Louis C.K. at the Wilbur, the Kendall, and on TV

If you want to see Louis C.K. this month, your options are plentiful. He’s at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre September 24-26. His new special, Hilarious, is screening at the Kendall Square Cinema at 7:30PM September 8, one showing only. It also screens in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. that day.

The special debuts on the premiere cable channel Epix on September 18, and will then move to Comedy Central to be aired and released on DVD next year.

And there’s also one week left in the regular season of Louie on FX (search the site for my episode reviews and earlier feature on the show). The show has been picked up for a second season.

If you want to see C.K. in Boston for his Word shows, get your tickets now. He has sold out the first four shows, prompting the Wilbur to add a fifth show on Sunday, September 26. But the folks at the theater tell me there are only about 400 tickets left to that show as of this afternoon.

Stay tuned for more on Hilarious.

Complete Hilarious screening info:

Austin
7:00 PM screening at Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek, 13729 Research Blvd., Austin. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available through www.drafthouse.com/lakecreek

Boston
7:30 PM screening at the Kendall Square Cinema, 1 Kendall Square, Boston. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 4:00 PM and are available through the Kendall Square Cinema box office or online at www.landmarktheatres.com

Chicago
7:00 PM screening at Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., Chicago. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 5:00 PM and are available through www.etix.com

Los Angeles
7:30 PM screening at The Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday, August 31 at 10:00 AM and are available through http://louisck.tickets.musictoday.com/default.aspx

New York City
7:30 & 9:45 PM screenings at IFC Theater at Waverly, 323 Avenue of the Americas, New York City. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available at the IFC Theater Box Office or through www.ifccenter.com

Philadelphia
7:30 PM screening at Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, September 1 at 12:00 PM and are available at the Prince Music Theater Box Office, the Trocadero Box Office or online at www.ticketmaster.com

San Francisco
7:30 PM screening at Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, San Francisco. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available through www.landmarktheatres.com

Washington, DC
7:30 PM screening at Arlington Drafthouse, 2903 Columbia Pike
Arlington, VA. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 8:00 AM and are available through www.arlingtondrafthouse.com

The BC Q&A: Christopher Titus

The first time I saw Christopher Titus perform, I was cover comedy for The Buffalo News, and he was performing at the Funny Bone near SUNY Buffalo, my alma mater. He put on a dark show with long moments where the audience didn’t know how to react, like relating how he broke his mother’s suicide to his father over the phone.

That show would become his one-man show, Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding, which would then become his Fox sitcom, Titus. What I didn’t know was that I had caught Titus at a turning point, where he decided what he wanted to do with his comedy after more than a decade in the clubs.

Titus comes to the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre with a full plate. He’s working on a new sitcom for Fox, an update of Titus based on his last Comedy Central special, Love Is Evol. He’s also trying to turn his rejected Comedy Central pilot, Special Unit, into a movie. And he’s got a new live show, Neverlution,, which he’s workshopping for the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal next month.

I spoke with him by phone.

I always expect to hear that you’ve been kidnapped or your wife has shot at you when we speak.

That’s the next special.

Are you at a happy point in your life? I know that in Love Is Evol, you talked about actually being happy.

Yeah, I am, actually. The new one is called Neverlution, The new one is about how we’ve lost our country, how we just gave it away and how we’re raising a whole generation of kids who aren’t going to take it back for us. I’m getting that ready for the Montreal Comedy Festival, which is… I’ve got to have it perfect and ready by July 12.

So one-man shows are still something you’re interested in doing even with everything else you’ve got going on?

It’s such a misnomer, though. People always tell me, Titus, you do such a one-man show style, but I always kind of look at it as, I just do comedy for an hour and fifteen minutes with a them. I saw Lily Tomlin years ago do Signs of Intelligent Life and it was thematic and it was really funny.

The guy I’m working with now, he got Eddie Izzard going at Westbeth Entertainment. He kind of picked me up. He said, “You really do that show in a club?” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s how I make sure it’s funny.” In a theater, people are willing to let it be quiet and not funny for a while. But if I work in a club where it has to be funny every eighteen seconds, then I get to the theater and I take those moments, and it’s hilariously funny, it just makes it that much better.

I remember seeing you years ago in Buffalo when you were working on the show that would become Norman Rockwell is Bleeding –

Oh, god, when I was really angry.

I remember you were asking the club owner, who was also a comic, for advice on putting that in club setting.

Yeah, Paul. I think his name was Paul. That was one of the first early weeks of me really just going with my new style. I remember that. I found out if you’re just really funny… I think it would be hard to take from a theater to a club, to work on a theater piece that had a lot of good moments in it but not a lot of funny in it, and then try to take that to a comedy club, you’d be dead.

You’d wind up doing highlights, and it would…

It would kill it. I agree.

Wow. You know me all the way back to Buffalo. Wow.

You were in LA then, right, and touring with that in clubs?

Yeah, but if I remember correctly with Buffalo, I had been doing comedy for twelve years, and I got to this really weird place where I really hated my act because I hadn’t found anything, and when I went to Buffalo, I just changed my act. I just started doing edgier, I started performing angrily, and performing like who I really am inside, I guess, and really kind of pushing it. It was working, so I pushed it so far that at one point, I started to walk people out of the room, and then I pulled it back to where it felt comfortable, and that’s where I am now.

So that period was a turning point for you, you’d say?

Definitely. I was going to quit comedy. I was really going to quit comedy. It just didn’t work.

I had gotten kind of a backward impression of that, where you had been doing that kind of show with those moments where you were digging yourself a hole, especially talking about your mother’s suicide, and trying to reel them back in after that, and you were trying to make it work more in a club.

This was before I got the show, right?

We talked afterwards and you were working on something.

This was ’97 or ’98?

Yeah.

So if we go back to then, yeah, it really got clear that I didn’t want to do bullshit comedy anymore. I didn’t want to do ten minutes on masturbation, ten minutes about porn, ten minutes about commercials, ten minutes about how stupid my girlfriend or wife is. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to do something different in a club. Paul was a comic, he was totally okay with it.

The show you did there was almost exactly Norman Rockwell is Bleeding, I think.

Yeah, I had just got it in shape. In ’98, we put it up in a theater – that was in the summer, wasn’t it? We put it up in a theater like a month later, we put it in a theater in September, and that’s when I got the deal for Titus.

Most of the shows of yours I’ve seen have been intensely personal, and if this is a broader political show, how does it relate back to you?

It’s weird. If you saw The End of the World, it was very topical, and about [raising my kids after 9/11]. This one is about the social structure that we’ve actually currently built in our society right now. I was trying to figure out what this show is about.

It’s not about the politics, it’s about us. I have a whole bit about, it’s not illegal immigration’s fault, it’s our fault for going to Home Depot and picking up six of those guys to build an unpermitted bathroom in a house we can’t afford. That’s the problem. And it’s all about personal responsibility and taking the country back. Dealing with congress and the senate the way they need to be dealt with. I have some weird ideas in this show.

