Tony Hinchcliffe and his podcast/ variety – talk show – talent – freak- show- show business game changing jamboree, celebrated it’s ten year anniversary last week in Austin to a packed concert hall of three thousand crazed fans and who knows how many hundreds of thousands more streaming around the globe on Moment.co. It was more than a hit it was a major milestone for Tony and Redban and the whole Kill Tony crew. It was an American rags to riches story, a comedy Rocky. Born in front of twelve people in The Comedy Store’s tiny Belly Room, then forged down in the Main Room where it became a must- see show, touring the world, morphing into a genuine sensation in Austin, Tx, now slated to headline and sell out an arena down there this New Years eve.
It’s truly an amazing tale, and one of the most exciting, original, and electric forces of energy in American entertainment today. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer, more deserving little shit-heel anywhere. I’m kidding! I am. I give Tony a hard time, because, A) someone has to, and B) I love the guy, and he knows how much I think of him. If you read my book, STANDUPWORLD from three years ago, (FREE here when you sign up to our newsletter), or if you saw the stuff on him in The Comedy Store doc, or read the piece I wrote on him not long ago here,
You know how much respect I have for him and for his work. (By the way, this article, between here and my Substack, was read or downloaded over a hundred thousand times, one of the most popular pieces we’ve done which tells you how much buzz there is on this guy.) He deserves it as well, he’s made his own way in a really scary part of the business in tough years through the slowdown of stand up, then covid, and a slew of other tough winds at his back. A time when being a white guy with a wicked tongue was the last thing anyone was buying. He was the farthest thing in the world from the cool kid or in vogue, yet he never once came close to changing his style or his stance. Now he’s the man, and it’s only just beginning. I predict the next ten years will be when Tony really shines.
When I came back to the Store after years away and became aware of Tony, I remember one of the hottest comedians in the industry, who I was friends with, told me I was a fool to want to do a thing on him in the documentary. He claimed Tony was a bully, and treated newcomers shitty, that he was bad for stand up.
He was dead wrong. Next to Joe Rogan these days Tony has helped more people’s careers than anyone. Brand new stand ups, and comics that have been around for years. Bob Saget loved Tony, and Kill Tony. He used to tell me all the time how much he got out of being on Kill Tony, and what it did for not only his career, playing to a younger, crazier, crowd, but his confidence.
Tony’s own wicked unshakeable confidence has only gotten stronger and bolder in the last four years or so that I’ve known him, and it’s made him even funnier. Not just on the show, but as a stand-up. Dom Irrera, Jeff Ross, (who Tony started writing roast jokes for), and so many comics, Holtzman, Ron White, he’s given a lot of these guys, five month energy shots in the arm, not to mention what he’s done for the people who’s name he plucks out of the bucket.
Kill Tony’s formed a rag-tag group of nut-jobs and created a bunch of big time comedy names in the new world emanating out of Austin. He has an eye and it’s only gotten sharper. This newest guy he taken on, is Kam Patterson, he’s right, he’s got something special, same with Hans Kim, who slap the table funny in the anniversary show with new material about going back to Korea and seeing his family, then coming home to America and finding out we have “a black little Mermaid, the one group that has the least going in the way of swimming skills”. William Montgomery and Afrodeity, and David Lucas, all his regulars, one minute it’s the Gong show, one minute it’s the Tonight Show, and the next it’s Showtime at The Apollo. I also have to say the production values were damn good. Everything, the sound, the camera work, the graphics. It rivaled anything you’d see on a Network show or cable show, anything you’d need to see, put it that way. Half of that shit is so overproduced. So many moving cameras and flashy garbage you can’t appreciate what’s going on. This felt like something put together with heart and soul.
The opening music was astonishing. Just popped. Started the show so crisply. It’s still streaming for a couple more days. Get on it. Fast.
Okay, that’s it, enough kissing the little saps ass! If you’re in LA on July 1st come see ME! At the Ice House. Sat. Night July 1st. 8pm Mike Binder and Friends.
It’s a great line-up. Get Tix now. Last two shows sold out!
Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Tim Allen, Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, and Adam Sandler may have made it look easy, but the shift from stand-up stardom to movie stardom is obviously anything but simple. Bert Kreischer, Sebastian Maniscalco, Jo Koy, and even Bill Burr with a new film he’s made have all had a bumpy jump from the gate into the movie world. This is a group that is filling arenas and halls, theaters, motorways, and sometimes stadiums with paid fans hanging on their every word. They are the cream of the crop of today’s comedy culture, but Sebastian, Bert, and Jo couldn’t lure most, if any, of their core crowd into the movie houses, and Burr couldn’t scare up a theatrical deal on his first film, “Old Dads”, after shopping it all over town, which, by the way, I’ve seen, and it is nowhere near a bad film.
THEN
When Pryor, Murphy, Martin, Tim Allen, and Sandler, and even Kevin Hart were filling movie theaters, the industry was very different. The movie business, for them, was a direct step up from the touring circuit, almost a rite of passage. A comedian’s success in the film industry was an affirmation of their status in the world of comedy. A hit movie was the ultimate validation, the comedy world’s equivalent of an Olympic gold medal. Today, the entertainment industry has so many other platforms to showcase talent. There’s no longer just one path to success. Platforms like YouTube, Netflix, and HBO have given modern stand-up comedians the chance to deliver their material directly to their fans. They have more control over their content, more creative freedom, and the ability to build a successful career without the necessity of a hit film. Yet, they still want it. They still see it as a mountain that needs climbing.
Here’s the rub. Here’s my theory as to why all four of these movies weren’t hits, why all four of them didn’t sell, why the comics from another time, even the recent past, were different as filmmakers, why all four of these stand-ups need to get to the plate again, what they need to do to make great movies if that’s what they want to do.
I may piss some of them off, I may be wrong. Who knows? I hope not, that’s not the goal, not at all. It’s to look at the craft, to learn, to help you understand it, to help me. To maybe help them.
First off, it’s harder than it looks to make a great movie. That’s a given. When you’re in an era where people aren’t going on a consistent basis, you better give them a reason to go. The whole point of all the arena and comedy concert sales is that the studios and the networks have abdicated comedies. Given up on them. They used to release several a weekend. Now they release a few a year and they mostly suck because the studios are all big companies, and have to follow woke corporate cleansed diversified, friendly, p.c., bullshit color between the lines rules, and comedy that does that isn’t comedy, it’s garbage.
