Today in press releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

 

 

RIVER ROCK CASINO RESORT

 

PRESENTS

A SIT DOWN WITH

ROBIN WILLIAMS

 & DAVID STEINBERG

FRIDAY, JUNE 8

 

Richmond, BC – An Academy Award-winning actor and multiple Grammy Award-winning performer unparalleled in the scope of his imagination, Robin Williams continues to add to his repertoire of indelible characters. Well known for his free-associative monologues and for pointing out life’s absurdities through his astute social and political observations, Williams performed 90 shows in 65 cities before 300,000 fans over the course of his most recent stand-up tour. Born in Chicago and raised in both Michigan and California, he trained at New York’s Juilliard School under John Houseman. It was in 1978 when Williams first captured the attention of the world as “Mork from Ork” on the hit television series, Mork & Mindy which ran on ABC for four seasons.

He then made his cinematic debut in 1980 when he starred as the title character in Robert Altman’s Popeye. His additional film credits include The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson, Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets Society, The Fisher King, Hook, Mrs. Doubtfire, Jumanji, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting, Patch Adams and Night at the Museum. Williams takes great joy in supporting causes too numerous to identify. He has toured the Middle East four times to help raise morale among the troops and is perhaps best known philanthropically for his affiliation with “Comic Relief” which was founded in 1986 as a non-profit organization to help America’s homeless. To date, the overall efforts of the “Comic Relief” organization have raised over $50 million. Robin Williams will be appearing along with Canada’s own David Steinberg for an evening of laughs at the River Rock Casino Resort on June 8, 2012.

 

 TICKETS ON SALE THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 @ 10:00 AM

 

 

DOORS   7:00 PM         SHOW   8:00 PM

 

 

Tickets: Orchestra $124.50 & Golden Circle $174.50 (+ Service Charges)

 

 

Tickets available at all Ticketmaster Outlets or charge-by-phone 1-855-985-5000

or order on-line at www.ticketmaster.ca

 

Ages 19 years & over

Break Room Live with Maron & Seder

I was a big Marc Maron fan without ever having seen his stand-up act. For years I admired his intellect as a panel guest on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. It was sit-down comedy, I guess. And I loved him in animated form on my favourite animated show of all time, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist. Then in 2003, I met his publicist at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. She told me Marc would be playing the Chutzpah festival in Vancouver the following year. I couldn't wait.

When the time came, I arranged an interview. Needless to say, it was a good one. The guy is whip-smart and full of neuroses, always a great combination for a comic and an interview. When I finally got to see his act, I wasn't disappointed, even though he almost killed my baby. My wife was pregnant. Right after the show, she experienced some bleeding so she went to a clinic the next day and the doc told her she probably lost it. We figured Maron made her laugh so much she spontaneously aborted the fetus. Thankfully, it was a false alarm. All was forgiven.

A couple years later, Maron returned to the Vancouver comedy festival (not sure what it was called that year – it has a different name almost every year). I got to see a much rawer Maron experience than the more genteel (but not gentile) show at the Norman Rothstein Theatre.

Here's what I wrote in a festival wrap-up. I believe this section on Maron was edited out of the final story that ran in the Straight:

Marc Maron, former morning man on the Air America radio network and one of the prime movers in the so-called alternative comedy movement of the mid-1980s, was nothing short of brilliant all six times I saw him. His best set, oddly, was at Balthazar’s House of Comedy on Monday night. The restaurant/bar is not the perfect comedy room with its temporary stage and L-shaped layout. Throw in a party in an adjoining room, and you’d expect nothing good to come out of it. But Maron hit the stage with attitude and did 38 minutes of pure gold, talking about everything from religion (“I don’t mean to mock the myths that define some of you”) to drug testing (“It’s cheating. If you can’t tell I’m high just by looking at me, I win”) to politics (“George W. Bush is absolutely the right president to oversee the end of the world. I think he’ll do it quickly and efficiently”).

Unfortunately, the next night at Yuk Yuk’s, as good as he was, four fans sitting front and centre, ruined it for the rest of us by constantly interrupting, while Yuks security stood by the whole night doing nothing. In 15 more minutes than he got the previous night, he got to only half of the same material. But Maron handled it beautifully, eventually pointing at the overzealous quartet saying, “I’m the audience now. Bad show.”

And this brief graf was also lost in the editing, I do believe, the next time he came to town:

Marc Maron’s existential angst is always a treat. His wife left him this year, so his soul-baring was even more pronounced than usual. But as he says, he’s just as happy if someone comes away thinking he’s hilarious as he is if they just hope he’s okay.

The guy's a real mensch, too. I e-mailed him during his first comedy festival appearance here in 2006 to ask if he'd be in town on the Sunday night after the festival ended, and if so, would he want to do my little radio show. He wrote back and said he wouldn't be, but if I could get him an extra night at the hotel, he'd stick around and do it because he was just going to be driving to Seattle and didn't need to be there until mid-week anyway. Our show – hell, our station – has no budget, so I asked festival organizer Will Davis if he could keep Marc an extra night at the hotel. Bingo, he was in.

