Pointy Little Body

I Do Not Care That You Don’t Care

Somewhere around the hour of 11:30 PM eastern time this past Monday, Twitter (or “the Twitterverse,” if you’re an intolerable asshole) exploded after the bush league replacement referees called up by the National Football League to wring a few pennies out of the regular officiating staff made a horrendous call on a last ditch Hail Mary play, gifting the Seattle Seahawks an undeserved victory over my beloved Green Bay Packers. The reactions on Twitter included angry disbelief (two thumbs - this guy), jokes ranging from funny (Morgan Murphy had some of my favorites) to not (most of Twitter) and then a third group, which was tweeting mainly sanctimonious reminders that they do not care about sports.

To that third group: Good for you. There’s nothing wrong with not caring about sports. But constantly bringing it up puts you in the same category as people who say “I don’t own a TV” and grown-ass adults who are outraged at what they perceive to be the low quality of Justin Bieber’s music. If you’re going to live in this world, you might as well face the fact that not everything is going to be for you, and that doesn’t make it your job to see that nobody else is able to get any joy or satisfaction just because you can’t relate to it.

The most annoying segment of the proud non-sports-watchers was a group implying that the widespread outrage over this week’s Monday Night Football fiasco is indicative of society’s decline overall. Which is stupid. Some people lose perspective, but that’s true of anything that people are passionate about. I know it’s just football, but it’s something I love, that I’ve been following closely since I was seven years old. The subpar officiating makes me mad because it’s fucking up something I love. I’m upset by this in the same way that I’m upset that they’re not making any more episodes of Firefly, or that they’re remaking Videodrome (don’t even fucking get me started). I can be pissed off while still knowing it doesn’t really matter. I’m smart enough to know the difference, and I think most other people are too.

Ted Alexandro, a very funny comedian out of New York, tweeted this:

If the level of outrage directed at referees was directed at things of actual consequence we’d see things change overnight. #OWS#LIBOR

I think he’s missing the point. If anything, the problem is that people like me follow politics in exactly the same way as we follow sports, and politics are not the same as sports. If people want to scare the NFL, they just have to stop watching. Making a difference in politics requires a lot more effort. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve been completely obsessed with following this election on television. I have my team that I root for (basically, Team Not-Romney). I’ll tweet jokes about the indefensible things that Republicans say. I’ll talk a lot of shit with my friends. I’ll vote in November. But I’m not involved on the local level. I’m not informed beyond what I can absorb passively. I just follow politics because I like watching the ball move. The problem isn’t that I love the Packers or the Twins or, for that matter, weird David Cronenberg movies from the 1980s. The problem is that I’m lazy. We’re all wasting too much of our time, I’ll give you that. But don’t act like your way is more useful, more important or in any way better than mine.

And to any of my friends from Seattle who might be Seahawks fans, I’ve cooled off a lot since Monday. But I still don’t ever wanna see you again.

A Serious Itemization of My Political Convictions

Now that I’m living in Washington DC, I’m constantly surrounded by people my age who are politically involved on a level that I never had to deal with in Seattle, where we would typically only get into intense political debates if we were pretty goddamn high indeed. Now I’m not some fancypants guy who works for a think tank or knows what a think tank is, but I’m still not without my own strongly-held political beliefs, so I thought I’d lay my cards on the table here.

Every day, this giant, pointy dong reminds me of freedom.

- I believe that people should not be allowed to own firearms. Guns should be rental only. And make sure you don’t return them without any bullets in them. Be kind, reload.

- I think that this country is too divided on abortion to settle the issue without some kind of a compromise. I propose that pregnant women be forced to flip a coin. If it’s heads, we make them keep the baby. If it’s tails, they have to kill it. It’s the only realistic way to keep everyone happy.

- It’s my conviction that gay people should be allowed to get married, but once they’re married, they still shouldn’t be allowed to murder people.

- I’m pretty sure that Dick Cheney is not so much a person as he is a man-sized cockroach wearing a weird, gray, flesh suit like the bad guy from the first Men in Black movie.

- I believe that people who say YOLO are insanely annoying and should be, like, at least yelled at.

This guy was in a terrible movie about vampires.

- I don’t think that the government should be allowed to raise income taxes to 100% for everybody. That seems too high.

- I think that “The Dark Knight Rises” could have been a better movie, but ultimately I was satisfied. I believe it provided a reasonably good conclusion to Nolan’s Batman series and I thought Tom Hardy made a pretty awesome Bane.

- I believe that we should allow animals to vote. If they can figure that shit out without even having opposable thumbs and whatever, then they deserve a voice arguably more than you do.

- Our soldiers have sacrificed a lot to fight for our freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s high time that we rewarded them by invading a country with a nicer climate.

- I believe that immigration is a thing that a number of people have talked about, but I could probably be convinced otherwise if you made a really good argument.

I have no idea who this is supposed to be.

- I believe that you should not be allowed to purchase or use drugs unless you really want to.

- If you’re so upset about the direction in which this country is headed in, I think you should stop whining and just donate a million dollars to a presidential candidate like everyone else does.

- I believe that we should continue building nuclear weapons at least until we get to a nice round number, like 10,000 or something. I don’t know. Whatever you think is best.

- I believe that everyone should have a nice time.

