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Aspire-ing to 'clean' comedy

Standups get a new showcase on Magic Johnson’s network.

Comic Erin Jackson with Bob Sumner, of Aspire's 'Laff Mobb's We Got Next.'
Comic Erin Jackson with Bob Sumner, of Aspire's 'Laff Mobb's We Got Next.'Read more

* LAFF MOBB'S WE GOT NEXT. 10 tonight, Aspire (183 on Comcast).

* FRONTLINE: GENERATION LIKE. 10 tonight, WHYY12.

IT'S NOT easy being clean.

Not, at least, for comedians facing audiences who've come to expect a certain level of raunchiness from their stand-ups, who in turn have probably come to expect that they'll spend a fair amount of time trying to make drunk people laugh.

But one result of the slicing and dicing of the cable universe into smaller and smaller sections is that it eventually creates a market for just about everything.

Even clean comedy.

That's the goal of former "Def Comedy Jam" producer Bob Sumner, who explains in tonight's premiere of Aspire TV's "Laff Mobb's We Got Next" that his new show is "going to flip the script. This is going to be straight clean. When I say clean, I'm talking about Tide clean."

I don't know if that last statement qualifies as product placement, but Sumner clearly has the Aspire brand in mind.

One of the first minority-owned channels to be picked by Comcast as part of its deal to win federal approval of its acquisition of NBCUniversal, the stated aim of the Magic Johnson-launched Aspire - which you can find on Comcast Channel 183 in Philadelphia - is to deliver "enlightening, entertaining and positive programming to African-American families."

That includes delving deep into the TV archives and coming up with pre-"Cosby Show" Bill Cosby, who can be seen in reruns of both "I Spy" and "The Bill Cosby Show" (where the Philly-born comic played a gym teacher), as well as Diahann Carroll's "Julia," in which she played a widowed nurse with a young son.

Original programming ranges from the Suzanne Malveaux-hosted interview series "The Root 100," to "Black College Quiz," a weekly contest featuring students from historically black colleges.

In "We Got Next," Sumner says he's interested in showcasing "that new comic, that fresh comic, rearranging the furniture, creating new stars," but what he really seems to be trying to do is to give career comedians a shot at a bigger audience.

Of tonight's group, the least experienced, DC Ervin, has been working as a standup for nine years. The most veteran, Geoff Brown, says that he's been at it "25 1/2 years."

Not working blue doesn't mean sex is off the table - far from it - but one of the funniest lines of the night, from Erin Jackson, employs the word "penis" in a way that even fans of abstinence-only education should appreciate.

'Generation Like'

Sunday's New York Times included a story about what it called the "permanent intern underclass," college-educated Americans in their 20s who work for little or no pay in hopes of gaining footholds in industries that may never hire them.

I couldn't help thinking of that while watching "Generation Like," tonight's "Frontline" presentation about the ways that social media have put users to work marketing the very things - movies, music and celebrity - that once had to be sold to them.

In some ways a follow-up to media analyst Douglas Rushkoff's 2001 "Frontline," "Merchants of Cool," which showed how teens' own culture was being sold back to them, "Generation Like" finds Rushkoff dealing with a group that's so comfortable with commerce being part of social interactions that some happily spend hours a day helping promote products that may "pay" in little more than scraps of recognition.

What robber baron wouldn't "like" that?