Long Entry about my need for attention

My last entry mentioned what I think is the basic uniting characteristic of comedians: the selfish desire to be the center of attention. In fact, this is not at all limited to comedians, and all artists will do this in some form or fashion; actors, even when unfunny, tend to commandeer conversations, and musicians will always reach for the guitar the moment they enter a room and strum a lick from their new song, seeing if anyone is impressed. With comedians, though, it’s especially blatant. It’s especially bad when a few comedians decide to out-riff each other at the same time. This competitive social atmosphere is exhausting, and I often feel physically tired after actively trying to be funny for an extended period of time. I’m sure other funny people have felt this way, or the similar feeling of wondering why you can’t just be serious and normal like other people. Maybe I’m crazy and alone on this, but I feel like this is a common problem among comedians.

But it’s not as if there is anything wrong with entertaining others. It’s an admirable goal to reach for, and I am glad that we have some many people who are trying to succeed at it at the same time. I think the problem comes when it becomes such an aspiration that you are trying to make people laugh when they don’t feel like laughing. Jim Carrey, especially in the mid-90s, was pretty much the epitome of this idea. In every interview on every show in America, he jumped around and made stupid faces, aiming for laughs with hernia-inducing vigor. It really began to feel pathetic, to the point where I would feel worse for him than the interviewers he tormented. It was pretty clear to me that he was completely unsatisfied unless he had people in stitches at all times.

Steve Carell, on the other hand, is the perfect example of a controlled comedian. Interviews with him almost uniformly discuss his offstage persona to be extremely normal, almost Norman Rockwellian in nature (new word!). Yet he is, in my humble opinion, the best comedic performer* of this era. In a particularly helpful example, he outshines Carrey himself in Bruce Almighty, eliciting my only bout of uncontrollable laughter in an otherwise dull movie. But his true ability shines in his subtlety, on showcase much more clearly in the 40 Year Old Virgin and The Office. In these performances, Carell displays his ability to perfectly capture complex, 3-dimensional characters as well as his caricatures. And he does this all without feeling the need to perform in everyday life.

I may be rambling, but I think the point is that I feel the need to combat the urge to overperform, which I think has hurt me in the past. I distinctly remember leaving parties in a hurry after finally realizing that I was annoying the shit out of whomever I was trying to entertain. Over the years, I have improved on my ability to discern a real laugh from a forced, uncomfortable one. Alcohol impedes my laugh-dar, but I feel pretty good about gauging the tolerance of my friends for their willingness to deal with my shit. Still, I need to spend less time acting as the center of my social universe and more time observing and listening to others. Obviously, this makes me a better and more tolerable friend, but this isn’t a blog about my crippling neurosis, at least not officially. What this pattern of listening does is allows me to more fully understand what people are responding to, as opposed to charging headfirst with whatever I think people want to hear. This is where I think Carell improves upon Carrey’s style- he is more in tune with what other, normal, non-performers are interested in laughing at, and he presents that material in the best way possible. I think it’s important to note that Carrey used to be my idol, and now Carell is. I want to be undeniably funny, no matter if I am performing for my roommates or their parents. That takes a lot of time and observation, and I think that’s what I need to be doing right now, at the outset of this stand-up thing, rather than later on.

Ok, enough starfucking for me, I will post less philosophical and more practical things later. Next performance August 10^th.

*I know I said Patton was the best working comedian, but I meant stand-up. Carell is the best comedic performer around, bar none.

Cross

David Cross has got to be the biggest asshole in the country. He also is probably one of the funniest people working in comedy. His first album, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby, is absolutely hilarious on every track, and it is helping me get through the day at work. But you can tell just by listening to his work that he is a bitter, spiteful person with no regard for most people. This feeling is enhanced by his accompanying DVD, when he tortures club owners and berates his fans.

My mom always used to say that she would never want to know a comedian that well. They’re always working, always manic, constantly trying to impress people and make everyone laugh and focus on them (More on that later). Her big examples were always Jim Carrey, Chris Farley, and Andy Kaufman. I think that David Cross would be the worst of the bunch. My fear of David Cross is so pure that I would leave a room that he entered rather than meet him. His acerbic wit and disdain for others would manifest in some sort of nightmarish scenario where I am made to look like a stammering fool while all my friends and loved ones gather to congratulate Cross on his successful evisceration. Clearly I am thinking rationally here.

