Friends & Co. 3.30.05

Last night's set:

So Kirstie Ally has a new show - Fat Actress. It's a reality show where she tries to lose weight, It's not going too well, apparently, because last week they just disconnected her feeding tube.

The Pope needs a feeding tube, it turns out. He doesn't have a problem with it, but he does have one request: He wants his feedings administered by Jose Conseco.

Did everyone have a good Easter Sunday? Get some chocolate? They arrested another protester at the hospice where Terri Schiavo is. He tried to sneak her a bottle of Hershey's syrup.

Michael Schiavo has had a little change of heart, apparently. He said if he knew Terri was going to suffer so long he would have just called Robert Blake in the first place.

How about this Boy Scouts of America official, Doug Smith? He's been with the Boy Scouts for 39 years and was arrested yesterday on child porn charges. His computer was full of kiddie porn. According to him, though, he wasn't doing anything wrong, he was just working on his Neverland Badge.

I get a lot of X-rated email. I know how I get it, too - I spend a lot of time whackin' it to internet porn. But this email amused me - it said: satisfy her every time. Get a 10" cock in 24 hours. So I clicked it. The next day Ron Jeremy came over and fucked my girlfriend.

Then I did my porno movie bit and part of the pube-shaving bit. It all sounds pretty well done on the audio tape, but onstage there was hardly any response I could hear. Again I got plenty of compliments afterwards, but during the set I was competing with the din of dozens of conversations going on. The lack of response (and a couple beers beforehand) made me lackadaisical and so I ended up cutting a chunk where I heckle the college audience about their porn-star inspired fashion choices. I wrapped it up in about 6 or 7 minutes. I have video of this one, and eventually I hope to have a new site with the clips.

Frank Rich of the NY Times

Preach, cracker!

Friends & Co. 3.23.05

Last night's routine:

Nazi Green Party (Minnesota school shooting)
I Was There (that annoying guy who has to one-up you on cool concerts he's seen)
Demos (that same guy and his CD collection)
Grateful Dead (the nightmare box set)
Hippies (hit the showers!)
Terry Schiavo/Pope (I get the two confused)
Terry Schiavo/Michael Moore (just think "feeding tube" - you can figure it out)

Total time: 8-10 minutes

I got a good response on most everything, though the closing bit was weakest. No hecklers this time. I suppose presence does something to help, because the audio sounds sloppy and poorly paced. I have yet to see myself on stage, but I will begin to remedy that next week.

oops

This is what I get for not watching Leno every night. Sometime last week Drew Carey did this one:

Michael Jackson apparently threw his back out.
Well, kids are getting heavier these days.

And here's the difference between a rough joke and a polished joke. My bit about MJ being outweighed by 13 year olds is all right and makes sense because everyone knows how thin and frail MJ is, but Carey's line has the added feature of drawing on another familiar issue, childhood obesity. Hence, two jokes (or at least a joke and a half) for the price of one.

Just for Kicks

I don't spend a lot of time working on topical humor, but I do write jokes based on the day's headlines. I consider this practice, only rarely producing something that will still be funny in two or three days. Below I've posted a handful of jokes I've written over the past couple days on the Michael Jackson trial and the Terri Schiavo situation. It will be interesting to see whether the same gags - or similar ones - show up in tonight's talk show monologues. Please note that these are unpolished, off-the-top-of-the-head jokes.

1. Michael Jackson was late for court again today. He had to drop his boyfriend off at school.

2. They’re not showing much of what’s going on inside the courtroom. The networks are afraid one of his breasts will fall out.

3. Michael Jackson’s doctors claim he had a back injury. That’s what happens when a 13 year old boy outweighs you.

4. Bono, lead singer for U2, talked with World Bank president-elect Paul Wolfowitz about poverty. That’s like Michael Jackson talking about being black.

5. The Vatican has come down on the side of keeping Terri Schiavo alive, which is not surprising considering that the Pope will need a worth successor soon.

6. So gas has hit $3 a gallon in some states. Can you believe that? That's almost half what I pay for water.

I can never keep up with all the nighttime shows, but you can hear monologues at various websites:

Letterman
Leno
O'Brien (selected)
Bill Maher (not posted)

I don't know if Jimmy Kimmel, Carson Daly, or Craig Ferguson do monologues, as I've never seen these shows. If they do, they are not featured on their web sites.

