'Inside Comedy' review: Picking brains with funny bone

So it's smart, really -- Steinberg guides them separately through their careers and comic attitudes, then intercuts chat strands to weave humor revelation.

Monday's second-season premiere pairs deadpan '60s arrival Bob Newhart, the overnight-sensation standup turned long-running TV star, and current king Louis CK, a long-running standup turned tube sensation in FX's "Louie."

Next week, it's current comedy writers -- Syosset native Judd Apatow, whose TV work ("Freaks and Geeks") led to movies, and Tina Fey, whose Second City improv led her to TV's "Saturday Night Live" and "30 Rock."

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All get great clips, too, of both their work and their influences. (Future weeks range from Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin to Will Ferrell-Betty White.)

Louie, too, is counterintuitive, succeeding in failure. "If you're afraid to be bad, you won't develop," he says. "I realized, I have to invite the awful."

Through judicious cutting, Steinberg strikes a deft balance between drilled-down-to insight and offhand confession. (Apatow on casting the same actors in so many movies: "It's a way to pretend that the shows weren't canceled. In my head, these are all just elaborate 'Freaks & Geeks' episodes.")

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