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The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Last Things First asks comedians and funny performers about the historic lasts and firsts in their lives as their comedy careers have blossomed.
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The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First
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Now displaying: Category: comedy, interviews
Nov 7, 2016

Rory Albanese joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart shortly after graduating from college in 1999, and rose from the ranks to become executive producer by the time he left in 2013, and was the showrunner for The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, also on Comedy Central, where you also started to see him more in front of the camera as a contributor and panelist. He released his first half-hour stand-up special in 2010. So what’s next for Albanese? I asked him, so let’s get to it!

Oct 31, 2016

Nicole Byer first captured the comedy world’s attention as part of the improv group, Doppelganger, which also featured future Saturday Night Live player Sasheer Zamata. Byer co-starred in a late-night sketch show on FOX produced by The Lonely Island called Party Over Here. She’s also appeared on Lady Dynamite, Transparent, 30 Rock and the movie, Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates. Nicole’s relationship with MTV began with appearances in webseries, then on TV with Girl Code and Ladylike, and now her own starring series based on her life, Loosely Exactly Nicole. She caught up with me before her first-season finale, so let’s get to it!

This episode is sponsored by Seeso, and by the Impractical Jokers.

Oct 24, 2016

Norman Lear is a television legend. Writer, producer and creator of all-time classic sitcoms of the 1970s – including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude. Lear made satire tackling race, class, and gender inequalities and things that matter to people, at a time when nobody else on TV dared to do so. At one point, he had five of the top nine TV shows in America. Lear left TV to found the progressive organization, People For the American Way, and later purchased the actual Declaration of Independence so Americans of all ages could still see it. Now 94, a new documentary about him from American Masters, “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You” premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, and it’ll make its broadcast debut Oct. 25, 2016, on PBS.

So let's get to it!

Oct 21, 2016

You first saw Joe Rogan on the classic NBC sitcom NewsRadio, then later as host of the competition show Fear Factor. Now not only can you see him commentating on UFC fights, but also hear and see him on his hit podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. His latest stand-up special, Triggered, is exclusively out now on Netflix.

Rogan recounts the key moments in his career, from making the leap of teaching taekwondo to stand-up comedy in Boston in the late 1980s, to surviving his first failed sitcom experience in Los Angeles, lessons learned from an infamous takedown of Carlos Mencia and sticking up for the underdogs, to building his own electronic independence via message boards and podcasts. So let's get to it!

Oct 17, 2016

Miranda Sings has been telling Haters to back off since she first uploaded a hilariously bad cover of Aretha Franklin’s Respect in late 2007. Since then, she has accumulated more than 7 million YouTube subscribers and one billion views of her videos – more than 5.1 million Instagram followers, 3.67 million Twitter followers and 2 million Facebook fans – and just launched an eight-episode series called Haters Back Off! On Netflix. She’s the brainchild alter-ego of singer Colleen Ballinger, who has millions of fans and followers for her real-life pages, too. She developed her funny new Netflix series alongside her brother, Chris, and it co-stars Angela Kinsey and Steve Little as Miranda’s mother and uncle, who are blindly devoted to helping the homeschooled Miranda achieve her dreams of stardom. How did Colleen Ballinger pull this all off? She tells me her true story of talent, hard work and determination, so let’s get to it!

Oct 10, 2016

Derek Waters is the co-creator and star of Drunk History, which has won both an Emmy and a Sundance Film Festival award and is now in its fourth season on Comedy Central after appearing on Funny or Die and HBO. A fifth season is forthcoming. But Drunk History wasn’t even the first successful webseries from Waters; he previously collaborated with Bob Odenkirk and The Big Bang Theory’s Simon Helberg on “Derek and Simon,” which actually was an HBO pilot before it became a webseries. And before that, Waters co-starred on a network TV sitcom for ABC (“Married to the Kellys”). If that history sounds confusing sober, just wait until you try to retell it drunk. Or just ask Derek Waters yourself. Like I did. So let’s get to it!

 
Oct 3, 2016

Cue the bugle sounds and put your puns where we can see them, because Andy Zaltzman is my guest today. Zaltzmanis a critically-acclaimed comedian in the UK where he has been performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 1999 and collaborating with John Oliver since 2001 — they created the hugely popular podcast, The Bugle, in 2007, only stopping earlier in 2016 when it became acutely apparent that Oliver’s Emmy-winning work on HBO’s Last Week Tonight had made him too busy to continue working with Zaltzman. Zaltzman is relaunching The Bugle on Oct. 21, 2016, with a rotating lineup of all-star guest cohosts featuring comedians from around the globe. He also has brought his interactive political comedy show, Satirist For Hire, to the United States for the first time — he’ll be taking requests in advance from audience members via email and performing unique satire for audiences across North America in the month leading up to the 2016 elections. Zaltzman sat down with me after his New York City tour stop to talk satire, crickets, puns and more. So let’s get to it!

