For two decades and counting, Andy Kindler has regularly done one of the scariest and gutsiest things a comedian can do: He delivers an annual State of the Industry Address at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival.

This is an opportunity for Kindler “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” as the old newspaper adage goes.

In other words, he skewers and lambasts the most powerful people in his own industry.

Jay Leno, Ricky Gervais and Adam Sandler are frequent targets.

Kindler performs April 7 at the Tiger Room in Fort Wayne.

Last year, Kindler went after Louis C.K. at a time when Louis C.K. was popular with pretty much everybody.

Louis C.K. didn’t respond to Kindler’s remarks but fans of the former sure did.

“With the Louis C.K. thing, I did get blowback,” he said, in a phone interview. “I got blowback even from people I know. I won’t say who it is because I have enough trouble. Also, I worked it out. I’ve had arguments with friends of mine.”

Kindler’s beef with Louis C.K. (such as it is) is that Louis C.K. has cultivated an “aw shucks” persona that belies an ego and an ambition that are as large as anyone’s.

People often accuse Kindler of sour grapes but what really bothers Kindler is when a talented person is motivated by success (or the quest for it) to behave in cheesy or insincere ways.

One of the things about Leno that always bugged Kindler was how he would come out at the beginning of The Tonight Show and bask in applause, sometimes for as much as a full minute.

“If part of your show has to be you on camera being congratulated by the crowd, that says a lot about you,” he said. “Leno did that and Jimmy (Fallon) does that. Everybody who performs is needy. Everybody who performs wants the crowd to like them. But this is such a naked grab at audience support; I think eventually people see through that.”

After the fuss over his Louis C.K. comments died down, Kindler said he had “something like a spiritual breakthrough.”

“I used to feel like, ‘Oh man, I have gotta justify why I am doing this,’” he said, referring to the State of the Industry Address, “And now I’m more like, ‘Well, that’s what the thing is – it’s kind of like a roast of the business.’”

Kindler is adept at sniffing out B.S.

Four years before Fallon was widely condemned for a fawning Donald Trump interview, Kindler tweeted this: “‘I heard you were responsible for like 30 million deaths. That’s crazy.’ Jimmy Fallon interviewing Stalin.”

As much mileage as Kindler gets out of deflating pomposity, what really seems to bother him are racism and sexism, as is evidenced by his factious Twitter activity.

He is appalled by President Trump, but he tries to work out his rage on Twitter rather than in clubs, because anger isn’t funny.

Trolls tend to accuse Kindler of envy, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that Kindler’s comic credentials aren’t sterling. His timing and facial expressions, which evoke those of Jack Benny, can pull late laughs out of jokes that seem to have fallen flat.

In his routines, he is as hard on himself as he is on anyone else. He once described himself thusly: “(Like) Chris Rock, without the charisma, confidence and material.”

Comedy hasn’t made Kindler as wealthy as it has some of his loftier targets, but he doesn’t sound bitter about it.

When you love something like he loves comedy, he said, there are a lot of pathways to success.

“It’s always a trap when you have a dream that has to be so specific,” he said. “There are so many different ways of doing stuff and not everybody is going to have their own sitcom. And if you had your own sitcom, maybe you wouldn’t like it.”

Kindler, 60, said that he genuinely enjoys touring more than he ever has.

“I could lie to you but why would I lie?” he said. “Maybe because Trump is president now. The truth is, I really do love standup comedy now more than I ever did. I don’t know why I think nobody’s going to think I am being honest.”

It may be that rock musicians make their best stuff when they’re young and angry, Kindler said, but there’s no reason a comic can’t just get better and better.

“I have never been happier than I am now,” he said. “I have never liked my act better than I do now. Of course, by saying all this, I am jinxing myself. It’s like I am looking for ways to poison my next tour.”

Getting older has been a blessing in many ways, Kindler said.

“I hate to talk about how old I am, but I can’t stop talking about it,” he said. “In general, the good part of aging is – the way I felt in my twenties is that I was so consumed with ambition. I was so hard on myself. I had to achieve. When you get older, you just don’t have that same ambition. It doesn’t have to drive me anymore.”

Ghost in the Shell, based on a long-running Japanese comic book, tells the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi (Scarlett Johansson), a state-of-the-art, one-of-a-kind, cutting-edge, overly hyphenated cyborg assassin.

In the film version, the character is called merely The Major because producers thought American audiences might be confused if Scarlett Johansson played a character with such an unquestionably Japanese name as Motoko Kusanagi.

They did briefly consider changing it to Myrtle Krebsbach.

