There are a handful of cities where most comedy specials are taped, the big two being New York and Los Angeles. Maz Jobrani will be tuning up Saturday at the Wilbur for taping his next special next week in... Stockholm.
"I was looking for a place that was different, but also had great audiences," says Jobrani by e-mail. "I've played Stockholm twice and loved it. They're great comedy fans. We've got an Elizabethan theater called Sodra Teatern that's one of the oldest theaters in Sweden so hopefully it'll turn out nicely. Also gives it the international vibe."
Jobrani has tapped local comic Mehran once again to open the show. "He's kind of my go to guy in Boston," he says. "I love his energy and the fact that he pushes the envelope. I also have Ian Edwards coming from LA. Should be a great night."
Also expect to see more of Jobrani's self-produced Web series, My Two Worlds, on his site soon. He filmed a short that serves as the series pilot last year, and has more in the works. "I'm putting more episodes together so I can shoot them all at once," he says. "Seems to be the model these days - self produce and do it as cheap as possible. I've got three episodes written, and will write a total of six then get to shooting."
Bruce Bruce originally came up through the Atlanta scene, but he chose to film his latest special here in Boston, at the Wilbur Theatre. It's called Losin' It! Live In Boston, and it's out today on DVD with bonus footage and an interview. You may even get to see yourself in the audience.
Newbury Comics might be your best bet for finding it without ordering online. A lot of other stores seem to have cut back on orders like this, but Newbury tends stock more stand-up specials, especially when they're new.
Here's a look. First clip is SFW, second clip, NSFW.
In case you missed it, Bill Burr just scheduled a date at the Wilbur Wednesday night. Burr explains the short notice thusly in his newsletter: "Hello peoples! I'm going to be at the Wilbur Theatre on Wednesday, October 20th at 7:30PM. This is a special show to help raise funds for my brother Bob who is running for State Senate in the state of Massachusetts. All proceeds will be donated to my brothers campaign. I'll be telling a lot of family stories that I usually don't tell in my act. So it should be a great night."
Bob Burr is the Republican candidate for Massachusetts State Senate in the Norfolk, Bristol, and Plymouth County District running against Democrat Brian A. Joyce, not to be confused with comedian Brian Joyce, co-host, along with Derek Gerry, of The Whole Truth on Tufts Radio every Wednesday.
When you speak to Des Bishop, the accent is a bit hard to place. It sounds American at the core, a bit of New York, the result of his Queens upbringing. But there’s at least a touch of Irish in there, not surprising, since he has spent the past 20 years in Ireland, where he is a celebrated comedian and television personality and runs a comedy club in Dublin.
Fitting, then that he says some people think the particular stew of speech makes him sound a bit Bostonian. Bishop is back in town Saturday at the Wilbur, a few years after his first appearance at the Boston Comedy Festival. He’s coming on the heels of a successful run of his one-man show, My Dad Was Nearly James Bond, in Edinburgh. It’s a fun but serious show, he notes, dealing with his father’s acting and modeling career, and a battle with cancer the family is still fighting.
I spoke with Bishop earlier this week from his home in Dublin where he was getting ready to leave for Boston.
What brings you back to Boston?
What happened was, I did some one-off gigs in New York leading up to going to Australia. And I thought, I’m always getting e-mails about doing a show in Boston, I want to do a show in Boston. I was going to do the Burren pub in Somerville. Because I actually had been to Boston once in 2008 but it was for a documentary about the Irish language, and I did a little gig at the Burren.
So I was going to do a gig at the Burren, but then I thought, might as well do a theater. An agent I knew in New York suggested the Wilbur, and we booked it in. It was all on a bit of a whim. But then, of course, I went to Australia and I’m just back from Edinburgh and all of a sudden, wham-o. I’m going to Boston tomorrow.
Do you have fond memories of coming to Boston?
Yeah, I love it. To be honest, I’m kind of annoyed at myself for not doing it more. I just wish I’d gone on a more regular basis because I think an Irish-American kid from Queens who lives in Ireland has a lot of things to say to people from Boston. Obviously the whole Irish-American upbringing is a common upbringing in Boston. Even though I was brought up in New York, I think there are a lot of similarities. A lot of people think my Queens accent actually sounds like I’m from Boston.
