The Comedy Lightbulb Switch

I've been struggling to take another step up in my comedy over the last couple of weeks. I haven't had any crazy gigs since Bobcat came to Laughs in July. I haven't been booking myself out much either as the summer is pretty lite and I'm out enjoying the sun while it's still here. Still, I'm always somewhat working, always asking, what's next? I was most recently stressing over my audition set for the Vancouver Comedy Festival. I actually did the set twice, once to no one, and other to a booker I may never see again. Long story short, I'm probably not going to Vancouver this year (it's in 3 weeks). Regardless, a very big development did come out of the audition experience. Here's the story.

I had recently written a new joke about how nice it is when you get to have sex in the morning, before getting out of bed. I deliver it with more confidence than anything I've told before because A) it IS really nice, and B) it actually happened. It really is my favorite new joke. It's got a great, easy to relate to angle, characters, and fun twist at the end. Because of its energy, I started using it as my opener when I first wrote it. It would start my set with, "I'm having a great week this week because...", and go into the new joke. This is how I started my second Vancouver audition. The owner of Laughs Comedy Spot takes me aside and says, "Brian, love the new premise, but it really clashes with your other, more self-deprecating stuff. You should really think about changing the voice or moving it around in the set, because as your opener, no one knows whether to feel bad for you or not when you tell a self-deprecating joke later." As much as I love constructive criticism, I was upset by this comment initially. "It's my new opener!" I thought to myself. "This is the high energy stuff I should be doing! How dare he suggest I rewrite this!" It wasn't that dramatic but you get the idea. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. He was right. Time for an experiment.

My next big gig after the audition was opening for a comic named Brad Upton at a casino about 30 mins north of Seattle. I had decided earlier that I would open using my old opener (about my parents naming me BJ) and put the new morning sex joke at the end. I thought it would make a nice storybook ending to my set. "See all these bad things that happened to me? Well it doesn't matter now, cause I'm doing this" sort of thing. Best part, it worked! Left the stage feeling really good about how my act flowed and how my new joke worked even better as a closer.

But there was still something nagging me about this new joke. It kind of smelled different than my other material. Even as a closer I felt like the audience wasn't really going to accept this premise after hearing all my previous no-so-confident opinions about everything else. I didn't want to water down the morning sex material so to speak. I need a way to alter the approach on the rest of my act. Enter my friend Joe Larson. Joe is probably one of the hottest young comedians on the east coast who your probably haven't seen yet. You will very soon I guarantee it. His act oozes confidence, even when he's talking about how he's not, he still is. I wanted some of that in my act. I asked myself, what is Joe trying to say with his material? I wrote it down some of his jokes and the attitude/opinion he delivered them with. Then I asked, what am I REALLY trying to say with my material? Not "what am I saying today" not "what did I write down originally", but really, to me, deep down inside, why do I care about the premise? What do I care about? I looked at my jokes and then, suddenly, the attitude just started jumping out at me. I was so excited I could barely write it all down (maybe coffee was also to blame). I started grouping jokes into categories based on these various attitudes (which I wrote out as headers) and then segways and setups that had always seemed clunky and void of laughter became obsolete. "I don't need to tell them this because what I really wanted to say was this..." kind of thing. What was left was the real funny parts to my ideas but none of the "fluff" I had padded it with because I didn't know how to butt it up against anything else. When I finished hacking, my opener was gone, assigned to a point about 4 jokes into my first section. My closer is, well I might not have one anymore. Everything is a complete mess and, at the same time, more aligned than I have ever seen it before.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to put it any of this into practice yet. This could be an amazing new epiphany or just another detour on my development as a comic. I'll know in a couple of weeks. Either way, its moments like these that make the creative process something I never want to live without.

Hemp Fest is filled with D-bags and Hippies, why do I go?

Cause I want/have to work the comedy stage there, that's why. Laughs Comedy Spot in Kirkland got the job of providing daylight comedy entertainment in a tent at Hemp Fest. Hemp Fest, if you don't know, is a weekend long celebration to the (hopefully?) eventual legalization of marijuana. It has very little to do with the industrial uses of hemp. Me, being a really big nerd, that was the reason I first went. I thought, "maybe I'll be able to buy a really cool hemp backpack or something. At the very least, a nice poster." So there I was, circa 2006 on the hottest fucking day of the summer, strolling down to the park to buy myself a backpack. Little did I know, the creators originally wanted to call it "Marijuana Party!" but Seattle talked them down to "Hemp Fest" with the provision that if don't actually blow the smoke in a cops face, they'll let you smoke pot in public just this once...