But I will say that this attitude that he carries with him on all his stand-up shows has the power to overwhelm his talent. And I think that his more recent album, It’s Not Funny, is proof of this possibility. Cross has moved from achingly funny to achingly obnoxious, constantly taking low jabs at politicians that, unlike on his first album, are unsupported by the requisite amount of comedy. He comes off like a mid-level message boarder instead of the comedic genius he has shown himself to be. I call this trend the “Daily Show” syndrome, where liberal comedians become so incensed by the current administration that their comedy becomes more bitter than funny. I hope that Cross, Stewart, and everyone else that falls prey to this debilitating disease can snap out of it and get back into the business of being funny, which, after all, is why we loved them in the first place. Consider this the closest to confronting David Cross about anything that I will ever come, ever.

Patton Oswalt

Is the best working comedian. Better than Cross. This guy is fantastic. I am watching his special on DVD, and it is wonderful. A lot of the material is the same as his album, but it's amazing to see it performed.

Anyway, I got this great idea for a bit. It's kinda dated, but it will still work at Brown, which is pretty political. It's basically about how Kerry sucks, but everybody voted for him anyway. It's like going to a party, and the band sucks and it's hot, and so you're like "I gotta get drunk" but the only beer they have is Natty Ice. Anyway, I think it will work pretty well eventually.

Speaking of beer, my birthday is on Monday. Woot.

Bossa show

So I am taking some time out of cleaning my apartment to update the blog.

Thursday night went extremely well. I went on right in the middle of the show, which is the best time to go on in an open mic night. In addition, the crowd was loving it the whole time, which was helped by the fact that every comedian that went up before me was funny. So I was much less nervous than when I performed on Wednesday. My new joke went over well, and every one of my bits got at least some amount of laughter, which is cool.

The best part is the way I felt afterwards. If you compare my mood on Thursday to my mood a week before when I bombed at Topaz, you could hardly believe it was the same person. I guess that’s the way it is, live by the sword, die by the sword. And it’s clear that no performance guarantees that the next performance will be even remotely similar. For example, I doubt I will get a better crowd than Thursday’s as long as I remain on the open mic circuit. I can’t start expecting to kill every night just because one audience liked my jokes. At this point, I’m just working on writing more jokes and keeping my expectations low.

Well, I have more to write, but it’s back to cleaning for me. I’ll write again at work when I’m more bored.

I must rent this movie

And I must rent it NOW:
Santa With Muscles

Dr Dremo's Wednesday

Last night went very well.

I was 14^th out of 15 people. The show lasted for over 2 hours. I went on at about hour 1:45. At this point, everyone had been through such a whirlwind of varying comedic talent that I could tell they were pretty beat. About half the audience had already left, so that was also lame. But I still managed to pull out a decent set. I certainly didn’t kill, but I got good laughs at roughly half of my jokes. My new bit about the exclamation mark being gay went over very well, which I was really happy about. I totally fucked up my joke about the guy crashing into the restaurant, and I didn’t even realize it until I got offstage. I was standing up there wondering why nobody even chuckled half-heartedly, until I realized that I had left out a crucial line in my setup. To be fair, I think that joke was lame anyway. I love the premise, but I am going to have to approach it from a totally new angle. In other news, my drunk joke went over not-terribly-well for the first time, which made me sad, especially because it included my first bit of crowd work ever. I said “I’m sort of an inappropriate drunk,” at which point a girl let out a yell from the front table. I was all “hey, so are you, you yell at shows!” It was amazing. Clearly I have a gift for this business. Oh, and my Vitruvian man joke did really well again, so I am happy. I like that one a lot as an opener, so I’m keeping it there. Exclamation mark is a good second bit, so that’s set as well. And I’m keeping Drunk as a closer, cause fuck you guys, that’s why.

Anyway, Katie Reisner is coming to my potential show tonight, and Dryer and Tess may join her. This is notable mostly because Katie is the “best potential audience member at any open mic night ever.” This is mostly due to her beauty. Also it has a little something to do with the fact that she laughs louder and more often than any living human. Anyway, cause for excitement. My set will be the bits that worked last night plus some new/previously bad stuff in the middle that I want to work on.

I wish all the other comics had stuck around last night, I am desperate for pointers. Oh well. They’ve seen plenty of shitty comedians; they don’t need to see another.