So they gave up even bothering making them, but, Covid in the past, people need to go out and laugh, so they go to clubs and concerts. They’re back in movies now, and yes, it’s all thanks to Nicole Kidman and her ad for AMC theaters, but whatever the reason, people are back at theaters, so, if you’re making a movie, it better be great if you want to win. Want to stand out. Back when Adam Sandler made “Billy Madison” as his debut, he could A) keep it in theaters for almost a year after a pretty just okay six-million-dollar opening, and B) Get another film made. It wasn’t a do or die thing. Studios and companies wanted to build careers. Understood it took a beat.
NOW / THE MACHINE
I love Bert Kreischer. I really do. He’s a good man. I wanted to love “The Machine”. I almost did. I think a lot of people felt this way. Of all the four films from these modern stand-ups, it was the freshest. The biggest swing. The less of a retread. It was an action comedy retelling of his beloved college story. The problem to me with the movie was Bert. He wasn’t quite good enough in the lead. God, it hurts to write this. I’m such a huge fan of his. I like him so much as a person. I wanted this thing to do a hundred million dollars. For Bert and for comedy. It would have if Bert would have been better in it. I believe that.
I may be talking out of my ass here, but I do think I have some experience and sense of it. In too many scenes, Bert looked like a deer in the camera’s headlights. He wasn’t there with the rest of the actors, and we weren’t as deep into the movie as we were supposed to be. Think about Eddie Murphy in “48 Hours” Steve Martin in “The Jerk”, Tim Allen in “The Santa Clause”, Adam Sandler in “Billy Madison”. They all centered those movies in a way that we took the ride with them. On one level, I don’t blame Bert so much. I don’t think the director did a good enough job helping him settle into it. I also take into account the guy only had twenty million dollars, which is nothing to make a movie of that scope, and he had to focus on everything else but Bert and Bert’s performance, and the rest of the movie is pretty damn good, the action and the stunts and the look and the pace, but the main guy needs to be protected.
Then there’s the theory, and this is what I’m thinking in general, that maybe there is no protecting these guys in this modern age. Maybe they don’t realize just yet how much work filmmaking is, and in a time where it’s just another little ribbon they want to pin on their sash, they’re going to be too busy, too tired, too messed up to be good enough to be fantastic. I know Bert’s director had his hands full just by some of the interviews I read where Bert talked about being up all night before shooting and coming back from doing concerts and that kind of thing. I also know Bert likes to drink and has publicly stated he’s never giving up drinking.
I learned early on that movie life and stand-up life were two distinct lives. The crews and the people that made movies were completely opposite types of people than the ones that I knew in the comedy clubs and the stand-up world. In stand-up, we went all night, hard, and in movies, we worked like crazy people, all day and all night. We didn’t have time to party. Not until the film was over. Not really. I had to get sober when I started writing and directing and acting in films. It was too hard to do it messed up. I also had to let stand-up go. I didn’t have the bandwidth to do it all. The machine will eat you alive if you try to do too much. It’s one thing to be a comic and do podcasts and YouTube stuff or even some sitcom work, but if you’re talking about carrying a movie? You need to be retired from everything else.
I also wasn’t making the millions and millions of dollars from stand-up that these guys are. It’s even harder to let that go. I don’t think you can be great as a movie comic or filmmaker as a hobby, though. Bert Kreischer and Burr and Sebastian and a few of these guys need to do some soul-searching and decide if they want it that badly. Tim Allen had John Pasquin on “The Santa Clause” read him the riot act. Told him to get his shit together, fast. Eddie Murphy had his shit together, so did Adam Sandler. He didn’t do his stand-up for years as he broke into movies. When Albert Brooks made his films, he never even thought about doing stand-up, sometimes years at a time. Their films were their expression. Their release.
The times we’re in now, the top stand-ups are so successful, so in control, so in demand, they really can’t take the time to be the kind of craftsman that can make a movie that’s personal and real enough to match what the audience has come to know about them through their stage act. Sebastian has done such a great job of painting us the picture of his life as an Italian and his relationship with his father just standing there at a microphone, to do something that authentic and exclusive to him to be a breakthrough film, to match the experience his fans have come to expect would take such painstaking craftsmanship. A small, heartfelt, one-of-a-kind, honest piece that had never been seen before. Something like Albert Brooks’ “Modern Romance”, only about him and his father. Instead, he went with the opposite, with a film that felt like it was rubber-stamped and taken off the shelf and done twenty times before and resized for his body and sense of humor. A movie that could be made in a time slot between his next tour and his next Netflix special.
It was a swing for the fences when maybe he didn’t really need to hit a home run. He needed to make his fans happy they were his fans, and he needed to stretch as an artist. He should have made “The Big Night”. Him and his dad opening a restaurant. Something sweet and small. He still can. It’s going to take concentration if he wants to do it though. The same with Jo Koy. Both of those movies were misfires. It’s okay. Get back on the horse if that’s what you want to do. Just figure out how bad you want it because the truth is, you don’t need it. Not in today’s world. It’s another thing that may just be an antiquated notion. If you have a story you’re dying to tell, you can always just make it yourself and put it up on YouTube. It’s going to be a lot better. Watch.
OLD DADS
Burr’s debut film will, I believe (I’m not sure), be streaming on Netflix sometime this fall or late this year. Netflix didn’t make it, Miramax did it. In fact, Netflix passed on the script, which was crazy considering he’s one of their biggest stand-up stars. Miramax made it a couple of years ago for something like six million dollars and Burr directed it. He co-wrote it with Ben Tishler, who’s a really good writer. They both are. It’s a sharp premise; I read a few of the drafts, and I saw a rough cut of the film play to a preview audience. It’s a good film. I have to say, of all the comics discussed here, Burr is the best actor. He has the chops. I do think he made the exact same mistake and just thought he’d whip off a movie in between eleven other things he was doing before a giant arena tour and playing Fenway Stadium, just cram a movie out in five weeks having never made one before. He made it sober, but high on his own farts, never listening to anyone’s advice but his own. God bless him, Burr’s always the smartest man in any state he’s in, and he applied that rule to his filmmaking skills, including all the ones he brought to the very first film he ever made.