Bullshit

Once again the federal government in its arrogance has seen fit to intervene in citizens' lives -and deaths - and to show contempt for state legislatures.

Dear Paula Zahn,

People being shot and killed in the course of their work day is a tragedy - for those involved and those who care about them, not for every American citizen who has had to listen to you and every other news reader warp the Chris Nichols/Ashley Smith "story" into a slobbering Lifetime Channel premier. All that's missing is the sex. I heard you describe Nichols' courtroom shooting as a "rampage." I have yet to hear Terry Ratzman's actions of Saturday described in this way, though he killed eight people including himself. In fact, I've seen very little coverage of that grisly tale at all since Sunday, while Ashley Smith's having spent half a day with Nichols apparently warrants 48 hours of coverage. Does the fact that Ratzman was an evangelical Christian who shot other evangelical Christians at a church service affect the news-worthiness of this story in some way? As much as I would love to believe that you and CNN find the ultra-religious killing each other to be funny and nothing to worry about, I fear that the motivation for ignoring this tale has more to do with an unwillingness to place God-fearing Christians in a bad light or call into question the psychological and emotional effects of their beliefs and teachings. It reminds me of the non-coverage of the Catholic sex scandal. Because what you do is often not journalism but pandering. It's much easier, and potentially less offensive, to play up the all-American blond-haired heroine who convinced the scary black rapist to turn himself in.

Rampage. Really. The mainstream news media's ability to warp public perception through language is truly impressive. I especially appreciate how, in Iraq, "militants" became "insurgents" became "terrorists" in a matter of weeks. In the past, the people one fought were referred to as "the enemy," a term I have not heard once since the whole thing began. But that is another story altogether.

And you wonder why people find weblogs more appealing places to read news and analysis. It's because you suck.

Broad Ripple

I had never heard of the Broad Ripple area of Indianapolis until I looked up Crackers Comedy Club, where I went last night for their weekly open mic. BR is a nice area to say the least - one of those "desirable locations" most cities have, where old money meets trendy restaurants, with a healthy dose of the arts. And yet, like a lot of places in the midwest, I've noticed, mostly devoid of pretense.

Unfortunately, I did not get on the list to perform, since I was unaware that I was to have emailed a request to get listed a week or more in advance. Such is the popularity of a comedy club in a large city - something that a few years in a small town can make you forget. Fortunately, I got to eat a fabulous Italian meal unattainable here in my own small hamlet, and I stayed for what turned out to be an entertaining show.

Not that all, or even most, of the 15 or so people that went onstage killed. Not even half. In fact, only one performer - a tall thin guy named Mike(?) Chin, did a solid funny three minutes.* He did some racial stuff about being Asian American and trying to date white women, which in theory is the sign of a professional hack, but he was original enough and funny. His opener was the observation that Sarah Jessica Parker was both sexy and hideously ugly at the same time. Forgive my inability to render this perfectly here. Trust me, it was hilarious.

About three or four others had a minute's worth of funny, and the rest, well, I can't remember what they said or did, so there you go. One guy, who looked like Redd Foxx but weighing 400+ pounds, rambled endlessly about the reefer-heads in his building and never once delivered a punchline. He also broke the open mic No-"Fuck" rule. Twice. He is now barred from performing for 3 months. At first I was a bit contemptuous of the rule, but when you listen to 15 comedians in a row, and knowing how liberally people will pepper their speech with the word, I can appreciate it. Two people did Old Men in Locker Rooms bits, a topic I did not know was so popular.

No one can guarantee they won't bomb, and even good material falls on deaf ears from time to time, and this happened to at least one performer last night, but I'm confident that my best three minutes will get laughs in that room. Unfortunately, I won't be able to find out until May, since my teaching schedule won't allow me to make the long drive to Indy in time for the shows.



*If you think it's easy to be funny for even one solid minute, and you have never tried it in front of 60 strangers, please, go out to an open mic this weekend and shoot yourself.

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Family Viewing

Interesting post yesterday by Joe Duemer that highlights what I see as the fetishization of the family. I always understood family to mean relatives, but the religious right has succeeded in warping the term to mean our current political and social climate's most priveleged unit, in which adults have no identity as such but children remain children. And not just children as in people who are not yet adults, but THE children (read: that segment of the population regularly exploited by a radical minority for religious/political purposes).

