We got Bruce!

Vilanch, that is. One of the most celebrated joke writers in the business has descended on San Francisco to mine local news nuggets, gobs of gossip and salacious stories to share on the Marines Memorial Theater stage at 8 p.m. on Sunday, April 13, for the Big Gay Comedy Show, a benefit for Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation.

“It will be a lot of comedy with a couple of cabaret performers thrown in, but they’re funny: Shawn Ryan and Jason Brock. San Francisco is such a uniquely comic town. You get really political comics like Marga Gomez, and then you get really artistic people,” Vilanch said.

Big Gay Comedy Show will also feature B.O.O.B.s, Leanne Borghesi, Shann Carr, Cassandra Cass, Ali Mafi, Katya Smirnoff-Skyy and Kitty Tapata.

The red bespectacled, wacky T-shirt adorned Vilanch is currently “casing the joint” to gather up-to-the-minute material for his portion of the show.

“I have a week to get to know all of that, which is more than usual. I will probably tell stories. That’s what I do,” he said.

After more than four decades in the business—writing for every conceivable awards show including a bunch of Oscars—Vilanch has more celeb, behind-the-scenes tales than Kathy Griffin. His “almost famous” life is chronicled in the documentary “Get Bruce,” which is now streaming on Netflix.

But while he’s made a sweet living writing funny lines for other performers to say on stage,

ilanch’s passion is performing. He’s probably best known for his years on “Hollywood Squares” and for performing in drag as Edna Turnblad in the Broadway and touring productions of “Hairspray.”

“I’ve been looking for the kind of stuff to do that Nathan Lane always gets to do because he’s the master of it right now,” Vilanch said. “The singing and dancing fat guys is what I would love to do. More acting. Playing a woman is one thing, but to get them to accept me as a straight man will be even more interesting.”

Vilanch is getting his chance with 42nd Street Moon’s revival of the Cole Porter musical, “Du Barry Was a Lady,” in which he plays a swanky nightclub men’s room attendant who wins the lottery, gets slipped a Mickey Finn and thinks he’s King Louis XV. Burt Lahr originated the role in 1939.

“Since I’ve been compared to the Cowardly Lion in looks alone, I thought it was time I brought one of Burt Lahr’s other roles out of the closet and see what I could do with it,” Vilanch said. “He was so brilliantly funny. I was a huge fan of his.”

The musical runs at the Eureka Theater April 30 to May 18.

“It’s lyrically wonderful. The stuff that I get to sing is all comic patter. The most famous is ‘Friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship!” That was written for him and Ethel Merman. People think it was written for Lucy and Ethel, because ‘I Love Lucy’ did it a couple of times,” Vilanch said.

 With Disney now in control of the future of “Star Wars,” one of Vilanch’s old projects might see the light of day. He was a writer on the much-maligned “Star Wars Holiday Special” that aired one time only in November 1978.

“Oh, my God, I have the script. I save the script to everything. Occasionally, I will go back and look at that thing and say, ‘Oh, my God, we actually did this. We really did this.’ I think there was a prop I took. I think I got a mug from the cantina on the planet Tatooine, where the aliens and Bea Arthur had a big number,” Vilanch said.

Tickets for Big Gay Comedy Show are available by calling (415) 273-1620 or online atbiggaycomedyshow.eventbrite.com. For more information on “Du Barry Was a Lady,” visit42ndstmoon.org.

Corey Andrew has been interviewing comedians and writing about comedy for the last decade and a half. He recently published the book, “Laugh Lines: Conversations with Comedians.” Corey was a writer and performer with Midwest sketch troupe, The NonProphets, before moving to the Bay Area with his family several years ago. If you have ideas for future columns about comedy, you can send them to coreywrites@yahoo.com or follow him at twitter.com/coreyshame.

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The post Bruce Vilanch’s Big Gay Comedy Show Lands in San Francisco first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is normally not a praying man. But backstage at the Academy Awards, for which he has long served as head writer, he often gets religion.

“You pray that somebody will make a fool of themselves in the early minutes of the evening,” Vilanch says of the unpredictable live telecast, “then you take it and run with it.”

The classic example came during the 1992 Oscars, when Jack Palance celebrated his Best Supporting Actor win by doing a few one-armed push-ups. That sparked a night of priceless quips from host Billy Crystal, many written on the fly by Vilanch (“Jack Palance just bungee-jumped off the Hollywood Sign”).

With his Elton John eyewear, kooky T-shirts and trademark blond tresses on display, Vilanch might recount that story in delicious detail when he appears Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Addison-Penzak Jewish Community Center in Los Gatos. The event is billed as “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch.”

Avilanch_bruce_vilanch_normal_sizeAs this JCC performance shows, Vilanch is not just a behind-the-scenes funny man. He starred in a Broadway revival of “Hairspray” and currently stars in an off-Broadway hit, “Rubble.” He’s acted in films and for many years he was a familiar X and O on “Hollywood Squares.”

