June 29, 2010

Recently someone came up to me and asked for advice in regards to making a career in comedy.  First off I have no idea why they wanted to talk to me. My career seems to go from day to day and even hour to hour at times. Game plan? Long term goals? That’s well and good but there’s too many things that can get in your way like a not being able to keep your mouth shut when you should and having a personal opinion that goes against what people really want to hear or worse having an act that no one in the television industry knows what to do with because you can’t or won't carve it up. My advice to anyone who wants to get into the game is don’t do it. Comedy is a cruel bitch that will tickle your sack for twenty minutes telling you you’re the best ever and then forget all about you as soon as you leave the stage. Hence the reason why drug abuse and alcoholism is so rife in the wings and futility will always rule. Sell bad insurance door to door, trade Star Trek toys at conventions, get elected into government anything just don’t think this is the best way to make a living. All that being said for me this has been the easiest job I’ve ever had. Why? Because I’ve had to do real work in the past. Work that requires you to get up at the same time everyday which is always too early and deal with idiots and then go to bed tired. Work where you have to wear gloves and respirators and hard hats and aprons and guns and always be on the lookout for the boss or the police or someone’s husband because you’ve been nailing his wife while he was on parole. For me it’s just too bad I didn’t learn that comedy is no longer the last bastion of freedom of speech and the majority of those working in comedy have no sense of humor me included. Too often comics will say and do anything on or off stage because they think it’s funny rather than shut the hell up because you never know who might be listening especially the one you’re talking to. I’ve now decided to not tell anyone anything unless I was willing to say the same thing in a full page ad in some national paper. Even if you think you’ve said something to someone in confidence you’re fucked so the best thing to do is to treat everything you say about someone or something like you’re telling a racist joke to a black guy. Sure he might laugh but he’ll never look at you the same way again, ever and if he can stick it to you later he will because you deserve it. Why do I think this? Because it’s come to my attention, quite recently, that opinions I’ve had and believed to be right because they’re mine have now come back and bitten me in the ass. Hard. Because I’ve always done my best to treat this like a great job and forgot or ignored that others have gotten into comedy for more than personal glory and fame and any comments made to them regarding what they’ve done they take it like you’ve stabbed their children in the eye with a fork. So watch your back. That offhand altruistic comment you’ve long since forgotten about someone who’s now doing better than anyone could imagine was heard by someone who now has power and now you are fucked. So I’d like to apologize to people like Michael McIntyre and Bill Dare and the guy I pulled the gun on while driving too fast down Interstate 5 south of Portland and all the others. I’m sure I deserved all the shit I got. Will my new attitude save me or help me or reverse the damage I’ve already done? Probably not but at least I don’t drive with my gun any more. That’s something, right? Right?

April 28, 2010

It’s been a few days since I’ve left the Manhattan Hotel in Dubai after being stuck there for eleven days and I’m beginning to wonder if I’m starting to miss it. I miss the clean lobby manned by the hard as nail Sikh with the pot belly that can’t speak English but can lift an overweight suitcase with one hand while pushing out a drunken Asian man with the other. I miss the wifi that cost £3 an hour but it takes three tries to get on and each time takes ten minutes off the time you bought. I miss the short light skinned, suited Pakistani man that manned the desk till midnight that smiled and told you that he’ll send up some fresh towels all the while shaking his head back and forth which means you’ll never see those towels. I miss the darker skinned Indian guy who watched the front desk from midnight till 7 in the morning whose job it was to make sure no drunk leaving the three bars trashed the lobby or threw up too close to the front door. I miss the small bar off the lobby that had three flat screen TV’s all tuned to cricket and African football and was decorated to look like the inside of an all white, chubby plane that will never fly because of the round bar in the middle and the bad service from the Nepalese bartender. I’ll miss the bar snacks they served in the white plane bar that included extremely salty popcorn and a Bombay mix that freed up your bowels so much the next day that you truly felt like you were actually in Bombay the night before. I miss the night club on the ground floor with the original named Asian Night Club where Asian women and Asian looking women did bad line dancing and the men watching tipped them with prepaid plastic disc all the while wondering what to do with their semen laden testicles and the growing pain it provided. I miss the night club on the next floor up called The Mint that played extremely loud music that could be heard over all seven floors and varied from house to eighties disco to reggae and went on every night till 3 am. I miss waiting for the elevator that was programmed to get from any floor to the 7^th floor no matter how badly I needed to get from the ground floor to my room on the 3^rd floor. I miss the Thai message parlor on the 7^th floor that never shut and did a booming business on the weekend relieving the built up man fat that the men in the Asian Night Club were hefting around as a result of promises never kept. I miss the varied nationality of the men who did go up and use the Thai message parlor. Men ranging from mid-level Chinese business men to locals wearing the traditional dish-dash to Russians who couldn’t afford a hand job from one of their own but could get the works from a Thai girl. I miss seeing high end cars and SUV’s parked out front late at night with dressed up Asian men playing American gangster rap and Bollywood sound tracks head splittingly loud and waking to find beat up Toyotas and Hondas in their place. I miss the rooms with the hard as a concrete loading dock beds. I miss the toilets that were not designed to take toilet paper and to keep them from clogging you had to do what the locals did and wash out your ass with the short garden hose next to toilet all the while getting your own water diluted feces on your hand and forcing you to hopefully wash them afterwards with the small hotel soap provided that has the logo from some other hotel. I miss the state edited movies that showed no real nudity or any language that might be interrupted as an insult to God. I miss the air conditioning that when it did come on was loud enough to drown out the music seeping up from The Mint. I miss the guy from housekeeping that had a wonky eye that kept a look out for his boss while he gave me clean towels and more small bars of soap. And finally I miss the one star rating the Manhattan Hotel Dubai had and that regardless of it all they kept it shined up and displayed proudly out near the entrance so you’d have no excuse as to why things are as they are.

