1. People often bandy about the overuse of the words “genius” and “legend” when applied to a comedian, often arguing that it gets tossed about way too frequently and thus devaluing and actual “geniuses” and “legends”. In case it wasn’t clear from Maria Bamford‘s entire body of work, she more than qualifies for both labels without, as far as we’re concerned, debate. Her latest hour special Local Act affirms Bamford’s singular comedic brilliance through precision voice and character work and self-awareness, inclusivity, empathy, and honesty all baked into the DNA of ever single one of her jokes. It also highlights how Bamford continues to be one of the very best human beings in comedy as she does a fast paced open mic of other “local acts”, up and comers in LA comedy (and her husband), letting her dedication to community live on in perpetuity in a truly beautiful special in LA comedy’s tiniest venue, Public Displays of Altadena.
You can now stream Maria Bamford: Local Act on AppleTV, Amazon, GooglePlay, YouTube, and more.
2. NYC comedy staple Ian Lockwood sings a pop tribute, Orbo, to A.I. dealing with the existential prison that is sentience (and might have a better hook than A.I. anthem[?] Grimes’ We Appreciate Power).
3. Kenny DeForest, a great and big-hearted comedian, was struck by a car while on a bike in NYC and has had to get emergency brain surgery to get some sort of stable condition. A GoFundMe has been made to help him and his family deal with the oncoming onslaught of medical bills that are inevitably coming in Kenny’s lengthy road to recovery. They have met their goal of $150K as of this post, but we’re sure more costs are coming with a incident of this magnitude and we have no doubt that Kenny and his family could use all the support that they can get.
4. Julian Velard croons what is, effectively, a beautiful PSA about the waking nightmare of telling a piano man to play Billy Joel’s Piano Man.
5. We’ll leave you with this: Congrats to Datgirl Serene and Matthew Fine for reading this far and getting completely free tix to Brett Goldstein this past weekend at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.