Tag: personal

A Comedian’s Notebook 2.0 Is Now Live At acomediansnotebook.com!

Yup, that’s right: this blog is now old hat. Cuz I have a new hat. And that new hat is acomediansnotebook.com – it fits very well, you can wear it for almost any occasion, and the hat doubles as a stand up comedy blog. It’s pretty! It’s better! Go there!

Facts About The New Site/Hats

  • fewer/better articles always out on Tuesdays
  • awesome comedian guest writers
  • original art by multitalented comedians
  • fancy design
  • can wear it on your head (only applies to hats)

The first new article is live right now! It’s real cool…it’s called What Your Microphone Grip Says About You. Oh my gosh is it funny!

I’m still keeping this site around at stumelton.wordpress.com and maybe even as stumelton.com …but I’m not going to be updating anything here. SO if you want to stay up to date on everything new, like the Facebook page, follow the Twitter, or join the mailing list! But most importantly, go read what new stuff I’ve got on the new site! You can tell how cool it is by my new logo. Wow, what a great day!

 

Bottle Openers

Last year, my sister went to the Wimbledon tennis tournament. You know what that is? It’s a tennis tournament. And she brought me back a keychain bottle opener that says “Wimbledon” on it. Which essentially says, “I’m a douche who is prepared to party” which is redundant.

And last year when I graduated college, my mom got me an antique bottle opener, which was cool except I couldn’t use it because I didn’t have any antique bottles to open.

Now, my mom is moving away from my hometown. So, to commemorate the place where I spent the first 18 years of my life, she got me…a bottle opener! I don’t know what it is about me that makes my family think I really need to open bottles. They must think I just have thousands of unopened bottles stashed away in my apartment or something…

But this one is not just any bottle opener, because it has the name and the exact geographical coordinates of my hometown on it!

Which strikes me as the ultimate drunk survival kit. Because you can use it to open up all the beer you could ever want and it also says, “If found drunk and passed out, please return this person to 41.7947 degrees North and 88.0169 degrees West. Someone there will recognize him and will know what to do…even if they haven’t seen him since high school.”

If someone found me in that state, it would be like, “Wow! How’d you get all the way to New York City, fella?! These coordinates are in Illinois! This is gonna be one hell of an Uber ride.”

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.

Yelp Is Racist

I was lucky enough to have Christmas in Hawaii this year. But, before I got there, I spent a couple of days in Los Angeles at my sister’s. One of those days she was very occupied with her boyfriend’s birthday plans, so she said, “Take my car and go visit your friend in Santa Barbara.”

So I was like, “Cool.” And I did.

Continue reading “Yelp Is Racist” →

Gentleman And A Scholar

People are always complimenting guys saying, “He’s a gentleman and a scholar.”

Those are two things I’ve never wanted to be.

If I want to compliment someone, I say, “He’s a pimp and he runs a charity.”

That way, you can’t even be jealous of him. All you can say is, “He’s a great guy…he deserves all those hoes.”

What If Unicorns Were Real And One Was Like Francisco?

What if a unicorn just walked into a wall…and got stuck there. Forever. Do you ever think about that?

Like, I know unicorns aren’t real. But what if they were?

That means that they must have been evading us pretty darn effectively for thousands of years. So if they did exist, they’d have to be extremely brilliant, magical, and elusive creatures that have totally outsmarted us dumb humans.

So what if they did exist and there was one unicorn that was really, really stupid. And one day it just…walked into a wall. And got stuck there. And ruined it for all the other unicorns. Because a person found it and that’s how people found out that unicorns were actually real.

All the other unicorns would be like, “Francisco! What are you doing?! You’re freaking magical! We’ve been avoiding walls for thousands of years, Francisco! All you had to do was NOT walk into a wall. That was literally your only job…You can fly. And you don’t even have wings! How have you not mastered avoiding the wall?”

Well, I think about that a lot.

So, if you ever see a horse with its head against a wall like this:

Screen Shot 2015-12-16 at 4.25.41 PM

You better give that horse a little tug. You better give him a little tug, tug, tuggie-poo. And you better make sure your name isn’t Sir Charles Darwin, because you might have just discovered Kevin.

 

The feature image was found at steynian.wordpress.com.

Bill Burr Quote

A comedian friend posted this on Facebook saying that he’d seen it a few times before, but that looking at his bank account balance while sleeping on the couch made him remember it.

Here’s why I’m not a sad computer programmer, for instance:

Realize that sleeping on a futon when you’re 30 is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and a job you hate. You’ll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There’s no risk when you go after a dream. There’s a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe.

How To Look Like A Serial Killer

My room used to be all white with totally white walls, all white furniture, and white bed sheets. And I just recently realized that that is not normal.

So I called up my friend on the phone who is a photographer and I said, “Hey, why don’t you send me a picture so that I can put it up on my wall.”

So he sends me the picture, and I open it up and see that what he sent me is this giant print of…what looks like an empty, white room.

The only thing creepier than having a totally white room with all white walls and white furniture is having a totally white room with all white walls and white furniture, where the only thing on the wall is a picture of an empty white room.

Trying to seem less serial-killer-y, I decided to pin up my comedy notecards on the wall, too. Not that weird, right? After organizing them, I realized that all of the notecards are white as well. And they have the names of all my jokes on them. And the more you look, the weirder they sound, especially because you’d have no way of knowing why I wrote the phrases on these notecards without asking me.

“Make someone care about you?”

“Shower Ritual”

“Bill Cosby Cover”

“I think State Farm is there”

Normal people do not write these things on their wall.

I also acquired a new mattress. Not knowing what to do with my old one, I shoved it against the inner wall of my closet, thinking “Oh wow, I bet this would totally sound-proof the closet.”

Stop! Stop being a serial killer! How does being boring make me so creepy?! An all white room, one artsy photo, joke notecards, and a mattress are just boring things!

Maybe I should just embrace my inner serial killer and buy some tarps and an axe in preparation for my American Psycho-esque meltdown. The only problem is that I have no idea where they would sell axes in New York City.

You know, it really doesn’t make sense how having a really white room makes you seem crazy. It would just be way harder to clean when you do axe-murder someone. Just saying.

 

Sometimes when I don’t want to use a silly photo I found on the interwebs, I use my own pictures of NYC venues as a feature image. Greenwich Village Comedy club is in the heart of the West Village on Macdougal Street, just down the street from the Comedy Cellar. It’s where I’ve had my worst set: a grueling five minutes of complete silence. So it holds a special place in my heart. 

When To Quit Comedy

I came across this depressing piece a few days ago: Saying When: When is the right time to walk away from the comedy dream?. It’s a really long piece detailing when you should probably give up on comedy and do something real with your life. What fun!

Why would I want to read something like this? Well, for one, it’s good to know what to avoid. I think I’ve gotten loads better just seeing other comics do badly (not to be mean) and thinking “well I know why that didn’t work.” It’s almost as useful to see what doesn’t work as it is to see what does work and you see a lot of things not working at open mics, that’s for sure.

And for two, comics just like to talk about sad things like failing. Marc Maron has all but made a career out of it.

Positive things I took away:

  • do things your own way
  • don’t compare to others
  • keep creating

See? It’s not all sad.