The whole idea behind doing comedy in a foreign country and I’m talking a real foreign country here so this doesn’t apply to Canada, is to maybe experience at least little of what the place is about and then make fun of it. At least that’s the theory. In reality you find yourself in a place surrounded by mostly British ex-pats who rather than mix with the locals would rather run into their own kind day after day no matter how much they dislike them. They’ll even continue to fuck on a rotating basis of course, the same few women that are just as stuck in the community as they are. Consequently you don’t lose your girlfriend you just lose your turn. After moving amongst these people for a time you realize that should something disastrous occur they would surely turn on each other and feast on their flesh as opposed to break out of their well established comfort zone. Sure the Americans are not one to point fingers when it comes to being fit but there seems to be an accepted norm as to what most of the British males look like. A bad fashion choice in foot wear that leads into a pair of legs that if not actually occasionally moving might be mistook for a pair of legs one might find in a morgue. This all leads up to an ass that left them sometime between being ass-fucked in public school and them getting on the long haul flight that led them to where they are now. Above the belt line is a midi-sized belly that would make some of Buddha’s servants embarrassed were it not for the excuse for two arms sticking out of their counterfeit Ben Sherman short sleeve shirt they bargained for from some third world import market dweller trying to feed their extended family of twelve with the loose change profit they’ll gain from the westerner all the while claiming to be their friend.

And where are the American ex-pats through all this? Hiding in corporate fortified neighborhoods where they can surround themselves with the illusion that they too are working abroad and getting some culture when in reality an adventure is ordering a Big Mac from a Philipino girl whose parents are working sixteen hour days doing hotel laundry and trying to not think about their other daughter turning tricks in some Russian gangsters nightclub. American’s working overseas will never venture too far from their own kind thanks to years of misplaced intentions regarding US foreign policy. They’re learning that it’s always easier to advocate sanctions on other countries when you’re sitting comfortably in your Lazyboy channel surfing between laugh track heavy sitcoms and the shopping channel. What they don’t know and may never have the courage to discover is all those speaking languages they never bothered to learn because they may feel that democracy is best understood in American is most people on the ground working and living every day in these countries have a smile and will use it if you learn to give one first. Granted if for some reason you’re not paying attention while crossing a road because you can’t quite take your eyes off the young Chinese girl in cheap plastic high heels and a truck loaded with tossed out plastic bottles nails your ass they will drop the smile and clean out your pockets. And can you blame them? It’s always easier to take the high moral ground when your belly’s full but when you’re staring down the gun barrel of one more night in a shack with no air conditioning or a floor hell yes you’ll grab that mobile phone from the crushed hand of the western guy who couldn’t take his eyes off your little sister and as far as the guy in the street hoping someone will call an ambulance before he bleeds out internally the last thing he’ll be think to himself over the din of the call to prayer he’s been hearing five times a day is did I really need to come all this way to avoid paying a little tax?

