Tag: funny

StandUpTalk Is Great

I found this website and it’s very lovely. It’s got interviews, videos, and news about comedy…and what more could you ask for? A lot, but that’s because you’re not being grateful. Grateful should be spelled greatful not grateful. It just sounds like it means “full of grates.” That doesn’t sound too pleasant.

Anyways, here’s a good little article about Brent Morin to give you a taste of their lovely work at StandUpTalk, which I believe is run out of The Comedy Store in LA. Looking…looking…I think that’s true.

Regardless, they have some great stuff if you’re a comedy fan. Going on the Things I Like.

Graphic Art, Not Cartoons: An Interview With Kaitlyn Kieronski

It was a rainy, freezy day this past week when I met up with Kaitlyn Kieronski, a fellow alum of the always lovely Avery Coonley School and a current senior at NYU. We rendezvoused at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in the West Village (a venue that offers much more than it’s name suggests) to warm up with a cup of coffee and chat about graphic art – one part of Kaitlyn’s very complicated, self-designed major.

We talked about Walt Disney, voice acting, Cartoon Network, Seinfeld, Pokemon, a brief history of Pixar, Japanese computer games, and a lot of other fun, fantastic, and amazing stuff.

Continue reading “Graphic Art, Not Cartoons: An Interview With Kaitlyn Kieronski” →

Jon Huck Loses His Pants – This Is Not Happening

I mentioned Ari Shaffir’s show This Is Not Happening a while back, but I never showed it in its true glory. It’s basically a story-telling show where comics get up and share stories centered on a particular theme.

I stumbled across this video of Jon Huck, a comedian I hadn’t heard of before, and it’s one of the funniest stories I’ve heard. It’s long, but it’s worth the wait. It just shows how awesome the show is, because you’ve got great, well-known comedians like Kyle Kinane, Joe Rogan, and Iliza Shlesinger who appear on the show, but you also have a lot of comics who most people haven’t heard of – and every single one of them are just fantastic stories.

I had to share this one because Huck makes a backhanded shoutout to Naperville, Illinois (my hometown neighbors!) and also because it’s a story about Oktoberfest and the half German in me came out and was like, “yeah!!!” You can follow Jon Huck on Twitter here.

Watch all the great stories here on YouTube.

How To Get More Compliments On Your Set

Eli Sairs is a great comedian in NYC and I see him at The Creek and the Cave all the time. He wrote this funny piece for the The Interrobang about how you can get people to compliment you after you have a monster set. I like it.

 

As he says, “New York comic runs a free comedy show called Wildcats with and every second Friday of the month at 8 pm at The Creek and The Cave (10-93 Jackson Ave, Queens). The Wildcats are a street gang that surprises audiences by invading a respectable event or charity and using it as a playground for their offensive comedy anarchy, like a punk rock 3 Stooges.”

Hannibal Buress, His Fame, And His Netflix Special

Hannibal Buress!

One of my favorite comedians. His special came out (yesterday? two days ago? yes, two days ago) on Netflix and I watched the first 20 minutes or so last night before I fell asleep. How quickly I fell asleep was unrelated to the goodness of the special. However, I feel like I’ve seen him do better. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, I remembered him describing this as his “sweatiest” special, so you know he’s working hard. There was one bit I remember about how one time no one would let him into a particular hotel because he didn’t have his ID…something like “yes I’ve gone on TV with the alias Hannibal Buress just so I could check into this hotel.” I really liked that one. And hey, I haven’t seen the whole thing, so maybe the rest is absolutely fantastic and I’m being unfair.

This Splitsider interview came out a couple of days ago to promote the special. It’s about Buress and dealing with fame. It’s pretty fun.

Now here’s the trailer for the special. If my dumb blog post didn’t get you excited enough to head over to Netflix this will, probably. I’m not sure. Probably.

“I’m Gonna Go Kill Myself!”

If comedians have a bad set, they’re always like, “I’m gonna go kill myself!”

And then everyone is like, “HAAAAA! THAT’S THE FUNNIEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD!!!!!!!!!”

Which I think is dumb. To me, it’s not funny to just say you’re gonna kill yourself. That’s not a well-written joke. I just feel like it should feel more hacky to other comedians by now. Like, if you want to have a mental disorder, then get more creative with it, right?

How about something like, “Man, there were so few laughs in this set that I’m gonna have PTSD!!! I know that’s a real thing that people actually have but I don’t care!!!”

Or, “This set was so bad, when I go home and my wife wants to have sex with me I won’t be able to get hard!”

Or, “After this I’m gonna go home and have me some bulimia so I can puke up all that shit I just ate on stage!!!”

Jokes That Only I Think Are Funny

One of my favorite things is telling jokes that only I think are funny and nobody else thinks are funny. Which is, like, fantastic for stand up – I know.

I just think that there’s something hilarious about somebody thinking something is the funniest thing ever and everybody else just being like, “No, that’s not true. That is NOT funny. At all.”

That happened to me in real life once recently. 

I was on the train listening to a podcast in my headphones and then something funny happened in the podcast and I started laughing out loud. Like, really hard.

And then I looked next to me and I saw that this really old woman who was sitting next to me had just fallen off her seat on the ground.

And then I realized that everyone in the train was looking at me like I was some asshole because they thought I was just laughing my ass off at this old, injured, helpless lady who was sprawled out on the ground of the train.

And that just made me laugh even harder! Because they didn’t get the joke. They didn’t get why I thought it was funny. And at this point I was laughing hysterically, so I couldn’t just be like, “No, people…you don’t understand: my podcast is funny.” So I thought, “Okay, fine. I don’t care. I’m just make this even funnier for me.”

So, I just went with it. I pointed at the lady on the ground and went, “Ha, she’s old! She’s old and she fell! That’s hilarious!”

And then I got up…and I started kicking her. Real hard.

And then I pulled out my switch blade and I went, “STAB! STAB!”

And then I grabbed some of the blood and I was like flicking it on peoples faces all around the train.

And they still did not get the joke. They did not think that was funny. At all.

Except for one guy who was laughing. But then I realized that he had headphones on too, so he was probably just listening to the same podcast.

You people get it though, right? That’s FUNNY. You get it. You’re totally on my side.

The featured image is a mural of Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza from the TV show Seinfeld that I found somewhere in Brooklyn. I think it was in Bushwick.

John Roy’s Completely Free Stand Up Comedy Course

I’ve heard of this thing a million times from people and never taken a look until now because, well, it slipped to the cracks! But it’s just as awesome as everyone says!

John Roy is a veteran comedian based in LA who has created a whole 12-week, completely free comedy course. Roy mentions in the first week that,

“The majority consensus among fellow comedians are that [comedy courses] are of dubious value. They may help a little with some fundamentals or with building courage and comfort on stage, but they will neither replace the time you will have to spend in Open Mics nor are they worth the hundreds of dollars they normally cost.”

Roy goes about it with this knowledge in mind. There’s no learning stand up without doing stand up. You jump into it right away.

He’s also great at being efficient. His weekly courses and assignments aren’t very long; they put the work on you to go out and write, perform, and watch comedy yourself rather than to learn it from someone else.

In the same vein, I will be succinct. If you want to try comedy and you don’t want to spend money on a “real” course, do this one. It is infinitely better than a “real” course, which are all designed to get money out of your pocket, not to teach you anything. (Trust me, as someone who started out by taking one and interned at a comedy school n college. Almost no one sticks with comedy after trying a course. Even though it feels like you accomplished something, you have not until you go out there and do it full-time.)

Here it is!

It has been added to my Things I Like page, which, by the way, if you’re tryna be a comic, is a great resource.

You can find out more about John Roy on his site.