Good morning, and welcome back to Comedy Means Business.

Coming to you recharged after my first weekend off in two weeks. Was really grateful for the chance to attend the final Sundance Film Festival in Park City — having attended the fest on and off since 2012 — but boy, does it take it out of you.

In any case, it was the best Sundance I've been to in a number of years — plenty of great films to watch. On the comedy side, the best I saw were The Shitheads — the latest from Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Macon Blair, which you can read more about below — and The History of Concrete, John Wilson's first big project since wrapping up his HBO series How To with John Wilson, which is very much in the same vein and was great fun to watch in a packed crowd at the Holiday Village Cinemas, even if I found myself bending my seat backward and craning my neck painfully from the front row.

It's a short read today: For the time being, I'll be taking the newsletter down to one guaranteed issue a month, with the potential of a bonus newsletter as time allows, with my companion Comedy Means Business podcast continuing on twice a month.

I'm also going to be trying something different this year in regularly offering my take on the Special of the Month, rather than a Discovery of the Week. Our first honoree, Shaun Murphy, is someone you need to know. (Would also flag Mike Feeney as someone to watch/pursue — just discovered him via his great podcast Co-Host Wanted, and he mentioned in passing in an episode with Joe List that he's so far garnered less industry attention than he might like.)

ICYMI, for last week's podcast, I sat down with Stapleview founders Sam Grey and Daniel Lantsman to examine their business model in producing digital-first comedy. You can watch that here.

With that said, as there's been little transactional news in comedy of late, aside from a couple of stories I have coming up later this week, let's get to our new segment.

SPECIAL OF THE MONTH

SHAUN MURPHY: LONG STORY THIN

Shaun Murphy (Mike Lavin)

Comedy Means Business' inaugural Special of the Month is Long Story Thin from Shaun Murphy — a very well-written and performed 40 minutes from a comic I'd never seen before, who definitely shouldn't be unrepped, yet somehow is.

Filmed in NYC last August in the Comedy Cellar's sister showroom, The Fat Black Pussycat, the self-distributed Long Story Thin sees Murphy take on topics like losing his hair, reparations, body shaming, how white women are over-hated, and more. It was released three weeks ago, as a collab with Mark Normand, and deserves much more than the 39K it's accrued on YouTube in the last three weeks, if you want to take a look.

Long Story Thin is Murphy's second special on the heels of 2022's Neal, which was also self-released. Mike Lavin directed and produced via his 3 Nuts Studios produced alongside Liz Furiati.

Of Furiati, Murphy said, "I'm very thankful to her for letting me use the room, putting me in contact with Mike, and for just supporting me in general.

"Ditto," he said, "to Mark Normand. I randomly featured for him in Portland Oregon at Helium in 2017 and since then I've opened for him all over the world - including three different times in Europe. In addition to all of that, he was nice enough to put my special on his youtube page which is a huge help!"

Murphy began performing stand-up at a place called Comix Cafe while attending college in Buffalo, NY in 2004. He stayed in Buffalo for another 10 years after that, and given that "in those days comics were rarely allowed to bring openers," he says, he got to work with the likes of Andrew Schulz, Jen Kirkman, Gilbert Gottfried, Tony Hinchcliffe, Dave Attell, Tom Green, and Kevin Pollak, among others.

Murphy moved to New York City in January 2014, got passed at the Comedy Cellar in November 2021, and continues to open for the likes of Dan Soder and Beth Stelling.

Check out his new special here.