Entertainment

Forget Justin Bieber. Here’s Dean Martin’s celebrity roast of Jackie Gleason, featuring roasters Art Carney, Gene Kelly, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Foster Brooks, Nipsy Russell, and others.

If you were watching NBC in February of 1975, you may have caught this as it originally aired. If not, here’s your chance to watch it anew – a Dean Martin roast from start to finish.

Kevin Hart is a relatively new arrival on the comedy scene, and his career has been going quite well. I think I heard that he will be headlining a comedy performance in a stadium soon, something few, if any other, comedians have attempted.

This is his show, I’m A Grown Little Man, from 2009 or so.

Sandglass Theater presents African Adventure Tales by Crabgrass Puppet Theater in Winter Sunshine Series

PUTNEY VT- On March 28th at 1 and 3pm two funny folktales from Africa come to life with vibrant puppets, spectacular scenery, and an infectious musical score. “Koi and the Kola Nuts” is a tale from Liberia in which the young son of a chief sets out on a wonderful journey in search of fortune, carrying only a sack of kola nuts. His kindness to the creatures he meets is rewarded when their help saves his life! And in “Anansi and the Talking Melon,” we meet one of the most hilarious trickster characters in world folklore.

In 1986 Robin Williams star had risen and he taped the following performance at the Met in NYC.

It seems to be an accurate representation of what people most enjoyed about him to that point – a manic genius. Part of that may have been some the cocaine he was known to be doing, but it was mostly a real talent for laser-quick improv, free-association, and ability to mimic and caricature.

Tune in this tuesday, March 10th,6-8pm to “buttahmilk” for another experience that you won’t soon forget. DJ Pockets talks to Eric Dubay, yoga teacher and current resident of Thailand about the Flat Earth. From his book “The Flat Earth Conspiracy”

“Wolves in sheep’s clothing have pulled the wool over our eyes. For almost 500 years, the masses have been thoroughly deceived by a cosmic fairy-tale of astronomical proportions. We have been taught a falsehood so gigantic and diabolical that it has blinded us from our own experience and common sense, from seeing the world and the universe as they truly are. Through pseudo-science books and programs, mass media and public education, universities and government propaganda, the world has been systematically brain-washed, slowly indoctrinated over centuries into the unquestioning belief of the greatest lie of all time.

You probably know Patton Oswalt from TV or movie roles. I thought he did a great job as the voice of Remy for Ratatouille, for example, and as the assistant deputy mayor in the Reno 911 movie.

His comedy takes on popular culture, comics, religion and atheism, and social issues. This show is from just a few years ago, titled Finest Hour.

Come join in the fun! Gallery Walk Friday, March 6th is the First Annual Spring Forward Extravaganza hosted by the Brattleboro Time Trade!

Featuring:

MUSIC by The Snaz, Jesse Lepkoff and Luz Elena Morey • Silent Auction • Spring Gardening Show
• Dessert Bar and Cafe  • Raffles, games, free give-aways!

Brattleboro Time Trade members trade time (and not money), thereby building community & friendships, helping people share skills, meet needs and have fun!

Gallery Walk Friday, March 6 from 4:30 – 8:30 pm at the River Garden

More information available on our

A member of marching band and the math club. A basketball player. A member of the Air Force. Sinbad has been all of these things, but he is best known for comedy.

His style is very clean. I can almost avoid giving the warning for bad language with his show, in which he often comes across as a big kid, or maybe a nutty uncle. He seems like he would be fun to invite to a party.

The Brattleboro Rotary Club is raising money to help upgrade the radio station KILI, a non-profit radio station broadcasting to the Lakota people on the  Pine Ridge, Cheyenne River, and  Rosebud Indian Reservations, part of the Great Sioux Nation in South Dakota.

On Sunday, March 1, 2015, from 4-8PM at the New England Youth Theatre, the Brattleboro Rotary Club will be sponsoring the sixth annual “International Film & Food Festival,” with proceeds benefiting KILI which serves 30,000 people on the three reservations and seeks to preserve Native American culture and instill pride in the peoples’ unique heritage.

This is a follow up to our Steven Wright show of last week. If you liked that one, you should enjoy this one as well. Mitch Hedberg is similar in style, doing a surreal series of nervous, one-liner, observational jokes.

