Boston Comedy TV Notes - Myq Kaplan and Shane Mauss

Shane Mauss and Myq Kaplan both taped their half hour Comedy Central Presents... specials in November, and both specials now have official release dates. Mauss's special will air on March 12 at 11:30 PM, and Kaplan's airs April 30 at 11:30 PM. Both have CDs on the way.

Mauss, who is at The Comedy Studio tonight, will also be on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on March 9. Kaplan appeared on the show December 16. Here's the video of the appearance.

Rooftop Comedy spotlights Mottley's

Mottley's Comedy Club is featured on the front page of RooftopComedy.com this week, complete with a link to two pages worth of comedy clips from DJ Hazard, Bethany Van Delft, Josh Gondelman, and a few others, all shot at the club. For the uninitiated, RooftopComedy.com does this with differnt clubs around the country, giving it a pretty deep reach into various local scenes.

Here's a bit of a sample from DJ Hazard's sold-out show in December.

The Black Comedy Explosion welcomes Freddie Ricks tonight

Jonathon Gates hosts Freddie Ricks, whose credits include Shaft and Def Comedy Jam, tonight at the Black Comedy Explosion at Slade's, 958 Tremont Street in Boston. Here's a bit of a sample for the uninitiated:

MC Mr Napkins says TTFN Boston

At about 6AM New Year's Day, Zach Sherwin, a.k.a. MC Mr. Napkins, left Boston on a flight to Los Angeles. But before he left, he hosted one more show at The Comedy Studio, where he has honed his craft these past couple of years. The show featured great sets all around, from Josh Gondelman, Andrew Mayer, Tom E. Morello, and Chris Fleming. Expect to see a Napkins album in the near future on the Comedy Central label.

I caught up with Sherwin in the stairwell of the Studio as he told Boston, ta ta for now.

Women In Comedy: Submission Deadline Extended

If you missed the first deadline for March's Women In Comedy Festival, I just got word from Festival co-creator Maria Ciampa that the submission deadline has been extended until Monday. For more, check the WIC Web site: http://womenincomedyfestival.blogspot.com/

Here's the full announcement:

The Second Annual ImprovBoston Women in Comedy Festival's submission deadline has been extended to Monday, January 11, and both men and women are encouraged to submit for the 2010 festival! This year's festival will be held at IB Mar. 24-28.

Submissions from a variety of genres will be accepted this year, including improvisational comedy, live sketch comedy, stand up comedy, short film / TV pilot, scripted musical comedy, storytelling, and humor writing.

Please see the Women in Comedy Website to download a submission form and learn more about the submission process for each comedy genre.

The festival is a celebration of Boston-area and nationally-known women in comedy. The festival's mission is to create a forum for people to experience the unique comedic expression of women, see strong female and male performers and, most importantly, to have a great time.

Tom Kenny interview from Comedy Central

Before he was the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, Tom Kenny was a stand-up comedian struggling to find a voice in Syracuse, New York, and then Boston. Kenny doesn't mention Boston specifically in this interview, but the kinds of comedians who work hard on their acts sounds familiar from stories of boom-era Boston Comedy.

SpongeBob SpongeBash
Interview with SpongeBob's Tom Kenny
www.comedycentral.com
Joke of the Day Stand-Up Comedy Free Online Games

Kevin Knox Celebration of Life Memorial SErvice

For those of you who haven't seen this yet, the Kevin Knox Celebration of Life Memorial Service will be held tomorrow at the Collins Center for the Performing Arts, 80 Shawsheen Road, in Andover. Visiting with the family is from 12-2, and the service begins at 2PM. To RSVP, follow the Facebook link.

Mike Dorval gives Death By Chocolate more of a stand-up spin

When I interviewed Mike Dorval about his Death By Chocolate one-man show for its run at Wellfleet in July, he told me he was happy to announce it was coming to the Boston Center for the Arts in November (it runs Fridays-Saturdays through December). He said then, "Who knows what can happen between August and November?" Apparently, what has happened is a change in his attitude toward the piece.

When Death By Chocolate debuted at the Boston Plyawrights' Theater in February, it was definitely a theatrical one-man show. It was a complete story, about Dorval's struggle with weight and diet, told in scenes with a definite ending.

Dorval says the show has loosened up considerably for the current production. "It's definitely funnier now as I've embraced the stand up side of my nature," he says. "Originally it still had the feeling of something of a monologue but having had the chance to be in front of so many people and interacting with them like I do in my stand up, I have a better understanding of how to relate what I have to say to other people. And I've decided its ok to include things simply because they make me laugh."

