Witness the might of "might":

* IF there are people who only know Sarah Silverman from two movies, and

* IF those people, on watching The Aristocrats, concluded that this woman who appeared onscreen telling a joke, in the middle of a movie that consisted of dozens of veteran professional comedians telling a joke, was not a veteran professional comedian, and

* IF those people were then to hear that Silverman had landed a self-titled sitcom, and

* IF they were tired of the television industry's constant practice of building name-branded sitcoms around unknown and unproven comedians

then...what? They "might bristle." Unless Edward Wyatt of the New York Times--having executed the classic Straw Man Lead, aka the Flying Pig--is there to placate them:

At ease, bristly people, wherever you might be! Edward Wyatt is here to tell you that Sarah Silverman is actually a hard-working comedy veteran. And, um, also (with less fanfare) that her "holy grail" sitcom consists of a six-show run on cable--which puts her in a bit of a a different league from Bob Newhart.

Mr. Clooney wore a suspicious expression all night that seemed fully justified: Mr. Stewart and his writers were on his case from the start. When Mr. Clooney received the first major Oscar of the evening, the Best Supporting Actor award for Syriana, he quipped that the Academy seemed to be telling him that he wouldn’t be picking up the Best Director and Best Picture awards for Good Night, and Good Luck. I’ve always been suspicious of the Academy’s attempts to build up suspense for its choices by pretending that only two people at Price Waterhouse know who won the awards before the envelopes are unsealed.

The biggest suspense this year involved Best Picture, with Brokeback Mountain and Crash touted as the top contenders, and Best Actress, with Reese Witherspoon favored for Walk the Line, but with Felicity Huffman coming on strong for her transsexual role in Transamerica in a year for shattering taboos—and a year in which Harvey Weinstein actively intervened on her behalf with an elaborate publicity campaign. All the while, I couldn’t help wondering how many Academy voters had actually seen Transamerica, much less people in the rest of the country. But then all the nominees for Best Picture combined made less money than the Best Feature-Length Documentary winner, March of the Penguins, pulled in on its own. But far from apologizing for its low-grossing nominees, Mr. Stewart and his crew repeatedly made fun of Middle America and its prejudices.

Curiously, the satiric needle was inserted much less often into the Bush administration, as had been hoped and feared by the left and the right, than into the film industry, particularly with its ill-advised, time-consuming pleas for people to return to movie houses with big screens so that they could better enjoy the marvelous special effects so little in evidence in the industry’s own Academy-nominated films. Mr. Stewart got one of his biggest laughs when he faux-promised a forthcoming tribute to Hollywood montages.

Dustin Hoffman provided one of the brightest ad lib moments when he commiserated with all the losers in the front row, praising their “good work.” Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep came on to honor Robert Altman by demonstrating with uncommon cheerfulness and generosity his penchant for improvisation. When Mr. Altman came on to accept his honorary award, he startled everyone in our apartment with the revelation that he had received a heart transplant from a 30-year-old woman several years ago, and therefore he was receiving this award under false pretenses, since he still has almost 40 years to go.

Someone told me long ago that the tip-off to Best Picture is the editing award, and sure enough, Crash won both prizes—as had been expected by those who felt that Hollywood wouldn’t burn all its bridges to potential customers in the red states. Similarly, Paradise Now was passed over in the Best Foreign-Language Film competition for Tsotsi, a black South African film. My own favorite foreign-language film among those nominated, by the way, was Sophie Scholl.

I much preferred Woody Allen’s Match Point and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale for Best Screenplay over the eventual winner, Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco’s Crash. My favorite actor this year was Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, but he wasn’t even nominated, and I can live with the choice of Philip Seymour Hoffman in (and as) Capote.

But I was deeply disappointed by the choice of Rachel Weisz as Best Supporting Actress in The Constant Gardener over Amy Adams in Junebug. Similarly, in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, I preferred Josh Olson for A History of Violence over Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain.

On a personally positive note, all was right with the world in the choices of Reese Witherspoon as Best Actress, and Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit as Best Animated Feature Film. Finally, I would have preferred William Hurt as Best Supporting Actor in my own personal choice for Best Picture, A History of Violence.

The biggest in-your-face moment was the selection of “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” performed by Three 6 Mafia, as the Best Movie Song—prompting Mr. Stewart at his most sagacious to announce the following Oscar score: Three 6 Mafia, 1; Martin Scorsese, 0. Bravo, Jon. People may tell you that you bombed, but it was the audience that actually did.

Party People

Matt Zoller Seitz’s Home, from his own screenplay, underscores the perils of shooting one’s feature-film directorial debut in one’s own freestanding Brooklyn brownstone home. Home takes place on a sweltering midsummer night, when a score of fictional twentysomethings swarms into the building for an all-night house party. One of the male characters seems obsessed with having reached the pivotal age of 29, and he keeps asking various females how old they really think he looks. More than a few of the partygoers of both sexes spend at least part of the evening gazing at their reflections in a bathroom mirror, as if hoping to discover who they really are—or, perhaps, how closely they adhered to the laws of natural selection.

I have always found parties hellish experiences. When I was younger, I assumed that they were great fun until I arrived and after I left—but while I was there, even people I didn’t know were conspiring to make me miserable. Mr. Seitz picks up these overtones of social unease with a group of performers unfamiliar to the general audience, though not without some discernible talent. The problem is that it takes too long for us to figure out the identities of the decisive characters when the dramatic payoffs materialize.

On the whole, the females are less differentiated than the males in terms of hair coloring and physical type, and their names flash by too hurriedly for recognition in a maze of medium group shots. Still, Mr. Seitz is hardly niggardly with the close-ups, though he is clearly torn in distributing his dialogue between what is plausible as party small talk, and what he can sneak in as covert character development for people we don’t know from Adam and Eve.

If one tries to recall successfully chaotic on-screen parties, one has to go back to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) and—admittedly an extreme case—Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962). One must remember, however, that the hosts of these parties were considerably wealthier than Mr. Seitz—which, I suppose, proves that money is everything where pleasure is concerned.

Of course, for crass commercial purposes, Mr. Seitz had the option of turning his party into an all-out orgy—but he could hardly do that while filming in the presence of his wife and co-producer, Jennifer Dawson, and their 5-year-old daughter, Hannah. There is a briefly licentious flurry when a few of the partygoers indulge in the juvenile game of spin-the-bottle, and a few intense kisses are exchanged. But for the most part, the proceedings are reasonably polite; with guests in every nook and cranny, more aggressive behavior would have seemed unduly exhibitionist and hardly seductive. By the final fade-out, there have been only two or three resolutions, positive or negative, to the erotic and emotional alliances made during the party itself; the rest is mere flirting and self-promotion.

Curiously, the program notes tell us that the genesis of the project was a proposed short film in which the characters of Bobby (Jason Liebrecht) and Susan (Nicol Zanzarella) meet and connect at a party. Mr. Liebrecht and Ms. Zanzarella do manage to project the necessary on-again/off-again/on-again charismatic electricity once the party is over and they are more or less alone. This leads me to wonder if parties are such a good idea for movies, particularly since the point is usually to humiliate someone.

Ballet’s Best

The enchanting, edifying and exhilarating Ballets Russes, directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, and written by Mr. Geller, Ms. Goldfine, Gary Weimberg and Celeste Schaefer Snyder (with a narration by Marian Seldes), is still playing hereabouts. You should definitely see it, if only as an object lesson in how to live a satisfyingly productive life in one’s later years—even in a field in which one gets too old at a ridiculously young age. This too-often-self-pitying oldster was veritably inspired by the spectacle of once beautiful and virile artists spending their twilight years teaching beautiful and virile young dancers the precious craft they all share.

Appearing in the film in both their younger and older days are Irina Baronova, Yvonne Chouteau, Yvonne Craig, Frederic Franklin, Alan Howard, Nathalie Krassovska, Alicia Markova, Nina Novak, Marc Platt, Wakefield Poole, Tatiana Riabouchinska, Mia Slavenska (in archive footage), Tatiana Stepanova, Maria Tallchief, Tamara Tchinarova Finch, Miguel Terekhov, Nini Theilade, Raven Wilkinson, Rochelle Zide and George Zoritch. As one may gather from even a cursory glance at this list, the phenomenon of Ballets Russes began as a largely Russian enterprise sparked by impoverished exiles of the Russian Revolution, led by the legendary Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929), whose death at the end of the Roaring 20’s led to schismatic battles involving such contentious impresarios as Massine, Balanchine, Hurok, de Basil and others. New York, London, Paris and Monte Carlo served as magnets for the troupes that brought serious dance to the civilized world.

The various recollections are anything but idyllic, as a familiar litany of neurotic disorders accompanies the discordant histories of the various competing companies. On rare occasions, racism rears its ugly head, in the stories of how pioneering African-American dancers were shunted aside to ghettoized venues. I can’t say that I know as much as I should about ballet. This film has filled in many of the gaps for me, in addition to supplying both still and motion-picture footage of such illustrious collaborators in the Diaghilev era as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).

