all, fellas. Let Roseanne whine if she wants, and if she does, don’t try to gaslight her and us into her being a Holocaust denier because she isn’t. She just isn’t.
OUT OF THEIR MINDS
Is she a little nutty? Uh… Yeah. So are all the people going after her. Out of their minds nutty. Like dogs chasing after cars with low bumpers that are gonna smash their heads in when they slam on the brakes at the first red light. They all need to settle down. In the past I gave Roseanne on here, a hard time because she didn’t do a great Fox Nation special. Because she wasted a prime opportunity to speak her mind. To use her platform. Say what she wanted to say. That being said, she’s a strong comic with a unique voice when she’s in the game skipping rope. Joe Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe and the Austin, TX, new era gatekeepers have given her safe harbor, which I respect. They gave her new wind in a similar way they did Shane Gillis after Lorne Michaels blew his shot with him.
For people to think they can take Roseanne down again now is bullshit.
HOW DARE SHE?
I’d like to see some big-time Democrats, Valerie Jarrett, maybe RFK Jr., or Susan Rice, stick up for her. Tell people to back off. Stick up for cooling the waters. That won’t happen, I know, but let’s be real, no one in their right mind believes this one. Believes Rosanne Barr is a Holocaust Denier. Is it something not to joke about? Maybe. But I don’t know. Are we getting close to not drawing pictures of the big Muslim Kahuna time? Is anything really that scared that we can start tearing people apart for cartoons or sarcastic comments? They just want to hate. That’s at the bottom of this dark pit. They want to hate because she’s talking about 2020 with 2024 up over the next hill. How dare she? We told everyone two nights after the election it was the fairest election ever, and so it was over and that was that. Quit mentioning it. The hell with Roseanne for doing it again. She’s got it coming. She must have taken some horse pills or something.
CAN YOU HANDLE THE TRUTH?
You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? I think Theo Von is CIA. I do. I think he’s a CIA boy. A plant. I don’t even think he’s from the South. I think he’s a Jewish kid from Manhattan who’s putting it all on. Playing dumb. Setting good people like Roseanne up. Getting her to talk shit about the election and the Holocaust. A two-fer. A double banger. You don’t get that lucky and have this kind of publicity if you’re just a funny-as-hell hick with goofy hair. You have to be a Langley-trained Jewish CIA guy. You have to be playing four levels of inter-political-hate chess to know full well how to bring the Hebrew Comic Roseanne, the right-wing hubba-hubba crowd, the anti-Holocaust hoo-hoo-ers, and all the Bannon boy bootlickers tumbling down with one magic bullet. Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA boy. So is Theo Von.
Theo Von knew where this was going. Listen to the whole podcast. He sits there playing naive. Playing simple. He ain’t simple. In ‘Theo talk’; he’s ‘setting Mama up’ . He’s good. Sorry Youtube, #4 on Spotify.
I guess, what I’m really saying is lighten up. Lighten up on Roseanne, lighten up on Theo, lighten up on the Dems, the Repubs, the North and on the South. Just lighten up. Lighten up on yourself.
As my buddy Milton Dicus used to say, LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP!!
Love you!
Check out our Tweet of the day if you want to see a longer version of the exchange with Rosanne than Roger put up.
Thanks,
AND P.S. IF YOU’RE IN LA, COME SEE ME AT THE WORLD FAMOUS COMEDY STORE, WEDS JULY 5! 8PM GREAT SHOW.
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Yeah, okay, for the past little while, Netflix has become synonymous with some great stand-up comedy specials. They’ve done so much right you can’t fault them. But like everyone, every now and then they shit their pants and it’s a long walk home at the end of the night. This one is a trek through the woods with a loaded pair of underwear for somebody.
CHICO BEAN, KARLOUS MILLER, DC YOUNG FLY
Look, I know how popular these guys are with their podcasts, and even as separate comedians. I also know their tours sell out like umbrellas on a rainy day in London, but this was their first Netflix special. They had Stan Lathan, one of the best, if not the current premiere stand-up director helming this thing. Rikki Hughes was their producer, who, like Stan, knows her game when it comes to producing, and it had so much more going for it. Have some bits prepared. I get it, it’s an ‘on the fly’ show. It’s cool to call it that, but have some shit prepared! They came off like f-ing amateurs. It took them twenty-five minutes to crack a joke. Not one f-ing joke. Twenty-five minutes in. It was painful. Like watching a pony die.
PREEN AROUND THE STAGE
I really wanted to love this thing. I love to laugh, and I like their stuff, but they just preen around the stage, yelling back and forth at each other with this great set behind them, sharp cinematography, and strong musicians that they keep stepping on, and an enthusiastic audience that is quickly realizing they’re going to have to fake an orgasm if they’re going to have one. It’s so disappointing.