Will we be seeing that show at the Wilbur?

Yeah. I’ve gotta get it right, so I’m really working on it.

The BC Q&A: Jim Florentine on heavy metal, football, and A Little Help

Jim Florentine’s first exposure to a mass audience came thanks to a puppet. Florentine voiced the character Special Ed on Comedy Central’s Crank Yankers, on which puppets made prank phone calls. The show was canceled three years ago, and Florentine has moved on to That Metal Show on VH1 Classic, frequent radio appearances, and a new film, A Little Help starring Jenna Fischer and Chris O’Donnell.

But the compulsion to prank stays with him. He’ll release a new Terrorizing Telemarketers CD later this year on the late Ronnie James Dio’s record label, and he’s also planning another Meet the Creeps prank DVD with his Metal Show partner, Don Jamieson, for late summer or fall.

Florentine comes to the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre tomorrow. I caught up with him by phone this week.

Do you have to do any research for That Metal Show or do you pretty much know your history already?

Sometimes I have to do some research, just check up on some facts. Some of these bands have been around for twenty-five years, so I might have missed some of their mid-90s stuff that they did, so I’ll look up a little stuff. Most of the stuff I’m fairly familiar with. I’d say about eighty percent I’m pretty familiar with.

Are there any particular favorites from the shows you have coming up?

We have Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper coming up on the show, which is going to be great. We just had Zakk Wiyde on, Ozzy’s old guitarist, and the reunion of the band Dokken. They came on, so that was really cool. And then Slayer. You can never go wrong with Slayer if you like heavy metal.

How long have they been doing it now?

I think they put their first record out in ’84.

I used to sit at the metalhead table in high school, and I remember the Slayer, Metallica, and Anthrax t-shirts.

They were one of the original thrash bands.

Do you have anything against nu-metal? I know there was an introduction to one of the shows where you said, don’t be disappointed your favorite nu-metal band isn’t on the show.

I have no problem with it. I like a lot of nu-metal. The problem is, on VH1 Classic, it doesn’t fit the format. It’s more like classic hard rock, the videos they play. It’s like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Iron Maiden. Not so much the newer stuff like Lamb of God, Shadows Fall, Slipknot. I love all those bands, too. We’ve had Hatebreed on, so once in a while, we can introduce a newer artist, but [with] the format of the network, it’s not really our decision. It’s not really our call.

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It’s been kind of a rough couple of weeks for metal. Is there anything you want to say about [Slipknot bassist] Paul Grey and Dio?

Yeah. Ronnie was a guest on our show, we were friends with him. We knew him well. We were out in L.A. about a month ago for the Golden God Awards, the heavy metal awards show, and it aired on VH1 Classic, actually, last weekend, and we’re doing interviews for the red carpet and Ronnie came up. Ronnie came out because he was up for best vocalist, which he did win. We talked and he said, yeah, I just had a little setback, the chemo’s kicking my ass, but I’m going to do summer dates, and I’m starting to slowly sing again. I’m going to beat this and I’ll be all right.

That was a month ago. And it’s just really sad. He was such a nice guy. He’s one of the nicest guy I ever met. He was just incredible. Everyone that was around him or any musicians will say the same thing. He was just a sweet guy.

And then Paul Grey from Slipknot, that was such a tragedy because that band was so close-knit. If one guy out of the nine can’t make the show they’ll cancel the whole show. It’s just like, look, this is our original band, and this is it. It really sucks, because I’ve known Paul for four or five years from being on the road and seeing those guys and hanging out with them. He was just a really nice, quiet, super guy too. It’s a shame, it really is. And was a main songwriter, too. He was a main writer in Slipknot, he wasn’t just the bass player.

People don’t realize how many nice people there are in metal. That might take some of the air out of it, but if you go to a really heavy show, people are nicer there than at a lot of the mainstream shows.

It’s true, and the musicians are, too. Maybe because they’ve been around a while or something, they’re not young punks anymore. And then you look, that’s probably the reason they got this far in their careers, is just being nice and not being a dick to people and not burning bridges and just treating people the way they would want to be treated. And it always comes back to you. I mean, Rob Halford [of Judas Priest], sweetest guy in the world. My girlfriend met him, my girlfriend doesn’t even like heavy metal, she’s into country, and she said, I can’t believe what a nice guy that guy is.

I don’t know if they don’t want to let that slip because of the reputation, there has to be something edgy about it.

Well that’s the thing with metal, it doesn’t have to be, “Raarw, I’m fuckin’ – I love heavy metal and that’s it,” and, “This stuff’s gay, everything else sucks.” You don’t have to be like that. Like I said, you can like a Stryper and you can like a Slayer. Even Kerry King from Slayer said, we mentioned Stryper to him, and he said, “Look, I’m not a fan of the band. Obviously I don’t agree with their lyrics, but, hey, whatever.” He goes, “We’re actually going to do some shows with them.” There were some offers to do some shows overseas. He said, “I’ve got nothing against those guys. Let them do whatever the hell they want.”

I think it can be that way in comedy, too. I think people are surprised sometimes when they see a guy like Brian Regan on Opie and Anthony or an edgier show like that. And there’s a real respect and mutual admiration between some of the comics who are edgier, and those that aren’t.

That’s true. Speaking of comics, I lived with Jim Norton for four years, we were roommates. And everyone’s like, “How’d you live with that guy? Oh my god, that must’ve been insane!” And I’m like, the guy was the best roommate I ever had. He was amazing.



I remember telling Norton in Montreal once, are people surprised when you’re a nice guy, and he said, I guess sometimes, but that’s my act, I’m not a monster.

You’re thinking, how can I bring Jim Norton to meet my family? That’s what people think. He’s totally fine. Totally respectful and everything else. He’s just got some strange things he’s into.

How big is your role in A Little Help?

I’ve got three or four scenes with Jenna Fischer. I play her love interest in the film. It was just in the Seattle Film Festival last week, and this weekend it’s in the Staten Island Film Festival. It’s a smaller film. They’re trying to put it in festivals, get a little buzz going for it. That was great. They’ve got a pretty good cast. Chris O’Donnell’s in it. I’ve got a really nice role in the film. It’s not a lot of scenes, but my role is pretty pivotal.

Is this something people might not expect to see from you? It looks like a fairly serious drama.

Yeah, but you know what, I guess they call it a “dramedy,” so there’s some comedy in it, too. My role’s pretty comedic in it. I would love to do a dramatic role.

Is that something that you’ve looked for or ever gotten offers for?

Yeah, I mean, I’ve done a couple of small films. As a comic, you’d love to have a nice film career. I think you can be a lot edgier in a film, and the characters can be more developed than in a corny sitcom or a reality show or something. I’ve always wanted to go that route.

