Hop For Pop

Rebecca Wolf auditioned for her first school play and was too shy to get a part. She watched the show from the audience and decided that was exactly what she wanted to do. The next year she landed the role of Glenn the Gull. As she puts it now, she has gone from bird to pig, and intends to work through the whole animal kingdom eventually.

The pig is Peg, star of The Pigs Next Door, and she was born from a thirty-second audition prompt: you've just received a call from the IRS. Rebecca decided the person taking that call was the third little pig, because her eldest brother had hired the big bad wolf to destroy his siblings' houses for the insurance money. She already owned a pig costume. The character stuck.

What grew around Peg is an immersive, improvised sitcom in which the audience are the neighbours. A pink telephone gets thrown into the crowd, and whoever catches it becomes a character they've just heard described. There's a stuffed pig husband called Joel who can't argue back, an original song, a burlesque number that is deliberately terrible, and Boston Conservatory training in devised theatre underneath all of it.

In this conversation on The Comics Unseen she also talks about the high-school senior project that was supposed to help the community. She did forty-five minutes of stand-up about her boss, put it on YouTube, and got threatened with a lawsuit, then stopped doing stand-up for years because she thought it made her a bad person. There's Clown Gym in New York, which she says broke her wide open and taught her that she likes to be in charge; why "yes, and" doesn't mean agreeing with your scene partner; the heckler she stopped by pointing out he'd just broken into her house; and the man she cast as an Amazon delivery driver who simply said "no, I don't work for Amazon" and gave her the biggest laugh of the night by accident.

It is, in her own words, not deep. It's meant to be fun.

The Comics Unseen is a series of long conversations with comedians you haven't heard of yet.

Keywords: Rebecca Wolf, The Pigs Next Door, immersive comedy, improv, clown, character comedy, Boston Conservatory, Clown Gym, Groundlings, UCB, Brooklyn comedy, New York comedy, women in comedy, comedian interview, comedy podcast, The Comics Unseen.

Jackie Joy moved from Brazil to Vancouver with, in her words, almost no English. She'd had a good marketing career back home, but in Canada she couldn't communicate. On her first project her boss replied "Roger that," and she spent the whole day looking for someone called Roger. Her colleagues called her Roger for a year.

Then she walked into the comedy club across the street from her office. She had already handed in a letter saying she was leaving Canada. After that first open mic she went back to her boss and asked to stay. As she puts it, comedy decided her next steps.

In this conversation on The Comics Unseen, Jackie talks about doing stand-up in a second language: keeping the broken English in on purpose, because the jokes stop making sense without it; listening back to a recording and hearing the audience repeat her accent to each other; and why Brazilians living abroad are the one audience who fully get the material. With only about 6% of Brazil speaking English, her act doesn't travel home, so for shows in Brazil she writes new material in Portuguese, a language she says uses far more words, while English forces you to cut.

She is candid about the hard parts too. She once took eight minutes to tell a story she now tells in three, cried after her first real laugh, and froze completely on stage in her third month, then didn't perform again for three months.

Instead of waiting for gatekeepers, she builds her own rooms, producing the shows How I Met My Trauma and Only Fails, and describes herself as "80% marketing, 20% comedian" after twenty years of speaking to rooms of 300 at startup events. She also talks about performing for Judy Carter for the first time after a year of working for her, cutting her set down to a laugh every ten seconds, and opening for Brazilian comedian Rodrigo Marques.

The Comics Unseen is a series of long conversations with comedians you haven't heard of yet.

Keywords: Jackie Joy, stand-up comedy, immigrant comedy, Brazilian comedian, Vancouver comedy, Canadian comedy, comedy in a second language, women in comedy, How I Met My Trauma, Only Fails, Judy Carter, Rodrigo Marques, comedian interview, comedy podcast, The Comics Unseen.

Read the full interview: https://hopforpop.com/diogo-portugal-built-the-brazilian-comedy-scene-he-now-performs-in/

Diogo Portugal is Brazilian, despite the surname. Diogo was his great-grandfather's name, Portugal is just his last name, and he has spent a career explaining that his name is Portugal but he is from Brazil. Curitiba, to be exact.

