Friday, September 19, 2003  

Because I'm the Cheapest Motherfucker on the Planet

Does anyone out there have a copy of Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, a Guide to Narrative Craft they'd be willing to let me borrow for a semester? I'm taking a short fiction writing class at Harvard Extension School, mostly because since I work at Harvard, I get classes for 40 bucks and to not take one would be wasteful and retarded.

I can't quite bring myself to spend more on the textbook than on the class, however, so I'm holding out my digital tin cup in case any of my fellow creative types would like to hook me up. I can trade CD's and stage time, if anyone wants 'em.

Comedy Studio Wrapup

Great show at the Comedy Studio last night. Typical for the Studio -- fantastic lineup, and absolutely no crowd. Can't quite seem to get any traction there these days. Last night's show was as good as we've had, even without the benefit of Walters' wang.¹. I was especially pleased with my opening set. Freestyled 15 minutes of stuff I hadn't planned on ever doing onstage. It was one of those rare nights where I pulled that off without being (a) self-indulgent or (b) unfunny. A little of the stuff was one-shot: it won't ever work if I'm consciously trying to make it a bit. But at least one little chunk should be usable.

The rest of the gang came to play as well. Abe Smith, who I've really come to like, was hilarious, and Dan Sulman caught the stream-of-consciousness bug and riffed a little bit on watching Scarface as a 12-year old kid. Brendon Small was in town, brushing up for Aspen. He's sporting some weird new American Chopper-esque moustache and mutton chops, but is still a bona-fide Funny Motherfucker.


¹The spread of the Reuters story seems to have slowed, but Sam forwarded me this email [cursing at me for getting him into this has been excised]:

Hello Sam,

My name is Marc Fellhauer and I am the producer of the Drew and Mike show on WRIF in Detroit. I just read a story about your stand up routine last Thursday in Cambridge when you exposed yourself. I was wondering if you would be interested in talking on the air about your unique comedy. Actually, we find it very funny. I can be reached via this email or at xxx-xxx-5608.

Thanks and I hope to hear from you,

marc

Is it me, or does anyone else smell a setup here? I'm going to try to talk him into doing it but have a contingency plan in place in case they sandbag him.

Power to the People!

Ha! Had to pass this along:

The Strange Habts of Gas Pumpers

Sometimes, I Don't Hate My Day Job

Sure, being a total lackey at Harvard Law School is a lot like being a medieval serf, and being a 33-year old secretary sometimes makes me want to hang myself in the men's room, but every now and then, there's a perk or two that make it moderately less humiliating.

To wit: Erin Judge, a funny comic who also works here, hooked me up with a name badge so I could get into a debate on campus between John Perry Barlow of the EFF (one of my personal rock star Jesuses...Jesi?) and Cary Sherman of the RIAA. Sherman bowed out at the last second, citing airport closure concerns (which I buy...there's a goddamn hurricane coming), but Barlow was still astounding. He's so passionate and smart, and he's got the moral weight of being a successful musician that's actively encouraged free sharing of his music for years. The highlight of the session was his assertion that music isn't a product to be consumed, that at its best, it's a verb and a direct communication between his heart and his listener's, and that the Internet and digital recording make it possible to make all of human history available to all humanity, and that that goal should trump trying to prop up a broken music industry.

Poetically or ironically, based on your perspective, I used my minidisc recorder to record the whole thing, and will encode it as an MP3 tonight after the show.

Insomnaic Conspiracy Freaks Rejoice!

Thanks to John Curtin for a tip on this wonderful news! No one makes good radio like Art Bell. I fell in love with his show the night a man named Captain Galactic talked about how he'd been sent to save the earth from Rigel 7, and the only way to get to Rigel 7 was through a dimensional portal with an approved guide: The Archangel Michael OR Sasquatch would do.

Why do we lock our schitzophrenics up in jail when we should be giving them air time???

Midnight Club Better Be On There!

Quick pointer for the geeks in the house: Game Spy is running a week-long series on the 25 most overrated games of all time.

Saddam/Baghdad Bob Reprise

Adam Pearlman and Andy Wasif will be reprising their Saddam Hussein/Baghdad Bob sketch at the Comedy Studio tonight! I'm sure the rest of the show will be fantastic, but this alone should inspire you to head out to the club.

Nude Comedy Roundup or How I Got Naked in Some Man's Basement For Free Booze and Hummus

You would think that a road story that begins with "So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me" would get pretty juicy pretty fast. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. I thought so...hell, that's why I agreed to do a free spot on the Naked Comedy Show. I got such good mileage out of the time I got a little naked on stage, I figured that if I got all the way naked, I'd have a bit of Hunter Thompsonian proportions.

I was wrong. Who knew?

So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me. There were about 45 people crammed into the basement of a house in Newton, theoretically a staid, white-bread community where things like this simply do not go on. No one in Newton would be crazy enough to let naked people sit on their white carpet, would they? Oh, yes they would, brother. Oh yes they would. A local comic had promised these people a naked comedy show, and they were there to collect. Luckily, they'd let us decline coming to the naked potluck beforehand. Conventional comic wisdom is to never eat with your crowd before a show, and this was definitely not the night to break that rule.

And then BAM, I'm out the door and onto the stage, facing a sea of people ranging from fully nude to fully clothed, and righteously fine to astoundingly lumpy. Two men in Speedos are spooning to the left of me, a good looking woman in a sports bra is sacked out to the right, and three naked comics stand in the back of the room to watch me face down a demon. Let's put it right out there. If I liked how I look naked, I wouldn't even have to DO stand-up comedy. With the exception of ages 1-6 and a pretty sweet senior year in college, I've always had the kind of body that makes a guy develop a good pesonality pretty fucking fast. It's basic psychology that comedians become comedians because of something bad in their past. Mine was how I looked in Levi 501s in the ninth grade.