Mr. Clooney wore a suspicious expression all night that seemed fully justified: Mr. Stewart and his writers were on his case from the start. When Mr. Clooney received the first major Oscar of the evening, the Best Supporting Actor award for Syriana, he quipped that the Academy seemed to be telling him that he wouldn’t be picking up the Best Director and Best Picture awards for Good Night, and Good Luck. I’ve always been suspicious of the Academy’s attempts to build up suspense for its choices by pretending that only two people at Price Waterhouse know who won the awards before the envelopes are unsealed.

The biggest suspense this year involved Best Picture, with Brokeback Mountain and Crash touted as the top contenders, and Best Actress, with Reese Witherspoon favored for Walk the Line, but with Felicity Huffman coming on strong for her transsexual role in Transamerica in a year for shattering taboos—and a year in which Harvey Weinstein actively intervened on her behalf with an elaborate publicity campaign. All the while, I couldn’t help wondering how many Academy voters had actually seen Transamerica, much less people in the rest of the country. But then all the nominees for Best Picture combined made less money than the Best Feature-Length Documentary winner, March of the Penguins, pulled in on its own. But far from apologizing for its low-grossing nominees, Mr. Stewart and his crew repeatedly made fun of Middle America and its prejudices.

Curiously, the satiric needle was inserted much less often into the Bush administration, as had been hoped and feared by the left and the right, than into the film industry, particularly with its ill-advised, time-consuming pleas for people to return to movie houses with big screens so that they could better enjoy the marvelous special effects so little in evidence in the industry’s own Academy-nominated films. Mr. Stewart got one of his biggest laughs when he faux-promised a forthcoming tribute to Hollywood montages.

Dustin Hoffman provided one of the brightest ad lib moments when he commiserated with all the losers in the front row, praising their “good work.” Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep came on to honor Robert Altman by demonstrating with uncommon cheerfulness and generosity his penchant for improvisation. When Mr. Altman came on to accept his honorary award, he startled everyone in our apartment with the revelation that he had received a heart transplant from a 30-year-old woman several years ago, and therefore he was receiving this award under false pretenses, since he still has almost 40 years to go.

Someone told me long ago that the tip-off to Best Picture is the editing award, and sure enough, Crash won both prizes—as had been expected by those who felt that Hollywood wouldn’t burn all its bridges to potential customers in the red states. Similarly, Paradise Now was passed over in the Best Foreign-Language Film competition for Tsotsi, a black South African film. My own favorite foreign-language film among those nominated, by the way, was Sophie Scholl.

I much preferred Woody Allen’s Match Point and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale for Best Screenplay over the eventual winner, Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco’s Crash. My favorite actor this year was Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence, but he wasn’t even nominated, and I can live with the choice of Philip Seymour Hoffman in (and as) Capote.

But I was deeply disappointed by the choice of Rachel Weisz as Best Supporting Actress in The Constant Gardener over Amy Adams in Junebug. Similarly, in the Best Adapted Screenplay category, I preferred Josh Olson for A History of Violence over Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Brokeback Mountain.

On a personally positive note, all was right with the world in the choices of Reese Witherspoon as Best Actress, and Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit as Best Animated Feature Film. Finally, I would have preferred William Hurt as Best Supporting Actor in my own personal choice for Best Picture, A History of Violence.

The biggest in-your-face moment was the selection of “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” performed by Three 6 Mafia, as the Best Movie Song—prompting Mr. Stewart at his most sagacious to announce the following Oscar score: Three 6 Mafia, 1; Martin Scorsese, 0. Bravo, Jon. People may tell you that you bombed, but it was the audience that actually did.

Party People

Matt Zoller Seitz’s Home, from his own screenplay, underscores the perils of shooting one’s feature-film directorial debut in one’s own freestanding Brooklyn brownstone home. Home takes place on a sweltering midsummer night, when a score of fictional twentysomethings swarms into the building for an all-night house party. One of the male characters seems obsessed with having reached the pivotal age of 29, and he keeps asking various females how old they really think he looks. More than a few of the partygoers of both sexes spend at least part of the evening gazing at their reflections in a bathroom mirror, as if hoping to discover who they really are—or, perhaps, how closely they adhered to the laws of natural selection.

I have always found parties hellish experiences. When I was younger, I assumed that they were great fun until I arrived and after I left—but while I was there, even people I didn’t know were conspiring to make me miserable. Mr. Seitz picks up these overtones of social unease with a group of performers unfamiliar to the general audience, though not without some discernible talent. The problem is that it takes too long for us to figure out the identities of the decisive characters when the dramatic payoffs materialize.

On the whole, the females are less differentiated than the males in terms of hair coloring and physical type, and their names flash by too hurriedly for recognition in a maze of medium group shots. Still, Mr. Seitz is hardly niggardly with the close-ups, though he is clearly torn in distributing his dialogue between what is plausible as party small talk, and what he can sneak in as covert character development for people we don’t know from Adam and Eve.

If one tries to recall successfully chaotic on-screen parties, one has to go back to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) and—admittedly an extreme case—Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962). One must remember, however, that the hosts of these parties were considerably wealthier than Mr. Seitz—which, I suppose, proves that money is everything where pleasure is concerned.

Of course, for crass commercial purposes, Mr. Seitz had the option of turning his party into an all-out orgy—but he could hardly do that while filming in the presence of his wife and co-producer, Jennifer Dawson, and their 5-year-old daughter, Hannah. There is a briefly licentious flurry when a few of the partygoers indulge in the juvenile game of spin-the-bottle, and a few intense kisses are exchanged. But for the most part, the proceedings are reasonably polite; with guests in every nook and cranny, more aggressive behavior would have seemed unduly exhibitionist and hardly seductive. By the final fade-out, there have been only two or three resolutions, positive or negative, to the erotic and emotional alliances made during the party itself; the rest is mere flirting and self-promotion.

Curiously, the program notes tell us that the genesis of the project was a proposed short film in which the characters of Bobby (Jason Liebrecht) and Susan (Nicol Zanzarella) meet and connect at a party. Mr. Liebrecht and Ms. Zanzarella do manage to project the necessary on-again/off-again/on-again charismatic electricity once the party is over and they are more or less alone. This leads me to wonder if parties are such a good idea for movies, particularly since the point is usually to humiliate someone.

Ballet’s Best

The enchanting, edifying and exhilarating Ballets Russes, directed by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, and written by Mr. Geller, Ms. Goldfine, Gary Weimberg and Celeste Schaefer Snyder (with a narration by Marian Seldes), is still playing hereabouts. You should definitely see it, if only as an object lesson in how to live a satisfyingly productive life in one’s later years—even in a field in which one gets too old at a ridiculously young age. This too-often-self-pitying oldster was veritably inspired by the spectacle of once beautiful and virile artists spending their twilight years teaching beautiful and virile young dancers the precious craft they all share.

Appearing in the film in both their younger and older days are Irina Baronova, Yvonne Chouteau, Yvonne Craig, Frederic Franklin, Alan Howard, Nathalie Krassovska, Alicia Markova, Nina Novak, Marc Platt, Wakefield Poole, Tatiana Riabouchinska, Mia Slavenska (in archive footage), Tatiana Stepanova, Maria Tallchief, Tamara Tchinarova Finch, Miguel Terekhov, Nini Theilade, Raven Wilkinson, Rochelle Zide and George Zoritch. As one may gather from even a cursory glance at this list, the phenomenon of Ballets Russes began as a largely Russian enterprise sparked by impoverished exiles of the Russian Revolution, led by the legendary Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929), whose death at the end of the Roaring 20’s led to schismatic battles involving such contentious impresarios as Massine, Balanchine, Hurok, de Basil and others. New York, London, Paris and Monte Carlo served as magnets for the troupes that brought serious dance to the civilized world.

The various recollections are anything but idyllic, as a familiar litany of neurotic disorders accompanies the discordant histories of the various competing companies. On rare occasions, racism rears its ugly head, in the stories of how pioneering African-American dancers were shunted aside to ghettoized venues. I can’t say that I know as much as I should about ballet. This film has filled in many of the gaps for me, in addition to supplying both still and motion-picture footage of such illustrious collaborators in the Diaghilev era as Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).

In a North Carolinian drawl, his eyes sparkling, Bobby Tisdale yelled “Yaaaayyyyy!” into the microphone. Mr. Tisdale must say “Yaaaayyyyy!” 15 times a night; it’s the “yay” of an overly zealous camp counselor.

Each week, Mr. Tisdale emcees “Invite Them Up,” an hour and a half of comedy at Rififi, an East Village watering hole where he and co-producer Eugene Mirman gather some of the brightest young minds in stand-up. Later in the evening, he would climb on empty chairs in the front row and demand, “What’s everyone going as for Halloween? A cat? With a tail and perfect tits?”

Less a staged show than an intimate evening with a party atmosphere where audience members are invited to have a drink with the comedians after the show, “Invite Them Up” has become known as a trove of undiscovered talent.

