Circus Freak of the Week

The highlight of my week has been receiving my "AquaTeen Hunger Force" DVD Box-set. I haven't had a decent set of comedy all week, but that's okay. I'm cool with that. In the meantime I have some friends, The Seattle Comedy Mafia (self-christened... I call them the Seattle Clown Mafia, they're freaks who pack in 5 to a car, all with red noses) who are blowing the stages up around here. This is good, because they are funny, cool, and truly care about the comedy scene here in Seattle. Check them out!

Like anybody's actually reading this dang thing...

So yeah, the AquaTeens happen to be making me LOL, which I don't do very often. The funniest people on TV aren't even people, that can't be good for America. Of course, what's funny is subjective, but I do love this show. Yes, I'll be 30 on Feb. 4th, so what? If American TV had anything close to BBC's "The Office" then maybe I'd be entertained. America's arts movement sucks, for the most part. Did I just call TV an "art?" Save me now. I need to be laid 'ponst a PotteryBarn sleigh bed while wearing Old Navy fleece and doused with Hamm's the Beer Refreshing... Regardless, The AquaTeens RULE.

Hey, this episode has a Mummy in the basement! HA HA HA HA HA! You must NEVER hug a mummy! He's using the basement as his tomb, looks like the floorboards are cursed. If you don't follow, maybe THIS is more your speed.

Lord almighty, Wednesday (check this out) was a weird night for comedy. The comedy was great, but the after-show stuff really stunk. I realize now how much of a pain in the pipes some dudes can be when they have no ability to talk to women. They're parasites. They are the smarmy used car salesmen of the Single's Scene. A guy like me finds wants to talk about driving, and these idiots are pushing a great deal on a 1983 Honda Civic Hatchback. Not that I'm in a position to sell a car, but sometimes it's not about the sale, it's about the shopping. I can't have people with bad credit trying to buy on my account.
Further adventures in apprehending these idiots will be blogged. THis was boring.

Hit me!

The Open Mic Review,01-26-04

Wow. That’s all I can say after sitting through Monday night’s open mic show at the Comedy Underground. I don’t mean “wow” as in “Now that’s a big raise!” or as in “She not only dumped me, she stole my dog’s food and pair of my underwear. I didn’t know she even knew voodoo.”

When I say “wow” I mean it as though I were a master mechanic watching someone try to change the oil in a car by pounding on it with a mallet and holding a blow-torch to the battery. They get tired, so someone else comes up, same mallet, this time firing bullets into the battery. It started slow, got slower, and ended up being so terrible I could really only comment on people’s clothes. Is this what comedy has come to? Making fun of a performer’s clothes? It was 10 times more fun than listening to their jokes.


The following is an opinon and review of the night:
RM: Witch Hazel meets die-hard Heart fan. Lounging on a prozac blanket.
JC: Had me fooled. I picked this one for meth-addicted logger with eagle tattoo. I was way off. He’s a baggage handler for an airline. From now on, only carry-ons.
TB: San Diego idiot, they all seem to be. He said he’s from “the San Diego Comedy Works.” Cool, now I know who to blame. I figured the low ball-cap and non-descript moderately clean long-sleeve T shouted “convenience store clerk” or, if he’s motivated, “2nd Assistant to the Head Car Detailer” at Nu-Weelz, Inc. Went over time, had nothing to say, then his group left 2 comics later. Bad jokes, bad act, bad skin. Hope I never see him again. (I’m a poet and…)
KH: Funny, smart, kind of that “emo kid” look. New guy, he’ll be fine, as long as he lays off the doppios and finds a brush soon. I kid because I love.
LD: This is like a one-sided domestic dispute. Never starts out funny, then gets worse and more abusive towards men as the rambling mixes with prescriptives, gin, and issues with dad. At least this one won’t be up next week. Pat Benetar starring in Boogie Nights.
Best comment of the night from the MC: “She did pretty well, normally you can hear people smoking.”

JJ: Ceramics and pottery enthusiast, been known to take a Bic to a Bra. Did a Lily Tomlin joke she prefaced by saying “I saw Lily Tomlin this weekend, and in one thing she said…” Uh… Did you tell us you are stealing? Politically charged, without the mucky-muck of humor.
BJ: Jerry Lewis Farrkhan. At least TRY to not do a street joke everytime on-stage, let alone 2, let alone sandwich one of your own in the middle and listen to it hit the ground like the waste it is. If you can’t write, stay away from the stage. If you want to act out a someone else’s, ACT is just up the street.

