Andy Hendrickson was kind enough to answer all my questions about the inner workings of a Late Show gig.   Andy was also generous in allowing us to post a practice set of the exact material he’d perform on Letterman. If you want to know how to kill on Letterman, this is a great place to start.  Enjoy!

RC(RooftopComedy):Congratulations on a phenomenal Late Show debut! This is a moment comics dream about and only a select few will ever realize. I’d like to explore the Late Show experience from the beginning to how it’s currently impacting your career, so let’s get started!

RC: How were you contacted and how did Letterman hear of or see you?
There are 3 bookers that work together to find comics and prep them for the show. I met them through a comedian friend of mine here in NYC and sent them a link of about 10 minutes of my best TV material.

RC: How much lead time were you given before the appearance? What kind of instructions did they give you regarding time/material. Was there an approval process for the jokes?
It was a long process for me but it’s different for everyone. It took almost a year of whittling my set down from 10min to about 7min for a live showcase. Then based on that live showcase we cut it down to about 4-4.5 minutes and then I did another live audition. Then we tweaked a couple things and moved the order around. I kept sending them links to revised versions of the set. I had one line that I added that got approved the day before. They’re looking for about 4 minutes in the club. It translates to about 5 minutes in front of the Letterman audience with applause breaks and solid laughs. They are great at what they do. They picked out some really good jokes that fit the style of the show…and I figured out how to put them together. Then we made adjustments.

Eventually, I was given a ballpark as to when it might happen but I got official notice on a Monday and recorded a week later on a Tuesday.

RC: I’m going to have both clips of the performance in the article. Is there anything you want to say about either clip?
Well, the clip from The Comic Strip was on a Sunday night in front of a mostly European tourist crowd. I recorded Letterman on a Tuesday. At that point I had the set down word for word. They were kind of rough crowd and weren’t quite warmed up yet. I just pretended I was in front of a huge crowd that was laughing hard and practiced going slow. Sometimes that’s tough to do when they’re not quite on board with what you’re doing. You know you should stick to the script but your instincts tell you to speed up, change the jokes or maybe talk to the crowd. I just forced myself to rehearse as if I was on Letterman.

RC: Have you appeared on any other late night or television program before?
No, this was my network TV debut.

RC: How did you feel leading up to the performance, during and after?
I felt really good about the whole thing. I had been prepping and rehearsing this same set for a few months so I knew it backwards and forwards. The week before the taping I ran around NYC and did my set about 15 times.The experience was a little surreal when I was standing on the side of the stage ready to go out. I could see Letterman at his desk and it really hit me that this was going to happen. I just told myself to have fun. I knew I had enough experience and if anything weird came up my instincts would take over and the set would go great. Those Letterman crowds are the best. Afterward, I felt great. I felt relieved and excited. I knew it went well. I had a sense of satisfaction and gratitude. I told myself that all the hard work pays off.

RC: What kind of in studio practice did you get? Were you given coaching?
No studio practice. You get to walk out on the stage and stand on your mark. You get a feel for the space and the room… its smaller than you would think. It’s very intimate in there. Like doing a small theater. The crowd is really close and very receptive. As soon as I got my first joke out I really loosened up and just performed like I would for a great theater crowd.

No coaching really. I’ve been studying Letterman comedy sets for a few years. I have friends that have done the show. I knew that it’s best to go really slow and let the jokes breathe a little. I also knew to expect applause breaks and laughs in places where you don’t normally get them. I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands because there’s no mic. I tried to practice that as well but I figured it would come naturally just like having a conversation at a party. I always try to make it feel like I’m just having a conversation with the crowd.

RC: Have you always been a fan of the Late Show with David Letterman?
I’ve always been a big fan of the show. Since college. It has been a goal of mine to perform on the show since I got into comedy. It still feels a little surreal.

RC: Why do you think the Late Show has more gravitas than other late night programming?
I think its because the Late Show has a solid tradition of smart comedy. The show has it’s own style that has been consistent for years and years. People respect that. People respect David Letterman as a comedy icon.

RC: Was this an opportunity you visualized in your mind far before it happened?
Absolutely. Before I had my opportunity to do the show, I went backstage with a friend who did the show and I’ve sat in the audience. I stood on the stage in the spot where you perform. I visualized myself being there, performing and killing…. more than I care to admit.

