Bill Burr’s Motorcycle Lessons, Bert Kreischer’s Disney Luau Bit, and Whitney Cummings Investigates a “Fishy” Aquarium

0:03 Hello, I'm Johnny Mac with your daily comedy news. Bill Burr recently spent a day at the NOLA Motorsports Park in New Orleans getting riding lessons from three-time world champion Freddie Spencer. First, Freddie offered to take Bill Burr for a lap as a passenger. Yeah, exactly. That's better. I've literally never ridden on the back. I got you. Don't worry. Put your foot up on the peg. Don't worry about grabbing me. Put your hand... First team. I appreciate that hug. I'm confident. Yeah. I'm taking you off.

0:52 Next up, Bill Burr explained his secret for learning anything, and it's a skill that people who know him say he does not have. I will say anytime I try to learn something new, I've learned that if I do try to empty my brain and just shut up and listen, which people who know me is a difficult thing. That's what I, I just like, you know, I'm just, you're Freddie Spencer. I'm going to do what you tell me to do. I did the same thing when I've With drum teachers, helicopter instructors, I'm just like, okay, I'm going to do what they say to do. I'm not going to do what they say not to do. And finally, because he is Bill Burr, he had one complaint about the motorcycle industry. I like riding the MT-09. What's that? The MT-09.

1:33 Why do they have like all letters and numbers? It's just like, why can't you just call it like a Caprice or an Impala? You know, like the CB750. He knows all of them. And I'm like, how do you remember that stuff? It's like code. Yeah. Nice job by Use Bikes Direct on YouTube there for those. Bert Kreischer says he's been trying to work a story into a stand-up act. The story, minor spoiler, is about a... He told People magazine, so it's not like I'm ruining the joke he did. It's about a Disney luau he once attended where he was convinced Dwayne the Rock Johnson was going to make a surprise appearance. Kreischer said, there's a story I'm working on. We all went to Hawaii. My whole family went to Hawaii. Usually if we all get together, I get a good story out of it.

2:13 He did get other stories out of it. He says his mother asked his daughter, how much do you weigh these days? And Bert was like, oh, please stop. And Georgia says 130. And Bert says, which, by the way, is not overweight. And my mom goes, oink, oink. That's who my parents were turning into. Boy, that's harsh. He said, I had all these great stories throughout the whole thing, but I didn't have one good story. Had one that I thought was great, but it wasn't working the way I wanted to. Then he was at his sister's house for a party. Of course he was. And he was reminded of a story that might have legs. Bert Kreischer said, I was a little left up and there was a Michael Jackson impersonator there. And I didn't know she had gotten a Michael Jackson impersonator. I ran into him and it's Michael Jackson. I went up to my sister and I go, Michael Jackson's here. She goes, no, this is like the time you thought the rock was coming to the luau. Gratia went back to that and said, I thought The Rock was going to show up. So I got excited. I got my hopes up. I took my shirt off. I whipped around my head and they're like, ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for your special guest?

3:05 Bert's like, yeah. And then the big reveal, put your hands together for Mickey Mouse. I can see that's a funny story. Just some idiot in the basement reading it. So I can see Bert turning that into a nice little chunk there. That could be fun. Burt is getting ready for a fully loaded at sea, his very own four-day comedy cruise, setting sail November 19th aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Burt said, if I can leave that cruise with that story intact and put it in a special, I'm done. If I can get that story going, my special's ready to tape. Whitney Cummings was in Syracuse and found out they're opening a new aquarium. She said, hold on, aquariums aren't being newly built. Aquariums are things they built in the 70s and 80s. She said, I don't drive around Syracuse and be like, you know what? This place is missing a bunch of stingrays in a box floating above my head. That is a level of money laundering that I have not witnessed in a while. People in the crowd told her the aquarium wasn't open yet and that it would have beavers and that it leaked. Apparently, the tank underwent a six-week leak test. Try saying that phrase at all. That was take four that you just heard.