“Ghost in the Shell” has been described in a Paramount Pictures press release as an “internationally acclaimed sci-fi property” and nothing stirs excitement in the true movie aficionado quite like the word “property.”

In the film, the Major leads a cybercrime task force called Section 9 against hackers, cyber-spies and those Facebook friends who say they have a big announcement to make on Facebook Live and then try to sell you bogus dietary supplements.

The Major is hot on the trail of a ruthless criminal kingpin who calls himself The Puppet Master, even though this was also the nickname of Shari Lewis.

At regular intervals, the Major’s body is replaced with a newer, more limber and more vigorous body, just as her husbands are regularly replaced with a newer, more limber and more vigorous husbands.

The Major can choose any body she wants but she repeatedly chooses the Scarlett Johansson model. Asked to explain why, she replies that the Scarlett Johansson model suits her needs. Also, the Kevin James model looks really disturbing in the spandex.

The Major’s form-fitting thermoptic suit is based on the original one worn by Slim Goodbody.

The film has stirred some controversy for casting Caucasian actors in what originally were Japanese roles.

Paramount has countered that they’re just copying the strategy for success followed by such Anglicized hits as “Dragonball: Evolution,” “Speed Racer,” and “The Conqueror,” starring John Wayne as Genghis Kahn.

The original comic book came out 28 years ago and Paramount believes the story is as durable as other things that were popular in 1989: things like Andrew Dice Clay, Richard Marx and “The Slater Dance.”

Ghost in the Shell opens today.

 

There is much that is atypical about Love Hustler.

For one thing, the band practiced and tinkered for more than 10 years before performing its first show.

For another, the band only has two members. But those two guys make it sound like they, in the words of Walt Whitman, “contain multitudes.”

Love Hustler is composed of longtime local music stalwarts and multi-instrumentalists Adam Rudolph and Matt Cashdollar.

While it is true that Love Hustler performs electronic music, the reality of what the band does is not fully addressed by that phrase.

Yes, Love Hustler makes use of laptops. But Rudolph and Cashdollar also play instruments and sing.

Love Hustler doesn’t remix or mash-up other artists’ hits. It performs originals – the sort of originals that people take an instant liking to, unless they were brought up wrong.

Rudolph and Cashdollar call what they do electrofunk and it as ingratiating as some club music is punishing (at least to these middle-aged ears).

Advanced technology aside, Love Hustler’s music is more old school than whatever the opposite of old school is.

At first, Love Hustler was purely a studio project, Cashdollar said.

“We just wanted to record as much as possible,” he said.

“And have as much fun as we possibly could,” Rudolph added.

Cashdollar said it took a while for the guys to figure out how they were going to pull it all off live.

“For a long time, we were thinking, ‘Why don’t we just teach these to a band?’” he said. “He and I were in the Freak Brothers together.”

Some Love Hustler material did make it into the Freak Brothers canon, Cashdollar said.

Then, about two years ago, the guys began to slowly construct an elaborate interlinked and interlocking performance system whereby all the elements of Love Hustler could come together on stage.

“There’s been a little trial and error,” Cashdollar said. “Syncing the lights with it – that was all him. I was on vacation. I was in Florida for a week and I came back and he said, ‘There’s a light show.’ And was like, ‘What?’”

Rudolph said he thinks his lighting solution he had never been tried before.

Rudolph worried at first whether Love Hustler – an unusual concept in the grand scheme of electronic things – could find a place on the club scene.

“I just thought the DJs were going to look down at this or any idea like this,” Rudolph said.

But the management at Hush, a downtown club, was intrigued rather than incredulous and asked the band to perform last summer.

“So they took a chance on us I feel like,” he said. “We were very, very gracious to them. They saw the potential and we were like, ‘Yes!’”

“They gambled on us,” Cashdollar said. “Usually it’s a DJ or a team of DJs and that’s it. But we’re a band. We’re a band that functions in the role of a DJ.”

Watching Love Hustler perform is a singular experience. It puts a person in mind of a “one man band,” the pre-digital troubadour who played various instruments simultaneously with various appendages. Cashdollar and Rudolph do a lot of different things on stage and do them all well.

Love Hustler’s roots in eighties funk are unmistakable. Cashdollar cites Zapp & Roger and Midnight Star as especially strong influences.

One of the more intriguing effects of some of the band’s music, especially for a person who grew up during the eighties, is that it can bring you instantly and joyously back to that era, even though you are hearing the songs for the first time.

More contemporary influences include the British band Jamiroquai and the Canadian duo Chromeo.