That said, he made a good little movie. He desperately wanted it in theaters and for it to be a Will Farrell kind of thing, and I think that was his big mistake. It was another one that felt like we’d seen it before despite it having a fresh premise. Things happen the way they’re supposed to though; he didn’t get the theatre release and I think he’ll be grateful one day. He should be making films for Netflix. His brand is smart; his fans will go with him to cool, bold, intelligent places in unique films. He needs to stay in there, learn the craft, listen to smart people, shut his trap every now and then, work with some good directors. Note to Netflix; You should support him. Put “Old Dads” out in some theaters first maybe. Market his stuff. There’s no way Burr can’t give you everything you get from Noah Baumbach and more in time.
By the way, if anyone’s reading this, thinks I’m kissing this guy’s ass, trying to get work from him, wrong. I’ve worked with him a lot, and I’d rather have a dead pony shoved up my ass than do it again. In fact, he’s on my bucket list of things never to repeat as long as I live. With that said, I do think he’s someone who could be a strong filmmaker. I just think he’d be smart to set whatever needed to be set aside to make his films and grow that side of his art. He’s taking pretty good care of himself, so the question for him is, can he shut his mouth and listen long enough to collaborate? Not just pretend to listen? Because even as a writer-director and star, film is still a collaborative art.
THEY NEED SUPPORT
With all of these stand-ups, I really hope the jerk-offs that are running the studios these days are smart enough to realize not only how popular they are but how talented they all are. Bert, Sebastian, Jo, Burr, these guys, Ray Romano, a few others, Shane Gillis, they need to be given shots and then more shots to build film careers. Yeah, films aren’t cheap to make, but if you stay with these acts and they hit, you can build back a wing of the industry that got shut down because either you or stupid people before you messed up. The business needs about five more Adam Sandlers.
I’LL TELL YOU ONE WHO CAN BE THAT .. EASY.
Ali Wong. No doubt. Talk her into doing a major movie with a big star. Adam. Tom Cruise. Denzel. A comedy. A drama. Anything good. With a good director. Boom. She’s gone. Off to the races. She’s the next huge international star. Between “Beef”, her Netflix specials, and movies, she’s primed to do a box office thing. She’s kept herself private. She’s smart. Sexy. Funny. She’s the one.
Okay. That’s it! Don’t hate me. I mean you can. But don’t. It won’t help.
If you’re in L.A. on July 1st, come out to the Ice House and see me and a great show.
I love this special. Shot at Capo in Boston’s Southie, this is Will Noonan, Boston hometown hero at his best, ready to step up and show off out of town so to speak. People that are in Boston and on the comedy scene there no him, but this is a great chance for others to see what he does and his unique squirrely, squidgy, honest, and provocative sense of humor. A monologist in the Louis C.K., Bobby Kelly, vein, he’s also got the charm and charisma that a John Mulaney or a Jerry Seinfeld has, if maybe a touch more blue collar. More Boston weatherbeaten.
I’m telling you, this guy’s gonna be a star. Remember that you heard it from me, that way if you run into him in a bathroom at a game of something you can tell him that. While he’s pissing. He loves that. Tap him on the shoulder. Say, hey, back in ’23 Mike Binder told me you were gonna be a big-shot. He was right. Carry on.’
Check it out. You’re going to like it. This Friday!
Also, if you’re lucky enough to be in the LA area on July 1st. Come to see this great show out at the Ice House in Pasadena!
What does it take to piss off the powers that be nowadays in the ways that Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, George Carlin, Joan Rivers did in their day? Who is brave and bold today in that way in the world world of stand-up? Is it pushing the envelope to simply berate white women, even if it’s funny? Does that make a smart comic brave? Does crudely and in detail talking about sex as a woman comic make you someone that courageously walks the edge today? Is it as risky as some of the stuff Pryor and Paul Mooney or even Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock or Bill Hicks were doing as they were breaking through? The best stand-up is always counter-culture. It always spanks the elites and those that have their hands on the wheel and in the till. It’s telling us things we’re not supposed to hear, didn’t want to hear, through humor.
PLAYING TO TRAINED SEALS
Some of the most successful and respected and so called ‘edgy’ comics today are not brave in the slightest. At least not in the last five to ten years they haven’t been. They’ve been fake-brave and we’ve accepted it. They by and large have been pretending to be willing to push the buttons, to be telling the truth, giving the crowd exactly what they know they want to hear. Yes, they’re talented as hell, but with the wind at their backs, they’re playing the same game state sponsored media has been playing in the same time period. By the way, those comics have the right to have those opinions, and their audiences have of course the right to laugh at those jokes. In their heart though these stand-ups know they’re taking a softer way home. Maybe for that reason, offstage the condemnation for a Bill Maher biting into the slightest tip of a red-pill is routinely off the charts. As was the smugness you would hear in the Comedy Store and Improv green rooms when Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes and shat down on all their celeb friends for coming up to awards shows and giving lectures instead of just ‘thanking their agents and fucking off’.
Even Chris Rock, maybe the greatest stand-up of the last twenty years started to censor himself. This is the guy that stunned the world with the genius comedy special ‘Bring the Pain’. The rawness of the groundbreaking piece ‘Nigga vs. Black People’ was breathtaking. He wasn’t supposed to be talking like that and it wasn’t supposed to be that funny. He was going directly against the tide. It had been years since anyone had done that. All of his bits from that era were of that ilk. ‘What did he say? Holy shit! That’s true! That’s funny as hell.’
His piece about ‘How not to get your ass kicked by the cops’ was hysterical. But even more important, it was spot on, so it was memory hole’d in modern times. It wasn’t the kind of comedy that made the modern audiences laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpjcdZpXrnk
You could say, ‘yeah great, this guy loved two Chris Rock bits that made black people look bad’ but that’s missing my point. I loved most of his stuff. In fact all of his stuff. I’m bringing up two of his bits that he spoke hard truth to the world and that’s why it was funny until we got to a point that the world didn’t want to hear certain kind of hard truths, and no version of them were going to be funny. His later stuff, for a long time, Tangerine, for example, which I didn’t laugh that much at, only made fun of white people, his wife, kids, police, and things that it was okay to laugh at.
There wasn’t the usual ‘Rock’-naughty or problematic bits in terms of it being ‘not okay’ for Chris to mess with it but he did anyway. There wasn’t any kind of truth that scolded and shocked you while you laughed your ass off. In my opinion the whole special was one long version of letting you know Chris Rock loved black people, loved Obama, loved MSNBC and all that everyone there represented, and he wasn’t cool with white people, was having trouble raising his kids, and staying true to his wife. There wasn’t anything in it that was magical in the sense of that he took on anyone in power. Told us anything that we weren’t supposed to know which was his brand.