4:07 That reminds me. At one of the colleges I teach in the bar area, they had this really big fish tank with beautiful fish. And I walked past the area the other day, and the fish tank is gone. There is no fish tank anymore. And I'm wondering, what happened to the fish? I'm wondering if something horrible happened, and then they removed the fish tank? Or did they just decide, we don't need a fish tank anymore, and the fish people came and moved the fish to their new happy home? I'm going to choose to believe the latter, even though deep down, I got a bad feeling about this, as Han Solo might say. Whitney Cummings was curious about the aquarium. Maybe that's where the college fish went. They went to the new aquarium in Syracuse. See, now I'll be able to sleep at night. Okay, the fish are fine. The fish are fine. They've moved to Syracuse. Whitney said, we're done with comedy. We're getting to the bottom of this aquarium thing. Is there a person we can call? A person in the audience handed Cummings a phone that they had already dialed. That is suspicious. They wanted to call the county executive. His name is Ryan McMahon. Whitney Cummings left a message. Hey, Ryan, Whitney Cummings here. I'm here with a bunch of your constituents. I'm not trying to be silly here, but the aquarium is fishy. Why is it leaking? How come it's not open? Are they really beavers?

5:15 We have questions. We'd like to see the receipts, et cetera, et cetera. Turned out the audience member had dialed the wrong person. They had actually called the McMahon Ryan Child Advocacy Center. Yikes. So the next night in Albany, Whitney Cummings said, the Syracuse people are very ticked off about it. I told them I was coming to Albany and they said, F you about the aquarium because the state government is here. That's all fun. Kate Berlant has her new special on HBO. She got a nice profile in Vanity Fair. She said of her special, Parmesan, it's funny because when I was putting together the special, I had this feeling of, you know what? I'm not going to talk about phones. I'm not going to talk about the world ending. Do we want to get away from that? Shouldn't I provide an escape from that reality or something? And then, of course, it's just, no, I have to talk about how I actually feel. Ideally, the work you make in some way reflects the moment in which you're living. She talked about her previous show, Kate. She said, I wrote that in COVID, and it's completely scripted. It's a one-woman show about someone who's revealing who they are, but really, it's a total fabrication.

6:10 I talk about having a cruel Irish mother in it. It's not real. Once that ended and I slipped into a deep depression, I was like, okay, right, stand up, stand up. And so I did feel a calling to maybe talk about myself for once. I was like, oh, what if I just did more stand up comedy? Capital S. Kate started stand up when she was 17. She talked about the specials that influenced her. Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker, Sarah Silverman, Jesus is Magic. I think I was 16 when that came out and Rock My World. Zach Galifianakis, Live at the Purple Onion. I was really obsessed with David Cross's stand up, which followed him on the road. That was the thing that actually made me want to start writing jokes because I thought it looked so fun. I was like, oh, he's just traveling to different cities, doing the shows and meeting people and going to a bar every night. I thought that looked like a cool life. As for the notebook on stage, it's not a prop and it is a prop. Part of what helped me to do it was like, I'm going to write down a couple ideas, a couple words and see what comes out of it, not be too precious. And the notebook allowed for that. The notebook allowed me to feel like I could just go on stage and rifle through it.

7:02 And I felt this excuse to allow myself to non sequitur and be fragmented. It's not that deep. I just got dependent on the notebook. As you can imagine, I was like, OK, let me do it without it. And then I got very in my head about it. And then I straight up missed it. And it also felt like I let myself have it. And then, of course, that becomes a joke, too. The worst person who ever lived, Jay Leno. Poor Jay. Oh, people get so mad at Jay. Jay talked about the economy, but because he's Jay Leno, he talked about the economy through the lens of cars. You know, we have a situation now where Unfortunately, the whole company, there's no middle anymore. You have poor people or you have rich people that can afford. You know, I'm like with the Mission S, the Porsche. I see Porsche moving upscale. They want to be like Ferrari, sell fewer cars to more money to fewer people. I'm starting to see in the old days, every Porsche, you know, Ferrari had 800 miles and Porsche had 60,000, or Corvette, same thing. They used to do the shootouts, which is fastest.

