What You Are Laughing At

Hack Comedy Is Not On The South Beach Diet

Long blog, short: I hate apathy, and I hate confident apathy even more.
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On Wednesday night, 1/21/04, I witnessed a performance by a stage-whore over in Kirkland. I will not call this guy a comedian, I refuse to. He did about 6 minutes on-stage, 5 minutes of which were street jokes.
Street Jokes are the jokes we told each other in grade school, usually offensive, and are available to anyone with an internet connection or access to a bookstore. Someone writes these things, publishes them, someone e-mails them to you a hundred times, and after a while you get reeeeal bored of them.
So the Wednesday night dork comes up to me after his set and, with all the cocksure swagger of an overnight DJ on KNDD 107.7 with a pocketful of GHB, "aks's" me, "Hey man, you see my set?"
Me: "Yep."
Idjit: "And?"
Me: "And, what?"
Buttcrack: "And what did you think of it?"
Me: "You did a lot of street jokes."
Assneck: "Excuse me?"
Me: "You did a lot of street jokes, stuff you get off the internet. You opened with a Chris Rock joke, then did stuff that I've had e-mailed to me over the past 5 years."
Sh!tpile: "Well hey, I'm an entertainer, my job is to get people to laugh, and they were laughing."
Mind you, it's not his JOB, he is not a working comedian, he's some guy from DC who has "low-rent wanna-be pimp" written all over him. But he did set himself up to be called-out on-stage, which I did, because I just can't let it go for some reason.

Here's why it bothered me:
1) He stole jokes.
2) He told them as if he wrote them. This makes him a thief and a liar.
3) He has no integrity as a stand-up comedian, so I cannot call him one.
4) By the time I went on-stage, homeboy had left, which was sad, because I mentioned his stealing while I was on the mic. Why?
Imagine you are a really good cook. You spend 4 days preparing a 6-course meal for your friends, picking out the menu and the ingredients, etc. You present this meal and they sit back and say "My lord, that was amazing. If ever there was proof of God, I found it in your Butternut Squash Ravioli." For an ender, you trot out a fancy dessert that everyone loves, and yet someone feels the need to throw whip cream on top of it. I worked hard to let it stand for itself, and yet someone's gotta show what they can bring, even if they didn't make it, because they believe it will add to the experience.

Folks, you can get Cool Whip any old time of the day. But some of your comedians want you to experience something richer, something tastier, something... Geoffier.