But his role as a writer for awards shows such as the Oscars and Emmys has given him his widest notoriety. Somehow, in a town famous for eating its young, Vilanch has lasted 23 years at the Oscars, serving up jokes for hosts great (Billy Crystal) and not so great (James Franco).

The New Jersey native credits the great Jewish comedians of old for his sharp wit. “I was exposed to so many of them as a kid,” Vilanch recalls. “I was a rabid fan of Henny Youngman and Alan King.”

He also salutes his mother, who was a master quipster like her son.

Vilanch tells the story of how his mom used to keep the living room furniture covered in plastic most of the time. Eventually she decided to reupholster the well-preserved pieces, and when Vilanch asked her why, she replied, “I’m telling people it’s because Sonny Bono died.”

The Vilanch family belonged to a local Conservative synagogue. Little Bruce attended Hebrew School three times a week, was a member of United Synagogue Youth, and was bar mitzvahed.

After college he gave journalism a try, but when Bette Midler met him in 1970 and offered him a job writing jokes for her, the comedy die was cast, and a lifelong personal and professional relationship began.

A move to Los Angeles led to staff writer positions on variety shows, and hired-gun joke-writing jobs with stars such as Lily Tomlin and Joan Rivers.

He made his premiere as an Oscar writer in 1989, eventually becoming head writer in 2000. Once asked if he wanted to keep working on the show after so long, he replied, “It’s the greatest show on Earth. It’s like asking somebody ‘Hey, would you like to play in the Super Bowl?’ ”

Long before it was cool or commonplace, Vilanch, who is gay, was a major activist for LGBT rights. He says the social progress made on that front in the last two years has been “absolutely staggering.”

But now he has turned his attention to Russia, which recently instituted harsh anti-gay laws and has seen an uptick in anti-gay violence.

Says Vilanch, “All of a sudden comes [Russian president] Vladimir Putin, fresh from a midnight reading of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he decides to make gay people the new scapegoat in Russia.”

It’s a rare solemn moment for Vilanch, who prefers to make light of most situations.

And though he’s far from the first person to note the long, powerful link between Jews and comedy, Vilanch has his own theory as to why it’s been such a fruitful association.

“Any people who are oppressed find humor as a way to deal with it,” he says. “African Americans have, gay people have. It’s a common thread, and the Jews are really good at it.”

“An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” takes place 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31, at the Addison-Penzak JCC, 14855 Oka Road, Los Gatos. $15-$20. http://www.svjcc.org or (408) 358-3636.

The post “An Evening with Bruce Vilanch” Saturday, Aug. 31, Los Gatos first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

Bruce Vilanch is coming back to his home state to do a bit of “sit-down” comedy.

“I sit on a stool. It’s not like traditional stand-up. I tell a lot of stories about my life and times and the work that I’ve done,” says Vilanch, a native Patersonian who will be performing at Ramapo College in Mahwah. “I rarely do comedy clubs, because it’s a different energy. I come from a different tradition, I guess, although that sounds so dry.”

What does not sound a bit dry, though, is a topic Vilanch promises to do a lot of gabbing about — The Oscars.

Though he’s quick to note that he had nothing to do with this year’s telecast — which Seth MacFarlane helmed — Vilanch has been head writer for many other Academy Awards shows. “Twenty-three years’ worth of being backstage. It’s like 23 Super Bowls,” the Emmy winner says. “I talk about a lot of things we came up with on the spot. I talk about things that we almost did, but fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.”

the details
WHO: Bruce Vilanch.

WHAT: Comedy.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.

WHERE: Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts, Ramapo College of New Jersey, 505 Ramapo Valley Road, Mahwah; 201-684-7844 or ramapo.edu/berrie center/index.html.

HOW MUCH: $25to $35; under age 17 $20.

He adds, “This year, there were no cooler heads. … the first half-hour of the show was all about how the host was bombing. It was an unusual choice.”

Of course, Vilanch notes, “I worked with James Franco, which was almost as terrifying.”

Franco and Anne Hathaway were widely panned when they co-hosted the 2011 Oscars.

“He was out of his comfort zone and he was next to Anne Hathaway, who is a precision instrument,” Vilanch says. “So, he made her look particularly robotic and phony, because he was so invisible, so not present. He was conspicuous by his presence.”

And then there’s Johnny Depp, another actor for whom he has written Academy Awards material. “He’s not difficult so much as … he doesn’t know who he is when he’s onstage and he doesn’t have a character to play,” Vilanch says.

Vilanch also plans to talk about his stint as head writer and celebrity square on “Hollywood Squares” (“It was six glorious years and we have many stories about that”) and — because he’ll be in Mahwah — about his Jersey childhood.

“I was a child model and a child actor,” says Vilanch, who was born in Manhattan but brought to Paterson at 4 days old. “I was just never a child star, or we’d be having this conversation in rehab.”

His mother, Henne Vilanch, now 93, lives in Hackensack. “She’s incredible. She’s absolutely staggering. She plays cards every day. She’s all there. And a Record reader,” Vilanch says.

