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Jeffrey Gurian is a writer and comedian in New York who loves to Jump Around. Follow his regular column right here, to find out what’s happening in comedy, and who Jeffrey Gurian ran into this week in and around New York. This week Jeffrey covered the scene at New York Comedy Club, Gotham, and more.
Hasan Minhaj Taking One Man Show on National Tour
Ran into my buddy Hasan Minhaj at Comedy Juice which as you know is every Tuesday at Gotham Comedy Club. He told me he’s taking his one man show, Homecoming King which I saw last year at the Cherry Lane Theatre on a national tour starting in August. It inspired me to do a one man show. If I could only figure out who that one man should be! As a senior correspondent on The Daily Show, Hasan will also be attending both political conventions and broadcasting live from each convention. And he was really excited to tell me that he served as the guest entertainer at the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington D.C. with Governor John Kasich delivering the keynote address. Monroe Martin came in to do a set wearing a T-shirt with the names Carlin, Hicks, Pryor and Bruce so I asked him if they were all his idols. He said one of them was. I’ll let you guess which one it was! Also saw a cool young comic with long hair who works clean but his manager didn’t want him to get any press yet, so I’m not writing about him…yet.
I attended the truTV taping of Mo Mandel’s Comedy Knockout, which is another of those difficult shows for comics to do because they have to come up with so many jokes about different and unusual topics. For instance, they have to come up with funny responses to lines like “Tell me what not to say when you attend Bible study with your grandmother.” After several rounds the audience votes off one of the three comics on the panel, and the other two go head to head in a sort of Roast Battle competition where they are free to make fun of each other as well as doing their funny lines. Damien Lemon is the host and the night I was there saw Mike Vecchione, Amanda Seales and Noah Gardenswartz competing against each other. The loser of the evening has to read an on-camera belittling and withering “apology” written it seems by people who hate him/her, aka the show’s writers. Amanda Seales told me the comics are free to use their own jokes and are not limited to just what the writer’s provide. I can’t give away any of the details, but suffice it to say it was a really fun taping with hardly any do-overs like you get at some tapings, and they served beer and pizza to the audience which made it feel like a real party environment. It was really a lot of fun, and the show returns on August 1 at 11 P.M. for Season 2.
Rory Albanese Working on Hour Special
I popped by New York Comedy Club and was so glad to run into Rory Albanese, producer of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore cause I hadn’t seen him in quite a while. After his set we hung out in the backstage office for a few minutes and he told me he recently had a night at Carolines, is at The Cellar every night and is working hard on putting a new hour together for a TV special. He’s often on camera at The Nightly Show and he said it will be interesting to see if that turns into ticket sales when he goes on the road which he’s planning to do soon. His story is really cool because he started as a PA on The Daily Show, and left as the executive producer. Only in America! He left to do stand-up full time and had written a sit-com for Warner Brothers. CBS was supposed to do the pilot, but it wound up not getting done. We commiserated on all the projects we’ve labored over that didn’t get made, but at least he got paid for his! And I had such a confusing day that it wasn’t until I took the photo with Rory that I realized I had been wearing my red “at home” glasses all evening and left my usual blue glasses sitting by my computer at home.
Also in the office was host Matt Pavich of Joking Off who said it’s cool that the show is now on regular MTV and that the third season starts August 4. He’s been on all three seasons so far. I told him it seems like a difficult and stressful show to do. He said , “When you write a good joke it takes time, but on Joking Off, you’re on the next day, and you get the material the day of, so sometimes it brings the “corny” out of you because you’re writing at such a high speed, so you have to edit your corny jokes into good jokes in five minutes and it’s very stressful. It’s crazy. You’re just running into rooms asking other guys, “Hey, is this funny?” And they’re like “Yeah” and someone else is like “Naaah”, so you go into the next room and do the same thing and Brendan Sagalow says, “Yeah that’s hilarious”, and Matt Richards goes “Nah, that’s not funny.” We work in teams and each team has their own room. And there’s always the chance that the other comics have the same idea so they’ll tell you it’s not funny so they can use it for themselves. Everyone’s running around like chickens without their heads, but it’s the most fun and most stressful thing at the same time.” He said all that!
Rory Scovel and Clayton English to Headline Atlanta Fest
When I was performing in Atlanta last year at The Improv, I met two Atlanta comics named Gilbert Lawand and Michael Albanese who told me they were moving to New York. The other night at Gotham I was coming up the stairs and who was going down but Gilbert. He told me they were gearing up for the second year of a comedy festival that he and Michael started in Atlanta called The Red Clay Comedy Festival and it runs from the last weekend in September. It will feature 30 comics, including “three headliners handpicked by the producers” and so far they are Clayton English the winner of Last Comic Standing and Rory Scovel and the third is yet to be announced. Some of the other 30 that I know are Tim Dillon, Molly Austin, Jared Logan, Joe List, and Kenny DeForest. Oh, and there’s a third producer, who we all know, Rebecca Trent owner of The Creek and The Cave, right here in Long Island City.
Lucy Pohl Bringing One Woman Show to Edinbugh
Riddle: What do these three things have in common; the break-up of a ten year relationship; being evicted from your apartment; filming a movie in Turkey with Michael Madsen and Stephen Baldwin? Give up? They’re all themes of the new one woman show from Lucie Pohl called Apohlcalypse Now. There are talented performers and then there are talented performers, but Lucie Pohl is in a class by herself. She does one woman shows the way John Leguizamo or Mike Birbiglia do one man shows. This latest which she’s taking to Edinburgh next week for a month is the more than honest story of how she’s handling the aforementioned things mentioned in the riddle. The way she goes from character to character each in their own voice or accent so seamlessly is phenomenal and probably why she’s appearing in the new Harry Potter film Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, has a role in Homeland and a lead role in the new series Red Dwarf, as well as the lead in a feature with Michael Madsen and Stephen Baldwin. Make it a point to see her perform when you can.
