Video by Karina Granda and Elizabeth Kreutz

Did you miss our third annual live showcase as part of the New York Comedy Festival? Enjoy a snippet from each of the fantastic performers; it will have to be enough to tide you over until next year.

Read profiles of the comics here, here and here.

At last night’s annual fundraiser for storytelling powerhouse the Moth, the superstars of the world of the narrative celebrated and gave their support. We asked each the same question: “What will be the opening line of your next memoir, real or imaginary?”

“If you know me, please don’t read this.”
Jonathan Ames, essayist, HBO character

“I was completely unprepared for this.”
Sarah Jones, playwright

“Thank God for my two families, my original and my present.”
Albert Maysles, documentary filmmaker

“I am sitting in a Starbucks trying to fill the page so they’ll pay me.”
Mike Birbiglia, comedian and author

“I wish I’d never gotten involved with storytelling.”
George Dawes Green, novelist and founder of the Moth

“It was on Labor Day, lying on a massage table with a woman squeezing my glutes and talking about Jesus, when I realized that I was suffering a stroke.”
Garrison Keillor, Prairie Homesteader

“This is an ambush and I’m outraged.”
Tony Hendra, satirist, Ian Faith

“57 and not getting any taller.”
Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys

“There are the things we can see and the things we can’t.”
Jennifer Stein, poet and writer

“Let’s see, where was I…”
Tommy Tune, Broadway director and choreographer

“My name is Adam Wade, and I’m originally from New Hampshire.”
Adam Wade, Moth GrandSlam Winner

“Everything changed once I was able to hold two ideas in my head at the same time: that life wasn’t fair and that I was really lucky to be here.”
Ed Gavagan, Moth GrandSlam Winner

Photographs of Jonathan Ames (top) and Garrison Keillor by Sarah Stacke.

Photo: Andrew Marantz

1. Moderator Virginia Heffernan (online media critic at The New York Times) wanted to push the notion that the Internet is fundamentally changing TV comedy, but the comedy writers were not having it. That impasse was reached within the first two minutes of the panel and then explored for the next two hours. “So, you guys really don’t think the Internet is changing the way you work?” said Heffernan. “No, not really,” said the writers. Over. And over.

2. “I don’t even have a computer,” said Jim Downey, and he was not joking. Having worked at Saturday Night Live since 1976, Downey is clearly qualified to talk about television writing. But as the last person in America to hold out on the computer fad, he had absolutely nothing to say about the “Internet” part.

3. The other three writers had some predictably cranky things to say about the Internet. Peter Tolan (Rescue Me) thinks it’s too democratic. Al Jean (The Simpsons) thinks it’s too negative. “Most of it is negative,” Rory Albanese (The Daily Show) agreed. “Except for the porn.”

4. The Simpsons producers were the ones who leaked the video of Homer trying to vote for Obama. I knew it!

5. Extrapolating from tonight’s four-person sample, we can deduce that 100 percent of comedy writers are white men; 75 percent of comedy writers dress in black sport coats; 75 percent of comedy writers wear black-rimmed glasses (the other 25 percent keep their glasses in the pocket of their sport coats); and 0 percent of comedy writers will read this post, because they don’t really care about the Internet.

1. A surprise set from melodic and heartfelt indie-rock power duo Mates of State is the perfect lead-in to a night of comedy from stand-up’s most endearing talent, Mike Birbiglia; both are the performance equivalent of friendly hugs.

2. He wasn’t drunk. He promises. In spite of what a blogger claimed to have been disappointed by in an earlier performance, Birbiglia is never intoxicated onstage. “Apparently I’m just a mess. Me at neutral is a mess.”

3. The spinning-circles-within-spinning-circles movement of the “ubiquitous” carnival ride known as the Scrambler can actually be physically represented by one person on a stage. And it will make you as nauseous as the memory being recalled.

4. Birbiglia always sticks his landings. His act is not only a collection of funny jokes, but also a series of ideas and anecdotes that, you realize at the end, relate to one another thematically and humorously for an even bigger payoff.

5. When he sprinkled classic jokes into his set, audience members delivered the punch lines in tandem—”Season tickets to the Yankees!”—and when the Mates of State backed him on “The Oatmeal Song” as an encore, the crowd stood, clapped and sang along. Mike Birbiglia will be a household name…but I guess we actually learned that a while ago.

