Assignment One:
Find out where the open mics in your town are. Find out how many you can go to this week. Write five minutes of material and perform at them.
What sort of material? This is up to you. Think of what you may have said that made your friends laugh. What additional info would strangers need to have to laugh at that? There’s a joke.
Don’t spend more than five hours writing this material. Don’t prolong that first performance. That will only make you more nervous. It very well may be nerve wracking. Best to rip the band aid off. Your fear will be much diminished once the experience is no longer a scary unknown.
Do this same five minutes at your first three open mics. Don’t adjust anything yet. Ask yourself the following questions in a notebook or Notepad file. These questions will remain the same after every three open mics. So get used to them, you will be answering them a lot.
thats charming, the thought that I might spend five hours writing five minutes. If only I had that kind of dedication! Anyway, Im gonna write some jokes here and try them out next week. Some of these are gonna be variations of stuff I was trying last week.
I have a facebook friend who keeps inviting me to like things, which is almost as obnoxious online as it would be in real life. "Hey, do you like snowboarding? No? Maybe you should" Its like that, only more self serving, because theyre inviting me to like pages that they made. "Hey, do you like everything that Ive ever created or been involved in? No? Maybe you should". I like a lot of different things, for a lot of different reason, but the one thing that it all has in common is that nobody had to fucking tell me to like it.
I dont like magic. It seems dumb. If I was actually magical I would do something more useful than link and unlink metal rings. I cant think of a single application for that in real life. Even sawing a woman in half seems pretty useless unless you can get two fully functional women out of it. Magic is just a bunch of simple tricks that I dont understand because theres a group of assholes who refuse to explain it to anyone. Congratulations magic, I dont understand how my car works either, and there are books explaining it. Imagine if all of the car mechanics formed a guild and insisted that cars were magic and that human laws no longer applied to them? They would rule the world.
Thats pretty much what investment bankers have done. I thought I knew what money was, it was pieces of paper that I could use to get candy. It turns out that money is a lot more complicated and scary. Money is a mysterious force, and sometimes there is a great disturbance in the force and then its important that the government gives a lot of money to some very evil rich people or otherwise our entire society will end up in flames, and I wont be able to get candy anymore. It worries me that money seems so fundamental to our culture, and the smartest people who study it cant agree on what it is or how it works. We dont understand money the way we can understand chemistry, because chemistry is in everything, and money is a big fake thing that we all pretend is real so that we can have houses and cars and jetskis, which are all just adult candy.
I was thinking of going into poker, and how its useless and fake in the larger scheme of things, but I ran out of juice. I think that thats about two minutes of material there, so maybe Ill come back and write more later. I get a free pass from doing a new five because a lot of the mics that I can do wont give me five minutes. So maybe Ill bang out a new three.
Ill also do the second part of the assignment soon: watching Greg Giraldos special and answering some questions. Im losing focus for now
