Standup comic and cable TV personality Roy Wood Jr. just shared a tale of a run-in with former SF Mayor Willie Brown, and says Da Mayor waltzed into one of his shows without paying, and swiped a CD from the merchandise booth.

Stand-up comic Roy Wood Jr. is best-known for being a Daily Show correspondent from 2015 to 2023, also hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2023, and his touring schedule has brought him to esteemed SF venues like the Palace of Fine Arts. And it may have been that Palace of Fine Arts show, or perhaps a gig at Cobb’s Comedy Club, where the Chronicle reports that Wood says former SF Mayor Willie Brown crashed the show for free and pilfered a CD from the merchandise table.  

Yet Wood still concedes that Brown was “charming.”

This was all told via Twitter exchange, in which some other standup comic observes out of the blue that “Cartoon mayors used to always wear top hats and a sash.” Wood then responded with some pictures of former Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Bernard Kincaid sporting some pretty wild hats.

One follower responded to that by commenting that the fedora resembled the well-known hats worn by Willie Brown. And boy did Wood have a Willie Brown story to share.  

Wood starts the story with “Willie Brown showed up to my sold out San Francisco shows once & told the door man ‘Willie Brown on every list’ (he was NOT on my list) still they gave him a free ticket.” That would not be the end of Wood’s Willie Brown story.  

“THEN after the show, he came up to my merch table, took a CD w/o paying, then shook my hand and said ‘You just met Willie Brown, You want a picture?’” Wood continues. “Before i could answer he disappeared into the night. No date, no homeboys, no security detail. Just the mayor out by himself showing up to yo show for free and stealing yo shit. He was so charming i couldn't even be mad.🤣🤣🤣”

So there you have it, Roy Wood Jr. says Willie Brown scammed his way into the show and took a CD without paying. But Wood simply learned what we all knew from the movie The Princess Diaries, which is that “It never comes down on Willie Brown.”

Related: Hold on to Your Hat, It’s Willie Brown’s 90th Birthday Today [SFist]

Image: @Schwarzenegger via Twitter

Controversy-courting comedian Dave Chappelle is doing more shows in the Bay Area this week, and hosting three consecutive nights of events at the Blue Note Jazz Festival in Napa, despite being persona non grata with much of the LGBTQ community at this point.

A predicted protest failed to materialize in any significant size when Chappelle was last in the Bay Area for a documentary screening at Chase Center in November. And while Netflix seems to have moved on from its employee protest of last year over Chappelle's special The Closer (Netflix has basically told employees to put up or shut up and they have bigger fish to fry vis a vis stopping the hemorrhaging of subscribers), the larger LGBTQ community has not.

It may be little use trying to "cancel" Chappelle, as he still has a large fanbase — a base who doesn't seem to mind his brazen, grumpy, old-mannish transphobia that appears rooted in a desire to pit minority against minority. (Chappelle has been open about his annoyance that white LGBTQ people appear to have leapfrogged ahead of Black people in terms of achieving civil rights and acceptance in the U.S., and he largely ignores the existence of Black and brown trans and queer people in that rhetoric.) And this week, a petition drive up in Sonoma County to get the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts (LBC) to cancel Chappelle's four sold-out shows there went nowhere.

ABC 7 spoke to a representative for the group TransLife Sonoma County, Jennifer Rihl, who said her group is "upset and appalled" by the fact that Chappelle's arrival in Santa Rosa is being met with shrugs by the LBC. "Espousing the transphobia he does, it normalizes transphobia," Rihl said, adding that LBC's allowing the booking is "a slap in the face to our community."

Live Nation is renting the Luther Burbank Center for the shows, and the center is trying to shift blame, but is declining to cancel the shows.

LBC issued a statement saying, "The LBC has been a gathering place for over 40 years, working with the community and a number of presenters to provide a place for diverse voices to be heard. We always appreciate feedback from our community, and we have shared the collective concerns we've received with Live Nation. In addition, we have been inviting those who have expressed their thoughts to keep the conversation going, so we are able to find ways to better support and elevate the voices of our entire community."