When people complain that something is inappropriate for "family viewing," what they're really saying is that they find the material objectionable - not just for children but for themselves because of their own religious/political agenda, which they were busily foisting onto their unfortunate progeny when you're "inappropriate" art barged in.

It's About Time

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In the past, I have done the vegan thing - zero animal products. It felt great, and I don't know exactly why I went off of it. I had even gone through the holiday season without folding. But that was when I was living in south Florida - Boca to be exact - and there were entire grocery stores devoted to health foods (I now regard the term 'health food' as synonymous with 'smaller, more expensive food') and vegan alternatives. When I moved to southern Illinois, I found the stores specialized in bratwurst - miles of it. I became something of a weekend carnivore, eating a fair number of vegetarian meals at home during the week and succumbing to bratwurst at Saturday cook-outs.

Now it's time to go back to full-time veg. There's nothing exceptionally noble about my decision - it isn't moral or philosophical. My 36-year-old body just seems to be telling me it's time. I was never much of a "dieter" in the sense of calorie counting, etc. (when you're an enthusiastic beer drinker, what's the point?), but I'm at the age where I can easily tell how my body responds to certain foods, and meat is an energy-zapper. So is beer, and that is on its way out, too. I may keep a few eggs in the regimen. I like eggs more than steak or anything else animal, and they present one with a legal way to eat the unborn.

I am often amused by people who devote inordinate amounts of time and energy to dieting, which for most people means finding some magical formula that will allow them to lose weight and still "eat the foods they love." They will torture themselves with counting grams of everything in every meal they eat, all for the purpose of justifying a piece of fried chicken or a Jack and Coke. Wait, I take that back - it's not amusing. It is absolutely hysterical. It is so much easier to simply not eat pork than to devote one's time to calculating how much of what kind of sausage one can consume at what time of day how many times a year.

Why am I writing about my dietary practices on a weblog? Someone please beat me with a garden hose.

Zen and the Art of Irritating the Fuck Out of People

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You know what I hate?

Reading.

Well, not reading so much as having reading recommended to me, usually by some screeching twit who thinks I'd just be sitting on the edge of the bed setting my pubes on fire were it not for his literary promptings.

The irritating thing about book recommendations is that they are rarely about the book as much as they are about the recommender, who has obviously identified with some character or philosophical aspect of whatever book it is and is seeking validation, confirmation, or sex.

"Have you ever read The Sorrows of Young Werther? No? You should. It's fascinating. I'll lend you my copy." Translation: I am Werther; please blow me, or I will kill myself.

The most irritating thing about such recommendations is the "should." I hate people who liberally pepper their conversation with shoulds and should nots. I'm not talking about a teacher addressing a five-year-old who just peed on the crayons, I'm talking about adults addressing one another. Implicit in the "should" is the idea that you have a problem which the book will solve. This is not limited to self-help titles. Often the recommendation is a Zen book, which, unfortunately, too many people consider a form of self-help book - a habit many publishers are only too happy encourage. Witness the ever-growing shelf space devoted to such books at your local book hangar.

"You haven't read The Way of Zen [or The Three Pillars, or Zen in the Art of Archery, or Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, or...]? You should. I think you'd like it." Translation: I am Werther; please... Have you read Zen and the Art of Shut the Fuck Up? You should.

You know what I hate?

Zen.

Well, not Zen itself so much as the way the word is bandied about to describe everything from office wear to home decor. Zen is not a style, an attitude, or a brand of coffee. Zen is sitting on the floor in a burlap robe with twenty other suffering baldies in an un-air-conditioned room staring at the wall until your legs develop gangrene. Because recommending Zen books is so irritating, I gleefully suggest...

Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner.

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Springfield Funny Bone Open Mic #2

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Thank you for asking. It sucked.

Not because it isn't great to have an open mic at an actual comedy venue and work out my stuff. That's great. It sucked because they make it a contest where each person throws in $5 and the first place winner (as judged by staff voting) takes all. Second and third place get tix to their weekend shows. I could care less about that or the money. What sucks is doing 6 minutes of material I know is good and seeing hacks get the encouragement of my $5.