Does the fact that your comedy is a bit rough hurt your chances for something like that? Do people try to pigeonhole you?

It probably used to be like that, that was the case, but then again, now you get famous if you’ve got a sex tape out there. You get TV shows from it. If you screw Tiger Woods you get a reality show. I think that’s all out the window now. Before it was like, this guy’s too crazy when he goes onstage. I don’t think that matters anymore.

But if you were looking to do more dramatic roles –

A good case is Denis Leary. He was a really edgy comic, was really out there, really crass and everything else. He’s had an amazing career, and it didn’t hurt him. He basically found his persona and made it work on TV and it’s great. His stand-up was really crass.

He did a lot of that by writing projects and creating projects for himself. Do you see yourself doing something like that?

Yeah. That’s how we got That Metal Show. We came up with the idea, it was mostly Eddie’s idea. Eddie Trunk. We thought it would be a good show, because we always sit around, us three, and argue about stupid stuff like that anyway, so why not put it on TV? Because a lot of people do.

Coming up, were you concerned with creating a “tight five” for late night talk shows, or –

Yeah. I’m supposed to be doing the Leno show, The Tonight Show, probably by the end of the year.

Was that a world you were concerned with when you were first starting, when you were finding your voice, or did you just follow your own path and ignore the industry concerns?

At first, I wasn’t. My stuff was edgier and a little raunchy and everything, so I knew that wasn’t going to be my path, Letterman and stuff. But as you get on in your career, it’s like, so what? You do five minutes, and it’s more exposure. You do five clean minutes, it’s on TV, and you pick up some more fans and let them come see you at clubs doing your own thing. I got no problem with that. As long as it’s material you really like doing, I’m not going to write clean jokes for the sake of writing clean jokes.

Does Special Ed stick with you? Do fans still talk about Crank Yankers?

Yeah. Absolutely. People still go crazy over the show. It’s been off the air for three years now, and for some reason, people are still obsessed by it. Which is cool. I got no problem with it. It put me on the map. It’s great. I love that. My goal in comedy was always to get people to come see me in a comedy club instead of just being the guy up onstage, “Hey, who’s this guy?” That was my thing, because then I knew at that point I could pretty much do whatever I wanted onstage, because people are coming to see me. And that character really helped me get to that point.

Do you plan on doing any more Meet the Creeps videos?

Yeah, we’ve got another one coming out. Me and my partner, Don Jamieson. We’ve got a bunch of stuff that we shot that’s been laying around that we’re going to put it together and put one out for later this year. The hidden camera stuff.

And then also we have these prank call CDs where we mess with telemarketers, called Terrorizing Telemarketers. There’s a volume five, we’ve put out five discs so far. It came out about a year ago, we put it out ourselves, and now Ronnie James Dio was starting a record label and wanted us to be on his label. So we actually signed to his label. It’s still going to come out, we signed a deal a while ago. That’s going to be coming out late summer or fall.



Is that label going to go forward? Are there people in place to do that?

There are still people in place to do it. I know Ronnie had a lot of stuff in archive that they’re going to release, some footage and video from the 80s and stuff like that. They’re working on that, anyway.

How did you wind up on Inside the NFL on the NFL Network?

They were looking for someone, I guess Wanda Sykes was moving on, they were looking for another comedian to do some sketches. The producer, this guy Brian Hyland, knew me from comedy or wherever. I came in and I talked to him, I told him I was a huge football fan and I got the gig. The show won an Emmy, so I’ve got an Emmy working on that show for a year. So it was great.

Do you have a particular allegiance, or are you just a fan of the game?

I hate to say this since it’s a Boston paper, but I’m a Miami fan. But I don’t hate the Patriots at all. I like that organization. I like the way it’s run, the coaching and everything else. I like the way Belichick goes balls up and doesn’t care about running up the scores and pisses people off. That’s the way football should be played.

Everybody’s trying to rip each other’s heads off and kill each other on the field, but then Belichick goes for another touchdown when they’re up thirty-one to seven, “Oh, my feelings are hurt.” That’s so stupid. I don’t get that. What’re you practicing for, why are you studying tape? Coaches are sleeping in their offices and not seeing their families, and then suddenly they’ve got to pull back when the game’s getting a little out of hand? Bullshit.

Any final thoughts for Boston?

I love coming up there. The crowds in Boston are always amazing. I don’t get up there as much as I’d like to. So I’m really excited. They’ve got that sarcastic, dry humor, because that’s the way they are up there, too. They don’t get offended easily. That’s what I like about Boston.

Do you think New York, New Jersey, and Boston might have more in common than any of them would like to admit?

Yeah. And throw Philly in the mix, too. Absolutely. That’s why a lot of great comics have come out of Boston. They know that if you’re not funny, they’re like, oh, this sucks. You’ve got to be funny coming out of a tough area like that. Some of the most amazing comics have come out of Boston.

You’ve got to impress the folks who are coming out from M.I.T. and the folks who just finished a pipe-fitting job.

Exactly. It definitely helps.

Jim Florentine half-price tickets

If you're a fan of Jim Florentine, you can get half-price tickets to Saturday's show at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre by clicking here and entering the code, "FUNNY." Apparently, the Connection folks aren't overly concerned with someone cracking the code.

Watch this space for my interview with Florentine, coming soon.

Cheech and Chong tickets on sale at... 4:20PM

Cheech and Chong were gone from the comedy landscape for 25 years. Fans had to go to the old albums and movies to see their favorite high-minded heroes. Now, you can see the pair on tour and on their new DVD, Hey Watch This, which chornicles their Light Up America reunion tour, which began in 2008 and is still going strong.

Now it's called the Get It Legal tour, which Cheech and Chong will bring to the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre on July 8-9 (they'll also be at the Cape Cod Melody Tent on July 11, tickets go on sale for that tomorrow). The DVD was released on 4/20, and just to keep the theme going, the Connection will start selling tickets this afternoon at, yes, 4:20PM. You can get tickets here at that time.

On the last tour, Cheech and Chong concentrated on a kind of greatest hits package, doing scenes from the movies and albums, with Chong doign stand-up in between. Now that they've been together for more than a year, it will be interesting to see how much new material they might generate, and if they can get away with replacing some of the more classic stuff they've been doing.

The BC Q&A: Dave Willis and Dana Snyder from Aqua Teen Hunger Force

For ten years, Aqua Teen Hunger Force has been a popular eleven-minute cartoon on the Cartoon Network’s popular Adult Swim programming block starring a giant box of fries (Frylock), milkshake (Master Shake), and wad of meat (Meatwad). Last night at the Comedy Conection Wilbur Theatre, it was a live show.

How it makes that leap is hard to explain, even for show creator and Meatwad voice Dave Willis, and voice of Master Shake Dana Snyder. But god love ‘em, they gave it their best show when I spoke with them last week.

