Spit Take Saturday: Tom Shillue

April 27, 2013
By Julie Seabaugh

Welcome to Spit Take Saturday, courtesy of Brown Paper Tickets’ Comedy Doer Julie Seabaugh and her professional comedy criticism site The Spit Take. Julie’s goal with the site is to “elevate the public perception of stand-up comedy to that of a legitimate art form, and to enable comedy criticism be taken as seriously as that of theater, film, music, food, even video games. No a**-kissing. No bias. No mercy. Just honest, unfiltered, long-form reviews written by professional, knowledgeable comedy critics.”

Every week Julie will select an entry from the site to be included on our blog and hand-pick some related events happening that week that she feels all you comedy lovers out there will appreciate.

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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The title “Halfway There“ refers to both this album’s place in Tom Shillue’s yearlong slate of monthly releases and his status as a popular kid in school. This is album number six, which means Shillue has released something approaching three-and-a-half hours of new material so far. And he’s only halfway through. Impressive in quantity at the very least. And in quality. And consistency.

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Spit Take Saturday: Gabriel Iglesias

April 20, 2013
By Julie Seabaugh

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Gabriel Iglesias doesn’t so much tell jokes as act them out like classic radio plays, inhabiting various characters with a snappy, head-spinning precision that would make most vocal actors jealous. It tends to render the physical side of his shows less essential than his rubbery, high-pitched voice, but his on-camera persona at least adds a certain sports-mascot joviality to the proceedings. His latest special, “Aloha Fluffy,” refines that colorful persona while building on the mountainous inventory of stories that have made him a touring gold mine.

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Spit Take Saturday: Fred Stoller

April 6, 2013
By Julie Seabaugh

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Over the past 30 years, self-described “schnooky” comedian and character actor Fred Stoller has racked up more than 60 appearances on a number of hit TV series including “The Drew Carey Show,” “Murphy Brown,” “Friends” and even “Seinfeld,” where he also spent a year in the show’s notoriously competitive writers’ pool. He’s also appeared on flops barely anyone remembers, such as the “Married…with Children” spinoff “Vinnie & Bobby” (alongside a pre-fame Matt LeBlanc) and the extremely short-lived NBC sitcom “Singer & Sons,” which lasted only four episodes.

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Spit Take Saturday: Tom Shillue

March 2, 2013
By Julie Seabaugh

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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“Edgy” isn’t the word that jumps to mind when describing the likeable, profanity-free storyteller Tom Shillue. Thus his decision to devote one album in his “12 in 12” project to racier material seems like more of a challenge to himself than a sampling of his material. It’s a brave choice to venture outside of his comfort zone as part of this grand experiment, and his immense talent means that even though taboo-busting isn’t the best use of his storytelling skills, the album is still very funny.

“Racism,” the first of two tracks on the 29-minute “Edgy,” begins with the strongest material. His musings on white panic and whether he’s inadvertently contributing to a culture of racism are both clever and mixed with an appropriate amount of liberal guilt. But the second half of the track, about whether women should rule the world, is more a story about telling a joke than a joke in itself. Comparing the Manhattan crowd at the taping with a past, über-liberal Brooklyn audience who had rejected his pro-male defense, one assumes he hoped to re-capture a great, confrontational set but instead gets a slightly put-off but mostly just unconvinced crowd.
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Spit Take Saturday: Eddie Pepitone

February 23, 2013
By Julie Seabaugh

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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There’s an implication throughout “The Bitter Buddha” that comedian Eddie Pepitone, the subject of this documentary, is, well, bitter. Bitter that after a stand-up career that spans decades, he hasn’t achieved mainstream appeal or sold a TV show Seinfeld-style. That even though he’s beloved by modern comedy deities like Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman, it’s somehow not enough. Director Steven Feinartz begins his film with the assumption that in the five stages of grief – lamenting the loss of theoretical lucrativeness – Pepitone is stuck on “anger.”

Yet despite this narrative thread, “The Bitter Buddha” paints Pepitone as having completed these five stages. Lack of popularity is no longer an albatross around his neck. In fact, Pepitone has the uncanny ability to see the albatross around everyone’s neck, and talk them into taking it off. Pepitone is on “acceptance,” and laughing about it.
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Spit Take Saturday: Todd Barry

January 26, 2013
By Brown Paper Tickets

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Todd Barry is a sharp, precise joke writer. It speaks to his talent as a performer that he appears loose and not overly rehearsed, but if you follow his stuff from set-up to tag, it’s wonderfully efficient, high-percentage comedy. Zero fat. So why would a guy like that mount a seven-city tour doing two shows a night of nothing but crowd work? Turns out, because he’s very good at it.

