Chaz Miller, Cameron Miller, and Amanuel Richards are one half of the sketch comedy group Dormtainment, who formed in Atlanta in 2009. They went straight from college to YouTube, and over the next eight years, amassed one million YouTube subscribers, a Comedy Central web series called Six Guys One Car, two albums on the Billboard comedy charts, and a live show that’s a hit on college campuses. They’ve now joined Kevin Hart for his new online venture, the Laugh Out Loud Network, where they produce and star in the satire of National Geographic called Black Geo. They invited me into their Comedy Trap House in the San Fernando Valley to tell me how they did it. So let’s get to it!
Jimmy Shubert was just a kid from Philly who wanted to be a magician. That’s how he started in show business, before moving to Los Angeles in the 1980s and taking a job at The Comedy Store, where he became the kid in Sam Kinison’s outlaws of comedy crew. That led to development deals and pilots early on in his career. Over the years, you’ve seen him in recurring roles on King of Queens and Entourage, more recently as a finalist on Last Comic Standing and a headliner on Dave Attell’s Comedy Underground. I caught up with Shubert at Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival, where he was performing as part of the Masters showcase. So let’s get to it!
Dave Smith is a native New Yorker and key member of the emerging new platform, GaS Digital Network. You’ve likely heard Dave as one-third of the Legion of Skanks alongside Big Jay Oakerson and Luis J Gomez, or as host of the podcast Part of the Problem, which combined receive hundreds of thousands of downloads each week. You also can see Dave featured regularly as a comedic political analyst on FOX News. He was a New Face at Montreal’s Just For Laughs fest in 2013, and in 2017, he has released his first stand-up comedy special, Libertas, the first such special for GaS Digital. It’s out Sept. 11. So let’s get to it!
Scot Armstrong grew up outside of Chicago and first studied comedy under the legendary Del Close, before moving to New York City and joining the Upright Citizens Brigade improv troupe Mother, whose members included Jason Mantzoukas, Jon Daly and Jessica St. Clair. He has since worked with St. Clair as an executive producer on both of her TV series, Best Friends Forever and Playing House. But you’ve come to know Armstrong’s work more through his screenplays, which have included Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, School for Scoundrels, Semi-Pro, and The Hangover Part II. He’s also the creator of the Showtime series DICE, which follows Andrew Dice Clay now past his prime in Las Vegas. DICE’s second season debuted in August 2017. Armstrong sat down with me to talk about the Mother of all comedy stories, so let’s get to it!
Ryan Hamilton grew up in a small town in Idaho and studied broadcasting before turning to comedy. Hamilton calls several comedy scenes home, and that perhaps allowed him to emerge nationally in the mid-2000s in Sierra Mist’s America’s Next Great Comic Search. He’s also won the Great American Comedy Festival contest, and performed multiple times at Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival, where I caught up with Hamilton before the debut of his first Netflix special, Happy Face. So let’s get to it!
Lynne Koplitz caught her first wave of success hosting or co-hosting TV shows the likes of Change of Heart, How to Boil Water, and Life and Style. The stylish comedian became friends with the late great Joan Rivers while paired up in the IFC comedy Z Rock, and later became a recurring character on Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best. Koplitz more recently was seen on the big screen in Chris Rock’s Top Five, and the small screen in Louis CK’s Horace and Pete, and she dedicated her first Netflix comedy special, Hormonal Beast, to her mentor, Joan Rivers. Koplitz tells all to me…So let’s get to it!
Janicza Bravo has made several short films that debuted at premier festivals such as Sundance and SXSW, and also directed an episode of the hit FX series, Atlanta. Bravo’s first feature film, Lemon, features her husband, Brett Gelman, as an actor and acting coach who turns 40 and realizes nothing in his life is where it’s supposed to be. In real life, you’ve seen Gelman shine in everything from Mad Men to Twin Peaks, as well as Comedy Bang! Bang!, Funny or Die Presents, Married, Love and Blunt Talk. They co-wrote Lemon, which hits theaters this August after a Sundance premiere earlier in 2017.