Chappelle's recent sets have apparently included jokes about monkeypox being a "gay disease," as the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports, and he makes light of trans people who protest his shows, referring to them as "transgender lunatics."

Anita Wiglesworth, LBC's vice present of programs and marketing, tells the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that Live Nation did not inform the venue who would be performing there when they agreed to rent the venue in recent weeks. Still, LBC decided not to reneg on the contract, citing a desire not to censor a performer.

"Many members of the [LBC] staff, which represent the diversity of the community, watched ‘The Closer’ and other material from the artist to understand context,” Wiglesworth told the paper. "In the end, we determined it is not our role to censor, particularly from an organization renting our facility and one that provides diverse artists to our community. This decision was not made lightly."

Chappelle is playing four shows at LBC between Tuesday and Thursday, and then he heads to Napa to play host at the inaugural Napa iteration of the Blue Note Jazz Festival. The festival first launched in New York, in connection with the famed Blue Note jazz club, in 2011. The Blue Note also has a location in downtown Napa, and this weekend they are doing the festival for the first time on the West Coast, at Charles Krug Winery.

Each night of the festival features a "dinner party" event hosted by Chappelle, which various special guests including keyboardist Robert Glasper, Snoop Dogg, and Erykah Badu.

Related: Dave Chappelle Tackled By Armed Man During L.A. Show, Makes Trans Joke Afterward

Top image: Dave Chappelle performs onstage during the Dave Chappelle theatre dedication ceremony at Duke Ellington School of the Arts on June 20, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images)

Remember the innocent days of 2011 when a YouTube meme took off and spawned a hundred iterations covering most U.S. cities and a variety of cultures and subcultures, even baristas?

Yes, that was the "Shit ____s say" phenomenon, and the "Shit San Franciscans Say" video was a late arrival in 2012, a creation of Annie Sloan — who incidentally started her own company last year that "puts the mini-bar, concierge, and gift shop in your Airbnb." See it below.

I'm not sure if all of San Francisco needs to see itself through the lens of the young tech executive/entrepreneur. But that is what we have in comedian Alexis Gay's 2021 version of the same concept, published this week on Twitter.

She captions it "every single park hang in San Francisco," but, I mean, I've lived here quite awhile, and I've done my fair share of park hangs, and none of them sound like this because I don't hang with people who talk like this.

But hey! For a certain segment of the park-hanging population, perhaps you will get a chuckle out of this. Otherwise, it seems like we've had this conversation before about tech cliches, and Silicon Valley ended two years ago, and we're all tired of hearing about someone's air-quotes "angel investor" or "raising a SPAC."

The line about Souvla is kind of funny, though.

Pete Davidson was in San Francisco for a show near Civic Center on Thanksgiving Eve, and word has gone around that he's been making his audiences sign non-disclosure agreements and put away their cellphones with the penalty for infractions costing $1 million.

Ticket holders for Davidson's November 27 show at the Sydney Goldstein Theater were all asked to sign the NDAs before attending the show, in addition to putting away all recording devices and mobile phones at risk of having them confiscate and their contents deleted. Anyone who didn't want to sign the agreement was allowed to get a full refund, but the move marks a new stage in performers trying to navigate the world of social media and instant broadcasting.

Furthermore, Davidson's NDA forbids show attendees from publishing any opinion about it or even tweeting about it, with the penalty for doing so being $1 million. The language in the agreement, which show-goer Stacy Young posted to Facebook, suggests this is because of "works-in-progress creative content" that Davidson doesn't want leaked or discussed on the internet. It's a familiar issue for standups — they often work on and repeat material over months or years, and if everyone's already heard the joke on social media, it loses its freshness and value on stage. (Thus successful comics typically have to start from scratch writing new material every time they do a TV or Netflix special, because all of that material is now "burned.")

As the Hollywood Reporter suggests via other social media grumblings, Davidson has been asking other audiences on this tour to sign the same NDA and agree to the same terms.

