Viggo Venn Wins Britain's Got Talent 2023
A comedian still has yet to win America's Got Talent, though...but who knows?
My friends in the clown community got super excited this spring when they saw Norwegian clown Viggo Venn’s audition for Britain’s Got Talent 2023. I can only imagine how they must feel knowing Venn won the competition, announced on last night’s finale on ITV. Venn wins £250,000 prize and a slot in the lineup at the Royal Variety Performance in November at The Royal Albert Hall in London. I’m looking forward to seeing Venn’s full show this August at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Here’s what he did for his finale, btw…
The new season of AGT, meanwhile, just got underway last week on NBC. This summer’s first major comedian to audition, Orlando Leyba, who is no stranger to NBC or competitions, having appeared multiple times on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon as well as on Bring The Funny.
Whether or not Leyba or any comedian ever wins AGT, the show feels as though it does a great job of propelling all the funny people who audition into bigger careers on the road. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the guy who has been booking comedians on AGT for years, who spoke to me a couple of years ago for Piffany.
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E-Gadsby! Critics Savage Not-So-Great Gadsby Picasso Prank At Brooklyn Museum
For those of you who’ve watched Nanette, you may recall Hannah Gadsby took some swipes at Pablo Picasso in her award-winning comedy special. Gadsby’s new Picasso exhibit which opened at Brooklyn Museum over the weekend? Not so much with the rave reviews. Art critics wonder where the exhibit even is at “It’s Pablo-Matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which 50 years after Picasso died in 1973, features one-liners from Gadsby on placards next to his works, audio commentary, and other assorted quotes.
From Hell Gate: “What's the point? I'm astounded to say that there may not be one at all. Don't get excited—"It's Pablo-matic" teases that it should be easy to deflate Picasso's myth, but ultimately is too scared to even try. This is not some heretical assault on Picasso; rather like its title, it's a half-finished riff.”
ARTNews felt the true problem was “the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.”
And a widely-circulated NYT review wrote, in part: “anyone who was expecting this to be a Netflix declension of the Degenerate Art Show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as ritualized scapegoat, can rest easy. There’s little to see. There’s no catalog to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point.”
Louis CK Documentary Pulled By Paramount
Variety reported on Monday that Paramount Global had scrapped plans to showcase an upcoming Showtime documentary on Louis CK and his fall and rise since #MeToo. As much as I’d love to blame me for this, it’s apparently part of a larger Paramount pivot away from docs. From what I’ve learned (full disclosure: I sat for extended interviews with the director and producers last fall), the doc is almost done and should still be seen, sometime and somewhere, TBD. Stay tuned.
R.I.P. Jacky Oh
Jacklyn Smith, aka Jacky Oh, died unexpectedly May 31 in Miami, where she had gone to undergo cosmetic surgery. She was 32. Oh and comedian DC Young Fly met on the set of MTV’s Wild ‘N Out, and have been together since 2015. They have three kids together. DC Young Fly has been out on the road this spring playing arenas with the Straight Jokes No Chaser tour as well as his 85 South Show crew — that trio also has their first Netflix special, 85 South Ghetto Legends, due out June 20. My heart goes out to their family and loved ones.
Industry News and Notes
Stand Up! Records, with Omnivore Records and Richard Pryor’s production company Indigo, has re-released newly remastered vinyl editions of the late great comedian’s first two albums, Richard Pryor and ‘Craps’ (After Hours), as the vinyl debut of Live At The Comedy Store, 1973. The double-deluxe vinyl reissues also include bonus material originally issued as tracks on Evolution/Revolution: The Early Years (1966-1974) and No Pryor Restraint: Life in Concert, …And It’s Deep Too! The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968-1992). Jennifer Lee Pryor, Reggie Collins and Cheryl Pawelski produced the reissues, all of which were mastered by Michael Graves, with vinyl remastering on the self-titled album's bonus material and lacquers cut by Greg Reierson.
What else is new?
Spotify announced Monday it plans to lay off about 200 more workers as the company pivots its podcasting business, saying “we will be combining Parcast and Gimlet into a renewed Spotify Studios.” The company bought Gimlet Media and Parcast for about $300 million, followed by The Ringer for about $200 million, and also reportedly convinced Joe Rogan to go exclusively with Spotify for another $200 million.
