05.09
For some reason I’ve been watching a lot of stand-up comedy specials via ITunes as of late. Most were good, the rest were meh. However last night I watched something that was just plain odd. Frank Caliendo’s “All over the place”.
The guy is pretty funny. His impressions are dead on, and I loved how he would integrate all of the personalities into each part of the act. However somewhere within the last 30 mins of the show he was so unfocused it felt like he was out of material and was just filling time until he could walk off stage.
I went from laughing my ass off to confused as hell. He literally lies down on stage for a min and does nothing. At first it seemed like a setup for a new bit, but it went no where fast.
It made me a little sad. I have always seen his commercials for his show and never got to see it. So when I remembered that he existed (yeah bad memory for that kind of stuff) I was all over renting it. He’s pretty damn funny, but that last part makes me question whether I should even bother searching out his show on ITunes.
Shortly after watching that small debacle, I rented another show that had Frank as one of the performers from a few years before. Guess what? (chicken butt). It was the exact same routine word for word. OK I take it back. Apparently it was before dubya became president because there weren’t anything related to him in this other routine. However everything else was the same. Same order, same everything.
Yeah I get that comics reuse material, and I don’t have a good established time line of when that second show was recorded. However based on the film quality and his appearance (like pre-have-your-own-show-that-pays-well) I would say that the recording I saw was at least 4 years prior. And you would hope that within that time he could come up with some new material.
Add in the appearance that he ran out of material with at least 10mins to go on stage and it just seems like he hasn’t anything new for a very long time.
Oh well, he was funny while it lasted.
