Last night we were lucky enough to join Christian Finnegan, his bride-slash-publicist Kambri Crews, comedians and well-wishers at the NYC launch party for Christian's debut CD, Two for Flinching.

Highlights (including an excerpt from Christian's first CD "review") after the jump. (All photos by the awesome photographer Billy Tompkins.)

[Our friend, comedy publicist Kambri Crews (above, with fiancé and client Christian Finnegan, and Drew Carey) is giving us reports from the biggest comedy festival in the world - The Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, Canada. Kambri provides the publicist/girlfriend point of view of the festival.]

MySpace Day 3 coverage by Steve Byrne

Friday afternoon I made sure not to miss the much anticipated State of the Industry Address delivered by the hilariously embittered Andy Kindler.  He takes the last year of entertainment business and skewers it in front of many of the people who are involved with the very things Kindler roasts.  He kicked off the speech with, “Do you know how much has to go wrong for me to come back here every year?” He moved on to the obvious targets Mind of Mencia, Last Comic Standing and Dane Cook’s Tourgasm since they are a few of the most publicized shows on television highlighting stand up comedy.

Regarding the title “Tourgasm” Kindler joked that when thinks of comedy it usually involves an orgasm.  He followed up with a list of potential spin-off titles like:

- Cruiseaculate for a comedy boat tour;

- Bowlsterbate for stand up in a bowling alley; and

- The Jizzersize Tour, Jerkoffapalooza, or Safari Spooge which all speak for themselves!

[Our friend, comedy publicist Kambri Crews (above, with fiancé and client Christian Finnegan) is giving us reports from the biggest comedy festival in the world - The Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, Canada. ]

MySpace video Part II with Christian Finnegan

Thursday night I caught one of the two "New Faces of Comedy" shows both hosted by Shaun Majumder (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle).  New Faces features twenty-two of the best new comedians in the industry, but the “new” part is a bit of a misnomer.  A quick survey of most of the talent revealed an average of four to five years performing comedy.  That’s years of open mics, trudging from late night show to late night show to perform for five disinterested tourists in dingy basements carrying around a pound of humility and a ton of stick-to-it-edness that can’t be taught or learned.  You either have what it takes to suck up the lifestyle or, well, you don’t.  Add in writing and performing skills and the ability to deal with people and voila, five years later you might have a career as a comic.  Sounds enticing, no? 

[Our friend, comedy publicist Kambri Crews (above, with fiancé and client Christian Finnegan) will be guest blogging this week from the biggest comedy festival in the world - The Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, Canada. Kambri will be sharing festival highlights, anecdotes and photos from her unique insider perspective. Note: Kambri's opinions of Christian's sets are clearly double-triple-super biased, but ours aren't: the dude is funny.]

First: Video of Christian on MySpace.com interviewing festival participants.

Last night’s Gala, the first of four major shows televised for the CBC, was mostly good.  The 2,000 seat theater was filled to capacity and backstage was humming with nervous energy.  Craig Ferguson was an adept host darting from Stage Left to Stage Right at least 50 times for his various entrances.  I was surprised to learn that not only was he doing stand up, he had two big sketches and a very long production number as the show finale. 

The “mostly” part of my “mostly good” assessment had nothing to do with the comedians.  They all killed.  Demetri Martin and Christian Finnegan were crowd favorites and Canadian comics Joey Elias, Tim Nutt and Shaun Majumder (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) did just as well (See the Montreal Gazette review.)

[Our friend, comedy publicist Kambri Crews (above, with fiancé and client Christian Finnegan) will be guest blogging this week from the biggest comedy festival in the world - The Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, Canada. Kambri will be sharing festival highlights, anecdotes and photos from her unique insider perspective. Note: Kambri's opinions of Christian's sets are clearly double-triple-super biased, but ours aren't: the dude is funny.]

Bonjour!  The second of two scheduled “Bubbling with Laughter” shows was another success for Christian Finnegan.  His pacing was much better after dropping one joke to allow more time for the fleshing-out of others.  Between the festival rep, his manager Rick Dorfman of Relevant Entertainment and myself, Christian got an earful after coming off stage.  Swapping “sh*t” for “crap” is an obvious edit since his set will be airing on CBC television on Sunday evenings at 7:00.  But instead of “faggoty”, “delicious” and “fu*king idiot” various synonyms were tossed around as possible replacements.  It’s amazing the finite degree to which a seven minute set of jokes are combed over.  So much work is invested in a sentence to make the sentence not sound like work.