Like Mr. Tisdale, Mr. Mirman is part of the draw. Tall and sanguine and well-read, he has built a twentysomething fan base, evidenced by his tours with bands like the Shins and Yo La Tengo. One recent evening onstage, he told of seeing faded rock star and Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley at a bar, celebrating his daughter’s birthday: “She was wearing a tiara, and she was really drunk. And he was drunk too, and they were being very obnoxious. As they were leaving and getting into a limo, for some reason I yelled out, ‘Ace, don’t fuck your daughter!’”

Mr. Mirman can’t tell stories without giggling. Born in Russia, he moved with his parents to Lexington, Mass., in 1979: “I found out that during the Cold War, a lot of elementary-school kids were very suspicious of Russians.” He went to Amherst College, then moved to Prospect Heights. “I temped at a law firm for a while,” he said. “It was pretty terrible. Lots of secretaries were mean to me because I was only a half-secretary.” He started “Invite Them Up” in 2002 and asked Mr. Tisdale to join.

“When I was in seventh grade, I was at a Pizza Hut with my friends,” said Mr. Tisdale, “and I ripped up a bunch of napkins and I threw it up in the air and screamed out ‘Graffiti, graffiti!’—and I really meant to say, ‘Confetti, confetti!’ My friend Will laughed so hard he almost peed in his pants, and with a very redneck accent said, ‘Bobby, you’re a goddamn trip. You should be a comedian.’ And I knew from that day on that I was going to be a comedian, or just retarded.”

With the help of Friendster, word of mouth and some big-name guests like David Cross and Janeane Garofalo, the evenings took off; before long, Comedy Central put out a CD.

“Invite Them Up” is an outgrowth of the defunct Luna Lounge showcase “Eating It” that dominated the downtown comedy scene in the 90’s. Luna Lounge, some said, had become less experimental, and too much a showcase for “industry.”

“The thing about Luna was that they didn’t have a microphone. Luna was totally different,” said Mr. Tisdale. “It was lounge-y, very free-form. And then it started turning more into stand-up, but before that, it was very experimental and you were supposed to try something new. We definitely wanted our show to be like old Luna, but we want it to be better. Absolutely fucking better.”

On a recent night onstage, he introduced his roommate, an impish, smirking fellow named Craig Baldo, who has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman. He said his grandmother, who knows that he is sometimes on TV, recently called him, thinking that he was on Celebrity Poker. “No, Grandma, that’s not me,” he cracked. “That’s Dave Navarro. He’s fucking Carmen Electra, Grandma.”

The highlight of the night was Demetri Martin, who often closes the show. He left Yale Law School in 1999 to do comedy; since then, he has written for Conan O’Brien, had his own special on Comedy Central, and is currently a correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. With his self-described “gay Beatle” haircut, he delivered a string of one-liners while strumming a guitar:

“The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades—especially if your teammates are bad at guessing.”

“I feel like the theme in most theme parks is: ‘Stand in line, fatty.’”

“I want to make a video game where you have to take care of everyone who has been shot in all the other video games. What are you playing? Super Busy Hospital.”

“Next week I’m going to throw a surprise party for someone I don’t know. Because then it will really work.”

“An easy way to start a conversation is to say, ‘What’s your favorite color?’ An easy way to end a conversation is to say, ‘What’s you favorite color … person?’”

Mr. Martin said he sees “Invite Them Up” as a healthy alternative to mainstream comedy clubs: “It’s a model that you can hopefully extend, where you say, ‘This is not a comedy club. We’re not going to make you buy drinks. We’re not charging you a lot of money to come see us. You pay a small amount of money to get a really good show.’

“Unless you’re at a very high level,” he continued, “comedy clubs just pay you a flat fee, and they’re greedy and they take all the money. It’s so greedy, it’s disgusting.”

The following week, there was a sign on the door that read “Sorry, full to capacity.” Andy Blitz, solemn and nervous-looking, was onstage; he’s been nominated for six Emmys as a writer for Conan O’Brien. His set was seamless. “I’m on the CD,” he said. “Check out my joke about Rosa Parks that now seems incredibly inappropriate.”

On another night, a comic named Leo Allen was onstage. He looked like a tall, unshaven Harry Potter and spoke in a slow, deliberate baritone: “I stopped a guy in his car and asked him for directions, and he was like, ‘Sure, I know where that is—get in.’ Those aren’t directions. Those are directions to get buried in a field somewhere.”

He said he loves the audience at “Invite Them Up” and the freedom that the format encourages: “You’re not going to be fired from ‘Invite Them Up.’”

Todd Barry, a curmudgeonly comedy veteran of 18 years and somewhat of a mentor to this crowd, added, “There’s something very safe about doing a 10-minute set in front of a friendly audience.”

Meanwhile, Aziz Ansari, a short, wiry comic, was the night’s 22-year-old ingénue. He played the role of a somewhat cagey, but ultimately dorky, underdog. He hosts his own show, “Crash Test,” on Mondays at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and he’s playing a small role in a comedy directed by Todd Phillips, who directed the mega-hit Old School.

Lest one get lulled into thinking that “Invite Them Up” reflects the current state of stand-up in New York, on a random Monday night I stopped by Caroline’s On Broadway. Inside, a middle-aged comic was making jokes about Mapquest and her pot-smoking daughter. The other comedians did voices and imitations, told jokes about prime-time TV and shopping at Wal-Mart.

Miserable-looking waitresses scoured the floor, making sure the patrons had fulfilled their drink minimums. The floor manager paced behind my table like a pit boss.

Later that week, I stopped in at Rififi. After the show, comedians floated about the room, talking mostly to each other or their female fans.

A.D. Miles, who just inked a deal with Comedy Central, stood by the bar, telling a story about nearly getting hit by lightning. Mr. Tisdale was by the turntables with his girlfriend, Jenny Slate, an actress and comedian who appears on VH1’s Best Week Ever.

The atmosphere was festive.

“I think what we have is a similar idea of what comedy is, though executed very differently,” said Mr. Mirman. “I believe that comedy has to be very sincere: people carrying through with an idea of purpose of what their comedy is. And Leo Allen, Bobby, me, Demetri—we’re all sticking to this vision that we each have.”

“I think Bobby and Eugene have created a haven for comedians who want to try something that is non-traditional,” said Mr. Martin. “I don’t know of any ‘tough guys’ who do ‘Invite Them Up’—guys who wear leather jackets and act like they’re real troopers, real hard-asses, really enduring the grind of comedy. It’s like, ‘Dude, you’re a fucking comedian. We’re all dorks. I don’t care how tough your haircut is, you’re one step from a clown.’”

—John Ortved

Year-End Pronouncement

“2005 has been the best year for yoga since 1061 B.C.”—Swami Ragatman

—Sparrow

Bloomberg's voters were wildly outnumbered... by registered voters who didn't cast ballots, laments Andrew Friedman at DMIBlog.

Doug Forrester, the failed Republican candidate for New Jersey governor, blames his defeat on Bush. But over at the New York Young Republican Record, Rick Brownell doesn't buy it. Forrester's finger-pointing, says the blogger, is "infantile." Or at least, um... unoriginal.

In a post titled "NYC Drifts Right...Upstate Drifts Left?" the Daily Gotham suggests that state Dems have showed up the local party. Urban Elephants grabs the first part of the deadline, trumpets with glee.

The secretive scribes of Backroom Deal Breaker look forward to the Speaker's Debate on Wednesday, demand more public participation, offer a can of whoop ass.

Eliot Spitzer surfaced on Comedy Central, where Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report asked him how much it takes to run a gubernatorial campaign these days. "Probably 30, 40 million dollars," Eliot estimated. "It is almost an obscene amount of money...The reason it's not completely obscene is I'm about to do it, so I don't want to say it's obscene," he added with a laugh.

Yes, this last item was not so bloggy, and the show aired a week ago. But it's funny enough to merit a look and a link.

He's planning to spend about $500,000 over the last two weeks on these networks: Comedy Central, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, TNT, YES (including 11 Yankees games), and USA.

The buy also includes Lifetime, a regular stop for pols, and -- for some reason -- Nickelodeon!

"This woman-let's call her Stumpy-she goes, 'Hey, I was attacked by a shark!'" Mr. Attell said. "What are the odds-here I am, talking about shark attacks, and there is somebody in there who was attacked by a shark?"

The room laughed.

"So before we continue," Mr. Attell said, "has anyone here ever been raped at a rodeo?"

The room paused, as if briefly shocked. Then: an eruption of laughter.

Mr. Attell, bald and barrel-chested, charged on.

"Having a job is so important now, isn't it?" he said. "You got to look out when you look for a job because they falsely advertise. You ever see this ad in the paper: CALL UP NOW FOR YOUR DREAM JOB? YOUR DREAM JOB IS A PHONE CALL AWAY. I call up and I'm like, 'Hello, is this the chocolate factory run by big-titted hookers?'"

Another eruption.

"Ladies, is it the size of a man's penis that matters?" Mr. Attell asked.

A chorus of female voices responded. "Yes!"

"Well, the whores have spoken!" Mr. Attell said.

