news, show listings, contests, ticket give-aways and slander about Nashville's comedy community
Nashville transplants Ralphie May (Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing, Celebrity Fit Club) and Lahna Turner (VH1, Comedy Central) have welcomed their second child. On June 24th, August James May weighed in at 8lbs 7oz and measured 20 inches. Their first child, April June May, is now 21 months old. Ralphie and Lahna will be celebrating their fourth wedding anniversary this month.
Congratulate Ralphie this week at Zanies! He’ll be headlining Thursday through Sunday. Tickets are on sale now.
Now taking sign ups for:
Stand-UP Comedy: Level One Writing
Starts in 10 days!!!
Class dates:
MONDAYS, JUNE 29, JULY 6, 20, 27
TIME: 5:30 – 7:30 P.M.
All of the classes listed above will meet at Zanies Comedy Showplace in Nashville, TN. Class fee is $200.
Many have asked, “Which class is best for me?” Ask yourself the following questions. Be honest with yourself!
How solid is your material now?
Do you know the reason each joke gets a laugh?
Are you tuned into which techniques you use that suit you the best?
Are you able to mix it up for different types of crowds?
Can you turn a story into a comedy bit?
Do your jokes get consistent laughs?
Are you able to get a laugh every 15 seconds or so?
If you don’t know some of the answers, then you’d benefit enormously from the writing class!
ASK FOR A SIGN UP FORM NOW! E-Mail me: rik@rikroberts.com
If you have any questions about any of the classes feel free to e-mail me and ask … otherwise here’s a look at what’s coming up …
The Bu$ine$$ of Comedy class is tentatively scheduled for Monday, September 14th. Thanks for your patience. This will be a one evening seminar, from 5:30-8:00/8:30 at Zanies, cost is $75. pre-registration is required.
Click http://www.schooloflaughs.com for class descriptions.
Stand UP Comedy Level Two: Performance class is tentatively schedule for August 3, 10, 24 & 31. Class fee is $200. Class description on www.schooloflaughs.com. More info as the dates get closer.
DID YOU KNOW …
If you take the writing and performing classes you are granted a spot on a graduation show at Zanies?
Students who successfully navigate the two courses will be invited to perform a set onstage at Zanies. This is the absolute fastest way to get on their stage. You are not REQUIRED to perform in any way. But most students are pretty fired up and ready to get under the spotlight.
That graduation set is recorded to a DVD for you to have forever and share with friends or even online.
Stage time for former students at ZANIES!
Zanies has asked if I would run an open mike twice a month on TUESDAYS specifically designed to get my graduates more stage time.
Set lengths will vary from 3-5-7 minutes and there will be opportunities to emcee the shows as well. These shows are a direct result of all the quality new faces who have taken the classes and taken it to the next level.
The still has a few limited slots available on the “off” nights as it always has. But, your odds of getting stage time has increased radically with this development.
I will be hosting the OPEN MIKE on June 30, July 7 and July 14. Show starts at 7:30pm. Call or e-mail me for FREE TICKETS
Extra Stage Time
nashvilleStandUp.com has a complete list of all the open mikes in the Nashville area.
ALSO … If you have any news you’d like to share with the rest of the School of Laughs please send it on to me and I will put it in the next newsletter.
Gift Certificates
Don’t want to spend the money on yourself for classes? Have someone else do it! You can let people know you want to take these classes and have them pay your tuition with a gift certificate. Just have them e-mail me and I will guide them through it. The gift certificate is available for any of the 4 week courses for $200, and for the Business Class for $75. All pre-paid certificate are fully refundable if you decide not to take the class.
Anna Matsen attended John Oliver‘s May 25th show at Zanies and sends in this review:
Somebody put the fear of Nashville in John Oliver — thankfully for comedy fans, he nonetheless braved the city. To test the audience, he opened with a Voldemort vs. Cheney joke in which the former Vice came off the worse. (Call me crazy, but that appraisal coming from Harry Potter’s grown up doppleganger — minus only the lightning scar — carries added authority.) When the crowd roared in response to this and a Catholic Church vs. Galileo joke, Oliver expressed relief and excitement over what was sure to be a fun night.
