| Comedian Nick Di Paolo sounds off :: Sportstainment must go |
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Please stop trying to meld the worlds
of entertainment and professional sports.
This effort has been going on for the
past few years and must be stopped now! "By Nick Di Paolo"
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Let’s get this straight.
Professional entertainers and
professional athletes are
from two completely different
vocations. I hear pro
sports figures like Terrell
Owens refer to himself as
an entertainer. No, Terrell
you are a professional football
player. Just because
millions of people find
what you do on the football
field entertaining doesn’t
make you an entertainer.
If that’s the only criteria,
then the owner of the two
dogs I saw fucking in a
church parking lot last week
should be on the phone
with the William Morris
Agency as we speak—
because that was some
entertaining
I guarantee if CBS put
footage of two dogs fucking
on at 9 p.m. every Monday,
we’d say goodbye to Two
And A Half Men and say
hello to Everybody Loves
Humpin’.
This year at the Super
Bowl they had a red carpet
laid out ‘a la the Oscar
Awards during the pre-game
show. Can you imagine
back in the day, Vince
Lombardi being asked by
Joan Rivers, “So who are
you wearing tonight,
coach?”
“None of your god damned
business, lady!” would have
been his response, and
rightfully so.
What makes this more
aggravating to me is that
the same Hollywood jerk offs
who are trying to make
this marriage work spend
the majority of their time
depicting jocks (professional
or otherwise) as bullies, date
rapists and ass holes in every
TV show, commercial and
film they produce. But now
that professional sports are a
ratings bonanza for these
networks, Hollywood agents
and executives want a piece
of the money pie that is the
NBA, NFL or MLB. |
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And that’s fine. But quit
doing things like turning the
Monday Night Football
booth into a second-rate
late night talk show to push
your shitty movies and TV
series. I’m trying to find out
if the last play was a touchdown
or not, but I can’t
because Mike Tirico is
grilling Courtney Thorne-
Smith about the complex
plot of the next episode of
According to Jim.
Last year the NFL had
washed up actress Rene
Russo pushing the playoffs.
In one commercial she looks
into the camera and says,
“The playoffs are where
moments are made.”
My response? “Yeah, and the
kitchens are where sandwiches
are made. Now get
in there and make me one
and quit trying to jump start
your career on the back of
Ray Lewis.”
I’ve been a participant in
both fields: entertainment
and athletics— the latter,
albeit, at an amateur level.
But in my opinion it takes a
lot more work, determination
and guts to succeed in
sports than to be successful
in Hollywood (see Paris
Hilton). Pro athletes have been successfully making
the jump to Hollywood for
years but never the other
way around. Chances are you’ll see Tom
Brady on the big screen
before you’ll see Tom Cruise
throwing one.
Let’s quit pretending
there’s no difference
between the Walk of Fame
and the Hall of Fame. They
would never let a homeless
crack head piss on Vince
Lombardi’s bust. |
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The Whitest Kids U’ Know: Sketch Gone Wild "By Rob Turbovsky" |
When you watch a Whitest Kids U’
Know sketch, you get a feeling that
anything can happen. But it’s not so
much they’re breaking the rules
Monty Python-style, it’s more that
their stone-faced deliveries and their
even-keeled approach to the psychotically
absurd convinces you that
they’ve never even heard of rules.
The proof is their second season,
which premiered on cable channel
IFC earlier this year. For founding
members Trevor Moore, Sam Brown,
and Zach Cregger, and their partners
Timmy Williams and Darren Trumeter,
it’s been an interesting path to success,
a path paved with poop jokes,
surreal premises and an uncomfortable
amount of drag.
What’s fun about writing a sketch
like the dating game bit, where one
of the bachelors tells the single girl,
‘I want to beat you with my hard
dick’?
ZC: It’s fun to write stuff that you know is going to make your parents
cringe if they ever see it. |
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When we
would ever do that dating game
sketch live, my girlfriend at the time
would ask if we were going to do it,
and if we were, she wouldn’t come
to the show. That kind of made me
laugh.
You tend to stray from politics and
celebrities. Most sketch groups
thrive on those things.
TW: We try to stay accessible— even
though it scares away people like my
mom and my grandma. But if they
wanted to watch it, they’d understand
it.
Is fame ruining you
guys?
TW: No, I’m just kind
of more lazy.
We’re still cool. I
got a weird tattoo
of a
dinosaur on a spaceship, but I think I would’ve gotten
that whether I was on TV or not.
TM: I guess I would want that drug
overdose in a hot tub, or just die in
some little plane crash in the
Midwest, because that way I’d be
close to home, like a Big Bopper
kind of thing.
What are the benefits of fame?
TM: I did an interview with
SuicideGirls.com.
They sent me a free
password to their site.
So that’s one of the benefits being
famous?
TM: Free porn? Yes. |
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Steve Hofstetter
Dark Side of the Room "Review by Dylon P. Gadion" |
Steve Hofstetter’s latest offering, The Dark
Side of the Room, pulls triple duty: of
course first it’s a comedy album—and, at
that, a consistently funny one. And since so
many of Hofstetter’s punch lines arrive from
roads paved with ultra-timely, ultra specific
pop-culture nods (e.g. Bob from the Enzyte
ads, Kevin Federline, American Girl dolls),
the album acts as an audio time capsule.
Finally, the nearly 50-minute set presents
his audience with a travelogue of
sorts, humorously recounting his experiences
in small town America, places most
comics wouldn’t touch, fearful of those
locales’ inherently drab nature. But
Hofstetter has the chops to maker it otherwise.
