1. Despite Burr’s whiny “girlfriend” voice, his fantasy about shoving her head into a pumpkin and his insistence that old men can descend into a fixed state of horror due to their significant others’ nagging, Burr’s girlfriend is really quite a peach.

2. Joe DeRosa is someone to watch. Opinionated, smart and cutting, he was not only a good match for Burr’s tone but had his own dark, deranged bits that killed: He defended George Bush’s initial reaction to the news of 9/11 at the elementary school, carefully enacting the meltdown he would have had if he’d been in Bush’s position—it involved lots of wonderfully hopeless self-castigation—and illustrating the way in which New York transforms young, hopeful dreamers into the crazy people you see on the street who believe they’re Michael Jackson.

3. Burr wanted a dog, so his girlfriend rescued a pit bull despite his fears about it (“The thing’s face had muscles! It probably survived two weeks by the L.A. river by choking out coyotes!”). Quickly, though, Burr came to love it; people now give him as much room as he wants on the street: “It’s like having a gun you can pet!”

4. At this point, crowds heckle Burr just to see what kind of impressive judo-style maneuver their comments produce. A guy who blurted out “Irish motherfucker!” got an inspired riff about how it wasn’t the ’20s, Burr didn’t just get off the boat, and they weren’t going to meet at the edges of their respective neighborhoods to do battle over who had the right to sell apples on the corner. Another guy who asked Burr if he wore sandals; in Burr’s eye, this guy became a sad, unsuccessful salesman who was seizing what he saw as a golden moment of business opportunity in an embattled market.

5. It’s beautiful to see Burr attempting to tackle his anger issues, to do things like accept the offer of a cookie from another man and not feel threatened. He told a story about shutting up his know-it-all nephew by pouring a little water on his head—and then feeling just slightly bad about it. The new twinge of regret makes his meaty rants all the more delicious…and it seems clear something in his nature will keep any peace just out of his reach. “I just have to knock everything down,” he admitted. “That’s the natural way I go.”

1. Comedy writing is not a choice. When asked about how they became comedy writers, head writer Barry Julien posited: “I think people realize they’re comedy writers more than decide.” “It’s exactly like being gay,” added Peter Gwinn quickly.

2. The panel’s moderator, a former Lampoon guy and cartoonist called Zachary Kanin, seemed a bit stilted but did have his moments. He turned to Meredith Scardino, the only female of the 12 staff members, asking, “Okay, everyone here wants to know: What’s it like being the only member of the staff to have been on Cash Cab?” A joke, sure, but a good one that kicked off a long riff about discrimination against Cash Cab participants and the glass ceiling they inevitably struck.

3. There really is no room on the set under Colbert’s desk. Rob Dubbin, dressed in robes and sandals to play a Biblical-era Jew being freed from bondage in Egypt, had to wait with two other guys under the cramped desk for an hour while the audience shuffled in. “It was like Tetris,” he complained. One of the other writers put it this way: “When you finally popped up, it was like you were being freed.”

4. Colbert’s now-legendary appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner received mixed reactions from the staff, at least initially: “He delivered it well. Why weren’t people laughing?” wondered Gwinn. The morning after the event, when Dubbin overheard someone at another table talking about it in a restaurant, he considered, “If [Colbert] bombed, maybe it was a kamikaze bomb.” After more of the public response came back their way, Gwinn finally determined they “were connecting with people.”

5. Few things are more fun than baiting comedians. When one happy writer mentioned that Colbert had a great track record for not hiring jerks, Scardino immediately snapped, “Would you guys shut the fuck up?” which prompted this tidy, callback quip from Gwinn: “Oh, here comes Cash Cab…”

1. The programmers did good in putting up a couple of unique and dork-friendly comics before Oswalt. Morgan Murphy detailed the perils of text-message sex for the first-timer; at the crux of her first (and presumably only) experience, she accidentally wrote the phrase come in me eyes—“like some fucking freaky pirate!” Brent Weinbach scored points for his creative, theatrical notions—including a montage of sexy behavior made more sexy by the presence of smooth jazz—and his Russian-alphabet bit, in which just about every letter expands into the phrase “Get out my house, motherfucker.”