He started by accident. A friend was throwing a going-away party to raise money and asked him to do a few minutes. He had never faced an audience. He did jokes, impressions and a character, and people weren't laughing much, until he lifted the microphone off the stand. He got looser, he moved, and people started laughing.

There were no comedy clubs in Brazil then. Comics went on when the jazz band took a break. Years later he dropped the wigs and the characters for pure stand-up, which meant walking on as himself and explaining to people what stand-up comedy even was.

Now he runs Risorama, a festival that pairs the biggest names in Brazilian comedy with newcomers nobody has heard of, and he explains why the unknowns often win the night: nobody expects anything from them.

He also talks about what happens when a joke meets the law. He describes how his friend Leo Lins faced around two million reais in penalties and the threat of years in prison over his material, before being acquitted, at which point Diogo booked him for the festival. Diogo has faced legal action over jokes himself. He is clear that a joke is not an opinion, and equally clear that newcomers reaching for the darkest material usually aren't ready for it yet.

In this episode:

• Why it's Diogo, not Diego
• His first ever set, and taking the mic off the stand
• Performing in the gap when the jazz band took its break
• Trading wigs and impressions for his own words
• "There's no rehearsing for comedy. You just go and do it."
• Why you are never safe on stage
• Building Risorama, and why unknown comics often win
• Starting a Brazilian roast
• Leo Lins, and comedy and the law
• "A joke is not your opinion. It's just a joke."
• Writing from his own life and the week's headlines
• His show Improprio Para Politicos, not appropriate for politicians
• Performing in English in Tokyo, New York and Miami

Watch the full interview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOqBYEPgUm0

More from Hop For Pop
Website: https://hopforpop.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopforpop/
The Comics Unseen: https://www.instagram.com/thecomicsunseen/

In 2022, when the mobilisation started in Russia, comedians began arriving in Almaty with nowhere to perform. A 28-year-old comic and his wife opened an 800-square-metre room and let them in. Four years later, Almaty Central Stand Up Club is the hub of stand-up comedy in Central Asia.

This is a long conversation with its co-founder, Nuraskan, recorded in Almaty, about building a comedy scene almost from scratch, in Kazakh and Russian, languages that reach about 21 million people worldwide and no further.

He is remarkably unsentimental about it. Nobody set out to save comedy during the war; it was simply the only thing any of them were good at. In four years the club has never charged a comedian for stage time. Thirty comics get three minutes each at the weekly open mic, and the ones worth watching move up to five minutes, then ten, then a paid weekend slot. For a year or two he sat with anyone who asked and took their material apart line by line, what he calls being an author for somebody.

There's a very funny stretch about trying to book a Western headliner. The club ran an entire marketing campaign aimed at Joe Rogan before someone on his team explained that a twenty-hour flight was never going to happen. They actually landed Chris Tucker, whose management said yes, and then couldn't raise the fee: hundreds of thousands, he points out, not the millions the Saudis pay, and money that exists in Almaty if anyone will spend it.

He's candid about the pressure, too. Comedy in Kazakhstan is controlled, he says, not the way journalists are chased, but enough that everyone is careful, and a comedian walks a thin rope between government attention and a fierce local cancel culture.

And he has a sharp answer to a question comics ask constantly. Everyone obsesses over output, the hour a day of writing, the discipline. What most of them lack, he says, is input: they aren't curious, don't watch good films or documentaries, and don't have meaningful conversations. Comedy comes from living, which is why comedians get better with age.

Also in here: where Kazakh comedy really comes from (aitys, a centuries-old improvised verse duel played on the dombyra that's essentially a roast battle), what independence in 1991 meant for comedians who had always answered to Moscow, a roast that hit a million views in eight days, the Eddie Murphy special subtitled into Kazakh that shaped a generation, why Louis C.K. is a demigod across the post-Soviet world, and why he still tells new comics to read Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible, but only after they've found their own voice.

The Comics Unseen is a series of long conversations with comedians you haven't heard of yet, and with the people building the rooms they'll come up in.