Dave Attell has been a comic for 16 years. He's played thousands of clubs, told thousands of jokes, lobbed thousands of insults without fear. His act is a darkly abrasive stew of cursing and bawdy talk about subjects like men, women (or the lack thereof), masturbation and pornography. He is crude and smart at once; he specializes in what he calls the "educated dick joke." At their best, Mr. Attell's performances are raging, X-rated verbal operas-brilliantly unafraid and twisted, a combination that the television host Jimmy Kimmel compared to "a party clown jacking off into a birthday cake." And his TV show allows Mr. Attell to drink and smoke on the air more than any performer since Dean Martin.

The public is just coming around to Mr. Attell because of Insomniac, but stand-ups have adored him for ages. His work ethic is legendarily obsessive; he writes and rewrites so much he's regarded as something of a freak. Never satisfied, he constantly blows up his act. He'll tell some old jokes, but nearly every one of Mr. Attell's shows is different; each performance brings new interpretations, new lightning riffs, and always new attacks upon the audience. He brings a tape recorder to every show and listens when he gets home, trying to figure what he did wrong, what he could do better. Sometimes he'll bomb intentionally, just to try and dig himself out.

"You just watch and you feel inadequate," said the comic Todd Barry. "He just pulls shit out of the air. I've seen him do throwaways he'll never do again, just off-the-cuff things that I would be like, 'Man, that's a keeper.'"

Said Mr. Kimmel: "You'd certainly have to rank him up there with-or above-the best comics working."

Television success-and Insomniac, in which Mr. Attell travels around the country visiting nightcrawlers, many of them drunk, is one of Comedy Central's most popular shows-has a weird way of making people feel new. But Mr. Attell is one of those talents who's been on the verge for so long that he probably can't remember when he wasn't on the verge. He was a comic to watch in 1992, in 1993, in 1994, and probably every year after that. He's performed on Letterman and Conan and written for The Jon Stewart Show and Saturday Night Live . People tried to build television shows around him before Insomniac , and it didn't take. A stint on the Daily Show was uneven. He got fired from a part on Spin City . Tom Hertz, a comic who was a Spin City writer and later its executive producer, said of Mr. Attell: "He is not a great actor."

Mr. Attell agrees wholeheartedly.

But it doesn't matter. People who know Mr. Attell say that he is one of the last of a breed: a guy who is in it for the jokes. Comedy has become awfully slutty in its age; a full generation of men and women have entered the profession with the idea of using stand-up principally to graduate into television and film. The result is that many young comics spend their time onstage polishing the same sliver of mostly harmless jokes, prepping for a late-night talk-show appearance that could take them to Hollywood. Not Mr. Attell.

"He is very pure," said Mr. Hertz. "Most comics now try to get together 12 minutes and get a sitcom-it's a means to an end. It's not a means to an end for Dave." Said the comic Jeffrey Ross: "Dave really is the real thing."

That Mr. Attell doesn't look very Hollywood, doesn't suck up to Hollywood, and is something of a personal mystery only burnishes that real-thing image. He drinks and smokes too much, and looks it. He eats pizza slices after bar time and spends tons of time on the road; when he's home in Manhattan, he lives alone in a small apartment. He is not on the verge of marriage or family and happily proclaims himself to be a "loser." It sounds like a self-effacing remark, but it's not totally. Mr. Attell is friendly with colleagues, but few admit to really knowing him. "He's in his head," said Mr. Ross.

Mr. Attell himself said: "I think I will always be kind of a bitter, loner-type drunken guy. I don't think that whatever happens, that will change."

The tortured comic, of course, is an old cliché, and the negative swirl Mr. Attell spins around himself is admittedly useful as a professional device. He seeks to be the loser who wins you over. He loves to stack the deck against himself; in performance, he lives to find an uncompromising audience already in its cups. He's like a tennis player who blows the first two sets just to make it harder on himself.

"I remember M.C.-ing a show at the Boston Comedy Club, and it was one of those audiences that was just hateful from the get-go," Mr. Barry said. "And Dave popped in and was like, 'Ooh, I want to come back when it gets really bad .'"

Mr. Attell has established that he can harness the hecklers about as well as anyone in comedy. (He smartly dissed an unruly out-of-towner at Caroline's by telling him: "Take your wallet out of your shoe.") What Mr. Attell is less sure about is fame. He has spent the past decade and a half of his life admired by pals, but in relative public anonymity. Now he goes to clubs and college kids yell "Wooo!" and want to buy him shots. He sold out that three-day September stand at Caroline's. The audience, it's certain, came mostly because of Insomniac , and they adored him. To Mr. Attell, it felt great but also creeped him out a little. He felt a new pressure to deliver. People were coming to see Dave Attell-could he not mess around with them like he used to?

"I kind of thrive on the negativity of the anonymous crowd," he said. "A guy I know used to say, 'My problem will be that I'll feel I have to kill every time, so I'll stick to my material, so I won't keep thinking of new stuff and taking more chances.' Even at Caroline's, when it's sold out, you're like, 'I better not try this one, because I know it's not a definite thing.' Then I'd half-try it and nobody would win."

A few nights after the Caroline's show, Mr. Attell did his penance at the Comedy Cellar, a subterranean cave on MacDougal Street, where he figures he's spent a cumulative five years of his life. He went on about half past midnight. The audience was a strange mix of college students, tourists, fledgling couples and, impressively, separate tables of Iranian men and Hasidic Jews. It wasn't clear if the audience had watched much of Insomniac . But they were drunk, and growing hostile.

Mr. Attell appeared thrilled. Soon, he started telling a joke about how he's too old for the clothes at Abercrombie & Fitch. Dressed in a black bowling shirt, Mr. Attell motioned towards a young blond kid in the club.

"See, man, I could never wear a shirt like that," he said. "It wouldn't work for me. For you, you look cool. You may be a missionary type. A date rapist …. "

The kid shot Mr. Attell a sour look.

"You weren't hurt by that, were you?" Mr. Attell said. "You're not going to blow up your high school, are you? I know young people and criticism."

"No one laughed," the kid shot back.

"What? No one laughed?" Mr. Attell replied. "Really? Well, what is your name, man?"

"Keith," the kid said.

"Keith? Keith, I am so glad you're here, because it's guys like you that make women like that"-Mr. Attell nodded toward a pretty woman in the front row-"fuck guys like me."

The place went nuts.

"I'm glad you're here," Mr. Attell said to Keith. "I hear a little laughter."

Here many comics would have let it alone, a victory had. But Mr. Attell would soon twist the screws tighter.

"How many people here graduated high school?" Mr. Attell then asked. "Has that ever helped you in any situation? It hasn't. Have you ever gotten a blowjob because you're a high-school student?"

A burly man to Mr. Attell's right said, "Yeah."

"You have?" Mr. Attell said. "Really? What a freaky crowd. How did you do that?"

"It wasn't solely because of that fact," the man said. "But I think it had something to do with that."

"That was the clincher," Mr. Attell said. "It was between you and two other guys, and they were both fucking G.E.D. guys. And you were like, 'Hey, I showed up to the dance . I was there .'"

Mr. Attell spun toward the blond kid again. "Keith, was that funny? Was there any humor in that? Since you are a robot whose one design is to search out funny …. "

Keith shook his head no.

"Well, bleach your asshole," Mr. Attell said. "I think there was some humor in that."

The next day, Mr. Attell sat in a chair in the back of the Westside Tavern on West 23rd Street. It was late afternoon, with only a scattering of people in the place. "Honkytonk Woman" was playing on the jukebox. Mr. Attell, who was drinking a club soda with lime, lit an American Spirit cigarette.

"I want to be a hard, headlining road comic," he said. Mr. Attell is polite and soft-spoken in conversation, but an intensity lingers. "I want to be like, 'I am not a hack. I am not a guy that they came to because they saw me on TV, but I'm like hard and fast.' Like Metallica years ago. Like how they struck fear into the town: 'Metallica's coming-better watch out.' That's what I want to be."

Mr. Attell grew up in Nassau County. His parents worked mostly in retail; he credits his late father with giving him his relentless drive to work. He has two brothers and a sister, and says he mostly kept to himself as a child. A fantasizer, he was lousy in school. College wasn't his deal; neither was a 9-to-5 job. A comic's itinerant sundown-to-sunup life suited him.

"This lifestyle is pretty good, cool, because it gives you a lot of opportunity to be alone," Mr. Attell said, though he admitted he now hates the traveling.

Friends of Mr. Attell say that Insomniac is perfect for him because it allows him to be himself instead of some sitcom cut-up, and it allows him to stay out all night. In the three seasons of the show, Mr. Attell has visited nightspots everywhere from Alaska to Tijuana to New York to Tempe. The show feels like a freewheeling trip through the après -midnight underbelly; Mr. Attell and his director, Nick McKinney, try to avoid the glossy cheese of party shows like Wild on E! Asked for a favorite place he visited during an Insomniac episode, Mr. Attell mentions a beer factory in Toronto.