I sat down with Bravo and Gelman for some blunt talk about their love, marriage and how they think their lives and careers are matching up to expectations. So let’s get to it!
Natalie Morales is an actress best known for her supporting roles in sitcoms that have included Parks and Recreation, Trophy Wife, Girls, and The Grinder. She’s also done drama with White Collar, and action-adventure with The Middleman. She directed a webseries for Funny or Die about James Joyce’s Love Letters, and you can currently see her on the Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet. Later in 2017, she'll co-star in the movie, Battle of the Sexes. But it's all love, no war here. So let’s get to it!
Nate Bargatze is Jimmy Fallon’s favorite stand-up comedian, and Bargatze has the Tonight Show credits to back that up. Nate also has gone on tour with Fallon, multiple tours to entertain the troops in Iraq and Kuwait, and has two hit comedy albums to boot: Yelled At By A Clown and Full Time Magic. Those are references to his father, who was a clown and now is a magician. Bargatze released his first hour special on Comedy Central in 2016, and he performs in two separate Netflix specials in 2017 — a Half-Hour as part of The Standups collection, and a showcase set in Brad Paisley’s Comedy Rodeo. He’s just as fun to talk to offstage as he is to listen to on it, so let’s get to it!
Judd Apatow has one of the most impressive comedy resumes of anyone, anywhere. His Apatow Productions has produced and developed the television series Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Girls, Love and Crashing, he has directed the hit movies The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, This Is 40 and Trainwreck, and produced another dozen smash comedies on film since the late 1990s. Before that, he wrote and produced on The Ben Stiller Show and The Larry Sanders Show. Before that, he infamously interviewed famous comedians while still in high school in the mid 1980s. As he approaches 50, though, Apatow has returned to his comedy roots and filming his first stand-up comedy special for Netflix. which he’s recording at Just For Laughs in Montreal. I sat down with him as he made his final preparations for it, so let’s get to it!
Dylan Brody started his stand-up career in New York City while still a teenager in the early 1980s, performing on multiple TV showcases, writing monologue jokes for Jay Leno when Leno was still just guest-hosting The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he has performed around the world. In more recent years, you may have seen him on The Green Room with Paul Provenza, opening for fellow humorist David Sedaris on his stage tour, or on NPR affiliates in California. Brody has released several comedy albums just in the past decade, published three young adult books, and is touring his latest work, a one-man show about his life and career, Dylan Brody's Driving Hollywood. So let's get to it!
Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley had mutual friends growing up in Nebraska, but didn’t meet each other until they were both aspiring comedic actresses in Los Angeles. Hensley has appeared in shows such as Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Smedley has appeared in several TV commercials. But together, they’ve built up a fan base of more than a million Facebook followers for their video series, I Mom So Hard. They talked to me about why they went to Facebook first instead of YouTube, and how they’ve adapted in just a year to performing for sold-out audiences across the country. I caught up with them in Los Angeles during a break in their Mom’s Night Out Summer Break Tour that’s hitting theaters across America in 2017. So let’s get to it!
Erik Griffin is recognizable to fans of Comedy Central’s Workaholics as Montez, but he’s also a veteran stand-up comedian who’s playing a stand-up comedian and a Vietnam veteran in the Showtime series about comedy in the 1970s, I’m Dying Up Here. I sat down with Griffin in LA’s iconic Canter’s Deli to talk about his career path, what it’s like to fictionalize stand-up comedy for TV, and the making of his first one-hour special, The Ugly Truth, which premieres on Showtime this July. So let’s get to it!
Tom Rhodes has been obsessed with stand-up comedy since he was 12. As a teenager in Florida in the 1980s, he performed with fake IDs to get into the comedy clubs and won a contest that allowed him to perform at 19 at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. After stops in New York City and San Francisco, Rhodes became the first comedian signed to a deal with Comedy Central, and starred in his own NBC sitcom, Mr. Rhodes, in the mid-1990s. A decade later, he was hosting his own late-night talk show in Amsterdam. Three CDs, two half-hour specials, self-produced DVDs and many travels later, Rhodes and his wife are still globetrotting, but stopped long enough to catch me up on where he’s been and what’s next. So let’s get to it!
