Reporter's Notebook: Standup Sampler

In this week’s feature, we profile Stand Up! Records, a Twin Cities-based indie label that’s put out some the sharpest, most envelope-pushing comedy of the past eight years. YouTube clips abound after the jump.

Below: The first two tracks from Lewis Black’s 2002 album The End of the Universe. Recorded at The Punchline in Atlanta, the record is Stand Up!’s best-selling album to date.

Doug Stanhope offers life advice to a receptive crowd. (This bit first appeared on his 2000 album, Something to Take the Edge Off.)

A few choice musings from David Cross’s Shut Up, You Fucking Baby.
Originally put out by Sub Pop in 2002, the album went vinyl under Stand Up! shortly thereafter.

If you only know Greg Proops from Whose Line Is It Anyway?, you might find his standup a pleasant (or maybe disturbing) surprise.

Marc Maron, former co-host of Air America’s Morning Sedition, has done two albums with Dan Schlissel and Stand Up!. (Another is on the way.) Here he pays homage to the great Jewish magicians of all time.

What if Neal Cassady had gotten behind a mic? It probably would’ve looked something like this. Wildman Rick Shapiro rides the butterfly.