Then you have that added extra thing of so many Irish people from Ireland that live in Boston. So you throw all those things together, it’s probably a city in the world I should be in more often.
You don’t get the Boston versus New York argument?
I don’t care about that. I’m not competitive with Boston. Plus I’m a Mets fan, and I know that there’s a bit of bad blood over 1986. It’s really a Yankees/Red Sox rivalry, and I hate the Yankees as much as Boston fans do, so I can identify.
Are you doing a lot of the Irish press here?
I did The Emigrant. I must admit, I was a bit late getting on top of it. That was just because I was in Edinburgh doing a new show that I’ve written, and it kind of took off. It kind of went a whole lot better than I was expecting. The whole thing kind of took off and it became sort of all-consuming.
Is that the new one about your father and him almost being James Bond –
Exactly, yeah. All that stuff. So when I booked this in, I didn’t realize that that was all going to take off as well. There’s a part of me that would love to just take that show to Boston, but I haven’t really booked it in that way and I haven’t really organized the technical stuff that goes with it.
So this is going to be a straight stand-up show and not the one-man show that you’ve been touring with?
Well, first of all, it’s not really fair to do that to people who come. As much as I would have loved to have done that show, because it went amazing… It is stand-up, but it has some moments that are not really funny, deliberately. And I think that’s fine for people who paid to see that particular show, but I don’t think it’s fair on the audience if they’ve come in expecting a certain thing and then you give them something else.
But this is going to be a great stand-up show. There’s stuff from that show that will be in it. A good 50 percent of it, to be honest. But it won’t have the sort of through-message of the show that I did in Edinburgh, which was quite powerful, but can be a little bit emotional at times.
How often have you been doing that show?
I just did 30 shows of it with only one night off over the month of August. I did an early version of it in Australia, but then that’s it. I’m doing an Irish tour of it from the end of October. I hope to do a run of it in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago but at a later date when I have some backing in the U.S. I had some people in Edinburgh inquire about it that want to get involved, but I’ve just got to figure out who’s the real deal and who’s not and try to do it properly. You can just get lost in the mix in the United States. It’s just massive.
What is the through-line? I know it has to do with your father and your family.
My dad has lung cancer, so that was the motivation behind it. But her was also an actor and a model before I was born. It was kind of a story I always wanted to tell. Because he did legitimately have an audition on Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It was a cute enough story that I wanted to tell it for a long time, in relation to what he did as an actor before I was born.
But it has a new impetus now because he’s not going to be around that much longer. There’s a lot of stuff in the show about his regrets about giving up acting. As a result of learning so much about my father and about families in general from him being sick, there’s also a sort of liberation about how a lot of those regrets are quite ridiculous when you consider what you’ve achieved as a father as opposed to what you feel you didn’t achieve as an actor.
It’s all about what you learn and how liberating, strangely liberating, terminal illness is for a family. So it’s a serious enough story but it’s funny all the way through. It’s hard to describe. In its description, it’s quite serious but actually in its performance it’s quite uplifting. Because unfortunately, we’re all going to have to face death. That’s an unfortunate constant in all our lives. And we are experiencing the road to my dad’s last few days in quite a fun, enriching, and uplifting way.
I try to tell that in a really humorous way and it’s gone down really well. I use a lot of pictures from our lives. It’s quite nostalgic. People’s family lives are quite nostalgic and they’re not as unique as people would like to think. There’s a lot of identification in [the details of] our lives, so people have responded pretty strongly to the show.
Has he seen it yet?
Oh, well that was the great secret in Edinburgh. He got onstage with me 18 nights in a row at the end. Because it’s all about him sacrificing his dream to give us a stable life, so the ultimate gift to a man who’s made that sacrifice is to let him live his dreams and get him back onstage, at least for one more standing ovation, which is what he got 18 nights in a row.
Did he perform anything?
Oh yeah. We had a little bit of banter, nothing major. But he had a few lines. He had the closing line of the show. He had the last word.