I didn't really know that Hemp Fest was this sort of mecca for some people. They come from all over. All different kinds of people. Actually they are all the same type of people. All selling the same thing. Bongs. And t-shirts with bongs on them. They had bongs made out of junk this year, that was interesting. There were Arabs selling hookas like they were electronics. That was fun to watch, especially at 6pm on Sunday when they all mysteriously went "on sale". There were bongs that were six feet tall, which is stupid, especially for a person my size. Even stupider were the douche bags that were carrying them around obviously for the attention. It was like a stoner's version of a Porche. I'll take a real Porche, thank you.

The one guy I did miss this year was the unbreakable pipe guy. He's been replaced with bamboo pipe guy, which was nice, but I really liked the other one. He would whack this thing against the table going "IT'S UNBREAKABLE" . "SEE?!?!" He was the Sham-Wow guy of Hemp Fest basically. That really is the only reason to go to Hemp Fest, the people are so goshdarned funny, even if they are all hippies and douchebags. If they aren't funny they are also semi-naked. There are two types of semi-naked at Hemp Fest. There are the girls sporting the bra because they live in Seattle and don't actually own a bikini. Then there are the guys. These guys I missed at Folk Life. These are the fellas that work out all summer, then go to events like this shirtless and strut around, as if someone is going to go, "OMG, I love your tat and your 6 foot bong, please have sex with me and my friend with the bra on". So now the guy driving around in the bong-Porche is getting it detailed as if that makes it look better? I did not see one hookup the whole weekend, although I did see a guy pleasuring himself under a tree. Now THAT was awkward.

The comedy? Oh right, that. I did 5 sets. I watched a couple comics get eaten alive by a stoned crowd with the munchies and no appetite for jokes. I watched one comic clear the room on purpose, and a couple more clearing it on accident. I even did some improve on stage with a bunch of other comics with a special guest host. I capped off the weekend with a set in front of the last act. It's really interesting to do comedy during the day time to people who didn't invest anything in seeing your act. By interesting I mean sucked a larger than average penis. Even so, I did about 15 minutes and really had the crowd on my side by the end of it (at least in my head that's how it went down). Was able to talk with them and had a lot of fun with it, good end to it all. Note: I want a 12 year old sitting in the front row at all of my shows and he has to be as cool as the one at this show. Thanks.

I think the best part of doing comedy at Hemp Fest was that we had a backstage with our own bathroom, drinks, and a place to sit that I didn't fear getting stabbed in the ass from someones broken bong or pipe. We were supposed to have other people that had backstage passes back there with us, but the owners of the club where like "ummm I don't know you, so get the fuck out of our area." Most of them wouldn't have stayed even if we let them; the other backstages apparently were much "cooler" than ours. And they had food. We had a bag of chips, but we were fine.

In the end, I was there for the same reason all comics go to this sort of thing, to get new material for my act (and my blog). And I got another really nice poster.

It's so Freaking Hot! or: How I learned to stop sweating and love the sun

That's a lie. I don't think I'll ever stop sweating. At least not anytime this week. Yesterday and today Seattle broke the hottest day on record record with 103 and 96 degrees respectively. It's really freaking hot, for Seattle. Its like 85 degrees in my house when I try to fall asleep, at 2am. I've been getting about 5 hours of sleep this week because of the heat, so I've been especially tired and cranky at work. On top of this, I find myself waking up at 4am all delirious thinking that someone is trying to break into my house all because I'm sweating and dehydrated and the fan is blowing straight into my eyeballs so I can barely open them in the morning. Seriously, I spent a good 10 minutes staring out my window last night thinking that my "fire twin" was going to come in through the door and it was going to get even hotter! I was totally sober to the best of my knowledge. That, or I need to go get some more of those raviolis from the farmers market. It's actually really nice though in the morning. Reminds me of my first job in Phoenix when I was doing tech support and needed to be in at work at 8am. The sun was just starting to get hot and there was a muggy coolness to the air still. Then it got hot as balls (mine can attest to this).