RC: At what point did it seem like Letterman was a possibility?
As soon as we started selecting specific jokes I felt I was on the right track.

RC: Have you already felt an impact on your career? Have any immediate opportunities surfaced from the appearance? Are you hoping for anything specifically?
I’ve had a few things pop up here and there. I can’t be too specific but, yes, it’s already impacted my career in a great way.

RC: Any advice you’d give a comic about to debut their stand-up on TV?
Just have fun. You’ve already put in the hard work and you deserve this moment. Make sure you enjoy it and that’ll come across to the audience.

Thanks Andy! If you want to keep tabs on where Andy will be performing visit his website, www.andyhendrickson.com

Follow him on twitter @andyhendrickson

And checkout his latest album, Underachiever

Posted: March 28th, 2013 under A Tight 5ive, HOMEPAGE, Interview, Late Night Television.
Comments: 58

Dylan Gadino founded Punchline Magazine in 2005 because he saw a void; stand-up comedy seemed to have no professional outlet or voice. Music had Rolling Stone and a multitude of other magazines; Movies and Television had Entertainment Weekly (and a multitude of other magazines). But no one had focused on comedy.

To celebrate Punchline Magazine’s fifth anniversary, shows are being held in New York and Los Angeles. Top-notch talent including (but not limited to) Christian Finnegan, Michael Ian Black, Greg Proops, and Maria Bamford will perform at either show, and tickets can be purchased via the web:  Los Angeles — New York

Rooftop had Nathan Timmel discuss all things Punchline with its founder, Mr. Gadino.

NT: What got you interested in comedy, and then pushing it via the magazine?

DG: I’ve never been a comedian, but I was always a huge fan of stand up comedy. Ever since my senior year in college I did a lot of freelance writing for music magazines; I had a lot of experience interviewing musicians, and writing reviews of rock albums. When I started getting sick of that I thought, ‘why not take all my experience in the entertainment industry and cover stand up comedy the same way we’ve seen music, movies, and television covered?’ That’s basically it. So, huge fan of stand up, and a huge fan of creative writing, and I just wanted to combine the two.

NT: Your background in music; do you find the saying “every musician wants to be a comedian, and every comedian wants to be a rock star” to be true?

DG: I think all that means is that rock stars are starved for attention and want to be famous, and so do comedians. I don’t know how many rock stars literally want to be comedians or how many comedians want to be rock stars, but they all want to be well respected and well liked.

NT: I sometimes wonder if it isn’t more literal; you get comedians who say ‘Oh, musicians can write a love song that gets played over and over, but no one wants to hear my masturbation joke on the radio, and I can’t dedicate a joke to a woman…” I was lucky enough to meet Dave Attell once, and when he found out I used to be in a band he said flat out, ‘Then what the hell are you doing comedy for? If I had any musical talent I wouldn’t be doing this shit.’

DG: [Laughs]

NT: Did technology play into your desire to have a comedy presence; where traditional print might not have worked, the web allowed you an opportunity?

DG: Yeah, I wanted to go online because it’s just so much easier and less expensive. There’s not as much overhead, and even five years ago it didn’t seem like a great idea to make a print version of a consumer driven magazine that covered stand up comedy.

NT: How much has your enterprise grown in the past five years?

DG: Basically, I launched the site in 2005 with a childhood friend named Bill Bergmann. We grew up on the same street, and we played in bands together. He does all the tech stuff, and always has. When we first started it was just the two of us, and maybe once in a while one of my friends would contribute a piece or two. It’s definitely grown since then, but not in a way that would provide an awesome contrast between then and now. Today it’s still me and him, plus a lot of great people I know across the country who will interview comedians and write reviews which is great, having fresh eyes and minds doing the writing and interviewing. I’ve tried to now shift my focus to managing and work on the business end of things: maintaining relationships, working with other sites, marketing… everything behind the scenes.

One big recent change is a few months ago, Salient Media, in Beverly Hills, acquired the site. I’m still running everything from an editorial side, but now there’s a bit of a machine behind the business, and hopefully within a year that will be apparent, that we’ve got some push now.

NT: You mentioned partnerships; how did your friendship with Rooftop Comedy develop?

