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Saturday Night Live is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the festivities continue with a brand new documentary NBC announced on Thursday (Dec. 19).
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music will feature interviews with artists, cast members, writers and producers who have contributed to SNL‘s iconic legacy. The three-hour documentary will also “feature untold stories behind the culture-defining, groundbreaking and newsmaking musical performances, sketches and cameos of the past 50 years,” per a press release description.
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The broadcast is directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, and produced by Two One Five Entertainment, RadicalMedia and Broadway Video. Questlove also serves as executive producer alongside Lorne Michaels, Zarah Zohlman, Erin David, Dave Sirulnick, Jon Kamen, Meredith Bennett, Alexander H. Browne, Shawn Gee and Tariq Trotter. Rodriguez serves as producer.
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Bad Bunny, DJ Breakout, Elvis Costello, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and Finneas, Dave Grohl, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Mick Jagger, Dua Lipa, Darryl DMC McDaniels, Tom Morello, Kacey Musgraves, Olivia Rodrigo, MC Sha-Rack, Paul Simon, Chris Stapleton, Justin Timberlake, Lee Ving and Jack White are all the musicians set to appear in the documentary. The show will also feature cast members including Jimmy Fallon, Bowen Yang, Fred Armisen, Conan O’Brien, Bill Hader, Eddie Murphy, Andy Samberg, Kenan Thompson, Maya Rudolph and many more.
“Everyone knows the most famous SNL appearances, whether it’s Elvis Costello, Prince or the Beastie Boys, but they’re the tip of a huge iceberg,” Questlove said in a press statement. “The process of going back through the incredible archival footage was like being in a time machine, DeLorean or other. I’m so happy I went on the trip and now get to share it with everyone.”
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music will premiere Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and stream the next day on Peacock. The documentary is part of a collection of celebratory programming, including a four-part SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night Peacock docuseries on Jan. 16 and a live primetime special on Feb. 16 on NBC and Peacock.
Martin Short is set to host Saturday Night Live this weekend (Dec. 21), and he couldn’t help but throw playful jabs at his friends in a new promo for the upcoming episode. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In the hilarious clip shared on Wednesday (Dec. 18), […]
As promised, Jamie Foxx is opening up about the health scare that led to his hospitalization in 2023. In his new Netflix special, Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was…, Foxx details the brain bleed that led to him going off-the-radar for much of the past two years due after an April 2023 health emergency that led to the Oscar-winner’s hospitalization.
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“You have no idea how good this feels. Atlanta, I’m back,” Foxx says tearily in the special that dropped on Tuesday (Dec. 10), according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I was fighting for my life, but I’m here in front of you.” The emotional return to the stage — which has already picked up an early 2025 Golden Globe nomination for best performance in stand-up comedy on television — is described as a mixture of “laughter, music and sobering truth,” as Foxx gets candid with the crowd about his rehab and recovery.
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The special was filmed in Atlanta, which is where Foxx was when he became ill while filming his on-screen reunion with Cameron Diaz in the upcoming Netflix comedy Back in Action. It opens with a montage of videos of fans speculation about what happened to Foxx, with his daughter Corinne coming out first to thank the audience. “This is a special moment for me and my family. It is a blessing to even be here,” she says.
Foxx is emotional at first, wiping away tears, before diving into the red-hot internet rumor mill that revved up after his hospitalization, which was stoked by the lack of accurate information on what had befallen the 56-year-old star. “The internet tried to kill me, though,” he says. “They said I was paralyzed. They said I couldn’t walk. Well, look at me now.”
The tone then reportedly gets serious, as Foxx says that his team still doesn’t know exactly what happened to him on April 11, 2023, explaining that it all began as a very bad headache. “I don’t remember 20 days,” he says, noting that the first doctor he saw dismissed his symptoms, though his sister, Deidra Dixon, sensed something was seriously wrong and drove him around looking for a hospital to treat her brother; that hospital, Piedmont Hospital, is just around the corner from the Atlanta theater where the special was filmed.
A doctor there realized Foxx was having a “brain bleed” that led to a stroke and needed immediate surgery. He recalls that the doctor told Dixon that it was possible the actor would make a full recovery from the stroke, but that he was facing the “worst year of his life.” Foxx says that’s why he retreated from the public, remembering that he woke up on May 4 in a wheelchair with no recollection of what had happened.
“I saw the tunnel. I didn’t see the light,” Foxx says in the special. “It was hot in that tunnel. S–t, am I going to the wrong place in this motherf–ker? Because I looked at the end of the tunnel, and I thought I saw the devil, like, ‘C’mon.’ Or is that Puffy [Combs]?”