But Phoenicians know how to deal with heat. So does anyone from the South or the Eastern seaboard. West coasters north of San Fran, they're all retarded. I say "they" and not "we" only because I bought my fans last year and haven't been a part of the fan and a/c buying frenzy that everyone saw coming from about a week away. Seriously, if I wouldn't feel like such a douche, I could have made a killing in the air conditioning futures market. What am I getting at? There are no fans left in Seattle. Actually there are still some left in Seattle. There are no fans left in Bellevue is more appropriate. There are big signs at the entrance to the Home Depot in Redmond that says they are out of air conditions, check back in 2 weeks. Two weeks?!? It will be probably be raining by then, who needs a flipping air conditioner then? (Hopefully not, my parents are coming to visit). I heard some friends saying that they wanted to check into a hotel room for the a/c. Consider you can't even buy it, I would be suprised if you could rent it...

But fans and fan technology has been the topic of choice this week, because I work with a bunch of nerds really. The current argument is that the "Vornado" is the best of fans. After Tuesday night, I'll agree with them, but the name is just silly. They're all silly names, I know. You go to Target and all the brands are "Hawaiian Breeze" or "Wind Extruder" or "Hunter". I think a good marketing move would be to make the brand of fans called "I Am Hot". Then all the different sizes and shapes could be different variations on the phrase. "I Am (A Little) Hot" would be the smaller one, good for bedside tables and office desks. "I Am (Always) Hot" would be a clip on solar powered fan, for the sweater on the go. "I Am (Really) Hot" would be the room sized box fan, great for any space inside the home. "I Am (Annoying) Hot" would be the one that rotates and purifies the air at the same time. "I Am (Fucking) Hot" would basically come with a block of dry ice and a package of condoms. I would have the "I Am (so hot I'm hallucinating 'fire twins') Hot" model, which, coincidentally, is also a box fan.

The other part of the Summer Heat Showdown 2009 that I enjoy are all the Facebook updates regarding the weather. I mean, even if you lived in an air conditioned bubble you could still experience vicariously the miserableness of others though the science of the internet. These daring pioneers of weather opinion reporting are also the same people, that, go back far enough, you'll see them complaining about it being too cold on their Facebook accounts. I'm convinced that God has a Facebook account and is friends with EVERYONE and is now just screwing with us all in response to his news feed. Twitter and Facebook are very god-like like that. If I could play God, I would really love to make it 45 degrees for a couple of days coming up, just to make the Facebook status updates go from "oooh this weather is cooling me off, so nice!" to "man I kind of miss the heat now, just had to turn on the heater" to "WTF! Its August and its 45 degrees! Seattle blows!". Until I have the power to control the weather, I'll write blog posts about it next to my box fan, ehem, I mean "I Am (so hot I'm hallucinating 'fire twins') Hot" fan.

Ice Cream is BACK!

I like good food. I like eating. I like eating good food. Good food, I'm convinced, used to just be called "food" 30 years ago. It was just what you ate. You didn't really think about it. If it was sweet it probably had sugar in it. If it was salty, there was probably a crapload of MSG in it. Nutrition wasn't really an issue, since food was made out of food.

Now, there seems to be this idea of a "craft food" movement that is happening right now. Kind of like what happened to the beer industry 20 years ago. Refresher, before that point, all beer in this country was crap. But, like 100 years ago, beer was amazing, because it was really beer! Now. Fast forward today. Food, or the thing that we know of as food, isn't really food. 30 years ago it was, but now, for the most part, it is not. Enter the craft food movement. Enter, ice cream stores. These are on the forefront of the craft food movement, right behind those god damned cupcakes. We used to have ice cream store, then things like Dairy Queen and Baskin Robins took them off the map. We'll they're back my friends, back with a vengeance and a really douchy following.

