Many people don't know what the comedy dick of death is. Probably because I have only heard one person ever use the expression before. But I sure found out what it was this weekend. Let me start at the beginning.

On Monday, I was reminded that I had signed up for Rascals new talent night. I went to the one two weeks prior, but had recently found the video camera, so I thought that it would be a great place to shoot my act. I set it up, and waited my turn. A few people that went before me did rather well. Most of their material was on the dirty/vulgar side, but whatever works. I get up on stage and do ok. Not my best show, but certainly not my worst. Ok, so I got a decent show on tape. And it wasn't even my full act, but a hurried 5 minute segment of it. Well, it's something to look at and see what I look like on stage.

Friday, I am booked in what I thought was a church in Westville, NJ. Hey, you gotta take what you can get. I get there and find out that it isn't a church, but rather the Most Holy Redeemer Grammar School. Shit, I hope there aren't any kids there. I find out that it will be an adult audience. I also find out that the booker will be there. Great. Not only do I have to clean up my act a bit since it is the Most Holy Redeemer, but the booker will be there as well. The booker asked the priest that was there if it is alright to use the word "shit". The priest said "Shit, I use the word shit all the time." Sweet. So my set goes all right, again. Nothing to write home about. Ryan Maloney was the middle act and Peter Jung was the headliner. Both of them kicked ass. Well, I thought they did, but a woman came up to me and told me about how offended she was because Peter talked about adding cheese to a communion wafer. She explained over a 25 minute conversation about how sacred that is. Apparently, alcohol is sacred to her as well because she was blitzed.

Saturday brought a new club I hadn't played before. In fact, it was in a state that I hadn't ever been to. My buddy Glen Jensen was performing at Tracy's Comedy Club in Baltimore, MD and asked if he could bring me along to do a 7 minute set. The owner of the club said ok, so we car pooled down there. Glen told me on the way down that Larry, the owner of the club, "will be the host of the show and open with 10 minutes of local reference jokes and then bring you up. Now, it is really hard to follow that. Especially with straight material. The audience isn't used to hearing material yet, so it will take them about 4 minutes before they will start to respond to your material." Bullshit. I am going to get up on stage and knock a home run. Well, it went EXACTLY as he said. The first 4 minutes on that stage was probably the worst 4 minutes of my stand up career. For those first four minutes I "Ate the Comedy Dick of Death". I friggin' sucked. After about 4 minutes they started laughing and I finished up mediocre. Holy crap did I learn a lesson from this. My lesson...DON'T EAT THE COMEDY DICK OF DEATH. It leaves a really shitty after taste until you can wash it out with a good set. Great! A whole week of dick of death on my breath... and I promised myself that I would give that shit up.

 

Posted @ 4:26 pm / Permanent Link

For all of you uber-geeks out there, I just wanted to let you all know that I installed an RSS feed for my news/blog updates. So if you have an RSS feed reader or a browser that supports RSS feeds like Firefox, then you can easily see when I have updated this lovely page. Whether you have a PC or a Mac, you should get Firefox anyway. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is a piece of crap and allows spyware into your computer without you ever knowing it. Thanks Billy Gates. So to sum up, get Firefox, then subscribe to my RSS feed. Bitches.

 

Posted @ 4:47 pm / Permanent Link

Saturday night. Doylestown, PA. In one corner was me, confident, cocky, and ready to throw down after a good previous weekend of comedy. In the other corner were 45 people, most of which were age 50+. The setting, an upstairs room in a Moose lodge. I sit in my corner anticipating the bell, just waiting to come out swinging. My opponent, sitting there with that smug look on their face, was drinking beer, snacking on chips, and ready to get on with the show. The announcer enters the ring. He recites the tale of the tape and introduces yours truly. I stand up, walk up on stage and start jabbing. I get a few good punches in right up front. Nothing that will hurt, but it does sting. I step up my game and start to throw some punches that should leave a mark. Oooh, I missed a few. No problem, I'll get them with a flurry up against the ropes. Hmm, they are tougher than I expected. Ok, I'm tired of this. Time to show them who the hell I am. I throw a huge right uppercut...and miss. I am taken aback. How did that not connect? How is it that they weren't knocked down? Did my opponent last week just have a glass jaw? Were they some kind of chump that was there to fill my ego just so that I could get it crushed? How the hell am I supposed to recover after throwing that giant punch and missing? I am suddenly weak in the knees. Cut me Mick! I throw some more jabs hoping that one of them will connect. I get a few more jabs in and prepared for my special move. The move that won me the nickname of "The guy that does that one thing". I go for it and only slightly connect as they were moving away. Then I hear the final bell. It looks like this one is a split decision. There will be a rematch Doylestown Moose...oh yes, there will be.

The two other fights for the evening are easily won by Stan Stankos and Keith Purnell. The press event afterward showed that my opponent wasn't as tough as I thought. Perhaps I just didn't give 100%. Who knows. What I do know is I still hate that fucking woman in the front row. Why sit up front if you aren't in the mood to laugh, if you aren't in the mood to play along, and if you aren't in the mood to act like a fucking human being for an hour and a half and try to enjoy something.

So now I need to wait a week before my confidence level has a chance of raising up just a bit. I guess that next week, I will just half to throw a sucker punch below the belt right up front just so that they know that they are my bitch. Holy crap! Reading back on what I just wrote made me realize that I need to stop watching The Contender.

