Ash Wednesday / Safety First

One thing I’m learning from this endeavor is that I immediately have notes for myself as soon as I post these, which is good. That means I know where I’m making mistakes, and what can be improved upon. Eventually, that won’t be part of the post-posting process.

This time I’m doing two at once, since they’re both less than a page. These are actually ideas that I posted on my old LiveJournal years ago, and in the course of hitting a wall/being swamped with other work, things that I could revisit and translate. They’re pretty straightforward. Enjoy.

Ash Wednesday
Safety First

Celebrity Breakup News

People seem to care so much about what’s happening with celebrities, almost at the expense of their own lives. Snoop culture, and not the fun kind that involves smoking weed with a man whose last name is Doggy Dogg.

Celebrity Breakup News

Next show is Tuesday 6/30/09 at 8:30 PM. Legion Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Visit www.groundwilliams.com for more info!

Earlier this month, I passed the 6 year mark of chasing comedy as a career goal. Two weeks after graduating from college in 2003, after doing stand-up about 6 times in college, I went to the Pittsburgh Improv for an open mic night with the specific goal of that being the jump-off point, the very first step in what I knew would be a very, VERY long road. Herein, I’ll be looking back at what I’ve done, what I should have done, where I am, and what I still need to do.

All through my life, I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, but I didn’t really know how to do that or what it entailed. To be honest, I still barely know. I denied that a lot, because I grew up in an area where people didn’t do “entertainment industry” as a career choice. Beaver County wasn’t a place where dreams grew, it was a place where dreams rusted out, then you got someone pregnant and eventually taught yourself to hide your seething animosity for your own place in life. It wasn’t until I was hanging out with a girlfriend in college that I said I wanted to be a comedian, and she turned to me and said “yeah, I can totally see that.” That was all the validation I needed, because she’d trusted me enough to let me fuck her, so I knew she believed in me.

I took the stage for the very first time in October of 1999, during Penn State’s East Halls Talent Competition. Like most talent competitions, this meant “a bunch of singer/songwriters.” And me. If you ever feel like you want to do comedy, but keep chickening out, here’s my advice: hire Rob Griffiths to come over and force you to do it. Standing in front of the sign-up list, after passing it and discussing it for weeks, he dropped the gauntlet: “You can either write your own name on the paper, or I can do it for you.” To protect my dignity, I wrote my own name.

The night of the show, I specifically remember being so nervouse that my vision blurred a few times. Lucky for me, my sense of responsibility and my secret lust for danger and instability far outweigh my fear. I had written the themes and keywords of my jokes on the back of my hand, and the sweat had smeared some of them past recognition. I thought I was going to die, in front of 300 people eating or waiting for food at The Big Onion. I did my first joke, which I believe was something terrible about Penn State instituting a course in Pimpology. I must have thought it was REALLY funny, as I later repurposed it for an article in the school humor magazine a year later. When I finished the joke, a table of 12 people sitting directly in front of me got up and walked out. This was entirely visible to everyone around, since their table was slightly elevated, and thus, they blocked people’s view of me during their exit. At that point I knew that, no matter what, nothing would ever happen on stage that was worse than that. I birthed my very first comedic thoughts in front of hundreds of strangers, and in a very public display, a dozen said “No thank you,” got up, and went home. It helped me relax.

So flash forward: post-grad, living at home with my mother (aka LIVING THE DREAM), I called and put myself on the list for the Improv open mic night. My mother was in the audience that night, and I remember ordering her a Mike’s Hard Lemonade from the stage to either make up for a joke about my childhood, or to thank her for being there. Either way, I remember the important part: the alcohol.

The material I performed was adequate for someone who’s set the game to “child” difficulty. I felt good after getting off the stage, adrenaline still rushing as I checked my notebook to see if I had done every joke I’d planned. Somewhere, I have a notebook with this material. Also still lurking in my mom’s apartment, I’m sure, are scraps upon scraps upon scraps of paper with bits, notes, and ideas. If there was something to write on, it was written upon. Recipes, seed planting instructions, napkins, menus…I think I even ripped off part of a greasy box of KFC to write something down and kept it for a very long time. Sadly, the bit had a shorter shelf life than the cardboard’s.