“Chromeo is a two-man band and they are literally the genre that we’re doing,” Cashdollar said.

“They really pushed us to want to perform it, Rudolph said, “seeing what they’re doing.”

Now that these men have proved definitively that Love Hustler can work beautifully in a live setting, they plan to take the band outside Fort Wayne this summer.

“We want to get the band into different environments in other cities,” Cashdollar said. “We would certainly love to see this on a festival stage and not just in Fort Wayne.”

The guys don’t have any lofty goals beyond having fun.

“We just want to take it where it’s appreciated,” Rudolph said. “If you worry about the music and just being good and making sure the music is good, I think everything else just takes care of itself.”

The band’s next performance at Hush is May 13.

Ask guitarist Marcus King about where he got his love of music and you will hear a story that sounds like it came out of an anthology of southern literature.

“Music was always really big part of my life from a very young age,” he said via phone. “Ever since I can remember, I was hanging out on my great-grandfather’s porch up in Blue Ridge and everybody was making music with each other, playing guitars and banjos and fiddles and singing old gospel tunes. And everybody was really happy.

“No matter what was going on at that time,” King said, “everybody kind of escaped. I think it was very inadvertent to everybody. It was (inadvertent) to me for a very long time until I became aware that I was releasing my emotions through a musical context.”

These days, this Greenville, South Carolina native releases his emotions in a musical context for a living.

His band performs March 23 at C2G Music Hall.

If you knew no more about him than that he’s a Southern guitarist who grew up listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, you might draw certain conclusions.

You might decide that he must be a blues shredder. Or an heir to the swamp boogie stylings of Gary Rossington.

But you’d be wrong. King is his own man. His horn-infused band is eclectic. Sometimes it sounds like Chicago, pre-Cetera. Sometimes it sounds like it came out of cities where it’s harder to find grits, like Memphis or Detroit.

King said he loves and is heavily influenced by Rossington, Duane Allman and those unrelated but like-minded Kings: B.B., Albert and Freddie.

But, eventually, he started reaching out for other influences.

“I was taking stuff from these guitar players like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Hendrix… Robin Trower,” he said. “And then my ear really started getting more drawn to the singers like Robert Johnson and Hank Williams Sr. – emotions in the voice – and B.B., Albert and Freddie as well.”

King made an effort to emulate the techniques of great singers in his guitar playing. He did the same with the organ playing of Jimmy Smith and the pedal steel playing of Buddy Emmons.

He ultimately came to the realization that he couldn’t fully express himself through guitar playing alone so he decided to teach himself to sing. Otis Redding and James Brown were huge influences here.

He later studied Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin.

Given the breadth of these influences, it is not surprising to learn that King shies away from describing the band’s “style” in sound bite form.

“I want to avoid branding ourselves,” he said. “We made a decision early on to remain ambiguous. Throw people off the trail. I mean, they say what they want to say anyway. I have always thought it doesn’t do music any good to put it in a box or in a category. You don’t need any chains holding it back.”

King is an exceedingly self-assured guy. He seems driven by an unpretentious search for artistic purity, a quest to fully manifest the music he hears in his head and the music that he will one day hear in his head.

He quit school after his junior year in high school with the full support of his parents. They knew how ambitious and motivated he was, King said.

“It wasn’t like I was quitting school so I could be a drain on society for a while,” he said. “I had gigs lined up. I was ready to go. (School) was only going to be in my way.”

He later earned his GED.

In 2015, the band collaborated with Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Hayes on the album, “Soul Insight.”

Young bands often tell horror stories about their first encounters with seasoned industry professionals, but King said his band’s artistic partnership with Hayes was a meeting of the minds.

“We were nervous,” he said. “We’d never done anything on that scale, for a major label. We were as green as can be. But Warren made us feel really at home. He was easy to get along with and not pushy in any way. He was open to try anything at least three times. He was very patient with us.”

Going forward, King said the only constants in the band will be a Hammond B3 organ and its accompanying Leslie speaker.

King adheres to a definition of success articulated in the mid-1990s by Lauren Hill.

“I always thought success was like ‘Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,’” he said. “(Hill) was talking about how she was successful because she had a happy marriage and a happy son. Her success was not defined by money.”

“As long as we’re able to create music every night and keep the lights on in the house,” King said, “we’ll feel successful.”

When the phone rang, I was not too proud to say aloud, “The Mads are calling.”

Because they were.

The Mads are writer-performers Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff. For a better part of the 1990s, they played Dr. Clayton Forrester and his bumbling henchman, “TV’s Frank,” on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Beaulieu also created and performed the role of Crow T. Robot).