They talked a bit about the history of the show, how they plan to bring it to life onstage, and the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Volume 7, out June 1, which includes an extra detailing how they found the guy who is currently playing Carl on the tour.

They also talked about the unavoidable subject in Boston – the marketing campaign gone wrong in 2007, when Light-Brite images of Mooninites, created by local artists to advertise the show, shut down parts of the city when they were mistaken for bombs. Dave and Dana spoke by phone from somewhere in a bar on a tour stop in Buffalo.

Thanks for taking the call.

DAVE: We’re in Buffalo. Dana is purchasing two giant foam chicken wing hats. You know the cheesehead hats? He just got two buffalo wing hats. He’s going to turn our entire bus into a rolling garage sale.

Have you been picking up stuff like that from different locations?

DAVE: Not much, not much. But occasionally. We have some people onstage tonight that might be forced to wear them. I’m afraid. And I’m afraid they don’t know about that just yet.

Well, this won’t come out in time to warn them, so you’re safe.

DANA: No, no. this won’t come out in time.

DAVE: That’s true. He’s not going to know until right before he gets onstage, so. But he eats fifty chicken wings in every audience, so wearing a hat won’t be anymore humiliating. Coated in suicide sauce.

So who’s in the cast of this show?

DAVE: Well, it’s Dana and myself, but we also have the young lad, Dave Long, Jr., who won the Carl look-alike contest –

DANA: Yeah.

DAVE: -- from our live-action episode and we decided to bring him on tour. Since he worked at a liquor store, he said, yeah, let me just check with my boss and see if he’ll hire me back after I give him the finger.

DANA: Let me just go shove my boss and I’ll be ready for the bus.

DAVE: Yeah, I told him on a Tuesday and he was on the bus by Thursday. It’s great. I think Carl has helped inform his life. I think it’s like the Green Lantern when he puts on that ring. As soon as he shaves his head bald, he becomes someone else. Someone more powerful.

DANA: He was attempting to drink two PBR tallboys in Columbus, Ohio last night screaming, “I am the real Carl!” at the top of his lungs. [Dave laughs] So it’s safe to say the glove is fitting him.

You’ve been a great, positive influence on him, then, you’re saying?

DAVE: Yeah.

And that’s chronicled on the new DVD, correct?

DAVE: Yes, that’s true. Our exhaustive, nationwide search for the real Carl.

Was it harder to find the one character who’s human than it might have been to find some of the other characters?

DANA: Well, it seemed clear right from the start that they wanted to get just the best lookalike as possible for Carl.

DAVE: We kind of approached it like, we’re going to have to cast him anyways. They’re going to have to find us. We’re going to have too much trouble finding them.

Can he act? Can he do what you need him to do onstage?

DAVE: He is a better actor than we are, than either one of us are. That’s the great bonus, that we actually have a guy that’s really good. Three hundred pounds, that doesn’t mind shaving his head bald and wearing a mustache.

DANA: Wearing nothing but his tighty-whities.

DAVE: Or a wifebeater just stained in wing sauce. And yet he can act as if he’s a member of the union. He’s incredible. He’s getting more and more coarse as each episode—each live show progresses. And it’s just working better and better.

How did you decide on the different voices for each character? Each character has a very specific cadence and timbre.

DAVE: We didn’t know what we were going to go – oh, wow. I’m looking at a picture of Burt Reynolds with the police chief of Buffalo. It’s framed on the wall of this place. It’s in a place of high honor.

DANA: Right beside the toilet.

DAVE: Yes. Entitled “Smokey and the Bandit,” engraved in brass. We didn’t know what we wanted for Shake. In fact, I was doing the rough voice of that in the room as Ignignokt, one of the Mooninites. That was the original Shake voice. But we were just casting a wide net, sort of seeing what we got from the description, “jerky.”

DANA: It was meant to be, at that point. You throw that word in.

DAVE: Dana was just a friend of an ex-girlfriend and we auditioned him very informally, but the cast is great.

DANA: I had to leave a message on their voicemail. That they then erased accidentally before they could play it for the boss.

What made you decide to tour with Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

DAVE: We did a couple of live things. We occasionally get asked to speak at a school or something.

DANA: Really just a Q&A, but we were just sort of like, even at those Q&As, we want to make it something more than just a Q&A, we want to make it more memorable. Then we flew down to Australia, they put us down in a convention down there, and we sort of worked up this opening song.

DAVE: Just to mix it up a bit, to make it not a boring, “Oh, how great are you?” – “What’s your favorite episode?” – “Oh, they’re all so good.”

DANA: To make it more like a show instead of this dry Q&A, which is what everybody does. But it all sort of came out of there. We started to book stuff, and then we were like, oh shit, we actually have to put a whole act together.

What does it look like? What’s the staging of it like?

DANA: Oh, spectacular. Have you seen Sunset Boulevard on Broadway?

No, I haven’t.

DANA: Did you see The Color Purple on Broadway?

No, but I did see the commercials.

DANA: Okay. Picture that, many of the sets…

DAVE: We built a special backdrop for it.

DANA: It’s not even a backdrop, it’s a frontdrop.

DAVE: We built it especially for this show out of duct tape and duvetyne.

DANA: You can clearly see that it says “ATHF” on it, and it’s being held up by unused microphone stands.

DAVE: No, we have puppets made by one of the guys from Jim Henson’s company.

DANA: Ex guys from Jim Henson’s company.

DAVE: Just because they have mental illness or problems doesn’t mean that they aren’t capable of making puppets just as good as the Henson company. Yeah, we had puppets made for the characters… I don’t know. It’s like the show. It’s an extension of the show in a lot of ways. We’ve never been the best animated show on television.

But still, how do you take a show that’s to absurd and fantastical visually and conceptually and make it into a stage show?

DAVE: Well, we’ve made it into an absurd variety show, basically. We’re doing some songs, we have some absurd audience participation, we have Carl’s regional beef, where he yells and tells you why your city sucks wherever he is. We have a Meatwad soundalike contest.

DANA: I basically take on my Shake persona onstage of berating people for not giving me the proper amount of respect and applause. And women for not throwing their room keys or underwear up.

So there’s no overall story arc, necessarily?

DANA: You’re not going to see a story up there, I’ll tell you that much.

DAVE: There’s an arc in there in that I think the humor is definitely informed by the show, and we’re sort of the arbiters of that. So if you like the humor of those shows, you’re going to enjoy – you’re not going to see characters, in full-length suits of the characters ice skating around with a whole story behind it.

DANA: It’s more the sensibility and the humor of the show.

DAVE: Yes.

What was the biggest challenge in porting it from animation to the stage?

DAVE: This, right now, explaining…

[Everyone laughs]

DANA: Trying to explain what the show is.

