• jerryseinfeld.com

It’s been a few years since legendary comic Jerry Seinfeld performed in Boise. And he opened his act at The Morrison Center on May 17 with his observations on how it has changed since his last visit.

“Boise is getting cool,” he pandered to a near-capacity crowd. “You all have drinks and phones.”

After that, he spent nearly a half hour dissecting the various types of breakfast foods.

“When I was a kid and they introduced the Pop Tart, it nearly blew my brain out the back of my head,” Seinfeld said. “Back then, all we had was toast.”

Seinfeld is from another era, and I don’t mean the 1990s. The longtime comic’s act is the sort that is rooted in the classic style before Lenny Bruce came along and smashed comedy into a thousand little sub-genres. Seinfeld wore a trim blue suit and stood in front of his signature red curtain, his only on-stage companion a stool and a bottle of water. The closest thing to a swear word that came from his mouth was when he said cookies should be called “chocolate sons of bitches.”

Several years after the finale of his sitcom, Seinfeld made the decision to toss out all the material he had accumulated over decades of doing stand-up and to start from scratch. His material at The Morrison Center was a good cross-section of contemporary, yet classic issues, though it betrayed hints of the comic curmudgeon sneaking in at the corners.

“Coffee used to be 10 minutes in the middle of the work day, now it’s 10 minutes of work and eight hours of coffee,” Seinfeld said of energy drinks.

“Marriage is like a game of chess, but the board is made of flowing water and the pieces are made of smoke,” he said.

“I just hope I live long enough to see them turn 50,” he said of the Facebook generation. “Because the moment you blow out the candles on your 50th birthday cake, you immediately think: The less people in my life, the better.”

There’s an old joke that comedy is all about the delivery, and if you want to learn how to do it, don’t go to college, just get a job at Domino's. It’s true. Seinfeld’s book, Seinlanguage, is painfully unfunny. But Seinfeld’s delivery is as smooth as it ever has been; he never stutters or babbles and there was nary an “um” in the whole act.

The only drawback is that part of the fun of comedy is the back-and-forth that develops between comic and audience. But in a room as big as the Morrison Center, there is little crowd work or rejiggering, the comic simply plows ahead with well-rehearsed material.

After the conclusion of his set, Seinfeld tossed the smoothly rehearsed script aside and stuck around to take a few questions from the audience, like will he please shoot another episode of the show.

“Why would you want that?” he fired back. “Just so you can say, ‘Wow, they got old!’”

Then the evening’s closer: “Did you ever sleep with Elaine?” someone shouted from the balcony.

He grinned a sly grin and let the awkwardness sit for a moment.

“No, because I’m not that stupid,” he eventually said. “Here I have this TV show, why would I go and mess that up by screwing my co-workers?”

Seinfeld went out on top and made the choice to go back to the bottom and work his way back to the top again. Viva la old school.

Seattle comic Kermet Apio—the resident comic at Liquid Laughs this week—is a busy man. He's done comedy in 47 states, and says the biggest thing he's learned from all that travel is "the smaller the airport, the more I look Arab."

In Apio's bone-dry delivery, the joke kills. It's almost like the fretting frog was modeled after the comic.

"It's not easy being named Kermet," Apio droned.

In the first night of his residency at Liquid Laughs on May 3, Apio discussed his love of pie and dislike of lottery tickets, which he called "a sadness coupon."

The last time Apio performed a public gig in Boise was 1997, and he said the comedy scene has grown a lot since then.

"There's a lot more young comics," Apio said. "I think the Internet has made comedy more accessible, so a lot more people try it than before."

Apio will be performing at Liquid Laughs through Sunday, May 6. Tickets are $10 and available online or at the door. Locals Aaron Sheehan and Gabe Dunn are opening.

For the MTV-U series Stand-In, college students get a heckuva surprise when their professor steps aside and hands the class over to a celebrity guest lecturer.

The series has featured South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone lecturing on screenwriting, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus discussing micro-finance, and Hotel Rwanda actor Don Cheadle speaking about genocide in Sudan.

For a soon-to-be-aired episode, a UCLA politics class received a guest lecture from comedian Bill Maher.

The episode will air Monday, May 7. Maher will perform at The Morison Center in Boise on Saturday, Aug. 18.

What drives people to heckle at a comedy show is a force more mysterious than gravity. Sure, it's attention for the attention-starved, but if the comedian is even remotely experienced, the attention amounts to being verbally berated in front of your date and, in a final insult, having paid for the experience. That hardly seems worth it.

It is definitely entertaining for everyone else though. A recent post on Cracked listed its 10 greatest heckler-destroys of all time, and it is some dang good funny. Especially the clip of Jamie Kennedy telling a heckler quibbling over referring to servers as waitresses, "Well I'd like you to serve your mouth shut."

The post somehow left out this clip of Zach Galifianakis destroying a mouthy nursing student. Effin' poetry.

More can be found at the YouTube HecklerBlog channel.

This is all worth bringing up because of another clip, shot in a Long Island comedy club, that was recently brought to Boise Weekly's attention. It shows what ultimately happens to hecklers after all that humiliation: they get kicked the f@#$ out.

