Creating a Comic

Twitter sure seems to provoke an awful lot of indignation from people who don’t use it, and never intend to. There seems to be a strain of personality that just isn’t able to shrug and say “I don’t get it.”

But today isn’t the day that I mount a full-throated defense of Twitter. I just wanted to mention one of the tool’s many goofy uses: the hashtag memes.

Hashtags are Twitter posts linked together and distinguished by the #keyword appended to everyone’s 140 character contributions. If you follow enough interesting and/or clever people — comedians, for example! — then the memes can be fun to watch and even participate in.

It’s basically a public session of joke brainstorming.

The meme du jour the other night was #hipstersitcoms, and while Sturgeon’s Law was in full effect, some of the tweets represented some high quality improv. My favorite #hipstersitcoms included:¹

• Grace Under Arcade Fire
• Postmodern Family
• Joanie Likes Chachi’s Facebook Status
• My Twee Sons
• “Friends”
• Chaz in Charge
• Punky Micro-Brewster
• Undeclared (But Leaning Toward Art History)

On my scorecard it was The Office‘s amazing, adorable Mindy Kaling who ultimately carried the day, with her contributions of Family Skinny Ties and then my favorite, M*A*S*H*U*P.²

My own first efforts… sucked out loud. Night Torte was just lame, and Top Fixed Gear wasn’t terrible but was based on a non-sitcom. But after a few more minutes I managed to come up with a few that don’t make me cringe with embarrassment:

• Married… without Children
• Eight is Enough Viewers
• The Dicks with Van Dykes Show

That last one felt satisfying enough that I decided to quit while I was ahead.

1. And no, I didn’t keep track of attributions for each of these, since they were flying by too fast, and anyway I’m not the Curator of All Twitter Twats. [↩]
2. M*A*S*H*U*P is one of those ideas that is both so immediately obvious and so tightly clever that I get annoyed at myself for not coming up with it first. Not that I actually could have done so; it just seems that way. This is usually the mark of a great joke. [↩]

It’s kind of silly, how manic my enthusiasm about stand-up can be…

• Down: Right after I bomb, I’ll spend the night moping around in a haze of self-doubt and despair. Vague notions of giving entirely up on comedy won’t just dance around, they’ll rent out warehouse space in my head for an all-night rave.

After a day’s worth of this nonsense, my resolve to quit will erode. I start writing again. After another day or so I’ll have completely forgotten about quitting; by then I’m usually itching to get back on stage.

• Up: But when a set goes well, it feels like nothing in the world exists except for comedy. A wave of euphoria blows even the most minor achievements all out of proportion.

That’s the situation tonight, when what actually happened was incredibly modest, in stand-up comedy terms: I got a decent audience reaction to a very short open mic set — a set that was far from flawless.

I may have made a nice little molehill, but for the last two hours I’ve been swaggering around as though I were King Shit of Fuck Mountain, all but wheeling around a cushioned wheelbarrow for my giant comedy cock. The universe was so thoroughly bent to my will, after the show, that the fifteen minute bus ride at the end of the night found me chatting up and exchanging info with a beautiful exchange student from Brazil. (No joke; I’d avoid such an absurd-sounding cliché if I was embellishing.)

My happy glow from the show stems in part from tonight’s set being 100% new material — with almost all of the jokes proving to be either funny or promising. Beyond the new stuff’s surprisingly high hit rate, the attempt itself felt like an accomplishment, since doing completely new material is something I’ve only done once before.

And unlike that earlier novelty occasion, tonight’s jokes can go into my regular act!

Finally, and perhaps best of all, my friend Andrew was on hand to gift me with an insightful, laser-guided critique of my opener — the part of my act that’s always my weakest area, and where I have a congenital blind spot.¹

On second thought: his help was great, but this evening’s “best of all”? That… would be the Brazilian girl.

BATHE HER AND BRING HER TO MY TENT!

1. We disagree a bit on exactly how to remedy the problem, but that’s a lot less important than his spot-on diagnosis in the first place. Thanks, buddy! Someday we’ll be boring together about thesis, antithesis, synthesis rhetorical structure, and why such deep-brain thought patterns take precedence when the grammar conflicts with your (usually reliable) jihad in favor of pure word economy. And that this underlying theoretical stuff is still correct, for the writing, even when I earfuck the performing of the joke. [↩]

Mike Drucker is a national comedy writer and stand-up comic, as well as a recent Seattle transplant from New York. And now he’s also the man behind the best joke of 2010, at least according to some people who voted over at Time Out New York.

Before unleashing the funny, I want to point out yet again that silently reading a typed out stand-up joke is like reading a detailed description of an amazing play in sports; you get the general idea, but it’s a pale and bloodless approximation. There’s a reason that most comedians consider stand-up to be 70-80% performance and only 20-30% writing.

Anyway, here’s the joke:

A friend told me that picking his favorite Star Wars character is as hard as picking his favorite child.
Sure, except his favorite child doesn’t matter to me.

Outstanding. A lot of the other jokes are great, too; check ‘em out!

I got bumped at tonight’s open mic, which meant I didn’t get to close, as I had really hoped to do, with this topical holiday joke:

What would Dr. King say if he were alive today? This:
“You mean that all along, I’ve really been a Sagittarius? PFFFFT… naw nigga, you trippin’!”

The horoscope thing might get a chuckle,¹ but it’s mostly an excuse to shift the great, eloquent man of history into the modern black male vernacular — an idea that’s sort of funny. And having that vocal inflection suddenly coming out of my non-black face would have been surprising enough to get a solid laugh, I think.

It’s also likely that my dropping the (sorta) n-bomb would have upset somebody, or several somebodys. I’m on record as believing that white people should avoid saying that word under pretty much every circumstance — so why is it OK for me, as a mostly-white person, to use that word in the context of a joke?

To be honest, it’s probably not OK. Because while I know that my silly joke reflects absolutely no hatred or belittling intent, and my friends know it, anyone who doesn’t know me has no way of seeing into my heart.

It’s the first rule of communication: what one person says isn’t necessarily what another person hears.

So why was I going to say it? Firstly, and mostly, because I think it’s funny. But secondly, I’m also just not sure whether it crosses the line; I was actually kind of hoping the joke would provoke someone to take me to task over it. One of the wonderful things about comedy is that we can use it to probe around in these hazy and uncomfortable areas, and the ensuing argument/discussion might have helped clear away some of the murk.

In other words, sometimes crossing the line is the only way to find out where, exactly, the line is drawn.

Comedy can only make us think after it’s made us laugh, though. Nevermind all this ethical and linguistic wankery, then; is the joke actually funny? Who knows?? Hopefully I’ll have another chance to tell it to an audience, someday!

1. Although it’s certainly a relevant example, because in my experience the only class of males who rival gay dudes, in their knowledge of the zodiac, are younger black guys. Seriously. [↩]

I am less than fond of talking on the phone, in the same way Hitler was less than fond of upper lip waxing. I would 100% support a national program to round up all of our nation’s cell phones and fry them in a racist series of ovens.

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. [↩]