I never found Ellen funny. I think she seems like a generally nice, cool person, but not hysterically, oh my god funny person.
I like the BCCT, but Larry the Cable Guy is the weak link. He hits a little TOO close to the stereotype. I’ve been a fan of Engvall for years-I remember him doing stand up and making jokes about a doll his daughter had when she was a toddler.
Rita Rudner, Margaret Cho, they’re great. Wendy Liebman’s okay, and I don’t mind her delivery, but it seems she never varies her jokes-they’re always the same.
Chris Kattan makes me want to dig my eyeballs out.
Another comedian who puts me off with repetitiveness. He couldn’t seem to deliver a single joke without touching his forehead and dramatically jerking it away. OVER and OVER and OVER …
I thought Ellen Degeneres did a wonderful job in Finding Nemo, especially the bits where she spoke whale. I’ve only heard a bit of her standup, though - which wasn’t half-bad either it’ll need to see/hear more before I make a final judgment.
Margaret Cho does an excellent impersonations of bubbly, sunshine-vomiting sorority chicks.
What’s disappointing is that Rock is capable of so much more. His book was absolutely hysterical, and at his best in stand-up he’s made me double over, but it’s not the fact I’m white that makes me say “GET SOME NEW MATERIAL! THIS AIN’T A WORKIN’ ANYMORE! YEAH YEAH YEAH BLACKS AND WHITES ARE DIFFERENT, BLACKS HAVE GOTTEN THE BROWN STINKY END OF THE STICK, GOT IT! ALREADY KNEW IT, IN FACT! Now talk about something we don’t already know and haven’t heard you say five hundred times before.”
I can’t believe Bill Maher hasn’t been mentioned yet. I hate that narcissistic asswipe with a passion. I agree with him on many major positions and I’m an agnostic with no great love for Fundamentalism, but he won’t let his conservative guests speak most of the time, if he has a conservative Christian guess you can rest assured it’s going to be a Pat Robertson type Bible thumper and he’ll be on worst behavior, his monologues are dreadful, he thinks he’s an expert on current events because he reads a newspaper (and what the hell is your medical background for saying vaccines are bad?), is way too insecure to let a guest get the funniest line of the evening, etc… Worst of all when he got called on his bullshit while on network and the show got cancelled he screamed "Censorship!.
Dude, censorship is when you’re told you don’t have the rightto express your opinions in a public forum. You still have your right to hold and express any view you want. However, you do NOT have a right to get paid (a lot of money at that) to express your views in a public forum (I’m mistaken I wish they’d tell me where to show up and when to be there).
But let there be no mistake- I can’t frigging stand Bill Maher.
That would be Karen Murayama. And no, she wasn’t very funny.
Kathy Greenwood is actually an award-winning improv comedian in Canada; however, the short form format of “Whose Line…” didn’t match her style. She could be very funny on occasion, but she definitely paled.
Denny Seigel was probably the funniest of the female contenders, but even she didn’t compare to the guys. Josie Lawrence is highly appreciated by the fans, but I did not find her funny at all in her two appearances on the US show. (In part, this is because she immediately resorted to potty mouth humor, which is a big turn-off for me.)
You reminded me of Jay Leno. I hate that smug, unfunny, lowest common denominator-suckling piece of crap. His Tonight Show monologues suck, even though I realize he has a whole staff of unfunny writers working for him. I don’t even remember his “real” stand-up, but his personality and voice and delivery are just so grating that I can’t imagine I’d enjoy it. Fuck Jay Leno.
A strange situation: Jerry Seinfeld was an absolutely hysterical stand-up comic before his eponymous show. In fact, his HBO special is what made me want to watch The Seinfeld Chronicles in the first place, when NBC slipped it, unheralded, into the schedule. But when the show became Seinfeld and took off, the stand-up parts were easily the least funny parts of the show (“Pardon me, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to whack you”). My friends and I, while watching the show religiously, would make fun of how bad the stand-up interludes were.
Now that the show is over, Jerry Seinfeld seems to have regained his stand-up chops. I guess coming up with thirty seconds of new material a week was too much.
I actually watched his last HBO special because I was curious (and they were raving about it here) and it was basically one long unfunny pit rant, with the audience cheering every time he made some simplistic point (Bush is teh suxxors! [clap clap clap]) and him doing this incredibly annoying sounding I’m-not-really-serious hur hur hur type chuckle every time he thought he’d said something controversial.
David Brenner If you want to know where Richard Lewis steals most of his material from, look no further. Why this guy was a regular on Carson and Letterman for so many years I don’t know. Maybe he had pictures of them in a 3-way with Joan Rivers or something.
It’s a shame about Dennis Miller, he used to be truly smart and funny. Now he’s like “Grumpy Old Men” only he doesn’t have Ann Margret to work with.
I don’t know if she actually belongs in this thread, but TINA FEY is so lacking in the ability to deliver even good humor that she made Jimmy Fallon look funny and he’s so bad he make Colin Quinn look like a master! ARRRRRRG!
I feel MUCH Better now.
Actually, Brenner used to be funny. but, having said that, now, he’s not a sad clone of his old self. He is a very sad clone of Richard Lewis, as TF notes. He even does the old Lewis bit of the nervous pacing, endlessly, back and forth across the stage. And isn’t he now wearing all black, just like Lewis of old?
And, I forgot completely about Bill Maher. If he hadn’t got lucky with that 9/11 crack, he would have faded by now, and he and Charles Grodin would be comparing notes.
Now, if we can only think of a way to trick Sampiro into saying something **bad ** about him…