JA: An entire act built around how much women drive men crazy. Gasp. Brilliant. Ground-breaking. I’ve never seen any(YAAAAAWN)thing like zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… Nice 501’s, too. Get pants that fit, I don’t need to know your religion. (oops, dick joke)



Overall it was a terrible show, but a decent night. I’m sure some people will say they “destroyed” and “killed,” but they didn’t. 22 people, 2 really good ones, 1 pretty good one, 1 really entertaining one wearing a ski mask and bloody pants (let it go), and then 18 piles of piles of mung.
The secret? When there’s crap everywhere, someone’s gotta be the shovel. Dig it.

Weekend Wrap Up,

I'm enjoying honesty today. For example, I haven't worked out in 4 days, that's the longest I've gone in about 5 years. More honesty? Here ya go. I think kids should be banned from Coffeehouses. Sugar and Caffeine. Perfect for a 3 year-old! Hey parents, take that crap to your living rooms. You get a tax break from the government for the snot alarms as it is, take that money and get yourselves a babysitter.

The hair on my neck stood up on that one.
Giada Di Laurentiis... wow.

The raddest of rad nights for comedy last night. One-half of the self-christened Seattle Comedy Mafia was in the house. Mastermind as MC, who worked on, warmed-up, and corraled an otherwise unruly group in the first show on Saturday. Masterful job as the Master of Ceremonies, he's not going up to be cute, he's gonna get the crowd involved, give them a sample of his funnies, then call on the other talented folks to keep it moving. Right-on, brudda. "Oh, there's no water in there..." Awesome joke, come see him sometime.

In the oven in my home right the heck now, a ground chicken-ground turkey meatloaf. Smells like I'm cooking two pounds meat in the form of a loaf pan. Mmmmmmmmmeat. I love being at the top of this foodchain. Unapologetically Omnivorous.

The Safecracker did a great job in both shows, and I'm very excited to see where her next steps go. Once you tap your dark side, embracing it so it knows it is loved and coddled, it will give you love that only an adopted Chinese girl who wants to murder her birth parents can give. You'll be safe, but the real culprit best be lookin' over their shoulder. And The Safecracker (no racial overtones, mind you) is tapping the good stuff right now. We'll see a happy marriage of her delivery and material soon, and it's off to the races. "The Races", of course, refer to Pat Wilson gigs!

Dat Phan's special is on Comedy Central this coming Friday. I'll be free-wheeling it in Tacoma. He calls himself a "Professional Stand-Up Comedian," which means I am now a Spoken-Word Humorist. I wouldn't want to belong to any group that would have Dat Phan as a member. I just made that up, please share it.

And last night I destroyed at the Comedy Underground. This may just work out after all.

MEAT IS DONE!

Geoffrey Lott - The MicroTouch Trimmer Of Your Unsightly Unhappiness

I'm witnessing the funniest TV show of the past 10 Years, BBC's "The Office." Get this, get it now, buy it or rent it and sit back with a bucket into which you will be spitting, snotting, and crappin' yerself with laughter. Imagine the bastard children of Nigel Tufnel running a successful paper-sales company. Into the ground. Through sheer negligence and ignorance. I'll likely order my coffee in a Cockney accent. Watch THE OFFICE today! Skip work to watch this! Your job SUCKS, you have earned a day off, and you'll never look at your co-workers the same again, which is bad, because you can't look them in the eye since your "performance" last Mardi Gras. And you may throw a straight right to the next mid-level manager you see jauntily walking 'round the cubes espousing "creative synergy through leveraging cross-market disciplines." (i.e. teamwork)

What are you waiting for?

