Chelsea Handler switched from E! to Netflix for her show “Chelsea.” Except, Handler took full advantage of the platform by adding her own political views that were too taboo for television. She also spiced it up with some adult language she was so infamous about being bleeped for on E! Network. In McHale’s case, there is nothing in the first four episodes that depart from his style on E!, except for adult language and adding another camera to the set. 

“If you ask me, there’s nothing more desperate than an old show resurfacing on a new network with almost the same exact format and the same old tired host,” he admits at the start of the first episode. 

“The Joel McHale Show” makes fun of the most ridiculous reality shows on television, especially those that are so obviously scripted. When “The Soup” was on cable for over ten years, it’s viewership was a staple for any reality show guru to catch up on the latest drama with a dash of McHale’s humor.

The show chooses clips from shows like E!’s “Hollywood Medium,” Oxygen’s “Snapped,” ABC’s “The Bachelor,” Bravo’s “Real Housewives,” among others. McHale seeks to reaffirm what we’re all thinking by putting the true meaning of “reality” into “reality show.”

“The McHale Show” features celebrity guests, such as Kristen Bell, Billy Eichner, Jason Priestley, Eric Bana, Eric McCormack, Seth Green, and more to come.

To add, the show features skits outside of the studio. A skit about “The Bachelor” plays on the recent “Bachelor in Paradise” sexual assault scandal. In the clip, producers hover around the actors not permitting any kind of touching, groping, or anything without verbal consent. The narrator jokes, “because you can’t spell ‘consensual’ without ‘sensual.’” 

Although this unique platform seeks to humiliate the characters of the reality shows, it actually functions as a symbiotic relationship. The more insane reality TV is, the more exposure these shows receive. The more harsh McHale is, the more reactions he receives from celebrities. In episode 3, McHale makes fun of Donna Farizan, who hosts her own show of NBC’s the “Today Show” on YouTube called “Donna-Dorable.” 

McHale jokes about how she can’t book guests on her show. In return, she gets Josh Dumel to send in a video of himself telling Joel McHale that he’d be delighted to appear on her show if he had the availability. McHale says, “Granted you can only book them for cell phone videos.” Realistically, McHale helped Farizan land an appearance on “The Today Show.” Publicity on a popular Netflix talk show is never a bad thing.

Initially, the old style of “The Soup” the show takes on didn’t hold any nostalgia, instead exasperation. But all in all, without implementing new strategies to recreate the talk show’s unique platform, this show proves that Joel McHale is the pioneer of talk show reality television and premise remains timeless.

“The Joel McHale Show” continues weekly with a new episode for 13 episodes on Netflix.

The post Netflix and Trill: All Hail Joel McHale appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Tonight I got the privilege of watching Aparna Nancherla on stage after seeing her on talk shows, Amy Schumer’s Inside Amy Schumer and TV shows like Master of None.

And she’s shyer than I ever knew. She came out on stage with a blue cardigan atop a dress decked in birds. She walks with her hands by her sides, and she looks down to the left speaker near her feet during her entire show.

When she does look up, you know its a moment you’re going to burst. She conditioned me so that when she lifted her eyes to the balcony during the show, I knew she was about to declare a killer line that would leave the Englert loud.

Nancherla makes shy jokes, too, like her FOMO: Fear Of Missing In. “I wonder what my apartment is doing while I’m gone” and her need to keep her coat on during parties so that she can make a quick escape, and keep warm since, you know, she runs a little cold. “I love to wear enough layers where people go, ‘does she have a figure at all?’”

When she finally did make a political joke, she apologised for it which only made the crowd laugh harder knowing how rare it was for her to come outright and say it. 

Nancherla ends her set with a hilarious powerpoint including excerpts of emoji issues, her parents texts to her, and online dating screenshots.

But perhaps the most laughter in the crowd came from her simply reading off absurd Yelp reviews in her own tone.

You cant help but have a good and wholesome time at Nancherla’s show. Most of her jokes were clean, and honest, two things that can be more rare than ever in today’s comedic scene.

The post Witching Hour: Aparna Nancherla @ The Englert 10/21/17 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I had been looking forward to this show for weeks.

Not surprisingly, I was surrounded by mostly white folks who think they’re so #woke because they watch The Daily Show. Despite the regular Iowa City majority, I saw quite a few Desis in the audience, which was encouraging and comforting. Their presence became clearer through the night.

The show opened with Arish Singh, a comedian raised in Waterloo but now splits his time between Chicago and Iowa. He began the show by discussing the difficulties of being an Indian Sikh kid growing up in Waterloo, from watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which I refuse to link to because it’s so racist) with his white friends, to attacking questions about his turban.