Foxx says it was hard to accept the diagnosis at first, but that a psychiatrist helped him focus, which led to what he describes as a deep conversation with God that helped him fight hard to recover by leaning into his humor. He says that his mantra became: “If I can stay funny, I can stay alive.” He also thanks his daughter Corinne for cutting off all access to him during that time, saying his family “didn’t want you to see me like that. And I didn’t want you to see me like that… I want you to see me like this.”
Though he was afraid during the first two weeks of hospitalization that he would die, Foxx gives 14-year-old daughter Anelise credit for sneaking into his hospital room and playing her guitar, a scene she recreates in the special. Jamie Foxx: What Had Happened Was… is streaming on Netflix now.
Ken Marino and David Wain have, in a sense, been bandmates for decades. They became fast friends at New York University and started a comedy troupe there that became The State, which got its own eponymous MTV series in the early nineties. They’ve collaborated closely many times over the years since, perhaps most memorably in the cult-classic Wet Hot American Summer, one of several features Wain has directed; Marino is a consistent comic presence onscreen, known for his roles on Party Down, Children’s Hospital and The Other Two, among many others.
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But over the past two years, they’ve taken their friendship and creative collaboration to a new level: being in an actual band together. The Middle Aged Dad Jam Band — a covers band with Marino as frontman, Wain on drums, and various of their friends, co-workers and family members filling out vocals and instrumentals — emerged in the waning days of the pandemic and has amassed a following both on YouTube and live. Their covers, which, as Marino puts it, run the gamut “from Schoolhouse Rock to Kiss,” often feature their famous and very funny friends, like Kristen Bell (who recently duetted with Marino on “Islands in the Stream,” which has been viewed nearly 2 million times on YouTube), Thomas Lennon, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Paul Rudd.
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The MADJB, which has toured over the past two years, is currently heading out on a new slate of shows, including a performance at Comic Relief in New York City Dec. 9 and a gig at Irving Plaza Dec. 10, as well as a night at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles and a New Year’s Eve show (the latter two will be livestreamed). Ahead of their run of shows, Marino and Wain spoke to Billboard about finding their own version of rock stardom – and Wain, ever the drummer looking to keep his hands busy, performed a magic trick too.
Middle Aged Dad Jam Band
Steven N. Smith
How long has music been part of your friendship?
Marino: I mean, since we met. We met in college, and when we were doing The State, anytime we’d do a show, the show was riddled with music cues that we would all talk about and put in the show.
Wain: We were in the dorm with [singer-songwriter and composer] Craig Wedren, who I grew up with, and were sort of in his orbit of a lot of stuff he was doing. But we weren’t really like music partners, or even going deep and talking about music until we did [MADJB].
When The State was on MTV, were you guys crossing paths a lot with musicians, or more just feeling adjacent to it?
Wain: We were definitely like the oddball, black sheep of a music cable network. At the time, MTV was mostly music videos, so our show, by directive from the network, was very music heavy, and our whole soundtrack was just stealing from the videos.
Marino: But we were never hanging out with the top MTV stars. We were so outside looking in.
Wain: We in fact once did a sketch spoofing that — like, what if MTV is like, Slash is just hanging around, the rock stars are just in the hallways. But that’s not what it was like.
When did you decide to officially form a band together?
Wain: Like so many things we’ve done, it wasn’t really like, “This is the plan.” I had a garage that was big enough to have a drum set and friends over, finally, as the pandemic was waning, and I just started inviting whoever over, like, “Hey, let’s jam, whatever.” And then eventually these jams became more frequent, and we started being like, “Hey, let’s actually plan [to] learn this song and this song for the jam.” And then it sort of felt like, suddenly, we’re in it. We would joke like, “Come on, we’re late for band practice!”
Marino: David actually was in a band in high school and has always played drums, and has always wanted to scratch that itch through the years. And so he would always find some way to play drums…
Wain: Like by shoehorning it into any sketch or movie or whatever…
Marino: But like Dave said, it was this organic thing — everybody would come, and everyone was invited to sing, and over the course of many weeks, I sort of became the person who was singing the most.
Were you both in bands at some point earlier in your lives?
Wain: I was the manager of Craig Wedren’s high school covers band when I was in like, sixth, seventh grade. I wore a hat and sunglasses and I’m like, “I’m the manager,” and that was basically all I did.
Marino: A little extra fun information about that: When Dave made up a poster about Craig’s band, he put his face and his name bigger than the band’s name himself.
Wain: That band was called The Immoral Minority. But then Craig moved on to the bigger high school band at one point, so then I was in a band called Batman and Robin. We did win the battle of the bands twice. It’s not, it’s not….
Marino: [Faux modestly] It’s not a big deal, it’s just, you come and you compete, and that’s fine, and that’s… that’s the the gift.