I don’t know whether his show was literally sold out, but but the crowd was sure packed in and excited. The vast majority of people there were no doubt already big fans of his because he is popularly recognized; therefore, concerns that the audience wouldn’t get his humor were ultimately unwarranted. However, it’s worth noting that Nashville is a more mixed town when it comes to political humor than many realize, particularly when it comes to jokes at America’s expense. Sure, there are folks here (as everywhere) with a distaste for political comedy, but even those who’d get up-in-arms in defense of blind patriotism would have been at a loss how to react to Oliver’s jokes. His satire wasn’t aimed at critiquing U.S. policies, but rather expressed his dumbfounded, ironic love of all that’s ridiculous in American culture … and if there’s anything true about U.S. mass culture, it’s that we’re a “more to love” body of people.
For instance, do you know which of the U.S. states is the “least obese”? Or that our nation has the most flamboyant (if not the most participatory) democracy? Did you know that Americans have the most names in the Guinness Book of World Records? John Oliver can answer all of these questions, and has several illustrative examples proving that Americans will do anything for a token of notoriety. He also talked that night, as he does on his recorded stand up special Terrifying Times, about certain gloriously frivolous products found in our malls — things (according to him) no other country would make or buy, like the oreo pizza and the inflatable grill.
But the set wasn’t dedicated solely to satirizing American culture — Oliver is a pro at candid self-effacement too. He described for us his first feeble time firing a gun and the young (hilarious) trauma which inspired him to pursue comedy rather than athletics. After chastising his own insufficient masculinity to properly “Wooooo!,” he actually tried competing yell-for-yell with the happily rowdy audience — an unwise, but greatly amusing move.
Toward the end of this gig Oliver received a gift from an audience member: the quite hefty Encyclopedia of Rock. He stayed on stage an extra ten minutes just flipping through the pages for entertaining bits, like the maracas on the “things you need to start a band” page. Inspired by this, I am right now issuing a challenge to every other city that John Oliver visits: I dare you to outdo Nashville, particularly with a thoughtful and creative gift of some sort, given toward the end of his act. Since he pokes fun at America for not just inventing but selling items like the inflatable grill, best of all would be a product of like-minded American ingenuity. (Perhaps the portable microwave I once saw advertised in a magazine … I presume for people who have so little free time that, to eat at all, they simply must nuke on-the-go.) We want him to keep laughing at/with us, after all, so that this witty Brit stays a permanent import.
Finally, on The Daily Show he’s always struck me as the most bubbly correspondent — someone who’s thrilled to tears every time he reports. Happily, both his stand up show and his podcast with Andy Zaltzman (The Bugle) embrace the same invigorating enthusiasm. John Oliver is a smart, irrepressibly fun comic who works well with a crowd, even when self-conscious because unknown somebodies hyped him full of worry over Nashvillains. And there’s always the bonus of the lovely accent. (If he recorded a CD of himself reciting binary code, I’d buy it … but I’d much prefer his comedy.) If he comes to your town, go to his show, laugh a lot, and bring a gift. I dare ya.
Anna Matsen — a word nerd, political junkie, amateur philosopher, sushi-lover, and Nashvillian — attends as many comedy gigs as she can afford. As a grad student of English at Belmont Unversity and an English tutor at The Learning Lab, she works daily to improve her writing skills, hoping to one day write something worth a book jacket. Visit Anna on Facebook.
Whitehurst is a retired veteran member of the Armed Robbery unit with Nashville’s Metropolitan Police Department, where comedy became a tool to ease volatile situations as well as stress relief for co-workers and crime victims. Dan began hitting open mics in and around Nashville in the fall of 1998. Unsure how the police department would react, he did the prudent thing and didn’t tell them. By 1999, he had won the KDF Talent Search and the local news agencies began reporting on the detective with the unusual side job.