The Show Where Kent Must Regain His Self-Confidence Or Die

Show tonight at this place called Dr. Dremo’s in Arlington. I am excited, partly because of some new material I am excited about, and partly about the other good comedians who are performing with me. Rory and Danny, whom I mentioned in my last entry, are both great, as well as Jeff Maurer, whom I also saw (but forgot his name until I looked it up on the roll call). Jeff, actually, was the only guy to truly do well at Topaz in terms of audience response. So I am excited to talk to them a bit during/after the show. My new (good?) bit is about how the exclamation mark has become the gay punctuation. This is actually a bit hard to explain onstage if you haven’t noticed it before, so here is an example. Imagine that you are you, and the following is an email you receive from me:

Hey, ____! How are you? Good to hear from you, it’s been a while! I’m having a great time in DC, working for the future and doing stand-up. What are you doing? Well, it was good talking to you, can’t wait to see you this weekend, or in the fall!

Compare to this email, without the exclamation marks:

Hey, ____, how are you? Good to hear from you, it’s been a while. I’m having a great time in DC, working for the future and doing stand-up. What are you doing? Well, it was good talking to you, can’t wait to see you this weekend, or in the fall.

Verdict: The first email is gayer. I don’t know why, or how, this became the common diagnosis, but it is and that’s just something that we heterosexual male email-writers are going to have to deal with. So look forward to that bit beating you over the head with internet-gay-related-humor. Also, I wrote a large portion of the bit in the voice of my hypothetical friend, whom I will call Trey, since he talks and acts exactly like that guy Trey that Matt and I wrote about for a year.

Actually, that’s a really fun part about this stand-up bit. I am able to keep exploring the characters that we created for Elected just by affecting their mannerisms and personas onstage. On Thursday, when Dryer was there, I tried to throw a little Jeff in there for him, including a line that I ripped off, word for word, from the follow up. I don’t feel bad, though, since it’s a very general line, and I fucking wrote it anyway. Basically, as much as I don’t miss some aspects of the show, I definitely do miss writing new jokes with those old characters, and this way I get to explore them a bit more, which is very exciting for me.

Anyway, I also have a bit I may or may not do about the guy who drove his car into Andreas in Providence on St. Patrick’s Day. Basically, that’s the best premise ever, and I want to make sure my joke lives up to it, so that I don’t let that crazy guy down.

If not, I will do my bit on Warren’s tattoo, which went over well the first time I did it, as well as my bit on 9/11, because any joke about that is just money in the bank. Then I’ll finish with my bit on being a drunk asshole, which is my favorite/best joke, and a good closer in my opinion.

Sifting through my Comedy Word document...

And I came up with this nugget:

It’s all about living in the future, you know? Like, “sandwich!” That doesn’t work yet?

That's seriously all it said. I think I woke up in the middle of the night to write that one down.

Second Show Wrap-Up

So, uh, that could have gone better.

Yay, my first bomb session happened in only my second show! Others should be so lucky. Yeah, I bombed, and in front of all my friends to boot. But here’s my rationalization. First, that audience fed on the misery of the aspiring open mic-er. It was like 20 of this one girl’s friends who hated every other comedian, 3 ladies from Mexico who just noticed the sign in the hotel advertising a comedy show in the basement, and my 7 friends, who may or may not have laughed at all either. I don’t know, I kinda blacked out when I went up on stage.

Although it’s ridiculous to say this, most of my material was new, meaning I had written it in the last week and hadn’t performed it at the last show I did. Mostly it was about porn and September 11^th. Of course, I only had 3 minutes to analyze these deep, complicated issues, so maybe the audience was upset at my generalizations and logical fallacies. Also, the jokes may not have been that funny. The biggest laugh was probably my Paris Hilton joke (you heard me), which I threw in as a no-brainer to make sure someone laughed at least once in my set. It’s a crutch I hope to get rid of eventually, but I don’t want to challenge myself too much right now. Right now just getting up the nerve to perform is challenge enough. Especially when I have to draw laughter from the audience like blood from a stone (Song title!).

Oh, yeah, also my voice hasn’t come back, so the whole set was like early Tom Waits performing awkward college-style humor.

Anyway, I saw some truly great comedians perform awesome sets and get similarly destroyed (www.roryscovel.com, www.funnydanny.com*), so I don’t feel as bad about it now. I am performing with both of them and a few other guys at a similar open mic this Wednesday, but none of you are invited until I get funny again. At that show I will be picking up a DVD of my performance on Thursday, so when I get famous I can show everyone what a hacky douche I used to be. It’s going to be torture to watch that set over and over, examining why I lamed out, but hey, since I paid $4 a minute for that disc of comedy gold, I am damn sure going to use it.