Sep 26, 2016

Today’s guest, Tony Hendra, began his career at Cambridge University with the famed Footlights as the comedy partner of Graham Chapman, and starred in the annual revue with Chapman and John Cleese. He came to the United States as a duo act with Nick Ullett, appearing multiple times on The Ed Sullivan Show and Merv Griffin, before splitting up and taking a job as the first editor hired by the founders of National Lampoon. While there, he made the Lampoon’s first album, Radio Dinner, with Michael O’Donoghue, and followed that up by giving John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest their first starring roles in the Lampoon’s off-Broadway hit, Lemmings. Hendra appeared in This Is Spinal Tap, playing the band’s manager, co-created and co-produced the British TV satire, Spitting Image, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Spy Magazine from 1993-1994. He has written four books, including the posthumous memoir of George Carlin, “Last Words,” and for the past several years has led a new satirical operation called The Final Edition. He’s just put out a new comedy album with the Lampoon, “Are There Any Triggers Here Tonight?” There’s a lot of great comedy history and stories to get to, so let’s get to it!

Sep 19, 2016

With the 2016 election careening toward Judgment Day, Lewis Black is back on Broadway this fall, giving voice to the grand majority of Americans and citizens worldwide perplexed at our politics and our political discussion. Black is performing “Black to the Future” Monday nights on Broadway, and heading out on the road for tour dates across the country in between, delivering his comedic rants and interacting with fans both in his live audience and livestreaming online. Black called in to ShowBriz Studios to talk about what’s happening now, and how he found his way from playwriting to stand-up comedy, through three hosts of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to now. So let’s get to it!

Sep 12, 2016

Gary Owen is the only white comic to host BET’s Comic View, and many years later, he’s bringing his whole family to the network in the reality series, The Gary Owen Show, debuting in October 2016. Not something you might have expected from a kid growing up in a trailer park with an abusive stepfather in southern Ohio. Gary always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, but he enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school. It was only when he was stationed in San Diego that he could use his leave hours to hit the comedy clubs there and in Los Angeles for open mics. He talks to me about all of that, how he sustained himself in the decade between getting a role in the Jamie Foxx movie Held Up and his eventual success with House of Payne and the Think Like a Man films, and how the death of his brother from a drug overdose changed Gary’s outlook on comedy. All of that, plus Gary’s decision to have his black wife and mixed-race children on camera with him in BET’s The Gary Owen Show. So let’s get to it!

 
Sep 5, 2016

Hosting duties are nothing new for Ben Gleib. He’s been doing that since he was a teenager, rubbing elbows with Hollywood stars and their children in Beverly Hills High School. Gleib’s college talk show became a national sensation thanks to The National Lampoon, eventually scoring him a TV pilot on FOX produced by Lorne Michaels. After appearing hundreds of times on panels with Chelsea Lately and The Today Show with Kathie Lee and Hoda, Gleib has hosted the Game Show Network’s Idiotest for the past two years. You’ve heard his voice on the big-screen in the animated hit, Ice Age: Continental Drift, as well as hosting his own podcast, Last Week On Earth. His first stand-up comedy special, Neurotic Gangster, premiered this summer on Showtime, and Gleib sat down with me during Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival to talk about his journey. So let’s get to it!

Aug 29, 2016

Godfrey was born in Nebraska to Nigerian parents who had fled that country’s civil war in the late 1960s.Godfrey grew up in Chicago, which is also where he started pursuing comedy – despite his pre-med psychology degree at the University of Illinois – and where he filmed his newest hour of stand-up comedy, Regular Black, for Showtime. You also may have seen Godfrey in memorable roles on the big screen in Zoolander, Soul Plane and Johnson Family Vacation, or the small screen as the 7-Up spokesman, multiple episodes of Louie, and before all of that, a Bravo reality show that followed aspiring actors that also included future Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner. Godfrey talks to me about all of that, plus working with Bill Cosby, in a lively if not also distracting conversation amid the hubbub of Union Square pedestrian traffic.

So let’s get to it!

Aug 22, 2016

Ms. Pat’s early career sounds a little bit like the role Sally Field’s in the 1988 movie about comedy, Punchline, except only Ms. Pat grew up in a bootleg house in Atlanta, became a mother of two by the time she was 15, sold drugs, was shot twice, and arrested multiple times all before she met her future husband at 19. Her husband brought her stability. Her comedy brought her joy and a newfound purpose in life. How she made that transition, from a big break opening for Katt Williams, through her first time appearing on radio’s Bob and Tom Show, through 2015 where she appeared on NBC’s Last Comic Standing and Comedy Central’s This is Not Happening. All of that, and how far Ms. Pat has come just in the six years since her first trip to Montreal as a New Face in 2010, she shares it all with me now.

