Now Would Be A Good Time To Leave
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Holy infant so tender and mild, I work next to one of the most annoyingly enthusiastic people ever to walk the face of a Harry&David catalog. This disembodied voice, slightly nasal and broken only by coughing fits, of which there are two per day (10:30am & 2:45pm), consistently draws from a vast knowledge of "snappy comebacks" and "saccharine sarcasm" to, well, darn it... Keep spirits up around here! Oh yes she does! Yes she doobly-do!
Fashion, if you can call it that, is seriously lacking any semblance of knowledge that it is 2004. Comfort is key, I dig it, but oh lord, the sweaters parading past my desk each day make Pink Floyd's "The Wall" movie look like a flip-book. I haven't seen these horrendous color combinations since the last time I ate salsa with Lucky Charms, then puked. Does the Queer Eye 5 do 40-something tree-huggers?
She's actually a very cold person, too. Once away from her desk she is cooled way back, as if she's not the one who just finished a 37 minute (you count the time when life is hurtin') conversation with her sister about where she may have put the Male Cardinal Ornament because, she just knows it was next to her favorite cat ornaments. Oh lord, do you see why I'm up to 2 bottles of cough syrup a day?
People are people, so why should it be
Everything she does bothers the sh!t out of me?
She's having a coughing fit RIGHT NOW. This is the 3rd one today. These go on for a good 3 minutes. Why? Because she doesn't get up to get some wa-wa. Why? I don't know. After once kicking a bookcase I had moved into a hallway I remembered that "Hey, if I don't want a sore baby toe after yelling the big F at 1 in the a.m., so I'm walking over here." It's learning, adaptation, growth, and not dying of a sore throat in 2004.
Somehow this won't come up on her yearly review.
Geoff Lott: Comedian, Writer, Philosoteur. I am here to amuse you, not entertain you. If not now, later. If not you, somebody else. If you can't laugh at yourself, that's just fine, too. I will do it for you.
Friday, January 23, 2004
Hack Comedy Is Not On The South Beach Diet
Long blog, short: I hate apathy, and I hate confident apathy even more.
---------------------------------------------
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.
Long blog, short: I hate apathy, and I hate confident apathy even more.
---------------------------------------------
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.
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