Monday Night at the Dubh Linn

Well, last night was another show at the Dubh Linn. Open mic amateur comedy. Free entertainment, and actually a lot of pretty funny people.

In my humble opinion, I am usually the least funny of any given batch, but felt quite comfortable last night. The crowd was decent (eventually, since we started late) and responsive to everyone.

What follows is a portion of the set I originally wrote for my last gig. I usually write out a bunch of ideas with the intention of using a portion for my intro. Last night, I started right off in left field and never did touch the bases in order, but eventually found my way home. It was fun and we'll do it again sometime.

August 18 Intro Ramblings

Here’s some great news. My son and his wife came home from California a couple weeks ago. I ran out to greet them, shouting, “My son is home, kill the fatted eggplant.” His wife is vegan.

I’ve been asked where the eggplant humor comes from. It’s not demented, if that’s what you mean. It’s what you get when you cross certain strains of ethnic jokes with lawyer jokes. It awakens the dormant genome within the structure of the lawyer joke DNA.

For this reason, my favorite eggplant joke is...

Q. How many eggplants does it take to roof a house?

A: It depends on how thin you slice them.

I raise eggplants on the side. I catch them in the wild using eggplant traps. They’re not easy to have around though and they go bad pretty fast. First they steal pencils, then they steal money from your wallet, and the next thing you know you have an eggplant crackhouse in the back yard.

I’ve not given up on my attempts to domesticate them despite the reports of eggplant violence in parts of Florida and the Southwest.*

It’s good to have Micah home. He is a very talented cook, but on the side he’s been making extra income as a mime. He developed a skit in which he impersonated the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He calls it Random Acts of Silence. A lot of his punch lines seem to fall on deaf ears, he confided to me last week.

I was thinking recently how the real Free Speech Movement and a Bowel Movement had a lot in common. Ever notice how a bowel movement varies in duration based on how constipated one is? Maybe if our nation hadn’t been so constipated, the Sixties would not have given us such a hard time.

The irony is, the Free Speech radicals won, and now poets can stand in public on soapboxes quoting poetry with the F-word in it. This has evidently been deemed a great advance for Western Civilization.

What I don’t understand is why the list of things you CAN’T say today is longer than the original list. If it ain’t Politically Correct… you better scrub out your mouth with soap. In fact, don’t even think it.

Playlist

1. Napoleon Quote
2. Johnny Depp
3. Sign Language
4. Eggplant Humor
5. Romeo & Juliet Rewrite
6. Chinese Condoms

Of Pirates and Other Scallywags

What is it that causes children to become so fascinated with pirates, gangsters, hoodlums and Wild West outlaws? Perhaps it's because adults are fascinated with pirates, gangsters and others outside the law so that they write books and make movies and tell stories. There's an air of bravado and daring-do. And it's a lifestyle outside the boring routines of most peoples' daily lives.

The popularity of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow then is nothing new. A traditional yarn with exceptional Hollywood skill in terms of production, Depp took it over the top with his rendition of heroics and villainy.

Pirate yarns, however, go way back. Edgar Allen Poe's The Gold Bug certainly fits the bill for stirring up pirate adventure as two men strive to de-crypt a code that purportedly carries instructions to Captain Kidd's hidden trove of treasure. The cryptogram in the story created such a fascination with decoding mysteries that to the very present our newspapers carry a daily cryptogram in them! (You didn't know that Poe started that, did you?)

Treasure Island is another tale featuring pirates and buried treasure. Long John Silver was the villain in that coming of age story. Pirates also have a prominent role in bringing dread and adventure to the storied Swiss Family Robinson, though adventure is not exactly the right word in real life, because these lawless rulers of the high seas were not nice very nice men. Terror is a more appropriate term.

Captiva Island, now a beautiful resort area, is where the pirate Bluebeard purportedly kept the women his men absconded with after making husbands walk the plank. Yes, pirates have needs, too, besides money... and our daughters and wives were part of that booty. I'm willing to bet they did not always shave and bathe either.

The names I remember from my childhood include Captain Kidd, Blackbeard and Bluebeard. There were many other famous and infamous pirates on the high seas, including Black Bart, Calico Jack, the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet, and "The Corsair" Jean Laffite. There were also famous women pirates like Mary Read and "Ann Bonny" Cormac as well.

Once commerce commenced between the "New World" and Europe, it was easy for opportunists to take advantage of chinks in the system. Sir Francis Drake was considered a pirate by the Spanish, but a hero to the English, so some pirating is simply a matter of interpretation.

Maybe that is why some people who "pirate software" consider themselves heroes to a certain group of like minded peers. Software and music pirates today can potentially disrupt commerce, but as of now I know of none who took captives of made others walk the plank.

The most famous symbol for pirates was the Jolly Roger, a flag which was employed to terrify others into giving up without a fight. If you can take what you want without losing any men, you have more fighting men for the next adventure. Is this not why bank robbers brandish guns? Napoleon used the same strategy in several battles, not with a pirate flag, but with the element of surprise causing terror to disarm his enemies.

There are still pirates on the high seas today off the coasts of Indonesia, Somalia and Nigeria. In 2004 there were 251 reported incidents of piracy, with nearly a third of these in Indonesian waters. If you are planning a little boat ride around the world some time, there are certain waters you may wish to avoid.

Is my fan here?

You gotta start somewhere. The bottom is usually a good place to start because it’s all up from here.

OK, let’s see a show of hands if you want to hear eggplant jokes?

My stage name is Eddie Danger. Most likely you will never see it in lights. And it's true I am probably not that funny for most of my waking hours. I have several friends who have an incredibly comic wit and at one time I wanted to write some funny material by sending one of them my sentences to see what kinds of comeback lines they'd produce.

As you walk into Side Splitters Comedy Club in Tampa, there is a large print of Charlie Chaplin, one of America's first famous funny men. I just finished watching the film Chaplin (about his life) and his classic Modern Times. Truly, he was an awesome performer.

I read that Johnny Depp studied Chaplin's films because he'd learned that Chaplin created comedy by using the tension of contradictions. Not only did the actor wear contradictory clothes (large shoes, baggy pants with a small tight coat) he also used his eyes in a contradictory manner. He would communicate the opposite emotion with his eyes from that which was on his face or opposite of what the scene required. Depp used this to great effect in his Pirates of Caribbean blockbuster.

So for my own opening I told a joke, communicating only with my eyes. It seems inevitable to get a response. Then a follow up line about messing up the timing on the punch line. As if there had been a punch line.

I have done it a couple times before and found it effective, but this time I had a recording device in my hand and was going to play a laugh track when I got to the theoretical punch line. It was a new twist on my opening, but instead of hitting the play button, I accidentally hit record. It was an oops moment an messed up the set up for the next line, but actually made for laughs, too, because I did not get flustered, acted as if it was intentional.

Maybe next time I'll get it right.

One thing I noticed is that five minutes goes very fast. Which means you have to do fast setups and keep your little routine moving forward.

A few lines about enlightenment, idealism, the current Democratic candidates, and the introduction of my eggplant wound up the show.

Gotta run. Take care, dream big and have a great day.