What's weird about Insomniac, however, is that it's made Mr. Attell, Mr. Alone, into the life of the party. Part of him is grateful for the attention; people come out to the shows, and who doesn't want that? (He also bought his mom a house.) But there's also the question of how it may change his audience. Mr. Attell was asked if he felt he couldn't go after a heckler's jugular as hard as in the past, since people now showed up to the club … liking him.

"Well, that's their fucking problem," he said. "Because on the show, I go out of my way to treat everybody as good as I can. I'm on my people where it's like, 'Let's not make anybody look too drunk, too stupid, too whatever'-it's like, it's an all-night party and everyone's invited. But in my standup, if things go wrong, I have to take control. And I'm a mean prick sometimes, you know. If they came in thinking it's going to be like a feel-good time, to 'Wooo!' and scream my name out, that is not what I am about. It's usually more cutting, and I like it that way. I'm not going to change that."

Though Jeffrey Ross said he's never seen Mr. Attell "smiling this much," he is not yet a contented man. Mr. Attell said he remains happiest when he's at home, listening to other people's tapes, like Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx and Don Rickles. "I just really enjoy that," he said. "As cool as you think you are and as good as you think your joke is, you know that somewhere, someone was doing a version of that joke."

Mr. Attell is loath to compare himself with the greats; he's not ready to place himself in the comedic canon. "I know what really great comedy is," he said. "And I am not there. I don't know if I will ever get there, because you get older and your dreams change."

Maybe he'll never be totally satisfied or happy. But at least people now know who he is.

"There's got to be a certain sigh of relief, that the world finally knows Dave is the funniest motherfucker out there," said Mr. Ross. "He's been dragging that around for a long time."

Comedy Central is cashing out on Win Ben Stein's Money . The network confirmed on Tuesday, August 13 that is ceasing production on the 5-year-old game show-one of Comedy Central's longest-running original series -in which contestants went head-to-head with the bespectacled former Nixon speech writer turned actor.

" Win Ben Stein's Money has been a great success for the network since its launch in 1997, both from a ratings and branding standpoint," a Comedy Central spokesperson said. "However, it lost a little bit of steam in the ratings department over the course of the last year or so, and as a result, at the end of this year, we will not be making new episodes."

The spokesperson added that the network has 65 unaired episodes of Ben Stein that it intends to show later this year and next.

But Comedy Central's decision will bring an eventual end to one of the network's signature programs. A smart game show with a hip edge-Mr. Stein had already achieved youth icon status thanks to his cameo as a teacher (" Bueller ... Bueller ... Bueller ... ") in Ferris Bueller's Day Off - Win Ben Stein's Money was one of Comedy Central's most critically acclaimed programs. It won seven daytime Emmy Awards, and was also a TV launch pad for comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who began as Mr. Stein's co-host before moving on to Comedy Central hits like The Man Show and Crank Yankers. and is now planning an ABC late-night show.

Mr. Stein, who also worked as a Federal Trade Commission lawyer before going Hollywood, was gracious about his game show's demise. In e-mails, he wrote that while he was "sad" about Comedy Central's announcement, he was grateful to the numerous people who made the show possible. He called Ben Stein "a dream come true."

"How many other trial lawyers for the Federal Trade Commission get to win Emmies?" Mr. Stein wrote.

Earlier that day in a telephone interview-before Comedy Central confirmed its plans to stop production-Mr. Stein had expressed hope that Win Ben Stein's Money would soldier on.

"I will be heartbroken if in fact Comedy Central decides to do no more Win Ben Stein's Money and nobody else does either," Mr. Stein said.

Mr. Stein said that if Comedy Central passed on more episodes, the show's producer, Buena Vista television, would look to move it to another network. The Game Show Network was one idea, Mr. Stein theorized. He also joked about putting it on the Fox News Channel.

"I'd love to bring it to Fox News!" Mr. Stein said. "Fox News is my absolute favorite."

Even if no one picks Ben Stein up, there was a silver lining for the host. "I think to myself of the agony of losing when I was in that booth, and I think to myself, 'Well at least I wont have to be in that booth losing and having somebody take my money and feeling stupid because I couldn't recall the capital of Ohio,'" Mr. Stein said. Though he won most of the time, he estimated that contestants had won "about a million dollars" off him over the years.

Word of Ben Stein 's ouster from Comedy Central first surfaced in an Aug. 13 posting on the Web site Tvbarn.com. Comedy Central also may have foreshadowed its intentions earlier this year when it moved Ben Stein to 5 p.m. from its traditional slots at 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., the latter slot after the hit Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Mr. Kimmel, whose cousin, Sal Iacono, now occupies the role he himself once held on Ben Stein, called the show's new time "lousy."

"It's not the Match Game- it's not a game show for old ladies," Mr. Kimmel wrote in an email. "At five in the afternoon, it never had a chance to work."

Mr. Stein himself will not want for work. An accomplished author and public speaker, he has a flurry of upcoming books-including a self-help tome entitled How To Ruin Your Life -and speeches at schools including the University of Arkansas and Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He is also at work on a screenplay about the World War II, and is planning a talk show pilot with Warner Telepictures.

"I have very busy days," Mr. Stein said. But on this night, he was headed to Las Vegas with Mr. Kimmel for Mr. Iacono's bachelor party.

Par-ty! Betcha the Comedy Central accounting department gets a nice expense tab from that trip! Today, Comedy Central unloads a two-hour blast of Crank Yankers . [COM, 45, 8 p.m.]

Thursday, Aug. 15

It's not all bad news for TV Steins this week. It looks like Time magazine columnist Joel Stein's oft-delayed VH1 show is finally going to see daylight. Entitled Hey Joel , it's an animated series about a guy named Joel who works as an intern at VH1 and gets himself a show where he interviews celebrities, puts his foot in his mouth, and high jinks ensue. Kind of like Mr. Stein's day job, minus the appearances by Time managing editor Jim Kelly.

You may remember that Mr. Stein's relationship with VH1 extends back a couple of years, and the correspondent wasn't always sitting pretty in the music network's penthouse. More than a year ago, he wrote a Time column about receiving an e-mail from a VH1 executive-with critical notes on a script draft not intended for Mr. Stein's eyes. (It was an e-blunder.)

Well, whaddaya know: The beaten-up Joel is going to make it onto VH1 after all. The network has ordered 13 episodes of the show with the idea of airing them in January or February 2003, Mr. Stein wrote in an e-mail this week.

"We're almost done making them," Mr. Stein wrote, "though the nice people in Canada who do all the drawing stuff won't be done until Jan or so."

Tonight on VH1, a Diary of the increasingly aggravating Pink, who should be appearing in Cabaret by June 2003 or so. [VH1, 19, 11 p.m.]

Friday, Aug. 16

If you're wondering where all the skinny, sensitive men with chunky glasses and Puma suedes who daydream about writing for Conan O'Brien are this weekend-they're not at the Wilco-mentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart , they already saw that three times, bro , and it fricking rocked -they're at the Culture Project at 45 Bleecker seeing their comic musexpot Sarah Silverman in her one-woman show, Jesus Is Magic.

"It's stand-up with a couple of songs," Ms. Silverman said the other day, putting on the heavy sales pitch. "That's all it is."

Ms. Silverman didn't sound too glum about the cancellation of her Fox TV show, Greg the Bunny. Though the show had an absurd premise-talking bunny, bro -the risky Ms. Silverman had an uncharacteristically buttoned-up role.

"I loved the people and I had so much fun doing it, but I don't know if I'm a sitcom type," Ms. Silverman said. As for her acting future, she said she wasn't going to "get excited about anything unless I write it myself-or it's inspired."

But then she added: "I'm happy to read anything!"

Ms. Silverman, of course, took a little bit of a licking last year for using the epithet "chink" during a joke on Late Night with Conan O'Brien . Though part of her wanted to put the incident and public upbraiding behind her-"Just forget about it"-she said the episode also had caused her to think more about language in comedy.

"It really has become what I am interested in, the whole question of race and taboo and lines and what is politically correct and incorrect and what that even means and who's associated with it and why," she said.

Still, Ms. Silverman said she didn't consider herself to be much of a risk taker. Taking a risk means a threat of losing something, she said.

"The truth is I have nothing to lose," she said. "The people who are taking risks are people like Frank Smiley, the segment producer at Conan O'Brien, who lets me do that kind of stuff."

On another front, Ms. Silverman said that she was disappointed by The Anna Nicole Show, which she had high hopes for.

"At first I was like, 'Oh my God, this is amazing, incredible, love it, love it, love it,'" she said. "But then it was like, 'I don't feel right standing by and watching this.'"

"It just felt really ugly, so sad," Ms. Silverman continued. "At least with The Osbournes, they all stand on their own two feet and they are a family. This woman, it's like watching a gang rape ... it's really the essence of exploitation."

Ms. Silverman said she was more hopeful for the upcoming late-night show on ABC from Mr. Kimmel, whom Ms. Silverman has worked with on Crank Yankers .

"I think that show is going to be awesome," she said. "Because he doesn't give a shit."

