Photo by m. berru

Friday:
Tiny Hostages — which is either a troupe name or an actual group of diminutive captives — perform The Improvised Movie, which is exactly what it sounds like, at the iO West. (8pm, $10) Sizzz-eth Morris, Wizzz-yatt Cenac & Kizzz-ulap Vilaysack welcome their posse to Rap Crisis Center, their night of hip hop-based stand-up, sketch and live music at the UCB. (9:30pm, $8) A group of performers search the sketch landscape to find their own truth, regardless of what is supported by fact, in The Pursuit of Truthyness at Second City. (10pm, $10)

Saturday:
Ed Helms and Seth Morris welcome guests Morgan Murphy, AD Miles and Nick Kroll to their magical puppet talk show appropriately-named Seth and Ed’s Puppet Talk Show. (midnight, $5) The Tomorrow Show guarantees that “this show will sell out”; seeing as their guests include Mike Kenally, Mary Van Note, Matt Manser, Erica Doering, Jim Earl & Chris Hobbs, we tend to agree. (midnight, $5) If the above midnight selections are a little too rich for your blood, head over to iO West’s cross between “Inside the Actor’s Studio” and YouTube at the Sinema Symposium. (midnight, Free!)

Sunday:
Watch Cartoon Overlord ruin the magic of Disney movies by drawing, animating, voicing and creating an improvised cartoon right in front of your very eyes at Acme. (8pm, $12) The undiscovered comedy acoustic fem-rock duo VOMIT! take their first step to getting discovered with their show at The WE. (9pm, $8) Jeff Garlin welcomes JB Smoove and the twice-above-mentioned Seth Morris to his Combo Platter. (9:30pm, $1)

If you’re like us, your eyes are already starting to blur after spending the last few hours trying to find the face of Jesus in the smoke behind the Hollywood sign. To put off the inevitable bloodshot eyes for a bit, we recommend cleansing your visual palette with the below video, a behind-the-scenes look at the turmoil surrounding Paul Rudd’s appearance on The Michael Showalter Showalter:

We’re guessing it’s a promotion for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer gone wrong:

Jesse Thorn, “America’s Radio Sweetheart”, recently announced the next step in his plan for global domination, a plan that involves depriving the rest of the world of sleep by producing 24 hours worth of podcasts a day:

Last year, I did a show with an old friend of TSOYA, Mal Sharpe of Coyle & Sharpe. Mal and his partner, James P. Coyle, spent the early 1960s walking around San Francisco, roping people into some of the most bizarre put-ons imaginable, and recording the whole thing for their radio show. That TSOYA episode was one of our best-received shows ever, and it got me to thinking. I knew Mal and his daughter Jennifer had a huge archive of Coyle & Sharpe material that was hard to find or hadn’t seen the light of day since it was broadcast, so I asked them if they wanted to do a podcast with maximumfun.org. To my delight, they said yes! Coyle & Sharpe: The Imposters was born.

The podcast will be produced weekly, either from their CD releases or from Mal Sharpe’s archives. The first fantastic episode features the pair approaching random San Franciscans on the street to offer them jobs, claiming to be hosts on a show called “Job Opportunities”. We highly recommend subscribing to it, even if it means hastening Thorn’s ascent to his role as Dominator of Earth.

We know, we know.

If we write another few posts about Jen Kirkman we run the risk of heading into a Rob Pash-esque fit of single-performer promotion, a path that will inevitably lead us to grow a bouffant, add about a foot to our height, and, years down the road, end up in a mental institution, sent there for speaking nothing but the phrase “JenKirkmanJenKirkmanJenKirkman”, in a Being John Malkovich kind of way. But, honestly, what other choice do we have during this, The Year of The Kirkman? To hopefully ward off our eventual institutionalization for a few years, we’re just going to make this short and sweet: Jen is doing two shows at the UCB tonight.

First up, a half-hour of stand up comedy. (8pm, $5) Over at AST, Jen goes into detail about what to expect:

There comes a time in every comedian’s life when they have put themselves doing stand-up comedy for 1/2 hour on tape for various people to scrutinize. I’m recording that night, not for sale or distribution but for “the inside”. I need an audience.

“Is this new material?” No. It is not. Some of it has been covered on the CD. Hopefully I will cover it more tightly.

Following that, Jen will be appearing as a special guest during The Benson Interruption, guest-hosted by Paul F. Tompkins. (9:30pm, $5) In order to make our daily quota of made-up words, we’re going to go ahead and call this show “The TompkInterruption”.

by David Pardue

Doug Benson loves movies. This is no secret. For the past six years, he’s been the resident movie critic at bobanddavid.com, weighing in with succinct reviews which boil the average movie down to something around a sentence (”YOU, ME AND DUPREE – You and Dupree can do whatever you want, just leave me out of it”). In some cases, a sentence is much more than some of these movies deserve (”HOOT – isn’t one”).