He knew it as well. Trust me. He knew it. He picked a side in the culture war which his right to do, but when he did it, he wasn’t anywhere near as funny as he once was. Before then he didn’t have a side. He was bigger than the war.
DAVE CHAPPELLE
Meanwhile, the stand-up who was getting the dick-sucking Chris was used to getting, was Dave Chappelle. Dave Chappelle loved Obama, liked some of the folks over there at MSNBC, but he also would take a dump on all of their desks if he found something funny about anything he heard them say he found fake. Jussie Smollett. Michael Jackson. Transgender women. Trump. Trump haters. Jews. Hillary. Vaccines. He didn’t care what your positions were. He wanted you to hear his. Especially if he had a good joke about it. The joke he did about the censor at Comedy Central making him cut a problematic word from a sketch was a perfect example.
‘David, you can’t say the word, ‘Faggot’ in a sketch. You just can’t do it. I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah, well, how come I can say the word, ‘Nigger’, but not the word, ‘Faggot’?’
‘Oh David, you know the answer. You, are not, a ‘Faggot.’
‘But, Carol. I am, not, a ‘Nigger’, either,’
Chappelle, didn’t care to be told what the rules were. He wasn’t going to play by any of them anyway. He didn’t trust anyone and he knew the audience didn’t either so he understood he was better off just using his own sense of right and wrong as true north.
SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
Rock’s last special ‘Selective Outrage’ was a return to greatness because he was willing to get into trouble again. Willing to tell you what he thought was what. Speak his mind on whatever subject he wanted to talk about, he didn’t care what the folks in the DNC sponsored media controlled crowd that were mad at Bill Maher or Ricky Gervais this week or this month were thinking. He was going to make himself happy and he got back to being funny. He took on everybody from Jay-Z and Lululemon to single horny women to black guys without jobs to, of course, the raw truth about Will Smith. The bottom line about the special though, and if you watch it, it’s so obvious, Chris isn’t coming from any place, group, faction, race, tribe, or party, other than that of a comedian. He just wants to be funny, real, raw, and kick some ass. He loves what he does and he wants to follow his buddies, his idols, and his dreams. He doesn’t care about anything other than the laughs, they light up his eyes wide each time they come at him, like trucks passing him on the highway at night.
He loves to make you laugh, everything else comes second. That’s the secret sauce. That’s why I love the guys work.
SARAH SILVERMAN
Is one of the funniest people on the planet. She was a star right out of the gate. She’s also been in a lot of trouble with her fellow liberals (and conservatives) because she’s spoken her mind and said what she wanted to say, a lot. Many years ago though, she got in trouble for a joke she told that angered some Asian people, one columnist in particular, and she stood up for herself in a way stand-ups rarely get to do anymore. She stood her ground and I’ve never, ever forgotten it. If you watch it, you realize why she’s a cut above everyone else. She’s not only funny as hell, but she knows exactly why she’s saying what she’s saying, and what the point she wants to make is. It’s so wonderful how she holds her ground here.
Today, people don’t care what a stand-ups point is. They don’t care what comedy is ‘trying to do’, what question it’s asking. They’re actually taken aback that comics think they have the right to make a point. Even stand-ups don’t stick up for themselves this boldly anymore. They either say nothing, or they apologize.
This clip is so worth watching. It says so much, not just about Sarah Silverman, but about what needs protecting. About what’s so brilliant about the best of the form.
JIM BREUER
Jim Breuer, is someone many of you only know from his SNL days or the few movies he did, or his GOAT BOY character. What maybe you don’t know is that he’s become an amazing stand-up with a huge following who fills theatres all over the country and many parts of the world. He has a hugely popular podcast and a well watched Youtube channel that he puts many of his own self produced specials up onto. Plus he’s hilarious as hell.
One problem. He’s a conservative. Stand-up wise he has scurvy. If he was a pirate they’d throw him over the side of the boat. Doesn’t matter how funny he is. How much money he makes. How much truth he tells. The one problem is there’s a lot of the audience that doesn’t know the rules so they come anyway, and he’s making them laugh their asses off.
SOMEBODY HAD TO SAY IT .
The saddest thing to me, as I’ve said here before, is when other comics don’t stick up for their fellow comics right to make jokes about anything they feel the need to make jokes about.
When they don’t keep in mind what George Carlin once said;
‘”Apparently the good Reverend forgot there were two buttons on that radio. An on button, and an off button.’
Jim had a special that he made himself called ‘Somebody had to say it.’ It was in the height of the push to have anyone that didn’t take the vaccine fired. Have them ostracised, or shunned. Something we now know was probably a mistake. Something we now know ‘the science’ kinda got wrong, which as far as I’m concerned is part of life, part of the process. It’s okay. They were wrong. But, that means, the others were right. Jim Breuer was on the side that was maybe right. At the very least, he was on the side that was at the very least justified to be making jokes about it all.
Some people were acting like fools. Like lemmings, like pearl clutching bitches, and Jim was doing comedy on it. He had the right to. It was good stuff. I loved it. I wrote a piece on it. This was Feb. 7, 2022. It’s here in the archives.
A lot of my friends got pissed at me over it. I think Twitter throttled me. I thought I was safe. I’ve been a registered Democrat my whole life. Donated to the right causes. Walk the walked. Thought I could write about whatever I wanted to. Thought I was inoculated. I was wrong.
A very famous comedian I was working with at the time, a big shot, someone everyone sees as a really brave, edgy stand-up, called me when it came out on this site. He said I needed to call him right back. He had just landed back from Europe at a private airport. Seemed important.
This was one of my good friends. I called him back right away. He and his wife had just come from staying at some castle in France. He was in a shitty mood because his wife thought the castle sucked. The one just down the road was nicer. Bigger.
Anyway, the reason he needed to talk to me so urgently was he read the Jim Breuer piece I wrote here on the site and this edgy, brilliant, free thinking, ‘ranter’, went off on me. The conversation was so strange, I made notes about it right after, as I sometimes do, because I didn’t want to forget it.
‘Hey,do you have any idea what an idiot this Jim Breuer motherfucker is? Do you have any idea?’
‘No, but I’d put money down that you’re about to tell me.’