DAVE: It feels like when we read reviews of shows we’ve done, we’ve gotten great reviews. We just wish those reviews came before the shows than two days after.

DANA: So many people, they just don’t know what it is. And it’s hard to explain other than “it’s a variety show,” but people say, “How can you have a variety show about a cartoon?” It almost works the opposite. I’ve had some friends who have come to the other shows who have said, “I didn’t even ever watch Aqua Teen, but I thought the show was really funny. Then it turned out I had friends who were super big Aqua Teen fans who said, that was beyond what I wanted it to be. So it sort of works great.

DAVE: Even if you don’t know what Aqua Teen is, you’ll still enjoy it. And if you do like Aqua Teen, you’ll love it. And if you don’t like it, you’ll just be saying, oh, that fat guy in the flip-flops and the undershirt was very funny. But the Aqua Teen guy is like, “No, that’s Carl, you don’t understand, man.

Do you find you’re selling out a lot of places? That the Aqua Teen fans are showing up for the tour?

DAVE: I think people are mostly confused. I think everywhere we go, we get a few hundred strong, but I can see where people are like, I don’t even know what the hell this is, man, and it’s my Saturday night. But I assure you, it’s well worth your time.

I could see you getting a lot of rhetorical questions in interviews, like, “What the hell?”

DAVE: Yes. That’s a good one. What the hell? What the hell? What the hell, man?

Did the live action episode with T Pain and Jon Benjamin help with the planning of this?

DAVE: Not at all. They are so completely unrelated. The only thing it helped in was helping us find Dave Long, the real, live Carl. But other than that, they were just completely two totally different entities.

How will the Squidbillies make an appearance?

DANA: Granny comes out and she gives a cooking demonstration for her world-famous crusted red snapper, country style. Which she pulls out of the audience, she asks if there are any budding chefs with hot, big muscles who love to party.

Do any of the other characters make it in?

DANA: Not really. Granny’s really the only one.

DAVE: It depends on where you are, but not in Boston. I know in Charlotte, the voice of Early is going to be a big part of the show. But each show is going to have a different unique thing, and fingers crossed, I think there will be a couple of very unique things in the Boston show.

Would you consider doing an entire Squidbillies tour after this?

DAVE: I’d love to –

DANA: NO.

DAVE: -- Unknown Hinson is the lead voice of Early Cuyler, and the guy’s an incredible performer. His side gig is playing lead guitar for Billy Bob Thornton’s band. They guy’s incredible. I’d love to do like a traveling medicine show with those characters. You never know. People seem respond to them. When you make cartoons and you’re not out there in the public eye or doing a lot of shows, you really don’t have a good gage for how the show is being received.

Was episode 100 a big landmark for you?

DAVE: Yeah, it was. When we started, I didn’t know if we were even going to get to make more than one. I didn’t know if they were going to pull the plug before we finished one. So to have one hundred episodes, almost ten years later, is a nice little achievement.

And to have a franchise build on these characters.

DAVE: Yeah. I look forward to them putting together a ride at an Adult Swim water park – pi

DANA: Turnerland Music Park?

DAVE: -- thirty years from now my son leading a lawsuit to try to get some of the money.

DANA: After you’ve wasted your fortune away.

DAVE: Yeah. My fortune. Right.

What do you have planned next for the show?

DAVE: Well, Aqua Teen is no more. Now the show is called Aqua Unit Patrol Squad, and they’re going to be detectives, from now on, every episode. We’ve already written and recorded four episodes, and – boy, there’s some cackling ladies in this bar. We were staying inside because of the wind, but now it’s just cackling alcoholics. No, the characters are going to be detectives from now on. Every episode will be a crime they have to solve. A mystery.

So were you careful to avoid Mooninite imagery advertising in Boston?

DAVE: No we weren’t. We weren’t careful advertising in Boston, and we certainly weren’t careful advertising in Boston a few years ago, either. We’re the same reckless, not thought through…. I will say, though, that I’m hoping that we can show something special for the Boston crowds. That’s pretty much all I can say.

DANA: Just don’t even elaborate, Dave. You said it.

Do you still get feedback about that? Boston was the only city that had any problem.

DAVE: It’s odd that you would say that, because you live in Boston, because everyone else… but you’re not an idiot. They keep asking us about it, you know? I had to go through a media training course based on what happened in Boston. If we’d have worked on South Park, we’d have had an episode about it six days later. Turner, especially after that lawsuit, was like, you shut up about what happened there. That never happened, that city doesn’t exist.

I can tell you, there’s a fairly large contingent of people, at least that I knew, who were puzzled by the whole thing. I can see that at first, you didn’t know what it was, but once you realized what it was, why was it a problem?

DANA: It was a very puzzling situation to say the least.

DAVE: I can say that I didn’t even know about it until I heard people talking about it, and then I turned on the news. I didn’t even know those Light-Brite things existed. Now I own one. I keep it inside, I wouldn’t want anyone to say there was a bomb on my house.

DANA: Now it just looks like you have a bomb in your house.

DAVE: We didn’t even know that thing was happening. That was like a marketing arm of the company. I will say the one thing that angered me was that the media kept calling it a “hoax,” which implied that Turner not only put a device up there, but claimed that it was a bomb. I mean, that’s what a hoax infers. That was not at all the case, you know?

Were you ever in touch with the local artists who did the whole thing?

DAVE: No. And it was like a slow media day combined with this crazy thing, so we got non-stop press for a couple of days. And just when I thought it was starting to die down, these two guys start talking about 70s hairstyles. It was like, wow, you guys found a way to stretch it another thirty-six hours.

DANA: I read something about the main guy who did that in the local Boston paper about three weeks ago. He’s like a big performance artist or something now, a DJ. And that’s still referenced every time someone is describing them.

So the tour is almost over after this, right?

DAVE: Yeah, our last day is May the fifteenth. Atlanta, Georgia.

Do you think after this experience you might tour with Aqua Teen Hunger Force again?

DANA: In the world of show business, anything is possible. Just ask a fifty-five year old Sean Connery, after he said he would never play James Bond again. And then he was in Never Say Never Again.

DAVE: One of the worst James Bond movies. So I guess the answer is, yes we would tour again, but only if it could be really terrible.

The BC Q&A: Bill Burr

Bill Burr says he’s happy. He should be. He’s got a new CD/DVD special, called Let It Go, coming out in August, he sold out two dates at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre on Friday and added a third show for tonight, and he’s in the new Steve Carell/Tina Fey vehicle Date Night. He’s got his Monday Morning Podcast on which he gets to vent his spleen, had a short but successful tour o f the U.K., and he’s living in North Hollywood, a place he says he loves.

Not to worry, though. He’s not so happy that he’s lost his sarcastic edge. I spoke with him by phone last week about the new special, selling out his home town, and “Nature Boy” Ric Flair.