So I don't want to get all Rudy about it, but suffice it to say that it took some balls for me to do it. I didn't really have a choice. Given the opportunity, I'll yak your ear off for an hour about how standup comedy is the purest form of performance art. How there are no barriers and how only a comic can really connect with a crowd. So when the chance to strip away the last few barriers arose, I realized that I'd pontificated myself into a corner, and so dammit, here I was in a psychologically significant and truly fucking horrible situation.

And I don't know why or how, but it was the most engaged 25 minutes I've ever spent on stage. Period. I was jacked right into that crowd, and the laughs came as easy as breathing. We were in that perfect comedy rhythm, and I think I could have stopped talking entirely and still kept on getting them, because we were just riding that real comedy wave together. I don't know if it was being naked, or facing a fear, or having a room full of freethinkers, or if I just got lucky, but it was a great...GREAT...night of comedy. Hell, we even got to hot tub afterwards and finish the leftovers from the potluck.

I ate some hummus, soaked in the jacuzzi, and I even treated myself to a Kentucky Cheroot for the ride home. I had a happy skinbuzzy kind of feeling on, so I rolled down the window and just cranked up the music. The radio was playing David Bowie, and you don't exactly have to be a shaman to understand that that's one of the universe's fundamental ways of telling you you've just done the right thing.

Hey, Now, You're a Blog Star...

My boss is having lunch with Eugene Volokh today, and he just called to confirm. How geeky is it that I got moderately twitterpated because I was talking to the man whose blog I've been reading the longest? On the other hand, since I'm neck deep in what-the-hell-have-I-done-with-my-life angst, I don't know why talking to a guy who got a math degree at 15 makes me happy at all.

Jude and I ended up on Warren Ellis' blog last night. Poor kiddo has a wicked cold, and I'm snapping pix to get on the web. I'm a total asshole.

Good christ. If I'd known just how many goddamn newspapers would pick up the Walters penis item, I wouldn't have started listing them. Now I'm trapped in a cycle where all I do is follow the media trail of this phallic meme. Sam's wang now has a better press kit than Sam himself. And apparently, I'm its agent. Sigh. That said, more papers in more countries, including China and Croatia:

The Taipei Times
Sampion (Croatia) (2 down from the Arnold piece)
Tiscali News (UK)

Thanks to Rob Reuter for the sightings.

The penis du jour just re-hit Yahoo. Only this time the comments are actually about Sam. Come watch the dimwits who would actually take the time to comment on a Yahoo news story race each other to skin flute puns.

People have been asking me to post about the Naked Comedy Show I did this weekend, and I intend to. I just wanna wait for the hubbub around Sammy's schlong to die down so that my entire site isn't about comics' genitalia. I didn't intend to change from a static homepage to an electronic sausage party.

Sam's penis continues to get more press. Sure, the Hindustan Times was impressive, but now he's made it all the way to Jackin World, which I gather is something like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for cocks.

(Thanks to Ku for the tip via Kvetch)

RIAA Redux

I've gotten a few emails, so I just wanted to restate my point in a much less rambling way: I don't believe that the RIAA is concerned with protecting artists from being screwed; I believe that the RIAA is concerned that new technology will interfere with its own ability to screw artists.

Here's another anti-RIAA site I surfed via Penny Arcade, for whom I am basically becoming a shill, their writing is so damned good.

Yikes! It just hit Yahoo! For some reason, the comments are a weird collection of posts about other penis, flag, or flute stories on Yahoo, so it's a little bizarre.

I know I promised people that I wouldn't post links to the Reuter's UK story about Sam on the Thursday Night Fight, but since it's gotten picked up by the Boston Globe, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Winnipeg Sun, the Hindustan Times, and the New York Post, I figure the cat's kinda outta the bag.

Read the links above for a crash course in journalistic spin. We go from the original story:

Walters' tribute involved decorating his penis with stars and stripes and showing it at the appropriate moment. Audience members laughed, but Walters lost the contest.

"I don't think my penis has ever been more embarrassed or looked so small," the comic told Reuters on Friday. "You would have thought the vertical stripes would have made it seem longer."

But the Post takes it off the wire and changes it thus:

Comedian Sam Walters was battling for laughs at a comedy club in Cambridge, Mass., when he unzipped his pants and exposed his penis - painted red, white and blue like the American flag.

The audience wasn't impressed.

"I don't think my penis has ever been more embarrassed or looked so small," he said.

Tha's the ENTIRE story as run in the New York Post, whose own agenda is pretty obvious.

On the other hand, the picture the Hindustan Times attaches to the story is downright surreal. I assume someone knew what they were doing when they put the "enlarge" button under it.

Oh, man, this is going to get weirder before it gets better. For his part, poor Sammy is shitting proverbial bricks. And not entirely without reason. He lives in Southie, not exactly the home of lovers of genital-oriented satire. He could end up blugeoned to death with a side of corned beef. However, I've seen his apartment, and it really looks like an IRA safehouse, so would-be "critics" may shy away.

The stories above totally leave out the context (and MY NAME, harumph) and make it sound like some sort of defiant, Sinead-ripping-up-a-pic-of-the-Pope moment, and it wasn't that at all. It was a totally self-deprecating-I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this kind of thing, and in the context of the whole show, came off both hilarious and surprisingly not offensive. It was just funny, man, but you can't explain funny, and I think Sam and I are both worried that at some point, he's going to have to try to do just that.

So for the record: it was funny, it was appropriate, and it was by-god good satire.