It’s too bad you couldn’t recreate scenes from Her Majesty’s Secret Service to show them how it would have been so much better.
You’ve made an assumption that perhaps I have already done. We did a little, probably illegal without any rights, we did a little green screen stuff with Her Majesty’s Secret Service. So the end of the show, it’s very fun, because it’s all about giving my dad that one final performance. But we did do some stuff on Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Would it had been different for him, do you think, if George Lazenby hadn’t been one and done after that?
Well it certainly helped my cause in terms of the show. Because there’s a lot of humor in the fact that it was Lazenby’s Bond that he didn’t get. His performance wasn’t as bad as it has been remembered. But unfortunately he had the tougher act to follow in Sean Connery. And also, his accent wasn’t ideal. And also, he happened to be in the James Bond where they were quite experimental, in terms of Bond’s vulnerability, which was very experimental in terms of the late 1960s. I guess nowadays when they’re experimental with Daniel Craig, it’s more understandable. But society was probably still a bit misogynistic back then.
So there’s loads of reasons why Lazenby’s performance will be remembered as it was. I say in the show that people think my dad was lucky because Lazenby was the worst James Bond, but my father thinks of it more critically and thinks, [if] Lazenby was the worst James Bond, I was worse than the worst James Bond. So it’s hard to know whether that was good or bad that it was Lazenby’s Bond that h didn’t get.
Is it hard to do this show and then go out and do an hour of stand-up and not fall into the show?
The version I did in Australia was less intense, so I have an hour of stand-up that still uses the fact that my dad is ill as a sort of center point without it being too sort of one-man-showy. What I did in Edinburgh, I pulled back on some of the stand-uppy routines that are in it. But when I’m not doing that show, I expand the stand-uppy bits and I pull back on the storytelling bits. But it still sort of tiptoes around the fact that my dad is sick.
I still have a lot of good stand-up about illness, about nostalgia, and about the very humorous realization that you become the parent of your parents when your parents get ill. And there’s a lot to learn when that happens. It’s pretty light-hearted, the concept of that role reversal. It’s a pretty central premise of a lot of stand-up, sort of like, I became a dad and I learned all these things, I got married and I learned all these things. So now it’s like, now I’m looking after my parents, I’ve learned all these things. There’s nothing groundbreaking about that, actually. It just seems groundbreaking because it has to do with terminal illness.
The things that don’t have to do with that, is it harder to break those into the flow?
No, not at all. I would consider that to be my strong point, or the place where I thrive. In fact, it seems a strange thing to say it’s a crutch but I almost have a crutch of using the concept of serious subject matter as the thing that motivates me. It helps me if I think the thing that’s driving my stand-up is stuff that people are uncomfortable talking about. That’s where I become comfortable.
That’s where the better laughs are. You look at someone like Richard Pryor—
Richard Pryor, man, that’s my motivation. The strange thing about Edinburgh is that all the comics started coming to see my show. I wouldn’t have been that type of guy before, the guy that comics would go see. So it’s very flattering. But two of them, on two separate occasions, said they felt it was like Richard Pryor. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m like Richard Pryor, but it’s a lovely compliment to get, when the guy that you like the most is seen in your stuff.
He’s the touchstone for that vulnerable bravado, that confessional type humor, where you can’t believe somebody’s saying something this personal onstage.
But it’s the stuff I get the most out of, because stand-up can be so flippant. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good joke, but there is something great about taking a piece of that person away with you. Because it seems to be more useful in life. Don’t get me wrong, I love political humor, too. That has its own uses. I love good, witty play on words. That’s very entertaining. But I come from a life where I stopped drinking at 19, I had testicular cancer at 24. The parts of my life that have been the most enriching have been the parts where I had to be honest with myself. I like when I see somebody onstage being honest, because I feel that I’m getting something a little more out of it than just the laugh. You can take away somebody’s unique experience, you can take away the fact that they’ve shared a bit of themselves. There’s something to learn from that.
I’d assume there’s a fear that comes along with that, that if you’re a career comedian, wondering, is my life always going to be interesting enough to comment about.