DG: That was all MySpace. Years ago… [Pauses] Annie at Rooftop likes to say we “grew up” together. Which is true, in that we were starting around the same time, and looking to form alliances with like-minded websites. I think Will contacted me through MySpace, and we started emailing, which led to a phone call, and then five years later we’re both trying to champion stand up comedy. We’re not competitors, each site has its own focus, where they collect and disseminate the art form, and we critique and feature comedians. Today we try to cross promote one another, simply to push comedy.

NT: Which brings us to your anniversary shows, the cross promotion. You have two shows coming up to celebrate your milestone, October 5th in New York and October 11th in Los Angeles. What kept you from having multiple shows on one day, like Live Aid?

DG: [Laughs] That would have been awesome! The main thing that kept me from doing that, though, was that I wanted to be at both shows. It’s not like we have a giant office, with a bunch of people—I don’t have an assistant or anything like that—so I wouldn’t want one of the shows to happen without me there to handle complaints or problems.

NT: You’ve got a great line up; was it pretty easy to get people, just asking them if they were interested?

DG: Yeah, I mean, after doing this for five years I’ve established some good relationships, so it’s not a giant undertaking. I don’t have to go through managers or agents.. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m friends with these people; I wouldn’t want to trade on their names like that. But you meet them, exchange an email or phone call every so often, a “How’re you doing?” And then when something like this comes up you can just ask if they’re interested, and luckily a lot of them were.

NT: Talk about A Tight 5, your interview segments. The segments are edited; was there ever the thought to tell the comics up front, “This is going to be 5 minutes, so stay focused”?

DG: Well, we wanted to keep it to five minutes, because not many people are going to watch more than that online. Sure, there are probably a couple comedy nerds out there who would watch twenty-minute interviews, but generally keeping it to five minutes holds the viewers attention. I never wanted to say, “Let’s do a live five minutes, and keep it to that,” and there are a couple reasons for that. This is going to be online forever, so I wanted them to have a feel of timelessness. When you do a live interview, you’re usually really focused on what they’re promoting that week, that show or that album. What I wanted to do was give people the depth of a twenty-minute interview, in five minutes.

NT: You do sometimes post uncut interviews, and recently did with Robert Schimmel, whose loss was… just tragic.

DG: Yeah… I got to meet him twice; once at his book party, and once at the interview, and he was a nice, Zen, extremely soft-spoken person. I was surprised at how thin and frail he was.

NT: I think that was the cancer, sadly. I could never say this definitively, as I only met him after his bout with it, but I would say his Zen-like nature came from having battled that disease. He used to say that amazing phrase which was, “It was horrible, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.”

DG: I really liked him; he was gracious, and seemed genuinely interested in the interview.

NT: Do you feel like going on record and saying who your best and worst interviews were?

DG: [Pauses, laughs] Um…

NT: You don’t have to.

DG: [Laughs] No, it’s OK. I would have to say that it was Kevin Nealon, from a few years ago. I was purposely asking him open-ended questions that couldn’t just be answered with a yes or no, but he wasn’t giving me anything. I’m not saying he’s a horrible guy, or that he’s not funny, maybe he just didn’t feel like doing an interview, or was sick. But he wasn’t a jerk or anything like that.

NT: You didn’t have a Russell Crowe moment with him.

DG: [Laughs] No.

NT: And the best?

DG: From a professional point of view, like if I were to send out a tape as an audition to get an interviewing job, I’d have to say Jeff Dunham. I found him extremely nice, extremely professional, and the fact that he’s a bajillionare and extremely famous didn’t matter to him. He was seamless; we had some laughs, got some good information… he’s just a pro at giving interviews.

NT: One stupid thing to finish: I logged on to Twitter this morning and saw you verbalizing my thoughts on the news today, that George Lucas is going to release all the Star Wars films in 3D, showing that he hasn’t had an original idea since Howard The Duck.

DG: I rarely make any sort of editorial comment on the entertainment industry, but you have that childhood connection… I mean, I’m compulsive about certain things, where I’ll put Empire on in the background and let it run repeatedly while I do things around the house, because it just makes me feel good, and I guess it just [pauses] pisses me off that he just keeps re-releasing these things. [Laughs] It’s a stupid complaint…

NT: But a legitimate one.

