May 2012
2 posts
April 2012
5 posts
Listen
9 tags
8 tags
March 2012
1 post
February 2012
1 post
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
January 2010
1 post
My Comedy Projections
These are my projections for the next year based on a questionaire sent to me by The Comedy Nerds.
1)Come January 2011, what will the late night comedy landscape look like? -Have you seen Terminator Salvation? Bleaker, but with more belly laughs.
Where will Conan be? - In Latin America paying a man who knows a man who can kill three men. Or possibly at Fox, when he’s not at home swimming...
December 2009
1 post
10 tags
Narcissus, Googling Himself Eternally
Googling yourself: Cyber-Vanity
Googling common misspellings of your name: Neurotic Self-Aggrandizement
Finding a two year old posting of a person with whom you went to college misspelling your name while insulting you in passing while posting on the website of someone else with whom you went to college: Priceless.
Yesterday I did a search on a misspelling on my name, which is kind of a silly...
October 2009
1 post
September 2009
1 post
August 2009
1 post
July 2009
2 posts
May 2009
3 posts
3 tags
WatchSymbology: Live Feed — May 27th 9:30-11
3 tags
Myq Kaplan: The Blog →
Same guy, but a blog where he combines things to form comedy. I recommend it.
3 tags
Myq Kaplan: The Website →
I just attended Myq Kaplan’s CD recording yesterday. It was hilarious. If you’re the kind of person who likes saying “I was into [artist] before it was cool to be into [artist]” you should definitely check him out.
April 2009
3 posts
10 tags
Schrödinger's Pervert
That hobo on the subway, with a blanket bunched up, wriggling on his lap.
Is he jerking off under there? Or just playing with a dead cat?
8 tags
Mope y Poem
Youth is Beauty and Beauty Youth
Where do child actors go? When they turn 17 and a half Placed on an ice floe And gently shoved off Slow, aimed at rehab
March 2009
2 posts
Opening lines from my book on Geneology
“I’m a man of humble beginnings. Like most of you, I come from a long line of semen. I guess in some ways I had it better than my cousin, he came from a long line of cocaine.”
Tids and Bits 2
For my birthday my mom bought me a samurai sword so that if Comedy doesn’t work out I’ll have something to fall back on.
It’s ironic that I often hear comics talking about free speech at open mics they paid five dollars to get on.
Excerpt of a conversation I had today
Her: Do you think you’ll make it?
Me: These days with the internet, who can really say what...
February 2009
5 posts
From the Files of the American Medical Society of...
Patient # 63
Through an amazing birth defect, this patient was actually born with eyes in the back of his head. Fortunatley the rest of the patient’s body was also reversed.
Patient #87
This patient has the ability to convert any amount of text into an undecipherable hexidecimal code. This ability would be priceless if the patient were able to decode the hex himself.
Patient #39
This...
6 tags
Tids & Bits
Everyone complains about the small apartments in NY, but I don’t mind them, because my mom had a tiny womb.
A writer’s insult: Whenever he writes anything he should preface it with a colon so that people know everything that follows is indigestible shit.
One phrase I’ve never understood. “After Hours.” I don’t know what’s on your clock but on mine, you...
This Blog is Known to Cause Cancer in the State of...
Blueprints for a Bowling Pinsetter / Midieval Torture Device
Back when I was in college I worked at the Bowling Alley one semester. I enjoyed the job quite a bit, and not for the pay of which there was little, but because it allowed me to get away from the world of students that I lived in most of the time, and for a short while each weekend live in the world of pinsetters, which bore certain...
Short Pretentions to Start the Month
- I’ve heard many people say it’s pointless to study Philosophy, but but they never seem able to make a convincing argument for the case.
- I’ve always loved words. It has not always been mutual.
- They say that truth is stranger than fiction, but that’s just because if fiction involves a wildly implausible sequence of events we say it is poorly written.
- People always tell you if...
“If you attempt to create a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation,...”
– Mark Twain’s notebook (1935).
It struck me how well this applies to long-form improv. A scene which is grounded in some truth can spin off into wild places, but a scene with no grounding in truth soon finds itself stalling out on the runway.
January 2009
1 post
5 tags
Dramasturbation
Going to dramas is basically a way to simulate deep feelings resulting in a climax and catharsis. It’s essentially emotional masturbation, and dramas are emotional pornography. Which is of course why they’re called tear jerkers. But at least with regular masturbation we have the decency to do it in private. Comedies provide climax as well, but without all the self-importance. And yet...
May 2008
9 posts
5 tags
Opening Crowd Work
This was in response to a question about opening and crowd work.
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This is something you may just have to experiment with to see what works for you. I like to sort of interact with the room a bit, so that they know I’m there and present. If I’m commenting on the bathroom or on the crowd or something they know that’s not something I could prepare any time and it puts them at ease. A couple of...
Is Anything Off-Limits?