Yeah, I guess. But the point is that you’re still living, so life is always throwing things up. And of course, I wasn’t into this in the early part of my career. So I’m sure there will be other things that may float my boat in the future as well.
I guess those fears are always eased by two things. One, you’re always growing. You’re always doing things that you’ll find interesting. And also, the things that drive you creatively are always evolving, too. So in ten years time, I may actually be very motivated by something completely new in terms of humor. But then I might be motivated by the fact that I don’t want to be funny anymore and I want to explore these things in a new way, maybe by writing a piece of drama. You just never know.
So there’s no point in being afraid. I’ve been doing stand-up since 1997 and there were so many different times in life where I thought I’d exhausted the things that motivate me. And I couldn’t be any happier with the show that I’ve just written. In fact, it’s the most satisfying thing that I’ve ever done. So five years ago when I thought, shit, what am I going to talk about now? It seems like a wasted fear, really, you know?
Having spent the first part of your life in New York and the rest of it in Ireland, and touring so frequently, do you ever feel settled?
Well at the moment, no. With my dad being sick, I’ve spent so much time in New York. More time than I have since I was 14 years old. Which has sort of unsettled me again because I guess for the first time in a long time I actually thought, god, I could live in the States. I just hadn’t spent long enough to feel I could do that. So that really unsettled me because my life is based in Ireland. A time like this would do that to you anyway. Four years ago, I would have said, I’m Irish now, despite the fact that my accent is very American. Ireland is my life.
What comes with that, I would assume, is an outsider’s perspective no matter where you go.
Yeah. And I think that’s what happened in Edinburgh. John Bishop, who’s a very successful Liverpudlian comedian who recently broke huge in the U.K. out of nowhere, he actually said that very thing to me. Because I’m going to tour this show in the U.K., and he was saying, it’s about time that you made that move, because even though it’s always been the outsiders view in Ireland, you have an equal outsider’s view in the U.K., and you should exploit that.
And I guess it’s the same when I go to the States, because even though I’m from New York, I have 20 years in Ireland living away. Bill Clinton wasn’t even president when I left. George Bush was president. The first Iraq war hadn’t happened when I left. America has completely changed. I have that whole experience. The boom of the Clinton years, 9/11, the recession – all of those things have happened. So I have a sort of European perspective on that. Even in America, I have an outsider’s view.
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.
In comedy, no matter how high you climb, there’s almost always another plateau to reach. Take Canton native Bill Burr, who has played to arenas with Opie and Anthony’s Traveling Virus Tour, been a regular on one of TV’s biggest programs in Chappelle’s Show, and headlined some of the bigger clubs in the country.
I spoke with Burr about that in August for the Boston Globe, when his first one-hour special, Why Do I do This?, debuted on Comedy Central. At that point, Burr was looking at trying to produce another new hour of material for another special to be taped sometime this year, and had a pilot for Comedy Central brewing.
Two one-hour specials in a little over two years is a pretty lofty goal for a comic, something Louis C.K. is doing now, and George Carlin used to do regularly, but few others even tried. And while Burr is still on track for that, he takes a bit of a shot at himself for pursuing it.
“I’ve got to admit, I was pretty blown away when I saw how Carlin did a special once every two years for almost 30 years,” he says, speaking by phone from Los Angeles. “I really got inspired by that, yet I also am realizing that he’s him, one of a kind. It’s one of those things like, he did one every two years, I’ve gotta do one every two years, and then I was thinking the other day, why don’t you do one when you’re ready to do one? And not be on one of the all-time geniuses of comedy’s schedule.”
The yet-unnamed pilot is currently under consideration at Comedy Central, and Burr has high hopes for it. “We shot it and they seemed thrilled with it, and now they’re going to show it to a test audience,” says Burr. “And I’m hoping that some guy from Dodge City doesn’t come in there and just go [shouting], ‘I don’t like his shirt.’ And then my dream is over.”
