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Busy Comedian Iliza Shlesinger is Really Making a Name for Herself
BY LEE VALENTINE SMITH
I
N THE EIGHT YEARS SINCE SHE won the sixth season finale of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, Iliza Shlesinger has become one of the world’s busiest comedians. So busy in fact, she’s currently streamlining her name a bit to become simply Iliza. Last month Variety reported that she has two new pilot projects in pre-production - in addition to a proposed late-night talk show and Forever 31, a series on ABCdigital. Also she has a successful podcast, a book due for publication next spring and three topical comedy specials: War Paint (2013), Freezing Hot (2015) and Confirmed Kills which premiered on Netflix in September. If that’s not enough to occupy her time, she begins a US tour this month with a stop at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse on December 2. On a recent early morning, INsite caught up with Iliza by phone, still in bed at her home in L.A.
DOING STANDUP REQUIRES A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MENTAL PRESENCE AND IT’S A LOT OF THINKING ON YOUR FEET.
You have a very full multi-media plate these days. I do. But I’m just cautiously optimistic because nothing is ever set in stone. At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is still the most concrete thing in my life.
concerts with people just yelling out things. Not necessarily bits, but just feelings or some references from the specials. But as far as obligation to the audience, I think I’ve heard you are working on a late night my obligation is just to make them laugh. talk show project. How I do it is up to me and nobody gets to Well, there’s the promise - or as I like dictate that. Sometimes people are seeing to call it the threat - of a late night show. a joke for the first time on the special but Right now we’re in the very early stages of it was written maybe six development with it. If I had months before and you’re my way, we’d be starting it just not feeling it anymore. tomorrow but hopefully were Fortunately, since it’s not a working toward a show. I song, I don’t have to do that like the idea of interviewing bit if I don’t want to. On this DECEMBER 2 people and I really like to tour I’ll be doing a good mix Variety Playhouse see what makes them tick. I of material from the special have a podcast [“Truth and and some new stuff for myself. Iliza” available on iTunes] and it does pretty well. I started it so I can Will the new material from the tour end up in work on being a good interviewer. Most your next special? comics aren’t great listeners and I wanted to When I finished Freezing Hot I had become a better one. like a quarter of Confirmed Kills already decided in my head. Then when I finished Comics are sort of pre-programmed to talk Confirmed Kills, I felt like it was such a rather than listen. departure, such an exclamation mark on Yeah, doing stand-up requires a certain the comedic evolution. I don’t know where amount of mental presence and it’s a lot of I’m going to go after that one because it was thinking on your feet. There’s nothing really so definitive - in my point of view. I think relaxing about it. That being said, there there may have to be something different are plenty of times when I’ve been deathly about my life before I can do another hour. ill and I just go on auto-pilot and do the That being said, I can’t help but write so I’ve act. But that comes from practice so the written another 35 minutes. But it’s all on crowd can’t tell that you’re phoning it in. the topic of Las Vegas! So I’m just a little bit Maybe deep down you’re like, “I’m so sick, more than halfway toward a new hour but I’m gonna die if I have to make eye contact I don’t think ranting about Las Vegas is the with anyone.” But when you’ve done it long appropriate follow up to Confirmed Kills. enough, you get enough batting practice in to know where the beats are and when That’s a very open-ended place to be. to stop for the laugh. And that can be very It’s a weird kind of crossroads. I guess useful when you have the flu and you’re because I gave a lot with Confirmed Kills, somewhere in the middle of Michigan! for the next step in my career I’ll have to be doing something different. I don’t know. It’s Now that people have seen a lot of your nice to be at a place where people want you material - on the specials or even recently to do shows and want you to do a movie and on the Tonight Show - do you feel any need I’ll have a book [Girl Logic] coming out next to do all-new stuff when you tour? Or do year. But you know, we’ve all seen men and you feel like there are some things that women in Hollywood, where they were so become ‘greatest hits’? poised for success. But then they crapped I’ve been noticing in the last year that the bed, you know? So hopefully there’s no my shows are kind of turning into rock bed crapping going on anytime soon.
THE LATEST DVD, BLU RAY & VOD RELEASES By John Moore
BEING CANADIAN (Candy Factory Films) Being a documentary about a Canada, this film is equal parts laughout-loud funny and at times awkwardly polite. One of the first things Calgarian Rob Cohen, best known for his gig as a producer and writer for The Simpsons, realized when he moved to L.A. was just how little his new country knew – or cared about – Canadians. So with Being Canadian he set about to discuss stereotypes of his native Great White North. Through a series of hilarious interviews with folks like Mike Myers, Seth Rogen, Dan Aykroyd, Alanis Morissette and many others, Cohen does a brilliant job of selling the beauty of his country and its people through plenty of self-deprecation. It’s easy to see why this doc was nominated for Best Documentary Film by the Writer’s Guild for America. MOTOWN 25: YESTERDAY TODAY FOREVER (Time Life) The 1983 TV special Motown 25 was a defining moment in TV for many. Michael Jackson was at one of the highest peaks in his career and he slayed the crowd with hit after hit. It was also the moment when the world first discovered what Moonwalking was, as Jackson demonstrated it for the first time publicly on “Billie Jean.” Despite that pop cultural moment,
the show was crammed with a slew of stellar performances: a temporarily reunited Jackson 5 singing “I Want You Back,” Marvin Gaye delivering a poignant “What’s Going On” (he would be killed just a year later) and Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross offering one of the best duets in modern memory with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Time Life has just released a massive 6-DVD collection of the concert, featuring the show in its entirety, along with 20 additional minutes that never made the air, and 14 hours of added features (the original televised concert was just over two hours). EXTREME – PORNOGRAFFITTI LIVE 25: METAL MELTDOWN (Loud & Proud Records) In 2015, to mark the 25th anniversary of Pornograffitti, Glam Metal band Extreme’s biggest-selling album, they recorded a show in Vegas at the Hard Rock Casino, performing the multi-Platinum selling album in its entirety in front of a near-rapturous, if aging crowd. This set is a keen reminder of just how great a guitarist Nuno Bettencourt is with some jaw-dropping solos peppered throughout the set. And, yes, “More Than Words,” despite propelling the album to #10 on Billboard’s chart in 1990, does not hold up well two-anda-half decades later even when the audience is singing along here (to be fair few, if any, metal ballads do), but songs like “Get the Funk Out,” with its horn section, and the genre-straddling “Decadence Dance” certainly do. The three-disc set comes with DVD and Blu-Ray copies of the concert, a documentary on the band plus a CD of the set.
ILIZA SHLESINGER
insiteatlanta.com • November 2016 • PG 15