Davidson joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2014 at the age of 20, making him one of the youngest cast members in the show's history and the first to be born in the 1990s. At 26, he's already weathered the storm of national tabloid fame for briefly being engaged to singer Ariana Grande last year, and is even credited with spawning the entire national conversation about big dick energy.

And we can probably be prepared for more precautions like Davidson's NDA, and strict cellphone rules, especially at comedy shows. Now that we live in an age when people will post video of an entire concert to their Instagram story, that's probably a good thing! Madonna's making everyone lock their phones up in nearly impenetrable pouches for the duration of her latest shows, which succeeds in making them more intimate but also succeeds in creating more mystery and selling more tickets — you don't see full Instagram stories of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hanson for a reason.

Photo: Ticketmaster via Facebook

Comedian Will Sasso has taken to the medium of Vine like a dog to cat poop. And his vines are full of fart jokes, Hulk Hogan, DeNiro impressions, and lemons that pop out of his mouth. In short: amazing.

Follow Sasso on Twitter for the latest in Vine brilliance.

Below, an all-lemon compilation. Don't try this at home unless you have an extra-enormous mouth or double-jointed jaw.

We just heard the news about Phyllis Diller's passing at age 95, and we're heartbroken. She was a pioneering female comedian who inspired pretty much every other funny woman who's taken the stage since the 60s, and she will be dearly missed. Also, in case you didn't know, she began her comedy career here in the Bay Area, working first at KROW radio in Oakland in 1952 and then launching her first local TV show, "Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker" on Bay Area Radio-Television (BART) while living in Alameda. She later made her name appearing on the Jack Paar Show, and Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. (See her first appearance on that show below.)

In the 60s and 70s she appeared all over TV, and was a regular on Dean Martin's Roast show, roasting everyone from Ronald Reagan to Joan Collins, a clip from which you can see above.

Below, in a clip from PBS, see Diller with a pixie haircut trying to deliver her first joke to a national TV audience, on You Bet Your Life.

As many of you know, we here at the ists love a good meme. And for the past couple of weeks the webs have been ablaze with video variations all stemming from "S**t Girls Say," a clever and mercifully short video by Toronto-based comedy duo Kyle Humphrey and Graydon Sheppard. Not all the variations on the theme — collections of phrases, mannerisms, and commonly heard complaints attributable to a particular group — have been as clever or brief, but some have won us over. Because what is America if not a place where we can all laugh uproariously at what clichés we all are?

Oh, right... they're Canadian. Whatever.

We'll begin with Episode 2 of "Shit Girls Say," which was released four days after the first (it has a mere 2.1 million hits at present, compared to the 6 million+ of the first video), which makes up for its lack of Juliette Lewis with Mojito and hummus references.

Next we have our personal favorite, which we linked to last week: "Shit Gay Guys Say" by L.A.-based performer (and occasional Logo TV personality and 30 Rock guest star) Jeffery Self. There are lots of gems in here, but easily the one we've heard the most in real life is "He's definitely gay. I had a friend who dated him before he was famous."

Now there's a variation on that variation, "Shit Southern Gay Guys Say," by Wade Martin Murphy.

Next, we bring you "Shit Black Girls Say," by comedian Billy Sorrells. "Oooh, Basketball Wives is on!"

Now this one, by Tori Lord, takes the drag thing to heart, like the original. We've got Ms. Lord as a drag king doing "Shit Guys Say," and doing a lot of crotch grabbing. We think there's something inherently funnier about the girl and gay guy clichés, but maybe we're just sexist.

Arguably more accurate would be this, "Shit Dudes Say," by Jay Green.

But perhaps even more accurate than that as far as the dudes are concerned would be this 2007 Budweiser ad, which has just been getting some fresh airplay after a quick-fingered social media coordinator at Anheuser-Busch figured out they just had to call it "Shit Boys Say" and it would get watched a lot.

We look forward to a few more of these videos popping up before the meme dies its fast death. Because nothing really lives longer than two weeks on the internet.