Wain: In college, I did play with a band in the dorm. I was never that good at the drums, but I loved it, and I would do it whenever I got a chance. And then in my 20s, I was in this band called Liquid Kitty, which was a trio with me and two ladies. And then I really went quiet for awhile.
Marino: What about Rocking Knights of Summer?
Wain: Oh, right, when I was 19, I formed a band for the purpose of touring summer camps, and we did that for a summer, which was awesome.
Marino: I grew up wanting to be an actor from a very young age, so I was doing a lot of musical theater, and I liked singing. When I met my wife, many years later, we became very invested in karaoke, to the point where a lot of the people who came to our wedding bought us a big karaoke machine with thousands of songs, and we built a karaoke room in our house when we had kids, and I soundproofed it so people could come over and sing — we had a little baby monitor in the karaoke room.
For me, that was just a great way to brush up on all the songs that I remember from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. And I kind of stopped listening to current music after that. Even when we were doing The State I wasn’t listening to, like, the stuff that you guys were listening to.
Wain: Well, I still, I think of ’90s as new still. That’s like the recent new s–t.
Marino: For me, it’s just this little fantasy of getting to be a frontman in a band singing all these songs that just are deep, way deep back in my head from growing up.
Wain: It does feel like middle-aged dad rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp, you know?
If covers bands get a bad rap, it’s when they sound like bad karaoke. But part of what makes you guys impressive is that, both in the vocals and instrumentals, you sound pretty professional.
Wain: I’ve worked quite hard on my drumming in the last couple of years. As we started jamming, a couple people dropped by the garage who are actual serious musicians. And then the rest of us in the band were like, oh shit, we gotta try to keep up with that.
Marino: The keyboardist, Jon Spurney, and Jordan Katz, the trumpet player, Allie Stamler, my niece who plays violin. And then Craig Wedren started coming by and helping us with all things vocal and harmony…
Wain: I definitely learned so much about how little I knew about playing drums doing this. One of my great joys is just starting the journey of actually trying to understand the drums in a way that I never did in the first 30 years of playing.
Marino: We try to honor the song, but also make sure that it’s truly from us. There are certain artists I listened to back in the day, and I’ve listened to [their songs] so many times that it’s just in there. And then when you drive around in your car and you’re singing to that artist, you always sort of sing it slightly differently, or you put a little extra stuff on it, and that’s what I’ve done over the years.
Wain: One of the things I love about your singing is exactly that — you’re somehow channeling the thing that makes Billy Joel’s voice special, and also putting yourself in it simultaneously, which is very cool.
Marino: Thank you, David.
Middle Aged Dad Jam Band
Davis Wain
Where do your own musical tastes tend to lean?
Wain: The ’80s is when I most paid attention to and cared deeply about lots of music. I still love things from all times, from today, but I just haven’t put the time and investment in learning as much about more current artists. But as a kid, I loved and played in bands that played a lot of like ’80s alt — like the Replacements, and I was in an R.E.M cover band. I was in a Smiths cover band in high school.
Marino: I grew up on Long Island, so of course Billy Joel was a big thing. I enjoyed Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, singer-songwriter kind of guys. And then I went to college with a guy from New Orleans, and I really got into music from New Orleans — the Neville Brothers, Dr. John, Walter “Wolfman” Washington — and I like R&B stuff, Motown, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, stuff like that.
Even your guests are quite accomplished. Do you think there’s some connection between people who have great comedic or improv skill and those who have musical talent, too?
Wain: I think they’re definitely complementary. I feel like every actor I know, almost, is also a musician in some form, or wants to be, or could be. It feels very overlappy.
Marino: I just think there are a lot of people who were theater kids or grew up singing. And then you come to this town, and there’s not a big demand for that – so you don’t get to do it, but it’s an itch you want to scratch. We’ve been lucky enough to work in this town and work with really talented people who we’ve become friends with. So when we throw out, “Hey, you want to come by and sing some songs this weekend?” a lot of them are like, “Hell yeah!”
Wain: There’s a certain high of playing in a rock show with your friends on stage for an audience that is different than anything else that you could do.
Marino: It’s unique. The rush you get from doing a sketch show in front of people is really cool and fun — hearing the laughter and riding the waves and stuff — but a band playing together and really trying to make the music sound good, and doing it live in front of an audience, is a whole other sort of rush. At our [MADJB] shows, we do little comedy bits between the songs, and I think that’s initially what people were coming to see, but then they’re pleasantly surprised by the fact that we’re taking the music so seriously and really kind of committing to it.
Do particular songs the band has done stand out as challenges you’re proud of having mastered?
