It’s the stuff of NARN legend; in our first year on the air, we (Chad and company) got an email from JB Doubtless – Chad’s younger brother and a charter member of the NARN during its first three months – saying that he’d seen this comic, a conservative comic no less, that was pretty funny, and that he’d booked him on the show.  For us.

And it was atrocious.  Part of it was that the conservative comic talked more about politics than the funny during the interview – which was just not what we expected.  Part of it is – and I say this having worked on the Don Vogel show, where comics were trooping through all the dang time – comics are hard to interview.  It takes an unusual personality to work a room the way a comic does – and “unusual” all-too-frequently means “difficult for schlubs like us to relate to”.

So the interview went down in history as just about the most challenging one we’ve ever had on the NARN.

The comic, of course, was Brad Stine.  Ed and I talked with him last week (we didn’t realize who he was when we first booked him) and it went a lot better.

Just gotta say – Bun and I went to the show at the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts earlier this evening.  And he was really good.

Not conventional, naturally; Stine, who has a Dennis-Leary-style delivery (and, let’s be honest, look) with material that swerves between hilarious observational comedy about politics, society and religion, with some bits that sounded like they’d have been more at home in a particularly challenging Presbyterian sermon (and that’s a good thing; Presbyterians put more stock in engaging the congregations’ brains from the pulpit than any other denomination).

But dang, it was funny.  Any thought that Stine worked safe because he doesn’t work blue missed the point; he doesn’t work blue, but it was still edgy enough to keep me interested.

Anyway – Brad Stine was a lot of fun.  Check it out if you get a chance.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 am and is filed under NARN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.