No, you weren’t having a Zima flashback to 1994: That was Pauly Shore you saw at NATPE last week.
The Comic Formerly Known as the Weasel—who burned brightly in the ’90s on MTV’s Totally Pauly and in films like Encino Man—made his first trip to the show to pitch a new sketch comedy series, Pauly Shore’s Natural Born Komics: Miami.
"I have connections with the heads of networks and the executives," Shore, 38, told B&C. But he attended NATPE hoping to create "a groundswell of buzz" for Komics, a mix of standup, hidden-camera gags, parodies and man-on-the-street interviews that he envisions on Showtime, MTV or Comedy Central, if not the Internet.
"I don’t wanna call them ‘minnows,’" Shore said, "but the people who don’t sign the checks, they come back [from NATPE], and they’re like, ‘Pauly Shore was there, and he’s got this show.’"
That guerilla approach inspired the video he recently staged and leaked online. The clip, in which Shore gets socked by a heckler during a standup gig in Texas, has clocked hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
Displaying a wad of business cards from producers and new-media execs he met over three days, Shore said everyone’s struggling to adapt to a changing media world.
"There’s only three people who know everything: Bono, Spielberg and Madonna," he says. "Well, Katzenberg’s really smart, too."