Coming from Boston and New York, was Los Angeles as big a change as the east coast versus west coast comedy bits would have you believe?

I lived out here for a little bit ten years ago. That was more of a culture shock because I wanted to live in New York at that time. But just, my career had taken me out here. And I ended up going back to New York. And I loved New York and everything. I stayed in New York just long enough where I still love the place and I didn’t get sick of it. It’s just one of those deals.

New York is awesome, but after a while, there’s something not natural about living with twenty floors above you and below you. You just feel crunched down after a while. You gotta get out of there. I like L.A., man. Even though the traffic is brutal, the people are a little flaky, there’s a lot more space out here. And I love the weather.

Do you still have anything like you had in New York, meeting the other comics at the Comedy Cellar?

Out here it’s the Comedy Store. The Comedy Store is the freak show. And I mean that in a good way. It’s a crazy place. I love it. The Improv is great for hanging out. The Laugh Factory. It just takes you a minute when you get out here to just sort of settle in and see who you’re going to hang out [with]. It’s like, moving to the other side of the country.

How tough are the crowds at the Comedy Store? I saw you there really working hard to win people over who seemed indifferent to every comic up there, including Dave Attell and Dov Davidov.

No, it can definitely be challenging. It’s not for the faint of heart. That’s kind of why I like it. I always end up in those comedy clubs where there’s a certain potion of comedians who just don’t work there because they think it’s too negative or too difficult or the crowds suck. I don’t know if it’s that Catholic upbringing where I have to punish myself, but I’ve always felt at home.

And I also saw the challenge of it. Oh, this is a tough room? Let me go in there and I gotta figure it out. The job that I have, there’s a lot of fear involved when you first start out and a lot of stuff you have to overcome. So I’ve always been of the mindset that, if you’re afraid of something, just jump in with both feet.

The rooms you were playing when you first started out in Boston had a similar reputation. Seems there were a lot of tough rooms here.

Oh yeah. Nick’s Comedy Stop was no joke. Back in the day, when they would paper that thing, and you had 400 people who thought they hit the lottery just because they got free tickets and couldn’t care less about the show? Kevin Knox used to go up there and slap them around, turn it into a show. And then you’d go up there and try to ride the wave that he crated.

Nick’s is celebrating 30 years this weekend with Don Gavin.

Wow. That’s unbelievable. I’m really happy that, even though it’s not the Nick’s that I knew, I’m really happy that it still exists. Most guys, the first place they started was either demolished or turned into a Forever 21, you know?

When did you get back from your tour of the U.K.?

It was really quick. It was like three one-nighters. I did London, Dublin, and Glasgow, Scotland. It was just awesome. An awesome, unbelievable experience, jus to go over there and see what worked. You know what reference worked and actually killed, and I didn’t have to change it over there? I made a reference to Ric Flair.

The wrestler Ric Flair?

Ric Flair is huge. I threw it out there just to see. It got this huge laugh. I was like, wow, I knew that guy was world famous, but that guy is famous famous. My girlfriend was over there, she was like, I can’t believe Ric Flair worked. I was like, yeah, he went to Japan I don’t know how many times. Those guys were travelling the world. It was awesome. I hope I meet him someday. I want to tell him that story, because he seems like just a great guy.

What’s the context for the reference?

I was talking about Tiger Woods, how they were trying to redo his public image. I was like, why are they doing that? He should just go out there and be the bad boy of golf. I said I’d go out there, I wouldn’t even be wearing a shirt. I’d go out there like Ric Flair. It goes on after that. People jus timmediately related to the joke. It got a huge laugh. Whereas other things, I talked about kickball in fourth grade and they didn’t know what that was so I had to switch that up. But Ric Flair is the man.

Was there a lot you had to change? I know people always fret about what might translate.

No, I tell stories about my life. I would think a guy like Dennis Miller would have a big problem. He has so many references to pop culture. I think it’s easier now with the Internet and YouTube, we’re becoming more like one whole nation. But they had something over there called – what the hell was it called? They had these two twins. Ah, Jesus, I can’t even remember their names. IT was like this American Idol thing, and there were these two kids who were really into Vanilla Ice, thought he was the shit, and they were twins, and they somehow combined their names. Whatever their names were, they took half of one name and half of the other and that’s the name that they went by. They’re sort of huge over there in Ireland.

Did you have time to write about what you discovered once you got there?

Ah, yeah, I made an ass of myself. I asked them in London if they had squirrels. I hadn’t seen any. Evidently, not only did they have them, they had red squirrels, and some idiot trying to impress women over there with his travels hundreds of years ago brought the gray ones that we have over here and they kicked the shit out of the red ones that they have, ‘cause they’re smaller squirrels. So now the red ones are protected. That’s what I learned during a show.

We’re even imperialistic in our animal husbandry.

Absolutely. Insurgent gray squirrels. If anybody deserves to be taken over, it’s England. A taste of their own medicine.

Especially by squirrels. That’s the first wave.

Exactly. You go subtle. You go subtle.

Once the red squirrels fall, you just push the rest of the country right over.

9/11. You just blame it on 9/11.

So you have the new CD and DVD coming out – when is that coming out?

We don’t have a release date yet. I’m guessing sometime in August is when it’s going to come out. And I’m also in that new hit movie, Date Night with Steve Carell and Tina Fey.

I saw that. I kept hoping you’d be the guy to kick down the door and shoot up the place in the end.

I did get to take Common down, though. You know?

Was that a fun shoot? They didn’t give you a lot to do as far as comedy.

Well, they were trying to do a thing where it was sort of serious, and the funniness mas more with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, and then those cops being dirty cops, they didn’t want them to be wacky dirty cops. That aspect of it was serious. So yeah, I had a couple of people say that. “I saw you, you were great, but you weren’t funny.” It’s the usual thing, “You’re a comedian, how come you didn’t have a lampshade on your head?” That’s not what the director wanted.

Would you want to do more stuff like that where you’re not necessarily in a comic role?

Dude, I would take anything that they want to give me. I’ve been taking all kinds of acting classes out here, and I really enjoy it. I’ve gotta tell you, comedy’s a lot harder. It’s like they say, it’s a lot harder than the dramatic stuff. I say that because, somebody might be messing up some drama stuff and it might take you a minute to figure it out, but when a joke bombs, it bombs, and everybody knows it.

It’s very hard in a dramatic thing, if the theater’s quiet and people are paying attention, it’s hard to tell, are they bored or are they actually riveted? Unless you turn the lights on and look at their faces. But if you’re watching a comedy, and it’s a packed theater and nobody’s laughing, it’s pretty obvious that it’s bombing.

It’s probably harder to diagnose comedy, as well. If there’s a problem with the delivery, you can’t necessarily just say, try it this way.

