Yes, but he starts at “two.”
Is there a repository of information on upcoming stand up shows? I want to get in on the fun.
Your best bet is to know where the closest comedy venue is to you and to check their website. I prefer clubs and there is a very good comedy club in central Jersey. It gets a lot of top headliners. In a club like that you are more likely to see someone you know and like. Pop up shows in places that don’t exclusively have comedy are really hit or miss.
To me there is nothing better than a good comedy show and nothing worse than a bad one. I try to only go to shows I know I’m going to like.
Broon took my video camera and stuck the whole business end in his mouth and licked the lense. Still got that tape around somewhere…
I also saw the Attell/Hedberg/Black show when it came nearby. Unfortunately, Mitch was loaded (I was guessing Meth) and just rattled off his jokes at double-time and was painfully unfunny. His perfect comedy timing was blown and he kinda sucked. It was a shame. And then he was dead.
Oh! I didn’t even think about comedy acts I’d seen at Ren Faires; I worked at the Bristol Renaissance Faire (in between Chicago and Milwaukee) for most of the 1990s; I knew both of those guys, as well as The Swordsmen (Dirk and Guido), and the Mud Show guys. I saw all of them a lot during my Faire days, and Dirk and Guido were good friends of mine at one point.
BERT: I always say there’s nothing like a good joke.
UNCLE ALBERT: And that was nothing like a good joke.
I’ve seen a few (not nearly as many as some of y’all) :
Beth Donahue - first standup I’d seen live and thought she was great!
Charlie Murphy - this was after The Chappelle Show; he was amazing!
Robert Schimmel - what I remember most about seeing him, aside from him being hilarious, was how confident he seemed. His openers, in comparison, seemed kind of like Fozzie Bear - desperate for a laugh. He kind of had this “relax - we’re all going to have a good time” attitude.
Penn & Teller - earlier this year. They were great, though I was disappointed that they’d stopped doing meet-and-greets (though it’s understandable).
…fascinating thing about this thread to me is that I have forgotten how many “name” comedy performers I have seen.
So many posts I read and say “Oh yeah! I saw them too.”
Especially when Jake the Snake Roberts popped up. Completely forgot about that. I saw him at the comedy club in Burbank (Flappers?). I was friend of friend of someone who worked on his recovery documentary so I got to hang out with him a little after the show. Really good time.
Not a big fan of club comedy, but I’ve seen a few over the decades. Off the top of my pointed little head:
Gary Mule Deer
Mel Brooks
Jim Gaffigan
Rita Rudner
Paula Poundstone
Robert Klein
Patton Oswalt
John Cleese/Eric Idle
Reduced Shakespeare Company
Probably a bunch more lost to the sands of Time…
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the first 8 minutes of the show I attended became Act 2 in this episode of This American Life. Yeah, I was at the show where Tig got locked in her hotel bathroom just before the show.
Oh, I missed Jim Jefferies.
Also, John Cleese did 45 minutes or so after a screening of MP and the Holy Grail.
William Shatner’s one man show Shatner’s World
I wonder if she was inspired by Steve Post…
This thread went form 0-100 pretty quickly, and I haven’t kept up. Apologies if most of these have been discussed already.
Bill Cosby
Kids in the Hall
Paula Poundstone
Weird Al (but only on his rarities/deep cuts tour that he did just a few years ago; never one of his big stage shows. Emo Phillips opened)
Uncle Bonsai A humorous/satiric/folk musical trio from Seattle. They were probably most popular in the late-'80s/early-'90s. I think they were occasionally played on Dr. Demento with songs like “Cheerleaders on Drugs”, but did a lot of wonderful straight/sentimental songs too. I’m always a little surprised they aren’t better known here.
Victor Borge He must have been in his 80s when I saw him, but still great fun.
I remembered another one. I saw Peter Schickele several times ‘presenting’ (wink, wink) the works of P.D.Q. Bach; from a small chamber ensemble to a full orchestra and chorale.
Schickele used to arrive late, with someone on stage explaining the delay and stalling for time. He’d even make fun of the people arriving late and making their way to their seats. I had great seats one time and deliberately waited in the lobby before going in so I could be one of the people he picked on.
This is an interesting one. Having heard most of Weird Al’s more well-known songs, this sounds like it would have been a fun show. What sorts of deep cuts did he do-- Christmas at Ground Zero? Party at the Leper Colony? The Saga Begins? (That last one may not be a deep cut).
And Emo Philips as an opener, too, wow. He is the master of the dark misdirect punchline. Made all the more effective by his childlike delivery. One of my favorite jokes of his (no, not the long Christian denomination one, though that’s an all-time classic) is:
"My girlfriend was mad at me because I didn’t open the car door for her…
…but I was too busy swimming to the surface."
By the way, it’s interesting seeing the repeat act mentions that are showing up. Weird Al’s been mentioned several times. This is the second mention for Emo, I think. I believe Eddie Izzard is the most mentioned live act seen so far, surprisingly. If I get time later I might compile a list of all comedy acts that have been mentioned more than once, just for funzies.
Andre Rieu does that after intermissions – he won’t start the music while people are still looking for the seats. I’ve seen him fill in the time with comments on people’s clothes (“I wish I had trousers like that.”) with the cameras feeding the big screens aimed at the person he’s talking about, or by whistling “Colonel Bogey”.
Blue Man Group would abruptly stop the show for late-arriving audience members and play a recording of an operatic tenor repeatedly singing “YOU’RE LAAAAATE!”
I saw him performing Oedipus Tex back in my college days.
I’ve also seen a couple of the Reduced Shakespeare Company shows. And I’ve literally performed in a Monty Python stage show (minus John Cleese who couldn’t be bothered to participate and Graham Chapman who was too dead at the time).
I saw him twice while in college and I thought he was very funny. This was in the mid 90s when he was on the rise and before Chairman of the Board, which I haven’t seen. He teased a little prop stuff but then went into a whole bit about his plane ride to the gig and how he basically landed in a cornfield. I imagine he has a similar routine that he used for all small midwestern colleges but he had the audience laughing. I thought he had good material, some funny observational stuff, a little stoner stuff, and then ended with the props.
I’m not all that familiar with Carrot Top’s comedy, but I do know he has this reputation as “ugh, a prop comic”; and prop comedy is, in general, thought of as a classic crutch for bad comedians.
But done right, prop comedy can be funny. I seem to remember Pee Wee Herman doing a lot of prop comedy on his several Letterman appearances, to great effect.
Even Gallagher, who seems to be the gold standard of the awful prop comic, and whose humor I’ve pretty much never liked (who thought smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer was ever funny?) had a pretty good prop bit about the idiosyncrasies of the English language.