‘He’s a fucking moron. He’s out of his mind. First of all, he’s religious and shit, and second of all, he’s an anti-vaxxer and he made his wife who has cancer not take the vaccine, okay? So why the fuck would you glamourize this guy? ‘
This went on and on, with him telling me what a low life Breuer, who it turns out the guy on the phone who just stepped out of the private plane and had the torqued wife who stayed in the smaller castle to deal with, didn’t really even know the former ‘Goat Boy’, or hadn’t seen him in years, and more important, hadn’t seen the special I wrote about.
‘Fuck no, I didn’t see it. I’m not gonna watch some anti-science thing. Mis-information like that is just gonna get more people killed and the people that don’t get the vax are gonna prolong this damn thing and then screw it all up for everyone else.’
‘Well if everyone else has the vaccine, then it isn’t a problem because they won’t be able to get it. Right?’
‘No, you don’t know that, and either way they’ll clog up the system and the hospitals again and make new variants and just make this thing go on and on.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know it, okay. Don’t make me have this conversation.’
‘Well, I mean where did you hear this all?’
‘I didn’t it ‘hear’ it.’
‘Okay, ‘see’ it,’
“I didn’t see it, I don’t watch any of those shows. I don’t bother. I just know it.’
‘Well, where did you read it?’
‘I didn’t read it anywhere. I didn’t have to. I trust the science, Mike. I listen. Ninety eight percent of the scientists all say the same thing. I don’t need assholes like this guy making a bunch of stupid jokes and having a bunch of simpletons believing it and getting more people killed.’
‘Okay, you didn’t hear anything or read anything but you’re sure you’re right about all of this?’
‘Yes! Yes. I’m sure I’m sure I’m right. Fuck you. I trust the science.’
‘Okay, well, I find the guy funny. I think he’s funny, and he’s asking questions and making it all look funny that we’re all so confused about the whole thing. All so divided and so confused, and see the whole thing from so many angles. Isn’t that the benchmark for stand-up? If it’s funny? If it’s real, and if it makes you think?’
‘Fuck you. I got to go. My wife’s a cunt.’
DAVE SMITH
Dave Smith is way too smart to be a comedian. He’s a libertarian, which means you can’t ever be that funny because you’re too busy thinking too hard. Yet somehow or another Dave is really funny. He’s brave as well. He’s part of the Legion Skanks which if you weren’t aware of anything about them, you’d be sure they were either a heavy metal band or some road-show version of a whore house. It’s a damn funny podcast that he’s partners with Luis J. Gomez and Big Jay Oakerson, two men that also don’t want to spend a lot of time hearing the rules.
Together they own something called Gasdigital.com and several other podcasts and one of the wildest comedy festivals in the world called ‘Skankfest’ that is set in Vegas and New York, and several other spots that gets way out of hand. Skankfest features the whole retinue of stand-ups new wave, from Shane Gillis, Andrew Schultz, Brian Holtzman, Sam Tripoli , Sara Weinshenk, Joe List, Sarah Tollemache, Dave Attell, and a wild-ass group of stand-ups that make Joe Rogan and his buddies look like the nice boys down the street from the Salvation Army that do yard work free for the older neighbors on the weekend.
Dave has his own podcast called Part Of The Problem where he talks about the world and the ways it’s gone wrong, and he’s often very, very funny as he’s being insightful. He’s recently had on my buddy Bobby Kennedy, and I think he’s gotten him in a way that very few people have except maybe Jimmy Dore, which is hard to do, (*Jimmy was way ahead of the curve as usual on RFK JR.)
Dave as I said is a really bright guy and if you listen to him take on issues like the Ukraine and racism and global warming you think, ‘damn, this guy is going to step on his dick here’, but he doesn’t. He’s well-informed, and has a strong ability not only to interview but to explain.
As a comic he’s a voice that needs to be heard from, yet he’s someone I can’t really even tell if getting a laugh is that important to him, which is a little scary. Not a lot. Just a little. When I listen to his pals Big Jay and Luis I can feel the deep need for another wave of laughter, but Dave doesn’t seem to be jonesing for it most of the time. He seems more like he’s concerned with making a point. Bringing it home. That’s not always a good thing by the way. To me it’s what made Mort Sahl kind of just a guy that you always talked about how great he was, but never had a bit at your fingertips to rattle off to explain why he was the master you were describing. I could be wrong. Here’s a bit of Dave’s I do happen to like a lot.
IS ANY COMIC REALLY GETTING CANCELLED?
I don’t know. Not really. Not Chappelle, that’s for sure. He did a string of specials with a bunch of Trans jokes which should get you taken to the woodshed these days. He even threw some seriously crazy Jew jokes in there and everyone was so messed up over the Trans jokes they didn’t even mention the Jew jokes. That’s how brilliant Chappelle is, Also, when the Trans crowd stormed the Netflix conference rooms and parking lots, Dave got another four special deal, and they got a letter from the boss telling them ‘this may not be the place for you to be working.’ Yeah, I get it, he’s Dave Chappelle, but they were all dressed up pretty smart at those rally’s. They had on their Sunday best. It wasn’t easy to go against them. Kudos to Netflix.
The truth is, other than Michael Richards, who as best as I can figure lost his shit onstage at the Laugh Factory, no stand-up I can name has been cancelled for anything they said onstage or on a special or album. In they’re act. They’ve been muted. Scolded. The Jim Breuer’s, Ari Shaffir’s gotten in trouble for some jokes but he wasn’t canceled.
The fact is it’s hard to flat out cancel a comic today for their work when they have so many outlets and ways to do and distribute their stuff. It doesn’t make them less reluctant to be bold and brave though. It takes a rare breed to go against the headwinds in the times we’re in. To try to do comedy that pokes fun of the lack of trust we have in the government and the media and a culture that’s so dominant, a society demands that you color between the lines. Demands that you behave.
With that said. It’s still very tough to push back against the rules.
THE BIG LIE
Let’s be honest. No one trusts much of anything about authority anymore. It’s the number one reason that stand-up is so strong right now. That stand-up podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, Tim Dillon’s, and Jimmy Dore’s, are so popular. They’re telling the truth about not believing they’re hearing the truth. About wanting to dish out what the truth is. They’re asking questions. Bringing guests on that might have answers to things that aren’t making sense. Audiences want to hear these answers, and it’s pissing off a lot of people in power.