Thing I learned from Donald Glover, host of the show: Curse words aren’t so bad: “Know who didn’t curse? Hitler, that’s who.” Therefore, Comedy Central should let Glover tell jokes about the word niglet.

Thing I learned from sketch group Pangea 3000: Every fart sound has a proper spelling. If you spell a fart Fhfhfhoohinstead of Fhfhfhfhooh, you’re out of the spelling bee.

Thing I learned from sketch group Curtis and John: Ahab and Moby Dick were best friends until they argued over how to split the bill at a seafood restaurant.

Thing I learned from sketch group Murderfist: Watching a fat guy get progressively more and more naked is funny, yes, but mostly uncomfortable.

Thing I learned from the show: If this show is any indication, intellectual, jokey sketch is out and absurdism is in.

Photo: Andrew Yakira

Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Community premieres tonight on NBC at 9:30pm, and associate degrees have never been so hot. Danny Pudi plays a hyperactive student who ends up in a study group with various other misfits (misfits like Chevy Chase, that is). But is this half-Indian, half-Polish Chicago comic really community college material? Comedy editor Jane Borden found out:

Tell me a little bit about your character, Abed.
I talk a little too fast, because I don’t have a filter. I don’t really pick up on social cues. I might scare you a little too long. I mean, I will not break eye contact until you do… Uh-oh: Are we having a staring contest now?

Yep.
Okay.  Oh, this is serious.

Have you played more characters that aren’t from India than that are?
I played a Turkish French guy.… Oh no, you won; I looked away.
Read more »

Since we couldn’t be in Edinburgh this year, comedian and saucy songstress Jessica Delfino has sent dispatches through both the literal Scottish fog and the Festival Fringe alcoholic one.

Being a New Yorker in Scotland offers its own interesting set of issues. The very words New York City put glimmers in people’s eyes. They think the streets of NYC are paved with gold and that everyone there is obviously a movie star. Audience members who follow me outside after the show, hoping to catch a glimpse of me slipping into a stretch white limo and slinking off, are surely more than a little disappointed to instead see me get onto a rickety mountain bike and pedal away carrying my guitar and purse, like a pack mule. I feel as a New Yorker it’s my duty to live up to the polish and shimmer that I’m supposed to have, so I do dress up for shows, I do apply a shade of showbiz red lipstick every evening before my show, I do sign autographs after shows, and I do sip red wine all sophisticated like, while the brutish Scots glug down pint after pint and exclaim, “Oy!” and “Arr!,” both in awe—and in ugghhh—of my New York pizzazz.

Lots of my American friends are here: Kurt Branohler and Kristen Schaal, Ben Lerman, Jamie Kilstein, Mike Amato, Carolyn Castiglia, David Calvitto, Marshall Cordell. The list goes on and on.

Read more »

Tonight, at 10pm, The Jon Dore Television Show makes its American debut on IFC. The 30-minute comedy, which originally aired on the Comedy Network in Canada, is cocreated by and stars stand-up comic Jon Dore, who aims to improve his life in a new way in each episode. The show has a good-natured misguidedness familiar to fans of The Sarah Silverman Program, features Dore interviewing real people about ridiculous subjects à la Sacha Baron Cohen, and oozes with the kind of happy-go-lucky malaise of Chris Elliott’s Get a Life. Also, it’s super weird.

IFC will air both seasons of The Jon Dore Television Show on 26 consecutive Tuesdays, with encores of each episode the following Saturday. Dore, who was just named as one of Variety’s 10 Comics to Watch, is going places. See where he began.

Helen Hong at Laugh Match

Comedian-matchmaker Helen Hong has a track record of hooking up her Korean brethren, but can she do for “vanilla” and “chocolate” what she’s always done for “rice”? We sent Sex & Dating reporter Isabella Moschen to the August 12 launch of her all-races-welcome Laugh Match comedy show/speed-dating event at Comix to find out. Read more »

Just for Laughs ‘09:
718 artists, 306 shows, almost 25 venues, innumerable hangovers.

Excluding the gala hosts—Whoopi Goldberg, Martin Short, Lewis Black and John Cleese—there was a dearth of TV and film celebrities at this year’s fest. Bill Cosby did a couple of shows, as did David Alan Grier, Paul Rodriguez and sketch group Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest), but otherwise performance slots were filled by touring comics and new faces—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Still, the circumstance leads one to wonder if the festival’s continued expansion—not only in Toronto but now also in Chicago—is cannibalizing the roster of its flagship event.

