The live-comedy industry never played a larger role in sociopolitical debate than it did in 2024. But how much of that commentary, wonders James Adomian, was actually entertaining?
“Funny is funny. There is a lot of surprising material that can make an audience lose it, whether they agree or not,” says Adomian, a Los Angeles resident since age 9. That said, “I believe in being funny more than I believe in being correct. It’s almost a political belief I have: Comedy has to be funny. But there’s a curious system of algorithms, botnets and paid publicity that will scream the opposite at you.”
Following Adomian’s YouTube special “Path of Most Resistance,” released in September, his North American tour concludes Sunday, Jan. 19 at the Irvine Improv. The comic, impressionist and vocal actor will return to SXSW Comedy in Austin, Texas the weekend of March 7, performing a “keynote speech” in character as Elon Musk on opening night.
Adomian began performing post-9/11 during the early years of George W. Bush. He frequented shows in the basement of the Vermont Avenue Ramada Inn, downstairs at El Cid and the “show in Santa Monica near the promenade at a venue that no longer exists,” which was underground in terms of both street level and legality. “Maybe if we’re entering a terrible right-wing period again,” Adomian predicts, “the best comedy is just going to have to be underground for a few years.”
He became a regular on Scott Aukerman’s “Comedy Death-Ray” weekly at Upright Citizens Brigade and the show’s Indie 103.1 radio broadcast, then followed the renamed “Comedy Bang! Bang!” into podcasting and IFC’s 2012 to 2016 TV series. His hugely influential 2012 album “Low Hangin Fruit” was the debut release from Aukerman’s Earwolf Records. Adomian publicly embraced progressivism and proudly celebrated LGBTQ+ identity at a time when gay marriage wasn’t yet legal in all 50 states.
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With Anthony Atamanuik, his satirical “Trump vs. Bernie” debates commanded a 40-city tour, special programming on Comedy Central and Fusion, a “Trump vs. Bernie: Live from Brooklyn” album and countless media appearances continuing years beyond the 2016 election cycle. He even sat down with Anthony Bourdain over Armenian food at Sahags Basturma to discuss politics and culture on the late chef and host’s “Little Los Angeles” web series.
After more than 20 years in comedy, “Resistance,” Adomian’s improbable first solo special “is a long time coming. I’ve been edging it,” he says in his opening minutes on stage during the special. The high-energy and layered hour is “a stand-up art piece, basically.”
Portrait of James Adomian, a beloved L.A. comic before his Irvine show Jan. 19 on the heels of his latest special “Path of Most Resistance.”
(Marcus Ubungen/Los Angeles Times)
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His takes on Elon Musk, Alex Jones and his long-running Bernie Sanders appear during the hour. Adomian examines news media portrayal of Armenians, Turner Classic Movies, bigotry, the Federal Reserve and aging as a “notorious homosexual,” noting, “I used to be gay. Now I’m like an advisor on campus.” On the scourge of social-media expectations, Adomian says in the special, “If you see crowd work tonight, that means something terrible has happened.”
“I love to bring up an important or intelligent topic and then make very stupid jokes about it,” Adomian says. “People have said before that my comedy is smart or intelligent. That starts to sound like it’s one of those acts where you’ve got to have a degree in liberal arts to understand it. Nothing I do is difficult to understand. It’s all very basic and moronic.”
With Jared Goldstein opening, Adomian filmed “Resistance” at Echo Park’s “beautiful, dark and strange” Elysian Theater, where he’s a “Stand Up and Clown” veteran and had his own show for Netflix Is a Joke festival.
He admires the bravery and experimentation of newer comedians, calling fellow Elysian regular Courtney Pauroso’s October release “Vanessa 5000,” a sex-robot exploration of technology, “a dark work of genius.” Of experimental half-hour “How to Bake a Cake in the Digital Age” from Christina Catherine Martinez, he says, “I’m so enamored.”
In Los Feliz for more than a decade, Adomian is reputed as a vocal comedy-scene supporter and cheerleader. He cites his neighborhood’s Tuesday “Comedy Night at Best Fish Taco” among L.A.’s best stand-up offerings. Other indie-venue faves include Silver Lake’s Akbar and Lyric Hyperion, Eagle Rock’s the Fable, Echo Park’s Bar Bandini, Atwater Village’s Club Tee Gee, West Hollywood’s Bar Lubitsch, Koreatown’s R Bar, Highland Park’s the Offbeat bar and Westlake’s Dynasty Typewriter.
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Adomian took the opportunity to complete a long-awaited side quest when his tour paused for the 2024 holiday season. He wanted to see the country and to reduce airplane travel “as we enter the next video game level of the climate apocalypse.” Riding two Amtrak trains over three days from Washington, D.C. to Chicago, then onward to Albuquerque before returning to L.A., he got little sleep but had great views.
He thought about the ways he wanted to approach the New Year and its myriad changes. The journey was “fun, uncomfortable, relaxing, exhausting, beautiful and fascinating. And now I know how to take a shower at 100 miles per hour.”
There’s a balance somewhere between angry and openness that Adomian hopes to achieve in 2025. Or maybe it’s about staying invested while remaining spiritual. As a guy who says he believes in reincarnation, Adomian thinks that living beings — politicians included — will always reap what they sow. Karma can be a b—. And most important, it’s time for far less reliance on crowd work.
“Life on Earth is kind of a playthrough of painfulness, pointlessness, beauty and a deep trove of meanings that we have to find somehow,” he says. “It’s therapeutic for me to say funny things that make me feel better about being alive. It’s sort of playing a very silly game, but also bringing up something important and making it a funny thing that’s not scary or objectionable. To make a good time out of a bad time.”
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