We tag along with him to Indiana
(who, up until recently, ignored the rest of
the country’s rules on daylight saving time),
Pittsburgh (where there are stop signs on
Interstates), Dahlonega, GA (where he was
introduced to Christian country music)
Phoenix (where he performed at a strip
club for Penthouse), Las Vegas (where a
stripper recognized him from MySpace),
Tulsa (where he attended a biker rally for
God) and Northfield, VT, which is such a
small town that Mapquest’s directions to
Hofstetter were simply.
“Take a right out of
my driveway and go fuck myself.” |
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The one downside to Dark Side, is
Hofstetter’s inclusion of airline humor. And
although his treatment of post 9/11 FAA
regulations proves generally more original,
and wee funnier than most other comics,’
it seems it’s time to put an indefinite moratorium
on airline humor—unless your
name is George Carlin or Brian Regan. |
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Todd Barry: From Heaven "Review by Jhon Delery" |
I hate it when people abbreviate words,”
he confesses on From Heaven, his latest
release from Comedy Central Records,
recorded at The Comedy Studio in
Cambridge, Mass. Barry, a slight man definitely
too little to even browse in tall-men’s
stores but apparently too towering to even
fit into a small-men’s shop (let alone the
clothes it sells), can become, well, short with
those who chop, snip or clip the English language
into cute sound-bite-size colloquialisms..
Anyone — celeb or commoner — can
trigger Barry’s word rage, spark his ire (and
cause the otherwise composed comic to
contemplate aiming more powerful weaponry
at the offender). It’s faux fury, of course,
the cuddly Barry talking tough for laughs.
On From Heaven, he discovers humor in
a leaky light fixture; a compliment unintentionally
cutting enough to pierce the
strongest of egos; a colossally weird clothing
expedition at the aforementioned smallmen’s
shop; overly familiar fans who consider
his e-mail in-box an information booth;
wallet hunting at Old Navy.
In all, the funny flight of fancy lasts an
hour, with hilarious layovers in Barry’s sex life
and amusing side trips to Trader Joe’s,
Pittsburgh, Seattle, his apartment in New
York City, where he dwells not so much on
Easy Street.
Sorry, Todd: You don’t have a duplex on
the corner of Fame and Fortune, but at least
From Heaven will let listeners laugh all the
way to the ATM and elsewhere. |
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Brian Dykstra:
The Jesus Factor "Review by Jhon Delery" |
Brian Dykstra uses outrage and humor like a
blowtorch and kindling to ignite the slow
fuse that burns for 90 mesmerizing minutes
in his equally frightening and enlightening
comic monologue, The Jesus Factor.
Part comedian, beat poet, preacher and
history teacher, Dykstra starts out this new
DVD from Uproar Entertainment bashing
and bitching about the, uh, Three Stooges
(aka Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld) — easy
prey for his fusillade of potshots, he admits.
Like the court clerk at an arraignment,
Dykstra recites from what sounds like a long
list of charges to indict Bush and all the president’s
henchmen for gross misconduct in
office
He presses all the thermonuclear (or nukey-
er, in Bushspeak) hot buttons: the fraudulent
war in Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib,
the apparently interminable and possibly
unlawful detention of terrorists
(maybe…kind of…sort of) at Gitmo, the
insanity of the 56,881-word Patriot Act
superseding and crushing the spirit of the
4,730-word U.S. Constitution and the 482-
word Bill of Rights.
Throughout, Dykstra passionately and
unabashedly preaches the Gospel of
Liberalism, decrying the ignorance and apathy
that seem to form the foundation of our
conservative political structure these days. |
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The body politic will need massive reconstructive surgery to recover from Dykstra’s pounding, but he aims his hardest punches, his sharpest barbs, at another universally divisive target: religion. Most and best of all, Dykstra resurrects loud, fearless dissent, another casualty of 9/11. |
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I think that there
are two types of
music: there’ s good
and bad, and that’ s
it. There’ s good in
all types and there’ s
bad in all types. I
like the good. "JON REEP : : MORE WILCO, LESS TOBY KEITH" |
You’ve no doubt caught Jon Reep’s
face on television, either as the
“Hemi guy” on the popular Dodge
Ram commercials, his half hour special
on Comedy Central or most
notably, as the winner of NBC’s most
recent season of Last Comic
Standing.
Come April, you’ll be seeing a lot
more of Reep, this time in New Line
Cinema’s Harold & Kumar Escape
from Guantanamo Bay. Checking in
from his home in LA, Reep chats
about the essence of comedy, family,
and life as a Southern-fried fish out of
water.
Can you share your worst bombing
experience from your career?
One time in Virginia, I was doing
really well for the first 10 minutes but
I had a couple of drinks in me. So I
was like, ‘Hey, anyone got a cigarette?’
Five cigarettes came flying up
on the stage, and so I said, ‘Does
anyone got a lighter?’ and this person
hands me a Zippo.
So I took it and I started hitting it on
my leg; I was doing it real fast and
suddenly, it flies out of my hand and
hits this girl in the front row, square
in the forehead, and left a big red
square on her forehead. I felt so bad.
I offered to buy her a drink, but she
wasn’t even twenty-one. It was horrible,
and for the next 15 minutes, it
really sucked.
The South seems to be a virtual goldmine
for comedy these days. How
do feel you fit into that scene?
I’m more Southern rock than I am
country. I do like country, though; I
like everything, but I guess in terms
of music, I’m even more of a
Southern rocker than new country.
So you’re less Toby Keith and more
Wilco?
Yeah, |
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there you go, exactly. But some Toby Keith is good. I think that there are two types of music: there’s good and bad, and that’s it. There’s good in all types and there’s bad in all types. I like the good. I think I’m adding a younger, fresher, more energetic version of what southern comedy’s got going on right now. |
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