Keywords: Almaty comedy, Central Stand Up Almaty, Kazakhstan stand-up, Kazakh comedy, Central Asia comedy, comedy club owner, open mic, Russian comedians, comedy podcast, stand-up comedy, comedy advice, Joe Rogan, Chris Tucker, Louis C.K., aitys, The Comics Unseen.

Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne have made a podcast together every single Friday for nearly thirteen years without missing one. This is a long conversation about what that actually costs, and what it gives you.

Krystyna had just come off a month at the Edinburgh Fringe with a solo show she spent five years writing — one that goes to the hardest places in her life and still puts jokes on either side of them. She's clear-eyed about why she waited that long. You can always tell, she says, when someone puts something on stage before they've healed from it: "Game recognise game."

Corinne is the one who'll tell you the heckling videos you see online are mostly a myth. She isn't trying to shock anyone — she's trying to make you think about something familiar in a new way, and if that feels shocking, you're probably living in an echo chamber. She also runs a horror stand-up show at the Comedy Store, which exists largely because Los Angeles turned out to be far more goth than New York.

Along the way: how they actually met, through an internship and a bringer show. Why their on-stage chemistry can't be manufactured — thirteen years of it, and Krystyna reckons if you could bottle it she'd be a billionaire. What Slutsgiving actually is, and why audience members volunteer their worst secrets for it. Sabotaging her own SNL audition. Why non-comedians should never be in green rooms. And two listener stories, including a man who'd been secretly married for four of the ten years he was with someone.

And near the end, the line worth staying for. Heartache feels permanent, and it isn't: one day a friend will mention his name and you'll have to think for a second who they mean.

Content note: this episode discusses suicide and parental abuse, as the subject of Krystyna's solo show. Both are handled seriously and non-graphically.

The Comics Unseen is a series of long conversations with comedians you haven't heard of yet.

Keywords: Krystyna Hutchinson, Corinne, Guys We F****d, Slutsgiving, Sorry About Last Night, comedy podcast, stand-up comedy, Edinburgh Fringe, solo show, comedy duo, Comedy Store, heckling, comedian interview, The Comics Unseen.

Barry Katz has spent more than twenty years managing stand-up comedians, and the client list is faintly ridiculous: Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr, Jim Gaffigan, Dane Cook, Nick Swardson, Bert Kreischer — and Louis CK, his very first client, who helped him hang the lights when he opened the Boston Comedy Club. In New York. The name is not a mistake, and there is a story behind it.

In this long-form interview on The Comics Unseen, Barry sits down with Kishan Jhunjhunwala for a genuinely unguarded conversation about comedy management, the comedy business, and what three decades on the other side of the microphone actually teaches you.

WHAT'S IN THIS EPISODE

Barry explains why he kept signing comedians young — he liked the hunger in a twenty-two-year-old more than the cynicism in a forty-year-old — and what he looked for before anybody else had heard the name. He talks about running a room where he chose who got on stage, and what that responsibility does to your taste.

He makes a case about effort that is hard to shake. Ask anyone for their favourite Tom Brady moment and you'll hear about a throw. Nobody's favourite is the footage of Brady alone on a folding chair watching film for two hours — and that, Barry argues, is the only part that ever mattered. The work nobody sees is the work.

He is generous about Dane Cook, who he thinks understood what the internet was going to do to stand-up comedy before anyone else did, and who got remarkably little credit for it. He's candid about why he stopped performing himself: the same material could kill one night and die the next, and he couldn't live inside that.

And then there's crowd work. Barry loves crowd work. When he hosted, he says, it was all he did. He'll happily watch Matt Rife, Jessica Kirson or Aries Spears do it for an hour. But he poses a challenge to anyone building a career on it: write down the ten most influential comedians who ever lived, search their names alongside "crowd work" on YouTube, and count the clips. His answer is zero. He walks through Don Rickles as the one possible exception — then argues Rickles wasn't really doing crowd work at all. It's the most interesting disagreement in the episode, and he makes it while defending the thing he's arguing against.