The premise of the show involved virtuosic displays of movie mocking. It also involved robots and outer space and incompetent supervillains. It created a lot of devotees and not a few detractors.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 spawned a new definition of riffing, a term that had previously been used to describe jazz improvisation.

Riffing now encompasses movie-inspired quipping.

After leaving Mystery Science Theater 3000, Beaulieu and Conniff wrote for other comedic series and then toured with Cinematic Titanic, another movie riffing venture with a huge cast of established riffers.

The men subsequently formed a double act and are performing in theaters nationwide under the rubric, The Mads Are Back.

They will riff an as-yet-unnamed movie on Saturday night at the first annual Hall of Heroes Comic Con in Elkhart.

I interviewed both men recently. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I interviewed Conniff separately late last year about his hilarious bad movie memoir, Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever.

I ran out if time to write it up then, so I will now attempt to combine both interviews in a manner that is no more than mildly jarring.

Conniff joined Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (aka MST3K) before the start of its second season on Comedy Central.

He replaced J. Elvis Weinstein as Forrester’s sidekick and it quickly became evident that Beaulieu and Conniff shared a rare chemistry.

“I think the thing that really inspired TV’s Frank’s relationship with Dr. Forrester is that Trace and I are both fans of comedy teams like Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello and the Marx Brothers,” Conniff said. “We wanted it to have that kind of a feeling to it: one guy’s a stooge and the other guy takes advantage of the fact that he’s a stooge.”

The characters that Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk played in the 1965 film, The Great Race, Professor Fate and his hapless crony Maximilian Meen, also influenced the Mads, Conniff said.

Conniff said that he and Beaulieu share “a common worldview.”

“We’re very in sync in terms of our comedic sensibilities,” he said. “The things that make me laugh are usually the things that make Trace laugh.”

The name “TV’s Frank” grew out of a convention of print advertising in the 1960s and 1970s.

“When I was growing up,” Conniff said, “you would read in TV Guide – if someone from a TV show would do an ad for something – it would say, ‘Mike Connor, TV’s Mannix’ and that’s kind of where it came from. People just started saying it. It was just another one of those things from the show that came very naturally. Not a lot of thought went into it.

“I probably shouldn’t admit how much ‘TV’s Frank’ is based on the real me,” he said, laughing.

It was Conniff’s job on the show to vet and cull the films for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This meant opening box after box filled with VHS tapes and viewing hours’ worth of the worst cinema ever created by well-meaning incompetents.

This was not at all akin to ditch digging, Conniff said, but it was not a fun job.

Mere badness was not enough to qualify a movie for comic disqualification on MST3K.

Some bad movies unfold like gridlock, like slow WiFi, like sorting socks, like waiting in a long line to buy stamps.

If the movie lacked a followable plot, it did not lend itself to riffing, Conniff said,

“When you can’t tell what’s happening at all, it just doesn’t lend itself to an entertaining experience,” he said. “Even a movie like ‘Manos’ has a plot to it that you can sort of follow.”

“For every 20 films,” Conniff wrote in the aforementioned memoir, “there were usually one or two that would be deemed appropriate for our needs. ‘Are there films that were too awful even for MST3K?’ is a question I have often got and the answer is: yes, dear God, yes, heaven help me, have mercy on my soul, yes.”

Conniff left the show after the sixth season and Beaulieu after the seventh.

Both men say they wanted to try their hands at other sorts of comedy writing.

Beaulieu spent many years as a staff writer on ABC’s America’s Funniest Home Videos and Conniff was head writer on the acclaimed Nickelodeon cartoon series, Invader Zim.

After MST3K creator Joel Hodgson decided to shut down the Cinematic Titanic project, Conniff received a request to do a one-off live show and he and Beaulieu decided to see if they could turn that into multiple bookings.

The cardboard box method for finding riffable films has been replaced by web surfing, Beaulieu said.

“We’ve been dealing with the Ed Wood catalog because we love his movies so much,” he said, “and then just searching on the Internet for films that are appropriate to our needs. We need a movie that’s got some kind of plot to follow and plenty of room for us to add our comments.”

It’s got to be “the right type of crap,” Beaulieu said.

They try to find good prints, he said, but they’re now riffing a bad print of “a film noir starring Chuck Connors” and the shoddy quality of the copy seems to be working in comedy’s favor.

Of course, when you’re talking about “a film noir starring Chuck Connors,” comedy already has a significant head start.

The shows are tightly scripted, Beaulieu said, but there is room for improvisation.

