The latest round of This Is Not Happening kicks off with a crazy story from Doug Stanhope/great sales pitch for his book Digging Up Mother: A Love Story.
As you might suspect, recovering from a break-up for Stanhope doesn’t go like it does for the rest of us.
If you’re one of readers/followers, you are probably well aware of and love Eliza Skinner.
As such, you should enjoy her killing it during her set on last night’s Late Late Show with James Corden. If Eliza Skinner is somehow a new name to you here, relish in discovering her comedy with the aforementioned great performance.
Watch her set here.
Have you asked yourself what the acid-induced love child of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and A Scanner Darkly would be like?
Even if you haven’t asked that question, you should definitely see what the answer is in the trailer for the brand new Adult Swim live action, rotoscope animation hybrid Dream Corp LLC from Daniel Stessen.
Watch it here, then look for the series premiere on Sunday, October 23rd at 11:45PM.
Though Paul F. Tompkins regularly guests on @midnight and stars in Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ on Seeso, Paul deserves far more screen time.
Last night, that desired additional screen time came in the form of an interview with Stephen Colbert and a fun bit where Paul plays the guy who heads up the one newspaper in the entire country that endorses Trump.
We can only hope that the press tour for Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ leads to more of this.
More details here.
The rest of our listings for comedy events/shows as well as open mics and maps are embedded at www.thecomedybureau.com.
For over 200 episodes now, Dave Anthony, Gareth Reynolds, and a plethora of comedy’s best and brightest have gone through the weirdest, most overlooked chapters of history on the hit podcast The Dollop.
Many of the stories that they riff over seem so incredulous that you might want some corresponding images, which might leave those with a weak mind’s eye high and dry.
Luckily, The United States of Absurdity: Untold Stories from American History by Anthony and Reynolds will fill that very need going over their signature dives into bizarre historical nooks and crannies with accompanying illustration as well as trivia and timelines.
The book doesn’t come out until May 9th, 2017, but you can (and should) pre-order it now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Google Books, and Indie Bound.
As there is plenty of music that’s made in a bedroom, it only stands to reason that there would be musical comedy that would be also made in a bedroom. That being said, an album of funny songs that don’t have the benefit of being recorded live are near impossible feat to pull off.
SF’s Nick Stargu AKA DJ Real, however, has been able to do that with his latest album They’ll Say Yes. With a mastery of synths, loops, and lyrical cleverness, DJ Real has compiled over a dozen songs over 8 years that get-in and get-out of the melody and the joke quickly. As this is his sixth release, he’s really honed his craft.
You can listen to the whole album and buy it off Bandcamp here.
To up the ante on his own farce, Stargu has even made a MIDI version of this very album.
Thankfully, Bohmermann didn’t suffer the same fate as one Mike Ward.
It’s hard to not take freedom of speech for granted in the U.S. You can pretty much speak freely here, especially when you compare our free speech laws to those around the world. If you don’t look at what those laws are and how they’re enforced elsewhere, saying what you want in the good ol’ U.S. of A is just assumed to be the norm.
In this particular case, German comedian Jan Bohmermann presented a satirical poem on television suggesting that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sex with goats.The Turkish government did not take to those remarks kindly and brought Bohmermann up on charges of an old German law that prohibits insults of foreign government representatives. Luckily, the court taking on the case concluded that it was a joke, shouldn’t be taken seriously, and didn’t find Bohmermann guilty of the charges levied against him.
Though the case was dropped, let this be one of the thousands of cautionary tales of a potential Trump presidency. Already, Trump has said he’d open up libel laws so it would be easier to sue members of the press that he thought were making up stories about him and even briefly had a filed lawsuit against Bill Maher for a joke that speculated about Trump’s mother having sex with an orangutan.
If you care about free speech and comedy, you might want to make sure the much more despicable version of Biff Tannen doesn’t win next month.
The rumors are true. There is stuff that you should watch on go90.
The Cooties are definitely one of favorite things that we found out about in 2016. Their absurdist songs strike a great balance of being solid pop music while being almost completely out-of-left-field with their lyrics.
Recently, they got a chance to make a TV pilot with JASH through Verizon’s go90 and got the free reign to really go to the nth degree with pure, uncut, silly brand of comedy.
The result is Dad Friends and you should watch it as soon as you can.
Did you have a better summer than Shoemaker, Fairbell, and Payton from Those Who Can’t?
See for yourself as they reminisce what they did for the last few months before they go in for a mandatory meeting.
Oh, by the way, season 2 of Those Who Can’t premieres on Thursday, October 6th 10:30PM.
Get tickets here.
The rest of our listings for comedy shows/events as well as open mics and maps are embedded at www.thecomedybureau.com.