Hopefully, I can be like most other stand-up comedians and never deal with disappointment or rejection again after this. A girl can dream…

*Matt, if you read this blog, Danny Rouheir did a hilarious Tony Soprano that nobody laughed at, but it was spot on. I would have died laughing, but my voice was dead and I didn't want to hurt it before the show. Ho!

Testing...

Format changes... bear with me .

Ack!

So I have been watching Dane Cook’s Tourgasm pretty religiously since it started. I don’t really like Dane Cook at all, and the other guys annoy me to varying degrees, but I am trying to immerse myself with as much stand-up comedy as possible, so this show makes the list. Anyway, last night I was watching the episode, and Robert Kelly told a joke that is very similar to one I wrote right before my first show. I liked the joke a lot, and it went over well, but now I have to drop it. Oh well, at least I know it wasn’t that original.
So my voice is still pretty miserable, but I am going to perform tonight anyway. It’s important to me that I get a lot of stage time in before I go to Brown, since I really want to be solid and tight with my material by the time I perform for all my school friends. I also plan to drive to Boston pretty frequently and perform in clubs there, if I can get booking. I heard that the Comedy Studio is very newbie-friendly and receptive to more alternative humor, which is great, since I think my routine is going to be pretty all over the place until I find my voice.
I am using some of my bits from the last show that were well-received, as well as some new ones. They are: Make a Difference, Bush Caused 9/11, and Scott Stapp. I may add Paris Hilton and Capable Hands if I feel good about them, since I want to try out a lot of different material to build a longer routine.
The only problem is, I only have 3 minutes, and I haven’t timed myself yet. I was supposed to do that last night, but instead I got drunk and went bowling with some Derbies. So I am going to have to time myself during lunch using my cell phone.
I think Andrea and a bunch of Springs kids are coming tonight, which makes me more than a little nervous, but it’s cool. At least I’m not making fun of any of them. All I’m saying, they better fucking laugh. I’m just saying.
Last note: if you guys read this blog and have anything to say, feel free to leave a comment. It makes me know that I am loved.

Announced show: July 20th

Well, my stand-up aspirations have been postponed due to a serious cough that had me up all night a couple of nights ago and has destroyed my voice (Although I have a husky baritone that rival’s Matt’s this spring). Tonight I was going back to the stand-up venue from 2 weeks ago, but I guess I will have to wait. On other news, I have a confirmed stand-up appearance at Topaz Hotel in Dupont Circle on Thursday, July 20^th. The address is 1733 N Street NW. If you are in DC this summer, I hope to see you there!

Side note- When did the exclamation point become the gay punctuation? Apparently, anything greater than an ironic detachment to any of my declarative sentences is a tacit admission of homosexuality. That’s not fair! Seriously, guys!

And speaking of gay, Andrea watched the premiere of Project Runway last night, and that show is gayer than Queer Eye. I’m talking Broadway-performing, Cirque-du-soleil-attending, rollerblading, works-out-at-my-gym-in-Dupont gay.* Hmm. Maybe there’s a joke in there somewhere.

*In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that the author aspired for many years to perform on Broadway, rollerbladed throughout grade school, and does, in fact, work out at his gym. But Cirque du Soleil is wicked gay.

Nerdiest jokes ever.

The first one is funny, the second is just unbearably nerdy. I know it's not about my comedy specifically, but I just had to share.

A dairy company wishes to up milk production hires a chemist, an engineer, and a physicist to each come up with plans. After six months a meeting is held where the results of their individual researches are to be presented to the company's board of directors.

The chemist presents his results. He has come up with a feed additive that results in both a 6% increase in milk output as well as milk that lasts 8% longer before spoilage.

Next the engineer presents his design modifications of the milking machine, which can milk cows at a 7% higher rate than previous designs, and also reduces teat chafing, leading to less agitated, and hence more productive cows.

Lastly, the physicist wheels in a large blank chalkboard, upon which he draws a large circle and says:

"Assume a spherical cow . . ."

And here's the terrible one:

So all these polynomials are hanging out at this bar, and in walks this differentiator. he goes up to the bar and demands a free drink. the bartender refuses. the differentiator goes to work and differentiates the bartender into oblivion!

then he goes up to some patrons and demands to have their wallets. they refuse! BOOM he differentiates them into nothing!

he then approaches this lonely guy in the corner and demands his wallet. the guy says "ha, i'm e^x, i'm not afraid of you!"

the differentiator says, "you should be, i'm d/dy!"