Wain: I mean, “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” was definitely one that for a while we were just like, “There’s no way we could ever tackle that.” It’s just so much. But we’re like, let’s just try little by little, and we got that one into shape.
Marino: I thought “Islands in the Stream” with Kristen was gonna be super simple – and I went over to Spurney’s, and he’s like, “It’s very complex harmonizing —the song is pretty because of all the harmony.” So that one was overwhelming to me. We got it to where we wanted it to be, though. And it took us doing that for me go, “Oh, right, now I know how to do it properly.” Now when I hear the song, all I hear is the harmony.
Wain: Learning The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” was, needless to say, challenging. I ended up doing my own slightly simpler version of it. The original recording involves more than one drum track, but I did the David Wain slightly dumbed-down version.
You’ve performed “Magic To Do” from the musical Pippin, and there’s been a running joke in your videos since about playing more Pippin. So, as a musical theater nerd I have to ask: are you going to play more Pippin?
Wain: I mean, I think it’s literally our least viewed video of all of them. But uh….
Marino: If I had anything to say about it, yes, we would do more. But, yeah, it’s not the most popular.
Wain: Our YouTube stats, apparently, is that [our audience is] like 95% men, which might answer the Pippin question. But I also I think we should do something from Hamilton. Who knows. We could do [The Who’s] Tommy…
What can audiences expect from this next run of shows?
Wain: If you’ve seen us before, we’ve added a ton of new songs since then, there’s quite a bit of new material. But it’s all covers. I do think the band’s getting better and better, and I love all the music that we’re doing. I’m super excited.
Billy Corgan and Bill Burr sure look alike, don’t they? The Smashing Pumpkins star’s stepmother thinks that’s no coincidence. During an appearance on Howie Mandel’s Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast, Corgan shared a hilarious story after Mandel mistakenly put up an image of Burr behind him. Corgan explained that it’s not the first time someone has pointed […]
Eleven days. More than 300 shows. The 20th annual New York Comedy Festival offered a Golden Corral-style buffet of laughs. It was impossible to see them all, but here are the top seven performances — in no particular order — that Billboard witnessed.
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1. Zarna Garg
Garg, who closed the festival with a sold-out show at Town Hall in Midtown Manhattan on Nov. 17, took an unlikely path to stand-up comedy. Raised in Bombay, she escaped an arranged marriage by leaving home, immigrating to the United States and attending law school before becoming a multi-hyphenate in the comedy business: stand-up, screenwriting, podcasting and a memoir. She first headlined at Caroline’s on Broadway in 2020 and, according to her manager, the Town Hall appearance was one of her biggest headlining shows to date.
A lot of Garg’s comedy is steeped in Indian culture and stereotypes — “You are Indian, your pronoun is doctor!” she said during her performance —but judging from the composition of the crowd on Nov. 17, she has clearly crossed over. Garg got big laughs saying her bindi was the same kind of sticker that Macy’s uses to mark down clothes, and implied that she occasionally uses hers to snag a bargain. “You know I’m doing it!” she said. And she elicited a huge roar from the crowd after telling a story about keeping her comedy work from her parents. When her mother found out, instead of disowning her daughter, she told her that if it would help with her career, “May you tell your audience that your father likes to do it doggy style.”
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2. Jeff Arcuri
The Michigan-raised, Chicago-based comic opened the festival on Nov. 7, when he brought his Full Beans Tour to the Beacon Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and proved how he has blown up over the past year: with crowd work, which has gone viral on social media. Arcuri is so lightning-quick and scalpel-sharp that attempting to take notes of his back-and-forth banter with audience members — done with a big, wicked smile — is a fool’s errand. So, check out this video and note that, unlike other comics who single out members of their audience, Arcuri practices largely cruelty-free comedy.
3. Jordan Jensen
The Ithaca, NY-born former contractor — she called her company Lady Parts Carpentry, because her name was often misconstrued as male — Jensen is a tattooed bomb cyclone of funny, who became the first woman to win the festival’s New York’s Funniest competition in 2021. Her act is seeded with the wins and losses of womanhood and dating, growing up with a lesbian mother and an estranged weed-loving father, and her battles with OCD and intrusive thoughts. As one of Jeff Arcuri’s openers at the Beacon Theater, Jensen had the crowd screaming with laughter over a wild bit on the realities of menstruation.
4. New York’s Funniest
The winner of the festival’s annual joke-off — which catapulted the careers of Jensen and Michael Che, among other comics — was New York-based stand-up Jamie Wolf, who delivered a polished set that closed with a killer, seemingly new bit on why he’s pretty sure God is a woman. “Picture dicks and balls,” he said. “They’re so first draft.” It got better from there but go see Wolf to hear it firsthand. As they say in the business, it’s all in the telling.
