somehow this ends up being about comedy

Posted on By Wil

After ignoring the hype for as long as I could, I finally checked out Hulu, mostly because I knew they had shows I watched when I was a kid, like Emergency! and S.W.A.T., along with nostalgic classics I’d always wanted to watch but had never seen, like The Time Tunnel .

Turns out there’s a lot of movies there, too, as well as a ton of classic SNL clips. There are short commercials in most of the programming, but they’re not that intrusive or offensive to me; at least they don’t crank the volume up to ear-bleeding levels like they do on broadcast TV. Overall, it seems like a fair trade to me as a television viewer (as an actor whose residual checks are ever-smaller because of online reuse, I’m not crazy about it, but that’s not the point of this post.)

I have this nifty new iMac, with a monitor that’s bigger than the first TV I bought for myself with Star Trek money when I was in my teens. It’s got a better picture than the first TV I bought when I was officially an adult, and I won’t even address how vastly superior it is in memory and performance to pretty much every computer I’ve owned so far, including the MacBook Pro I’m using right now.

Suffice to say that it makes a great replacement television while my big screen HDTV is awaiting a replacement lamp, and I’ve been relaxing a little bit every day with some of those classic shows I mentioned above.

It was the SNL clips, though, that I’ve loved the most, and they’ve sent me down memory lane to my teen years, when I was just discovering stand-up comedy.

Remember when we’d get together to watch HBO comedy specials from people like Steven Wright and George Carlin? Remember the first time you saw Delirious and Raw? I miss those days. I guess it’s cool that Comedy Central provides an outlet for today’s comedians and the comedians who rip them off, but I miss the excitement of watching a new special or going to a theater to watch a comedy movie.

Anyway, I was thinking about some of my favorite comedy films and specials, and came up with this incomplete list:

Delirious

Raw

Everything Bill Hicks ever did

Bob Saget at the 9th Annual Young Comedians Special

Howie Mandel at the Young Comedians All-Star Reunion

A Steven Wright Special (which is inexplicably available anywhere I looked online. Sad)

You are all Diseased

Bill Cosby Himself

That’s just what I get off the top of my head; I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff that I just haven’t thought about in years. Oh! Like comedy albums. Damn, I could go on forever with those. Arizona Bay, Meat Bob, I Have a Pony, Class Clown, Louder than Hell . . . damn. Do they even make comedy albums any more?

I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but all that stuff would become a huge influence on me, as a writer and performer. All the time I spent listening to those albums and watching those specials on crappy VHS copies that I wore out paid off the first time I set foot on the stage at ACME so many years ago.

I was really attracted to comedy as social commentary (surprise), but there was stuff that I enjoyed just for yucks, like Howie Mandel blowing up a glove on his head and Emo Phillips . . . well, being Emo Phillips.

There are some great comedians coming up today. I love Paul F. Tompkins, Dimitri Martin and Patton Oswalt. Again, I’m sure there are others, but those are the guys who come to mind right away.

Feel free to add and share your faves in the comments.

this is awesome. awesome in pants!

Posted on By Wil


Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.
I’ve been hearing about this for weeks, but didn’t have time to watch the trailer until this morning. I was super excited to see that my fellow ACME-alumnus Felicia Day (one of the mad geniuses behind the hilarious-because-it’s-painfully-true series The Guild) got to work with Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon.
I can’t wait to see this, and I thought I’d share it with WWdN readers, because it seems to be the sort of thing a lot of you guys probably already know about — er, I mean, would really dig.

i saw david sedaris last night

Posted on By Wil

We saw David Sedaris last night. He’s the reason I’m a writer, so I was pretty excited to see him for the first time.

I was not disappointed.

We sat in the balcony of a sold-out Royce Hall at UCLA, and listened to him read for about 90 minutes. A few things struck me during the performance:

He does the same thing with his feet that I do when I perform from my books. I know it’s best to keep both of them planted firmly on the ground and stay relatively still, but I always find myself lifting one foot up, and pointing it toe-down to the floor behind me. It’s kind of a ballet-looking move, and I always feel a little silly when I catch myself doing it. After seeing him do it, though . . . ah, who am I kidding? I’ll still feel silly.

