**CHEECH AND CHONG ANNOUNCE FIRST COMEDY TOUR IN 25 YEARS**
Acording to PRNewswire via COMTEX:
"LOS ANGELES, July 30, 2008--Successful beyond their wildest dreams, the iconic comedy duo Cheech & Chong defined an era with their hilariously irreverent, satirical, counter-culture, no-holds-barred comedy routines. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong's phenomenal success began on the stand up comedy circuit which led to 9 hit comedy albums and 8 hit films, breaking box office records, shattering comedy album sales, garnering multiple Grammy nominations and mesmerizing fans for more than a decade. Today, from the world famous Troubadour where they were initially discovered, Cheech & Chong announced their first tour in over 25 years, an epic cross country U.S. trek with over 22 dates confirmed; additional dates to be announced in the coming weeks. Cheech & Chong: Light Up America ... tickets go on sale nationally at 4:20 PM on August 8th and are available at http://www.livenation.com. For more information on the tour and presale tickets go to http://www.cheechandchongtour.com.
The Live Nation produced tour will kick off on September 12th at the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. Other highlights include Los Angeles, Washington DC, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Austin, Seattle, Boston, San Diego and Denver to name a few. Chong's wife and comedy partner, Shelby Chong, will open all dates on the tour.
With nine albums released from 1972 through 1985, the duo was nominated for four Grammy Awards, winning the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album with their third album, Los Cochinos, released in 1973. Big Bambu, their second album, was the biggest selling comedy record of all time in 1972 and remained so for many years. Their stunningly successful comedy streak transitioned to film in 1978 with their first movie, "Up In Smoke," the highest grossing comedy of 1978, topping $100 million at the box office. Cheech and Chong co-wrote and starred in a total of eight feature films together, all directed by Chong. The comedy duo was initially discovered at the Troubadour in Los Angeles."
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At their peak in the 1970s, Cheech and Chong represented the mainstream embodiment of the attitudes and lifestyles of the underground drug culture. Much as W.C. Fields shot to fame by making alcohol the focus of his act, the duo of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong emerged from a cloud of pot smoke, simultaneously championing and lampooning the stoner community which became the team's most ardent supporters; although derided by critics and dismissed by the general populace, the team's stature as counterculture heroes was unquestioned, and for both aging hippies and dazed-and-confused teens, their comedy defined an era.The team began to take shape in the late 1960s when, after entering show business as a guitarist in a rock band, Chong established City Works, a wild improvisational troupe later joined by Richard "Cheech" Marin. When City Works dissolved, Cheech and Chong continued as a duo, formulating a musical comedy act. The music proved short-lived, however, when audiences began reacting favorably to the team's spacy pothead raps; after establishing their comic persona, the duo rarely deviated from the course -- for record after record and film after film, they remained blissed-out stoners, their humor locked in the druggy stasis of the doper mentality.Cheech and Chong debuted in 1971 with an eponymous LP featuring studio sketches like "Waiting for Dave" (a circular routine owing a debt to Bob and Ray), "Cruisin' with Pedro" (about drug-deal paranoia) and "Trippin' in Court." The album was a tremendous success, and its 1972 follow-up Big Bambu -- a record packaged in a giant rolling paper -- reached the number two spot on the Billboard charts. The following year's Grammy-winning Los Cochinos duplicated the feat, and included the novelty hit "Basketball Jones."After 1974's Wedding Album (which featured the hit "Earache My Eye") and 1976's Sleeping Beauty, Cheech and Chong had built enough of a cult following to make the leap into films. Their 1978 feature debut Up in Smoke established the formula followed by all of their subsquent movies, quickly dispensing with plot in order to focus on surreal narrative detours and long, meandering conversations between the principal characters. With the exception of 1980's Let's Make a New Dope Deal, the duo spent the next several years working exclusively on films, releasing a rapid-fire string of comedies like 1980's Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, 1981's Nice Dreams and 1983's Still Smokin.As the hedonism of the 1970s gave way to the "just say no" conservatism of the Reagan era, Cheech and Chong found little response to their trademark brand of humor; after 1984's The Corsican Brothers, their film career ended, and in 1985 they returned to the recording studio for their swan song LP, Get Out of My Room. After dissolving their partnership, both spent the remainder of the decade appearing in low-budget films; by 1993, Marin even recorded a children's album, My Name Is Cheech, The School Bus Driver. While Chong largely drifted into obscurity, Marin enjoyed a renaissance in the middle of the 1990s, appearing in the Robert Rodriguez films Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn; a prominent supporting role in Ron Shelton's romantic comedy Tin Cup led to a co-starring role opposite Don Johnson in the CBS detective series Nash Bridges. In 1997 Chong made a guest appearance on the program, marking the duo's first public reunion in a number of years. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
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