“The audience is so important for us to keep the films fresh and vital,” he said. “There’s nothing that I have experienced that is as fun as doing these live shows.”

“We love performing live more than anything,” Conniff said. “We love performing in front of audiences. We love meeting our fans.”

As Conniff and Beaulieu tour the country together, Netflix is preparing to debut Hodgson’s MST3K reboot, which features a new cast and crew.

In the interview I conducted with Conniff last year, he admitted that there were some bad feelings about the project among some of the show’s progenitors.

“You know,” he said, “we had all worked with Joel on Cinematic Titanic. When he finally got the rights back to Mystery Science Theater, he kind of just went forward and it was his own thing.

“I can only speak for myself,” Conniff said. “I can’t speak for the other guys. There were some bad feelings on my part that he didn’t include me in the creative process. But the thing is about the reboot is (that) I’m friends with most of the new people who are involved in it: Jonah (Ray) and Patton (Oswalt). I think all the people involved in it are really great and I think it’s going to be really fantastic. I feel like I want to be supportive of it because I really like all of those people.”

Beaulieu said he was asked to “come in and do some work” on the new show but “the offer was not a creative offer.”

“That wasn’t appealing to me,” he said. “Writing for other people – I have done that for the last 20 years. I’d rather write my own jokes and perform my own jokes.”

Conniff said he was not asked to be a part of it at all.

“And that’s outrageous, frankly” Beaulieu said. “Not to ask ‘TV’s Frank’ to participate?”

“We’re not upset about it,” Conniff said. “We’ve got our own thing going on.”

Beaulieu said the duo is booked through fall at this point. The project may progress to the stage where they’ll be able to offer digital downloads of the shows to fans. But, for now, “you’ve got to come and see our show,” Beaulieu said.

It seems likely that Conniff will always be known to most people as “TV’s Frank” and he said he is OK with that.

“I don’t see any downside to it,” he said. “I’m very grateful to have been a part of the show. I’ve done a lot of things since Mystery Science Theater and I’m doing a lot of things now that are very creative, that are very engaging to me and that I’m very proud of. But I know that Mystery Science Theater is the thing that people will associate me with and I have no problem with that.

“I’m very grateful to have been a part of what we can now say is one of history’s classic shows,” Conniff said. “And I’m old enough now to be a part of history.”

(A version of this article can be found at http://whatzup.com)

 

After 17 years, nine films and countless, unrelated musical numbers that have proved deeply confusing for comic book fans, actor Hugh Jackman has said that “Logan” will be his last go-round as the razor-taloned superhero known as Wolverine.

Never again will the movie makeup man apply the iconic claws and sideburns, Jackman has vowed, especially since he mixed them up that last time.

As “Logan” opens, Wolverine has been living a peaceful life and limiting the use to his claws to the piercing of tough hides (namely, plastic clamshell packages and Capri Suns).

His once remarkable healing powers have largely abandoned him. He numbs his pain with alcohol, and if a superhero does that, aren’t we all superheroes?

A fly in the ointment (Logan goes through a lot of ointment) arrives in the form of X-23, a feral child who seems to have the same abilities as Wolverine.

Chaos ensues, but there are a few heartwarming scenes, such as the one where Wolverine and X-23 paint each other’s nails.

The appearance of X-23, who was first introduced in the animated series, “X-Men: Evolution” and “Jim Henson’s Mutant Babies,” opens up a can of worms that forces Wolverine to use his claws to open one last thing: A can of whoop-ass.

“Logan” is loosely based on the comic book series, “Old Man Logan,” although not much of the source material could be used.

Disney owns the screen rights to most of the characters from “Old Man Logan” and is acting all stuck-up about it if you ask Fox.

For example, the climax of “Old Man Logan” features Wolverine being devoured by a villainous and super-colossal version of the Hulk. Since Fox isn’t allowed to depict the Hulk at all, this cannibalism will have to be committed in the film by some other character, perhaps the X-Man known as Pixie.

Fox should be credited with having the courage to release “Logan” with an R rating, and the R-rated “Deadpool” should be credited with giving the studio $754 million worth of courage.

So courageous has Fox become that it is promising an R-rating for its forthcoming film, “Ice Age 6: Tear Someone a New Ice Hole.”

“Logan,” which opens tomorrow, promises to be the saddest movie about a tragic hominid with giant claws since “Bigfoot’s Tears.”

My interview with Pink Martini bandleader and former northeast Indiana resident Thomas Lauderdale. Pink Martini performs with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic on Saturday.

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