Tony Hinchcliffe Says ‘Kill Tony’ Is More High-Wire Than ‘SNL’
For the uninitiated, Kill Tony features Hinchcliffe drawing the names of aspiring comedians out of a bucket, who then perform one minute of stand-up for a of comics and a live audience. A few of the comics kill. Several of them die painful comedy deaths.
At least Lorne Michaels and “SNL has its own writers and producers and everything,” Hinchcliffe told Dana Carvey and David Spade on the Fly on the Wall podcast. “A bunch of people clank their heads together.”
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“To help make a star,” added Spade.
Exactly, agreed Hinchcliffe. Comedians on Kill Tony, on the other hand, “are out there sinking or swimming on their own. So it's really exciting. I get kind of nervous every time I bring up a regular because I do want them to do good. I want them to shine.”
Spade empathized with the wanna-be comedians, knowing that a single minute of stand-up is harder than it looks. He recalled the first time he saw Eddie Murphy do stand-up. “For me, it's Delirious or it's Raw. It's a full polished hour so you're like, Holy shit, this guy's good,” Spade said. “But if you can see (a comedian) is good in one minute? And then he comes back and he is good again? Then you're like, oh, is this a fluke? It's like writing a hit song over and over. It's hard to do even a minute, you know?”
Even the most successful Kill Tony comedians have the occasional 60 seconds where “it’s kind of rough,” says Hinchcliffe. “It's not easy to kill. (Some comics) make it look easy. And then you have one rough week, and it's like, oh, it's real.”
The appeal, he says, is watching a young comic like Kam Patterson grow before your eyes. Patterson is “a Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle type, Chris Rock. Young, young, young, only a few years in, 25, 26 years old. And (viewers) are getting to watch this freak of nature become a superstar in real time. He just booked a huge movie with Kevin Hart. People have gotten to watch his process, not just see a star.”
Is Hinchcliffe positioning himself as a comedy kingmaker, turning unknowns into celebrity comics? Carvey thinks so: “You could be the next Lorne Michaels.”