Ok, first off, the ice cream (and the cupcakes for that matter) are delicious. Their great! Taste freaking amazing! Wish I could have them everyday. Good for those people for making such great ice cream. My problem with the whole situation is the douchebags that go to the new ice cream places when they open and comment how it tastes so "traditional and good, not like those brands you find in the store". Screw you people! You're the ones that welcomed the shitty ice cream with open arms when it first came out. Holy crap its a $1 cheaper and packed with more of that "home-churned taste." I'm just really afraid that in 20 years there is going to be a guy that opens an Apple Store that serves home grown apples that were actually grown on a tree. People will come and go, "Wow, all that classic apple taste. This is a place to bring the whole family to experience an apple, the way it should be." People will come by the hundreds to eat his apples, he'll open a chain of Apple Stores all over Seattle and Portland. A month later he'll be sued by the iPod-enabled robotic reincarnation of Steve Jobs. To think, his reintroduction, would have helped the APPL stock price that much.

This blog post is making me hungry. I think I might head over to Safeway to pick up a gallon of Dryers. They're 50 cents off today!

Cleaning Gauntlet 2009, Summer Edition

My apartment has reached a critical mass of dirtiness. It's not really that dirty, but I think it's finally breached the threshold between "unkept bachelor pad" and "you should really wear shoes if you're going to be in the kitchen". That's how I know it's time. You know how you put those strips in a solutions in chem lab and they would tell you how acidic or basic a solution is? That is what my linoleum tile in the kitchen is like. When it gets to be a certain shade of dull gray, I can just assume my entire apartment is that dirty and it should all be cleaned. They should make a sticker for that...

So the summer battle is upon us. It's my apartment versus me. I've been training these last couple of months for said battle by watching as much Stargate SG-1 as I can on Hulu. My apartment, on the other hand, has been getting better and better at hiding things I know must be somewhere, but cannot find. I don't have that big of an apartment; it must be getting really good at this. Something must be done. So after my epic comedy weekend, I throw down apartment (read: actually have time). I bite my thumb at thee! Prepare for an onslaught!

Now, the only problem with putting off the battle this long is the following: I cannot battle the beast alone. My own two hands cannot conquer the task, or at least, that would be too much work and I could really use some help. Short of magic, more SG-1, or someone else to help me, I need supplies. Now, usually I would want to use something earth friendly, cause that's how I am. I have a size 9 carbon footprint and I aim to keep it that way. Which is great, cause today, there are dozens of brands of cleaners that don't have artificial scents or dies, are PH balanced, or all natural ingredients. And they work great, as long as you clean more than once a quarter. Unfortunately for me, my apartment has become to strong and can no longer be fought with such gentle cleaning method. It must be beaten back into submission, like a penicillin resistant bacteria. I'm pretty sure you could throw all the lavender water or dandelion paste in the world at the grease on my stovetop and it would just smile right back at you. Smile as only 3 months of making bacon and frying potatoes undisturbed can. So I have to bring out the big guns. The cleaning solutions that were reverse engineered from weaponry used during the first World War. Solvents that say fuck you to grease, mold, and certain car paints. Products that will probably cause cancer in your grandchildren, but holy crap does it make cleaning easy!

The dust clears. The level of toxicity has been deemed inhabitable for humans. My kitchen is spotless. I will try my best to keep it this way, but I can feel it already giving into the laws of entropy. The universe is forever moving to a state of disorder. Next is my living room. Then the bathroom. Don't even talk to me about the loft. I think that place is growing a personality from the lack of attention coupled with the fact that I'm using basically as a garage right now.

Mom if your reading this, really, its not that dirty...

Opening for an 80's Legend

Yep, that's what I was doing this weekend. Bobcat Goldthwait came to Kirkland this weekend as part of his "Alimony 2009" tour, and yours truly was his opener. Funny how quick this gig came up. I remember what Laughs Comedy Spot's owner, Dave, asked me about wanting to do this gig. I was floored. Bobcat Goldthwait!?! Me? Really? That's awesome. I've been listening to this guy for years, his last CD was hilarious (pick it up if and take a listen). I know, a lot of people grew up with this guy, and I'm about as old in living years as his comedy career, but it was still a big deal. So that was back in March I think and I was thinking to myself, "wow, July, that's in a while", but it has gone and went.