Since our chat, Ms. Pat has received a put-pilot commitment from FOX to make a half-hour sitcom about her life, starring her and executive produced by Lee Daniels and Brian Grazer.

So let’s get to it!

Aug 15, 2016

Bert Kreischer is my special guest today, in an episode recorded in front of a live audience at the 2016 Just For Laughs festival in Montreal. He literally is the “Life of the Party.” That’s the title of his 2014 memoir — it describes how Bert's life changed as a sixth-year senior at Florida State University when Rolling Stone magazine visited and profiled him. That magazine article became the basis for the film, National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, starring Ryan Reynolds as a buffer Bert. Kreischer currently hosts two different TV series for the Travel Channel: Bert the Conquerer, and Trip Flip.

Kreischer talks with me about how Oliver Stone and Will Smith served as his entry points to show business, how his first attempt in stand-up went awry before he found Barry Katz and his Boston Comedy Club, and proves himself to be as much a lover of comedy as he is of life and travel.

So let’s get to it!

Aug 8, 2016

Variety magazine named Cameron Esposito one of the 10 Comics to Watch in 2016, and there already has been a lot to see of Esposito this year – from her appearances on the big screen in Garry Marshall’s final film, “Mother’s Day,” to the small-screen on IFC’s Maron, performing stand-up on The Late Late Show with James Corden, and her first stand-up special, Marriage Material, on SeeSo. She’s got two other movie roles that brought her to Sundance this past winter, in “Operator” and in “First Girl I Loved.” With her wife Rhea Butcher, Esposito hosts a live comedy showcase and podcast each Tuesday at the UCB Theatre in Los Angeles, Put Your Hands Together, made a webseries for Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls called She Said, and will debut their first scripted series together, Take My Wife, this August on SeeSo. If that’s not enough, Esposito is writing her first book as well as developing a TV series for FX. There’s a lot more to her story, and I recalled some of it that even made news to her.

So let’s get to it!

Aug 1, 2016

Hari Kondabolu and I go back to the scene of his very first big break, showcasing for the 2007 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and HBO, how that all happened, and how he managed to take a year off afterward to earn his master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Kondabolu since has enjoyed time writing and performing for late-night TV with Totally Biased, and just this summer launched a new podcast, Politically Re-Active, with his former boss, W. Kamau Bell. Kondabolu also just released his second stand-up comedy album, Mainstream American Comic, is working on a documentary about Apu from The Simpsons, and has a deal to develop his own TV series for TruTV. We talk about all of that and more, so let’s get to it!

Jul 25, 2016

Of all of the characters in Mike Birbiglia’s wonderfully true and funny film, Don’t Think Twice, Chris Gethard’s runs closest to his own. Gethard began taking improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade when he was only 20, and quickly became a darling of the UCB community, eventually starting a beloved improv team that saw one of its members — his friend Bobby Moynihan — leave for Saturday Night Live. Unlike both the movie and the title of Gethard’s one-man show, Career Suicide, Chris has continued to flourish. He has a stand-up comedy album, a book, and hosts a hit podcast, Beautfiul/Anonymous. On TV, you’ve seen Chris Gethard in supporting roles on Inside Amy Schumer, Broad City, and The Office; and on the big screen in The Heat and The Other Guys. He’s taken The Chris Gerhard Show from the basement of the UCB to Manhattan cable access to two seasons on TV with Fusion. This August, he’s taking his one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But first he sat with me to talk about his journey.

So let’s get to it!

Jul 18, 2016

Christian Finnegan co-stars in a new weekly show on A&E with Sherrod Small called Black and White, where over the course of the first eight episodes, they’ll deconstruct today’s headlines through the prism of race relations. Finnegan and Small cracked wise about less serious matters for years as part of VH1’s Best Week Ever. Christian talks to me about finding his way into stand-up comedy, how Jim Gaffigan provided him with an early break — Finnegan serves as a consultant and frequently guest stars on Gaffigan’s TV land series. Perhaps Christian’s earliest big break came by appearing on Chappelle’s Show, and we also talk about how sometimes the career path we were looking for was right in front of us the whole time. So let’s get to it!

Jul 13, 2016

The annual Del Close Marathon brings the founders of the Upright Citizens Brigade together along with thousands of performers from around the world, celebrating their late improv guru Del Close by improvising comedy shows around the clock for a three-day-and-night weekend. In its 18th year, the UCB4 – Amy Poehler, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh – opened the proceedings with a legitimate press conference, which allowed me to ask questions not only of them, but also to founding member and Saturday Night Live alum Horatio Sanz, plus actor John Gemberling, TV marathoner and Snapchat wizard Gil Ozeri, and Thank You Del documentary filmmakers Todd Bieber and Julie Gomez. So let’s get to it!

