THE MOON

Moontinuity

Hey guys. Bob here. I just wanted to tell you that our all new Past Shows section is online! You can check in to this part of the site to read synopses of previous shows and catch up on what you might have missed (or can’t remember because of Royal Oak’s terrific bar staff). Pop in each Wednesday for updates! That’s all for now. Keep tuning in for exciting new content!

Hey There Sports Fans!

We here at the Moon are kicking off an exciting event to celebrate Super Bowl XLV. In commemoration of this season’s championship game we’re coming at you live from the Royal Oak on February 1st at 8PM Eastern Standard Time. Those of you on the West coast can book your flights now on Expedia.com! Text 11482 for a limited time discount offer.

With your Starting Lineup

Hannibal Buress
Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock

Myq Kaplan & Micah Sherman
Last Comic Standing, Second City

The Pendulum Swings
Featuring Jason Trachtenberg of The Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players

Giulia Rozzi
Stripped Stories, Dive Comedy

and featuring your favorite Moonkids:
Bob Walles, Nat Towsen, Jordan Clifford, Steph Fagan, Kenny Pickett, Tim Skinner and Camille Harris!

So gear up, grab a bag of TOSTITOS® brand Tortilla Chips and TOSTITOS® brand Restaurant Style Salsa and TOSTITOS® brand Salsa Con Queso and TOSTITOS® brand Zesty Bean and Cheese Dip and head on down. Tailgaiting begins at 8PM. Pre-Game show kicks off at 8:30PM EST!

FREE
21+

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There are three adjectives I would use to describe you. Young! Silly! and Camille! But you’re already using those as the title of your show and website, “Camille! Young! Silly!” Can you give me three other adjectives, or one noun and two adjectives? Explain.
I’d say: Thoughtful, inclusive and fun. The explanation is that I love my family.

That should always be your explanation for everything. How young were you when you realized you were silly, and how silly were you?
Good question. I think most people aren’t aware of how silly they actually are. For example, this guy at the coffee shop today got angry because they didn’t take the foam off his latte. AND he didn’t say please. That’s completely silly. It’s not like he’s extremely allergic to dairy (like some of us here) and they got his milk wrong or anything and his tongue was swelling up (Hello!?! Actually happened last summer!). He was acting like a 5 year old. Those fivers are pretty ridiculous. Who doesn’t say please when they order? What grown-up can consider themselves a responsible adult if they don’t say please? He hasn’t realized that he is silly yet.

I was six and I was very silly when I realized it. I pretended to fall down so people would laugh. I was in Ms. Schwenker’s class at Douglass Elementary. 

The words “silly” and “jazz” don’t often go together, unless someone who thinks jazz is silly is talking about jazz. Can you explain what you mean by calling your music “silly jazz,” and tell me about the development of this genre? 
I definitely didn’t develop this genre, but I might have come up with the name. It wasn’t until after I started writing songs about the Muffin Man, The Monster Under my Bed, Commie Kindergartners and other silly things that I realized that there were SO many more people who do what I do. For example, I love Nelly McKay. She has some pretty silly jazz songs, but I didn’t know who she was until I had written “The Muffin Man” and everyone started asking me if I knew who she was. Of course, Tom Lehrer would be considered to be a silly jazz artist as well as Ella Fitzgerald. She wrote “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” and that is a pretty silly jazz song. Goldrich and Heisler wrote “Taylor the Latte Boy”. I call that silly jazz. 

But, as I said, I wasn’t fully influenced by these people until after I started writing my own stuff. I always have loved jazz music and theory and I went to vocal jazz camp, so my melodies and changes are a direct result of my jazz studies. I’d like to think that the melodies are better than the lyrics, although I do love my puns. It’s silly jazz because it’s silly and it’s jazz. Duh. I don’t make very many raunchy jokes. So it’s not “raunchy jazz.” I’m no Charles Mingus. Have you read his auto-biography? 

[I’ll read any biography that is recommended on its raunch.]

You’re on The Moon, a fabulous comedy variety show of great renown, and that must be awesome. Have you had any comedy experience in the past, and do you think of yourself as a comedy performer?
I always thought The Moon was a variety show and I was the variety? I have played my songs around at different shows and my solo show is mostly comedy. I mean, I’ve taken improv classes and I have done characters that were comedic. So, yes. I do claim comedian in my elevator speech.

I just learned today what an elevator speech is. Cool. So what place to you think comedy has in music and vice versa? 
I think that music and laughter are our most basic needs as humans. And we need water and sustenance.

You wrote a musical based on “The Muffin Man.” I’m not familiar with the man, but I love his product. What about muffins inspired you to write a whole musical and why do they only inspire me to eat more muffins?
It wasn’t the muffins. I can’t eat most muffins unless they are dairy-free, it was the nursery rhyme that got me thinking. I guess I like muffins. I prefer my own scones.

What, if anything, do you do when you’re not on or thinking about being on The Moon?
I teach piano, write, and perform my songs. And I help people produce things like music videos and PSA’s. I also read.

That last thing is where you and Kanye West differ, I suppose. A lot of your time (with me) is spent with and/or talking about babies and dogs. Tell me something about a baby you know.
I don’t think we’ve ever been together with a baby before. But I always tell you about babies. This one I know wants to crawl soooo badly! But she can’t yet so she just belly flops a lot.

Now tell me something about a dog you saw.
Oh my gosh! He was so cute! A little fluff ball with a dog cone because of all his hot spots. He is so allergic! But so adorable! He gets one Benadryl in his food at dinner. Floopy ears and curly hair!