 

Posted @ 10:28 pm / Permanent Link

So, Thursday night I had the pleasure of performing at Rascal's New Talent Night at the Rascal's comedy club in Cherry Hill, NJ. Two weeks ago at the previous New Talent Night, 138 people attended the event and supposedly they were a great crowd. This one had the makings of a great show. A funny headliner, a funny female MC, decent new talent night comics, there was just one thing missing... the friggin' audience. Damn it! What is with Rascal's and me on Thursday nights? The last Thursday night show that I was a part of at Rascals, 8 people showed up, six of whom I had invited.

So when show time came, there were about 10-12 people in the crowd. They delayed starting the show and by the time they started, the audience had doubled. Ok, I have performed for much fewer, and they weren't too bad before. Hopefully they came to laugh. Well, it turns out that they didn't. Traci Skene was the MC and did a good job even though the audience wasn't always with her. The audience blew. It just sucked. There were 8 new talent comics including yours truly. I was the last to go, and by the time I got up there, the crowd loosened up just enough to let out a few laughs. The headliner, Brian McKim, had a tough time with the audience as well. After my set, a woman who comes to these shows, tapes the comics and sells them copies of their performance on DVD came up to me and said she loved my act, which on a night like this is well appreciated. She said that when I first got on stage, my head is a bit out of frame, so she will give me a copy for free. Sweet! I have never seen myself perform... on stage. And this was a good show to see, simply for the reason that at one point I completely went blank on stage. Right in the middle of the joke. Right at the punch line... nothing. I couldn't remember any part of the punch line. I thought that it was pretty funny, especially when watching it back. Good times, good times.

From a shitty crowd, to the best one of my career, Saturday night was incredible. The room at Ruffini's was completely packed and the audience was ready to laugh. And they laughed hard. I had to wait after every punch line for the laughter to die down a bit. So that's what a real audience is like. Kind of nice.

The second show of the evening was at The Courtyard Inn. The headliner was Keith Purnell who did a great job at both shows. The crowd at the second gig sure as hell couldn't compete with the first, but they were still pretty good.

Then there was the Sunday night benefit show to help raise money for a woman with a lung disease. All 7 or 8 comics had volunteered their time to be there, and we outnumbered the audience. We had a good time joking around in the back of the room and making fun of audience members while on stage so it wasn't a complete waste of time. Hell we even helped to raise some money for the woman's family... even if it was only $17.

 

Posted @ 11:00 am / Permanent Link

I forgot to mention the passing of an incredibly funny and talented comedian. Mitch Hedberg was one of those comedians that could make everyone in the room laugh. You didn't need to like his style or agree with everything that he stood for, but you were guaranteed a laugh when you saw him perform. He had so many great one liners that I would find myself repeating them for days after hearing one of his cd's. I wish I could have seen him perform live in person. His website is saying that he died of a heart condition, but there are rumors that I am hearing from other comics that it was drug related. In either case, Mitch will be sadly missed by his fellow comics and his adoring fans. What a damn shame.

 

Posted @ 11:01 am / Permanent Link

April showers, don't always bring May flowers. They bring April floods. It has been raining a lot here lately, which sucks to drive in. Especially when driving over a few hours to different gigs in a state that I am not used to driving in. New Jersey roads try to screw up folks not used to driving in the Garden State. The roads don't stay consistent at all. Sometimes, you have to turn right, in order to make a left turn. But the very next intersection, you can turn left, but not right. new Jersey has these things called jug-handles where in order to make a left turn in an intersection, you need to make a right handed turn onto a street that loops around and allows you to go straight, which is now the direction you wanted to go in the first place. Hmm, that didn't make any sense. Anyway, it sucks. And trying to drive in blinding rain while lost and not knowing where and when I can turn just adds to the madness.

Luckily, the gig I did this weekend was worth it. It was in Hamonton, NJ at a Fire Company. The Hamonton Fire Company #2 to be exact. It was a fund raiser to help raise money for the volunteer fire company. The room was full with about 200 or so people, and they showed up ready to laugh. Unfortunately, the middle act never showed up. This seems to happen to me about once a month. But the headliner, Buddy Flip, did a bit over an hour and I did about 22 minutes so the time that the middle act was supposed to do was pretty much covered. My favorite part of the evening was a conversation I had with a midget. He works there at the fire company (I assume that he answers the phones or does the bookkeeping) and he had a request. He asked me to pick on this one guy who drunk off of his ass. "He is a plumber, and you could say, how are you supposed to fix pipes when you are that wasted, or something like that." I love it when audience members try to give me punch lines that I can use in my show. It's like me walking up to Kobe Bryant and saying "Next time, you should rape them in the ass so that they shit out all of the evidence." Thanks for the advice, but I know what I am doing. But the best part is, the midget is telling me who to pick on. I have waited over a year to get a midget in one of my shows, and he wants me to pick on someone else? Damn it, I find out before I go on, that he is kind of running the whole event, so I better be nice and pick on the drunk guy instead of the midget. But the audience was great and very responsive. I wish they all could be like that...especially with midgets.

I forgot to post about last weeks shows, so I will make it quick. Both shows were in Delaware...woo hoo? The first was at a place called the Volare Lounge, a hip martini bar, and was put on by a very funny guy named Geno Bisconte. The audience wasn't too responsive because they couldn't really decide if they wanted to talk with their friends or watch the show. I met a very funny guy named Mike Rainey who had some awesome bits. The audience seemed much more appreciative after the show that actually during the show. But it was still a fun gig.

The next night was at Stoneys British Pub in Wilmington, DE. The crowd was a bit rowdy at times, but they were a good crowd. Especially for a bar, where audiences can easily get out of control. I was able to bullshit with other comics and try out my Terri Schiavo joke, which went over surprisingly well. What a bunch of sicko's! I love 'em all.

 

Posted @ 11:27 pm / Permanent Link