Earthquake
One Night Stand HBO’s Stand-Up Comedy
HBO Video 2006
30 minutes plus 10 minutes deleted scenes
Earthquake is a great comic and his latest stand-up comedy DVD, One Night Stand, part of four recently released on DVD HBO stand-up comedy specials, is good stuff. Filmed in New York in front of an appreciative audience, this release is a half hour long with ten minutes of deleted routines.
On HBO One Night Stand Earthquake works rapid-pace though a variety of material and more often than not does it blue. He opens with a bit on the much weaker Lakers, women with children, and the salary cap of life. Earthquake also does a bit of political comedy with a bit about George Bush O.G. and Condoleezza Rice.
Puffy and Oprah are also butts of some of his comedy routines. His closer, about soldiers coming home, is definitely a message America needs to hear.
A lot of the comedy in Earthquake One Night Stand is oriented towards a Black audience though this stand-up comedian manages to build his routines so as to allow the white members of the audience to understand the references and the joke.
This is not that easy to do as a few Uptown Comics shows at Just For Laughs have demonstrated to me. I especially enjoyed the routines about white folks and animals and the differences between white women and black women.
The risk of going topical when it comes to comedy is the material might sound a bit dated by the time it is released. This is sometimes the case on Earthquake One Night Stand with references to Kobe Bryant, Ziegfried and Roy, and Michael Jackson’s woes (then again, chances are Jackson’s legal problems will be in the news again soon) but there are not enough of such bits here to make this stand-up comedy DVD unenjoyable and there is more than enough fresh, original material to make watching this Earthquake DVD something you will want to do from time to time.
Earthquake One Night Stand also includes some ten minutes of deleted scenes. These are pretty good though, like the one about doctors, not particularly original.
If you like Earthquake, and who doesn’t, and black comics, this stand-up comedy DVD is right up your alley.