March 13 2010

The problem with a blog is once you start you feel a responsibility to continue. My problem is not that I don’t have some of my own crap to throw onto the growing heap of personal opinions but rather I seem to have too much crap and I can’t seem to put in order what’s going out next. So here is goes: Recently I was having a coffee with a fellow North American comic, read Canadian. Let me stop there for a moment, to call him that would put him in with some of the other Canadians I run into overseas who feel the need to do whatever they can to distance themselves as quickly as possible from Americans. My friend is more than that. And as far as other Canadians go I hope they aren’t blowing random shit on America in an effort to further their careers but rather going for cheap laughs. What any North American comic living abroad needs to realize is most Europeans in the entertainment industry couldn’t give a crap whether you’re American or Canadian, either way you are not getting any work they can give to one of their own no matter how qualified you might be. Unless of course you’re a minority and if that is the case more power to you. If I was getting steady work as an ethnic minority or a woman for that matter I would go off to some secret room and have a good giggle just thinking about the possibility of somewhere out there some narrow minded white mainstream males are envious because they can never be anything more than that. And if such a mainstream idiot did object straight into my government recognized minority face I would hope to have the guts to stare them back in their face and tell them it sucks to be you for once. Damn, once again I’m getting off track. So I was having a few too many afternoon coffees with my north of the border comic friend in London when he pointed out that he noticed more and more comics are choosing to go on tour than work the clubs and in some cases even bypassing the club circuit and going straight to the tour. Again more power to them. If this new crop of comics can find an audience for what they’re selling without being subjected to some form of combat comedy may they rock on with their bad self. Granted they may never know the thrill of being in a rough comedy club with strangers who have made the decision to come out to see comedy, any comedy and they don’t know who you are or what show you’re trying to get on they just want to laugh and the big difference I see in the UK as opposed to North America is you better bring your game on really quick bucko or they will chop off your head and scoop out the goo that you thought was clever. They don’t give a shit that The Scotsman gave you 5 stars or you had 7 meeting with the head of comedy at the BBC. The people who come to comedy clubs come to see comedy. Any comedy. Unfortunately that may be some of the problem with the stand-up circuit in the UK. Supposedly everyone on the bill is more or less equal and if you’re the strongest one on that night you’re still getting paid the same or pretty close to the same as the guy who didn’t do as well. People come out to support the club and not necessarily the performers and as a performer if you want to start building an audience you can’t do it from the clubs like you can in North America. You have to go on tour. Now, does going on tour appeal to an old jokeslinger like me? Sure why not and I’d do it tomorrow if I had a bigger profile but I don’t for numerous reasons the least of which being I carry the wrong passport. So in the meantime I’ll enjoy the clubs and when the tour phase starts to buckle from it’s own weight and those comics have to come back to the clubs I’ll be waiting and you can finally start closing the shows for the same money I’m getting.

23-02-2010

After much deliberation I've decided to wait one more year to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. In theory, the fringe festival is a great idea. It's a place where a performer has a chance to bring up an idea that hopefully last no more than an hour and they can flush it out for a month till they have something they're happy with and with any luck a bit original as well. Unfortunately this workshop attitude it seems has not been the case for a few years and as I've learned quite recently if you don't bring your best game up you'll be crucified and forgotten very quickly. And that can make for the longest month of your life! That's too bad but I guess I can understand some of that. Competition for crowds is even fiercer than ever and the idea that something new and never seen might be discovered during the fringe is now a myth thanks to the internet. Also, it seems because of the price of seeing as many shows as possible I've been told that the crowds would rather go see an Edinburgh regular rather than take a chance on an unknown. Stick with the safe bet. Generally. And when I say safe bet I'm not referring to something that might be classified as a safe show I'm referring to something that has been coming back to Edinburgh year after year. Should I have come up sooner after my last visit in 2005? Fuck yeah but what's done is done. 

I got into doing stand-up because it was an act of rebellion to be able to make a living doing this. Hell it was a really great party. If you could make a living performing in comedy clubs you were on your way. Acting in a sit-com? It was never really an option. We were comics not actors. Being a regular on some panel show? It didn't exist. A national tour? Not unless your last name was Cosby. All that was 20 years ago. Now comedy has evolved into acts needing a game plan first and foremost and being funny and or slightly original is not as important as it used to be. Someone, not a comic, realized that this is a business and there was money to be made. Big money. And where there's big money integrity and originality sometimes takes a back seat. Those people writing the really big checks couldn't give a shit about where someone got their jokes or if they never really spent years in the comedy clubs working on their acts. They need you to be youngish, engaging, kinda clean and if they're lucky a minority. Thank Christ I've finally been able to laugh a bit at it all. It used to bother me but for some reason lately it doesn't. Maybe because I'm older, white, male, American and still just enjoy getting in front of a room full of strangers to see where it might go right at that moment. In the meantime over the next year or so I plan to flush out this idea I have that one day might be an Edinburgh show. Will it get me my own show? Not a chance. Will I lose money? Of course! Will I care? I sure as fuck hope not.