At one point, I looked at the audience, and saw people leaning forward in their chairs, doubled over with laughter. He’ll never see that, because they’re hidden by the footlights and he’s focused on his material. He doesn’t need to see the audience to know that they’re enjoying themselves, but I wonder if he knows just how much they are.

He signs books before and after his performance. I always sign after mine, but I’m always such a ball of nerves before, I can’t imagine sitting in the lobby of the theater, meeting the audience — and expending the energy that is necessary for a good signing — before I go on stage.

Anne has his new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. I won’t get to read it until she’s finished, but she loves it. She read it on the plane next to me the whole way to Hawaii. She shook our seats because she was laughing so much. He read a story from it called Crybaby, and I understood why.

My favorite piece of the night, though, was one said just wouldn’t work unless he read it. I don’t even know how to describe it, but if you get a chance to hear him tell the story about Nicaragua, drop everything and get to the theater.

He seems like a kind, intelligent, sensitive guy who appreciates his success. I wanted to meet him and tell him that he’s the reason I’m a writer, but the line was three hours long just moments after the show ended. I know he doesn’t use computers or read reviews, but I wonder . . . if someone reading this sees him, and has the opportunity, would you tell him I said thank you?

i think the planet is trying to tell us something . . .

Posted on By Wil

North Pole ice ‘may disappear by September’

Arctic sea ice is now retreating so quickly that scientists say there is now a 50-50 chance that it will have gone completely by September.

[…]

The Arctic is seen as an important indicator of the potentially catastrophic changes that scientists say will come as the planet warms.

Honeybee collapse claims record number of hives this year

A record 36 percent of U.S. commercial bee colonies have been lost to mysterious causes so far this year and worse may be yet to come, experts told a congressional panel Thursday.

The year’s bee colony losses are about twice the usual seen following a typical winter, scientists warn. Despite ambitious new research efforts, the causes remain a mystery.

Um. I like this planet. It’s really beautiful, and it’s currently the only one I can live on. Could we maybe work together as a species to stop shit like this from happening?

wil’s big news of the day

Posted on By Wil

I was picking tomatoes in my back yard yesterday afternoon when the phone rang. Caller ID said it was my manager. I picked it up and said, “Mister Black! What’s up?”

“Seth Macfarlane wants to work with you tomorrow,” he said.

The next thing I knew, I was looking into the concerned faces of my wife and kids, while a machine behind me went ping!

“What happened?” I said.

“You answered the phone, screamed like a little girl, and fainted,” Anne said.

“So it wasn’t a dream!” I said. I leapt to my feet, doffed a Fedora, twirled my mustache and added, “Quickly! To the auto-gyro!”

Minutes later, I was airborne, soaring over the Los Angeles basin, while striped-shirt-wearing nogoodniks chased after me in pedal-powered flying contraptions. It was perilous, to be sure, but my superior piloting and my trusty manservant Kwame’s peerless skill with curare-tipped darts assured my escape.

My brief and unexpected foray into a 1930s pulp novel concluded, I returned to my home, where I got back on the phone.

“What just happened to you?” He said.

“Um. Nothing,” I said. “What am I doing tomorrow?”

“Seth Macfarlane has a new online project called Cavalcade, and he wants you to work on it.” He said.

“Seth Macfarlane wants to work with me? Are you sure he didn’t mean the other Will Wheaton, the well-known jazz singer?”

“Yes, you.” He said. “I’m e-mailing you the script right now.”

The script arrived, I laughed myself silly, and called my manager back. “This is hilarious! There isn’t a single thing about this that I don’t like.”

“I knew you’d say that,” he said. “I’ll call them now and confirm you.”

. . . and that’s the story of how I got to work on Cavalcade this afternoon, where Seth Macfarlane complimented my beard and told me I was funny.

I am, without a doubt, the luckiest guy in this room right now.

Some parts of this story have been mildly exaggerated for dramatic effect.