However, for comedy nerds there were still plenty of celebrities on hand. Here is a conversation I overheard two comics having while walking back to the Hyatt around 3:30am. “Look, there’s Louis C.K., just walking on the street like he’s a normal person and not a genius.” “Yeah, just  breathing the same air as the unworthy lowlifes traipsing along behind him.”

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Even within the context of comedy, the definition of improvisation varies greatly, obviously, depending on whether the word is being used to describe a stand-up or a group of people creating scenes. Or so I thought.

U.K. superstar stand-up Ross Noble is a game changer. For Noble, who performed an hour in a small cabaret space more than 1,000 seats shy of his typical venues, improvisation is not a digression or distraction, is not a way to deftly handle the unanticipated or to warm up the crowd; it is the show itself.

He got sweet on the idea that there might be a simultaneous show happening next door with “wheelie panthers”—it spawned from one audience member’s overzealous reaction to Noble’s entrance; his scream was so sensational, Noble deduced there must have been a panther behind him, though probably it would have been stuffed, as that makes more sense, and would therefore have had to have to been on some sort of wheeled dolly crossing the stage, clearly to get to the show next door.

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David Angelo bought a topical cream.

To celebrate the U.S. DVD release of its surreal U.K. comedy show, Mighty Boosh stars and writers Howard Moon (Julian Barratt) and Vince Noir (Noel Fielding) performed a “secret stand-up” show last night at Bowery Ballroom, sponsored by MySpace. It drew hyperbolic lines of rabid fans in costumes, and delivered wonderfully silly sketches and musical numbers—including some overly dramatic folk that might have sent Jeff Buckley somersaulting in his grave. Here, several highlights.

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Adam Newman’s got a new joke.

He’s also got a great pickup line. Read more »

Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler

You know how it’s great when a “friend” becomes successful because they’re really talented, but they have to move away to follow that success? Blows, right?

Well, we’re worried this might happen to Flight of the Conchords‘ Kristen Schaal and her comedic partner, Kurt Braunohler.

They’ve just recorded a pilot episode of their Web series, Penelope the Pet Princess, in Britain. In case they’re across the pond for a while, try and catch them while they’re hot.

The pair is hosting a one-hour radio show on Raw Dog Comedy (SIRIUS channel 104 and XM channel 150) on Wednesday at 5pm, ending next week. And in honor of the so-not-dead wireless medium, we asked Schaal and Braunohler for their top five favorite moments in radio history. They love it so much they gave us seven:

1. The discovery of Planet Vultan after intercepting their good vibrations.
2. Beet boxing.
3. Caroline in the City radio play.
4. Washington’s announcement of independence from Great Britain.
5. 1968: The first radio that made it to the moon! (I loved when it hit that golf ball!)
6. 1972: The first radio that made it to the Marianas Trench. Radio never sounded as good as when it was two miles under the sea!
7. 2068: The first radio becomes sentient and demands to be listened to

If you’d prefer to see them in the flesh, Schaal and Braunohler are hosting their variety show, Hot Tub, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre every Thursday.

Sean Patton grew up in the suburbs.

See Sean Patton’s Joke of the week.

See all Jokes of the week: The webcam series.

Time Out Chicago Comedy editor Jason Heidemann reports from the Just for Laughs festival:

I made it to the Lincoln Lodge just in time for the Just for Laughs Homecoming show, featuring nine returning comics. They came, they conquered, and now they’re back to impress industry people who are scouting the fest for new talent. You get the idea. Nick Vatterott, who left only a few weeks ago, emceed the evening and warmed up the crowd with bits like, “Give it up for giving it up,” “Anybody in the audience married or not married?” and “I’ll be selling CDs after the show…Led Zepplin, 1,000 hours of America Online…” But Vatterott hit his stride when he launched into a bit about hangovers. “I woke up the next morning and somebody had written the word forehead on my dick” (think about it for a minute). Later he ranted about a public-service announcement that blasted the use of the phrase That’s gay. “That’s retarded, I thought.… I can make that joke, my boyfriend’s retarded.”

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Sam Morril has a restaurant idea.

Local comedians Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello blow your mind along with those of eight unsuspecting dinner guests.