We recently subjected Benson to The Coming Q&A interrogation, which in practice looks a lot like those billboards for Captivity.

How long have you been doing the I Love Movies podcast?
One a week for 22 weeks, so how long is that? Four and a half years, I think.

Has the ILM podcast officially replaced your ILM column on Bobanddavid.com?
No, because I learned recently that there are people out there who like my sense of humor but hate my voice, so that guilted me into writing another batch of reviews for bobanddavid.com. But also yes, basically.

Why do you tape the podcast in front of a live audience?
Because I like knowing if people are enjoying the conversation. If the audience doesn’t laugh for a few minutes in a row, I try to change the direction of the conversation.

Your Hard n Phirm-penned theme song is quite catchy. But is this lyric really true: “there’s still not one that he won’t see, cause Doug loves movies”?
I sat through all of The Postman in a movie theater. So I’ll go with true.

If you played the Leonard Maltin game against Leonard Maltin, how do you think you’d do?
I think it would be too close to predict a winner. And that I would want it more.

Any upcoming guests you’re looking forward to?
Matt Besser will be appearing on the show for the first time, and Patton Oswalt will be doing it again on April 3. I’m going to be doing a lot of repeat guests because I feel like people will want to hear more from people like Paul F. Tompkins, Graham Elwood, Sarah Silverman and Sean Cullen. (Plus some others that I am forgetting!)

Doug Benson’s I Love Movies is taped every other Tuesday at 6:00pm at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. The next installment is on April 3rd, with special guests Patton Oswalt and Matt Besser. Admission is free.

Neil Campbell — last seen playing by his own hardcore “Rock, Paper, Scissors” rules during the Super Bowl — relaunched his website “My Naked Dad” this past week with a slick new design:

Today, I’m officially announcing the relaunch of mynakeddad.com. To celebrate the relaunch, I will be posting a new strip every day this week from Monday to Friday. After that, a new strip will be posted every Monday. In addition to the strips, there will be some other new goodies posted this week, so keep checking back! And while you’re visiting, be sure to check out my Videos and Blog. Thanks!

Today’s comic strip is after the jump, banished there for its hand-drawn genitalia. We’re not sure how your work might feel about cartoon representations of adult weinies.

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Fracas! IV, the coolest named “first ever purely collegiate improv festival”, hosted by Second Nature Improv at the University of Southern California, announced its full three-day schedule on its website the other day.

Each evening of the consists of 5 performances where individual troupes perform. After the individual performances Improv Jams allow players from multiple troupes to perform with each other.

During the day, troupe members are free get their tourism on in Los Angeles, take Fracas! workshops, provided by LA’s finest improvisation professionals, or attend discussion panels with improvisers currently working in film, television, and theatre.

Fracas! takes place April 12-14. Head over here to see which troupes are performing when. For those interested in many, many, many, many more details, an extremely long press release is waiting for your perusal after the jump.

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Rule #3 of comedy blogging: Whenever the four members of the UCB decide to put their homicidal feud on hold for a moment and make a rare appearance together, it deserves it’s own post.

This Saturday night, the four will be recording the commentary tracks in front of a live(!) studio(!) audience(!) for two episodes — “Spaghetti Jesus” and “Supercool” — from Season 2 of their Comedy Central show for an impending DVD release. (8pm, $8)

Following the recording, the four will share a few “Supercool” stories and partake in a question and answer session with a handful of snot-nosed pretentious student filmmakers they planted in the audience before the show, James Lipton-style. If you see one of them about to raise their hand, feel free to kick them in the side of their knee, dropping them swiftly to the floor and opening the floor to less douchy inquiries.

by M. Berru

“A really nice lady” is how Jesse Thorn—the 25 year-old producer and voice of popular radio show and podcast The Sound of Young America—described me on-air, a day after this interview. I may or may not live up to the bespectacled, tweed-wearing, briefcase-toting image that “really nice lady” brings to mind, but then, what exactly did I picture when I planned my Saturday afternoon with a man who semi-ironically calls himself “America’s Radio Sweetheart”? It certainly wasn’t what happened—boba tea in a Koreatown coffeeshop, where “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race” by Fall Out Boy played not once, but twice, in the background. Musical backdrop aside, what I did expect from our discussion was provided by Mr. Thorn in spades; we two comedy nerds had a stimulating intellectual conversation about the alternative comedy scene, the internet, our favorite idols, podcasts, and Thorn’s own ambitions and shortcomings. Self-conscious of “the myth that interviews are about anything other than self-promotion in a very uncomfortable way,” as Thorn puts it, his existence is also simply one that contributes to the collage of unique personalities found in the L.A. comedy community.

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