ComedyBeat adds book reviewer: first up Tina Fey and Ted Danson
Roberta Proctor, associate professor of English at Palm Beach State College, has joined ComedyBeat as its principal book reviewer of comedy books. Welcome to comedy business journalism Prof. Proctor, where we do not laugh at jokes until we confirm with our reporters notepads that they were indeed funny.
Her first two assignments are Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants and Ted Danson’s Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them.
ComedyBeat makes progress on its new Web site
Screenshot of ComedyBeat.com
We have moved the ComedyBeat Web site to a WordPress Content Management System that will allow editors from anywhere in the world to upload news and information and team-edit each other’s contributions. We also developed a site that is more consistent with current online news magazine models. Now readers can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, and subscribe to our RSS Feed. We also have a slider for featured news and a video application.
There is still a great amount of hard work ahead of us as we continue to add functionality and value, but hard work does not scare us off. It fascinates, though it saps our veins and rents spontaneous joy and natural content from our hearts.
Here is one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats. Substitute “Web site” for “plays” and you will understand my frame of mind perfectly.
The Fascination of What’s Difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood,
Nor on an Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
However, given the kind of work we do—covering the comedy industry—once the coding is behind us, we can rejoin the laughter.
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From ComedyBeat’s Peter Haas: join me at Cabaret Corner
Peter Haas, Cabaret Columnist
Dear World –
Join me at Cabaret Corner!
It’s a brand new web site, written for professionals, fans and followers of cabaret. It will feature news, reviews and previews … tips and tactics based on first-hand interviews with performers, directors, musical directors and other pro’s … plus articles and miscellaneous musings about our field.
Cabaret Corner is a new section of the existing Comedy Beat site, which is expanding to cover additional segments of the entertainment industry.
Cabaret Corner is now up and running; stop by at your leisure. You’ll find it at www.comedybeat.com). Scroll down the front page, and you’ll spot us. I’ll be the fellow directing traffic. FYI, I’m also continuing my decade-plus writing relationship with Cabaret Scenes magazine and its on-going growth.
Comments welcome: I’ve got a mailbox at the corner. It’s phaas@comedybeat.com.
New York City Bar hosts a musical comedy
The remedy for lawyers who take themselves seriously is simply not to take themselves seriously. A local lawyer’s group has found a way to help them do just that: musical comedy. Recently, the New York City Bar, a lawyers association in mid-town Manhattan showed “The Last Lafayette,” a play written, directed, produced, and performed by lawyers. It’s not just for laughs, of course. Such programs allow attorneys to make new friends, hone their public speaking skills, and promote the cause of legal education. (Click here for more photos)
Although the play delighted in wonky details of medical and legal practice, it made for arresting drama as it tackled the question: how could a man (who later became a woman) drive several miles at night, stop at red lights, break into his father-in-law’s home and stab him 20 times, then drive back to his own home–all while in a state of sleep. Read more here…)
The next performance of the play will be on Oct. 6, 2010 at 7 p.m. at the Lambs Club in New York City and then on Sunday Oct. 10 at 1:30 p.m. at Cold Spring Harbor Library, in Suffolk County, Long Island.
ComedyBeat adds NY Post’s Mandy Stadtmiller to blog roll
Mandy Stadtmiller, photo by Caitlin Thorne
As ComedyBeat celebrate its first month of online existence, it feels at times like Ash Wednesday. At other times like Christmas. Today, with the addition of Mandy Stadtmiller to the ComedyBeat blog roll, it feels like Christmas. In some ways this is a natural outcome of several weeks of following each other on Twitter and Facebook. We came to appreciate how serious we were about both journalism and comedy. It’s that mix that defines both of us. Welcome to the ComedyBeat blog roll, Mandy.
ComedyBeat adds NY Post reporter Mandy Stadtmiller to blog roll
Mandy Stadtmiller, photo by Caitlin Thorne
As Comedybeat celebrates its first month of online existence, it feels at times like Ash Wednesday. At other times like Christmas. Today, with the addition of Mandy Stadtmiller to the ComedyBeat blog roll, it feels like Christmas. In some ways this is a natural outcome of several weeks of following each other on Twitter and Facebook. We came to appreciate how serious we were about both journalism and comedy. It’s that mix that defines both of us. Welcome to ComedyBeat blog roll, Mandy.