So I'm basically writing this post as an answer to the "how was it"s that I've gotten from all my friends. Not that I don't love them, thanks to everyone that has asked, I just work during the day and wanting to respond to each of you was making my head spin. So here's how it was...

We did four shows. Two on Friday and two on Saturday. I had done a show the night before at Laughs with a Dr. Kevin Fitzgerald (cat doctor / standup comedian) so I was feeling pretty good and practiced. One thing about this weekend that bothered me is that I didn't really have any new jokes besides one that I wrote last week. Good news is, the new joke is awesome, bad news was that I was doing a lot of material that people may have already seen. This bothered me some going into the gig (takeaways from the gig to follow). I didn't get to meet Bobcat until after my first set since he got there in between me hitting the stage. His sets were awesome. He did about 20 minutes it seems on Michael Jackson. I know that he had about 10 minutes on him before he died, so I think he knows that this is the death of the Michael Jackson bit tour. At least it would have seemed that way. Hilarious though for the next couple of months. He also told a joke about almost dying in a plane crash and the pilots reaction basically should have been, "ok, I'm going to try some shit I learned in pilot school..." Had me rolling every time (4 times).

My sets were all good. I never came close to bombing, although the first nights crowds were there to see Bobcat and really couldn't give a rat's ass who the openers were (or so it would seem). Here are some takeaways though from the weekend:

• My energy level the second night was down. I really need to make sure that is up before hitting the stage. It showed a bit.
• My long form jokes are getting better. Now that I know where the punches are and how I want to take the joke, I need to shape them so they sound more natural and less predictable.
• I was able to tag the crap out of one joke by allowing myself to be overcome by the ridiculousness, I should do that more often.
• My nerdy stuff isn't for everyone, but those that it is, it seems to destroy them.
• My crowd interactions are improving, and going out into the crowd really helped my relatibility with the crowd
• I think in one set, nine out of ten jokes are about sex in some way. I know, I know, I'm a 25 year old male, but I really think I need to branch out.
  
• Bobcat's groupies are not called Bobkittens.
  

I got a new Mike Birbiglia CD from Amazon.com today, so I'm giving that a listen as he is doing the kind of story telling I want to be striving for. "Two Drink Mike" is his first one, already consumed that. It was a little bit better than "Secret Public Journal", but this one has more stories, and since that's what I'm trying to do, well there ya go.

Oh, and here is a picture with me and Bobcat. I'm way too happy in the picture but the other one didn't come out very good. I think it's because he just wrote "Good Job" on my CD before signing it...

Can you Transform into less awesome, no way!

Quick one on the movie I saw last night. First of all, I lowered all expectations before seeing "Transformers II". That's what you have to do. Set the bar so low that it feels like you are leaping over it, no matter what happens. So here were my three criteria for this to be a good movie: 1) Things had to explode, alot. 2) Things had to explode, alot. 3) Megan Fox has to be running around, alot. "Transformers II, Revenge of the Fallen" was three for three. How could I be upset about that? It really is the best mindset to have when going to the movies, especially when its $10+ dollars now to see.

Transformers even went above and beyond my expectations. We've got too more racist robots, Skid and Mudflap. Some hot biker girl robots. Oh, and (spoiler?) some crazy hot terminator 3 like robot that tries to fuck Shiala LeBeouf to death. Optimus Prime doesn't have lines like "my bad" which is kind of nice. Shiala's character's mom is also a highlight. She is the source of most of the swearing and sexual reference. Without her character I'm sure we could have brought this down to a PG rating.

Best part of the movie is the complete rush of "I want to blow some shit up" feeling that you get after watching this movie. That's really the only feeling you can have. Cause "that was a fantastic cinematic event" doesn't really come to mind much. So if you don't get the first one, you're kind of screwed. My friend Matt and I left the theater and decided it was a good idea to completely tweak out in front of all the parents and their kids. I was thinking, it must suck to take a kid to this film as a parent, then I realized how we were acting, and I thought, "crap, how much would it suck to take us to the movies? We're 25. Oh well, screw it!" Then we tried to do our best impersonation of a transformer sound, which probably would have confused even a meth-head from Marysville. About 15 minutes later I got home and passed out, having expended all the energy I unusually burn over 3 hours in about 5 minutes. Whatever, I blame the Linkin Park song.