2. Oswalt’s favorite movie is Jerry Maguire; that is, “Jerry Maguire when [his] brother yells ‘Fuck you!’ at the screen.” This story revolved around a drunken, late-night screening with a few lonely souls on Christmas Eve 1996. Oswalt’s brother, who’d been gnashing his teeth in hatred the entire film, finally lashed out when Tom Cruise began his heartfelt speech with “We live in a cynical world.” The way Oswalt described it: “It was a 90-minute setup with one punch line.”

3. “A tube of circus peanuts,” is just one poetic image that shows of Oswalt’s dedication to his craft—the fact that it applied to a “well-fucked anus” in a postapocalyptic landscape of the future makes it even more indicative of his conviction to a point of view. “It went through several drafts!” he cried and then lamented that his life was passing him by; he leaned down as if explaining to his young daughter why he didn’t spend more time with her: “I was struggling to describe my asshole as it had been fucked by mutants in the future!”

4. Oswalt’s family crest is a pair of eyes rolling to the side, a bag of Cheetos, and the word fuck.

5. The KFC well is not dry, and now Oswalt has more to talk about than just the Famous Bowl. Their new and upsetting concoction: the unnaturally large chicken drumstick called Megaleg. As they’re testing it in the Midwest and not on the East or West coasts, Oswalt believes that they, like most corporations, are concerned with the food’s side effects. “They sell it to dirt farmers first,” said Oswalt, “to make sure it’s not going to give Chloë Sevigny ass teeth.”

1. Hannibal Buress’s imagination goes really far, really fast, but as important, it takes the audience along with it. In his world, he loves apple juice enough that racism disappears for a moment and he gets so high in Amsterdam he starts teaching classes because he suddenly speaks fluent Dutch. When an audience connects with Buress, he can be a hard act to follow; normally assured Kumail Nanjiani came to the stage, couldn’t find a way in with the crowd and gave up on his time early.

2. Louis C.K. is going to hell. “The premise of my life is evil. Some people spend all their lives starving. They wake up, think, I’m hungry, and then they die. I eat ice cream and I think, Ohh, mmmMMMmmm, ooh!, and I don’t care.”

3. The man has a gift for concocting sad and vengeful imagery: A homeless man didn’t have “Hacky Sack, medical-marijuana” dreadlocks but rather “a clump of hair for every year no one knew his name.” In another moment, he wished death on someone, hoping “the person that loves her most pushes her off a cliff, then Superman swoops her up and drops her from higher.”

4. A worldview with such a juicy concoction of pessimism and melancholy makes even smiling at a member of the opposite sex a potent of an ugly future: “something shitty is going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.” C.K. quickly reeled off all the ways in which relationships fail; then he detailed a relationship in which a couple laughs through their differences, falls in love with all the successive versions of one another, and it all sounds perfect. And then: “Best case scenario, you lose your best friend at 85.”

5. Occasionally, C.K.’s smile gives him away: it’s genuine and makes his capacity for joy evident.

Jake Johannsen

1. Jim Gaffigan looks like a bull when charging from the stage to grapple with a heckler. Even while Gaffigan and the drunken asshole are wrestling up the ramp near the emergency exit, some part of you still wants to believe it’s a joke. Then the asshole gets Gaffigan on the ground and gets a couple of good shots—at the Hot Pockets guy! Gaffigan talks about food and eating and he’s funny and chubby and lovable and certainly doesn’t deserve that. The management steps in just as sane audience members and the loudmouth’s beefy pals move past their shock to get involved. According to one of the Gotham workers afterward, the guy said something to Gaffigan’s wife. So one more piece of learning: Don’t talk shit to Jim Gaffigan’s wife.

2. A crowd doesn’t really recover from a comedy club fistfight very easily. A guy who’s hosting a raffle to benefit MS takes advantage of an empty stage to talk about nothing at all. It’s a bit chaotic.

3. Before the melee, the crowd got Jon Dore, who is funny and has really interesting ideas and unusual joke structures. “My grandfather survived the Holocaust with his hiding skills,” he says, “And by not being Jewish. And by living in Canada his entire life.” Postbrawl, L.A. comic Mo Mandel takes an authoritative tone and scores several laughs off the remaining, frightened audience members. He even works in some material about the relativity of bestiality: “A guy fucking a dog, that’s bestiality. A guy fucking a lion? Might be bestiality or it might be the X Games.”

