Hey everyone, I just found out that Wednesday, December 3rd will be the finals for the 2008 San Jose IMPROV Comedy Competition. I am a finalist and would love your support, as I have the chance to win money and more paid work. You can help, because the audience gets to vote. So come on out.
- Dan
I had the amazing opportunity of working last weekend with Robert Schimmel, a legend in the comedy business who has definitely made him mark as one of the top 100 stand up comics of all time. If you don't know who he is, or you haven't had a chance to see him perform, you are MISSING OUT. I won't lead too much into his act, I'd like you to see it for yourself, but it's a brilliant mix of his personal life, family, and his battle with cancer. It's pretty inspiring, and he ties it all together with an incredible message.
I had the pleasure of being introduced to his wife and kids, and he's got quite a family behind him. It was a touching look at the more human side of comedy that I think people too often don't consider about us as performers. We have families and lives we lead off the stage that help us form the view of the world we have, and it was fascinating to see this front and center. He's an amazing comedian and man, worth looking in to.
- Dan
I know we've only had 2 dates together, but I think I love you. Lets go steady.
- Dan
That nobody even reads these. Why would they? Bloggers are self-important assholes who think that the world around them wants to know what their opinion on the world is. I know that nobody is really interested in who I'm voting for, or what I think about movies, or where I stand on important issues. Why would I care about what you think about topics? Basically, blogging is for opinionated creeps and failed writers not good enough to get writing columns in papers or magazines. I don't even know why I'M talking about this. Probably because I just ready someone's blog who came off like such an asshole, that I felt the need to waste everyone else's time with it..
- Dan
p.s.
Voting for Obama, Dark Knight was decent, Tropic Thunder ok, Pro-choice, Pro-Health Care, Pro freedom, babies, and puppies.
Every once in a while you have something happen that is so god damn gangster, you’ve got to tell the story. This applies to my week.
So I got in Monday from Detroit around noon and literally took a nap, showered, and got back into the car to go perform at the Punchline Comedy Club in downtown San Fran. I cut my trip short so I could come back for the punchline show, which ended up working into my favor. Tuesday I received an email from the San Jose IMPROV asking me if I’d like to open for Jim Breuer. Of course I would.
I found out I’d be emcee’ing the show and Kris Tinkle would be feature. Tinkle is one of my favorite comics on stage and off, so I knew good times were ahead. The shows were great, the girls were hot, and the drinks were stiff. Which worked into our favor, since we got to see an extremely chesty female with tig’o'bitties chew on JCH(one of the IMPROV top dogs).
Anyways, on to the good stuff. Jim Breuer was a cool guy, eventhough it took him 4 days to remember my name. But hey, I’m Douchey McNutsack, I just host the show. I don’t expect a guy like him to remember. But he tried, and we shared a good conversation or two about baseball and what not. Breuer was always one of my top 10 personal favorite comics, and the guy lived up to what I had hoped for. Awesome.
However, sunday night the guy made me shit my pants. Breuer is well known for doing an EXACT replication of Metallica’s James Hetfield on stage. It’s dead on, and it’s awesome. Anyways, he walks in the door on sunday night, and he’s got James Hetfield with him. Wait, what? Yes. JAMES F’N HETFIELD. LEAD SINGER OF METALLICA! I told the club manager “I’m going so gay right now, you don’t know how many times I’ve imagined myself beating the shit out of 10 people to that guy’s songs.” I NEVER get nervous on stage, but I will admit I was crapping a bit. I hadn’t been this nervous since I performed in front of Robin Williams. But this was so much different. James Hetfield is a god. I looked into the balcony where he was sitting during my set, and he wasn’t even sitting in a chair. He was standing on a thunder cloud, backlit by the sun, shooting lighting into the audience. It was INSANE.
And that’s when things got momentarily lame. Some guy, during my closing joke, walked up to the stage from the back of the theater and popped a squat ON the stage, no more than a foot in front of me. I could reach out and pet him, although I was compelled to do something else to the back of his head that involved my foot. Luckily, I didn’t panic, said something witty and funny in relation to the guy, and ended my set gracefully to the best of my abilities. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the Metal God sat there and saw all of this, and I will be the first to say this was not my finest evening. I thought great, now I’m a complete d-bag in front of one of my musical heroes and one of my comedy heroes. “FUCK” I thought to myself. So I went and had that ass clown tossed.