Soon after I was doing 1-2 sets a week, and man, did that feel good. The only problem with all of the performing I was doing was a) in my head, I knew I wasn’t very good yet, and b) most gigs required about an hour of travel. That can be difficult when you don’t own a car, and your only methods of transport are your mother’s 12-year-old Plymouth Acclaim with 125,000 miles on it, or borrowing your dad’s 18-year-old Lincoln Towncar, a behemoth of a vehicle that spilled every fluid inside of it at any chance, and couldn’t be driven over 50 because of the cracked cylinder heads in the engine. Wow, I’m writing this as if my worst times are behind me, and meanwhile I haven’t been gainfully employed in 4 months. Career trajectory, or patterns of life? Jesus, kill me now.

Anyhow, soldiering on is what my dreams called for, and soldier on I did, until a downturn in my mother’s health and a lack of a car of my own prevented me from doing more than 3 sets over a 7 month period. I won’t go in to too much detail, but I still don’t know how the fuck I – or we – survived then. My dad played a big part in helping my mom meet her rent, and I handled all the bills in the apartment while my mom slowly fell apart. Trying to help with that while working 40 hours at a $9.00/hour job meant something had to give, and that something was comedy. This was easily the most depressed, darkest place I had ever been in my life. Reminding myself about what a shithead I was even now makes me a little uncomfortable. You know what I thought I was going to be doing 6 months after graduating college? Living in New York, trying to do comedy. You know what I WAS doing 6 months after graduating college? Working at my 5-year-old summer job, in the winter, taking care of my mother, broke, with no idea of how to make anything happen for myself. Luckily, I fell in with a good group of people that were having some fun doing improv, which helped me get back into comedy and out of the funk I was in.

*This is a good breaking point. Tomorrow, I’ll post about how The Cellar Dwellers helped keep my head in the game, and taught me that no matter what field you go in to, there are going to be fucking douchebags.*

Let’s begin!

Paul Watson, a man from an anti-whaling group claimed that Japanese whalers shot him while trying to protest their practices in the Antarctic.



Watson says he will take the hint and go on a diet.

Let’s begin!

For the first time, Congress was able to vote into law a new water projects bill that President Bush had vetoed last week. In retaliation, President Bush has declared war on Congress.

The crew of the space shuttle Discovery returned the Earth this week. Among the things they discovered while in space was that no one cares about space travel anymore.

Poor Indian women are renting out their wombs as surrogates for foreign couples who can’t have kids. There aren’t many takers, though, as the wombs are said to be filthy and crammed too close together.

The Writers Guild Association officially began its strike this week, meaning no new content is being produced in most mediums. In a related story, Hollywood police this week have reported a drastic decrease in robberies.

The criminal trial of OJ Simpson began this week. His defense claims that Simpson was just looking for the real killer’s memorabilia.

AND FINALLY…

Nike has made the first shoe designed specifically for American Indians. They’re practically a steal at only 60 guilders.

Have a great weekend.

-MAL

*shuffles papers on desk, clears throat*

So, as some of you may or may not know, in July I began freelancing for The Late Show with David Letterman. To date, I’ve gotten two jokes on: during the August 1, and August 29 episodes. You can catch those monologues here.

It was a pretty big rush to hear Dave say words that I wrote in my underwear that morning (I mean, I was in my underwear, not that I wrote the words on the inside of…anyway.). After being such a fan since I was a wee one, to be able to contribute to the show was an enormous thrill.

Because of that awesome turn of events, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting The Week That Was as often. I let it fall to the wayside because I was worried about burning out on topical jokes. So here’s what I’ll do, on the weeks that Letterman goes on hiatus, I will do a WTW. It’s still good practice for me to do so, and the few people I’ve spoken to that read it seem to enjoy it. So that’s taken care of.

You may notice too that the site is in a bit of disarray. It was left mostly finished from long ago, then it started acting up and the person that created it had too much on her plate to be able to handle this. I’m hoping to talk to someone about getting this place a little less awful in the near-future. Does anyone know why WordPress would not allow me to approve comments? If you do, e-mail me. DON’T LEAVE A COMMENT, because…well, duh.

I have some pretty awesome stuff coming up in the fall that I hope to share with you soon. Thanks for listening.

*stands up, dusts cookie crumbs off pants, jumps through window, becomes bird, flies away*

-MAL

Matt Little’s Big Show

Featuring comedian Matt McCarthy and music by StoleyPT!

$5.00 at the door, which includes a free Blue Ribbon gift.  We’re taping it now, so the bigger an audience we have live, the better it sounds on tape.  Please put your voice on my tape, because it sounds so velvety smooth when you giggle.

Gotham City Improv

48 W. 21st St., 8th Floor

(F train to 23rd St., b/w 5th and 6th Avenue)

Give me a few days to post, I have a plan.  I’ll tell it to you in person on THURSDAY!

-MAL

Let’s begin!