Nicholas Cage sometime comedic actor sues former financial advisor
ComedyBeat managing editor, Carl Unegbu, focuses his sharp legal eye on Nicholas Cage’s legal woes: Nicholas Cage, one of the highest paid movie stars in Hollywood, blames his former business manager for his woes and in his lawsuit he accuses Levin of fraud and mismanagement and seeks damages of more than $20 million dollars from him. But Levin isn’t laying low either and has fired back with own lawsuit against Cage, where he is asking the court to say he didn’t do anything wrong and for Cage to pay him $129,000 for work he claimed to have done. Read more…
Comedy gets greenlight at Brooklyn bookstore
Here is Carl Unegbu’s scoop on the Steamboat reading series at the Greendlight Bookstore in Brookln:
Comedians and bookstores are not two things usually found together in the same sentence. But here they are: the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood has created a special program for comedians and comedy writers. The program, called the “Steamboat Series,”premiered to a standing room-only audience. Actually the audience was larger than that. Some guests were sitting in a semi-circle around the microphone.
The Greenlight Bookstore, home of the Steamboat series
When what makes others laugh can kill you: Mandy Stadtmiller’s interview with Artie Lange
Artie Lange, photo by dearsomeone posted on Flickr
The New York Post’s Mandy Stadtmiller has an insightful interview with troubled comic Artie Lange that took place before Lange plunged a 13-inch kitchen knife into himself nine times. Lange speaks about his struggles with drugs and depression and how he uses it as material for his comedy. His failed suicide attempt now give his words a sad irony.
While I do not think as many comics suffer regularly from depression and drug abuse as he suggests when talking about his comedy heroes, he identifies a relationship between depression and laughter that I think accurate. I’m not referring to the relationship between, say, gallows humor and the nervous laughter it sometimes induces or the idea that if one were not laughing about one’s problems, one would be crying about them, however true. But that sometimes the best material for comedy comes from the dark and tragic moments of one’s own life.
“It’s just about drawing from your life and being original,” Lange related to Stadtmiller. “And my darkness helped my comedy … but to me, and to a lot of comedians depression and comedy go hand in hand.”
Here’s more from the interview:
Stadtmiller: But yeah so talk about, if you were just to say what is your relationship with depression. Is it just the opposite side of the coin from being such a funny guy?
Lange: I think a lot of comedians would tell you that they suffer from depression and are addicts, and I don’t know, it’s the most surreal thing to do for a living. Because you know you’re on stage being the life of the party and trying to get laughs and then in a lot of ways, you don’t have anything to give once you give it to the people. And for the last decade I’ve been doing it on the radio for five hours a day and then on the road all over the country on stage, you know what I mean? So, you know, you have a lot of dark times. The road is a lonely place and that sounds like a cliché, you know, like what is my life? [….]
And I started doing a lot of drugs to medicate myself, and I gambled money I didn’t have. If a bookie beat me up I wouldn’t care. I stopped caring and my mother and sister thank God are not addicts. They dealt with it in a different way and they’re like saints. Because if they were [addicts], the family would have been in ruins. Because I went through a bad coke problem as you could see from the pig story. But I was able to conquer it because two weeks before my father died he said ‘You gotta take care of your mother and sister.’ Look he was old school, he got through the 10th grade, he grew up in the streets, I don’t think he realized or wanted to put all of that guilt on my shoulders and any man from a working class family in Jersey, especially Italian, would take that as money. Make sure they got money. You know because we had to go on welfare when he got hurt, and uh, I’ve taken care of them with money but not emotionally. Like over the years I’ve made money and had success but one of the problems that I paid was a horrible addiction. And my mother and sister and my girlfriend right now too are the kind of people who they’d rather live in a closet and me be healthy and they truly are like that. I mean like I shower them with stuff because I force it on them but they’re just like, we don’t care. We want you to be alive and healthy. And that’s a good support system. So that’s my main source of pain.
Carl Unegbu’s ComedyBeat law blog is off to a strong start
Carl Unegbu, a ComedyBeat managing editor, explores what role if any the New York State courts would play were comedian David Letterman to sue Robert “Joe” Haldeman, the CBS news producer he accused of extortion. The answer may surprise you.