It used to be the Democrats and the mainstream culture in general railed against ‘Big military’, ‘Big Pharma’, Big Tech’, now they rail against the ‘Big Lie’. Everything’s a ‘Big Lie’ from both sides of the political spectrum actually. Anything they don’t want you talking about is a ‘Big Lie,’
‘Shut up! You’re lying. Shut up. I’m telling.’
My little brothers used to pull the same shit on me when we were kids.
When Joe Rogan had an expert like Dr. Robert Malone on his podcast to explain to him why we should or shouldn’t get vaccinated, or if Ivermectin was a realistic form of treatment for early cases of Covid it shouldn’t have lit the world on fire. It shouldn’t have made old fart’s like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell expose themselves as not only kind of worthless to Spotify, but stooges for a regime and a society that had lost it’s way. Everyone wanted to tear Joe’s head off because he looked into it and found out some shit that didn’t make sense. They plastered him with ‘Horse der-wormer crap-crazy’ stories that in their hearts they new had to be bullshit. They just piled it on. It didn’t matter. They were saving lives.
They have no real proof or solid evidence other than the morons on TV that were being paid to rattle off the term BIG LIE by BIG PHARMA, but damn they better shut down Joe Rogan, who at best knows about as much about it as they did only because he had asked a hell of a lot more questions.
Guess what though, they couldn’t shut him down. In the end the truth came out. The vaccine worked, yeah, kinda. So does Ivermectin. It worked on me after I got Covid, after I got the vaccine which was at first going to make it that I wasn’t going to get Covid. The vaccine also fucked a lot of people up. Badly. What was true was that people who didn’t take the vaccine didn’t hurt anyone else. They didn’t jam up hospitals and they weren’t the people from the Walking Dead. They didn’t spread anything to anyone. They weren’t ignoramuses. They had questions. We were told something completely different. Way different. That’s a big one to get wrong.
There were also good doctors, good scientists, good writers that had done a hell of a lot research. We had the right to hear it and Joe Rogan, Jimmy Dore, Tim Dillon, Dave Smith, Jim Breuer and everyone else had every right to ask questions and make jokes about it, yet something went goofy in our society and suddenly we were all supposed to not color outside of the lines no matter what they sensed, smelled, thought, heard, or had a hunch was off about Covid, Elections, Lockdowns, the Ukraine, Transgenders, Hunter Biden’s Russian bought computer, teaching Kindergarteners how to give head, George Floyd’s Sainthood, Clarence Thomas’s defamation campaign, that special needs kid who wandered into Wisconsin with the shotguns, or anything about any stripper anywhere that wasn’t banging Trump.
For most comedians, none of the above have been jokeable subjects since 2015.
Most of them agreed. Stayed clear of the list. Some not because they were in fear. They really agreed. To them, all of the above subjects were either dis-information that could get people killed, conspiracy theories that could cause people to go crazy and chew off their fingers, or worse, warmongering-queer bashing, that was going to trigger a race war that they wanted no part of. The bottom line, they were better people than the pack of low life stand-ups that told jokes about this list of things and didn’t trust the government or the mainstream news.
And by news, I of course mean SNL, Stephen Colbert, and the Daily show. That really was all there was left that any of us could trust anymore.
RFK Jr.
When RFK Jr’s book on Fauci came out, more than one of my friends asked me what had happened to him. They knew we had been friends for over thirty years. I would say;
‘What do you mean, what happened to him?’
‘You know what I mean? He was into cleaning rivers and bringing fish back to life or some shit, and then he just flipped out. He wrote that crazy book.’
Did you read the crazy book?
‘No. Hell no!’
‘Read it. It’s interesting.’
‘You read it?’
I did, yes, it’s really good, and well researched. I learned a lot. You should read it,’
I always got back a basic version of the same answer;
‘I can’t read that. No way.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to know about it. Even if it’s true. He’s a loon.’
‘No, no, I’ll get it for you. I’ll get you a signed copy. I’ll get him to sign you a copy.’
‘You better fucking not!!’
Let me tell you something. I try not to go into politics on this blog. In my comedy. I leave it to guys smarter than me, but what I’m trying to say here today is that we’re divided and messed up in this country because of a lot things, and in my opinion the two most profound things that are truly killing us, taking us way away from what it is that makes us great, is one, we don’t believe anything anyone in any authority says, and two, we don’t feel free to question or speak freely on a public level about anything we want to have an opinion on anymore.
The fish stinks from the head on that stuff, so I blame Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden for this all happening. It all happened on their watch. The one thing I can tell you is that Bobby Kennedy is the best chance we have to heal that break in the American psyche. I know him well enough, long enough to know he’s not going to put a government together that’s going to lie to the people, or tell the people they can’t voice their opinions on anything. Make jokes about anything. I’m not saying he’s all that funny, I’m just saying he appreciates humor and the need for it. He did marry a funny ass lady, a lot of his good friends are comics, and he does like to laugh.
Most important he likes the truth. He’s only in this to get to it. To get to the truth and let it out, on so many levels. To heal this country. It’s a big job. We need to get someone in there who gets us back to a place where we even have a little trust in them again. I’m hoping it’s Bobby Kennedy.
Go here to find out more, and sign up to volunteer and donate. Maybe give a kidney. RFK Jr needs one of your kidneys for America. Quit fooling around. Give a damn kidney for Free Speech!! Or just donate a little dough, or volunteer. Keep your damn kidney.
Is an amazing comic. He’s a liberal. Has he been ‘red-pilled? I don’t think so. I think at best he’s in the world of the Bill Maher’s that have seen the light on a lot of these subjects and as I’ve said, because he has his own distribution, other than Youtube being the censors they are and that kind of thing (Well, he can now claim any election he wants is fake. Go for it, Jim!) he hasn’t seemed to care anyway, and has been way ahead on a lot of political hot button issues, ready and willing to take live fire. I have tremendous respect for him.
He has a daily show on YouTube.
He’s truly one of the hardest working men in show business. His political comedy show is populated with all kinds of regulars like fellow comics Kurt Metzger and his wife Stef Zamorano and guests doctors and scientist and clips. His show gets compared to Jon Stewart a lot. I can see why. I’m sorry, God bless Jon Stewart, but Jimmy Dore is a lot braver and bolder and funnier than John Stewart, and he’s not gonna be getting the Will Rogers award. He won’t even get the Will Arnett. He may get the Will Forte one day.
