Comedy
By admin
Like many of you, we are dispirited by the ever-rightward lurch of the once promising Obama administration. As a result we view electoral politics more skeptically and wearily than ever. Nevertheless, we are challenging Charles Schumer for his United States Senate seat from New York for the very best of reasons.
If Mr. Schumer is unchallenged in the Democratic Primary there will be no opportunity for progressives to register disdain for his brazen work as a shameless apologist for multiple wars, state usurpation of our civil liberties, and further engorgement of the racist police/prison/military industrial state. Without a challenge from the left, Schumer will be permitted to whistle past the audacious bailouts of Wall Street and gargantuan banks — bailouts that are covered with Charles Schumer’s greasy fingerprints. If Schumer stands unchallenged in the September 14th primary, there will be no one to even suggest that New York’s disappearing middle class, and escalating numbers of poor face oppression and plunder that confronts them on behalf of Charlie’s rich but morally bankrupt cronies.
No one else is standing for truly progressive values against Schumer – except Credico2010. We are doing this duty because we feel we must confront New York’s senior Senator for his egregious neglect of the views and needs of so many of his constituents. We must see this through or he will be returned to Washington possessed of not even an iota of accountability to New York’s legions of true progressives. Worse, when he gets there, the corporate media will continue to inform us that the likes of Charlie Schumer represent progressive values.
With the help of a few dedicated and selfless individuals, we have managed to jump through every hoop and meet every requirement old school pols have placed in my way. To say we have run this campaign on a shoestring would be to seriously underestimate the cost of shoestrings. Nonetheless, to campaign in a state the size of New York is expensive– at least to a working class candidate such as myself. We are willing to continue to hold Chuck Schumer’s Guccis to the fire. But without an infusion of operating funds, we will be unable to continue to apply the heat. We know that times are tough and money is scarce. Were that not the case we wouldn’t be running a campaign meant to remind Senator Schumer that he had better start thinking in terms of the people who have been impoverished and victimized by his policies and the crooked cronies he services.
We continue to be taken seriously by not only alternative but the mainstream press. And on Monday May 24th, a new Sienna poll will be released featuring a one on one matchup of Credico2010 vs. Sen. Schumer.
On June 8 the hard part begins. It is the moment that tries peoples’ souls. It is the kickoff of the petioning drive to get on the primary ballot. This is a costly, labor intensive project. We will get the signatures but we will get challenged by team Schumer, who will spend millions to avoid a primary and a debate. THAT IS WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP. We need donations. Any kind of donation: Money, petitioning or organizing.
Here is a link to a recent interview on Capitol Tonight with award winning journalist Elizabeth Benjamin: http://capitaltonight.com/2010/05/randy-credico-hopes-to-unseat-schumer/
Filed in: Campaign News, Comedy, Press Releases, Uncategorized
By admin
Helmed by “Saturday Night Live” alum Laura Kightlinger, this hourlong exposé chronicles — warts and all — the life of comedian turned activist Randy Credico, an up-and-coming funnyman whose candor tanked his career. But the end of his showbiz days didn’t stop him: He switched gears and became a mouthpiece for various causes, including the fight against New York’s draconian drug laws. Credico’s peers and ex-girlfriends weigh in with insights.
 Not rated. This movie has not been rated by the MPAA.
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Filed in: Comedy
By admin
Helmed by “Saturday Night Live” alum Laura Kightlinger, this hourlong exposé chronicles — warts and all — the life of comedian turned activist Randy Credico, an up-and-coming funnyman whose candor tanked his career. But the end of his showbiz days didn’t stop him: He switched gears and became a mouthpiece for various causes, including the fight against New York’s draconian drug laws. Credico’s peers and ex-girlfriends weigh in with insights.
Not rated. This movie has not been rated by the MPAA.
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Filed in: Comedy
By admin
The New York Times
PUBLIC LIVES
By ROBIN FINN
Published: February 1, 2005
RANDY CREDICO, the stand-up comic better known as a flamboyant advocate for inmates serving sentences under the Rockefeller drug laws, hurtles along the quaint confines of Gay Street from Joe’s, the coffee shop where he routinely fuels up like a Hummer at a gas pump. His destination is “the Kunstler house.” He’s not actually late, yet he’s in a rush – always. Recent legislation has made it possible for 446 inmates convicted under New York’s drug laws, among the nation’s harshest, to appeal their sentences, but that leaves roughly 15,000 prisoners still doing time for, in his opinion, too long.
So Mr. Credico’s mission is far from accomplished. And it’s unpopular. But it makes perfect sense to him. His father, convicted of safecracking, spent eight years in an Ohio penitentiary. Dad was paroled, rethought his career (he went into the nightclub business in Ontario, Calif.), and told horror stories about prison. The cautionary tales caught up with Randy Credico in 1997 when, alone in a Florida motel room trying to quit cocaine, he saw a news program on the Rockefeller drug laws and had a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God epiphany.