And the show may continue to change, as long as Dorval finds new places to do it. "Every night is a little different and I love going in and tweaking and helping the show grow," he says.

Dorval says he has no plans for Death By Chocolate once the current run is over, but he'd love to keep doing it, and interest in the show is growing. "I just know I want it to live on in some form or fashion," he says. "And it will."

Nick DiPaolo taping tonight with Aaron Karo

Those who were planning on going to the Aaron Karo show tonight at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre may have a bit of a surprise waiting for them. Karo will be taping a special, and so will Danvers native Nick DiPaolo. The taping was set up quickly (the folks at the Connection told me they just found out this week). Each will do an hour or so of material. Boston's own Big Nezz will warm up the crowd.

RIP Kevin Knox

Veteran Boston comedian Kevin Knox passed away early this morning after a long battle with cancer. For those who knew Knox, or "Knoxie," as many called him, it's hard to believe there is something strong enough to beat him. If you saw him onstage, you know he never stopped moving. And his Gatling Gun delivery wasn't just a stage affectation. It was how he spoke, how he thought. And if you were a regular around Boston clubs for the past couple of decades, it was a voice you heard often, hosting showcases at Nick's Comedy Stop, The Comedy Connection, and, most recently, at Dick Doherty's Beantown Comedy Vault.

It was a common refrain to hear a fellow Boston comic say that cancer picked the wrong guy. "It just never occurred to me that he wouldn't keep fighting on and on and on," said Doherty this afternoon.

There was little Knox didn't try, starting with traditional medicine and continuing with a more organic approach. But, as too often happens in these cases, collective bravado and individual best efforts lost out to the inevitable. It's obvious from the dozens of recent benefits for Knox, including a standing Monday night benefit at the Vault, how much Knox meant to local comedians. It is a hackneyed phrase perhaps, but true. He will be missed.

A few pieces on Knoxie:

FunnyGrownHere.com

Men's Health

Boston Herald

Boston Globe: New Doherty Showcase

Boston Globe

Stephen Lynch on the second leg of 3 Balloons and his upcoming special

Stephen Lynch kicked off the first leg of his 3 Balloons Tour in Boston in February. Now he’s on the second leg of the tour and heading to the Hanover Theatre in Worcester Saturday. Sometime next year, you can expect to see a few different versions of the tour on a Comedy Central special, on DVD, and as a concert film, if you happen to frequent film festivals. I caught up with Lynch by phone last week.

How has the tour been going since you were here in February?

The show is much funnier than it was when we were in Boston, I’m pleased to report. Even though it was pretty good then, we’ve learned a few things. It’s going well. We finished that big tour in the spring and then I took the summer off, and then I started off this new tour with a trip to Europe where I did a bunch of Scandinavian dates and Dublin and Germany. It’s been going really well. Now we’re back to the U.S. and doing some places we missed on the first part of the tour.

Is it still the 3 Balloons Tour?

Yeah. The record’s eight months old now, but it’s still the same tour, really. We’re doing the same show, maybe a few changes here and there as we come up with things.

If someone saw you in Boston at the start of the tour and came to see you in Worcester, how would it be different?

Uh. Oh boy. Now I have to write something really quickly before I get to Worcester, don’t I? The show always is evolving, so I can’t tell you exactly what will be different. The set-up will be the same, where I show some videos and do a bunch of songs from the new record and I have some friends join me onstage. But there will be subtle things, and some new jokes here and maybe a song or two replaced as we come up with other things. But nothing radically different.

When you say it’s funnier, is it just a matter of the timing?

Yeah. The jokes start to gel and you start to think of better transitions between songs, and song orders, you experiment with those. By the time I’m done with this tour, I don’t know when it will be, probably sometime next year, it’ll be just where I want it. And that’s the time you have to hang it up and start over again. Which is unfortunate, but that’s how it works.

Are you someone who can write on tour?

Not really, no. I mean, yeah, I’ve done it before. But what I really need is time and isolation, which is sort of hard to come by when you’re traveling with people and checking into hotels and on airplanes all the time. What I need to write really is to sequester myself in a room somewhere with nobody around me and force myself to do it. If given the chance to watch America’s Next Top Model or write, I will probably watch TV before I take up a pen. Which is unfortunate, but I’m very easily distracted.

Then all the songs would wind up being about America’s Top Model or the people who annoyed you on the airplane.

Yeah. That would really be horrible. Maybe not. Maybe I could write a rock opera based on America’s Next Top Model. I think it would have a very short shelf life, though.

Have you taped the show that’s going to be the new DVD yet?