That Heritage Auction I mentioned last month took place over the weekend, with the original Cheers bar selling for $675,000, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show set went for $275,000, the All in the Family set sold for $125,000 (the same buyer also took home the Bunker chairs from season nine for $250,000), and David Letterman’s NBC desk and backdrop for $100,000.
Sebastian Maniscalco and Bert Kreischer hung on to Top 10 movie placements in their second week as leading men, with Maniscalco’s About My Father raking in $9.19 million worldwide as of Sunday, while Kreischer’s The Machine has garnered about $8.85 million. You’ve got another week and a half to support these stand-ups on the big screen before The Flash and Elemental overwhelm the cineplexes on June 16!
SiriusXM premiered a new game show Who Is This, hosted by comedian Dave Ross, on Laugh USA channel 98. Described as “in the vein of Name That Tune, in which comedians compete to identify famous (and more obscure) stand-up clips,” new episodes air Thursdays at 10 a.m. Eastern, with replays through the weekend.
The National Comedy Center, in Jamestown NY, announced that anyone 17 and younger will be admitted free to the interactive museum all summer, (sponsored by Shults Auto Group).
New tours announced from Dane Cook and Matt Rife, presales happening now.
Submissions close at 5 p.m. Friday June 9 for The PIT’s Saturday Night Live Scholarship, designed to train comedy students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to improve diversity in TV recruitment.
Last Week’s Specials
New on DryBar
New on YouTube
Yannis Pappas: Mom Love (via 800 Pound Gorilla Media) premieres tonight
Joe Kwaczala: Ooh La La (via Helium Comedy Studios)
Also, Ali Siddiq’s The Domino Effect part two Loss, came out on YouTube (previously debuted on Moment).
Note: I don’t know how or if we should acknowledge the people who are making fake specials and putting them online. They’re titled on YouTube as specials and picture themselves with a comedy club backdrop, but when you click play, it’s usually just a guy by himself talking to camera or, in this latest one, only the audio of a guy talking while still photos rotate onscreen. Sure, you might point out Netflix released a posthumous Norm MacDonald special that he’d recorded by himself before he died, but that wasn’t intended to be the final product. It reminds me of what wrote about in March on when fake podcast clips began circulating on TikTok. Just because you can call something a comedy special doesn’t make it an actual comedy special. Perhaps I’ll have to go through this full list at some point and make some judgment calls on exactly how many “true” comedy “specials” we’ve been flooded with this year.
THIS WEEK: 8
LAST WEEK: 15
THIS MONTH (JUNE): 8
RUNNING TOTAL for 2023: 311+8=319
Fun Things To Do In NYC
This weekend’s show I plugged in The New York Times: If weather permits, then Kevin James Doyle will host his 10th outdoor show at Low Tide Motors, a motorcycle garage in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Dina Hashem and Dan Perlman are on the lineup.
Elsewhere around the city this week…
Jacqueline Novak is finally filming her great show, Get On Your Knees, this Thursday and Friday at The Town Hall. Limited tickets remain via Ticketmaster. Novak spoke to me back in 2019 during her run at Cherry Lane.
At Union Hall: Ashley Ray records her album tonight, Natasha Vaynblat records her album Wednesday and Saturday, Adam Cayton-Holland and Irene Tu headline separate shows on Thursday, Ian Lockwood hosts his Boyfriend Pageant on Saturday, Julia Johns visits on Sunday, and Phoebe Robinson and Calise Hawkins do two shows next Monday.
At The Bell House: Stamptown returns on Thursday, while Jamie Denbo presents “BEVERLY LIVE” with special guest Laura Benanti on Sunday.
Feminist Buzzkills Lizz Winstead (Comedian, “The Daily Show” co-creator, founder of Abortion Access Front); Moji Alawode-El (writer, activist, marketing guru Abortion Access Front), and Marie Khan (abortion funder and programs director for Midwest Access Coalition) host their first LIVE podcast recording Wednesday at Drom in the East Village, with guests Jeff Hiller and V Spehar.
Matt Ruby hosts “Misguided Meditation,” a comedy show with visuals, soundscapes and ruminations, on Friday at Gaia NoMaya in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn.
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