Marc was true to his word. A couple nights before the show, I saw him and he asked if he could bring his friend Janeane Garofalo with him to the show. Yes, that Janeane Garofalo. Can you imagine a better show than Marc Maron and Janeane Garofalo on co-op radio? I couldn't. So I said of course. The next night I got an e-mail from him, again asking about Janeane, saying that if I didn't want her there, that was fine. I responded that I'd be more than happy to have her on, but it's totally up to him if he wanted to share the hour with someone else. Finally, on the evening of the show, he called me at home, just to make sure I was okay with him bringing Janeane with him. You can hear the hour-long show right here.

All this just as a preamble to say I stumbled across a show Marc's doing now on Air America. Or it's somehow affiliated with Air America. I don't quite get it. It's a web show, I think, on video. He does it with Sam Seder, but this week he's all alone. It's a funny political show. I don't usually care for bloviating opinion jocks, but this show is fantastic.

I couldn't figure out how to embed this particular clip, so I'll just provide a link below. In this particular episode, one of his viewers IM'd him asking for his top five comics of all time. Throughout the 22 minutes, he keeps coming back to comedy, all the while giving a thoughtful and intelligent lesson on the art form. He's more articulate off the top of his head than most people are in print (read: me). When a woman IM's him asking how he could possibly like Sam Kinison, Maron says this:

The reason that good comics like Sam Kinison is that he pushed an envelope. He created a delivery system that was completely unique and his own. He also had a sort of energy of wrongness and transcended moral barriers. Obviously he was questionable in a lot of ways but there's a couple of bits of his, just because of the way he delivered, because he had the thrust of the preacher and he developed this device in himself. He was sort of the perfect angry clown and he was a complete original. No one had ever seen anything like him and no one has seen anything like him to this day. His bit on drugs, his bit on Charlie Manson were spectacular. His bits on Jesus were spectacular. The homosexual necrophilia bit was spectacular. The questionable bit about "move to where the food is", which is wrong politically but nonetheless a clever bit. His stuff on women and on AIDS was pretty insensitive, though a couple things on women and abuse, even though he was speaking from the point of view of a potential abuser, were true-to-life psychic nightmares of many people. So I think that's why. I can understand why women didn't like him. A certain type of woman. But believe me, he had no problem with the other type.

He also talks about old-timers like Shelley Berman, Buddy Hackett and Lord Buckley. And brings up the Robin Williams-Steven Pearl comparisons. And if you heard him on my show talking about Dane Cook, you'll know he doesn't hold back. Here he is on his biggest beef with comedy:

The thing that I find most disturbing, because the business has expanded so much, because people can find their own little demographics or sort of campaign to get people to like them, and because of Last Comic Standing you get people who are too green or unprofessional or unoriginal. I think unoriginal or hacky disturbs me more than anything else. And I think the other thing that disturbs me is, because there is a movement towards alternative comedy, that I can sit in the back of a comedy room and close my eyes and not be able to tell the difference between comics and how they deliver jokes and how they structure jokes and how they distance themselves from anything real and just manufacture little packages, little poetic packages that have turns of phrases at the end without taking any emotional risk to find out who they are up there or be something different or at least engage in something that is real life.

To watch the whole thing (and you really should), go here: http://airamerica.com/content/post-show-chat-wednesday

But for some reason, I'm able to embed this short clip from a show earlier this week. Here Marc has a brilliant take on Bristol Palin's interview with Greta Van Susteren, including the greatest description of the male member you'll ever hear:

Robin Williams concert

I saw Robin Williams' Weapons of Self Destruction tour at the Queen E. on Monday night (see my review in the Georgia Straight here). I had seen Williams a couple other times at the late lamented Urban Well in Kitsilano over the years. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm not a big laugher so I don't know that it's a huge knock on the guy to say I never laughed once any time I've seen him. I sit in awe at his energy but I don't laugh. Don't get me wrong, I don't sit there hating him, either. It's more of a neutral-bordering-on-negative opinion I have, as opposed to an active dislike.

There's only so much one can write in a 400-word review, so let me expand a bit. I've long been on the record that there is no such thing as a hack premise; only hack jokes. If you can offer a new twist on an already tired subject, I'm all for it. I came to this conclusion after years of watching Irwin Barker, who does hilarious bits on Costco and airline travel. The bottom line is funny.

The problems I have with Williams' bits are that the premises are, for the most part, the jokes. We're supposed to laugh at his take, but we've heard the take countless times before. (I should point out here that the sold-out crowd absolutely loved the guy, so what do I know?) Sometimes I could place who said the same thing before him, other times I couldn't. Maybe some of you will be able to tell me.

* Canada is like a loft apartment over a biker bar. This may very well be original, but the format isn't. Canada is like a [something benign or good] over a [something crazy] I've heard lots of times. I think the joke is in the form rather than the specifics. Is it legit to just replace the words? It doesn't seem so to me but maybe some of you have differing opinions you'd like to share with the class.

* Snow would be nice. This refers to Vancouver getting the Winter Olympics. Irwin Barker did this joke (only much better) back when we first got the bid. Others have done it since. Irwin actually had jokes (and lots of 'em) to go with this premise. Williams made the premise the joke: "Snow would be nice."