I made a point of getting over to Gotham to catch Luenelle who was in from LA and headlining Gotham for the very first time. I was surprised to see Jared Freid hosting the show. I’ve seen him performing there many times but never hosting before. When he got off I asked him about it and he confirmed that it was his first time hosting. He said that one of the owners asked him to host and he was thrilled. Ophira Eisenberg opened and when she got off she told me she was producing an exciting type of variety show. She said she thinks she finally figured out the perfect model. “We start with a magician and Matthew Holtzclaw makes it looks effortless and cool- no cheesy banter either, he is a comic’s magician, followed by the hilarious Naomi Ekperigin from Broad City, then I do a nice 20-25 min set, and we end with the musical comedy experience of Adira Amram and The Experience, with Broadway- ready back up dancers. Not a dull moment.” I’ve seen Adira perform on one of my rare excursions to Brooklyn, and she was fantastic. The show called Ophira and Adira is on August 3rd at a place with the cool name of C’mon Everybody in Bed Stuy Brooklyn, and don’t be surprised if you see me there!
Harris Stanton went on next and even included some material about his broken wrist that he got in the crash that injured Tracy Morgan and Ardie Fuqua. I had bumped into Harris Stanton on my way in. He told me he was planning his first album, tentatively titled Naive Innocence which will be distributed nationally and also on Amazon and Best Buy, and he hoped to tape it at Gotham which he said was one of his favorite clubs. He also said that Keith Robinson teased him mercilessly about the title and said it sounded more like a Beyonce album than a comedy title, but Keith brings his Tough Crowd persona into all of his interactions. Harris said that every conversation with Keith is like a little mini-roast!
Luenell came out in a very unique way, which I likened to the dramatic way James Brown would appear or leave the stage. Jared introduced her and she was escorted to the stage by a large man who she introduced as Rock, her bodyguard, an ex-football player. She was wearing the jewelry of a small village, with nails so long I wondered if Rock had to pick things up for her. She said she was very excited about headlining Gotham for the very first time, and told the audience she had been performing for 26 years and while she was coming up, was deemed too dirty even for Def Jam, but she managed to make it anyway. Suffice it to say she uses all seven words that George Carlin talked about, and more. And the audience loved her! She opened with a serious bio about herself telling the audience things she felt they should know about her, including facts like she was the 8th of 8 children and that she had a 20 year old daughter, a husband, a boo, a boyfriend and that she was engaged! She ruled the crowd and the guy next to me kept pounding the banquette we were sitting on so hard every time he laughed that it felt like I was sitting on a seesaw. I kept popping up in the air, hoping she wouldn’t be so funny. A couple of loud talkers disturbed her, and she threw down her mic and chastized them for their behavior. It explained why her tour is called Easily Annoyed because as she described it, … she is. Luenell was a big hit and I’m sure she’ll be back again!
If you read the column regularly– and by the way it’s a “column”, not a blog, and not a newsletter, but an entertainment column– you know that I try and check out lots of alternative shows, and not only the shows in the major clubs. I had been hearing a lot about Matt Maran’s Comedy Fight Club at a place called Lovecraft and just the name of the place drew me down there. How can you not wanna check out a place called Lovecraft? Like a lot of bars in Alphabet City there’s a bar area and then there’s a cool downstairs space, and this one was really cool, like a catacomb. It had a European feel to it and had a very cool vibe. The show itself is like a Roast Battle with the audience participating and actually choosing the winner of each two man battle, and it’s themed like a wrestling match. Some of the comics even take on wrestling type personas, like one guy named Justin Lanza who’s named The Spirit Animal and often just screams at the audience. There’s Chris Crespo who they refer to as their mascot and who’s arms end at the elbows. That became fodder for jokes for the guys who went up against him. I was told that Alex Engelbert is named the official Harlot of Fight Club, Matt is The Commissioner, and they even have a Pope who is Ben Switzer, founder of the CFC.
I sat down with Matt for a bit after the show and he said, “We started Comedy Fight Club last fall on September 11th (of course). It is no holds barred, anything goes, and not for the faint of heart. Up and coming local comedians step into the fighter’s circle to roast each other’s asses off.” They run it like it’s a UFC fight, with the exuberant audience, on a par with a wrestling crowd, determining the winner of each fight. The winner gets a championship belt to wear and the current champ is none other than my old pal Gene Getman, who with Mike Coscarelli does the Social Villains podcast. The championship is usually defended once a month. The abiding rule is “no pity claps.” If the jokes aren’t funny they can expect to be loudly booed. Every Sunday night at 9:30. I’ll be back!
In the meantime, that’s it for me! I’m OUT!!!
Jeffrey Gurian is a comedian, writer and all around bon vivant in New York City. Subscribe to his YouTube channel, Comedy Matters TV. Photos below Jeffrey Gurian with Rory Albanese, Lucie Pohl and Hasan Minhaj.
The post Hasan Minhaj Touring His One Man Show, Rory Albanese is Working on a Special, Luenell Headlines Gotham and More News From NY Clubs appeared first on The Interrobang.