As a performing art, stand-up comedy is a lot like a sport: you have to practice.  If you don’t practice for a while, you get rusty — and you can only get better by practicing with effort and consistency.  Preparation helps, too.

So I’m going up again tonight. Hopefully I’ll fail a little better!

I’ll still spend plenty of time on the phone with girls, of course, because vagina is the Killer App and in that sense I don’t often have a choice.¹ But I’m generally allergic to guy-on-guy phone conversations that last longer than about 90 seconds, making occasional exceptions for (1) good friends who (2) I haven’t seen for a while and (3) whose life I’m actually interested in. But it’s pretty rare.

It was during one of those catch-up chats with Andrew, last night, that he challenged my regular readership of his blog. How could I be reading it, after all, if I had seen his post about Fuck Me Pumps and not immediately jumped into the comments to defend my own earlier post about women’s fashion?

I thought about it for a while, after hanging up, and eventually decided to try squaring the circle: I’d demonstrate my love while calling him retarded, an emotional delivery payload so common to male friendship that I’m surprised it isn’t encapsulated in a fancy foreign word we can steal.

While my comment on his blog was written after 4am and reeks of Overwrought First Draft sweatstains, I ended up spending a blog-post-amount of time on it. So here is:

Consider the Elephant: A Parable

(The title is a fond homage to David Foster Wallace‘s amazing Consider the Lobster, an essay about a fair in Maine that somehow left me questioning all of my food-related ethical beliefs. There are exactly zero other qualitative similarities.)

1. Compare and contrast the Facebook participation of single vs. married males, age 26-45. Vagina is even more addictive than FarmVille.

Giggles, my former home club, is closed; its ownership has changed hands; it has now become a strip club, renaming itself Jiggles. Yes, comics backstage did indeed joke about various rebrandings of Giggles as Jiggles, so it’s not a new or original idea. But we were joking, not trying to be fucking prescient.

I do not find this topic conducive to feelings of happiness and well-being.

The former owner has been Facebooking a sort of autobiographical retrospective of his years owning Giggles; favorite headliner, scariest moment, drunkest comedian, etc. It’s been entertaining, and if I can get permission then I’ll share some of it.

For anyone who went to Giggles during the last five years and enjoyed themselves, I’d urge you to attend the It’s Time: A Farewell to Giggles show next week at Laughs Comedy Spot. Many of the great Giggles comedians who entertained us over the last 5+ years — comics like Brian Moote, Andrew Sleighter, and Xung Lam — will be performing. So will Blake.¹

I put a lot of time and effort into Giggles. It was the site of my first open mic. It is gone.

Now let us never speak of this again.

1. LOL sorry buddy. But in the spirit of Giggles it had to be done.