Word: stand-up
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Kids, if you want to be famous, don't try stand-up comedy. Sure, it worked for Jerry Seinfeld and Drew Carey and, at least for a while, Ellen DeGeneres, but at what cost? Traveling from town to town, standing in front of a brick wall, yelling like a crazy person, delivering the same jokes night after night--what kind of life is that? Being a comic is being in show business only in the way that being a bowler is being in professional sports. And much like a bowler, you will have groupies, but they will look like...
...Cirque du Soleil quality (one of them, Michael Dahlen, is a member of the surreal mime troupe the Blue Man Group), and even they hope to bring their slacker vaudeville to TV. When clowns are having meetings with MTV and Castle Rock, you know TV has killed the stand-up star...
...their acts, the man they all want to be is, well, pretty much doing exactly the same thing. Except people are lining up for six hours for the privilege of watching him do it. Jerry Seinfeld has been on a month-long global tour, working out kinks in his stand-up routine in preparation for a five-night, 10-show Broadway run that will include a performance to be aired live on HBO Sunday, Aug. 9. "Welcome to the Seiny workshop," he cracked to a sold-out house at an old haunt of his, the 250-seat Comedy & Magic Club...
Still, you've got to give the man credit for returning to his roots. Comedian David Spade, who was coincidentally shooting a film called Lost and Found only a block away at the same time as Seinfeld's gig, remarked, "It's nice that someone still cares about stand-up and doesn't just see it as a stepping-stone." The audience cared too. "It wasn't really awesome," said a young woman who waited outside for six hours in brutal heat to get into the show. "But it was more like...
There's the pain. Years later, when Rock was 25 years old and on the stand-up circuit, he turned the experience into a punch line. "Ain't nothing more horrifying than a bunch of poor white people," Rock joked in his act. "They blame n_______ for everything... 'Space shuttle blew up! Them damn n______, that's what...