4. When Jake Johannsen comes out, it takes a while for people to respond to anything other than jokes involving fists, fighting, or fistfighting. But the guy is a pro; he wins them over addressing old oedipal impulses (“Don’t wait too long to fight your dad. You won’t feel good about yourself if all you have to do is unplug him.”), married life and how 2-year-old boys are a pretty good representation of a grown man’s inner monologue (“They’re like little Vikings!”). By the end of the evening, the laughs are strong and rolling through the crowd like you might expect.

5. Everyone seems to agree that Johannsen is more fun than combat.

Bob and Lee Woodruff, the philanthropists behind this foundation and the benefit, are not only philanthropists but people you’d probably want to hang out and drink wine with. Two of the reasons: Lee likened the show to a mullet (“Business up front and party in the rear”), and she nabbed her party dress at Century 21.

Rich people in a crowd are identifiable because, according to Brian Williams, they “glow just a little brighter.”

Brian Williams is pretty funny (and self-effacing) for a news guy. He carried his laptop onstage  for up-to-the-minute Yankees World Series updates, expounded upon the importance of highway exit numbers when growing up in New Jersey and navigated his epic man-crush on Bruce Springsteen.

The acoustic “Born to Run” sounds very little like the electric “Born to Run” the plebes among us are familiar with. (Also, where Springsteen is concerned, people in shirts and ties are generally plebes.)

There are folks out there willing to pay $50,000 on the spot for one of Bruce Springsteen’s guitars. It helps if you are a star in one of the Law & Order franchises and your name is Mariska Hargitay.

Louis C.K. loves his children and only his children. If there were a fire in the school cafeteria, he’d pick up his kid and trample over everyone else’s kids, even if it were possible for him to save the whole school.

According to Stephen Colbert, Iraq is dry and hot: “like Texas, but with fewer guns.”

You shouldn’t ask Lisa Lampanelli to do your benefit—or your anything—if what you want is a clean set; likewise, if you’re attending a benefit with Lisa Lampanelli, you can’t balk when she says she likes black people, not Asians, because she’s into chocolate and not urine.

Despite what you feel about the war, it’s always good to provide its soldiers with resources and recognition.

Thursday evening was an auspicious one for a reunion: just the wet, blustery sort that transforms cheap umbrellas into curbside shrapnel. The unpleasantness was staved off at the doors, however, as the five surviving members of Monty Python—and a shade of Graham Chapman—convivially gathered at the Ziegfeld to celebrate their 40th anniversary and the release of a six-part IFC documentary premiering on consecutive nights from October 18 to 23.

The documentary itself, which was hacked from six hours into two, was choppy and glued together by awkward interstitials, but it provided a gist of the Python arc, from inception to series to films—its reverence for the subject matter and its eye for detail will undoubtedly pay off for fans willing to consume each of its individual parts.

Then the Pythons entered to a standing ovation. This time they replaced Chapman’s ostensible urn, which made an appearance at the last Python reunion in 1998 at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, with a cardboard cutout of him in military garb.

Waiter types collected audience questions on cards as the guys, free from a moderator of any kind, did bits. “Why isn’t John funny anymore?” jabbed Gilliam, as though reading it from a card. Many questions that did draw their interest inevitably became bits as well; Palin didn’t hear one query about comedy troupes the Pythons liked so the others ribbed him about losing his hearing. They never got back to the question.

At one point, they invited a ten-year-old girl up to do her impression of the Spanish Inquisition sketch. Adorably nervous, she forced herself to stop and start over because she wasn’t getting it quite right. Eventually the Pythons had to stand, congratulate her and pry the mike out of her hand.

All in all, a happy 30 minutes passed as the Pythons shuffled cards and took playful shots at one another (while avoiding any lingering resentments among their factions). Gilliam showed off his legs. Idle sang “The Galaxy Song.” Cleese looked down at one of the cards, grandly pronouncing, “Michael Palin, what is the greatest regret of your career?” “I wish I’d been born a man,” Palin replied dryly. Watching Cleese’s reaction, a sort of deep, uncontrollable wheeze, was one of the several moments of laughter indicative of the intimate bond and affection among these men, and the troupe as a whole, that will never expire as a parrot or cheap umbrella might.