Haley Joel Osment was just a kid when he made his movie debut in Forrest Gump, racked up TV appearances as Jeff Foxworthy’s sitcom son and the Murphy Brown baby growing up, and earned his first Oscar nomination at the tender age of 11 for seeing dead people in The Sixth Sense. He’s also worked with Stephen Spielberg, starring in A.I., and paid it forward in Pay It Forward. After graduating from NYU, he returned with roles on Comedy Bang! Bang! and both of IFC’s soap opera satires with Will Ferrell, and he now steals scenes on HBO’s Silicon Valley. I caught up with him in Hollywood to catch us all up on his career and life growth before Silicon Valley’s 4th season comes to an end. So let’s get to it!
Chris Hardwick is probably hosting a TV show or podcast as you listen to me introduce him here. Four nights a week, Hardwick hosts the comedy game show @midnight on Comedy Central. Sunday nights you can watch him Talking with Walking Dead cast members and everyone else on AMC. He also hosts a primetime game show for NBC, The Wall. Hardwick currently serves as founder, CEO, and creative head of Nerdist Industries, a media empire under the Legendary Digital Network that encompasses a website, youtube channel and podcast network, including his own Nerdist podcast that receives millions of monthly downloads. He’s come a long way since co-hosting Singled Out on the MTV. You probably want to find out how he did it. So let’s get to it!
A comedian, actor and writer, Jim Jefferies has established himself as one of the most respected comics of his generation with a controversial and belief-challenging stand-up style that continues to surprise and entertain audiences around the globe. He recently wrapped an international stand-up tour, “The Unusual Punishment Tour,” to rave reviews which came on the heels of releasing his second Netflix special Freedumb last summer. Jefferies burst onto the U.S. comedy scene in 2009 with his popular HBO special I Swear to God, the first of seven specials, including his debut Netflix special, Jim Jefferies: BARE, which garnered attention for an iconic set focused on guns and gun control in the United States. Jefferies starred as himself in the FX series, Legit, and now helms his own newsy talk show on Comedy Central, The Jim Jefferies Show. I spoke to him the morning after his series premiere, so let's get to it!
Tom Shlllue can be seen on FOX News, where he hosted the late late-night comedy panel show, Red Eye, and still appears regularly in other hours, offering his homespun comedic values to the day’s news.Shillue has been featured on Comedy Central’s Broad City, and he can be seen and heard from time to time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as a member of Fallon’s celebrity barbershop quartet, The Rag Time Gals. Shillue’s first book, Mean Dads For A Better America: The Generous Rewards Of An Old Fashioned Childhood, is out now. In it, Tom recalls a time when parents genuinely ruled over their children, while still giving them plenty of space outside without technology to roam wild. Tom tells me all about that, releasing 12 comedy albums in one calendar year, and much more. So let’s get to it!
Mark Lonow is an actor, producer and talent manager, but he's perhaps best known for something else he did offstage -- going into business with Budd Friedman to save the Hollywood Improv and help oversee its expansion as the first major comedy club chain. But there's a lot more to Lonow's story, from his job as a teenager at the legendary Pip's in Brooklyn, to the improv/sketch trio he performed in with his wife and Henry Winkler which led him to Budd in the first place. From his own starring turn on TV in the 1970s, to organizing the strike against the Comedy Store in the late 1970s, to his extended family with Claudia Lonow and Michael Rappaport, to exeutive producing multiple specials and projects for Lewis Black, to seeing comedy through the 1980s boom, the bust of the 1990s and now the rebirth and boom of the 21st century. As we prepare to look back at 1970s Los Angeles comedy through Showtime's adaptation of the book, I'm Dying Up Here... who better than someone who lived through it to tell us what's next for comedy today. And why he still wants to be part of that. So let's get to it!