Okay, here. I featured at The Seattle Comedy Underground and pretty much rocked that baby to sleep. First show Friday was great, second show was worrrrk. Some uptight peeps trying to affect "entertained" when they should have been affecting "should've been home asleep an hour ago, but it's payday and I'll be a loser another night." Oh well, I did my job, the Headliner Tere Joyce, who rocks, right-on cha-cha-cha...
Saturday shows, unreal. First crowd was SOLD OUT, 193 people, and everyone wanted to laugh. Not good enough, I wanted them SCREAMING and HOOTING and CLAPPING and BARING THEMSELVES. Even with a microphone snafu resulting from the world's unfunniest Jewish Comedian dorkin' off on-stage, I ad-libbed until I got a microphone that worked properly, and kept on sailin'. 200 people paid to see a performance, ya can't just stop and say "Sorry, mic's broken, come back tomorrow." Either you got it or you don't, in situations like that, and last night, Baby, I had it, both shows, and I have it on tape to prove it, so why don't you get me a beer?

After that I was up until 4:30 at a dance club, having a wicked good time with some really great gals we met after the show. Another story, another time. Remind to tell you about Geek Dancing by "M." It may have been love at first spazz.

You've been excellent, I love you, I thank you, I spank you very much GOOD NIGHT!

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.

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.

Is it time to write a-gain? Heavens...
I am single. I am not now, nor have I ever been, married. I have no children. I am white. I am a male. I am a single white male, straight, not dating anyone at the moment, and on my way to being one of the finest stand-up comedians ever seen in Puyallup. Things are pretty good. However, because I pay attention, I'm feeling some outrage at the latest Presidential proposal:
President Bush wants to spend $1,500,000,000, that's one-and-one-half BILLION George Washingtons, to develop programs, curriculae, and classes that target low-income couples, in order to teach them interpersonal skills and to to promote marriage.
My first thought is, "SWEET. I guess that means all the children in this country have been fed, the schools aren't lacking teachers or supplies, and we've not only captured every terrorist in the world, we've sent them ahead to Mars to sweep for anything with more than one leg."
My second thought is, "YOU HAVE TO BE F*CKING KIDDING ME." Tax payer money being spent on teaching and encouraging unionization of people who may serve society better if they were sterilized, and we can't get a damn school levy passed? Do you see why the lid of this handbasket seems to be closing more each day? Classes on being nice? Interpersonal skills. If you don't have them, you likely can't spell them out on a test for employment efficiency, which means you're already out of your league, and you better not be on the giving or receiving end of a pregnancy until you're clearing $50K a year. Yes, Geoff Lott is in charge of your life. Don't frown, I wasn't happy with the job either...

Teacher: "Okay, DJ, AJ, RJ, and OJ... why do you all go by your initials? Anyway... Okay, so your girlfriend..."
AJ: "Old lady." (DJ, RJ, OJ nodding in agreement)
Teacher: "... Old lady is a term of derision. Girlfriend, lover, BunnyFuzz, Snuggles, all of these are acceptable, but 'Old Lady' is not to be used."
RJ: "Speaking of using an 'Old Lady,' what time you get out from behind that desk?" (A, D, and RJ whoop in agreement, high five each other, then punch stuff)

Class dismissed.
So why am I upset? If you're married, you get a tax break. If you have kids, you get a tax break. Even if you're not married, and you have kids, you get a tax break. I understand that these breaks are in place to encourage healthy financial planning 'round the hearth. Many parents probably welcome the extra money and use it wisely. Then there are people who see an extra $50 to $500 each month, look deep into their hungry child's eyes... then at the Best Buy sales associate... back to the hungry kid... over to the 48" flat screen... hungry kid... big tv on sale... prone child, passed out from low blood sugar... back to sale item... You get me? I get no tax breaks, not for one thing, not for one person, not for one iota of my presence in this country. I get write-offs because I travel to do comedy and give money when I can to food banks and homeless shelters. THAT'S IT. I give, I get sh!t-all in return, and what the government takes from me, our President sees it as okay to enforce a moral code of marriage upon this nation, which is holding steady on its 50% divorce rate within 4 years of marriage.
I went to a public school, I know how truly awful the government-funded education system can be.

This is a second test post. Don't put too much emotion into this, it'll change. Then you'll die.

Okay, I'm gonna give this thing a try here. Just a nice little warm-up, a shakedown flight, as it were. Nothing to get wound-up over, mmkay, just take 'er easy there tiger.
Can I get you anything? How about a joke? How about a diet joke? How about a diet joke with lemon? How about a cookie decorated with Christmas colors, but it tastes like Easter Candy? Is that sacrilicious or WHAT? I ask you...

OKay, that's all for me for now.