Sloop Biederman is the Stand-Up Poet. Emcee extraordinaire, voiceover artist, actor…
Before I explain that, Sloop, has been a featured performer at the Comedy Store and other Los Angeles venues; Zanies, Double Door, the Chicago Comedy Festival and others in Chicago; a voiceover artist; and is the longest-running nightclub variety show host in Chicago for the Flabby Hoffman shows (live and rebroadcast on CAN-TV 19 Thursdays, 11:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m.) and co-host/personality/impressionist of the corresponding radio show. He has appeared in film (Soundneedle Productions’ “Thinking Speed,” as Tyrus), TV shows (for Towers Productions and more) and commercials (for Chubby Moolah Inc. and more) and has been himself featured on outlets like WGN Morning News. He founded two sketch comedy troupes and was the 1999 National Poetry Slam Limerick Champion. He’s an award-winning humor writer and “News Poet” for venues including MAD Magazine, CenterStageChicago, Web sites and comedians and runs the popular humor site, http://www.DailyLimerick.net, since 1999. He’s also seeking literary representation for his book, “Stand-Up Poetry” (with poems and cartoons).
And yes, he’s the “Stand-Up poet.” Not “stand-up comic.” This is not saying Sloop isn’t humorous or, dare I say... COMIC. He does everything a stand-up comic does (and he’s often embarrassed to admit that) but… See, when Sloop WAS an actual stand-up comic, he spent a lot of time wondering how to stand out from the masses. (Stand-up comics aren’t exactly an endangered species).
So Sloop went back to his roots. You see, Sloop “fell into” performing. As a humor writer since high school, Sloop hit poetry open mikes in the early ’90s after moving from Ringwood, Illinois to the “Big City.” He figured that would be a good way to bang screwed up poet chicks while bonding with fellow bohemians—and he did, miraculously, make money at it. After years of this, he realized he had developed a stage presence and that people mainly liked his funny, dirty stuff. Noting that people weren’t paying top dollar to see poets, Sloop decided he should be doing stand-up. He even moved to L.A. for as long as he could stand it, which was a year. And that’s where he became jaded on the comedy scene, learning that he was one of the few people doing stand-up comedy to, well, do stand-up comedy, as most of the scene has transformed into Audition Land for Sitcoms.
Realizing that he still wanted to make people laugh in comedic venues and, through writing News Limericks for the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye and, more recently, “The News of Our Time--In Rhyme” for Continental Features, he’s learned that everything’s funnier when it rhymes. Emerging from his Limerick Laboratory (pronounced ala Boris Karloff), he unleashed “Stand-Up Poetry”—and history was made! He resurrected a bunch of his naughty old hack material and put it in poetry form. Then he turned his eye toward emceeing, voiceover, acting… Now, perhaps the world’s first, and undoubtedly the world’s finest, Stand-Up Poet….and Emcee/Entertainer Extraordinaire. |