The pilot is a strange mash-up of Burr’s comedy, similar to the regular Monday morning podcasts he posts on his site. There are short videos, set-ups, man-on-the-street interviews, and other elements that Burr has a curious way of describing. “The format’s kind of like the Banana Splits, in a way, you remember that show?” he says. “Remember the whole base of that show was they just went back to a bunch of mascots going down a water slide, and then you watch a cartoon, and you’d come back and they’d be shooting each other with water guns, and then you were on Danger Island. I’m obviously not dressed up like a mascot, but it’s like, there doesn’t have to be this ‘comedian stands in front of crowd…’”
Burr will continue to write stand-up comedy if he gets the pilot, and hopes to have his new hour of material filmed by the end of the year. But he will have far less time to devote to it. It’s a problem a lot of comedians would love to have, but a problem nonetheless, and one Burr is preparing for.
“You can stay real sharp by just continuing to go out, doing guest spots,” he says. “I don’t know, I’ve never had a TV show before, so I don’t know how that works out. But I do know I don’t like bombing, and I don’t like doing old material. I think sometimes when you see that happen to a guy it’s because the person’s not working at it. I don’t plan on doing that.”
Burr says he has seen comedians do embarrassingly old material, and while he works hard to avoid being that guy, he gets a morose kick out of watching it. “It’s funny watching them, especially if they have some topical material, how they get into it,” he says. “They’ll just start off with basically like a lie. It’s like, ‘People are still talking about O.J. Remember O.J.?’ People aren’t still talking about O.J. You just haven’t written a joke. Or they’re like, ‘Aw, my kid’s crazy, he’s listening to this C+C Music Factory.’ How old’s your kid? Thirty?”
If the Comedy Central show makes it to air and blows up, Burr will be thrilled. But if it doesn’t, he’ll still be a top-notch stand-up comedian, and he won’t be starting back from the beginning. “You take a chance and the next thing you know you’re back in the mailroom,” he says. “Me, if this thing flops, I go back to selling out shows in Boston. No big deal. I just keep rolling along and I’ll come back with another wacky scenario to try to plug me into.”
When he comes to the Wilbur tomorrow, he’ll have a couple of old friends opening for him in Larry Myles and Tony Moschetto. Burr singles veteran Moschetto out for praise, calling him “very original,” and hopes to see him break out soon. “That’s one of those guys, he’s got to get some people behind him,” he says. “I hate this business, because I think he’s fucking great.”
Musical comedian Stephen Lynch, last seen on Broadway playing the Adam Sandler role in the Broadway adaptation of The Wedding Singer, announced plans for a new tour, album, Comedy Central special, and DVD on his mailing list today. The 3 Balloons Tour, named for his new album due in March, kicks off at the Wilbur Theatre Feburay 27. Lynch also mentions a new 1-hour Comedy Central special to be released later this year, with a DVD of the special expected "around Christmas."
Here's a link to the title track of 3 Balloons, which I will just say is not about children's parties, from September.
Complete Tour Listing: 02/27/2009 Boston, MA Wilbur Theater 02/28/2009 Buffalo, NY UB Center For The Arts
03/06/2009 Chicago, IL Congers Theater 03/07/2009 Madison, WI Barrymore Theater 03/13/2009 Minneapolis, MN State Theater 03/14/2009 Detroit, MI Fillmore 03/19/2009 Indianapolis, IN Egyptian Room 03/20/2009 Cleveland, OH Lorain Theater 03/21/2009 Wilkes Barre, PA Kirby Center 03/26/2009 Rochester, NY St. John Fisher College 03/27/2009 Montclair, NJ Wellmont Theater 03/28/2009 Washington, DC Warner Theater
04/02/2009 Austin, TX Paramount Theater 04/03/2009 Dallas, TX Majestic Theater 04/04/2009 Houston, TX Verizon Theater 04/16/2009 Stamford, CT Palace Theater 04/17/2009 Poughkeepsie, NY Bardovan Center 04/18/2009 Albany, NY The Egg 04/23/2009 Westbury, NY Capitol One Theater 04/24 & 4/25/2009 Atlantic City NJ Borgata Music Box
05/01/2009 Los Angeles, CA Wiltern Theater 05/02/2009 Las Vegas, NV House Of Blues 05/07/2009 West Palm, FL Improv 05/08/2009 Orlando, FL Hard Rock 05/09/2009 Atlanta, GA Tabernacle 05/14/2009 San Francisco, CA Warfield 05/15/2009 Seattle,WA Moore Theater 05/16/2009 Portland, OR Alladin Theater
Improv Jones has cancelled tonight’s show at the Arsenal Center for the Arts due to weather. They have also canceled the December 26 show, but offer you this link to their YouTube videos instead… DJ Hazard will release Man of Hazardium Monday on CD Baby. You can check here Monday to order your copy… The Wilbur Theatre has added a New Year’s Day show with Joel McHale, who plays two shows there New Year’s Eve… Chris Coxen has announced his jazzy alter-ego Barry Tattle will host Valentine’s Weekend at Mottley’s Comedy Club… Brian Joyce is bringing Irish comedian Ardal O’Hanlon back to the States for a March 5 show at the Somerville Theatre. O’Hanlon, one of the stars of the BBC show “Father Ted,” gave a great show at the Burren last year when Joyce first brought him in. Make a point to catch this one.