I love his delivery and perspective. It’s too bad he checked out at an early age (37) so we don’t have more of his humor to look forward to, but he also seems to be one of the sorts of people that didn’t quite fit in on planet earth. His making sense of his time here was his craft.

PUTNEY- On February 20th and 21st Sandglass welcomes the puppet artist, Amanda Maddock, with a new collaborative work, Do Elephants Dream of Eclectic Sheep? In this piece the audience is invited to visit the bedroom and mind of a slumbering elephant whose dreams are just beginning to unfold. The elephant begins to question her fate as the contents of her room and mind reveal messages either fraught with meaning or frivolous…or perhaps both…or neither? Time, scale, character transformation, creatures and objects will be awakened, unpacked, and opened to interpretation.

This piece will be presented as part of Sandglass Theater’s New Visions Series, which serves as a laboratory for new works by artist in the field of puppetry and movement-based theater.

A 1985 performance by Steven Wright. Droll, dead-pan one-liners delivered rapid-fire. His humor twists things around and requires some assembly, but he gives you the parts, and asks the questions.

“Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?”

Come in from the cold and escape the deep snow at Brooks Library! Join cinefile, journalist, Tom Bedell, for a Thursday afternoon at the movies, to watch and discuss nine films that “you must see..but may have missed.

The first film in the series is screening today, Thursday 12 February 2015, 3 pm – 6 pm. 

Remember Rita? She’s sort of a cross between a fairy godmother and Gracie Allen, with her own style and grace, delivering innocent questions and observations with a delivery that packs a punch.

She’s originally from Miami and was a dancer on Broadway before entering the comedy biz. Woody Allen and Jack Benny are considered influences. More recently she can often be found performing in Vegas.

I had a different show picked out, but in the last day or so it was removed from YouTube, so instead of Check Your Neck, we’ll visit Jeff Foxworthy in the early 1990’s via his “You Might Be A Redneck” special.

Foxworthy is famous for his “you might be a redneck if…” jokes and TV shows, but how many knew that he did a five year gig maintaining IBM mainframes?

Winter Sunshine Series opens with The Three Little Pigs

PUTNEY- Sandglass opens its series on January 31st with two performances of WonderSpark’s Three Little Pigs, at 1pm and 3pm. The classic tale retold with hilarious puppet pigs and a silly wolf – with an emphasis on ‘being prepared’. Join storyteller and puppeteer Chad Williams for a highly interactive show with tabletop puppets and lots of audience participation. “Little pig, little pig, let me in!” “Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!” Three Little Pigs build their houses of hay, wood and bricks – but will they withstand the Big Bad Wolf?

Russell Brand is quick witted and politically-minded. In this stage show, filmed live at Hammersmith Apollo in London, Brand looks at media, poverty, symbols, advertising, image and values.

The show starts off with some audience banter, but soon he gets down to business. Jesus, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Gandhi are the icons that frame his larger discussion, and it makes for quite an evening of laughs as well as provocation of thought as he discusses each one.

Almost everyone certainly knows of Ellen from her current talk show superstardom. It’s not a bad gig, but she also had a period when she was paying her dues and working her way up. That’s where we head this week.

She was breaking ground in comedy with a unique style. She’d deliver a line, then digress, and digress again. Her humor comes in waves, and she has kid-like, almost-innocent revelations about topics. Audiences get layers of jokes piled on thickly.

Is it the bugged-out look on his face? His nervous energy? The self-deprecation? Maybe we just don’t get the respect we deserve, and Rodney speaks for us.

Rodney Dangerfield is old-school, but hip nonetheless. Here we find him performing in 1995, reeling off nearly an hour of non-stop one-liners. Jokes about being ugly, the wife, sex, drugs, being old, and of course, getting no respect. Jokes like “My father wouldn’t take me to the zoo. He told me, “If they want you, they’ll come and get you.”

I say, old chaps, I wonder if you mightn’t enjoy this 52 minute Sherlock Holmes episode with the irrepressible Jeremy Brett.

It has all the elements of what any decent Anglophile who appreciates the late-Victorian period would enjoy.Should you accept this most sensitive assignment of the highest order of the Empire, this message will self-destruct in 5 seconds.

The Second Stain by Arthur Conan Doyle