Yeah. We taped it back in, I think it was April in Portland. I shouldn’t say we taped it, we filmed it. We actually used film because I wanted it to have a certain look. I haven’t seen any of the footage yet so I don’t know if it’s going to have that look that I wanted it to have, sort of a 70s rock concert, Last Waltz-type look to it. So we’ll see. I hope it comes out the way I see it in my head. I wanted it to look sort of classic and not just another something you’d see on Comedy Central.

Was there a particular reason for doing it at the Aladdin Theatre?

I like the theater. It’s sort of an old, decrepit movie theater. I don’t know when it was built. It’s got to be a hundred years old, I’m guessing. And I always pull good crowds there. And there were film crews readily accessible there. So instead of doing it somewhere where I would have had to fly in a crew of a hundred people, there were people there or near there already. I’ve always done good shows in Portland, too.

Did you do anything differently for the filming?

No. I did essentially the same show. Now what I can use out of that, I’m not sure. For example, I always close my show with “Purple Rain,” which I think would probably more than I would ever make on the sale of the DVDs to actually use, because Prince does not come cheap, I do not think. So that’ll be out. I’ll have to think of a different way to close the show. And the video, I’m thinking what I’ll do is sort of intersperse the video that I show during the show with songs and with other videos, other tour diary type videos, which I have yet to shoot. I’m trying to give it some sort of storyline instead of just song after song after song. I think, I mean, that’s the plan now. Don’t hold me to any of this. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. I have some interesting ideas.

So Comedy Central’s going to have an hour version of it, you’ve got a version that’s going to be going around to film festivals, and the version that winds up on the DVD. Are those going to be three different versions?

No, I would assume that the one that winds up on the DVD will be the official work, and then if we chose to send that out to festivals, great. But what we give to Comedy Central will just be an abbreviated version. I don’t know what they want, I don’t know if they want just the songs or if they want the shortened version of the story I’m going to come up with. I don’t know. I’m really wracking me brain trying to figure out how to make this all come together.

How did you choose Gregory Dark to direct the concert film?

Somebody suggested him, I can’t remember who it was, exactly. But he came to see a show I did in Los Angeles and we spoke after the show, and he seemed to really be on board and have some good ideas and be on the same page as I was, so we just sort of clicked.

Had you seen any of his work before?

You mean his work in the music video world or the pornography world?

I’m unaware of his work in the pornography world.

Apparently he did some early work, in the 80s, I think, in the porno world. No, I wasn’t really familiar with any of his work. I just saw that he had a lot of experience, and then when I talked to him, we seemed to hit it off. That was enough for me.

Did he try to make you wear a big fuzzy mustache?

Yeah. It turned into a whole porn shoot. There were fluffers there before the show.

When does this get released in the different iterations?

You know what, I don’t know. I have to finish it first. Obviously people are waiting for me, waiting very patiently for me to do this. We did film it several months ago. But I like to take my time with these things. I want to make sure it’s quality before I put it out.

Do you have any plans for once the tour is over?

Hopefully I’ll have started writing new songs and I can get into the studio again and start recording. The last record, we did the whole thing in a week in a studio in Brooklyn. And this time what I’d like to do is sort of record in chunks, so when it comes time to put out the new record I don’t have to rush in and finish everything. I’ll have things that are already done. And that way I can tweak things to my version of perfection and change things as I go. So that’s the plan for now, just keep writing, recording.

Any idea, other than the method of recording, how you want things to be different from previous recordings?

I wouldn’t mind doing something with more of a through line to it. Maybe I’ll take a stab at a rock opera one of these days. Or even a mini rock opera and the rest can be unrelated songs. The idea of telling a little story seems intriguing to me. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for the past few months.

Read my previous interview with Lynch here.
Or watch my post-show interview from Boston here.

Gavin, Rogerson, Sweeney, and Dunn play benefit for Kevin Knox tonight

Some of Boston's most tenured veteran comics are playing a benefit tonight for Kevin Knox. Don Gavin, Steve Sweeney, Kenny Rogerson, and Jimmy Dunn will top the bill for tonight's show at the theater that usually hosts Sheer Madness (a.k.a. The Cahrles Playhouse Stage II), organized by the folks at Tommy's Comedy Lounge. Tickets are available at Ticketmaster.com, or at the box office for $25. Tommy's Comedy Lounge, 74 Warrenton St, Boston. 800-745-300

On a related note, Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault won't host their running Monday-night benefit for Knox to avoid conflict with the Tommy's show.