David Wain, Michael Showalter, and Michael Ian Black first started working together as part of the State in the late 80s in New York City. They debuted as Stella at Fez in New York City in 1997. All three live and work in New York. So that would make the obvious place to tape the new Stella live DVD… The Wilbur Theatre in Boston.
The individual members of the group had only a small window to pull something together before they got back to their regular schedules, and booked a short two-week tour schedule, which give them few options. So producer Jon Stern came out to Boston to scope things out, and the plan came together. They will tape the special at Thursday's show.
“We wanted to do it toward the end of the tour and we wanted to do it somewhere cool,” says Wain. “We thought Boston is a great place. We didn’t want to do it in New York where we all live. It just seemed less exciting.”
Stella has had a deal in place with Shout Factory for a while, according to Wain, and wanted to get their live show on tape. “We have DVDs of our shorts and of our series, but we never had one of our touring show,” he says.
Black, Showalter, and Wain have all been working on other projects for the past year and a half. Black has a new book, My Custom Van, and has a new children’s book coming out in January. Both Showalter and Black have worked on pilots for Comedy Central (they have a new one, Michael and Michael Have Issues, on tap for the network). And Wain has been promoting Role Models, which he directed.
For Wain, performing with Stella onstage is a welcome change from the grind of working on a feature film, where a joke might take four years to get from a script to an audience. “The changing of gear is life-saving for me in my creative mind,” says Wain. “I was so emotionally and mentally exhausted after doing the movie, so this is a complete shifting of gears. Better would be a vacation, but that didn’t happen.”
Wain won’t direct the new show – he’ll be too busy onstage, and directing a live performance DVD is a different skill set than directing a feature film. Stella is also a very improvisational act, which makes Wain curious about how it might come out, especially since they essentially have one shot at it.
“If we had the budget I suppose we’d do what U2 would do and shoot like ten shows and then edit them together as if they were one,” he says. “But the DVD viewers will see an authentic record of this one show.”
Wain says Stella has been doing almost all new material on the tour, with some musical and multi-media elements. Since they are taping here, the Wilbur show will be a bit different. “At the Boston show, we’ll be doing a slightly longer show, including some quote-unquote classic material because of the fact that we’re doing it for the DVD,” he says.
The troupe will also bring back Eugene Mirman, who started out in Boston and has been opening for Stella since their first tours in 2003. “Quite simply, we just think he’s funny,” says Wain. “He’s a little offbeat like we are. So the people who like Eugene will like us, and vice versa, in theory. It seems to have worked well.”
The live DVD is expected to come out sometime in the first half of 2009. State fans should also look for a reunion show next month in San Francisco, and there are rumblings about a new State TV special.
Wain is also at the beginning stages of a couple of new film project, which, in all likelihood, will involve his Stella or State-mates. “Pretty much everything I’ve done has been an organic like configuration of friends, usually with some group of people from the State,” he says. “One day I might work with people outside the State, who knows?”