Tonight on ABC, America's Funniest Home Videos , hosted by the mysteriously white-hot Tom Bergeron. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Saturday, Aug. 17

Even as E! gets creamed by the critics-and Sarah Silverman!-for Anna Nicole, the curiosities reality bandwagon rumbles on. VH1 continues to prep for its highly hyped Liza and David series, which will chronicle the exciting and busy, busy, busy lives of singer Liza Minnelli and new husband/manager David Gest. A VH1 spokesperson said that the Minelli-Gest Upper East Side abode is set to be fitted with lights and TV equipment, which will surely fit in nicely next to handsome twin pianos they keep for late-night renditions of "But the World Goes 'Round." Filming of Liza and David is set to start in late September, with a premiere episode in late October or early November.

Tonight on VH1, another "repurposed" installment of Rerun Show . Lame on NBC, impressively duller on VH1! [VH1, 19, 7 P.M.]

Sunday, Aug. 18

Everyone's harping on bad, bad baseball these days-strike, steroids, greedy owners, greedy players, the Mets in general-but as far as television goes, the game is in surprisingly improved health. Baseball's windy protectorates love to ramble on that the sport's popularity as television entertainment has passed, and while it's true that ratings are way down from their peak, the numbers for this season have taken a notable upturn. Ratings for Fox's national baseball telecasts are up 12 percent overall for 2002, and it's not just The Summer Game -thumbing geezers tuning in. Fox baseball telecasts are up 31 percent in the 18-to-34 age demographic-that's like, you know, the demo everyone wants-and 19 percent in the 18-to-49 demo.

Why the increase? The main reason appears to be the fact that those freaking fat-cat major-market teams are doing very well this year. The Yankees, Boston, Los Angeles, Arizona, St. Louis and San Francisco are all contenders this year. Even the Mets, as underachieving as they are, are still in it. This translates to larger-and younger-numbers for Fox.

Of course, this information does play into the hands of baseball's doomsdayists, who argue that television earnings-the local TV moola, that is, generated by outfits like YES-have tipped the competitive balance grossly in favor of major-market teams. They're right, of course. But if revenue sharing and balancing means we here in New York are gonna have to sit through a Royals-Rangers late season tilt ....

And sources said that even with all the hand-wringing about a strike, Fox has sold 85 percent of its commercial time for the 2002 baseball postseason, ahead of where it was at the same time last year. Should there be a strike and a canceled playoff series, some of these advertisers will be routed into Fox's N.F.L. coverage.

Tonight on Fox, Malcolm in the Middle . That Malcolm, he's always in the middle! [WNYW, 5, 9 p.m.]

Monday, Aug. 19

Meanwhile, CNN's still-under-wraps Sixth Avenue set for the Paula Zahn a.m. show American Morning showed some signs of life recently. They busted out the ticker! For those of you harboring Big Conspiracy Theories about cable television-and come to think of it, Brit Hume's looking more and more like one of those critters in Signs -here's another salacious tidbit: The ticker is Blue! As in Al Gore voting, brie-scarfing, tree-hugging media elite Blue! And Fox's ticker, just a couple of blocks down, is Red! As in Bush country Red! Wait-now we can't remember-were the Al Gore voting brie-scarfing tree-hugger elites the blues or the reds? Note: The Today show's ticker is red.

Tonight on Larry King Live, Larry's suspenders are ... yellow! [CNN, 10, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday, Aug. 20

America's pursuit of its next Falco continues apace tonight on American Idol. [WNYW, 5, 9 p.m.]

Gird, Sixth Avenue, gird: Here comes Connie Chung! Ms. Chung, who recently joined CNN, is set to blast live in New York from a brand-spankin'-new fishbowl studio in the Time Inc. building on Sixth Ave. and 51st Street.

Ms. Chung is just one of the high-profile puppies soon to be in the window of CNN's megabucks, mega-hyped Manhattan TV home. Another show ready to move to the Sixth Avenue location is Paula Zahn's already-running breakfast yapfest, American Morning . Aaron Brown's 10 p.m. info hour, NewsNight , is another potential candidate. As for timing, CNN has not announced an official new studio-premiere date-and won't get into details about its posh pad-but action is expected to begin there in late June.

What CNN wants, of course, is to work a little streetside, Katie Couric–style magic with its new set, hoping that families will load up the minivan and drive 2,200 miles to catch a glimpse of Ms. Chung laying her verbal mitts on John Ashcroft or another embattled Big Kahuna. Currently, CNN's New York–based shows are produced at the network's overcrowded, stale-aired hive at 5 Penn Plaza, but they might as well be shot in Saskatoon or Port Washington, since no one in the public has a chance to see their favorite personalities working in the flesh.

Now that will change. CNN has been (literally) keeping the new studio under wraps, but soon the brilliant disguise will be torn away, and the cable network will have its most prominent beachhead in New York City-of course, until that other prominent beachhead, the giant emerald hydra rising at Columbus Avenue, is completed sometime in … 2047.

Is this latest Manhattan splashdown further evidence that CNN's power base is crawling northward from Atlanta, the network's longtime home? Publicly, CNN executives maintain that Atlanta is the network's Mecca, but clearly, with three of the revamped network's new showpieces here in New York-and the indefatigable Larry King suspendered and sunning in L.A.-Southern cookin' isn't as critical to the network as it was when beloved boss Ted Turner would barrel into his newsroom with batty strokes of genius.

And another thing CNN isn't talking about is whether or not their new, very public Sixth Avenue studio might inspire the competition to have some fun at their expense. There is another New York–based cable news network: It's called the Fox News Channel, and it's helmed by a talkative man named Roger Ailes-and it's approximately three blocks, or the length of 36 prone Bill O'Reillys, from CNN's new home. Fox has a history of corpo-pranksterism-they've taken out classy, taunting billboards right across from CNN's Atlanta home-and it's reasonable to expect that they might try a little street-level, welcome-to-the-neighborhood-style disruption of their chief rival.

We shall see. Tonight on CNN's Moneyline , Lou Dobbs tells his audience that he's angling to do his show in a gold-plated studio atop the Waldorf-Astoria, sitting on a red crushed-velvet pillow and surrounded by palm-fanning handmaidens. [CNN, 10, 6 p.m.]

Thursday, May 23

Comedy Central vice president and general manager Bill Hilary hears this kind of thing all the time: You must be chafed when your scrappy li'l cable network carefully cultivates talent (Craig Kilborn, Jimmy Kimmel)-only to have a big, lazy vulture (CBS, ABC) with a fat wallet fly down and scoop them up.

"The truth about Comedy Central is that we do build up talent and sometimes they leave," Mr. Hilary said, sounding a little like a proud coach at Triple-A Columbus. "I don't have a problem with that; I actually think it's a really positive thing for our network that we make great stars."

The good news for Comedy Central, it seems, is that the threat of losing Jon Stewart appears to have abated. The New York Post reported in March that before chasing after David Letterman, ABC played footsie with the swirly-maned Daily Show host. Later, when ABC was dangling megabucks in front of Mr. Letterman, Mr. Stewart's name was repeatedly mentioned as a potential late-night successor at CBS, which, like Comedy Central, is part of Viacom.

But now, with Dave signed, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien locked in for eternity, Jimmy Kimmel taking the Politically Incorrect slot, and Ted Koppel and Nightline signed for another couple of years-can't Mr. Hilary breathe a mild sigh of relief about his network's biggest star?

"Well, who knows?" he said. "Jon is with us for another year and a half, and he seems to be very happy … he's a brilliant presenter. Will we keep him? Who knows? I'm really realistic about this." Mr. Hilary has been around long enough to know that the competition will always be nibbling at his talent. Theoretically, for example, should Nightline end its run in a couple of years, it's not a stretch to imagine that ABC could make a play for Mr. Stewart to take the 11:30 slot, leading into Mr. Kimmel's show.

But Mr. Hilary said he refuses to "live in the future." And he said he doesn't want to push Mr. Stewart into signing a multi-year deal if that's not what the host wants. "I personally don't believe in deals that tie talent if they don't want to be there," Mr. Hilary said.

In other words, if you love your host, set him free-and pray he doesn't wind up on The Learning Channel.

Tonight on Comedy Central, Ben Stein crows about the offers he's gotten from Channel 13 and C-Span 2. Win Ben Stein's Money . [COM, 45, 5 p.m.]

Friday, May 24

If you had to pick a moment that effectively summed up feelings about this year's upfront week, it was probably on Thursday, May 16, when Fox Entertainment president Gail Berman was touting a new series called Fastlane . Fastlane, Ms. Berman said, starred Bill Bellamy and Peter Facinelli "as a pair of rogue L.A. cops and 90210 's Tiffani Thiessen as their boss."

The notion of a buxom bombshell like Ms. Thiessen bossing anyone around anywhere except on a preposterous Fox drama was too much for the audience at the City Center on 55th Street to bear, and the crowd erupted in laughter-not polite, ha-that's-a-funny-idea laughter, but raucous, man-you-can't-make-this-crap-up laughter.

