Thursday, October 05, 2006  

Where've I Been? I Don't Know, Either

I believe this is what they call The Grind. I'm in it, now. Grinding them out - show after show after show. No complaints, dig? It's good. Real good. New jokes are coming off the assembly line, polished and shiny and ready to roll. There they are, on my set list, in comics' shorthand, one after another:

Punch a Cat.
PhD Penis.
Trash Can.
Goddamn Wakefield.
Duct Tape.

Meaningless, I'm sure, to everyone but me. Someday I'll turn up murdered, and some grizzled cop will pluck my Moleskine off my broken, bloody (yet still rakishly handsome) corpse and spend weeks, maybe months, trying to figure out just what these lists mean. Are they codes? Was this bald but well-hung dead guy a terrorist? What the fuck does "Fresh Prince Zombies" mean???

What it means, fellow misanthropes, is that I'm writing again, and that's why I don't mind The Grind. Because I don't really write, per se. Pen very rarely touches paper. Rather, I have these little joke nuclei floating in my rye-addled brain, with possible punchlines swirling around them like little protons, and it isn't until I get in front of a room full of drunken, possibly hostile comedy patrons that I can even try to grab one and make it work. It's all very Heisenberg (lesser-known Jewish comic), you know? But it's where my stuff gets made. Other comics can kickstart the act of creation while scribbling in a coffeehouse, and I envy them. Me, I need the chaos, the unknown, the possibility of actual physical violence to move my little funny fetuses down the birth canal and commence active labor.

Some of you may have already seen the new stuff, if you're one of the brave cats that's been coming to my shows at Jimmy Tingles, or if you're one of the numerous (and uniformly good-looking) people who came out at Keene State, or if you were one of those weird Swedish tourists at the Green Dragon. I hope you dug it. I used to hate my audiences; now I guess I consider them lab rats. That's improvement, right?

Check the calendar up and to the right. This weekend I take this little comedy research project to Hyannis and Manchester - the MIT and CalTech of joke labs.