One of my favorite jokes in his set consisted of dividing the audience along bipartisan lines. He asked Republicans “when I say race war,” republicans say the minority group which they’d like to harm, and asking Ds “when I say class war,” deny any wrongdoing. At this point, I was very curious about the reactions of all the old white ladies in the audience.

Singh ended his set with a powerful call to action against corrupt state and local politicians, citing examples of the University of Iowa revoking scholarships from over 2,000 students, to Iowa Senators Grassley and Ernst and their deafening silence among hate crimes in this country, to the state government taking away collective bargaining. “We can’t let Iowa become Nebraska,” he declared as he ended his set to laughter and applause. He gave Hasan Minhaj a touching introduction calling “Homecoming King” one of the best works of comedy he has ever seen, and left the stage.

Minhaj began his set discussing childhood, and with the help of his slideshow projected on the screen behind him, explained the conditional nature of “brown love,” the relatable phenomenon of brown/immigrant parents hitting their kids (which Minhaj claims led to the creation of “Indian sociopath” Bobby Jindal), and more.

Minhaj came to Davis, California with his father while his mother stayed in India until he was eight completing medical school. When his mother finally came to live with him in America, she shows up with his little sister who Hasan didn’t know existed until she walked through the door. He dubbed this situation “Maury for immigrants.”

He used this incident to explain two facets of immigrant life: immigrant parents love secrets, and his negative attitude towards immigrants (mainly his sister). Minhaj jokes that at that point, he “believed in the wall,” referring to Donald Trump’s plans to construct a wall along our southern border to keep immigrants out. 

Minhaj frequently incorporated Hindi words and phrases throughout his show, most notably “log kya kahenge” which translates to “what will people think?” For a Desi Muslim man to get on stage in Iowa City and speak to a largely white crowd using Hindi and Urdu reveals courage and audacity, to me.

He translated most of the words for the non-Hindi speaking population, but his references to movies like Jodha Akbar, Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham, and more without an explanation was a bold move. The absence of an explanatory comma with these references made me feel welcomed, like I was chatting with Hasan in my living room.

In addition to his hilarious jokes, Minhaj used lighting techniques and sharp emotional contrasts to tell traumatic, unfortunate experiences from his life too. He saved one of his funniest jokes to precede a dark moment in the show, the moment his father suffered a heart attack.

He described a tragic moment immediately after the terrorist attack on 9/11 where some white kids who attended his school vandalized his family’s property, stole his backpack and called him racial slurs including sand n*****, a name I was called often in my childhood.

He tries to keep this moment of the show palatable to white folks by explaining that he knows “white people have problems,” because he has seen “Girls” on HBO and Lena Dunham’s character hasn’t found love yet. However, he stands firm in his explanation of white privilege here.

He explains that immigrants feel they have to pay this “American Dream tax,” which requires them to accept moments like these. Immigrants constantly adapt to America, bend for America, and have to release “press releases to prove their patriotism” after moments like 9/11, and other terrorist attacks that many Americans wrongly connect back to the Muslim community as a whole. This part of his show resonated with me, and my experiences as an immigrant in this country grappling with my parents’ acceptance and passivity to bigotry and my refusal to compromise with racism.

From an ongoing story about a spurned (probably racist) prom date to a dramatic triumph in marrying a Hindu woman, Minhaj created a piece of art that connected with Iowa City audiences of all backgrounds.

His references to Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Mario Kart comforted the general public, but his inclusion of Hindi/Urdu phrases, Desi cultural explanations and immigrant experiences reached out more specifically to people of color and Desi folks in the audience.

Without tokenizing or making fun of brown folks or other people of color, he honestly showcased his own experiences in this country.

The post Show Review: Hasan Minhaj @ The Englert Theater 2/25/17 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I had heard of Jen Kirkman for the first time about a year ago through a friend. We watched her Netflix special, I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine), and laughed almost every thirty seconds. She thought the way I thought but she said what she was thinking out loud and that was fantastic.

Before Kirkman arrived on stage, an opener named Fran Hoepfner gave a short 15-minute-long show for the audience. I thought that she was a good warm up for the audience to see what Jen Kirkman would be like. She focused on stories about stalking exes on social media and coming up with new titles for the movie Now You See Me 2 because what an uncreative title! She has the same type of comedic voice that Kirkman has, which made her a really great choice for an opener.

I knew ahead of the show that there would most likely be jokes about the election in her show, and I was nervous to see how that would blow over. There are so many things that comedians joke about (race, sexuality, politics, etc.) that are hard to balance between hilarious and offensive, especially in a town as liberal as Iowa City.