This was written in response to the a question I received asking if I thought comedians should talk about certain touchy subjects.
I think that Comedians can and should talk about anything they want to. No topic is off limits. But that doesn’t mean that anything should be said. Dave Chapelle and Carlos Mencia both talk *about* race, but their points of view could not be more different. One breaks...
Theories of Humor
This was written in response to a question about superiority theory and other theories of humor.
If you’re interested in the psychology of humor then I’d definitely recommend reading that book I was talking about: http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Humor-Integrative-Approach/dp/012372564X I don’t have as much faith in superiority theory as you seem to, I think that status and power is involved in a...
Heckler Handling
This was in response to a question about what to do if someone’s heckling.
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Heckling usually happens when there’s dead space in an act. I keep my sets pretty tight, so I don’t get heckled much. Even if someone doesn’t like one of my jokes I’m usually on to the next one by the time they think they have something to say. Because of this my advice here is mostly based on what I’ve seen with other...
Developing a Process
This was in response to a question about how I prepared and my method when I first got started doing Stand-up.
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I’m going to write a lot here, some of which may work for you, some of which may not. Obviously everyone is different, but these are the things that I’ve found that help me produce and develop, so I hope you won’t think I’m saying it’s the only way or anything like that. Before I...
Don't Forget to Memorize
This was in Response to a question about memorization.
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I’ve been involved in theater for years, so this is something I have a decent amount of experience with. For memorizing material, something that I fucking hate but is hugely necessary: Decide on the order and then break it down. If I’m doing a set of 20 jokes, I first decide on the order (putting together jokes that have similar topics,...
Moving on Up: What next?
This was in response to a question about moving on to “the next level” in comedy.
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It sort of depends on your intended career path. Typically you put together a press kit (bio, resume, quotes, headshots, you can download one from Eugene Mirman’s site to see an example). Road comics will send that to clubs around the area they want to perform, presumably the same is true for comics living in a...
Why I was Posting A Joke Every Day
This was in response to a question about what went into my Joke Every Day project
— I’d say that when you start a project it takes a while just to figure out what you want it to be, so you have to establish stability before you can experiment or tweak it. The first couple of months my focus was just on setting things up and keeping myself going, I remember being amazed after the first month that...
April 2008
1 post
Portrait of the Comic as a Young Artist
This post is in response to Andy Kline’s response to my response to his blog… You get the idea. You can see the original post and comments over here at DC Comedy 4 Now. Again, the first paragraph is a direct response, the rest pretty much stands on its own. It’s broken into 2 Parts, if you want to see other peoples responses in between, check out the original post.
Pt. 1
This was a really...
March 2008
2 posts
A Brief History of Fart Jokes
This is a response to a guest blog that DC comedian Eli Sairs wrote on the DC Comedy 4 Now website. The original article can be found here.
Eli, your point about Steve Martin is well taken. The same could be said for Steve Allen and Steven Wright. Maybe Alternative comedy is all about being named Steve. More to the point, I think the idea is that alternative comedy is “supposed” to be a conscious...
A Few Types of Hack
This is from a much longer essay I wrote on the subject.
1. Non-joke/Presentational Hackiness - By this I mean phrases that have become cliched over time like “How you guys doing tonight (for the 10th time in a row), That doesn’t happen, that’s not right, Am I right, what’s that about (if you have to ask you don’t know), Can you believe this?, Have you seen this? , Didn’t they get the memo?,...
February 2008
2 posts
Add Vice With Mike
Originally posted Feb 25th 2008
Question Airs a.k.a. Add Vice With Mike
Dear Mike,
My boyfriend Bobby and I have been together for a year and 3 months on March 12th, but I just found out that he cheated on me with my best friend Stacy. He says he wants to work it out, and I really totally love him so I want to too, but I just don’t know. What should I do?
- Betrayed by a Bobby ...
Friday, February 22, 2008 Scientography...
Originally posted (in this color and font) Friday, February 22, 2008
Today someone asked me “What is Scientography?” And it’s a good question, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? Often times the words we want most to define are the ones that don’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, even the unabridged edition. It’s a bit like asking, “What is the rain? And is the rain anything like...
November 2007
2 posts
Racebook.com
Originally posted November 1st 2007
I think there’s a lot of racial tension in America, because sometimes we have preconceived notions about what people from another race are like. That’s why I’ve decided to launch my new website Racebook (http://Racebook.com). At Racebook we’ll facilitate racial communication and harmony by helping people of different races post fun things on their “racial...
LOUD NOISES!! I DON’T KNOW WHAT WE’RE YELLING...
Disclaimer: The following blog contains strong language (my words can benchpress like… 250. It’s no big deal.) and shouldn’t be read by people whose parents will be pissed off at me if they find out their children read this. Or wusses.
I was listening to a woman on the radio talk about how the term “special” in Special Olympics is offensive; she got pretty angry about this and one of the...