Category Archives: TV

Not long ago, we linked to an article about Eddie Brill who was the warm-up comedian for David Letterman and also the guy who scouted and recommended the booking of stand-up comedians for Dave's show. Certain things Eddie said about women in that job description angered some and it was announced yesterday that he's been relieved of his scouting/booking duties, though he will apparently still handle warm-ups.

A number of blog postings I've read about this have opined that Eddie should have lost that job because Late Show has had a pretty poor track record of booking good stand-ups. I think that's grossly unfair. As near as I can tell, Brill has been doing that part of his duties quite efficiently. The assignment, after all, is not to book great new stand-ups who'll have everyone talking about how funny they are. It's to find and suggest the kinds of comedians that Dave Letterman wants on his show. Those are not remotely the same thing.

As for his comments about women, I thought they were a bit off-the-mark but only a bit. He's right that there are a lot of female comics who try to act like men. He's wrong to the extent he was suggesting that all or most stand-up ladies are "inauthentic" because they do that. I can think of a lot of successful ones who don't: Rita Rudner, Janeane Garofalo, Kathleen Madigan, Paula Poundstone, Wendy Liebman…I don't think Kathy Griffin or Sarah Silverman fit that description and oddly enough, neither do a lot of openly gay women comics like Ellen Degeneres and Wanda Sykes. You may not think all of those ladies are funny but all of them could easily do five minutes on Letterman's show just as well as any male who's been on there. (Not that some of them would want to…)

Brill's comments really only drew fire because women like that are rarely booked with Dave — though Griffin is on tonight and may even talk about this if they'll let her. In any case, if women comics are being bypassed on the show, it might be because Mr. Brill never recommended many or it might be because Mr. Letterman vetoed those recommendations. It might even be because Dave never said — as Mr. Carson did once when TV Guide pointed out the gender gap in his bookings — "Hey, find me some female stand-ups." That led to Maureen Murphy and Victoria Jackson and a few other bookings and probably got Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show more often.

My suspicion here is that Eddie Brill is to some extent taking the fall for preferences from above. I also suspect that if Dave was upset about that N.Y. Times article it was mainly due to (a) the attention paid to someone who's supposed to maintain a lower profile and (b) the revelation that Brill has a side business charging up-and-coming comics to train them. It's not always an unacceptable conflict-of-interest for folks who are in positions to hire (or to recommend hiring) to accept money from those who seek to be hired…but it can make a lot of people very uncomfortable. If I were running a TV show, I would pay my casting people well but forbid them from doing that kind of thing.

Quick: Name a show that was hosted by Steve Allen and later by Johnny Carson.

If you said The Tonight Show, you're right…unless someone wants to nitpick. Allen's version was only called Tonight, not The Tonight Show.

But there's another, inarguable answer and we have it today over at our sister site, Old TV Tickets.

A portrait of Eddie Brill, who does the warm-ups for David Letterman's show and books the comedians.

A lot of folks seem to lament that none of the current late night shows have the star-making power for comedians that Mr. Carson once had. I think that time has passed and is unlikely to return…and Johnny's show didn't even have much power in that area its last few years. People forget that when Carson's Tonight Show booked new stand-ups, it was one of the very few programs on TV that did that. He kind of had the "introducing new comedians" market to himself. Now, in the era of cable and Comedy Central and so many other shows, there are other avenues…and a hot new stand-up in the club circuit no longer has to wait a year or two until the late night bookers decide he's "ready."

Night before last on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had Senator Jim DeMint on for one of those conversations that goes along and just when it gets interesting, it cuts off and Stewart says, "We're going to throw the whole thing up on the web." I have to remember not to watch those when they're on in truncated form and to wait until the next day and watch them online.

The one with DeMint was fascinating. The Senator said a lot of rational, common sense things that I suspect he said because of where he was and who was in the audience…things he would not say, and might in fact contradict in front of a Tea Party crowd. He also looked a bit embarrassed at times when he called for calmer rhetoric and then Stewart cited non-calm rhetoric from the book the Senator was there to promote.

Still, it was the kind of interview that no one else but Jon Stewart does, groping for common ground instead of barbecuing red meat and wrestling. And DeMint came off as less the demagogue and slave to those of great wealth than he usually does.

I thought of embedding the whole thing here but Comedy Central embeds are kind of screwy and can do odd things to your site. Mine has had enough tsuris lately so I'm just going to give you this link to go to their website and watch the entire conversation. Both parties frame their positions in ways you never hear on MSNBC or Fox. It's so odd that you have to go to a comedy show to hear a political discussion between two people acting like human beings.

I only caught a little of Stephen Colbert's presidential announcement last night but it seemed to be a brilliant slam at the notion that a candidate's non-coordinated Super PAC is an independent entity. As I understand, Colbert can't really run for President on the South Carolina ballot. It's too late to get his name on there and the state doesn't count write-ins. But he can sure milk the effort for material.

It is now possible to advance-order the DVD set of the TV series, Bob…which, by the way, turns out to be the most difficult TV show ever to locate on an Internet search engine. It comes out April 3, they say, and you can lock in Amazon's lowest price between now and then by clicking here. If enough of you order via that link, I might make enough in commissions to purchase my own copy. It's annoying when you have to cough up money to buy a copy of something you worked on but you usually do.