Great.

Camille Harris is a MoonKid and a musician/singer at large. 

Some Pretty Okay Questions is a new feature on The Moon Show Dot Com where I, your question master Jordan Clifford, will be asking some pretty okay questions to some pretty amazing performers who will be on our next show. So here are…

Some Pretty Okay Questions for Kurt Braunohler

Hey Kurt, what’s up?
Yeah right. 
(Wait was that sarcastic? I can never tell in email form.)

Well anyway. You’ve talked a lot in your act about how much fun it is to edit Wikipedia pages, and really stick it to those fools at Wikipedia for making a public encyclopedia. But are you at all concerned now, with the popularity of WikiLeaks, that you’ll be imprisoned for your actions?
No. Unless Parakeets have access to police. And could read. And could care about anything other than hopping. Because parakeets are the only animals I really “give it to” on Wikipedia, if you know what I mean.

Your Wikipedia page says you’re best known for your work as Kristen Schaal. How did come up the idea for Kristen Schaal?
It does? No it doesn’t. I just checked. But Kristen was a fever dream I had when after I saw Watership Down.

[Ed. note: It does now] 

You’ve been to Edinburgh a few times. And probably a few other places. The only time I’ve been out of the country was to go to Israel for Birthright, which was questionable in the first place. Oh and also to Montreal to visit a friend who didn’t want to go see strippers, but that’s a whole other thing. Is Edinburgh like that, and what’s YOUR favorite place to travel for comedy and why?
Edinburgh IS a lot like that. And my favorite place to do comedy is either right here in Brooklyn or San Francisco. They’re tied for most fun.

You were born in Neptune, New Jersey. Do you think that the cast of The Jersey Shore is giving Italian-Americans a bad name, which is to say, a worse name?
Nope. I think it’s giving them the right name. The name they’ve had all along. 

Did kids in school ever ridicule your name? College must have been tough.
They did, but no one ever went for the best insult, which is “Brown Holer” or Brown Hole. The best they came up with was Granoler. Lame. Also, what college did you go to that there were bullies? You must have been very ugly and awkward.

[Ed. note: I like that there are only quotes around “Brown Holer.” And also, yes, I was, but thank God that changed.]

You love to tweet. So I guess my first question about Twitter is ‘what is Twitter?’
I love to tweet? I wouldn’t say that. I’d say I like constant attention.

Is your Twitter anything like Sh*t My Dad Says the tv show? If not, why not? If yes, explain.
It’s exactly like that but it’s things that I said. So it’s like “Things A Hopefully Future Dad Says”

Sometimes you tweet jokes before you use them live. Do you think that is risky to put actual material out there where a handful of people might read it? 
Nope. You can’t be precious. It’s just jokes. I’ll make more. Also, It’s a good test of whether it would work for the stage. And I’ve never had a problem on stage where someone is like “Read that on Twitter, NOT LAUGHING!” I used to be precious with it, but then I realized that NO ONE KNOWS WHO I AM OR GIVES A SHIT. Once I’m mildly famous, maybe I’ll change my mind, but right now, the more people who see me making jokes, the better, I think.

My favorite Twitter hashtag is #uptonogood, which I saw on a subway poster for the Oxygen TV show Bad Girls Club. What is yours? (For the record I’m also a fan of your own #markwhaleberg)
I made one that was #underwater90spunkbands that was really fun and took of a little. I think my favorite one from that was “Shudder to Sink.”

There’s a guy on Twitter named BrendanJordan. I have an identical twin brother named Brendan, and my name is of course Jordan. Weird, right? What do you suggest I do about it, and has anything like that happened to you?
Fucking kill him.

[Ed. note: Done. Nuke ‘em.]

That concludes the Twitter portion of the interview. What is your most sincere resolution in ‘011? 
To quit things in general.

Do you have a crush on anyone?
I get really intense crushes for like 10 minutes at a time. So, yes. 

Do you have any questions for me? 
So many, but I’ll just ask you tonight in person.

To be continued?????

Kurt Braunohler is the co-host of Hot Tub with Kurt and Kristen, and you can see his new monthly live late night talk show, “Night of the Living with Kurt Braunohler”  starting Feb 4th at 11pm at the new PIT.

by Jordan Clifford

Greetings New Members of the Year 2011!

It is with great pleasure that we kick off season 3 of The Moon and extend an invitation by way of text and image. Now according to TV rules, season 3 is where things take a turn for the weird as the writers use the perceived stability of the show to stretch out and “experiment with the format”. Let us assure you, that is NOT going to happen here.

So come on down this Tuesday, January 18th to the Royal Oak bar at 8PM. We’ll be serving up old-school classic Moon entertainment without any messing around of any sort!

With Special Guests:

• Amy Miles (Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Co-host of Smart Girls with Amy Poehler)
• DANIELS (HBO’s Funny Or Die Presents, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!)
• Kurt Braunohler (Co-host of Hot Tub with Kristen Schaal, BBC4’s Penelope: Princess of Pets)
• Jamie Kilstein (Citizen Radio) “Jamie Kilstein is a doofus.” -Glenn Beck
• Brent Sullivan (Fag Life, The Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival)

And your favorite Moonkids, Stephanie Fagan, Jordan Clifford, Kenny Pickett, Camille Harris, and Tim Skinner.

As always, The Moon is a real live event at night. Please, come and participate in what promises to be entertaining for the duration of the evening.

Your Hosts, Bob Walles & Nat Towsen

FREE, 21+

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