If you’re talking about testing it in front of an audience, for comedy, you have to do that. You have to see if stuff plays. That’s another thing, too. Me and two of my buddies, we wrote and shot a short film that we’re trying to get into short film festivals called Shooting Angles. I just saw the final copy of it, it looks great. So I’m hoping I’m going to get something out of that.

Is that the one you were talking about on the podcast?

Yeah. It came out really good. We did it for ten grand and shot it in three days. The acting in it is great, it’s really funny, and it looks awesome. I’m really, really proud of it, and I’m hoping it’s the first of many. It was me, Robert Kelly, and Joe DeRosa. We all came up with the story, Joe wrote it and directed it. We all produced the thing, put our money together. Lou Wallach came on board, from Comedy Central. We just got the final edit done, now we’re making copies, we’re trying to give it to everybody we can to move the careers along, as they say.

What’s the synopsis?

It’s one of those things I can’t tell you, because there’s a misdirection in the beginning that would give it away.

Are you going to do more with these characters, or do you want to do more short video in general?

I’m thinking it’s more the ideas. We’ve got another idea, something we’ve been kicking around. A couple of ideas, actually. There’s three of us, so we just sit there throwing out ideas. You throw an idea out there and it goes through the mulcher, and if it survives it, then we do it. And if not, we either try to add on to that idea or abandon it and move on to something else.

How would people keep tabs on that? Just listen to the podcast and watch your Web site?

And then Opie and Anthony. We had a lot of fun when we were shooting that. Jim Norton was joking around like he was upset he wasn’t asked to be in the film. And the reality was, we didn’t ask him because it was such a small part we didn’t want to insult him. It was classic Opie and Anthony, where they are somehow able to trash something and it actually ends up being positive and you get three days of great radio out of it. I know their listeners are aware of the movie. They did us a big favor by trashing us for not putting Jim in it.

Do you like doing the podcast? Is that something you’ve taken to?

Oh, yeah. I love doing it. And really, to be honest with you, it all came out of the idea to get my name out there and to hype my gigs, but another big part of it was, I remember when I had a day job and Mondays sucked. I hated going to work on Mondays. Actually, the reality was Tuesday was always more difficult than Monday, Monday I was such a zombie. I just figured give somebody something to look forward to on Mondays, if they enjoy it, just give somebody a laugh. People listen to it on their way to work, they listen to it in their cars, they listen to it when they work out, they download them. They listen to them on airplanes to get through flights.

It’s also one of those things where it’s a fun exercise for me a a comedian, where I get to talk about a lot of stuff I wouldn’t necessarily talk about onstage. A lot of topical stuff. I don’t waste my time too much with topical jokes, unless I’m building a new hour. Right now I’m putting together a new hour, so I need new jokes, so I’ll have more topical things.

But topical jokes, they’re almost like appetizers. It’s like, whatever, I’ll get some mozzarella sticks. It’s no big deal. But with the podcast, you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time on a comedy stage, where if you’re really putting together a great topical bit, by the time you’re going to do a special a year and a half later, you’re going to seem like a guy who hasn’t written any jokes.

So the material you’re working on now is different from the material you did last time you were in Boston?

Yeah. It’s pretty much all different. It’s gotta be. I haven’t been there sine February of last year. I’ve written a new hour since then. So it’s going to be all different.

Are you still trying to keep on track to do a special every year or year and a half?

No, no, it was every two years. I think I might wait three years this time. Hopefully I’ll have some major life changes. I got some brilliant advice one time where it was just like, if you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything. In two years, if I feel I have something to say and I want to record it, I will. But I’m feeling like this next one’s going to be about three years.

Do you feel like you’re running out of things to say?

No. Christ, it’s not like I’m 70. No, I don’t feel like I’m running out of things to say, but it just feels like three years will be right for the next one. My life is really nice right now. It’s on an upswing. I’ll always have a new hour every year, but it’s like, I think two years is the quickest you can put it out and still have a memorable special.

Is it harder to write from a place of happiness?

Yeah, but when you have happiness, you have the fear of losing it. You just tap into that paranoia. It never ends. I just don’t ever feel, like when you said do you feel like you’re running out of things to say, it’s just like, Jesus, my problem is I can never shut up. I do a podcast where I babble for 50 minutes and I have no problem filling that 50 minutes. I don’t really repeat myself, either. It’s why I enjoy doing radio, it’s why I enjoy doing stand-up. Running my mouth is something I’m good at.

Does it mean more to you to have added more shows in Boston?

Well, considering most of the acts that come through town only do one night, those are big acts, the fact I was able to do two Fridays and one Thursday, that’s huge for me. It’s the stuff you dream about as a comedian. Man, what if I could do Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, a venue that big? That would be unbelievable. And just have a killer hour. And that’s what you need, too, man. You need a killer hour. That’s the perfect amount of time for people to see you. That’s the perfect amount of time where, if you do your job, they’ll leave wanting to come see you again.

Jeff Garlin makes the rounds in Boston

There are still a handful of tickets left to see Jeff Garlin at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre tomorrow. But if you miss your chance to see him do his own show, there are three other places you can see him while he’s in town.

Garlin has a new memoir out, called My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World. He’ll be reading from it and signing books at the Borders in the Back Bay at 2PM on Saturday. He’ll also be performing with the Harvard improv troupe, the Immediate Gratification Players, at 11:30PM on Saturday. Not sure about the ticket situation, so click through to the link for more information. He’ll also be reading from the book and signing it Sunday at the Jewish Community Center in Newton on Sunday at 4PM as part of the Boston Jewish Book Fair.

A short commercial for the book:

Guest reviewer Brian Joyce on Jennifer Coolidge

Boston native and Emerson grad Jennifer Coolidge was in town playing the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre on Saturday. Coolidge is an extremely talented comic actress who can turn a throwaway line into a punchline (See Best in Show, how she drags out the simple "Errm... me, too" into a bizarre rejoinder). But you can measure her stand-up career in months at this point.

I was covering another show (featuring Lynn's Sean Lynch -- stay tuned for a video interview with Lynch later this week), and I knew Brian Joyce, craetor of AltCom and co-host of the Wednesday night talk show The Whole Truth with Derek Gerry, was going. So I asked him for his thoughts. Here they are.

Joyce's review:

Coolidge did a short set - about 45 minutes - but it was packed with laughs and she left the crowd wanting more. There were a couple obligatory digs at Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, but for the most part she takes an absurdist approach to her storytelling, with not-so-True Hollywood stories about her long-lost scene in "Brokeback Mountain" and the time she got beat out for the role of "woman with flappy vagina" by the "girl at the bottom of the well in 'Silence of the Lambs'."

She played up the ditzy-blonde routine, but her dirty innocence and sultry theatrics make her appear genuine, even vulnerable. Some of the one-liners were a bit obvious, but her stories were funny, engaging, and ridiculous. She seemed as comfortable and confident on stage as many veteran stand-ups.