Wolf was one of 10 comics who competed at the Hard Rock Hotel on Nov. 16, and two in particular brought to mind a comment Chris Distefano made in an interview with Billboard last week, in which he talked about his comedy originating as a “defense mechanism” that arose from his parents divorce.
The competition’s opener, Soo Ra, who is Korean, was born missing fingers on one hand and adopted as an infant after she was found in a box that had been left outside a police station. A devastating story, but Ra, whose delivery is could be described as cheerfully deadpan, got a lot of laughs out of it, telling the crowd she might have been abandoned when her real mother looked at her unformed hand and decided, “This baby cannot fix Samsung phones.” She also said that when people ask her which Korea she is from, she replies, “The one you can get out of.”
Next up was Nick Viagas, who used his stutter to land a lot of laughs. He told the crowd that if he didn’t make it in comedy, “I can always get a job as a turn signal.” And that when he was put in charge of the countdown at a New Year’s Eve show, “That was the longest year.”
5. Ricky Velez
One of Judd Apatow’s favorite comics — he even made Velez a producer on The King of Staten Island New York City in which he co-starred with best friend Pete Davidson — the Queens-bred smart-ass repaid the kindness with a charged set for Judd Apatow and Friends at the Beacon Theater on Nov. 9. In addition to compelling storytelling — check out his Dominican drug dealer in the bit online — Velez likes to rile up the politically correct, and in his addressing the influx of migrants into New York, he told the audience, “I like migrants a lot because they’re fucking up the white-woman agenda. That makes me very happy. [In] 2017 white women canceled cat-calling in New York City. Well, guess what. Venezuela never went through a #MeToo Movement. So, good luck telling Papi that ass ain’t fine, Mami.”
He also welcomed more crime in the city, which he said was “the war on gentrification,” adding that he recently saw “three men eating croissants on the corner.” Declaring such a brazen act of refined tastes “crazy,” Velez had the crowd wheezing when he said, “This is New York City. That can’t happen. Those men need crime,” adding: “Croissants and tote bags. If you’ve got a tote bag as a man. Time to move, bro. We back.”
6. Chris Distefano
Distefano did back-to-back-to-back shows at three outposts of the New York Comedy Club, which is owned by his manager, Emilio Savone — in part to re-record classic bits he did on Netflix and other comedy platforms so that he could reclaim ownership. He dubbed them “Chrissy’s Version” in homage to Taylor Swift. But he also riffed on the results of the presidential election and some of his successful friends’ reactions to it. “I will say this. If you made a post crying about the president, you’re a p—y” Distefano said. “You gotta be an adult here.”
He further explained that a number of friends he met through comedy “do big things. They host TV shows. I took the bus here.” Some of those famous friends “are crying,” he said. “I’m like, relax. You’re a multimillionaire making believe. You live in America. Shut the f—up. Everybody’s just got to take a deep breath. It’s gonna be fine. Now, do I know for sure? No. I went to Nassau Community College.”
7. Stand Up For Heroes
Year after year, this benefit for military veterans brings out top-shelf talent to raise tens of millions of dollars. This year, Bruce Springsteen, Norah Jones, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Mark Normand put on a really big show, which you can read more about here (and watch a video of The Boss performing “Long Walk Home”).
One of the highlights of the New York Comedy Festival so far has been Chris Distefano, who performed three back-to-back sets at three different locations of the New York Comedy Club. It wasn’t quite the same as Phil Collins playing at Live Aid in London in 1985 then hopping on the Concorde to do the same at the Philadelphia show, but you try making people double over in laughter for three hours in a single day.
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Distefano’s Hat Trick — an excerpt is posted below — was more than a stunt. He was taking a page from Taylor Swift‘s playbook, and recording live bits that he performed on previous Comedy Central and Netflix specials, so that he could reclaim ownership of his work. The material will be culled from the Hat Trick shows and released as “Chrissy’s Version,” a nod to his inspiration, on Chrissy Chaos, one of two podcasts that he hosts. He and co-host Yannis Pappas recently revived the second, History Hyenas, after a four-year hiatus.
Forty-year-old New York-based Distefano, who has been performing stand-up since 2009, is as savvy about the changing nature of the comedy business as he is funny, and he spoke to Billboard about the value of podcasting, fan-building and his love of The 1975 — and as a comic who married into a Puerto Rican family, his take on Tony Hinchcliffe’s “floating island of garbage” joke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October.
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You performed at three locations of the New York Comedy Club in one day. What was the impetus behind that?