2009 College Improv Tournament -- Prelim Results

The preliminary winners from this afternoon's 2009 Coolege Improv Tournament at ImprovBoston are in:

Match A Winner - Cheap Sox (Tufts University)

Match B Winner - Purple Crayon (Yale University)

Match C Winner - DangerBox (New York Univeristy)

Match D Winner - TBS (Brandeis University)

Match E Winner - Seriously Bent (Suffolk University)

These winners will face off at Improv Asylum tonight at 11PM, and the winner will go on to compete against other groups from around the country.

Third Annual College Improv Tournament: East Coast Regional in Boston today

Fourteen improv teams will compete today in two different venues starting at noon for today's Third Annual College Improv Tournament. Priliminaries start at ImprovBoston at noon, with teams from Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and run on the hour until 4PM. The finals then move to Improv Asylum at 11PM. The shows are open to the public, tickets are $10 for the prelims and $15 for the finals, available by phone at ImprovBoston (617.576.1253) and Improv Asylum (617.263.6887). Student discounts available.

Participating schools: Emerson College, Yale University, Boston University, Tufts University, Salve-Regina University, Northeastern University, New York Univesrity, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Colgate University, Brandeis Univesrity, Penn State, Suffolk, and Mount Holyoke.

Show is on tonight at the Studio

There was some doubt earlier this week over whether there would be a show tonight at the Comedy Studio. Just got this from the Studio's Rick Jenkins, confirming there will in fact be a show, with a great line-up, to boot:

We will have a show tonight (Friday, November 6) at the Studio.

The Hong Kong wasn't sure until Wednesday night. So we quickly put together a pretty cool night. Personally, I feel like it's going to be a great time. Like the old days; small turn out; lots of funny friends.

Renata Tutko will host sets from Chris Fleming, Sarah Heggan, Rick Jenkins, Andrew Mayer, Andy Ofiesh, Sean Sullivan and Bethany Van Delft.

Eddie Brill at The Comedy Club at Cheers

Eddie Brill is a New York guy, but he has a special place in his heart for Boston. Brill, who books comics for David Letterman, went to Emerson College and worked on his chops here in his early days. Now he gets back for gigs like his two-night stand at The Comedy Club at Cheers, tonight and tomorrow, and to look for talent for Letterman. “Some of the best comics in the world are from here,” he says, speaking last night from his hotel room in Boston. “If I didn’t come here to check out the comics in Boston, I’d be a fool.” He booked Joe Wong for his debut this past April, and worked with him on his set. Brill also teaches comedy, and he’ll be teaching three days of seven-hour workshops at Emerson this weekend.

How often do you get back to Boston, do you think?

Probably about three to four times a year. I’m always here looking for comics for the Great American Comedy Festival. I’ll try to do a Letterman audition up here, as well, but sometimes they’re the same thing. And I always teach at Emerson once a year, and I come up once or twice a year to do gigs or corporate work. That kind of a thing.

What are the workshops on, in particular?

It’s a comedy workshop that I created about ten years ago. I’ve been doing the one-day, very intense workshops for seven hours. And I’ve done it all over the world now, in Australia and England and Ireland, and all over Canada and the United States. It’s been very, very successful. It’s really about comics being honest with each other and helping each other, being each others’ eyes and ears. I’ve got it down to a science where it’s really effective.

So a few years ago I presented it to Emerson, and they let me do a weekend. It was so successful that we’re into our third year in a row.

Who is it aimed at? College comics or –

No, I’ve done workshops with ten people and eight of them have been doing it for sixteen years, plus. Comedians are nice to each other, but it’s really hard to be honest with each other because there’s a lot of ego involved. This is a situation where people have been given the okay to really be honest with each other in a respectful way, and you can help each other and be each others’ eyes and ears, to point out the kinds of things that people don’t know about themselves because you can’t see yourself.

Is that the main point of it, to show people how to communicate within the comic community?

Naw, that’s only part of it. The key is, I learned more from teaching when I was at Emerson than I did from doing. So I created a workshop where everyone is a teacher. Everyone learns so much about what they do by seeing what others do.

How much of that is stuff you learned since working on the Letterman show?

Hmmm… I don’t think I’ve learned that much. I have learned about what we want at Letterman, but that’s something in addition to what I’m already doing. It’s pretty much a different hat. And I’ve always loved teaching and I will admit I’m pretty damn good at it. I’ve always been very good at being that kind of person. Been doing it or a very long time and I’ve had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students, and a lot of them have been in touch with me and a lot of them have been inspired, not only to be comics but to be writers, and they learn a lot from them. So it’s been very, very good. There are people who don’t ever do it again, but they appreciate it. And then there’s people who never thought about doing it and begin doing it.

How tough is it when you sit down with a comic, especially one who might be well known and has been road testing their material for years, how tough is it to sit down with them and do something for Letterman?