Barry started his set for his second sold-out show at ImprovBoston’s 100-seat theater more understated than usual, speaking a couple of notches up from a whisper so the crowd had to lean in a little. The host introduced him by saying Barry wasn’t going to tell any jokes, “He’s just going to talk to you.” Barry acknowledged the premise and said, “It’s going to be an awful show. Terrible idea for a show.” He hyped the previous “Crowd Work” shows in Philly and New York and the early show, and then said he was due for a bad show and this was probably going to be it.He was vamping, catching a thread to establish his particular blend of mock arrogance, self-deprecation and sarcasm; and simultaneously getting himself and his audience in the flow. And he found a lot he could work with. Once on his feet, Barry started building a cast, addressing a woman in the front row who turned out to be an opera singer. “You do, like, the music version of what I do,” said Barry. “Most people don’t get it.” He picked a small group of five or six people and set them up like spinning plates, returning to them when the mood struck.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkVj6QCCWR0]
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Spit Take Saturday: Harland Williams

January 19, 2013
By Brown Paper Tickets

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Silence is the worst thing a comedian can hear. A heckler can at least give them something to work through on stage or let them know that their audience hasn’t suffered a simultaneous brain hemorrhage during their act. Silence, however, feels like you’re trying to make Death itself laugh followed by his cold hand slapping across your face.

Harland Williams conducts a similar, interesting and sometimes entertaining experiment with his latest DVD special, “A Force of Nature.” Where Maria Bamford entertained a familial audience of two for her recent “the special special special!”, he has literally no one to bounce his material off of for his 53 minutes of stage time. The entire performance takes place on a flat hilltop in the Mojave Desert with nothing between him and those watching at home except for a couple of cameras, a constant wind and the occasional crow.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwDP3h496VI]
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Spit Take Saturday: T.J. Miller

January 12, 2013
By Brown Paper Tickets

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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T.J. Miller is loose and natural in pretty much everything he does, whether it’s a small part in a big movie like “Rock of Ages” or last year’s goofy faux-rap excursion “The Extended Play” EP. Lately the Denver-born, Chicago-bred standup has been hosting Comedy Central’s “Mash Up”, a half-hour experiment that goes beyond countless “Tosh.0” rip-offs to take legitimate chances with form and content.

But since he’s so prolific and straddles so many genres, it’s hard to find a project that encapsulates him. Each of the past few years has seen Miller building on his Hollywood bit parts and cross-country touring, and last November he enjoyed his first hour-long Comedy Central special with “No Real Reason”. His latest audio-only release, “Mash Up Audiofile”, is a companion piece to both that and his current Comedy Central gig, and while it shows off many of Miller’s best traits, it also feels like another sampler of his occasional brilliance padded with pleasant but inessential gimmicks.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIh-1ql_xKI]
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Spit Take Saturday: Gary Gulman

January 5, 2013
By Brown Paper Tickets

gary-gulman-inthiseconomy

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Despite the title of his latest Comedy Central special, “In This Economy,” Gary Gulman doesn’t really have much to say about the financial state of our country. Money is very much on his mind throughout the special, but his jokes are more microeconomic than macroeconomic, focused primarily on his own one-man financial system. He starts out with a seemingly dated rant against Blockbuster Video, but that soon segues into an amusing bit about Netflix, which cleverly encapsulates the absurd minutiae of the video-streaming service. “In this economy, if you’re not watching a movie, you’re losing money,” Gulman says to explain his obsession with getting the most out of his monthly subscription fee, and he’s certainly not the only person to feel this way.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-jPTswNlwo]
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Spit Take Saturday: The Best Comedy Releases of 2012 – The year heartfelt comedy melted our steely tickers

December 29, 2012
By Brown Paper Tickets

notaro.jpeg.CROP.article250-medium Welcome to Spit Take Saturday, courtesy of Brown Paper Tickets’ Comedy Doer Julie Seabaugh and her professional comedy criticism site The Spit Take. Julie’s goal with the site is to “elevate the public perception of stand-up comedy to that of a legitimate art form, and to enable comedy criticism be taken as seriously as that of theater, film, music, food, even video games. No a**-kissing. No bias. No mercy. Just honest, unfiltered, long-form reviews written by professional, knowledgeable comedy critics.”

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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1. Tig Notaro, “Live”

There is a way to make everything funny. Everything. And there is no finer example of this concept than Tig Notaro’s accidental comedy gem—an album recorded from a set at Largo that the owner just so happened to tape. Having recently received a cancer diagnosis, Notaro is honest in a way that’s not only inspiring for other comedians, but for everyone hoping to face problems head on. Notaro does so with immeasurable grace and wit, letting the world know that comedy is her armor, and that truth in comedy isn’t just a catchy phrase, it’s a goddamn prerequisite.

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