It was actually Emilio Savone, my manager and the owner of the New York Comedy Club, who was like, “I want to have a headliner come in and do three headlining shows back to back to back at my clubs — something different for the New York Comedy Festival.” He asked me if I wanted to do it. I was like, “Sure.” I was supposed to do the show later in the festival, but I’m going to be in a TV show with Tom Segura and the shooting schedule got changed. So, I did it sooner. And it was fun, man, because I was calling each show Chrissy’s Version — because I was doing old jokes that I did on my Comedy Central and Netflix specials because technically they own the audio rights to that stuff.
I was going to ask you about that. You name-checked Taylor Swift and her re-recorded albums at the show.
Yeah, Taylor Swift rerecorded her stuff to regain ownership of her songs, and I did it with my comedy that night. We’re going to take a mashup of the three shows that I did — three hours of material — take the old bits, call it Chrissy’s Version and upload them on Sirius XM and wherever. Now I’ll own them outright.
Will there be a video streaming version?
Yeah. Every Sunday at 7:00 p.m. for the past, I think it’s 10 weeks, I upload that week’s material on my YouTube channel — 20-30 minutes of my week of standup So, this Sunday, I’m going to put up some of that material. Then Emilio’s guys will take the audio version and get it uploaded to SiriusXM and hopefully they’ll start spinning it. This way, I own the rights.
Are you constantly touring? Are you the Bob Dylan of live comedy?
My rule is I typically only go away two weekends a month. I leave Friday, and I come home Sunday. I’ve got family, little kids, so I don’t want to be eternally on the road. I’ll make less money to have more time with my kids. This idea of a world tour seems good in theory, but it’s just too much time away from my kids. I would only go if they could come with me. I enjoy going on the road, getting my material out there for new audiences across the country. But I try to limit it to one or two times a month, and then the rest of the time I’m usually at one of the New York comedy clubs or the Comedy Cellar working on my material. Then I’ll post that every Sunday.
You have two podcasts.
Yes, I have Chrissy Chaos, which comes out every Tuesday. Then, I also relaunched my old history podcast, History Hyenas, with Yannis Pappas. We just started doing episodes again. It was really a fan favorite. We took a four-year hiatus, and now that we’ve brought it back, fans are really digging it.
Streaming and podcasts seem to be more and more important to comedy. Do they enable you to cut back on touring without sacrificing too much revenue?
To be honest with you, most of my peers and me could live off the money we make in podcasting. I still do the road because I enjoy it but as time goes on, I’m always looking for ways to stay home, stay in New York more, and the podcast is that avenue. Especially Patreon, where History Hyenas lives . That’s the best because that’s all fan generated. They pay $5 a month or $10 a month to get extra content or to get the episodes early.
Really, my whole career and life changed when I put my career in the hands of my fans. I still respect the industry. I have a TV show in development — I’m doing all those things, while generating income because of my fans. I’m living my dream and doing what I want to do with or without the industry. That’s why streaming and all that is very important, and more than that, having a direct relationship with your fans is humungous. It’s changing so rapidly before our eyes, and it’s a beautiful thing. You can have relative anonymity this way.
Take a guy like Tom Segura. He sells out arenas all over the country, and he’s still able to go to those towns and the general population won’t recognize him on the street. He’s making $50 million a year, but he doesn’t have to be locked behind gates with security everywhere — because he has a direct connection with his fans. I think that as far as entertainment goes, we’re living in such a transitional period. You might think, “I should go on this television show to promote myself and sell tickets.” I still do it — but I can do the podcasts from my home, and they will be 10 times more impactful than going on a late-night talk show.
It’s the same in the music industry. Maggie Rogers has yet to have a platinum record, but she sells out arenas all over the world because she has a direct relationship with her fans.
That’s why I like my manager, Emilio. He has adapted to this change. It used to be, a manager booked your flights and set up meetings. That’s not what I need anymore. I can book my own flights on an app with two taps on my phone. I need my manager to digitally market me. When I’m coming to Salt Lake City, calling into a radio station or going on the local news doesn’t work anymore. What I need is — how do you digitally market me so that when everyone opens up their Facebook or their Instagram, they’re seeing an ad for my show, with a link to click for tickets? E
milio and his team is making it very easy for me. It used to be you needed all these middlemen, but now you don’t. I think some of us recognize this shift, but some of my peers… either they don’t want to admit it or they don’t want to adapt. That’s fine, but the old ways — getting a late-night set or a sitcom — don’t put butts in seats anymore.
In your set at the comedy club, you alluded to Tony Hinchcliffe’s Puerto Rico remarks at the Trump rally in New York. You also talked about the Puerto Rican heritage of your partner, your children and your in-laws. Since you straddle both these worlds, how did Hinchcliffe’s joke land with you?