2017 LA Film Festival Now Taking Submissions
Late deadline is December 16, 2016.
Early deadline is October 28, 2016.
Regular deadline is November 18th, 2016.
The LA Film Festival will be taking submissions for films, both feature and short, and episodic series.
The fees range from $15-$50 for early deadline, $20-$75 for regular, and $25-$100 for late.
Get more details here and please submit some great comedy for next year’s LA Film Festival.
As of late, Más Mejor has had a streak of sketches and web series that you might want to give a watch.
It’s Pablo, their latest release, surmises a secretly made sitcom starring Pablo Escobar in the style of old family sitcoms of yesteryear.
Thanks to the minds of Joey Devine, Zach Gonzalez-Landis and Chris Garcia, the performances of Chris, Becky Garcia and Frankie Quiñones, and the direction of Teddy Filson and Alex Koll, you now have a perfect dessert for after Narcos season 2.
Watch it here.
As Nikki Glaser isn’t currently busy with her great show Not Safe, she can do things like perform stand-up, the thing that got her on TV in the first place, on The Tonight Show.
You can see the latest offering of her whip-smart, clever stand-up here.
Honest Trailers and Jimmy Kimmel Live Win Streamy Awards
This past weekend, The annual Streamy Awards honoring anything and everything that you can stream online (though they seem to want to avoid overlapping with The Emmys too much) announced their winners for this year.
Those winners included Screen Junkies’ web series Honest Trailers for Best Writing and Jimmy Kimmel Live’s Mean Tweets for Best Collaboration. In addition to this win, both were up for Emmys this year as well.
We can only see this awards show getting bigger as streaming because more tied-into how you watch anything that you watch on a screen.
This season of the hit Comedy Central storytelling series, This Is Not Happening with host Ari Shaffir, is going to bring you all sorts of f’d up stories from Doug Stanhope, Maria Bamford, Dave Ross, Brian Regan, Julian McCullough, Bonnie McFarlane, Ali Saddiq, Bert Kreischer with his shirt off, and way more.
Watch the trailer for season 3 to get a taste of what’s to come as well as how much great screaming is involved in many of these stories.
The new season kicks off on Thursday, October 13th on Comedy Central.
ABC Reviving ‘The Gong Show’ for 10 Episodes with Will Arnett Attached as Producer
One can only hope that one of the episodes features Arnett as G.O.B. Bluth doing his magic act.
40 years ago, America’s Got Talent wasn’t a thing along with the multitude of other reality competition shows that delve into the weird talents from all around the country. Back then, The Gong Show, which almost explicitly explored some of the weirdest acts they could find only to revel in hitting a gong to cut them short, was that weird talent showcase TV series.
Seems like a show that’s cut out for 2016, right?
ABC thinks so with a 10 episode order and none other than Will Arnett on board as an EP. There is no word as to who the host will be, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Arnett in that role as well.
This show is free to attend. More details here.
The rest of our listings for comedy shows/events as well as open mics and maps are embedded at www.thecomedybureau.com.
Open Mic Run Updated for Next Week 10/3/16
The return of Coffee + Food, plenty of stand-up, sketch open mics, and improv jams.
8PM on Starz.
Starz’s comedy line-up has had a good resurgence with this duo of Ash vs. Evil Dead and Blunt Talk.
Now, they’re going to play back-to-back in their second season premieres with Ash vs. Evil Dead kicking off the evening at 8PM and Blunt Talk right after at 8:30PM.
These Daily Show with Jon Stewart alums, Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert, seem to be in the highest of highs with comedy hosting their own big time shows.
As such, when Bee stopped by on Colbert they got a bit nostalgic for both their time at The Daily Show and the days of their lives that didn’t have to focus on the election.
Stand-ups not doing stand-up will include Tony Sam, Drennon Davis, Haley Driscoll, Troy Conrad, Ramin Nazer with the incomparable Ryan Singer and Dave Waite leading the way.
More details here.
The rest of our listings for comedy shows/events as well as open mics and maps are embedded at www.thecomedybureau.com.
Comedy Crawl Updated for Next Week 10/2/16
Plenty of political comedy as well as Idiocracy’s 10 year anniversary, a show at a Whole Foods, and good dose of experimental comedy too.
Of the outsider comedic perspectives of America that you might want to check out, Dylan Moran’s should definitely be one of them.
See why for yourself on his Conan appearance from this week.
Natalie Palamides workshopping is probably more mindbending-ly hysterical than most solo shows that have worked their way on to a festival line-up.
So, don’t miss out on Natalie honing her show throughout all of this month. More details here.
The rest of our listings for shows/events as well as open mics and maps are embedded at www.thecomedybureau.com.