Let me rewind for a quick second to before the show when James and Jim walked in. We had been standing there talking to Larry Bubbles Brown when they walked in, and we immediately fagged out and ditched poor Larry to run upstairs like little girls. We passed by the headliner green room and saw James standing there talking to Jim. From the regular green room we could hear James talking, and hear that voice that is so ridiculously recognizable. We closed the door to the green room and proceeded to rock out on the IMPROV couch, kicking into a spirited air band version of master of puppets. Tinkle was Hetfield, I was Lars, and we rocked that shit. We then opened the green room door and casually strolled by back down to get the show started as if we had no clue who the guys was.
Fast forward to the end of the show. Tinkle and I decided there was no way we were letting Hetfield and Breuer leave without us getting proper visual documentation that we were actually all in the same place, on the same show, at the same time. We decided that we were going to have a battle plan in order to make this happen, and we swung into full effect. We moved the merch table close to the stairs so that leaving would be a little difficult without crossing our path. As the emcee, it’s my job to close the show, say goodnight, plug upcoming shows and merch, etc. Usually this takes a minute or two and allows the headliner to make his way to the green room or out the door to be unbothered. However that night, I basically said goodnight, check the website, BYE! I then booked up the ramp to the front door and met a smiling Kris Tinkle: “They haven’t left yet dude.”
I strolled up to the green room calm, cool, casual, Bond style. I grab my things, walk past the green room and see the guys in chill mode and think “jackpot” as I stroll back down the stairs. We stood at the merch table selling t-shirts, shaking hands, kissing babies, signing boobies, all the shit that we don’t actually do but would like to think we do. Actually, Tinkle had his share of hands to shake and shirts to sign and sell. In the meantime, I was avoided like the plague since I was the lowly host, which was fine with me because it gave me the opportunity to focus on achieving a succesful photo to write a boring blog about for people who have half a clue who these guys are. They stroll down the stairs, I shake hands with Breuer and say thanks for letting me open the program, and ask for the picture. Biggity bam, it’s on, smile, cheese, CLICK. Then the best part: Hetfield leans over and says to Tinkle, “so where’s MY Tinkle t-shirt?” Tinkle scrambles to come up with one of the only shirts he had left: a baby blue Kris Tinkle “I did it” t-shirt. Awesome. The lead singer of one of the most, if not the most important metal band of all time will be walking around sporting a baby blue Kris Tinkle shirt. That’s metal.
Awesome weekend, even better ending to it.
This weekend I had the chance to take in the new movie “The Happening”. The basic plot of the movie is that the earth is upset with us for doing all of the bad things we do to it, so it decides we are a threat and goes into population control. It does so by releasing toxins into the air that basically re-wire the human brain to go from feeling the need to protect your body, to feeling the need to do yourself harm. Scary, yes.
Basically, it was a 2-hour political statement on how we are mis-treating the earth, and how if we aren’t careful, we run the risk of the earth deciding we need to be wiped out. I didn’t leave this movie feeling like I needed to be smarter about how I used and abused the environment, I left this movie feeling like we needed to do one thing: KILL ALL THE PLANTS. Those motherfuckers are out to get us.
I felt the movie had an interesting concept: releasing toxins into the air that make us want to kill ourselves. But I feel as a topic, it’s a bit overdone. We have already had a real-life issue with something similar. Every time I hear a song by Daughtry, I in fact want to kill myself. Screw worrying about earth, what are we going to do about Daughtry? And everytime I hear Paul McCartney’s “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” I think I could easily punch small children or orphan puppies in the face.
Good movie? It was okay. I’m not so sure it was worth the $118 I paid for the movie ticket, which, if you haven’t been recently, is now the standard movie price. Everyone is bitching about gas prices, but what the hell are we doing about movie ticket prices? There’s no way “fast and the furious 4: brazilian ball buster” will be worth that much to see.
Summary: It was an interesting movie, for about the first hour. After an hour of watching people kill themselves, you eventually start to consider your own options.
Movie Grade: C+
Headlines:
Bernie Mac passes away at age 50. In a related story, Sinbad is, in fact, still alive.
Stockton, California to be destroyed for its own good. California law-makers ask: What took so long?
Detroit Mayor arrested. Wanted to "connect more with the community."
Arkansas town creates 24-hour curfew to deal with crime. In a related story, Oakland, CA to be made into it's own island.
Sporting News:
Brett Favre is traded from the Packers to the Jets. What do the Packers and Jets have in common? Equally annoying fans.
Athlete says sports steroids changed him from woman to man, which begs the question: Is Chyna on steroids?
Officials deem 2008 Special Olympics "hilarious."
Kobe Bryant wins a gold medal in the "underaged breast stroke."
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