I’m serious. These guys owe Netflix some money back, or at the very least, they owe Ted Sarandos and Robbie Praw some yard work. If you think I’m wrong, view it. You’ll likely agree with me. The only time there’s any joy to the whole thing is when the two musical acts come out: Rich Homie Quan and Goodie Mob, which is Cee-Lo Green’s group. The music acts are both first class and they do light the audience up, which is a good thing so you know they’re not comatose or high as hell, because they’re truly not laughing very hard at the three funny guys.
Oh and by the way, even here, the three ‘not as funny tonight as ‘Hannah Gadsby is on a bad night guys’ don’t even scoot off and let the musicians do their thing. They stay there and step all over them. Even with the woman Violinist at the beginning and the Tuba player. They go on and on about what a cool move it is to have them both on a show, and when they start to do a solo, cut them off in 10 seconds yammering on about some stuff that once again is void of comedy.
A low point of the special is when they try to do a ‘Bumping Mics’ ‘Roast Battle’ kind of thing. All they do is make you realize how good Jeff Ross, Brian Moses, Dave Attel, and that whole gang are. These guys don’t land any punches on one another at all. It’s like watching three blindfolded old ladies slap fight. Every wallop thrown misses so badly the audience is finally laughing at the futility. Some of the stuff is their inside jokes that we just don’t get, Karlous and D.C. making each other laugh at something at Chico Bean’s expense, but it’s such an over the top miss, and D.C. Young Fly, in this special at least, comes off like a weird impression of an old ‘In Living Color’ spoof character. I’ve seen him be so much better
When the crowd at the live taping is just mildly amused, you know there’s a problem. When the band members are sitting right behind you most of the special wondering where this thing went wrong, it’s a calamity.
There are some good moments, don’t get me wrong; Getting to watch D.C. Young Fly take over the drums and realizing that he can. Chico dancing with an old lady in the crowd. A few others. But not a lot.
Improvising a special doesn’t work. Not on this level. Getting the crowd to jump up and down because you’re having them do it at your command is not the same thing as a spontaneous reaction. I wonder what would have resulted if these three had worked as hard at this as Stan Lathan and Rikki Hughes must’ve. Someone worked their asses off to get it to where it was, as well produced as it is. They just forgot ‘the set list for the guys’. I wish they had had some good bits put together.
‘THIS DUDE IS JUST A RACIST OLD BAT’
I know a lot of people are reading this and thinking, “Wow, this dude is just a racist old bat. He didn’t get any of the jokes. This is comedy for black people by black people, it’s not for him.” Bullshit. Fuck that. Funny is funny. They didn’t bring anything.
‘HEY A LOT OF MY BEST COMICS ARE BLACK!’
It’s true. A lot of the ones that make me pound the table are . Rock, Chappelle, Brian Simpson, Ian Edwards, I just saw this great comic, Heather Jay, the other night down in Long Beach who had me howling. Another one, a young black guy, George K. Burns (no relation), I got all their jokes, so it wasn’t that I didn’t get what 85 South are doing here, but they ghosted us. I’ve watched these three guys do stand-up. I know what they can do when they want to bring it. On this special, they didn’t. They wanted to wing it, and guess what? Maybe that isn’t their skill set? I don’t know. Maybe they’ve ‘wung it’ in the past. I just know they didn’t bring it on this show.
So, sadly, especially if you call me a racist because, my response would be to use the N-word. Don’t hate me…. Na*@eTTE!!
You just made Hannah Gadsby look good. At least she did her homework.
Sometimes Improv works, sometimes it doesn’t, but at the level these guys are at? Someone should have pulled it back in for a re-shoot. A re-tool. They needed to knock this out of the park and they didn’t even kick it out of the kitchen. Sorry.
P.S. Check out their other, much, much better work here.
Hey ALSO if you’re in L.A. this weekend I’m at the Ice House in Pasadena for Mike Binder and Friends. There’s still about 30 tickets left. Not a lot, so get them now. It’s going to be a great show, and if you do come, and you don’t like it, later, you can shit on my stuff like I just shat on 85 South’s. Fair is fair!
Matt Rife’s on a heater and he’s not one to waste it. He’s dropped another special right on the heels of ‘Matthew Steven Rife’ onto Youtube a couple days ago. It’s an all crowd work special along the theme of his Red Flag riff’s and it’s smart because A) he’s really good in this lane of his, and B) he didn’t have to take the time to build up another hour or whatever of new material and it just juices up his fans for his upcoming mega tour. He opens by claiming that he’s going to retire the crowd work after this, but it’s done in a clever way, because what he’s really laying a marker down is to not do ‘Red Flags’ anymore. He can do crowd work, just isn’t going to call it ‘Red Flags’. I had a plumber retire once on me. Was done with plumbing. Two weeks later he was over the house when the toilet clogged, he just wasn’t ‘plumbing’. He was doing ‘random water-works.’ Same card trick. Hats off to you, Matt. Clever.
By the way, the specials really good. Especially if you’re into waterworks.
If you’re in L.A. this weekend I’m at the Ice House in Pasadena for Mike Binder and Friends. There’s still some tickets left. Not a lot, so get them now. It’s going to be a great show.
