The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

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!