As Dan continued to tour, he became known around the country as a funny cop, but it wasn’t all fun and games when he was on duty. In December of 2002, Dan was named the Metro Nashville Investigator of the year for his part in the investigation of a serial robber/rapist described by the Tennessean as “one of Nashville’s most brazen armed robbers.”
In May of 2005, Dan left the police department and began traveling as a full time comedian. Dan’s laid back style, intelligent, unique material and thick southern drawl had the same effect on audiences as it had on co-workers all those years.. and he began building a fan base everywhere he traveled.
These days when Dan has time off from the road, instead of chasing perps down lower Broadway he prefers to spend time chasing his dog around his beautiful cabin in the woods.. but sometimes he’ll drive in to town to stop in at Zanies or one of the Nashville open mic’s where he got his start.
Tune in to hear Dan Tuesday morning, May 26th on The Bob and Tom Radio Show! Visit bobandtom.com for affiliates, or listen live online at Q95.com.
If you’d like to see Dan perform live, he’ll be working this week at Zanies with Andy Dick, star of the stage and screen, and will be back at Zanies the following Wed/Thurs to open for Janet Williams and Lahna Turner.
See Dan’s new website, www.DanWhitehurst.net for his full touring schedule, blog and more.
Anna Matsen attended Mary Mack‘s May 18th album-release show at Zanies and sends in this review:
My title isn’t fair. Mary Mack‘s humor isn’t purely absurd, but I’m at a loss how precisely to describe it. The most remarkable description I can give of her performance is that it’s both rambling and compact. Her thoughts flow like a meandering steam — one which, magically, loops back to earlier points with ease — yet the jokes are quick, craftily worded, expertly timed, and (ironically, given my stream analogy) bone dry. To put it another way, many excellent one-liners could be plucked from her material (“I don’t have a wide range of emotion. I get panic attacks, but I’m just not that excited about ’em.”), but strung together these jokes become each other’s seamless context.
Perhaps listing the subjects of her comedy would help. She talks about the eccentricities of her life and family, yet isn’t an “observational” comic (at least, not of the “Say, have you ever noticed …?!” variety). Many of her stories relate to small town northern Wisconsin, yet Nashville laughed as hard at these as it did the rest of her jokes. Once or twice she flirted with political humor, but the affair was fleeting, sweet, and refreshingly undramatic. She opened with a recorder-accordion duet, featured a charming Father’s Day song on mandolin (which will be stuck in your head for a week after hearing it), and finale’d with a special tune on her imaginary musical saw.
The show I saw, her album release show at Zanies (Pinch Finger Girl is well-worth the ten bucks — I’ve already listened to it twice through and will be loaning it out to friends), was my first time experiencing her humor. It took a little time for the crowd to fully warm up, but overall the atmosphere was awe and giggles in honor of the captivatingly eccentric lady with the breathy, pinched voice. Even the waiters seemed more relaxed than usual, reacting to the comic with joyful snickers as they ran between tables. She had one especially clever audience interaction: Miss Mack sang a quick ditty about her hope that the enthusiastically drunk lady near the stage wasn’t a speech therapist. The woman was too busy laughing, along with the rest of the crowd, to speak up for the next ten minutes. (I very much wish I could remember the exact line.)
I do have a conspiracy theory about Mary Mack, and I hope those who’ve seen her act will back me up on this: she’s the long-lost lovechild of Maria Bamford and Steven Wright, secretly raised by down home erratics in the middle of nowhere (i.e. northern Wisconsin) in order to trigger the coping mechanism that generates professional-grade comedic skills.. It’s the only logical explanation.
Mary Mack’s website is MaryMackComedy.com.
Anna Matsen — a word nerd, political junkie, amateur philosopher, sushi-lover, and Nashvillian — attends as many comedy gigs as she can afford. As a grad student of English at Belmont Unversity and an English tutor at The Learning Lab, she works daily to improve her writing skills, hoping to one day write something worth a book jacket. Visit Anna on Facebook.