The Comic's Comic Presents Last Things First

Dan Levy started comedy at the age of 9 and was competing at the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen while still a college student at Emerson College. Levy has toured with Aziz Ansari, John Mulaney and Whitney Cummings, and his 2012 album for Comedy Central, “Congrats on Your Success” debuted at #1 on iTunes. He co-starred on HBO’s Enlightened, and has hosted two shows in the past year, the stage show “Baby Talk” for JASH and the stand-up showcase show “Coming to the Stage” for Hulu. He’s currently a writer for ABC’s hit sitcom, The Goldbergs, and his first hour comedy special, Lion, premieres in November 2016 on Seeso.

So let’s get to it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI_YcDTkOFM

This episode is sponsored by Seeso‘s Stand-Up Streaming Festival.

Before we ever heard about Trevor Noah in America, Loyiso Gola was the star of his own Emmy-nominated TV satire in South Africa, Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola. He appeared in a PBS documentary in 2014 hosted by The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj called Stand Up Planet, and now in 2016, Gola is ready for his global close-up. His first stand-up special, Live in New York, is the first solo comedy special presented by Vimeo, and Gola sat down with me just after the New York Comedy Festival to talk about his journey and how to create your own comedy scene no matter where you are in the world.

So let’s get to it!

This episode is sponsored by Seeso‘s Stand-Up Streaming Festival.

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.Albanese told me about how he helped change the way The Daily Show was produced, what he loved and will miss about The Nightly Show, and how the entire late-night TV comedy game has changed now thanks to social media. So what’s next for Albanese? I asked him, so let’s get to it!

This episode is sponsored by Seeso‘s Stand-Up Streaming Festival.

Specifically, though, you can see Albanese this month at Levity Live in West Nyack, N.Y. (Nov. 9, 2016), The Comedy Connection in East Providence, R.I. (Nov. 11-13), and The Comedy Works in Denver (Nov. 17).

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‘s Stand-Up Streaming Festival, as well as by the Impractical Jokers on truTV.

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.

Lear also spoke with me about the importance of voting in the 2016 presidential election. I asked him what “Make America Great Again” means to him, and you bet Lear had a few things to say about that.

Here are two clips from the PBS documentary on Lear, too:

So let’s get to it!

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. All of that, plus Rogan’s thoughts on the 2016 presidential election.

So let’s get to it!

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!

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!

Cue the bugle sounds and put your puns where we can see them, because Andy Zaltzman is my guest today. Zaltzman is 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!

Andy Zaltzman: Satirist For Hire

Date

City

Venue

Country

10/04/16

Chicago, IL

House of Blues

United States

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10/09/16

Portland, OR

Aladdin Theatre

United States

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10/12/16

Seattle, WA

Neptune Theatre

United States

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10/18/16

Los Angeles, CA

NerdMelt Showroom

United States

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10/19/16

Cambridge, MA

Oberon

United States

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10/22/16

Toronto

Second City – John Candy Box

Canada

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10/25/16

San Francisco, CA

Cobb’s Comedy Club

United States

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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?

Hendra talks to me about Graham Chapman, Christopher Guest, John Belushi, opening for Lenny Bruce the night he got arrested, what he learned from both Bruce and George Carlin, and how making fun of Donald Trump in 2016 is a far different proposition now than it was when his Spy first made fun of Trump’s tiny hands.

There’s a lot of great comedy history and stories to get to, so let’s get to it!