It’s very tricky. What happens is, the kind of cool thing is, word has gotten around to trust me, that I’m not going to let anyone go up there and do anything that would make them look bad. Whatever I talk to them about will only be, will help them do better. And there have been some scenarios where I’ve helped some pretty top-name comics with some ideas for their sets and they just loved them. What it really comes down to, the bottom line is, it’s the comedian, it’s their set, not mine. So I might make suggestions, and most of the time, these people will follow it, but they’ll do it because they’ve learned to trust me.

Was it harder at the beginning, when you don’t know as much as you do now, when you first started the job?

I had booked before, a had booked a comedy club and a couple of shows, but this was booking for someone else’s taste. And interestingly enough, we have similar tastes. We both like the same kind of funny, which really is helpful to me. He also has a lot of integrity, Letterman, where he doesn’t care if anyone is big, he just cares that they’re funny. That’s a really great boss to work for, who’ll put comics on because they’re really great at what they do, not because they have a big name and you want to get ratings. He just wants the comics to be great. He’d rather find a young comic that no one knows about, instead of finding someone who already has all that power.

Are you currently looking at anyone else from Boston, or working with Joe again?

Definitely going to do something with Joe again in the new year. I like Dan Boulger. I like him a lot, I could see him eventually have a set for the show. There are so many great comics in Boston, and each time I see the groups from Boston, they improve all the time because there’s so much work here.

Ken Reid makes Music To My Years tonight at Mottley's

In a post-apocalyptic world, Ken Reid is the guy you need to preserve to remember all of human history. Well, maybe not all of it, but certainly anything to do with modern movies, music, or television. I have often told Reid about some obscure movie I saw on a Sunday afternoon, something I watched for a laugh, just to have him tell me when he saw it in the theater during its original run. Far from just parroting this stuff in his stand-up act, Reid makes it all personal, and hysterical. Tonight at Mottley's Comedy Club, he presents his third one-man show, Music To My Years.

You’ve talked about TV (A Very Special Episode) and movies (Cusack Attack), does a show about music complete the circuit for one-man shows for you?

I was actually thinking about this yesterday, when I first started writing the first show (Cusack) I thought that this would be the trilogy and that it would pretty much cover everything. Lately though as I've sort of been finding a good rythem with these shows I think there's a couple more in me. I was thinking of stories I have about slightly larger topics like school, horror and work and I think I could probably work shows around those topics.

Just how personal a subject is music for you?

Like most popular culture, it's very personal for me. But I think music is personal for most people even if they don't realize it. I tie a lot of my memories and specific times, places and events to specific songs. Songs act like pnemonic devices in a lot of ways for me. I spent most of my teen years in rock clubs and reading about music and hunting down records so it was a major part of my formative years. The first real experience I had with business and performing was all music as well even though I am in no way shape or form a musician. But I think if i hadn't been in a band, I probably wouldn't be doing stand up comedy now.

Would you consider yourself a music snob? Is there a style or genre of music at which you turn up your nose?

I am a music snob. But I don't think there's a genre I dismiss or turn my nose up at. Actually that's not correct. Reggaton.

Will you be playing music or videos for illustration at this show?

I always do a power point slide show with these shows. I feel like it adds some jokes and also keeps people from getting bored of me talking for an hour and gives them something to look at other than my mug. There will be some music involved with this show. I was going to include some video footage of my old band but decided against it, people can look that stuff up on Youtube after if they want laugh at my expense.

You’ve had brushes with a lot of notable musicians – how do you wind up coming in contact with these people?

That's a question I ask myself a lot. I've somehow managed to encounter a lot of "celebrities" and gotten myself into some strange situations over the years. I think most of it is just dumb luck. Some of it was just the company I kept and the places I was hanging out. The band I was in did fairly well locally and a lot of our peers got very big, so that helped. I also worked at a radio station in college which helped. I actually cut a few stories out of the show because even though they were true I thought they were so weird that people wouldn't believe me.
Will you be doing this show anywhere else? Or bringing back any of the other shows?
I'd like to. The other two shows I performed at some colleges and out of state a couple times. I'm hoping to take one of the shows down to NYC at some point.
I would be remiss in ignoring Halloween in this interview – what would be your top couple of recommendations for Halloween movies for comedy fans?

Night of the Creeps - All time horror/comedy classic, comes out on DVD (finally) on 10/27

Saturday the 14th and its sequel Saturday the 14th Strikes Back - Weird "kitchen sink" Mad Magazine type horror spoof comedies, I don't know why but I have a soft spot for them.