Here’s a clip from his new special COVID LIES ARE FUNNY which is one of my new favorite specials. Jimmy has it behind a paywall which is one way of doing it. It’s $10 well spent in my opinion. (You can get it for a kidney by the way.) This a clip he’s put out, but it doesn’t do the whole special justice. In the vein of this diatribe I’ve just gone on. (Probably way too long, I know. Sorry.) this special is the perfect thing to watch and wash down. It’s the answer. So funny and so head into the wind. Get it and watch it.
Jimmy Dore’s website to buy the special.
https://jimmydore.com/
Also, here’s a good interview with Jimmy and RFKjr.
Okay, that’s it. Thanks for reading! If you’re in LA this weekend, tomorrow night I’m at The Improv on a great show. Check it out.
Also on JULY 1st at the ICE HOUSE IN PASADENA, SAT NIGHT with Mr. Jimmy Dore. See him live with me at the Ice House!
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If you don’t know who Brian Holtzman is you’re missing out on a great treat. Next to Dave Attell he’s closest thing to the a true ‘comics -comic’ going right now.
Comedians are constantly talking about how great he is, how unbridled, how you never know what he’s going to say next. How hard he can make us laugh.
This is a special we worked on for so long. I believe we shot him over three months. Maybe ten different nights. Made him wear the same clothes. Didn’t censor him in anyway. Every streamer and network passed. (Fuck ’em) Peter Shore and I are putting it out ourselves and hopefully the comics will support it. Bill Burr and Peter and I produced it and put up and lost our money, but for me, I’m damn proud to have been part of it.
Joe Rogan has been a huge supporter of Brian’s, I’m not sure why Joe hasn’t had him on his podcast yet, he’s truly been one of Brian’s biggest cheerleaders from early on, I assume he will eventually. Tony Hinchcliffe has really picked up the slack though, I have to say. He’s on Kill Tony all the time.
Joe Rogan has been a huge supporter of Brian’s, I’m not sure why Joe hasn’t had him on his podcast yet, he’s truly been one of Brian’s biggest cheerleaders from early on, I assume he will eventually. Tony Hinchcliffe has really picked up the slack though, I have to say. He’s on Kill Tony all the time. He’s out now headlining clubs, causing his usual trouble, and if you follow Brian’s Twitter he’s underlining the walk-outs in a way only Brian can. I love it. It’s hysterical and so on brand.
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Joey Diaz’s memoir ‘Tremendous’ is one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years. I couldn’t put it down. It reminds me of one of my all time favorite memoirs, ‘Growing up’ by Russell Baker, the famed Washington reporter in that he told you so much about his life as a kid and becoming a man and his mother and his family that he didn’t even have to spend a lot of time telling you about his life as a journalist, because it was all baked into the story of who he was before he became a great columnist that when he did get into his career it all made so much sense. It was just almost a postscript.
Joey’s book is so rich, and so funny and so real. So dead on in it’s ability to take you back on the journey with him. In my opinion there isn’t a wasted word or paragraph. In fact this should be a movie. Someone smart should turn this into a great film in the vein of Chaz Palminteri’s great film and play ‘A Bronx Tale’. The way he talks about his mother, her energy, her work, her death, his family, his buddies. It’s heartbreaking and hilarious in the same moments like the best of this kind of work is. Joey has really done something special here. He’s distilled all his work life into a perfect pitch.
Born in Cuba, growing up in New Jersey, having lost his dad at three, under the wing of his bigger than life mother who ran a bar and a numbers outfit, Joey was a well written character from jump street. He was born bigger than life, and the beauty of his life, other than the fact that he survived it all and remembers enough of it all to turn it into stories and comedy, is that his heart remained so open and so big. His love for his world and his work and his friends and the things that turn him on and make him smile are so evident in the tales he tells that you can’t help but be entertained. That’s what this book is. It’s just entertaining as hell. It’s also damn inspiring.
I urge you to get this book.
Everything about it is readable as can be. From his drug use, to his horrible divorce. The horrendous point he comes to sleeping in a park outside in a rusted out rocket ship jungle gym is an amazing piece. He and his co-writer Erica Florentine just grab you here and make you go numb with the cold just as much as he does as you read the words. His prison term, his time in Seattle breaking into comedy, one chapter after the next, it never stops, the ride he’s gone is on is so grand. It’s theatrical in it’s consistency. He’s just been his own worst enemy yet at the same time he’s lived by his own rules and code that he’s carved out the space and voice he’s developed that’s all his own. You read it, (or listen to the audiobook, which I did both) you realize that he’s a great man. His mom is proud. His friends are proud. He’s unique as hell. He’s a beast. A legend.
JOEY THE COMEDIAN
It’s a given that Joey’s a great comic. One of the best in the business. Hands down. When I came back to the Comedy Store to make the documentary and I was first introduced to Joe Rogan, I told him I didn’t know a lot about the new group that was around at that time other than Bill Burr. I in fact had never even seen Joe work. I knew none of them. I had been gone from stand-up for years. Rogan didn’t miss a beat. Not a nano-second.
‘Joey Diaz. You got to see Joey Diaz. He’s the first on your list. He’s a killer. The best comic here at the Store.’
Rogan was so sure I didn’t waste anytime. Joey was scheduled the next night. My son Burt and I went back up and saw his set. I laughed my ass off. I hadn’t seen anything that raw and that alive, so real and authentic in years. We immediately set about doing whatever we could to get him into the doc.
Here’s a couple short little pops of Joey from the doc.
JOEY IN THE COMEDY STORE DOC PT. 1
https://vimeo.com/829239454?share=copy
JOEY IN THE COMEDY STORE DOC PT 2
https://vimeo.com/829241731?share=copy
WHERE I GOT MY BALLS FROM
This is a little doc that Joey made with Feliz Esparza his buddy. I think after you read/ listen to the book you should go back and watch this thing. It’s a bonus ride to see the neighborhood and a lot of the people he talks about interviewed. It’s a lot of fun. AFTER YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH THE BOOK.
THE MIND OF JOEY DIAZ – JOEY’S PATREON
Also, if you want to really get some great Joey stuff, I’ve been signed up to his patreon for a couple years and it’s never not been great. I love his podcast Uncle Joey’s Joint but this is next level. Some really funny stuff you don’t get unless you’re a member.