PunchlineMagazine.com’s 5th Anniversary Show with Michael Ian Black, Christian Finnegan, Todd Barry, Hannibal Buress and more goes down tonight at Comix Comedy Club in New York City. Click here for tickets.

Posted: October 5th, 2010 under A Tight 5ive, Punchline Magazine, Ruminations, theorizations and stuff.
Comments: 151

To celebrate five years online, our dear friends at Punchline Magazine are producing two live shows — one in New York and one in Los Angeles — with an incredible cast of not to be missed comedians.

Christian Finnegan will host the New York City installment at Comix comedy club on Oct. 5 with Michael Ian Black, Todd Barry, Hannibal Buress and surprise guests scheduled to appear. Tickets are only $15 and can be purchased here. Get there early and get some free goodies from Comedy Central. Stay late, and get some free Punchline Magazine birthday cake!

For comedy fans in Los Angeles, Greg Proops will host an all-star show featuring the likes of Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, Whitney Cummings and Chris Hardwick.
It’s all going down at Largo on Oct. 11. at 8 pm. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased here.

Buy your tickets online, e-mail proof of purchase to punchlinemagazine@gmail.com and they’ll give you a free 3-month national WiFi subscription, compliments of Boingo.com!

Happy Anniversary, Punchline!

Posted: September 23rd, 2010 under A Tight 5ive, Punchline Magazine, Shows.
Comments: 63

In this very special installment of a Tight 5ive, Punchline Magazine’s Dylan Gadino interviews comedian Hannibal Buress.

Filmed on location at the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival, Hannibal discusses his writing gig with Saturday Night Live, his life on the college comedy circuit, and his future in stand up comedy. Watch the interview.

Posted: July 29th, 2010 under A Tight 5ive, Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival, Interview, Punchline Magazine.
Comments: 49

In this installment of “A Tight 5ive,” Punchline Magazine Editor-in-Chief Dylan Gadino interviews Shane Mauss live from the Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival. They discuss Shane’s new album, life in small town Wisconsin, and farts!

Posted: July 20th, 2010 under A Tight 5ive.
Comments: 21

Live from The Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival… two guys that “usually don’t drink” – “drink”, and the results are hilarious! Peep it.

Posted: September 30th, 2009 under A Tight 5ive, Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival.
Comments: 15

Most stand up comedians have a stage persona: not Marc Maron. He’s the same person on stage as he is off stage, and it’s not always guaranteed to pretty, but it’s always guaranteed to hilarious.

As if he cares.

In this Tight 5 with Punchline Magazine’s Dylan Gadino, Marc discusses the problem with the term “rebel”, how he deals with psychological obstacles, and the zen of airplane bathroom mirrors.

You can catch Mr. Maron perform his critically acclaimed solo show “Scorching the Earth” September 24-26th at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago, Ill.

Posted: September 23rd, 2009 under A Tight 5ive, Interview.
Comments: 16

Laurie Kilmartin has performed at the Montreal, Aspen and Edinburgh comedy festivals, and at clubs in nearly every state in our glorious union. You may have seen her on Comedy Central, Jimmy Kimmel, Showtime or her punditry on Best Week Ever, the Today Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Rachel Maddow Show and Fox and Friends. She’s even skyped on Oprah. Top that.

In this episode of a Tight 5ive with Punchline Magazine’s Dylan Gadino, Laurie discusses the trials and tribulations of coming up with new material, dishes up some great parenting advice, and talks about her upcoming album “Five Minutes to Myself.”

Enjoy!

Posted: September 10th, 2009 under A Tight 5ive.
Comments: 11

On this edition of A Tight 5ive with Punchline Magazine’s Dylan Gadino, 2008′s Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival Comic’s Comic Award winner Robert Hawkins discusses his new lip cactus, performs some impromptu poetry, and wears a funny hat in the process.  Enjoy!

Posted: August 12th, 2009 under A Tight 5ive, Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival.
Comments: 12

On this edition of A Tight 5ive with Punchline Magazine’s Dylan Gadino, Rooftop favorite Dan Cummins discusses his new Comedy Central special, moving to Los Angeles, and lays out a blueprint on how to get drunk Dan Cummins style.

Enjoy!

Posted: August 5th, 2009 under A Tight 5ive, Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival, Ruminations, theorizations and stuff.
Comments: 10