There's also an honest stretch on fairness. One comic grinds for forty-two years and never breaks; another gets it in four months. Barry doesn't pretend there's justice in it. He talks about Kill Tony outgrowing the room it started in, why Mark Normand broke through, how George Carlin reinvented himself every decade — and why, if you're great enough, none of the rules apply to you anyway.

The best moment might be the smallest. Barry tells a story about seeing the Obamas in a Chicago restaurant, and a single line from Michelle Obama that quietly reframes the whole idea of luck.

1:13 Favourite comedian, dead and alive

2:49 Dane Cook saw the internet coming

4:05 Who gets the credit

5:04 Chappelle, Burr, CK, Gaffigan — all of them young

6:27 The Michelle Obama story

7:58 We write, direct and star in our own lives

9:24 The $850 apartment on Venice Beach

11:12 When life breaks your legs

13:28 Why he stopped performing and started managing

16:42 Opening the Boston Comedy Club — in New York

17:24 Louis CK, first client

17:47 Why he signed them young

19:16 "It was my house. I chose who was in it"

20:45 Watching Kill Tony outgrow the belly room

24:50 Comedy isn't fair: 42 years against four months

26:23 Rogan, SNL, Carson — the break has always existed

27:19 Why Mark Normand broke through

27:53 What's your favourite Tom Brady moment?

31:31 Carlin reinvented himself every decade

34:19 If you're great, there are no rules

36:35 Get out of the way of great artists

37:23 The one line he argued out of a special

41:14 Search their crowd work. You'll find zero

43:43 Only Don Rickles — and was that even crowd work?

46:48 Put your Mount Rushmore together

47:50 Where to find him

Website: barrykatz.com

Instagram: @barrykatz

On 13 March, two days after her birthday dinner, CeeKay Brown was driving when she crashed. She passed out three times, forgot her own name and date of birth, and turned down the helicopter. What followed was the thing no comedian plans for: the injury was to her head.For two weeks, light hurt. A ticking clock sounded like screaming. She could not turn her head left or right. And she forgot most of her own jokes - which, as she puts it, is uniquely brutal, because stand-up is cerebral. You need to think fast, reorder your set mid-flow, follow the room. She went back on stage two weeks later with notes in her hand for the first time in years, and had a panic attack on stage at the end of April. She still wears earplugs almost all day, and her ears ring every single night.This is also a conversation about the work. CeeKay did 180 shows in her first year of comedy and 260 in her second. She is a one-liner comic who is turning into a storytelling one, trained in Shakespeare, ballet, choir, pantomime, clowning and improv, and she argues that if you love an art form you should try every part of it - which is why she has directed plays, worked backstage and lost three roast battles for not being harsh enough.

Almaty has a stand-up scene that runs in three languages - Kazakh, Russian and English - and is about to add a fourth. Almost nobody outside Kazakhstan knows it exists.

I sat down in Almaty with Dosmukhamed and Alisher of Good Night Comedy to find out how it got built.

Dosmukhamed takes us back to a school talent show where he impersonated the most feared teacher in the building and felt the room turn into a volcano - the laugh he says he has been chasing ever since. He talks about the open mic in Chicago where being Kazakh turned out to be the most interesting thing in the lineup, bombing in Miami, and the strange stretch after January 2022 when a feeling of freedom and a wave of arrivals from Russia filled their rooms overnight. He also makes the case that comedy is native to a nomadic culture: when you cannot carry books, your only magic is your brain. Alisher comes at it from craft. Why he started doing crowd work (money, and the fact that it is the only thing the algorithm rewards), what Louis CK's rehearsed gestures and timed sips of water teach you about intention, and the test a university professor gave him that he still uses - if you shouted your point out of a window and nobody stopped to argue, it is not worth saying.

Then the part that stops you short. In Kazakhstan the risk is not being cancelled. Four comedians have gone to jail over jokes, and cursing on Instagram is treated as cursing in a public space.

Good Night Comedy runs English-language shows in Almaty. If you are ever passing through, go.

