​Throughout the award's history, Grammy voters have tended to bestow Best Comedy Album upon trusted favorites: Bill Cosby closed out the 1960s with six straight victories; Richard Pryor took home three trophies in the '70s and two more in the '80s; and Peter Schickele opened the '90s with four consecutive wins of his own. Lately, Chris Rock, George Carlin, and the Daily Show/Colbert Report nexus of talent have dominated the category, with Flight of the Conchords providing the only surprise. This year, however, the award is pretty much up for grabs. Full rundown below.

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IFC

​Portlandia: The Tour
Music Hall of Williamsburg
Friday, January 20

Better than: Watching television (but who has one anyway?).

In the middle of a nearly two-hour set of live sketches, improv riffing, and unseen clips, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the stars of IFC's Portlandia, strapped on guitars and played the song that served as the show's much-emailed teaser. "Do you remember when people were content to be unambitious, sleep 'til 11 and hang out with their friends? And they had no occupations whatsoever?" Fred asks. "When people were singing about saving the planet, forming bands?... When they encouraged you to be weird?" That dream, the dream of '90s, he explains to Carrie, is alive in Portland.

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After Yung Humma teamed up with labelmate Flynt Flo$$y to release "Lemme Smang It"—a smash/bang fusion of awkward rhymes, a minimalist beat from the reclusive Tummiscratch, and gif-ready dance moves that led to tour dates around the country, a Sound of the City interview, and this amazing t-shirt—the duo and their labelmates at Turquoise Jeep seemed to hit a bit of a creative wall. Slick Mahoney's "Go Grab My Belt" had a great video and got a boost from Humma himself, but it still felt like a step back. Meanwhile, the funniest part of Flossy's admittedly catchy "Did I Mention I Like To Dance" was my own attempts to emulate the moves. "Happy Sexgiving," however, might be the group's second masterpiece, easily the highlight of their post-"Smang It" catalog. Video below.

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Workaholics last week

Last week's episode of Comedy Central's Wednesday-night Workaholics, a first-season show about recent graduates fumbling through a post-college reality as telemarketers, took place at the Gathering of the Juggalos. From the attention to detail, it was clear creators did their homework: Juggalo interlopers called out "Whoop Whoop!"; Faygo, ICP's soft drink of choice, was omnipresent; background shots featured people passed out in the grass beside a kiddie pool, which is pretty much a microcosm of the festival. Even the few missteps--an extra who looked like the Crow, not a Juggalo; one character's Violent J facepaint was a little too Emmett Kelly; etc.--were so slight that there'd evidently been serious time invested in researching the wicked-clown family. We, as you know, can empathize.

Workaholics director Kyle Newacheck is the one predominantly responsible. Juggalo culture first fascinated the off-camera fourth-member of Mail Order Comedy, the Los-Angeles-based online sketch troupe behind Workaholics, after seeing the viral hilarity of "Miracles." Newacheck and his collaborators were particularly drawn to stoner rapping cartoons because they'd experimented with their own joke-emcee personas--wizened magicians who smoked weed and beefed with Harry Potter. Ah. . . we'll let him tell you the rest.

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photo by Nate "Igor" Smith

Hannibal Buress walks through a city of lost souls, i.e. the Gathering of the Juggalos' Drug Bridge

On the comedy stage of All Tomorrow's Parties New York this weekend is the recently minted 30 Rock writer Hannibal Buress. The local comic's been all over the festival circuit this summer, from Pitchfork to Wilco's Solid Sound to the Gathering of the Juggalos. The latter is where he told dearly departed Paste that Tina Fey discovered him for his new job.

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​So the gleeful journalism-destroyers over at the sports blog Deadspin have declared this Deadspin Music Week, and included a delightful tale of irascible Butthole Surfers frontman Gibby Haynes' inspired performance last month during a comedy show at the Bell House. Invited as a surprise guest by Eugene Mirman, it seems Gibby brought a prop along!