In fairness to Ms. Berman, the Fox upfront is the last of a grueling week of presentations, and by the time this year's crowd sat for her good-natured pitches, they'd already sat through eight others, including two (CBS, UPN) hosted by soft-spoken spotlight-deflector Les Moonves. By Thursday afternoon, the audience was already punch drunk-and in some cases, actually drunk-and Ms. Berman's plug for Boss Tiffani merely sent them over the edge.

That said, it was not the kind of upfront week that makes one feel poised on the next golden age of television. As dumb as a lot of it was, the reality and game-show wave at least forced networks to think creatively; but now, with the trend ebbing, programmers have largely retreated to conventional sitcoms and dramas, some of which recycle premises kicking around since Uncle Miltie's heyday. NBC's Good Morning Miami , for example, may be the progeny of talented Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, but it has to be the six billionth sitcom where the premise is a naïve straight man plopped into a wacky newsroom. They also have a sitcom called In-Laws , which may be the first new sitcom to make comic fodder out of in-laws in more than three or four months. And on ABC, they were thrilled to announce the return of … John Ritter.

It felt very 1987, to say the least, except for the parts that felt like 1957. Networks, you've no doubt read, have, in the wake of 9/11, dropped (some of) their usual sex and grime in favor of peachy, family-oriented entertainment-like NBC's American Dreams , in which a handsome suburban family grapples with football practice, American Bandstand and the Kennedy assassination.

That's why, really, it was something of a relief as well as a hoot to hear about Ms. Thiessen presiding over a pair of scofflaw, car-crashing cops. Fox thankfully understands that television still has a responsibility to show some irresponsibility-and if it has to smash a few Ferraris, then smash 'em up.

Tonight on Fox, Dark Angel . Every horndog magazine editor in America tried to make pillow-lipped Jessica Alba a television star, to no avail; Fox clipped her wings last week. [FOX, 5, 8 p.m.]

Saturday, May 25

Michael Musto, the Tony Danza of gossip television-just find a network he hasn't dished on!-is back on the tube as a resident 'sipper on Pure Oxygen Entertainment , a weekday magazine show on the still-kickin'-but-breathing-heavily women's network. Every Tuesday, Mr. Musto, a former E! personality most recently seen on the Metro Channel as the co-host of the gone-but-not-forgotten New York Central , pops up on Oxygen to chatter about boldface boo-boos.

Does Mr. Musto feel like a TV survivor? "I am Gossipzilla!" he wrote in an e-mail. "I will never die! I have survived E! and Metro and plan to storm every other channel on your dial except ESPN!"

What's more, on 61, Mr. Musto is a whole nine channels up the dial from his Metro days. This afternoon on Oxygen, stay home and eat an early supper, because there's a big, juicy rerun of Cybill ! [OXY, 61, 3:30 p.m.]

Sunday, May 26

Tonight on CBS, catch the jes'-canceled The Education of Max Bickford . Poor Richard Dreyfuss got an education in the vicissitudes of network television, didn't he? Now go and complete the Stakeout triptych, bub! [CBS, 2, 8 p.m.]

Monday, May 27

Back in those go-go days of a few months ago, when times were still pretty good and everyone thought Zach Galifianakis was going to be a big, big star, VH1 commissioned documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler ( The War Room, American High ) to do a vérité series chronicling the U.S. armed forces' effort in and around Afghanistan.

Mr. Cutler, as he did with the school kids in American High , gave digital video cameras to a number of military personnel and asked them to occasionally record their thoughts. The result is Military Diaries , a surprisingly textured portrait of American soldiers amid the recent war effort. Its grinding throb-rock soundtrack aside, Diaries is a refreshingly toned-down examination of the contemporary military, one that illustrates the dedication of the effort while showing a more human side of the people on the ground.

"The most surprising thing was how open people were in discussing their complex feelings about what was going on," Mr. Cutler said. "I'd say the vast majority, if not all the people with whom we'd worked, had joined the military long before Sept. 11 and long before there was any thought that they'd be involved in actual war."

Mr. Cutler said the U.S. military was quite cooperative in allowing personnel to participate in the Military Diaries project. And yes, though he did screen parts of it for the people depicted in the series (something he said he always does), he wasn't forced to drop anything. "I can tell you that there wasn't a single thing we were asked to change," he said. [VH1, 19, 10 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 28

So Bryant Gumbel went out as he went in: with hardly anybody watching. Mr. Gumbel's May 17 finale as co-host of The Early Show earned it a 2.1 rating-each ratings point represents approximately one million households-keeping the show far behind competitors Today and Good Morning America . Of course, CBS did not exactly give (nor did Mr. Gumbel request, apparently) a "Rachel's baby"–like promotion for his walk into the sunset, but geez, America-the guy woke up at 3:30 a.m. for two and a half years.

This morning on The Early Show , Jane Clayson runs across 59th Street and applies for a job at the Sherry-Netherland. [WCBS, 2, 7 a.m.]

It was Monday, May 13, and Mr. Kimmel, 34, was talking from his office in Los Angeles, where in a few hours he would hop a plane bound for New York City. The next day, the scruffy-cheeked ex–radio D.J. turned tele-chauvinist would step triumphantly onto the stage at the New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square to be crowned late-night television's Latest Shiny New Object. Battered ABC had signed Mr. Kimmel to do a comedy show after Nightline , one to replace the never-really-worked Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect .

Mr. Kimmel had spent the past three years blowing up as host of Comedy Central's Man Show , the weekly, wild testosterone release in which he and toothy co-host Adam Carolla, cheered on by an eager, beer-swilling audience, riffed upon subjects like urination, masturbation and farting while surrounded by half-naked sidekickettes called the "Juggies," some of whom jumped on trampolines. Seen as a he-man rebuke of 90's political correctness, The Man Show was not high art. On one Man Show skit, a shirtless Mr. Kimmel-all 191 pounds of him-had dry-humped a live chimpanzee.

Now he will follow Ted Koppel.

But as he verged on the Big Time, Mr. Kimmel offered this revelation: the Man Show man is not necessarily him . And his and Mr. Carolla's whooping, herdlike studio audience?

"I don't like most of them, to be honest," Mr. Kimmel said. "I like a certain segment of them, but I don't like them as a group. Individually they're fine, but as a group, I don't like the hooting and hollering."

And there you go. Like a kids' TV host who winds up loathing the children who bark his name, Mr. Kimmel had grown tired of his screaming, loyal louts. He was grateful for their love, but he hated their brainless cheering of potty-mouth words. He hated it when MTV, figuring they'd be perfect, sent him and Mr. Carolla to Mardi Gras, an event he called a "nightmare." Jimmy Kimmel grew up wanting to be an artist, for crying out loud. Didn't people understand? Just because he played well with horny packs of loudmouths didn't mean he was one of them .

"The idea that I am this guy who runs around snapping people in the ass with a towel, that's not really me," he said. "I like to think there is a little more to me than that. I know there is."

But now he's got his work cut out. Mr. Kimmel joins a gimpy network with an even wobblier late-night franchise. ABC bungled supremely earlier this year when it flirted with David Letterman, only to lose him and alienate Mr. Koppel and Nightline, its aging yet stentorian news beast. Nightline 's execution was stayed, but few people think it will last more than a couple of years.

ABC's mission, of course, is to get young-grab some of that 18-to-34 male demographic back from Mr. Letterman and Jay Leno. But Mr. Kimmel's selection raised eyebrows, and not just because his pee-pee gags contrast mightily with Mr. Koppel's lyrical dispatches from the Congo. Amid the Letterman mishegoss , there were rumors that if they didn't get Dave, ABC would chase The Daily Show 's Jon Stewart, who is witty and charming and the kind of self-effacing smarty pants who gets written up in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine -in other words, the type of guy Mr. Koppel would at least humor, if not laugh at.

Conversely, Mr. Kimmel, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Las Vegas, is seen as a merry lummox-the type that might get written up in Maxim , and that Mr. Koppel might avoid on the Delta shuttle. Physically, Mr. Kimmel reeks regular guyness: Short-haired, barrel-chested and usually in need of a shave, he's the kind of lovable-schlep who looks like he's wearing a Rangers jersey even when he's not wearing a Rangers jersey. Indeed, if late night is college and Jay Leno is the obsequious student-council treasurer, David Letterman the fifth-year senior turned cranky dorm proctor, Conan O'Brien the improv captain and Craig Kilborn the smarmy Lothario who slept with the freshman girls, then Jimmy Kimmel is the cool guy smarter than his 2.0 G.P.A. who didn't mind if you borrowed his porn, or puked in his room.

Because of that likability, Mr. Kimmel was able to pull off a tongue-in-cheek crudity like The Man Show . Like one of his idols, Howard Stern, who got away with the strippers and breast exams because he had a family in the suburbs and told everyone he possessed a small penis, Mr. Kimmel, who's been married 14 years and has two young kids (and now appears on Mr. Stern's show from time to time), is an on-air aggressor with a marshmallow inside-not a misogynist, but a pig with a wink.

At least he's played one on TV. As he prepares for the biggest leap of his career, Mr. Kimmel is eager to leave that frat-guy perception behind.