Ideas what I wrote

Since the spring, I have kept a document on my computer of potential ideas for stand-up material. There is some great stuff in here that I had forgotten about, some of which is better than the stuff I performed at my show.

I am quoting this one in particular because I think it almost works better in writing than in a set. I like it a lot, it has this Jack Handey appeal to it.

Have you ever had a dream that’s racist? Like all the bad guys are black? I think that’s the worst kind of nightmare. Because nightmares always exploit your weaknesses, and I have serious white guilt. So I’ll be the jolly old plantationeer, smoking pipe-weed and patronizing the local minstrel shows, until my mom appears out of nowhere and starts berating me about owning slaves, and then I realize, she’s right

Anyway, let me know if that's funny, and I'll try it out at the show on Wednesday.

My first comedy show: Carlin

When I was in 10^th grade, my dad surprised me with tickets to see George Carlin at the Alys Stephens Center in Birmingham. After sitting through a decent opening act and an intermission, we waited anxiously as the lights dimmed and George took the stage. Dressed in all black, he grabbed the mic, took a breath, and said “You know what you don’t hear about a lot in public? Pussy farts.”

I turned to my dad and said, “This is going to be a great show.”

I think that is the type of tone I wanted to set with my set on Wednesday. See, when I showed up at the club, I overheard 2 guys about my age talking about how you gotta get the audience on your side from the beginning, and that opening with a long, drawn out premise is death to an unknown comedian. So I panicked and decided to change my setlist so I could do my very funny dirty one-liner as my opening joke, and then go right into my prepared opener. Suffice to say, it didn’t go over quite as well as I had hoped.

So what went wrong? Well, for starters, it’s kind of a gross joke (I’m not telling, you’re just gonna have to come see my show). I don’t know if that audience is really prepared to hear that type of immediately sexual one-liner right off the bat. Sure, I thought the supportive comedians that made up about half the crowd would be more into it than they were, but I think they were more interested in seeing if I froze up and died onstage than actually laughing within 5 seconds of my set. Not to mention the fact that George Carlin has the innate advantage of being George Fucking Carlin, Comedy God.

I still love the joke, so it’s staying in my set, but not as an opener. Maybe when an audience gets to know me, like the Boston crowd next year, I can be a little more risky with my opening jokes, but for now, I’m going to stick with my rather safe, pretty funny joke, just to let the audience know that I don’t completely suck.

Oh, and let me state that, until some arbitrary time when I break this vow, I vow to never open with a new joke. Nothing spells comedic suicide than trying new material the second you get onstage. I have only watched 2 nights of open mic comedy, but 3 people have bombed with admittedly new opening material, and I don’t want to be one of those guys.

Also, anyone who reads this blog: “mic” or “mike”? Windows spell check is all up in my ass about spelling it like “mic,” but I like it that way. Unless popular opinion sways my judgment, I am sticking with it.

Post-performance

So here’s the deal. I didn’t bomb. In fact, I did pretty well. My first few jokes got average response, but the audience warmed up to me after a couple of minutes. I made a last minute substitution for a joke I wrote on Wednesday about a black guy doing an impression of a white guy. Don’t worry, it’s not nearly as hacky as it sounds. That one went over surprisingly well. The best response was to my “inappropriate drunk” joke, which I like a lot because it’s got more of a narrative to it than my other, shorter jokes. So, I’m going to go in that direction next time. Basically, though, I was bitten by the bug, and I don’t think I’m going to stop doing stand-up any time soon.

So, where to go from here? I am currently signed up for the next 2 Wednesdays at the same place. I also know of open mics in Dupont Circle on Monday and Thursday. SO I am going to work on some new jokes this weekend so I can try some new material at these open mics. I gotta replace or improve some of my jokes anyway, so I figured I’d try out new material just to keep challenging myself. What I want is to have 5-7 devastating minutes by the end of the summer. Then in the fall I will be going to Boston a lot to be doing stand-up there. Also, I hope to get in the Brown Stand-up Comics and perform at Brown.

Anyway, now that I didn’t totally bomb, I am allowing people to come to my shows, so I will update this site when I know where I’ll be performing in the future.

Thanks for reading, I hope to have some better content up here soon!