Jul 4, 2016

Here’s what I know about Yannis Pappas. He’s a native New Yorker. He’s gotten shot. He’s a sneakerhead. He’s Greek. In fact, so Greek he has performed in character as Mr. Panos, which is not to be confused with when he performs as a Puerto Rican transsexual named Maurica (More-eeesa). Pappas moved to Miami to help launch the Fusion cable network as co-anchor of the TV station’s live primetime news program, then moved back to NYC year later, where he has hosted the AOL original series, 2 Point Lead. He filmed a half-hour for Comedy Central in 2014, and his first stand-up comedy CD, Let Me Be Yannis, is out now. Who is Yannis, though, and how much of Mr. Panos and Maurica is still inside of him? I tried to find out. So let’s get to it!

Jun 27, 2016

Robert Kelly plays the Heathens drummer Bam Bam on Denis Leary’s FX series, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, which begins its second season this summer, and popularized the double-meal deal, Bang Bang, playing Louis CK’s brother Bobby on the award-winning FX series, Louie. He hilariously chastised me for combining the two things, Bam Bam! Bang Bang!! More importantly, though, Bobby caught me up on how he got clean and sober 30 years ago as a teenager living just north of Boston, emerging as a love of art, women and comedy. He tells of how he formed an improv group that auditioned and welcomed a young Dane Cook, culminating in their historically hysterically bad gig at Boston Garden, how Bobby started over again in stand-up, and rooming with Bill Burr when he moved to New York City. Robert Kelly only recently found his own true comedy voice, and has doubled-down on it – not only selling his 2014 stand-up concert film on his own site and terms, but also founding his own podcast network, Riotcast. You Know What Dude? Bam Bam. Bang Bang. Either way, Robert Kelly is always up for a great chat. So let’s get to it!

Jun 23, 2016

Welcome to our 100th episode together of The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First. This isn’t like the other episodes, and not just because it’s our 100th episode – I mean, is any sit-down with Doug Stanhope normal, exactly? Even though Stanhope and I haven’t sat down together in more than five years, he called me out the second he saw me across the room at the end of his own podcast at the inaugural Skankfest in Long Island City. “He’s going to ask me questions,” Stanhope announced to the crowd. “And I’m going to dodge all of them.” And yet. Stanhope graciously sat down with me between drinks on the back patio of The Creek and The Cave and answered more than a few – the others, he simply yelled, “It’s in the book!” That book is “Digging Up Mother: A Love Story,” out now, with a foreward from his famous friend, Johnny Depp. Depp wasn’t around this past weekend, but Stanhope did dig up Rich Vos for a fun cameo that really puts me in my place. We're going to Keep It 100...So let’s get to it!

Jun 20, 2016

Gary Gulman is the tallest funniest Jew I know, and I’ve known him personally since 2004, when he competed on seasons two and three of NBC’s Last Comic Standing. Gulman went to Boston College on a football scholarship but found his end zone in stand-up comedy a few months after graduation. He has recorded three comedy albums and three hour-specials for TV consumption – his latest, the brilliant “It’s About Time,” debuted this spring on Netflix. It’s about time I sat down with Gary and shared more of his life story with you. So let’s get to it!

Jun 16, 2016

Jay Oakerson’s first TV credit was on BET. Big Jay started stand-up comedy in all-black rooms in Philadelphia, and now he’s playing to everyone while often relying on his sharp wit to riff with the crowds in the moment. He hosts an all-crowd-work series “Big Jay Oakerson’s What’s Your F@#king Deal,” on the NBC digital comedy platform SeeSo, and his previous credits include multiple stories on Comedy Central’s This Is Not Happening, and appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Comedy Underground with Dave Attell. Big Jay currently co-hosts “The Bonfire” on SiriusXM satellite radio every Monday and Wednesday with fellow comedian Dan Soder, and also co-hosts the Legion of Skanks podcast with friends Luis J. Gomez and Dave Smith. They’re throwing their first anti-comedy festival, Skankfest, this June in Long Island City, NY – and Big Jay Oakerson’s first hourlong TV special, Live at Webster Hall, is premiering on Comedy Central. So let’s get to it!

Jun 13, 2016

Matt Balaker is writing a book about Greg Giraldo; scratch that, he’s writing THE book on Greg Giraldo, as there hasn’t been a proper biography about the outrageously witty stand-up comedian since he died in 2010 at the age of only 44. Balaker, a comedian himself, has interviewed more than 25 people close to Giraldo – from his former managers, friends, comedians, and his widowed ex-wife – and successfully received Kickstarter funding to finish the Greg Giraldo Book, along with a co-author Wayne Jones. Balaker sat down with me to explain how he got involved in this project, what he’s learned along the way, and asked me to share my own thoughts on Giraldo. So let’s get to it!

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