It’s one of those things where, for me, it’s always comedy first. Obviously, I have Puerto Rican family, and I watched the video with them. They were all like, “It was a joke.” You can say, “Is the joke funny or not?” Comedy is subjective — I get it — and I understand that if you’re doing comedy at political rallies, which are non-comedy spaces, you’re definitely opening yourself up to more criticism. Comedy is one of those things where it’s got to be the right setting, the right ambiance.
But I subscribe to comedians that never apologizing. The way I look at it is, you can’t be funny and hateful. Hitler wasn’t funny. So, if a joke misses, it misses. Don’t take one thing someone says and say, “This is who this person is.” That’s not going to get us further as a society.
Some of the best comedy knocks against political correctness, the status quo and even tragedy. What are your limits when you’re onstage?
My thing is, like — you can say whatever you want and cross that line, as long as there’s an attempt at a joke attached to it. Don’t just say a shock-value word to say that shock-value word. That’s being corny. That’s not what comedians do. My job is to thread that needle of saying something that crosses the line and possibly offends someone, but offends them and makes them laugh by making a heavier subject more lighthearted. It’s hard.
When you come to a comedy show, you have to understand what you’re buying a ticket to. There’s a lot of times we all swing for the fences and miss. That’s part of our job. We’re the group that makes light of a situation with humor. To me, it’s my defense mechanism. The reason I’m a comedian – I really started doing this for me, because I was upset that my mom and dad were divorced. So, I would make jokes and try to make my dad laugh when he would come pick me up. I did this because I was upset that my dad wasn’t there, so I would try to make him laugh to hide my tears.
Most comedians come from a place of – it’s our coping mechanism for the world. The comments about Puerto Rico were one of those things where most of us understood that whether you thought it was funny or not, it was just a joke. It didn’t land, he knows that, and it’s fine.
Chris Distefano
SAM CASHELL
Do you think the outrage that followed had any impact on the election?
Dude, it didn’t have an impact on the election because most adults don’t give a s–t about that. Most adults were like, “Hey, I can’t buy gas and groceries, so I’m not going to not vote for whomever I want to vote for because of a joke.” That’s when you’re going to have the celebrities coming out on social media. It may have made a difference ten years ago, but [now] nobody cares.
As a matter of fact, it looks worse when you have J.Lo or even someone who’s conservative telling people what to do and who to vote for. It’s like, “Really, you’re going to tell me what to do in your $50 million f–king mansion? I can barely get by here, so shut up.” I don’t think people understand that.
But with my career, I have to be a man of the people. You’ll see some comics get humongous, and then they have a comedy special talking about their mansion or their private jet and it doesn’t hit as hard — because the viewers are like, “Wait, wait, wait, where is the comedy?” I’m listening to what the common man is going through every day.
You’re also saying the things they’re thinking but are afraid to say, and making people laugh in the process.
That’s why Ricky Gervais is my favorite comedian of all time — a hero of mine, a guy who I would love to work with one day and who I strive to be like. He is far and away my favorite, because look at what he did at the Golden Globes a few years ago. He just destroyed [the celebrities there]. He said to them, straight up, “You guys are in no position to lecture to the public, so get your little f–king award and f–k off.”
Your exchange with the Norwegian guy who said “Americans are dumb” at your show was fascinating. I couldn’t see his face, so I couldn’t tell if he was enjoying the interaction.
You take a chance going into the crowd. He looked like he wasn’t having the best time, but I figure he’s a guy, he’ll be able to handle it. So, I’m like, “Let me poke at him a little bit.” If that was a woman not having a good time, I wouldn’t mess with that. But a guy not having a good time, you can typically f–k with. I think that he liked it, but I do think he had that European attitude when he said that Americans are dumb and stupid. I was agreeing with him — but I also was like, “I’m the one with the microphone in my hand, so I’ll just overpower you with my stupid American logic.”
When he said that, I imagined there was one of those vintage cartoon thought bubbles above your head with a big juicy steak in it.
Yeah. that’s why I love doing live standup because even though I did relatively the same jokes in the same order all three shows, every set was radically different because of the crowd. I would weave in crowd work with this guy and that would change this joke a little bit or whatever it is. That’s why, I know comedy is all over the internet — and I post it there — but the live stand-up comedy experience to me is still the best. Because you could go see your favorite comic and hear them tell the same jokes you heard him or her say on the internet or their special, but it’s going to be a totally different experience, because every audience is like a living, breathing organism that’s changing little things here and there about the show.
Besides your podcast, do you have any other projects in the works?
I have my Hulu special coming out February 21. Hulu is doing its first foray into comedy specials — they’re trying to dethrone Netflix, and they have a different stand-up comedy special every month. I think they’re starting off with Jim Gaffigan and Sebastian Maniscalco, Bill Burr, Andrew Santino, and them I’m the month of February so that’s big.