“I felt like I had dodged a bullet, because I’d violated those laws a million times but never came close to being arrested,” he says. He was insulated, he claims, by his milieu: white, privileged and connected. “If I were black or Latino I’d be in prison right now,” he says. “I feel like a lot of these guys are doing my time. Fighting these laws, which are unjust and racist, was a perfect platform for me: the antiwar movement is 0 for 50, you can’t stop a war, but a movement to repeal the Rockefeller laws is something local. You can put a face on it.”
He did: the distraught faces of the inmates’ mothers at a 1998 vigil to protest the 25th anniversary of the laws.
Mr. Credico figured he would put a year into the issue, then reignite his comedy career. One year became seven. His comedy gigs are limited to Tuesday nights at Rocky Sullivan’s. It’s a start. “There’s not a lot of money in left-wing political humor,” he says. David Frye was Mr. Credico’s original comic template; he blames Mort Sahl for getting him into political humor.
He is 47, a dangerous disclosure since his much younger Argentine girlfriend thinks he is 39 – the never-married Mr. Credico began lying about his age in his teens to appear younger than Freddie Prinze, “who made it at 19.” After a couple of decades of drug and alcohol abuse on the Vegas-Hollywood-Boston-New York comedy circuit, where cocaine flowed like a condiment, he expects his body to give out by 60. As penance, he has whittled his addictions to caffeine and the odd martini. And the limelight. Can’t kick that.
SIXTY Spins Around the Sun,” a documentary that chronicles his trajectory from comedian – his most momentous lowlight is bombing on the “Tonight” show with Johnny Carson 20 years ago when he strayed from mimicry into a harangue against United States foreign policy – to political activist is making the rounds at independent film festivals. The actor Jack Black financed the film. Mr. Credico says Arianna Huffington is pushing a possible feature version; her wish list has Ben Stiller in the Credico role. The documentary portrays Mr. Credico as passionate, annoying and “a sometime weasel.” He has no quarrel with the depiction.
“I have a lot of clay feet,” he says.
Snowflakes trickle down at an unobtrusive rate as he closes in on 13 Gay Street. He met his hero, William Moses Kunstler, when an old flame from his Vegas days, Joey Heatherton, was “on the lam” and needed a lawyer. Mr. Credico hooked them up and found himself a mentor.
“I’m an opportunist,” he says.
He wears cowboy boots (for height), jeans and a tired sport jacket above a rumpled tie that, once he reaches his office, will be dumped on the floor. He grips a supersize espresso in one fist; in the other, he brandishes, ludicrously, a plaid Burberry umbrella as if, like Mary Poppins, he might levitate to a rooftop at any moment.
He pops up the front steps of an aged town house where one of his spent cigars soils the snowy front stoop. The William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, the counterculturish legal aid service he directs alongside Mr. Kunstler’s widow, Margaret, a lawyer specializing in civil rights defense, occupies a messy warren of rooms on the second floor. Libby, the Kunstlers’ water-hating Portuguese Water Dog, awaits his arrival. Besides his role with the fund, Mr. Credico is resident dog-walker. As with the rest of his jobs, he is obsessive about it: wet days are hell for Libby.
When he is too beat to trudge home to Sunnyside, Queens, he bunks here. During his siege against the Rockefeller laws, there were plenty of all-nighters. Even though the State Legislature approved, on Dec. 7, an easing of the harshest sentences – inmates serving 15 years to life can appeal for a quicker release – his angst is unappeased. Inmates with lighter sentences were ignored.
And those inmates have mothers, many of them members of Mr. Credico’s New York Mothers of the Disappeared, a group he patterned after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers of vanished political dissidents in Argentina. He and the mothers want the Rockefeller laws repealed with an emphasis on rehabilitation.
“This isn’t a great victory,” he says, irritably, about the new legislation, which was implemented on Jan. 13. “We cashed in our chips, basically. It’s like going from the electric chair to lethal injection and saying you changed the death penalty.” Not funny. “We’ve got to remobilize.”
Full article available online here.
Filed in: Campaign News, Comedy
By admin
The New York Times
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
October 12, 1992
PITTSBURGH— Driving through the hilly night shadows at the edge of the city, the cab driver got lost in a joke, one he was telling about President Bush. “He was overseas somewhere — Iraq? — and got sick to his stomach, and the really funny part was why he got sick.” He paused, groped. “But I can’t remember that part.”