IN THIS EPISODE

- Sergey, "Russia's only living comedian", and how a character built on a girlfriend took over a career

- Bill Burr sharing the videos, and landing on Tom Segura's Your Mom's House

- Why a tracksuit and a gold chain get remembered when a good set doesn't

- Supernatural, Once Upon a Time, and a genuinely prolific cough syrup commercial

- The street show: juggling, chains, and escaping from a straitjacket in an English accent

- Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, and the freedom of performing as somebody who isn't you

- "I don't know anything, I'm immigrant" - how the character buys him leeway

- Learning to juggle at a summer performing arts school, and getting addicted to it

- Three summers of street shows before one of them finally popped

- Paying for the travel with street performing and doing spots wherever he landed

- Putting down the props: "All I have is just me and my words."

- The first set that ended in juggling, and the comics who told him he didn't need it

- Voices and accents as a way in, instead of pure physical comedy

- Gathering your own crowd outdoors versus a room that already came to laugh

- "Your success is my failure" - the competitiveness he found in stand-up

- Honour among thieves: why the street performing community felt different

- A community college comedy writing course, and phoning the club for a Monday spot

- The first laugh at nineteen, and knowing immediately that he could do this

- The set that goes great, the set that bombs, and how comedy humbles you

- Building a tight five when you have never had to write one to order

- Calgary to Saskatoon with a lying drunk headliner: "This is my future. I'm going to be this guy."

- Why a headliner who asks his opener to dumb it down is weak and insecure

- Standing out from thousands of white dudes doing comedy

- Canada's greats: Jim Carrey, Norm Macdonald, Phil Hartman, Howie Mandel

- Norm's long set-ups, and why Byron writes short instead

- Chris Rock, repeating the premise, and holding a room with tone

- The blunt Russian girlfriend who inspired the whole thing

- The backlash that never really came, and the Russians who thank him for representing them

- The online abuse that did: Ukraine, cancellation, and comments about the front lines

- Why hecklers are easier to handle as Sergey than as himself

- Creative block, and surrounding yourself with comedic minds - "it's like working out for your brain"

- Taking a funny line from a friend, and when you have to ask first

- "I haven't done stand-up as me in a while. Who am I?"

- Whether the internet just prefers absurd to intellectual

- "You're funnier as you" - and why Sergey still gets more heat

- Juggling vodka bottles as Sergey, with sponsors

- Idols: Norm Macdonald, Andy Kaufman, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Louis C.K., Sacha Baron Cohen and Gilbert Gottfried

- Louis C.K.'s fix for a creative block: turn back a few pages and work the old jokes

Larry Charles wrote Seinfeld, directed Borat, and used to throw up before going on stage.

In this episode of The Comics Unseen, Kishan Jhunjhunwala sits down with the man behind some of the most influential comedy of the last forty years —

Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mad About You, Borat, Brüno, The Dictator, Masked and Anonymous, and Larry Charles' Dangerous World of Comedy. His memoir Comedy Samurai is out now.

Larry talks about writing Seinfeld with Larry David when neither of them liked sitcoms or knew how to structure one, and where "no hugging, no learning" actually came from. He explains why the great comedy characters never learn anything, why he sold his jokes instead of performing them, and what Sacha Baron Cohen was doing on Borat that he calls a new form of acting entirely.

He also tells the story of the day Jack Nicholson drove past him on the Paramount lot and said three words that changed his career — the week before he got fired, and the day before Larry David called him about Seinfeld.

In this conversation:

- Why the Seinfeld writers used a whiteboard, and what it fixed

- "There is no right or wrong in comedy. There's only the laughter."

- Andy Kaufman, anti-comedy, and the night Larry told him to fake his own death

- Getting called "Line Crossing" on Curb, and why he took it as a compliment

- The six-hour cut of Borat that has never been released

- Why writers' rooms were an early version of AI

- Interviewing a warlord on a dark street in Liberia

- Comedy clubs being burned down, and why America has it easy

Follow The Comics Unseen for long-form interviews with comedians, writers and

directors — the conversations that don't fit anywhere else.

Instagram: @hopforpop and @thecomicsunseen

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