Also, if you’re in LA. this weekend, my son’s movie won the LA Film festival best independent film. 830 pm at the Regal Cinema downtown at LA Live the LA Premiere. Get a ticket and come down.
800 Pound Gorilla has a new special up on Youtube. Simon King’s As Good as or Better Than. Directed by Rory Scovel. It’s a hell of a lot of fun. Starts with a bang, right out of the gate looking for trouble he’s balls out having a good time in this special. If you like comedy that’s about to hit the tilt button most of the time and keeps you laughing straight through, this is a good special for you. It’s not nice and sweet. Put it that way. This guy is a truly funny guy, out of Vancouver I believe(?) I loved this special. It’s up now.
Watch it, then go out and pick fights with people that are different than you. (That’s a joke. Fuck off. Enjoy it, then stay home and knit. It’s really good.)
Ari Shaffir’s game changing special ‘Jew’s is coming very close to six million views. That’s pretty great for any stand-up special, for one called JEW, it’s got all kinds of special connotations. Jokes aside, which I’m sure Ari will have a boatload of, it’s a milestone we at Standupworld, who love the new world of self produced specials, happen to find this one to be in a class of it’s own. With that said, we are offering a special prize to the viewer who turns the ticker to six million, or, kills the final view, if you will.
A years supply of Manischewitz Passover Collection Matzo. Shipping included. So, just be the six millionth person to view this amazing special, one of the best of the last few years, and you’ll get this great prize, and you’ll go down in comedy history.
JEW! On YOUTUBE.
BTW.
This is what I posted back when the special first came out a few months ago. I feel even stronger about it now. Ari is a special dude. Very unique. Quite worth supporting.
This is an amazing special. Well made, well written, performed, superby directed. These specials need you to support them. Venmo, Pay Pal or Superthanks button on the specials You Tube page. Do it. Chip in. You want this new world to flourish. We all will enjoy the benefits. Andrew Schultz, Erica Rhodes, Shane Gillis, Mark Norman, Ryan Long and Tyler Fischer need to be supported. We’ll get more specials and better ones. We need to laugh. Watch less news and dumb shows and more stand up and let yourself laugh. It’s so healthy. Toss into the bucket.
I love what Ari says about this on a pinned comment. It says everything I want to say about the New World of Comedy.
PINNED COMMENT;
Speaking for all the comedians. If you guys give some tips, we can keep doing these. Imagine a world with no more gatekeepers. Where the only things holding us back is the amount of money it takes to make these. I like the Edinburgh Free Fringe model of shows where we don’t charge the audience for tickets. But then after the show, the comic stands outside with a bucket and people throw in their “thanks” as they file out. On great shows, I made more. On shows where I was off or tired, I made less. The adults put in more than the college kids. But even the college kids threw in a pound or two. And the people who owned houses kicked in 20s or 50s. Sometimes even 100! This model allowed everyone to take a chance on a show without financial risk, and then afterwards they gave what they woulda given had they known how good it was going to be. The amount of money I’d get in my bucket was always in direct correlation to how good a show I had put on. When I was on fire, the bucket would be overflowing with cash. When I was off the bucket would be lighter. It was fair. Well, same with these specials. If you see one you loved throw in a lot. If you see one that was so-so, throw in less. It was paid for by the guy on stage. And you’re directly paying back the guy who brought you an hour (or in this case 90 minutes) of laughs. I think a fair price for an ok special is $3-7 dollars. That’s a good price for something they worked on for 2 years (or in this case 5 years 6 months 11 days). And I think a fair price for something amazing is closer to $20. But obviously a lot of that comes down to your individual financial status. We’re all somewhere in between those college kids and those adults who owned their own homes. And by the way, this isn’t just for me. This is for all the comedians on YouTube. They all took a chance. And they’re out there with their buckets. Some of them you already walked past. But they’re still out there. Go back. Go back and tip out List, and Iapalucci, and Normand, and Morrill, and all the other ones. They gave you something you loved. Return the favor. If you got money, give them what they deserved. If you don’t, I get it. I was poor for a long time. A very long time. But just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you can’t put something in the bucket. In Edinburgh, my bucket would have plenty of bills. But it would also be littered with interesting coins from around the world. With Lucy, and Mandy. With ideas on cool restaurants and bars. The equivalent here is to tell people about what you saw. Post it in your stories with links. On your other pages with links. Post about it on your main pages and then again a week later. Spread the word. Leave comments. Tell the comedian how much you liked it. Tell them about a bit or two or some jokes that really stood out. All that stuff helps too. If we’re going to free comedy from these gatekeepers, we can all play a roleThe only reason a comic would go to network is for the reach and the money. Well, YouTube has the most reach. And the least censorship. YouTube has no executives coming in with their ridiculous notes on what a professional comedian should or shouldn’t put into their work. Honestly, how dare they? The gall to tell a professional and talented comic what they should do on their own special. It’s so disrespectful. And YouTube has no gatekeepers. Gone are the days where a talented comedian gets told they’re not famous enough, or they’re too dirty, or too political, or wrongly political, or they’re the wrong gender or race or age. That power is now in the hands of the comics. It’s up to us to decide when we are ready to record something. That’s our responsibility. And when that time comes, we gotta get a ton of money together and take a huge chance. And if you guys hold up your end of the deal, it can be at least a break even thing for us. We’ll all do this if we can break even. We’ll take years of work and give it away if we have a decent chance at simply breaking even. Those networks are irrelevant to good standup. That’s a shame but it’s true. We can change the game. We can free the art form from these dinosaur gatekeepers. Imagine no more censored comedy. Imagine every special being exactly how the comic wants it to be. Every deserving special getting made so you can watch it. We’re in this together. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Standup is the only art form on earth that requires an audience to exist. So let’s put these out together. Crowdsourcing after the fact. Pay what you can and what you feel like you should. The way they do it in EdinburghWe. Are.In.This. Together. I’ll be outside with a bucket after the show. Let’s GOOOOOO!Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/AriShaffir2?country.x=US&locale.x=en_USVenmo: https://account.venmo.com/u/AriShaffir1And there’s even Super Thanks that let you give right from the page. It’s a heart with a cash sign in it if you click the 3 dots next to the “likes” and the “share” buttons.
SUPPORT ARI’S SPECIAL
Watch, enjoy, share, and tip him. Venmo, Pay Pal, and Super thanks button on the Youtube page.