Neon Maniacs - Not an intentional comedy by any means, but one of the weirdest movies I've seen. the village people of monsters live inside the Golden Gate bridge and terrorize teenagers, also the monster dissolve in water.

Soulkeeper - Just checked this one out, it's from 2001, sometimes it tries a bit too hard with the comedy, but most of it works, and it has a Debbie Gibson cameo.

The Pit - You'll laugh watching it, because your mind needs to defend itself.

Kevin Knox benefits this week

Veteran Boston comic Kevin Knox is battling stage four melanoma, and is in need of help, which he'll get from his friends at Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault and Giggles. Starting tonight, the Monday night show at the Vault, which Knox usually hosts, will be called "Knoxie's Team," and proceeds from the show will go to Knox. Vault owner Dick Dohrty says this will be the case indefinitely, as long Knox needs the help (see line-ups below).

Team Knoxie at the Vault:

OCT 5: Dick Doherty, Greg Howell, Jim Lauletta, and Corey Rodrigues
OCT. 12: Frank Santorelli, Dave Russo, Chris Zito, Mike MacDonald, Rodrigues, Doherty
Oct. 19: Paul D'Angelo, Mike Koutrobis, Doherty

Also this week, Lenny Clarke and Steve Sweeney headline a special show at Giggles tomorrow to benefit Knox. the site lists Clarke and Sweeney "plus ten other comedians," and from past benefit shows, I know a lot of comics show up at Giggles to do a little time. If you're a comic and planning on attending, feel free to e-mail me or mention it in the comments section here.

I'll post any more benefit info as it comes in.

Sara Benincasa's Agorafabulous at ImprovBoston tonight

Sara Benincasa brings her new one-woman show, Agorafabulous, to ImprovBoston tonight. The show, about the comedian/writer’s experiences with panic attacks and agoraphobia, has drawn positive reviews in several cities, and Benincasa is also working on a book by the same name. Benincasa has quite a varied resume – she was a citizen journalist for the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team last year, hosted Tub Talk with Sara B., for which she interviewed people in her tub, and currently co-hosts Get in Bed, a sex-chat show on Cosmo’s satellite radio station and hosts the Family Hour with Auntie Sara at Comix in New York once a month.

The Boston Comedy Interview: Paula Poundstone

Paula Poundstone left Boston as a young comic in 1980, traveling the country before settling in San Francisco. In the intervening thirty years, she’s become a popular touring comic, a favorite panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, and an author. Her first book, There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant To Say, echoed her personal style, meandering through her very public personal struggles and much lighter topics. She says when she’s trying to lecture her kids, “I’ve heard myself talking about Norma Rae, and I realized I started out saying, could you make your bed?”

Poundstone released her first CD, I Heart Jokes, earlier this year, and she’s working on her second book, trying to work a tad faster than the nine years it took her to get the first one out. She’s also playing the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre tomorrow.

I was told you are writing a second book now, is that how you’re writing it again, [the stream of conscious method]?

No, which is probably why my brain is totally stalled on my second book. No, it isn’t. I’m going to try to be a lot more careful. I’m going to try to stick to the point in this one. I’ll be jumping back and forth, but I won’t just let go of the pedals.

Is there a particular theme?

My book is loosely, the working title for it is, The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness. Basically I’m trying to do the things that I either thought would make me happy or that somebody else, I talked to somebody else and said, what do you think would make you happy, and then I do it their way. I still have these awful scheduling problems, which was part of what made the other book take nine years. Hell, if I bring this one in at five years, I’ve nearly by forty percent, improved.

I think the way I wrote the other book made fits and starts more doable than this. With the other one, I could write for fifteen minutes and stop. This feels a little harder to do that. I’m not a writer for a living, so what I do is, I try to fit it in the cracks of my life, and sometimes, there’s no god damn cracks. Every day. You know, you’ve got your plan, and everything interrupts your plan.

[Dog interrupts, barking at the reflection of a necklace Poundstone is wearing, which starts a discussion about pets].

Honestly, I may have gone over the top in terms of numbers, but as just a general idea, we spend so much time saying, oh, look at this cat thing or that cat thing, what they do, and just watching them and are thoroughly entertained. I don’t know if it’s worth all of the vet bills, but it’s pretty fun.

For I’ve written about comedy for the past ten years, trying to promote good, smart comedy, what makes makes me laugh as much as anything is the I Can Haz Cheezburger site with the cat and captions.

