I really like the internet. Thanks to the Internet, I’m able to keep up on news in the US, and it helps me feel still connected to a culture that I left behind two and a half years ago. (I also make frequent calls home, but that is more a personal than cultural connection.)

I get most of my news from podcasts. I highly recommend WBUR & NPR: On Point with Tom Ashbrook, a nice 45 minute podcast that is only fifteen minutes two short for my commute, NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! for a humorous weekly news round-up, This American Life for very interesting stories about the American experience, NPR’s Science Friday with Ira Flatow, science!, and Car Talk for funny car-based humor from two ex-MIT guys. There is lots of other good stuff out there, such as the New York-based WNYC Brian Lehrer Show (makes me nostalgic!) and all sorts of other NPR news, but these are the main things that I listen to. Since I’m on the train for a bit over two hours a day, it really helps to have some stuff lined up to listen to.

But I also download and watch TV. Lately I’ve been watching NBC’s Last Comic Standing. I’ve always been a fan of stand up comedy, and liked going to shows when I was in New York. I’ve been to a few shows here in Tokyo and enjoyed them, but I don’t think the American style of stand up comedy is very common here (see my previous post on Japanese comedy and note that Japanmanship is no longer defunct, but is happily re-funct!

I vaguely remember Dat Phan in the first Last Comic Standing, and at the time he really came under a lot of fire for being a one-trick pony, only relying on jokes that play on obvious racial stereotypes. I thought he was pretty good, but I don’t remember very much about his comedy now, so I won’t comment too much on it.

In this new version of Last Comic Standing there are two comedians that I really, really want to like, but am having a really hard time with. Esther Ku and Papa CJ. (There are other acts that I don’t think are funny, such as God’s Pottery, which is basically just a one-trick musical act making fun of the religious right. I don’t see how they can have anywhere near the range required to advance in a show like this.)

I wanted to like Esther because she’s cute and asian. I won’t comment about whether Papa CJ is cute, but he’s asian too and has a bit of a geeky flavor to him that could be really funny. I think they both should have some really interesting experiences to mine for comedy, but I was really disappointed that Esther seemed to go for the obvious racial based jokes that aren’t new and aren’t funny. She has a few things that I think are funny, but she’s not very subtle, and some of her stuff is just depressingly obvious (asians can’t tell asians apart either! koreans eating dogs! were low points for me.) She is cute and bubbly though, and when she stays away from racial stereotype stuff (like when she was just talking about men buying women dinner) she is funny.

Papa CJ is interesting, but at least with the way that the show has been cut, he relies too heavily on outsourcing jokes and reincarnation. I guess my problem here is that he used the same material in his two sets, but maybe he’s also just trying hard to get through to the next cut and using his best stuff. What bothered me most is that he used a clear set-up of talking directly to an audience member that would have worked great in response to heckling, but just sounded very forced in the way he set it up. Still, both of them made it through to the next show, so hopefully there is more to their humor than I’ve seen so far.

As I expected, there has been a lot of talk on the blog-o-webs about Esther Ku, mostly negative but some positive (kind of) and even an appearance on NPR’s Talk of the Nation which I’ll listen to pretty soon here. I really hope that Esther is able to bring a bit more subtlety and social commentary into her act – I think Chris Rock does an amazing job of that – and does more non-stereotype based comedy.

As long as I’m talking about last comic standing, I want to say that I think that Iliza Shlesinger is really funny, and I hope she goes far. I also really like Paul Foot and Jim Tavare.

By the way, the Tokyo Comedy Store’s Ken Suzuki was briefly on the show, but they didn’t give him much of a chance – which is too bad because he’s pretty funny.

Anyway, I’m glad that I can at least get some weekly stand-up on TV, which is nice and easy to put on while writing (for example) blog posts.