Since this is Billboard, what music are you listening to?
My all-time favorite musician is Whitney Houston. I’m obsessed with anything Whitney Houston. But my favorite band right now, and has been for the past five years — the only band I’ve ever really cared about — is The 1975. I love those guys. Through comedy, I’ve gotten to know some of the guys — Matty Healy and Ross, and we keep in contact once in a while. I mentioned my fandom for them on The Joe Rogan Show two years ago, and Matty Healy reached out and we connected.
I wasn’t a big music fan growing up. I never went to concerts. But The 1975 came into my life at a time when I needed them, I guess. Then, I listened to interviews with them where they said they’ve been influenced by Whitney Houston. So I’m like, “Oh s–t, this is all connected.”
At the 2024 Grammy ceremony on Feb. 4, host Trevor Noah was nominated for best comedy album for the second time for I Wish You Would, but lost to Dave Chappelle’s What’s in a Name?. The Recording Academy hasn’t announced who will be hosting the 2025 Grammys on Feb. 2, but these two comedians are likely to both be nominated again for best comedy album – Chappelle for The Dreamer and Noah for Where Was I.
Chappelle has been nominated five times in this category – and has never lost in this category. (He did lose in 2022 when one of his albums, 8:46, in which he discussed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, was judged to be not primarily comedic and was moved to best spoken word album.)
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If Chappelle wins again, he’ll stand just behind Bill Cosby for the most wins in this category. Cosby won seven times from 1965 and 1987. Chappelle is currently tied with George Carlin and Richard Pryor as runner-up in the category.
Jim Gaffigan has been nominated seven times in this category, but has yet to win. He will likely be nominated again this year for The Prisoner. Gaffigan is the only comedian (and the only non-Grammy winner) who was announced last week as one of the presenters of the Grammy nominations on the livestream on Friday (Nov. 8). Does that mean the academy knows for a fact that he’s going to be nominated and booked him for the livestream so they’d have a happy reaction shot? I don’t think the academy knows that far in advance who is going to be nominated, but his booking on the livestream certainly isn’t a bad sign about his chances for another nod this year.
Adam Sandler, a three-time nominee in this category, is entered for Love You. Sandler and Chappelle are both past recipients of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Tig Notaro, a two-time nominee in this category, is entered with Hello Again. David Cross, also a two-time nominee, is entered for Worst Daddy in the World.
Joe Rogan is a contender with Burn the Boats. The Joe Rogan Experience is considered one of the most influential podcasts, though his politics do not align with that of most Grammy voters (as evidenced by the fact that only Democratic presidents and first ladies tend to be nominated for best audio book recording.) Burn the Boats is Rogan’s latest Netflix special.
Conan O’Brien, who won his fifth Primetime Emmy in September for Conan O’Brien Must Go, is entered with Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend: Quinquennial Celebration, a collaboration with Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley.
Taylor Tomlinson, the host of After Midnight, which follows The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on CBS, is entered with Have It All.
Nikki Glaser, who is set to host the 2025 Golden Globes telecast on Jan. 5, is entered with Someday You’ll Die. Jo Koy, who hosted that show earlier this year, is entered with Live From Brooklyn. Ricky Gervais, who hosted the Globes five times between 2010 and 2020, is entered with Armageddon.
Several other potential nominees have also hosted awards shows. Marlon Wayans, who co-hosted the MTV VMAs in 2000 with his brother, Shawn Wayans, is entered with Good Grief. Kevin James, who hosted the People’s Choice Awards in 2001-02, is entered with Irregardless. Jack Whitehall, who hosted the Brit Awards four years running, from 2018-21, is entered with Settle Down.
Other notable contenders on the entry list of 94 albums include Shane Gillis’ Beautiful Dogs, Demetri Martin’s Demetri Deconstructed and Matt Rife’s Lucid – A Crowd Work Special.
Our Fearless Forecast
Dave Chappelle, The Dreamer
Jim Gaffigan, The Prisoner
Trevor Noah, Where Was I
Tig Notaro, Hello Again
Adam Sander, Love You
Dave Chappelle and Killer Mike are hitting the road together. Blending the worlds of comedy and rap, the duo announced the Talkin That S–t Tour on Wednesday (Oct. 23). Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The comedic legend and Grammy-winning rapper along with the Mighty Midnight Revival will […]
John Mayer is set to perform at the annual Cool Comedy • Hot Cuisinefundraiser on Tuesday, Oct. 29, at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Comedian Jeff Ross will host the event. Mayer and Ross will both be honored with the Bob Saget Legacy Award, recognizing their commitment to continue Saget’s mission of raising […]