Oh, I’ve heard about it. I’ve never seen it. You know, some nights… I’m certainly not a genius, but there are nights where I weave, I think, anyways, politics and life… it feels my act has a meaning, sometimes. It’s not like an on-the-nose meaning, but some kind of a meeting, and then the crowd really responds, and it goes really well, and then I go, oh my god, this is how I want to do it. And there are nights it really feels great. IT just feels like it was the right balance of both things, I wanted trying to be anything I’m not, it went over really well, and then I talked to the individuals in the crowd, and there’s this soul to the audience that I’ve tapped into, and it just feels absolutely magical.

And afterwards I’ll hang around and sell my books and sell CDs and sign them and that kind of thing. And I shake people’s hands, and I take pictures with people, and I sign things and I talk to them some more. God, it feels great. And somebody will come up to me and say, “Hey, you didn’t talk about your cats.” Yeah. You know what? I forgot.

There were a couple of other things going on.

Yeah. The truth is, I’m the same way. I enjoy a silly, stupid cat joke as much as the next guy, or I suppose I wouldn’t do it. But it’s the same thing with, I make these little films and I put them up on YouTube, and I’m not a great editor, none of it’s the second coming. But I’m learning how to do it, and I’m including what I think are some pretty funny jokes. And it’ll get, if I promote it on my Twitter and blah blah blah, I can have a few hundred views within a couple of days! And then there’s somebody who films their goldfish. I’ve heard about it, I didn’t see it, “Oooh, it had a hundred thousand on the first day.” Okay. Great. I’ll just sit quietly over here.

Going back to talking about politics and life in general, I think the reason why weaving those things works for you is because they feel like they’re coming from the same place. It’s not like you’re starting one thing and stopping another.

Well, I mean, there’s a connection between the two. People always say to me, “Well, what can we expect?” And I have yet in all of these years to come up with an answer. “What kind of comedy do you do?” I feel like, largely, who I am is just a citizen, barely hanging on, in terms of obtaining information enough to make halfway decent to vote. But I’m not a political analyst, that’s not what I spend my time doing. Even when I do Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, I cram with newspapers on the airplane and the train on the way there. I always feel the others cheat because they’re born into the world knowing more about current events than I do. I always say to people, there are weeks where I’m very well informed about a lot of things. And then there’s months were I can’t tell you very much about politics or about what’s going on in the world because we were having tantrums at home or, you know, this health problem or this thing with this kid.

And I think most voters are like that. Most of us have our lives that we are trying really hard to contend with, which is why it’s really galling when there’s something like a town hall thingee, and people go to the trouble of shouting misinformation. Now, I think some of those people actually believed the things they were shouting. But they got that misinformation from somewhere. Where did they get it? Something like the Sarah Palin Website. Oh, please, that’s just terrible. I don’t mind somebody disagreeing, but I really mind the waters being muddied when I’ve only got a few seconds to look.

I don’t even know how people in other countries do it. There are places where the whole country is a lot more aware of what’s going on there. It’s not necessarily good news, by the way, it’s not necessarily good things are happening where they live. Places where they have new democracies and almost everyone goes out to vote, that’s astounding to me. Because I find it so hard to just get by.

Did you follow comedy as a kid?

Yes and no. I wasn’t very familiar with the… there’s more venues now than there ever were before. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. Maybe if I’d been raised in Manhattan, I might have snuck in and seen Lenny Bruce. So we had Bill Cosby albums, we had Alice’s Restaurant, we had Smothers Brothers albums, a couple of them. It’s funny, though, I never gathered that they were recorded in front of people. I didn’t know anything about recording one way or another. I thought… I don’t know where I thought it all came from. Magic, I guess. Who else? I think we might have had a Lily Tomlin album. So I loved those things and those people, but that was pretty much the width and breadth of my knowledge of stand-up when I was little. I loved the response of laughter, I loved to laugh myself. I loved the sound of everybody’s laughter. Even derisive laughter.

I met, when I was working Boston, I met this guy that had like every comedy album that ever existed. People you had no idea had ever recorded a comedy album, or you had no idea that they were ever stand-up comics. Oh look, Tip O’Neill. Who? He had a huge stack of them. He had Nichols and May and people I’d never heard of and certainly wouldn’t have known they made an album. This had been his passion for years.

Was he also a comic?

Yes, but very bad. And I think he eventually got out of it all together. He worked with a partner and oh my god were they bad. So it just goes to show you that having a lot of comedy albums isn’t a substitute for being a good comic. Although in truth, we were all bad. We were all just terrible. It’s amazing that anybody ever paid us.

What pushed you towards it?