These are my beliefs, and I’d be happy to debate the issues with any of you. But keep in mind, I went to college, so I’d probably fucking destroy you.

Struggles of a Sad Clown

This past Saturday, I performed on a pair of shows at a theater in Arlington, Virginia. After the early show, I was standing around in the lobby when an older woman, probably around my parents’ age, walked up to me and said, very firmly and with intense eye contact, “You were good.” I thanked her. There was a pause and then, to my complete surprise, she went in for a hug. Then she gave me kind of a pained smile and walked away.

Typically, these post-show interactions are mildly awkward at best and excruciating at worst. I’m too self-conscious and overly analytical to be any good at accepting compliments and from my experience, many audience members are equally inept at giving them (popular backhanded gems include “Well I thought you were funny” and “You really looked like you were having fun up there!”). But I think this was the first time I’ve gotten a compliment that had an undertone of motherly concern.

It was a weird moment and it’s made me think about the direction I’m headed in creatively (Author’s Note: Yeah. Probably the douchiest sentence I’ve ever written. Let’s see if we can top that). Over the past several months, I’ve definitely been skewing sadder onstage, and that’s at least partially intentional. While I still have a strong appreciation for silliness and absurdity, the more I perform, the more I’m drawn to the barren honesty of guys like Marc Maron (“In most cases, the only difference between depression and disappointment is your level of commitment.”) and Kyle Kinane (“Ever get so lonely that you sleep on the couch instead of in your bed because that way it feels like there’s someone lying next to you?”), and I’ve probably never laughed harder than I did at a piece by comedian Bryson Turner where he compared his nap-taking to committing suicide two hours at a time.*

This is my favorite kind of comedy. It resonates with me on a far deeper level than the whimsical, Demetri Martin-y type stuff that I was into when I started doing comedy, and it’s the kind of art I aspire to creating myself (Author’s Note: Topped it!). But it’s a hard thing to make people laugh at. When I say, for example, “I’m starting to feel like my parents taught me to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny to prepare me for the disappointment that was coming if I made the mistake of believing in myself,” a frequent audience response is somewhere between a laugh and a kind of gut-punched groan.

At least there is a response. From experience, it feels a whole lot sadder if it just gets silence. And that gut reaction is something I’m probably going to have to get used to. But it is frustrating, because if I’m saying these things onstage and the audience is thinking “Shit, is he okay?” then there’s a gap I’m failing to bridge. On some level, I feel like this is my most universal material. No matter who you are, you’ve dealt with fear, insecurity, sadness, disappointment. That dark place exists in everyone, and I’m trying to take you there and, if it’s not asking too much, to get you to laugh while you’re there. And it’s not about wallowing in it, it’s about finding some kind of relief in the acknowledgement that yeah, we’re all a little fucked up. I’ve been running with this mantra for awhile and it’s gotten me this far, wherever this is: “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to be okay.”

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*: The bit in question appears on episode 120 of WTF with Marc Maron, also featuring Eric Krug and Lucas Molandes, two other sad clowns whom I greatly admire.

On Rape and Other Things Comedy

Earlier this week, Daniel Tosh added the latest entry to the “Comedian Says Horrible Thing, People Get Mad” series by purportedly advocating gang raping an audience member who interrupted his planned forcible sex material during a show at The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. The internet hurriedly weighed in, as it is wont to do, with the general opinion that this was (and I’m paraphrasing here) “bad” and that Daniel Tosh is (again, paraphrasing) a “bad man.” As is usually the case with these sorts of incidents, I can’t really disagree with the popular assessment of the incident, but there’s something about this kind of thing that always sticks in my craw.

First of all, for those familiar with Daniel Tosh’s comedy, this really isn’t far out of his wheelhouse. He’s built a very successful career by being vile and mean-spirited, and the only thing that separates this instance from his usual yuk-yuks about abortion, other races and, yes, rape, is that this one was directed at a specific target who was present in the room. Tosh is a comedian who makes fun of people who are less powerful than him. While I respect his talent as a joke-writer and will admit he’s made me laugh on occasion, I’ve never particularly cared for what he does.

That being said, I think it’s absurd that this is news. In the age of Twitter, anytime a comic with a certain level of visibility goes too far in an unrehearsed moment, it inevitably turns into an international incident and everyone weighs in with their knee-jerk reaction (Author’s Note: Hey! Welcome to my blog!), and it never, ever goes anywhere productive.

What was the offended woman’s end game? What did she have to gain by sharing this with the world? Tosh.0 might lose a few sponsors. The people who didn’t like Tosh to begin with are still not going to like him. The people who liked him are either going to ignore this storm in a teacup or, worse, galvanize behind something horrible that Tosh himself probably isn’t too proud of having said. Comedy is a hard job, and comedians should be entitled to occasionally have a bad night and say something in the moment that they might regret without the whole world coming down on them for it.

So where does this leave us? The woman in question probably feels better after having her righteous outrage validated by legions of strangers, but Daniel Tosh isn’t going anywhere and neither are plenty of comedians worse than him. If you don’t like him, don’t go see him. Don’t watch his show. But there are plenty of dudes and ladies out there doing positive comedy that deserves your love and support as much as the average rapey-woman-hatey hack warrants your scorn. If you want to change the conversation, maybe try adding something to it that isn’t “This guy sucks.” Even if he does.