http://www.nypress.com/articles.sec-25-1-24_7-comedy.html Rising from the ranks of the unwashed standup masses, Eugene Mirman has made it to the top of the comedy heap with his sardonic, goofy brand of humor.Tonight he kicks off his titular comedy festival starring some of the city’s best comics in a similar vein: Kristen Schaal, Bobby Tisdale,Todd Barry.The opening night lineup features live acts as well as video by Max Silvestri.There’s also a whole roast pig involved.]]> Keemo, a smooth - talking guy with a friendly smile, spends his Friday nights on the corner of West 43rd Street and Broadway wearing a blue shirt and carrying a yellow sign. He might ask if you like stand-up comedy. If you say yes, he’ll whisk you three busy blocks west—dodging tourists and hurtling past the corpse of the Virgin Megastore—before ushering you down a dingy flight of stairs under Sweet Caroline’s Dueling Pianos. The club down there—Ha! Comedy Club NYC—is anonymous and unheralded.]]> "Where's the fucking cap for this thing?” It’s a few minutes until show time and Marc Maron is pissed. Flanked by a half-empty pack of nicotine gum and the ever-rotating “Shame Wall”—today featuring, from top-to-bottom, images of Gerald Ford, a bowling Nixon, George W. Bush, a most-likely Photoshopped gun-toting Bush 41 and a surprisingly presidential-looking Ronald Reagan—he shuffles papers angrily around his table, searching for the cap to his highlighter.]]> You may not know what The Lonely Island is, but you’re probably probably familiar with its members’ work. Or at least its members’ members. The group, which created the infamous, Grammy Award-winning Saturday Night Live Digital Short “Dick in a Box” with Justin Timberlake, has spawned plenty of imitators, but its brand of bawdy, ballsy humor isn’t easily replicated. The Lonely Island comprises Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer—all friends since their formative years growing up in Berkeley, Calif. Moving in together after college, the guys began posting satirical shorts on their website, thelonelyisland.com, buzz began building and, in 2005, all three were offered gigs with Saturday Night Live (Samberg as a player, Schaffer and Taccone as writers). Suddenly, SNL was funny again thanks to the trio’s Digital Shorts (and the Internet even funnier, it seems—the group’s most recent hit, “Jizz in My Pants,” which aired on the late-night institution in December, has been viewed close to 22 million times on YouTube).]]> After staging the hugely successful ROFLCon in Boston last Spring, Tim Hwang and a gang of fellow Harvard brainiacs have found themselves with a hit meme on their hands: Getting the stars of the Inter]]> In addition to being a bored temp turned unlikely political pundit, David Rees is also kind enough to buy lunch for freelance writers who suddenly find themselves without a day job. “I’m a bleeding heart liberal cartoonist, so I can buy you a sandwich. If I drew Mallard Fillmore, I’d tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and buy your own sandwich,” Rees muses as he opens his wallet and pays for two falafel sandwiches from a lunch truck in Murray Hill. It is an overcast October afternoon and Rees has just gotten out of a recording session for the animated series of his wildly popular ]]> LADIES GOTTA work that shtick. Kathy Griffin attempts to stay on her self-imposed D-List. Sarah Silverman continues to offend with her gross-out girl humor delivered with a kewpie-doll grin. ]]> BY DAY, HELEN Hong is steadily employed as a TV producer. By night, however, she’s a stand up comedian and the mastermind behind a crew of four funny ladies known as “Little Ethnic Girls.” Somewhere in the midst of all this, she finds time to date—and talk about it. “One joke I love doing is the one where I talk about my huge Asian tits, since all the Asian guys I date don’t seem to like big tits.” She volunteers that “huge” for Asian guys is apparently 36A. Much to her chagrin, Hong also has to endure the awesome ethnic guessing game as proposed to her by potential suitors. “I call it racist Jeopardy,” she says before volunteering that her background is Korean. Since another Korean comedian has already made a name for herself in regard to talking about dating, sex, body-image issues and immigrant parents, one has to wonder if Hong is a little miffed at being beaten to the punch.]]> BENARI POULTEN IS a resident of Astoria, or at least he was until his commitment to civic duty granted him a year-long vacation in scenic Iraq. In addition to playing the role of the opening hype man for the weekly Shoot the Messenger comedy show at the Green Room Theater, he’s also a regular at comedy spots Comix, People’s Improv Theater,The Tank and Rififi. “I think I’ve done everything that has been done,” Poulten remarks. “Even the places that have closed down.” One would be hard-pressed to find a comedian more qualified to skewer the political process and foreign affairs than 31-year-old Poulten.While other comics passively rely on newspaper headlines and sound bites for material, Poulten has already served as a Congressional Aide to Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass) as well as a staffer for the 2004 Kerry campaign. And he’s not just talk; Poulten has also spent the better part of the last decade enlisted in the Army Reserves as a print and broadcast journalist, having recently been promoted to Sergeant First Class.]]> Stepping in dog shit on the way to clubs. Putting your self-esteem in the hands of a drunken stranger. These are a couple of the funnier answers I got when I asked some comics from around town what the hardest thing about performing stand-up in the city is. Nate Bargatze, however, was uncharacteristically straight with me. “The toughest thing about being a New York City comedian,” said Bargatze, “is the competition.” The local joker, who you may have seen on Comedy Cen]]> Ah, slapstick comedy. It’s the kind of thing you can address one of two ways: you can roll your eyes in irritation, claiming that you’re far too mature to get a rise out of anything so juvenile as a person catching on fire, or you can lighten up and agree that watching a person catch on fire is and will always be really, really funny. CollegeHumor.com began in 1999 out of the dorm rooms of Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen, relying entirely on word-of-mouth promotion to get off the]]> It’s really hard to maintain any sort of critical distance when talking to Joel McHale, stand-up comedian, actor and host of the E! Channel’s The Soup. When a fire alarm went off in the E! offices while we were speaking on the phone, he just shut the door and kept on chatting, even though he was just asking me what sports team I root for and where I went to college. When I read him a passive-aggressive email his manager sent me about Joel being too busy to do print interviews days af]]>