I had always wanted to be a comic performer of some sort. I don’t know that I always thought that I would be, but I always wanted to be. There was no path for being a stand-up when I was young. If somebody came up to me now and said, I’d like to become a stand-up comic, I’d say most cities, or a number of cities, anyway, have kind of a nightclub circuit of comedy clubs. Maybe only a couple at this point, but most cities do. And they have open mic nights. And sometimes colleges do, as well. They have open mic nights. That’s what you should do. You should think of stuff you think is funny, write it down or just plain commit it to memory, get your five minutes going and get up and do your five minutes. Afterwards, order a juice from the bar and sit down and think about what you learned. Do that over and over again, a lot, and that’s how you do it.

Well, when I was younger, there were no… a lot of the people that went before me, they went to strip clubs and said, hey, can I tell my jokes here? I never would have been that brave. At one point, I did see street performers, and I thought, I could do that. I had no idea that they had an act, by the way. I just thought they were just talking. I thought I could do that. I also didn’t know that they had to audition and get a license. I really thought I would just stand up in Boston Common somewhere and start telling jokes and hope that people would gather. That was my fantasy, and I don’t think I would ever have been brave enough to do that. And therefore, I was a really funny table busser.

Whre did you play when you were here?

The Ding Ho. The Comedy Connection had a comedy night at the Ding Ho years ago, and that’s kind of what brought comedy in there. And then Barry Crimmins came along and negotiated a deal for himself there, and because the Comedy Connection was only there every other week or something for one night. So Barry had them do it five nights a week, or whatever it was. And that became a rising place for stand-up comics. And again, most of us were really terrible at the time. So I started doing stuff at the Connection. Of all the comics that sucked, and really and truly we all did, I was never a favorite amongst the powers that be and so I only even got the ten dollar jobs occasionally. And I only really worked out of there for a year or so before I took a Greyhound bus to see what clubs were like in other cities.

What year was that you left?

’80. And the thing is, when you start out in a place, they’ve really seen you be bad. You’re never going to be much worse than you are when you start out. Right, so they’ve seen you be bad, and that’s what they tend to remember. So I’d show up in a city where they’d never seen me before, and I’d gotten a little bit better, and they’re used to their people who are bad. So in some places, I seemed, well, desirable is too strong a word. But I seemed like a slight cut above.

I would take a bus, I had that Ameripass thing that they used to have on Greyhound – you could go anywhere you wanted for a month for a hundred and fifty bucks. What I would do is, I would take a bus to a place I wanted to go, say Denver, for example, when I got off the bus in Denver, I would go look at their bus schedule there. I would check my suitcase into a locker at the bus terminal, and I would look at their schedule to find a city, a town, a place that they went to that was four hours away. I would find the latest departure for that four-hours-away place, I would show up at the Greyhound station at that time, go on that bus for four hours, and I’d get out at that stop and get back on a bus coming the other direction. And in this hour, I slept eight hours a night. I did that for a couple of months. And along the way I stayed at this person’s house or that person’s house. Sometimes when people realized where I stayed, it was that age where we were all young and if somebody had one apartment, why not have ten people in it? I often flopped on people’s floors.

Did you go to L.A. from there?

No. I went to San Francisco. I worked, I did open mics in Canada a couple of places. Yuk Yuks in Montreal and Toronto. I went to Zany’s in Chicago. I can’t remember anymore. I went to San Francisco, and pretty much the second I got off the bus, or crossed the street, anyway, because the bus station was kind of the armpit of the town, the day I arrived, I said, I think I need to stay here for a while.

Did you have any favorite comics that you knew from Boston?

Well, Steve Wright and I started out a couple of weeks from each other. He was so different from what was mostly popular in Boston at the time. I mean, he’s different than lots of guys. He’s great and wonderful and clever. He would be described as different anywhere. But in Boston there was a style that was sort of the style, and even acts that might have been better had they used more of themselves and less of the Boston style, not too many people could find a way to not be a part of the “Boston style.” I don’t know. Steve just did what he did and he was great and brilliant. There’s a guy named Jack Gallagher that was great. I liked all those guys and I had a great time with them.

Jim Tingle is still a good friend. He’s somebody who had a really funny trajectory about how he did what he did. Jim’s a really brilliant, well-educated man. But he’s a Cambridge townie. And I don’t think at the young age we all were when we were back in the beginning, I don’t think you told people that you were a really brilliant, well-educated man. The way he does what he does changed. He didn’t used to talk about politics when he started. He played the harmonica and he’d go onstage drunk. He got thrown out of the club the first time he went on.

Why did it take you so long to record a CD, do you think?

Couldn’t find the button. I’m bad with technology. I don’t know. I don’t know why. I just didn’t do it before, and then I did. I always like to be clear with people that I owned a lot of CDs. I just hadn’t recorded one. I don’t want people to think that I’m not hip.