The laugh supper

“When Anna Nicole died, CNN didn’t take a commercial break for an hour and a half,” Lizz Winstead complained in her apartment on a recent Sunday. “An hour and a half! Once someone’s dead, hasn’t the story already broken?” The political comedian, former Air America personality and cocreator of The Daily Show was preaching to a choir of leftist writers, producers and stand-ups noshing around her dinner table. “You never know; she could come back to life,” responded local comic Sean Crespo. This led to a round of gruesome theories about what a reanimated Smith might say to Wolf Blitzer. “Like my body?” Crespo offered in a high-pitched voice, recalling the late model’s ad campagin for TrimSpa. Comedians know how to beat a dead celebrity.

For years now, a crew like this has gathered in Winstead’s spacious Greenwich Village home on Sunday nights to dine and whine about the week’s most important events and, more specifically, about how the media obscures them. “It’s just this roving band of my friends; whoever’s in town comes over,” says Winstead, who doesn’t share her age. “We shoot the shit, I make dinner, and we watch TV.” This particular Sunday was different, though: Someone was typing up the shit.Inspired by the dearth of live political comedy in New York, Winstead and her crew decided to bring their salon to a live audience. Shoot the Messenger, a new weekly comedy stage show, was born. The premise is a behind-the-scenes look at the workings of a fictional cable-news network, called 24/7. She describes it as an homage to SCTV, another spoof of cable.

But Shoot the Messenger—which fittingly takes place in a basement, at Ace of Clubs—is more subversive than its Canadian inspiration. At the start of one sketch, for example, the president of 24/7 says, “Ever since Alan Johnston was freed, BBC’s ratings have been through the roof—why can’t one of our reporters get kidnapped?”

The group came up with that particular idea, along with most from the show’s early-July premiere, while sitting around Winstead’s dining-room table the night before. There were three laptops humming amid several printed lineups in various states of completion. “We need an opener,” said stand-up Jeff Kreisler. “What’s at the top of Google News?” asked Winstead before taking a puff of her cigarette and changing her mind: “No. Go to Crooks and Liars.”

The scene is exactly how one imagines the writers’ rooms of The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live and The Late Show with David Letterman: a bunch of sloppily dressed caffeine addicts sitting around a table smoking in front of half-eaten plates of food. Except that image is false; writers on those shows almost always plug away in solitude. Although romantic, working as a group is time-consuming and inefficient.

But the crew behind Shoot the Messenger doesn’t care. The thrill of collaboration is what inspires them—no matter how late into the night it takes them (Winstead had e-mailed those lineups to the group at 3:30am that morning). Otherwise, why would a crew of writers who list among their credits Air America, Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher be toiling away on a stage show in a basement? “It goes with the cooking thing,” explains Winstead. “Sometimes you don’t have to get paid to do stuff you love. Plus, technically, they are being paid…in food…once a week. I sound like a sweatshop owner.”

The night before the first show, they ate fettuccine al limone from Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano, a cookbook Winstead describes as her personal bible. The pasta was fuel for the writer-performers’ debut the following night. Unfortunately, there were nearly as many technical difficulties as jokes.

But having anticipated A/V flubs, Winstead stacked the audience with personal friends (including Darrell Hammond, who hung out in the back in a baseball cap). They were so forgiving and encouraging that during one particularly trying audio screwup, Winstead shouted from the back, “We’re all friends here, you can just say it: This bit is a bust!”

The show finally hit its stride when Air America personality Rachel Maddow and NYU professor and author Mark Crispin Miller took the stage for the Q&A portion. “After mocking the media idiots who screw things up, it’s nice to highlight some of the people getting it right,” Winstead said before opening a discussion about the best ways for citizens to find stories that fall through the cracks (answer: the foreign press and political blogs).

This is Shoot the Messenger’s ultimate goal. “We are only as informed as those who control the information allow us to be,” Winstead says. “If news priorities turn to celebrity DUIs over the lies and corruption of our government, a light needs to be shone on the media for not probing into the decisions made by power brokers. When Michael Moore gets bumped off Larry King for Paris Hilton, somebody needs to give them shit.”

Shoot the Messenger runs Monday nights at 8pm at Ace of Clubs.