With so many venues in which to experience comedy, one would think that comedy recordings would fall by the wayside. Why listen to a tape or CD of someone’s act when you can either watch it live, see it on cable or buy a videocassette?
Comedy records had been staples of the recording industry for decades, when performers like Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Richard Pryor and George Carlin constantly had discs on the charts. But during the comedy boom of the 1980s, comics with records seemed to get less emphasis as the public got caught up in seeing performers either live or on television.
But a new appetite for recorded laughs has developed in the last few years, as evidenced by Jeff Foxworthy, whose CDs have sold millions of copies. Several comics have put out new recorded works over the past few months in an effort to copy that success.
“I think there is a market for it, and it makes sense,” says Tim Cavanagh, a Chicago comedian who is one of the latest looking to tickle your CD player’s funny bone.
“There are so many people who, through the boom of the ’80s, really got hooked on comedy,” he says. “And they like the product, and they like having stuff in their hands and having stuff they can listen to in the convenience of their own homes.”
Cavanagh is a comedian who, during the course of his 18 years in the business, has used music as a way to make people laugh. His staple is the parody song, and he has put several of them on a CD called “Sounds Like Fun,” part of a catch phrase Cavanagh uses on audiences in his act. (“Yeah, Tim, sounds like fun!”)
In addition to some new songs, some of the material on the CD are tunes that Cavanagh regularly performs on stage: “Joan Blunden,” based on an article that said ex-“Good Morning America” host Joan Lunden was born with a “b” before her last name; “Really Safe Sex” (“If you do it in a car, keep your seatbelt on . . . if you’re on a waterbed, keep the room above freezing”); and “Piston Souvenirs,” a quick ditty about keepsakes derived from Detroit’s basketball team (“I have Piston basketballs/When I dribble they do, too”).
“Sounds Like Fun” is on the Hits & Giggles Records label and is available at stores around Chicago, going up against not only other comedy CDs, but other forms of entertainment, a notion not lost on Cavanagh.
“You walk into a record store and it’s `Wow, look at what I’m competing against,”‘ says Cavanagh, 44. “What I had hoped to do with my CD was to (try) something a little bit different: concentrate on the songs, which have gotten a fair amount of airplay for me over the years. And to just try to put as much quality stuff as I possibly could on it.
“And then you just hope that you find that niche. But it’s always a crap shoot.”
But comics like Foxworthy, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and a few others have hit sevens with their recordings, “so I know that there’s a comedy buyer out that’s there,” Cavanagh says.
A longtime guitarist, Cavanagh decided to one day try to get his music across to an audience through comedy. He walked into Zanies 18 years ago, and even though he had no written material, got a shot at performing some of his songs on a lineup that included Judy Tenuta and Larry Reeb, “people who were a little bit established in Chicago, and good comedians, good standups,” Cavanagh says now.
“So in watching them I realized `Okay, I’ve got to have some jokes, some banter. So I started to just write like crazy and fill in the holes in my act.’ And as the years passed, I began to put together something that resembles more closely what (I do) today,” an act that is 50 percent comedy music and 50 percent spoken standup.
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You can see Cavanagh live this weekend, as he performs at K.J. Riddle’s Comedy Stop in south suburban Orland Park. Cavanagh is also expected to have copies of “Sounds Like Fun” available for purchase. K.J.’s is at 15750 S. Harlem Ave. in the Continental Shopping Center. For show times and reservations, call 708-614-6336.
And Cavanagh is scheduled to perform Saturday at part of WGN-AM’s sixth annual PumpkinFest, a daylong food drive and free entertainment festival at Goebbert’s Pumpkin Farm in South Barrington.
The standup lineup
Here’s who’s working at the comedy clubs. Current sets are scheduled to run through Sunday; all new acts begin on Tuesday unless otherwise noted. Lineups are subject to change.
– Jim Labriola, a standup comedian who plays one of Tim Allen’s hardware store buddies on ABC’s hit comedy “Home Improvement,” is the special performer Friday and Saturday at the Funny Bone, 1504 Naper Blvd. in the Tower Crossing Shopping Center in Naperville. Call 630-955-0500 for show times and reservations.
– New, wholesome variety shows are set for Saturday and Sunday at the Shark Bar, 212 N. Canal St. Comics, poets and gospel singers are among the planned entertainers; the event is produced by Let God Place It Inc. The host on Sunday is “the preacher’s son,” Chicago comic Ron Baker Jr. For tickets, call 312-299-1891; for other details, call 773-472-1120.
– Making special appearances this weekend at All Jokes Aside (1000 S. Wabash Ave.; 312-922-0577) is J. Anthony Brown, a co-host on Tom Joyner’s syndicated morning radio show (heard here in Chicago on WVAZ-FM), and a former co-star on Steve Harvey’s first television sitcom, ABC’s “Me and the Boys.”
– The Chicago Comedy Company is performing a staged television sitcom, complete with commercials (can’t get away from them). A new episode is mounted every two weeks; wrapping up this weekend is Episode 1, “Total Eclipse.” It’s playing through Sunday at the Royal George Theatre Gallery, 1641 N. Halsted St.; call 312-988-9000.
– Chicago comic Caryn Bark has joined the legions of ink-stained wretches. Bark, she of the successful one-woman play “Diary of a Skokie Girl,” is writing humor columns on motherhood for Chicago Parent magazine, a free monthly distributed in the city and most suburbs. Watch those dangling participles, Caryn.