This is a clip of ventriloquist Nina Conti, who strapped a Vent-Mask to the face of an audience member she pulled onstage. The Vent-Mask was invented by Joel Hodgson, the guy behind “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” who did it in his act in a Minneapolis comedy club in the late 1980s. Ronn Lucas, who headlined […]
There have been a few times when I’ve sworn I was done with Bill Maher because he did something incredibly anti-science on his show, like his dangerous anti-vaccination remarks or the interview with the “doctor” who claimed he had an AIDS cure made from the milk of arthritic goats (which I covered on my radio show […]
On my recent trip to Vegas, I was thrilled to discover that Robert Klein was appearing at the Southpoint Casino’s showroom. I’ve been a fan of Klein since my teen years, a topic I covered here in 2005 when he guested on my radio show. So, I bought a pair of tickets and took my […]
Swim at your own risk. We never know who is going to pop in. If an unannounced appearance is not your cup of tea, you are free to leave (unobtrusively please) no questions asked, your check on the house. That’s a sign on the wall of The Comedy Cellar, the nightclub in New York that […]
Three years ago, I wrote a piece about Elayne Boosler, one of the seminal comics of the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, I’ve followed Elayne on YouTube as she has posted clips from some of the many standup specials she did on cable, and I just ordered her new boxed set, “Timeless,” which includes four […]
With all the standup comedy specials populating Netflix these days, you’d think someone in Hollywood would study them to figure out how to do a movie about comedians. I don’t mean putting several of them on stage and filming them a la “The Original Kings Of Comedy.” I mean making a movie about a practitioner […]