Last night there were ties for a couple spots, so 6 out of the 9 people won, and I was not one of them. I shared the distinction of being voted into the 33rd percentile of the night's performances with a guy who read his lame routine off a piece of paper and ended with Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if..." lines based on his recent trip to Graceland, which he prefaced with the disclaimer that he wasn't stealing, he was "sampling." No, that's stealing. The really funny thing was that those bombed, too.

The winner was professional and funny if you enjoy blue collar comedy type stuff and Premium Blend. That's not as big a jab as it sounds like - most people can't manage that for 6 minutes, and a lot of people like it, so what can I say. He tied for first with this very large man named Ray who was either half black/half white or the greatest Whigga ever. He had one good line about being asked what his race was and his answer being whichever side was winning the bar fight. The rest of his stuff was pot jokes, none of which I remember. People love pot jokes, too. I wish pot was legal just so people would stop telling them.

One of the runner-ups was this Mitch Hedburg wanna be who had some decent jokes but did the exact same 6 minutes he did last month, when he also won. Another was a fat black guy who did jokes about being fat and black. I remember thinking he didn't suck, but then again I don't remember any of his routine. This middle-aged woman did some Rosanne Barr type stuff but without much of an edge. People love that as well, so no comment. She had a good line about being mistaken for a lesbian because she teaches phys-ed. A 20-something woman with a beer gut did my terrible love life stuff. She would say something such as, "When I go out I get THE BEST come ons..." then do that ridiculous head-cock/forced smile that a lot of women comics substitute for punchlines and wait for a laugh, which she got because people like that too, especially lonely women with beer guts.

Before we went up, the manager admonished us to do as clean a set as possible, specifically with regard to "pussy jokes," because his dad (the owner) wants to see if you can be funny clean. That is not the most unreasonable request - he makes money from tickets and beers, not a guy who can use "cunt" as a verb. But then Dad himself gets up to introduce the next performer and tells this joke:

A six year old boy ran to his father yelling "Daddy Daddy, Mommy has a shrimp on her!"
"No, she doesn't, son."
"Yes, she does! Come look!" The boy drags Dad into the bedroom where Mom is napping, totally naked, and points.
"That's not a shrimp," said the father. "That's her clitoris."
"Oh," said the boy, "sure tasted like shrimp."

I did an abbreviated version of last week's Friends & Co. set, which included taking an online longevity test, exercise, and things I ate in Japan (whale and horse, raw). I didn't do the most stellar job, but I got laughs, and I know what my writing skills are, so of course I felt gypped. I'm the only one of the couple dozen people I've shared a stage with in the past 5 weeks to actually do 6 - 10 minutes that is thematically unified while not being your typical Men vs. Women/Black vs. White stuff.

I promised myself I wouldn't have artistic pretensions about this comedy thing and would just have fun. It just so happens my idea of fun is a well-written, original joke. I know, I'm being petty. I'm not Denis Leary or George Carlin or Jim Norton or Jim Florentine or..., and no one cares about whether I'm funnier than so-and-so but me.

It's the same as with anything else. If the Butthole Surfers went up against Chicago in a battle of the bands, you know who would rock and who would win. I'm not comparing myself with the Buttholes because, of course, I don't do mushrooms every day, but you know what I'm saying.

In any case, a mic and a stage is a mic and a stage. I'm thankful for that.

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My First Heckler!

Went up around midnight at Friends & Co. for the third straight week. Third time's the curse, apparently, because this little drunk truck of a woman came marching right at the stage yelling FUCK YOU about three minutes into my routine. I gave her a line about saving her beer money for a knuckle transplant and kept going, but she did fluster me.

The routine was about exiting a disabled access stall to find a wheelchair-bound person sitting there waiting. This actually happened to me. In the real situation, I apologized and got out of the guy's way. In the routine, I berate the guy for giving me attitude, comparing him to Stephen Hawking and pointing out his deficiencies, etc. That's humor, you reverse the expectation and, ideally, do so towards some end.

Two weeks in a row I did sexually explicit routines, even a little racial humor, and got good responses. Tonight I did a bit on insensitivity towards the "challenged" and got heckled. Some people - no, a LOT of people - have no sense of irony. That is what makes the success of someone like Andrew "The Dice Man" Clay frightening. It's not him or his material, it's that part of the fan base that took him at face value.

I'm glad I got heckled. I felt nervous and flustered, and it was unpleasant, but I dealt with it and kept rolling. On the audio, at least, I don't sound like I missed one beat.