"I definitely like sports and drinking beer and all that, but I think I'm a little more well-rounded than that," Mr. Kimmel said. "I mean, I would never be in a fraternity. It's so funny when people say to me, 'Oh, this frat-boy humor,' because a fraternity is the last thing I would do. I don't need to belong to a group that tells me who my friends are. I have enough trouble keeping guys away from me."

Jimmy Kimmel said he is motivated by anger. Not scary-guy Travis Bickle–style anger, but resentment at the way he was shunted around the country, like a Wolfman Jack Willy Loman, in the early stages of his radio career. "There's a lot of spite that fuels me, it's true," he said.

Before he landed on television, Mr. Kimmel toiled in radio stations in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Seattle, Phoenix again, Tampa, Palm Springs, Tucson and finally Los Angeles. He was fired from all but two of those jobs. It still stings him.

"I was fired from all these radio stations, and people laugh and think it's cool or whatever," Mr. Kimmel said. "But you know, it wasn't funny and it wasn't cool at the time-it was me and my wife and eventually a kid or two having to go pack our house with no money and drive to another city where hopefully I would be able to get another job. It was not fun."

Mr. Kimmel admitted he was a "huge pain in the ass" in his early radio days. Radio-station directors, he said, "always want to make you into Gary Collins," and he was an unproven kid demanding that they not tamper with his undiscovered genius. "I was a skinny punk telling these grown men, 'You're not funny, I know better-just trust me,'" Mr. Kimmel said. "I can see why they didn't like me."

He began to find his voice in a little-listened-to R&B radio station in Palm Springs, where he spun Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle records and a childhood friend named Carson Daly was his intern. Convinced that no one was listening and thus no one cared what he did, Mr. Kimmel honed that wild regular-guy act, moaning about his boss, making crank calls, raising radio hell. "It was like we were doing a show in our living room," Mr. Kimmel said. "And it was very freeing in a way to feel like nobody's listening, because you feel like you can say anything-and I did just start saying anything."

Eventually, Mr. Kimmel wended his way to L.A.'s hyper-influential KROQ, where he rose to prominence as a wise-cracking sports freak called "Jimmy the Sports Guy." People started calling him with ideas for television. But he stunned suitors by turning most of their ideas away.

"I have said no to so many people when I had nothing going on, and they couldn't believe it," he said, laughing. " I was just on the radio, and they were like, 'We want you to host this show.' I said no, and they were like, 'What the fuck ?' I'd say, 'It doesn't sound good.' And they'd go, 'But you were on the radio ! Don't you want to be on TV ?' I'd go, 'Yeah-but I want to do something good.'"

In 1997, Mr. Kimmel relented and agreed to serve as the host on Win Ben Stein's Mone y, a Comedy Central quiz show in which contestants try and match wits with the monotone former Nixon aide turned movie actor ("Bueller … Bueller … Bueller … "). The acclaimed show earned Mr. Kimmel some critical credibility; he won a daytime Emmy in 1999 for best game-show host.

But even then, he was anxious to show more. "When I was on the Ben Stein show, I always secretly wanted to show I knew the answers to a lot of the questions," Mr. Kimmel said. He feels a little of the same in his ongoing gig as an armchair prognosticator on Fox's N.F.L. pregame show, where he plays a funny schmo trying to pick between the Saints and the Buccaneers.

"People equate comedy with being dumb," Mr. Kimmel said. "And you know, I'd be happy to take an IQ test or an SAT test. Just because [jock-turned-Fox-personality] Howie Long wears glasses doesn't make him smart. I guarantee you I am much smarter than those guys."

Mr. Daly, the MTV idol who also hosts a 1:35 a.m. NBC show called Last Call , called Mr. Kimmel "one of the smartest people" he knew. "He's very well-read, he is a great Trivial Pursuit partner-he has a lot of knowledge on a lot of levels," Mr. Daly said.

Still, Mr. Kimmel wasn't going to force his brain on anyone. Better to have your intellect underrated than overcooked, he figured.

"I think that's why Dennis Miller got hit in the head by a two-by-four," Mr. Kimmel said, referring to the recently canned Monday Night Football jester. "Dennis Miller seems more intent on showing people that he's smart than showing people that he's funny. There are zillions of smart people-there aren't that many funny people. If your goal is to show people how much you have read, there is something wrong with that if you're a comedian."

The Man Show, launched in 1999, would not pose such conflicts. Developed by Mr. Kimmel, Mr. Carrolla and Dan Kellison, the show became the second-highest-rated program on Comedy Central (after South Park ) despite a hairy excoriation from critics when it premiered. Susan Faludi, in Newsweek , dismissed it as a show where "flatulence seems to be the sine qua non of male identity."

Mr. Kimmel said he can't understand why The Man Show became fodder for generational arguments. On various occasions, it was derided as evidence that the male troglodyte had returned to pop culture; of a brewing backlash against gender equality; of the shamelessness of cable-television executives.

"It always reminds me of one of my bad book reports, where you have to find three points to support your argument," Mr. Kimmel said. "The first one is kind of strong, and the third one is fairly strong, but the one in the middle is just bullshit .

"We go and entertain these drunken guys-how is what we do indicative of anything that goes on in America?" Mr. Kimmel asked. "'Oh, it's this backlash against feminism.' No! It's a show people think is funny. Also, guys like to watch girls bounce. Simple as that."

It's not just guys, he said. Mr. Kimmel said that women tell him all the time that they love The Man Show ; he said the program's female fans regarded their loyalty as a counterintuitive badge of honor. "I think it makes them feel special," he said.

Over time, however, even the best-intentioned audience affections began to wear on Mr. Kimmel. He said that while they were thrilled that people came and watched, he and Mr. Carolla were weary of the cat-calling and barking from their audience; that they were eager to broaden horizons. Mr. Kimmel said they talked about it every time they taped another episode.

The rabid fans hounded them on the street, too. "Adam and I walk around, and people go bananas," Mr. Kimmel said.

Sometimes it was too much. Mr. Kimmel told a story about a time he was dining with friends in Las Vegas and a chatty fan suddenly sat inside their booth, trapping them inside.

"I guess my personality welcomes that behavior," Mr. Kimmel said. "I guess there are some things you got to deal with when you chug a beer at the end of your TV show."

Mr. Kimmel enters late-night television at a time when broadcast networks, believing that Sept. 11 turned audiences off of gratuitous sex and violence, have become broadcasters again, offering a steady diet of middle-of-the-road comfort-food entertainment. This spirit was evident at this week's upfront presentations, where urbane NBC, the home of Will & Grace and Fear Factor , announced a new series called American Dreams , about a white-bread 1960's family with a daughter who hopes to do the mashed potato on American Bandstand . Even the slutty WB is lowering its hemline, introducing a wave of family-values shows, including a remake of CBS's old Family Affair , starring that Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, Tim Curry, as a butler.

Mr. Kimmel's show-which is loosely being described as an hour-long talk and variety show-won't debut on ABC until January 2003. ABC, however, is in a rush to kick Politically Incorrect to the curb; the network announced on May 14 that it will soon jettison Mr. Maher and the chair he came in on for ( geez , this network gets weirder and weirder) an additional Nightline half-hour called Nightline Close-up .

Then, come early next year, it's Jimmy time. Bill Hillary, the executive vice president and general manager of Comedy Central, said that he's happy for his employee, but thinks Mr. Kimmel's transition from cable will be a challenge, if only because of the creaky viewers he has to convert.

"To be perfectly honest with you, I think it will be difficult at first, because ABC's audience is so old," Mr. Hillary said. "But I think if anyone can really break through, he can. The challenge for him is to get a younger audience to be loyal to his program and come to ABC."

Stacey Lynn Koerner, vice president of broadcast research for Initiative Media, a media-analysis firm, said that on ABC, Mr. Kimmel should probably "get a little broader, shake off some of his Man Show exterior. The key demographic in late night is young men-but that doesn't mean women aren't watching."

Mr. Daly was more blunt about his pal's ABC show. "Look out," he said. "Look the fuck out."

As for The Man Show, its future is unclear. Mr. Kimmel would say only, "I don't know what's going to happen." Comedy Central's Mr. Hillary said the network is undecided if the show will continue on, perhaps with Mr. Carolla and someone else; the network, of course, successfully transferred the Daily Show from Mr. Kilborn to Mr. Stewart. (Mr. Hillary added that Comedy Central has also ordered up four years' worth of Crank Yankers, a new puppets-doing-crank-calls show from Mr. Kimmel, Mr. Carolla and Mr. Kellison.)

Mr. Kimmel, though, will be busy moving on. At ABC's upfront presentation on May 14, he joked that he planned to get Barbara Walters on a trampoline.

This may make him sound like a dickhead, but Jimmy Kimmel thinks that he and late night can work.

"Everybody I know thinks I'm funny," he said. "Even people that don't like me think I'm funny in real life. There is no reason why it shouldn't translate to the rest of the United States."

-with reporting by Rebecca Traister and Gabriel Snyder