On a visit home a few months ago, he went back to Paterson. “Somebody told me that they had reopened the Fabian Theater, which is where I kind of grew up watching movies. So, I went back to see it, and of course, that building is gone. They put up [a multiplex] on the site, and they called it the Fabian, which is amazing that anybody remembers. They probably all think it was [named for] the old rock-and-roll star from my childhood and not Jacob Fabian, leader of the Jewish community, who was in the movie business like one or two other Jews,” said Vilanch, who is also Jewish.

At Oscar time this year, Vilanch was performing on a gay cruise. During the actual telecast, he says, “I was on a ship between Australia and New Zealand, and the satellite signal went down, so I didn’t really get to see it until I got home a week later, by which time everything had blown over and the only one who made a clean getaway was Shirley Bassey.”

Asked to evaluate MacFarlane’s performance as host, he says, “I think he’s a great writer, but not a terrific performer, and to me, it had no sense of occasion. … I thought it was the wrong note. But they were doing cartwheels because the ratings were up.”

Vilanch believes that the big boost in viewership came from the fact that six of the nominated films were box-office hits. “People tune in because they’ve seen the movies,” Vilanch says.

It’s too early for Vilanch to know if he’ll be working on next year’s Oscar telecast, but if he does, he knows that he’ll face the usual challenge.

“It’s like reinventing the wheel every year, and like the wheel, it always comes out looking the same. But they carry on like they’re going to do it differently,” Vilanch says, noting that both the Academy and the network have “so many hard and fast rules in play … it’s difficult to make it much different from the year before, because you’ve got the same task. As long as the Academy won’t jettison any of the awards, it’s always going to be long and always going to involve a lot of people you’ve never seen or heard of. There are only four acting awards, as opposed to the Golden Globes that give like 24 acting awards. So, it’s never going to be that kind of a party. But it is the Oscars and it’s got 86 years of tradition and meaning … so it has that going for it.”

The post Bruce Vilanch is coming back to his home state to do a bit of “sit-down” comedy. first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

If you thought that ‘Shark Tank’ couldn’t possibly get any more brutal than it already has been, the Friday, November 9 episode was certainly a force to be reckoned with. The sharks were vicious, the criticisms were plentiful, and the condescending laughs were intimidating the aspiring business professionals. Two out of four candidates were unquestionably chewed up, and spit back out.

First up, we had Drew with his “Drive suits.” You’re likely wondering what a drive suit is? Well, it is a wearable recreation device. It is functioned to instantly transform a costumed human from a walking state to a riding one. The project literally drives off the shelves. As difficult as this is to explain, I am speaking the truth. It is exactly what it sounds like. Drew wanted $150,000 for 20% stake. Though they seemed intrigued, all the sharks were on his case about all the mysteries involved with his product. They were recommending he take this transforming costume to a toy company. Drew had two offers, but being the gambler he is, he chose Kevin for $150,000 and 30% stake of the company.

Next up was David with his online PC classes. His main goal was to teach 50+ year old students how to use a computer, which to me, sounds like a universal need. Bruce Vilanch came along as a demonstrator because he said that David taught his Mom how to Skype. David tried to state his case, and to present his product, while Vilanch added humor, but it was obvious that the sharks just weren’t sharing their enthusiasm. Kevin called him a bozo, and he was told he was 30 years too late. They added insult to injury by saying that he gave them a good laugh. Ouch! Did anyone else think the sharks were a little too hard on him?

Following, the rejected David was Bill with Revestor, the real estate search engine of the future…or at least Bill hoped. He came in asking for $250,000 for 10% in his company. Bill was trying to explain how this can simplify a real estate search and help potential buyers find the house they need. However, the sharks just don’t understand his angle or his formulas, and they showed zero interest. If you thought they were hard on David, they were almost equally harsh on Bill. Dang!

The final potential business professionals of the future were two loveable grannies: Beverly & Charlotte. They were asking for $250,000 for 15% stake in their Ice Chips company. Ice Chips candy contains Xylitol – a natural sweetener. They wanted to have an alternative sweetener going rather than the usual sugar, or unhealthy options that are so common today. The sharks seemed to enjoy this sugar free candy, and the enthusiasm of these grannies was simply contagious. Ice Chips are already a big hit, being sold in health food stores, and dentist offices. The sharks could tell that these ladies knew their market, and they were not afraid to make offers. This was the most interesting product of the night as the negotiations got downright crazy. It seemed that everyone wanted the Ice Chips stake, and that they were stopping at nothing to get it. In the end, the grannies chose Mark and Barbara.

The post Were “The Sharks” Too Brutal Last Night? first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

When comedian Bruce Vilanch visited Pompeii, he especially loved the large penis drawings on most of the front doors.

A large penis was considered good luck, Vilanch tells hardtv stars Ryan Russell and Eddie Stone. He also chats about his favourite pornstars.

“I jerk off to dead pornstars,” says Vilanch, who names Ken Ryker and Jeff Stryker as two of his favourite living pornstars.

In the video below, he also talks about his love of groping:

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The post Video: Bruce Vilanch Talks About His Favorite Porn Stars first appeared on We Got Bruce!.