She explained that either Trump or Hillary winning the election could be scary because we’d either be stuck with even more systemized racism or a nation full of women-haters. She made a point that voting is vital for every single person of voting age. She talked about her family in Massachusetts that believe Muslims are taking over London. She jokes about the number of lesbians roaming around Iowa City and catcalling and periods and explains why women can be crazy and men can refuse to listen.

Kirkman executed her jokes about these things in a very unbiased way, and she did it hilariously. I’m the type to notice when something possibly could be construed as offensive, and I didn’t see any cracks in her performance.

Outside of these risky topics, Jen Kirkman is relatable. She empowers me and inspires me in the oddest way, by allowing myself to say “I react to things irrationally that way too! I am crazy! It’s fantastic!” She makes observations about society that make sense while also recognizing that she, too, is just one person and doesn’t have authority to tell people how to live their lives.

I went into this experience knowing that it is very difficult to get me to physically laugh at these kinds of things. TV shows, movies, comedy shows, I never laugh out loud for any of them. I can find something extremely funny and not even crack a smile because that’s how I am. I ended up laughing a few times during Jen Kirkman’s show when I wasn’t even ready for it.

If you haven’t heard of Jen Kirkman or watched one of her shows, I recommend that you watch her Netflix special or listen to it on Spotify below. I promise you (most likely, almost one hundred percent) won’t be disappointed.

The post Witching Hour: Jen Kirkman @ Englert Theatre 11/5/2016 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Friday night 37 year-old actor, screenwriter, producer, and more importantly, stand-up comedian Nick Swardson came to Iowa City for his sold out show.

The CAB comedy show was originally scheduled to take place on Friday December 13th, 2013, but due to unspecified conflicts, the show took place Friday January 24th in the Iowa Memorial Union Main Lounge at 10 pm.

Swardson is best known for his writing and roles in films and TV shows like: Grandma’s Boy, Malibu’s Most Wanted, Benchwarmers, Reno 911!, Just Go With It, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. Nick started out doing stand up comedy at the very early age of 18 and began making a name for himself in the Minnesota comedy scene.

But before Mr. Swardson graced the stage with his new material, comedian and opener Josh Mann took the stage. While Mann truly did make me laugh on multiple occasions, his material overall lacked originality. It seemed as though the less rehearsed the jokes were, the better the reaction from the audience, (Such as his jokes involving the Ped Mall). His stage presence was awkward at best, mainly due to his incessant sipping of an unidentified Starbucks beverage. His demeanor was somewhat off-putting and definitely did not help the delivery of his material at all. All in all I have to say I wasn’t impressed with Josh Mann.

As disappointed as many may have been with the opener, that quickly changed for the better when Minnesota native Nick Swardson took the stage. Greeted by a roar rather than applause, Swardson took the stage with his classic funny man swagger. Dressed in a Young & Reckless t-shirt and snap back, along with neon Nikes and blue jeans, he greeted the audience by shouting, “What the fuck is up Iowa City?!”.  If such language is bothersome to you, then Swardson’s act was definitely not for you. Like many stand up comedians, most of his jokes were somewhat vulgar and profanity saturated. I say that in the most complementary way possible, because literally he had me in tears. His material covered a wide range of topics. Anything from cats, to the first man to experience a brain freeze, to ice skaters with diarrhea, were all fair game. The material was relatable and original in every way possible, and the crowd loved it.

Check out a pic a UI student snapped at the show by clicking on the Tweet below. Nick then retweeted it to his 500,000+ followers:

“@nellym2011: First row in Iowa City! @nickswardson Throw me a retweet. #IOWA pic.twitter.com/O1axpZyGmd” am I albino? Wtf? Haha

— Nick Swardson (@NickSwardson) January 25, 2014

Like any comedy venue, the IMU Main Lounge had it’s share of hecklers, which Swardson handled like a real pro. One young woman, got irrationally upset when Swardson was a telling a joke involving a woman performing oral sex. She yelled from the back of the room in a moment of silence, “Women are not objects!”. To this Nick responded jokingly with “No, you’re just alcoholics.” and then proceeded to tell more jokes aimed at women to make a hilarious point. Again, those sensitive to such topics are advised to avoid Swardson’s shows, because he is crude and fully proud of it. I completely enjoyed his set, along with the hundreds of others in the IMU Main Lounge. He had the crowd in the palm of his hand, and delivered much more than our money’s worth.

Swardson seemed to return the pleasant sentiment with the Tweet following the show you can read below:

Iowa U was dope. Such a fun crowd w/ great energy and some hammered folks. Love ya! Driving out to Des Moines tonight. Rain check the party

— Nick Swardson (@NickSwardson) January 25, 2014

To keep tabs on Nick, like him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter.

The post Nick Swardson Brings Colossal Laughs to IMU appeared first on KRUI Radio.