So now that Boise's comedy scene is picking up, with dedicated clubs in Boise and Meridian and one-off nights sprouting up all over, don't heckle. Unless you want to end up like this guy. The comedian, not you, has the mic for a reason.

• Angela George

Someone run and tell the right-wing protesters to polish up their signs and put fresh batteries in their bullhorns. Renowned pot-smoking atheist and acid-tongued critic of all things Republican, host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, $1 million contributor to the pro-Obama super PAC and star of Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death—the greatest B-movie of all time—Bill Maher is coming to Boise to do his standup act on Saturday, Aug. 18, at the Morrison Center.

Tickets for that show will go on sale Friday, April 13, at 10 a.m.

Maher starting doing standup in 1979, but rose to prominence as the host of the late-night talk show Politically Incorrect, a job he was fired from for saying that he didn’t think the 9/11 hijackers were cowards. That show was also where Rhode Island senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell appeared 22 times, something she would come to regret when Maher replayed footage of her appearances on his HBO show, including a clip in which she said she had dabbled in witchcraft.

"I look like a lesbian professor at Hogwarts," joked comedian Matt Bragg, poking fun at his hat/sweater/collared-shirt combo. And thus began the Add The Words Benefit Comedy Show at Liquid.

• Matt Bragg wrangles comedians at the Add The Words Comedy Showcase.

There was nary an empty seat in the downtown lounge-turned-comedy-club on March 13, and the crowd wasn't a stereotypical Idaho audience. Bragg, the evening's host, asked bisexual, gay, lesbian and straight audience members to make their presence known. The crowd erupted with enthusiastic cheers. Attendees shelled out minimum $5 donations to a cause they believe in—getting the words "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" added to the Idaho Human Rights Act. The Add the Words initiative died in committee last month.

There was nothing funny about the Add The Words Idaho campaign's devastating loss Feb. 10. The campaign had been steadily promoting a bill that would have added the words "gender identity" and "sexual orientation" to Idaho’s Civil Rights and Human Rights Acts, but it died in committee.

But the Add the Word-ers aren't giving up. And tonight, you can help out in a unique way, while simultaneously laughing yourself silly. The Add the Words Comedy Showcase kicks off at 8 p.m., and for a $5 minimum donation, you can watch funny people Matt Bragg, Dylan Hughes, Olek Szewczyk, Jen Adams, Josh Adams, Mikey Pullman, Ryan Noack and Mundek Clement-Stein tear up the stage at Liquid.

Swig back some cocktails and have some light-hearted fun while helping to protect Idahoans from being denied housing or losing their jobs because of discrimination.

A recent post on BW's blog that referenced the Mormon practice of posthumous baptism raised a bit of a stir with commenters. That post included a mention of a website that turned the tables on the practice by offering to posthumously convert dead Mormons to homosexuality.

Recently, late-night comedians have taken the same issue in different directions.

After reports of the possible baptism of the world's most famous Holocaust victim Anne Frank, and a call by famous writer Elie Wiesel for Mitt Romney to speak out on the issue, late-night comedian Stephen Colbert took up proxy baptisms on his show, using a hot dog and a cigar clipper to give posthumous proxy circumcisions to dead Mormons and turn them "into dead Jews."

Comedian Bill Maher, host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher, performed an "unbaptism" on a recent episode of his show to reverse the proxy baptism performed on avowed atheist Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's father-in-law.

Maher used the "power granted to him by the Blair Witch" to call on Seal Team 666 to rescue Davies from Planet Kolob.

It's a good time for comedy in the Treasure Valley. With a growth of open mics and the opening of Liquid Laughs, a dedicated comedy club, Boise has been rapidly turning into a citywide chucklefest.

In addition to Liquid Laughs, there are now regular comedy events at The Red Room, The Quarter Barrel, and starting this month, Tom Grainey's.

But apparently Meridian doesn't want to be left out of the funny. A regular local comedy series recently started at Schooners Pub in Meridian, and beginning this week, Meridian will also get its own dedicated comedy club (and dueling piano bar): Varsity Pub, which will open in the former Bulls Head Pub space at 1441 N. Eagle Road.

Varsity Pub will feature open mic with Heath Harmison on Thursdays, and then paid feature sets on Fridays and Saturdays.

And now, a clip of this week's headliner at Liquid Laughs, Jimmie Roulette, a man who apparently has sexual fantasies about busty kangaroos. Yeowza!

The best comedy is not that which denigrates, but that which illuminates. The best jokes turn an issue sideways, revealing a truth that was always there but you somehow never noticed before.

For example: Snuggies. Sure, they're stupid beyond measure. But what you may not have noticed until stand-up comedian Matt Golightly pointed it out, is that wearing one also happens to make you look like the Grand Wizard of the KKK.

Cunning insight like that will be on display this week at Liquid Laughs, when Golightly serves as the resident comic, tonight through Sunday, Feb. 19. Golightly has made appearances on the Bob and Tom radio show and dished out some jokes in the San Francisco International Comedy Competition. Locals Matt Bragg, Jen Adams and Danny Amspacher will be opening. Tickets are $10 for Friday and Saturday nights and $8 on Sunday, and are available online and at the door.