* "Muthafucka, yeah!" This is how he would love to see president-elect Barack Obama at his inauguration. Again, the idea of the "real" Obama coming out of the closet once elected in the form of a ghetto rapper has been done to death.

* "...left turn and then another left turn..." Here he recontextualized an old joke about the simplicity of Nascar, but the point is it's not his joke. And I guess that's fine, to a point. But the joke hits like it's supposed to be something we hadn't thought of before. Now, maybe lots of people there hadn't heard it before, but there's something not right about the whole thing.

* "We still haven't found Osama... a 6-foot-7 Arab on dialysis." Again, who hasn't heard this dozens of times already? One defence of joke theft is parallel thought. It's a legitimate defence, too. But when something is out there all over the place, that defence gets thrown out. Yes, bin Laden is a distinctive looking fellow and the U.S. hasn't found him. He might very well have put those two facts together on his own, but once the joke becomes so prevalent, you gotta just let it go.

* Who will build the wall? This joke (about Schwarzeneggar wanting to build a wall to keep out the Mexicans) has been the subject of other theft charges. Joe Rogan went after Carlos Mencia, claiming his buddy Ari Shaffir did the original line. But the joke was out there even before that and just about everyone's done it. I saw Alonzo Bodden do the joke at Yuk Yuk's not too long ago. So I guess if everyone else is doing it, Williams should be allowed. And maybe he should. But he should know better. That's the thing.

* Starbucks next to a Starbucks. Funny thing about this one, we've heard it hundreds of times about Vancouver. But Williams, despite knowing the city well, was talking about Seattle. Again, it's premise as joke. We've all observed, here and in Seattle, the unique phenomenon of two Starbucks franchises close to each other. So what else do you got for us? Is that it?

* Sped-up Babe Ruth. This was an odd one because his old buddy Billy Crystal did this bit for years. Granted, the ideas were different. Crystal used it to show how funny it looked watching the old baseball players on newsreels. Williams used it to show that Ruth was actually buzzed on Coke (big and little c). But still, it's the pantomime that gets the laugh and Crystal is the guy who picked up on that. Williams shouldn't get a free ride.

* "Sex with an alcoholic is like playing pool with a rope." Nuff said.

* Nazi pope with a gay wardrobe who opposes gay marriage. It's so easy and not the least bit original. But if he had some killer jokes in that now-old premise, I'd say go for it. He didn't.

* On their first design, pubes were straight but females kept going, "My eyes!" Again, nuff said.

* Why aren't there more funny Germans? Because they killed them all. Now, this one just sounds familiar. For all I know, I heard him say it. Can anyone help me out here? I want to be fair.

* Chinese script on a tattoo that turns out to mean nothing more than 'ass monkey'. Everyone's doing this joke now and I can see how everyone came to it. Whitey gets a foreign language tattoo. Easy-peasy. But you gotta be aware of what's out there. We've heard it. Stop it.

* The human male has a penis and a brain and only enough blood to run one at a time. This one was even emblazoned on a shirt at the merch table. Surely Williams didn't write this, did he? It seems unlikely.

And then there were the mouldy-oldie topics: Chretien, Olympic Stadium falling apart, Margaret Trudeau, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky, Camilla Parker as a horse, cats/dogs, anal leakage, Viagra, porn acting...

I know I'm repeating myself, but I just want to drive the point home. While I have no idea if he steals jokes, it's lazy comedy. Surprising coming from a guy who works so hard. The thing is, he famously talks fast. He does have some good lines and maybe if he just slowed down and eliminated the borrowed jokes, he could accentuate the good, original material.

And while, like I said, I didn't laugh once, there were still a few lines and bits I thought were okay:

On Harper: "How did you find a guy to make Bush look good? He is so bland!" On reflection, not a joke at all. Maybe I just liked it because I agreed with it and it showed he's on top of Canadian politics, at least on the surface.

On Bush: "The reign of error has ended." Is that his? See, when you do so many jokes that aren't original, I can't totally get behind you when you say something halfway decent.

On Bush: "He comes from a family where the smart brother is named Jeb."

On Bush at summit meetings when no other world leader but Blair would stand by him: "It was like the U.N. version of Rainman." Then he launched into Bush as played by Dustin Hoffman. Not an original impression but seemed fitting.

On Palin: "Did Ronald Reagan and Vanna White have a kid?" He followed it up by talking about how they handed "the baby around like a joint". Nice image.

On his bad film choices: When his GPS tells him to take a right on the Golden Gate Bridge, he tells it, "I'm not that depressed." It responds, "Really, Robin? I saw Bicentennial Man."

On his alcoholism: "A functioning alcoholic is like a paraplegic lap dancer. You can do it, just not as well as the others."

He also did an inspired long bit about designing humans by committee. I thought for sure it would be his closer, but it wasn't. And maybe my favourite bit was in the encore when he trotted out some ancient impressions but had them doing porn: John Wayne, Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart. Of course he had to ruin it by finishing with Christopher Walken, but whatcha gonna do?