It had been another uneventful night in an occasional but ever more difficult search for political humor in America. If other wanderers can debate the tastiest sparerib cafes of the land, why then a professional witness lately criss-crossing the nation ought to come up with some nasty, deserved laughs at the Presidential campaigners’ expense.
Not the homogenized sort rooted in the balanced nightly monologues of television humor that reduces the nation to a vast collegiate sound stage. No, something imbalanced and in person, a mean and lop-sided funniness of the sort Jonathan Swift and Lenny Bruce might have applied to the vastly promising material of the 1992 campaign, all the evasions, squeaks and wheezes of its chief actors and the hard times and gullibility of its groundlings. ‘All Dead Horses’
“You got your Dan Quayle, your Murphy Brown, the not inhaling, Gennifer Flowers — these are all dead horses that none of the club comics want to flog,” apologized Chris Drake, proprietor of The Funny Bone here. This is one of the thousands of comedy clubs that dot the land where, professional comics and booking agents on this tight circuit say, there is no room for political jokes this year.
“The recession has hit our business, too,” Chris Cipa, one of the comics, explained. “Politics is risky. Most people come to the clubs and pay $20 or so to forget their troubles, not to have a lecture jammed down their throat. A Clinton joke will get a stare, not a laugh, ever since he became the front runner and got respect. And Al Gore is just not funny — the least funny person in years,” he insisted.
A recent night’s fare of three stand-ups at The Funny Bone might have had Willy Loman in the aisles grimacing: Hair-loss jokes. Relationship jokes. Homophobic wisecracks. Panhandling jokes. Condom jokes. Airline jokes. Gynecology jokes. Yet lots of laughs from a mixed crowd that stepped in from the madding world of a surrounding shopping mall, a youngish group that seemed sadly preoccupied with romance and mortality. A Stand-Up Exception
Which is all the more reason to appreciate a stand-up exception to the pathetic rule, Randy Credico. He is a comic who can name and mock a dozen now forgotten friendly dictators of Latin America, a politics addict who would rather joke about the S& L’s than S and M. He is so fed up with the politically correct, apolitical state of affairs in the clubs that he has rebelled and lately gathers a few brave political satirists every Thursday night on Manhattan’s West Side (you thought Kennebunkport?) for some bootleg, thoroughly imbalanced trashing of current politics.
In a basement hideaway at the West Gate Cafe on Broadway at West 114th Street, working beneath a club booming with Columbia University students whose general taste in humor he abhors, Mr. Credico only starts with the unfunniness of Al Gore, postulating that he was chosen for the ticket as “the only man whiter than Clinton” in a strategy of going for the Jefferson Davis vote. “A Clinton-Gore button — radical step these days, right? You know, like Fidel-Che?” he said.
On a recent Thursday, the laughter seemed eased by a sense of relief that it could be so easy to mock, publicly and quite unfairly, assorted targets like Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s ethics, City Comptroller Elizabeth Holtzman’s humorlessness, Senator Edward Kennedy’s obliviousness, the parallel vanities of Henry Kissinger and William Kunstler, Patrick Buchanan’s secret campaign for the German elections of 1996, radical feminism’s woodenness, and the pro-choice lobby’s insensitivity toward the Christian evangelical tobacco lobby’s need for fresh smokers. Plus the major candidates, rudely roughed up as hypocrites and fools. And a nostalgic tribute to Ronald Reagan in retirement, engrossed in the Reader’s Digest condensed version of “Cat in the Hat.”
As an average feminist, Lizz Winstead convulsed the place in pleading guilty to the anti-abortion lobby’s suspicions about her: “True, that’s all we have on our mind. I get up and say, ‘Well, I’ve got to go to breakfast, have an abortion, go to the sauna, have an abortion, wax my car, have an abortion.’ ” Dropping Children, Not Bombs
John Stewart was worthy of Swift in positing a scene out of the fact that the United States may be 15th in the world in child education but it is first in weapons technology: “In the next war the bombs will be way too smart and valuable. We’ll just have to drop illiterate school children.”
Mr. Credico updates by the news cycle, as in his latest tinny-voiced impersonation of President Bush commenting, amid Operation Re-Election Storm, on Governor Clinton’s anti-Vietnam-War activities as a young student. “He’s a, uh, he’s a RADical. Went to MOS-cow. Was there with Stalin, helped build those five-year plans. He was part of the October Revolution.”
Fairness? Balance? Well, Ross Perot was included, wavering on whether to vote for himself. “Perot is a French word that means LaRouche,” Mr. Credico explained. “Or Reverend Moon, or L. Ron Hubbard, something of that nature. Wonderful guy, isn’t he? Makes a lot of sense till he starts talkin’,” the comic said, unafraid to wax pernicious about 1992.
Full article available online here.
Filed in: Comedy