Ken Reid opens sold-out Patton Oswalt show

There’s a conversation I am convinced will take place sometime today that will be the most fantastically detailed pop culture, zombie-heavy, glorious nerdfest to take place in Boston, possibly ever. That’s because tonight local comedian Ken Reid is opening up the sold out Patton Oswalt show at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre.

Reid has done one-man shows that explain his life through television, music, and John Cusack movies. There are old-school revolving comic book racks in his home. Oswalt did a voiceover for Mike Mignola’s Amazing Screw-On Head (still disappointed that was a one-off), and has professed if he had a time machine, he would use it to go back and prevent George Lucas from making the last three Star Wars movies.

According to Reid, the happy accident happened because Oswalt and former Boston comic Myq Kaplan have the same manager, who asked Kaplan for a few names of possible openers. “Out of those names, for some reason, they chose me,” says Reid.

Don’t expect Reid to overindulge – he thinks it would be unseemly. “I don't really have anything special planned,” he says. ”I'm only doing a 15-20 minute set so it will probably be a few stories, I think one of them involves Boy George, but it probably won't be overly pop culture skewed. I don't want to come across as trying too hard to ape Oswalt's realm.”

The Wilbur seats about 1200 people for a sold-out show, which Reid believes is the largest crowd he’ll have played to as a comedian. As a singer, though, his old band, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, played comparable places once or twice. “I'm not sure how many people were at the Boston Music Awards at Avalon,” he says, “but I think that was a pretty big venue.”

Reid is in the planning stages for another show or two, the details of which are still being hammered out. “I'm working on a story telling show that would involve more people than just me,” he says. “I'm also trying to see if I can make some full length shows about comic books and horror movies work for a general audience.”

A sampling of Mr. Reid's work:

Score Patton Oswalt tickets with the Connection's "Big Fan" contest

When I checked Ticketmaster yesterday, there were only a few single seats left for Patton Oswalt's show at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre on Friday. By the time you read this, those will probably be gone. So the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre is giving away the last pair of tickets on their Facebook page.

To try to win the tickets, you have to friend the Wilbur on Facebook, and sometime between midnight tonight and 2PM EST on Thursday, post a photo on the Wilbur's wall that demonstrates why you are a "big fan" of Oswalt's. If you win, you'll be notified by Thursday at 6PM.

Click here to go to the contest page.

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.

The Boston Comedy Interview: The Daily Show's John Oliver

When I first spoke with The Daily Show's Senior British Correspondent John Oliver in November of 2007, the presidential election was still a year away, and the candidates were still gnashing away at each other in the debates. Oliver was the new guy on a show he’d always admired, and new to America, a country he hadn’t even visited before his TV gig here. And he was playing his first gig in Boston, at the Comedy Connection, which quit its Faneuil Hall location last year for the Wilbur Theatre.

Almost two years later, Oliver is no longer the new guy. He’s one of the best reasons to watch The Daily Show, and his stand-up special, Terrifying Times, was brilliant. He’s back at the Comedy Connection (in its new space) on Friday. I caught up with him by e-mail this week.

Have you gotten to tour around and/or visit America much since you were in Boston a couple of years ago?

Quite a lot, actually. The election last year meant that I was all over your country - from Sarah Palin rallies in Scranton to Mile High stadium for Obama's speech. I even got to shoot a piece with the Press Corps, inside the White House - and due to the fact that I was not American, had to have constant supervision wherever I went. I think as a British person they thought I might have come back to try and burn it down again.

You had said when we spoke last that it was still strange to you to be in a country where you could fly for five hours and land in the same country. Has that worn off yet?

I have pretty much got used to that now from the amount of traveling I have to do. The consequence of that is that whenever I go back to Britain, I see it as a laughably miniature excuse for a nation.

You also said you felt a little you weren't sure how you ended up with the Daily Show gig, why they were looking abroad and why they chose you. Have you settled in yet? Do you still get that feeling?

I feel very settled indeed, it's the most incredible place to work.
But I have to say, I still cannot fathom how or why I managed to end up in this situation. I still find myself walking away from work occasionally feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. That might be because I skip away from work every day dressed in a gingham dress and holding an oversized lollipop. It's just something I like to do.

I read where you have said that the Daily Show isn't a source of news, and that you and the other Daily Show folks aren't journalists. I'd have to agree how that reflects poorly on journalism as a whole, but why do you think the idea persists? Certainly comedy has functioned to inform and enlighten in the past, and your stand-up and your pieces on the Daily Show seem to function that way. Would you agree?

The persistence of the idea that The Daily Show is a key source of news, is just another example of the lazy journalism that has forced a basic cable comedy show to be mistakenly spoken about in those terms in the first place. The bottom line is that comedy has to be funny to justify it's dictionary definition. People are not going to walk away from a comedy show saying "Well, I didn't laugh much, but I feel so enlightened and informed it scarcely matters." If, as a comedian, you find yourself performing to a silent but fascinated audience, you are not doing your job. You are doing the job of a quality Chemistry teacher.

What's your sense of how America is perceived abroad since the election? Have you spent so much of your time here now that it's harder to get a sense of that?

Well, there is no doubt that the very election of Barack Obama challenged the lazy prejudices of anti-Americanism overnight. The key thing now, is for him to behave in a way which will not re-sow those seeds of resentment, and fertilize them with disappointment.

Mort Sahl said in an interview a while back that it has gotten harder to do what he does as a comedian because reality is stranger than anything he could exaggerate for effect. When you look at the birthers, town hall shoutfests, and the possible magnitude of the healthcare bill coming down the line, is it harder to make that funny?

No. Absolutely not.

How big is your part on Community?

Not at all big. I'll do a couple of episodes in these hiatus weeks, but that'll be it; I'm definitely not leaving The Daily Show. It's a fun thing to try, and is a nice change of pace, but I'm not interested in doing it full time. My heart, my head, and my limbs are all at The Daily Show.

What can you say about the movie deal you and Rory Albanese just signed with Paramount?

There's nothing much to say about it really. It sounds a lot more glamorous than it is. Basically, they are going to buy the next script we write. I think they are contractually bound to read it, and statistically bound not to make it. We'll see. It's something fun to do on the side of work - it's something we'd like to try to do, just to see if we're any good at it.

Is it something you will also star in?

That is very much not my decision to make. You are talking to someone with the kind of star power you would need a Hubble Telescope to detect.

Would you eventually like to segue into doing more movies and less TV?

I don't know. I love TV. More specifically, I love the TV show that I get to work for at the moment. I know that lots of people have used The Daily Show as a springboard to other work, but this kind of show is all I've ever really wanted to do. I like being afforded the opportunities to try other things around it (movies, etc) but there's never anything I want to do more than go back to The Daily Show office and attempt to trivialize the world's problems.