Lavell Crawford is best known for his portrayal of Huell, the bodyguard for Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad and now Better Call Saul. Originally from St. Louis, Crawford rose up the comedy ranks from Showtime at the Apollo to Comicview to Def Comedy Jam to runner-up on season five of Last Comic Standing. He since has been seen multiple times as a panelist on Chelsea Lately and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, on the big screen in 2016 for both The Ridiculous 6, and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. He provides a voice on Comedy Central’s animated series, Legends of Chamberlain Heights, and headlines a summer 2017 stand-up theater tour called Comedy’s Most Wanted. So let’s get to it!
Scout Durwood grew up in the Kansas outskirts of Kansas City with dreams of becoming the next Julia Roberts. Instead, after first playing soccer and then becoming a cabaret singer, Scout’s first major screen credit came in the MTV reality dating stunt, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. Durwood shook that off to remain entrenched in New York City’s cabaret and burlesque scenes as a funny singer, taking a one-woman musical to the Edinburgh Fringe, winning the Moth StorySLAM, and then re-trying reality television years later in Los Angeles with Oxygen’s Funny Girls. Scout stood out there, but she really shined more recently as a star of the MTV comedy Mary + Jane, produced by Snoop Dogg. She now has completed a project that perhaps best represents her spirit of whimsy and her many talents – Take One Thing Off, her first album for Blue Elan Records, 19 tracks produced by Dave Darling that breaks up her funny songs with funny stand-up bits recorded at The Pack Theater in Los Angeles. So let’s get to it!
Norm Macdonald is Canada’s most-famous play-by-play golf commentator on Twitter. Of course, you know and love Norm Macdonald even more for his years anchoring Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1990s, followed by The Norm Show on ABC. He’s also much beloved by David Letterman and many other comedians for the way he breaks down jokes to their humorous essence, whether it was his memorable Roast of Bob Saget, or in his criticisms of aspiring stand-ups on Last Comic Standing. He’s been Col. Sanders for KFC, and written a fictionalized memoir, “Based on a True Story.” His second stand-up special and first for Netflix, called Hitler’s Dog: Gossip & Trickery, is available for streaming now. So let’s get to it!
Aunty Donna is an Australian sketch comedy group that includes no aunts and no Donnas, but instead one Mark Samual Bonanno, Broden Kelly and Zachary Ruane. They burst onto the comedy scene Down Under with their first show in 2012 at Melbourne’s comedy and fringe festivals. They produced a new show each year since, taking three of them to the other side of the globe at the Edinburgh Fringe, and they’ve accumulated almost 150,000 YouTube subscribers by the time they sat down with me at ShowBriz Studios, where they’re prepared to launch their first North American tour starting in May 2017. So let’s get to it!
Eddie Pepitone has been called “The Bitter Buddha,” which also is the title of the 2012 documentary about the comedian, a New Yorker by birth who has called Los Angeles his home for the better part of the twenty-first century since landing a role in the hit movie, Old School. You’ve seen and heard him in many TV shows over the past decade, including The Sarah Silverman Program, Bob’s Burgers, Maron, Community and a recurring bit as Conan O’Brien’s late-night heckler on Conan. His first Netflix special is In Ruins, and he plays a tortured soul in Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell, which wraps its third season on Adult Swim this May. How close is that to real life? Pepitone sat down with me during the Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas, to talk about his comedic journey from Chicago City Limits to Hollywood, with a detour into the chaos of politics after the 2016 presidential election, his Twitter feed, and how he can find any serenity today.
So let’s get to it!
Joe DeRosa started his comedy career in the urban rooms of Philadelphia, and not long after he moved to New York City he earned a spot touring with Dave Chappelle. With Bill Burr and Robert Kelly,DeRosa co-wrote and starred in a short film called CHEAT, which they also turned into a book. DeRosa also has written for TV shows including The Pete Holmes Show and Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp; and like Burr, he also has ties to the Breaking Bad universe, appearing onscreen as the veterinarian Dr. Caldera on AMC’s Better Call Saul. He released three previous comedy albums for Comedy Central records, and his new hour special, which he directed, “You Let Me Down,” premiered in February 2017 on Comedy Central. You can hear DeRosa on several different podcasts, most recently engaging in Emotional Hangs with Kurt Braunohler. He and his dog checked in with me from his home in Southern California, so let’s get to it!