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Seriously, this guy

Let's take a moment from our regularly scheduled programming to notify you about something we tangentially cover here at Sound of the City, that I've personally deemed very, very important. Specifically that Tracy Morgan will be filming his very first HBO special at the Apollo this fall and it's open to the public. The engagement takes place over the course of two nights--Friday, September 24 (the same night as the last bait-and-switch Pavement show, but eff them) and Saturday, September 25--and tickets are relatively inexpensive in the context of these things: $30 face, with another $12 or so in extraneous charges. (Plenty left, it seems, so have at it.) Let it also be known that Jordan, when not trying to hide the fact that he's been faithful to his onscreen wife Angie on 30 Rock, works blue. So blue that a steady stream of uptight perms walked out of his Carnegie Hall performance last November. And so when Morgan promises in the event press release that the "special is going to be all the elements: fire, water, earth, air"--in other words, "the Avatar of comedy experience"--it'll be more like the Avatar porn of comedy experience. So: like nothing you've ever seen before. And very, very blue.

Charlyne Yi, pre-head-shaving antics

Last year, actress-comedian-writer-musician Charlyne Yi won a screenwriting award at Sundance for the film Paper Heart, in which she plays a character named Charlyne Yi who sets out to make a documentary about the meaning of love and falls for a character named Michael Cera, played, of course, by the lovable actor Michael Cera. Rumors spread that Yi and Cera were a couple in real life, but they never were. The confusion was just more proof of Yi's expert ability to blur the line between reality and fiction so well that no one knows when she's telling the truth and when she's joking.

After a couple years off from regularly performing on stage, Yi is back with a new solo show, A Little Time With Charlyne Yi, which she's taking to the prestigious Edinburgh Festival next month. Tonight and next Wednesday, July 21, she'll be her testing it out at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. (Advance reservations for both performances are booked, but there will be a stand-by line at the door.) In the run-up to the show, the Los Angeles resident took time out to tell us about her upcoming poetry book, her recent decision to shave her head onstage, and why she thinks she has no idea how to do comedy.More >>

Any attempt to describe what Reggie Watts does onstage will inevitably fail to convey the dizzying heights of absurdity the man regularly achieves, but here it goes. First, the Seattle-via-Montana transplant constructs backing tracks via carefully controlled beat-boxing and judicious use of looping pedals and pitch-shifting, weird-noise generating devices. And then things start to get strange. He might use the ramshackle tracks as the bedrock for a startling accurate imitation of a drunk British professor--or of a squirrel. He might sing a song filled with bizarrely right non-sequiturs like "Your ass crack/butter and toast." Or he might just decide to unleash a wave of distortion that would make TV On The Radio jealous.

Or he might just get real. Like, bizarrely, hilariously, specifically real about the minutia of his life. The highlight of his new CD/DVD combo Why Shit Crazy?, released via Comedy Central Records, is the song "My History Thus Far," in which Watts sings in detail about how he's never really paid rent since moving to Brooklyn a few years ago, and also makes a bold proclamation about the location of our city's finest hamburger. Free of the burdens of rent, Watts quickly found a home on New York's alt-comedy scene after moving here in 2006. He collaborated with Regina Spektor and gigged with absurdist comedy king Eugene Mirman, and built up enough buzz to land opening duties for Conan O'Brien's high-profile Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour. (He won the gig a day after one of O'Brien's writers showed The Once And Future Talk Show King some of Watt's live videos.)

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​From Ted's website today, where he belatedly got around to announcing his new album and new single "Even Heroes Have To Die," about which Pitchfork's Tom Breihan wrote yesterday: "From the sound of that one, Leo may have been spending some serious time listening to fellow Jersey natives the Gaslight Anthem." Or not! Ted then goes on for a while about "breaking balls" and kindly refrains from bringing Clipse into this whole thing. Update! Tom responds:

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