8:01 The only ones that showed up would be Corvette and Porsche. Everybody else just didn't, you know. And now you have cars like people buy a GT3 and I'm putting it away. Yeah. They know it's going to be, okay. I mean, that's the sad part. I would hate to see them become, Porsche have always been expensive, but they're not rare. There's a lot of them around. They make a lot of cars. Yeah. But using that Ferrari model, well, you can make more money with fewer cars. Yeah. But now you have this elite clientele. And, you know, the great thing about Corvette is it's an aspirational car. If you're a guy with your own plumbing business, boy, you can aspire to own, yeah, it's over 100,000, but it's not a million. So at some point in your life, you can get one. And that's what I like about it.

8:48 And everything is that way now. Hotels are either Motel 6. Or the Four Seasons. The middle dies. Yeah. Restaurant. Fast food or top-end restaurant. The Applebee's, the Denny's, just regular restaurant because we have no middle class anymore. That's the sad thing. The Nashville Comedy Festival is back for year 13. Pretty nice lineup. It's not until April 7th through the 18th Some of the acts. Tom Segura at the Opry House April 8th. Alex Edelman and Ben Folds at the Ryman on the 8th. Whitney Cummings on the 9th. Ron White at the Ryman on the 9th. Jeff Dunham at the Pinnacle on the 10th. This is a pretty good list. Matea Lane and Bob the Drag Queen at the Ryman on the 11th. Giggly Squad. Opry House April 15th. Friend of the show, Gianmarco Cerezi at the Ryman on the 15th.

9:34 Amber Autry, Michael Blaustein, Alisa Deke, Mojo Brooks, Josh Johnson, Jeff Allen, Joe List, Nateland Live, Ben Palmer, Bloodline Banter, Alfred Robles, and the Zanies showcase for The Tonight Show on April 17th. That sounds pretty good. Time Out Magazine has their comedians to watch. Some comedians you should watch are Kim and Aaliyah. The improv and sketch collaborators excel in authoring all sorts of offbeat, often exquisitely awkward bite-sized videos whether that's slightly unnerving cooking demos half-baked business pitches or more recently parodies of late analog era commercials all right what's the funniest thing about your life right now kate and alia they said i don't know how this works that they said but they said we made a half joke about how funny it would be if we launched a web arcade on our website Because of how much we love Flash game sites from the early 2000s, we took the joke too far and actually built an online game built on one mildly successful video series we have called Kitchen Hacks. We taught ourselves pixel art and game development and created a game where you can play as Aaliyah in her demented Kitchen Hacks world. Alright, I guess it's Kate speaking here. Then we became addicted to our own proprietary game. The highest score we've gotten so far is 198,020, which is actually quite high for a score if you know anything about this game, which most people don't. And the one joke that always lands. They say, any time we have a visual component while performing live, we always try to run the tech from the stage via Aaliyah's laptop. Instead of seemingly switching to the screen we want to share, we accidentally show Aaliyah's desktop, which we fill with embarrassing open tabs like Google searches for how to get people to like you easy, when is it too old for a first kiss, and are minions

11:05 real-life animals? Kim tries to vamp while Aaliyah struggles to navigate to the right screen. The audience always feels a split second of horror until they realize it's a bit. And that is your comedy news for today. Happy Halloween. Oh, I forgot to lecture you about early voting. So the midterm elections are coming up on Tuesday and you're going to vote, right? You're going to do what I'm going to do. You're going to get up and get a nice coffee and drive to the voting place. But if you don't want to deal with it on Tuesday, you can vote early. You're going to have to do a little work. You already got either a phone or a laptop out if you're consuming this show. So just Google early voting near me and they'll tell you what to do. But it's really important you vote. I don't care who you vote for. I do. I do. I'm not going to lecture you. But anyway, you should vote. See you tomorrow.