Comedy Incorporated! #1

Buttons I Shouldn't Have Pressed

My Uncle’s Drinking Problem

Resurrect Hitler Button

I'm Naming My Children After Names In My Spam Folder

Bowling O'Hallahan

Celeste Salty

Original Sack

Tag St. Wallclimber

Tammi Hurtgood

Michael Drucker

When It Comes To Disney Films, I'm A Joke Writing Genius

A conversation that actually occurred while watching Beauty and The Beast with my lady companion.

Vicky: If Mrs. Potts is Chip's mother, what do you suppose happened to Chip's father?
Me: Oh, man. Didn't you hear? The dish ran away with the spoon. BOOM! Where's my joke book?
Vicky: I don't know.

Fifty First Jokes: Something That Went Extremely Well

Jiwon Lee and Claudia Cogan's "Fifty First Jokes" at Webster Hall was unbelievably fun. They ran a tight ship with tight, attractive comedians on board manning the mast and stern and starboard and other stuff I read about in Billy Budd.

The line-up was intimidating, as you can see if you squint really hard:



While I'm sure everyone's going to try to figure out who dominated and who didn't, the truth of the matter is that most people simply had great sets. Big hitters like Kumail and Pete Holmes did great, but so did folks like Mike Lawrence and Danny Solomon.

My joke was one of the shortest of the night - something I'm relatively proud of. I'd actually planned to do a longer new joke, but saw something funny on the subway (I know, I know; I also saw this wacky bumper sticker and women are pretty different from black people...) which involved a lady confusing Nickelback with Nirvana. With a New York City hipster crowd, it felt silly not to talk about something I knew would work. And it did.

Anyway.

The best part of the show was the crowd. This wasn't an "Oh, they're nice" crowd. This was a group of motherfuckers who were ready to have a blast. They were listening, really hanging on your every word. If a joke didn't get a laugh, it was 100% on the comic.

In fact, there were too many people who wanted to see the show. Webster Hall was turning folks away at the door because they were at legal capacity.

While I was on sitting on stage, I took a photo of the massive, very awesome crowd:



I think forgetting to turn on Red Eye Control actually made this photo far more entertaining.

Thanks really go to Jiwon and Claudia and John F. O'Donnell (absent, but remembered) for putting on a show that made you remember why you do comedy: because it's fun.

Childhood Myths Revisited #239

Father: Oh No!
Mother: What is it? Oh My God! Blood's everywhere!
Father: Our son must've said "Bloody Mary" three times.
Mother: We don't know that for sure...
Father: I warned you about owning that fucking bathroom mirror. I said we didn't need it. But no - you wanted to look at yourself and put on lipstick.
Mother: I wanted to be beautiful for you...
Father: Don't you put this on me! Your vanity invited that witch into our home!

John Steinbeck Calls A Friend To See If He Finished Reading "The Grapes Of Wrath"

Hey, man, how are you? Uh-huh; that's great. Listen, did you finish reading my new book? Yeah, yeah, "The Grapes Of Wrath." Did you finish it?

What did you think of the ending? No, I really do want to hear what you think.

What - what does it mean? It's right there. It's a man sucking on a woman's boobs. I think that's pretty clear. Do you need more? I thought I was a good writer. Maybe I'm wrong. Let me ask what my Pulitzer thinks. It can't talk, but it has my name on it.

I thought you understood, man. John gets lonely. John needs a little excitement. You know what it's like to be with this woman Carol, my wife? It's terrible. I'm trying to tell people, "I need this. That shop closed up long ago. If I want to buy my medicine, it's going to be in the books or not at all." If there's any metaphor here, it's the dustbowl.

So forgive me if I tried to make a good American novel great. Most people would've put the pen down after pleasing the critics. I only put the pen down after pleasing myself.

You're not the first, though. I read some review that said the ending represented my "belief in the power of sacrifice for the greater good of mankind." What? Like, "Okay, yeah. Ya' got me. I just wrote a five-hundred-page book so I could hide the moral in a titty-sucking scene on the last page. Guilty!"

Come on. You can't kid a kidder. Unless there was a misprint, that scene reads as just one thing, and that's man on woman action.

But here's the good news: paid by the word. Viking Press gets their sob story about poor people; readers get the hottest scene of the decade; and I get cash money.

I mean, America! I love this country!

The 50 Specials Of Christmas - "Tales From The Crypt"

Fast fact: And All Through The House was directed by Robert Zemeckis. Rock it!

Unlike Christmas horror films like Black Christmas, And All Through The House features a woman who has been naughty. She murdered her husband so she could be with her lover. An honest Santa Claus would punish that sort of behavior. And he does. Holy shit he does.

The presence of the woman's daughter only makes things creepier. Is the woman deserving death because she robbed and murdered her husband? Or does she deserve to live because she protects her daughter? What will come of her daughter at the end?

It's a complicated story hidden in an awesome slasher film wrapped in a Christmas special.

The 50 Specials Of Christmas - “The Dick Van Dyke Show”

Did I already cover this one? I honestly can't remember and I'm too tired to look.

This is actually the earliest example of the “Let's Put On A Christmas Special!” storyline I can find. I'm sure there's some earlier one where, like, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin tumble down a hill into a movie lot shooting a Christmas movie. And your great-grandparents would laugh and laugh because they hadn't really invented funny things yet, so tumbling was the best thing you had.

Even though it's an early example, the format was already well-established. The special-in-a-special is comically awkward, with the actors and writers of the show blowing their lines and constantly threatening to ruin Christmas for everyone watching at home.

I think I enjoy these specials because they indicate media's self-obsessiveness. Specials like Dick Van Dyke desperately need to wink at the camera so viewers know that Hollywood knows that Christmas specials can be awkward.

Here's the whole thing below:

The 50 Specials Of Christmas - “Charlie Brown Christmas"

The Charlie Brown Christmas Special is familiar to you. Why recap it? Even if you haven't watched it beginning to end, you've certainly absorbed enough elements from it to construct a pretty good image of it in your head. Charlie's wimpy tree. Linus' religious speech. Snoopy's Christmas decorating competition. You're familiar.

But you're familiar because it works. It works because it hits on the religious and the secular and the ornamental and the personal and the performative. The briefer-than-you-remember special works because it's real. The children may be too precocious – evidenced by the sound of numerous takes by real children spliced together to create the dialog – but they capture the specific melting pot of ideas and traditions that create the amorphous blob of joyous weird that is Christmas.

Also, catchy jazz.

I'm Sorry!

Last night I got home at 2:00 a.m. after my flight was delayed and the baggage claim broke.

So. I'm sorry my updates have been late.

Things will get better.

Oh God, I know they can get better for us!

The 50 Specials Of Christmas - "Yo Gabba Gabba"

I recommend you buy this special in iTunes. It's two fucking dollars. What are you going to spend two dollars on? Beer? This is better than any beer you've ever had. It's a mind explosion of pure Christmas joy.

This clip isn't from the Christmas episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, but I think it makes a pretty good point.



Imagine that, but Christmas. Good. You've got it!

There's no plot to speak of, just unadulterated joyful chiptune club music playfulness. The "Thank You, You're Welcome Too" song will stay in your head, raise a family, and die in your head. What does that even mean?