For the last few months, I’ve been organizing and promoting a wonderful little show called Underbelly. The idea for the show is quite simple: Cincinnati’s best stand-up comedians doing improv, poetry, music, sketches, original characters… Everything EXCEPT stand-up comedy.
Here’s a quick video recap of our first show:
Our May and June shows were a lot of fun, not to mention very well attended. In fact, we drew a bigger audience for our second show than we did for our first, which was a very pleasant surprise.
If you’d like to attend one of our upcoming shows, Underbelly is held in the Parlour of the historic Southgate House in Newport, KY on the first Tuesday of every month. Doors open at 8:30 and the show usually starts right around 9:30. (Word of advice: Get there around 9 if you can. At our last show, just about every seat in the Parlour was filled by the time the show began.) BTW, admission is free!
Everybody loves crazy internet news headlines, right? I’m way more likely to click on a story if the headline is slightly bonkers.
For the last few months, CNN’s website has been offering its readers the chance to purchase t-shirts emblazoned with CNN.com headlines. Not all headlines can be printed on t-shirts, mind you, only stories that have a small t-shirt icon next to them. In capable hands, that would be a license to print money. However, CNN only offers shirt-printing abilities for boring headlines.
Case in point: “Obama heads West to sign stimulus bill.”
The only way I’d ever wear that shirt in public would be if the alternative was a tank-top that said “Federal Breast Inspector.”
“Obama heads West to sign stimulus bill” got its own t-shirt, while these fine headlines were unavailable for purchase:
Stop the madness, CNN! I want commemorative chimp slasher gear and I want it now! Or else I will not… I repeat… WILL NOT federally inspect your breasts!
I recently worked with comedic legends Dave Waite and Alex Stone on an episode of Dave’s podcast, “Waite For It.” I haven’t listened to the episode yet but it was hilarious as we were recording it, so here’s a link to the show.
The episode is called “Laments and the Blossom Exposed,” which sounds like the working title for Of Montreal’s latest album.
As far as comedy goes, 2008 was definitely a transitional period for me. My proudest achievement was finally learning how to turn my own life experiences into material, which was something I’d always been afraid to do because it was easier to maintain a wall between myself and the audience. My longtime theory was that if a joke bombed, that was okay, the audience was rejecting a joke, but if a story about my life bombed, the audience was rejecting me as a person. The weird thing I discovered was that opening yourself up will make an audience less likely to reject material, even if it isn’t 100% perfect, because they can sense you’re trying to bond with them and share your life with them. (With the exception the guy at last night’s show who called me a faggot when I talked about owning a cat.)
Thank God for my friends, who didn’t give up on me even when I went through about 50 different joke-writing phases over the last few years, most of which amounted to flinging shit against the wall to see if it would stick. (I read stories from a podium, wrote bits that required me to act like a lunatic even though I’m a total introvert, answered audience questions while impersonating Dusty Rhodes, and literally filled notebooks with nonsensical garbage when I flirted with the idea of creating a fictional persona and never telling the audience a single true thing about myself.) Too bad it took me such a long time to realize that the true stories were what I should have been telling all along, especially since the fact that I missed telling weird stories to my friends was one of the reasons I considered comedy in the first place. Maybe if I’d had more faith in myself and the audience, I’d be further along today. That’s okay, though. As they say, comedy is an AIDS marathon, not an AIDS race.
When you come down to it, this video clip says more about the way I feel today than mere words ever could.
I did an interview with ThisWebsiteIsSoAwesome a few weeks ago… Check that shizz out.
Also, big ups (Why do I use slang on the internet that I don’t use in real life?) to Josh Sneed for namedropping your boy Code Red in his interview with TWISA, which you can read here. And while you’re at it, download his new album, “Unacceptable,” which iTunes recently named one of their top ten comedy albums of the year.
Speaking of downloads, I’m working on a very special free download for you guys that should be available right before Christmas.