The weekend began at 4am on Thursday. That’s reportedly when the guy who roasted the pig in a makeshift pit on the sidewalk outside the Bell House showed up. By the time the crowd filtered into their seats at 8pm, plates full of smoky swine, it all made sense.

Among the evening’s highlights:

- Pete Holmes, amiable as usual, fired up a crowd that had given over to a postpork digestion coma. Turns out he doesn’t trust grown-ups who eat candy; he feels some disconnect between adult life and arguably childish treats. His repeated illustrations of this peeve culminated in his playing a woman wailing the name of her aborted child while sucking on a Ring Pop.

He vowed to cut that part of the bit next time.

- Kristen Schaal entered, doing a dance she later described as one in which she “seduced and then assassinated Adolf Hitler.” Later, she grabbed a guy from the audience [her ever-patient boyfriend, Rich, who also plays a great rube when required] and forced him to play MASH—that old kids’ game meant to determine where you’ll live and whom you’ll marry in the future. Once Schaal had determined he’d marry her, live in an outhouse, have 57 kids and drive a “Boogermobile,” the future she predicted played out in a short film.
- The night was threaded with promos for fake TV shows created by comics; the best among them was the simplest and came from Leo Allen. His preview was for a reality show that challenged a group of convicts to build a silo; if they didn’t build it in a week, they’d go back to jail. The network had a hidden agenda, though: It was going to blow up the silo and send them back to jail regardless.
- Out front stood the cardboard V.I.P. room. Someone really took some time building the thing, which came across like a glittery teepee made from old refrigerator boxes. Inside, an audition tape of actors wanting to become bouncers for the room, was playing on a loop. Caviar was also available.

Daniel Kitson also took the stage Thursday as a prequel to his pair of shows Friday and Saturday and killed from start to finish. Something he identified as his “preternatural comedic ability” transformed even awkward moments into joyful ones: An initial uncomfortable rant about unwanted picture-taking got stretched into the evening’s running joke. (After some extrapolation, Kitson equated photography with child molestation; he’d sneer at anyone taking a picture and spit, “Pedophile!”) Late in the set, he fell entirely off of the stage while giving a goofy high-five.

On Saturday, in the intimate, packed Union Hall space, his We Are Gathered Here did not disappoint. Ostensibly about the death of a beloved aunt, the show swayed anywhere from baking to coffee addiction to small miracles witnessed in cars’ turn signals. Kitson’s occasional flash of cockiness made you wish he weren’t as good as he was, but his endearing presence and incredibly creative wordplay kept the audience enrapt and cackling throughout. The formula worked even as he addressed sensitive subject matter: “Every time I touch the tip of my dick, someone somewhere in the world dies. Dead, dead, dead—don’t look away, you cowards!”

Sunday’s Tearing the Veil of Maya was back at Bell House, where Mirman and his coproducers had rented a Hummer limousine for the evening to take patrons to and from the Atlantic Avenue subway station.

The expectant sold-out crowd was treated to:

- Leo Allen’s enlightening look into the list of most-viewed Wikipedia pages, which range from Michael Jackson to vagina to U.S. Presidents without

- Michael Showalter lazily riffing on movies and commercials—not to say he didn’t have his moments. Describing an irksome national spot, Showalter realized he was disdaining TV hipsters in front of real hipsters. “I’m not saying that’s what you are,” Showalter assured the crowd, “I’m saying that’s what this commercial is saying I’m seeing.”

- Todd Barry’s great set, ending with a slow dissection of an Esquire column entitled “How to Feel Good to a Woman.” Apparently women want men to smell like Maine and push—not pull—their hair. Go figure.

- In a surprise appearance, Jim Gaffigan joking about—what else—food. “You’ll be seeing those jokes in Reader’s Digest next month,” he said, chastening himself.

- Reggie Watts, as per usual, ripping the roof off. He came at the crowd in what Mirman aptly identified as one of his “20-minute psychedelic riffs” with so many ideas and so much energy that one woman gave voice to the general sentiment: “We love you, Reggie!”

The show and the festival over at once, the crowd was invited to stay for a drink or take the waiting Hummer limousine, which Mirman and his coproducers had rented for the evening, to the Atlantic/Pacific subway station—another bizarrely classy touch to cap off a weekend full of them.