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

My Near Death Experience

This past winter the flu that was going around grabbed hold of me and shook me hard. I went through two forty-eight hour stretches where I couldn’t sleep, had fever and chills, and at one point literally wished I could die.

Then my life flashed before my eyes. The strange part was that half of it was fiction.

In one scene, I was sitting with William Shakespeare. He -- or we I am not sure – was trying to work some humor into the third act of Taming of the Shrew. I told him that the notion of having Petruchio stick an eggplant in his pants and strut around on stage as if it were a codpiece was a bit too lowbrow.

“Bill,” I said, “You can do better.”

He seemed to take great pleasure from imagining this scene, but finally cut the eggplant. I then took a knife and sliced another piece off, and he cut off another slice and in a few minutes we had a plateful of eggplant slices. I suggested we pour tomato sauce and cheeses on it, and bake it. “What would you call something like this?” he inquired. I hesitated, then suggested we call it eggplant parmesan, and he said maybe he could work this into a story he was developing about Venice. He was torn between Death in Venice and The Merchant of Venice as a title. I proposed the latter. (Tom Mann would later be relieved.)

In another scene that flashed before my eyes I was manicuring Charles Dickens’ nails. He was chattering on and on about Great Expectations, how much it just seemed to be flowing right out of him. He had evidently shown me an early draft of the first half, because I told him I thought the scene with the eggplant was quite hilarious. He leaned back in his chair and frowned.

“What?” I asked with my eyebrows tilted upwards.

“I didn’t think the humor was working in that scene at all. Besides, it didn’t tie to anything else in the story,” he said.

“It was an anecdote,” I said leaning forward.

He leaned a little further back, as if I had bad breath, which I may have had because of a bad tooth. He shook his head in a dejected way. And finally said, “I really don’t think there is anything funny that you can do with eggplants. Do you?”

I replied, “Maybe that’s why I am having such a hard time coming up with a punchline for ‘Why did the eggplant cross the road?’”

He gave me a quizzical look, and the next thing I knew I was trembling violently in a sweat on my couch, remembering my flu, grateful for life.

Having survived my ordeal, I have great expectations for the next chapter of my life, whatever it brings.

Eat healthy, stay fit, and you have a good day, too.

First Signs of Spring

At last, spring is theoretically here. (I say theoretically because the forecast is for another blizzard this weekend.) Yes, I realize the crocuses have already appeared in other parts of the country, and that further south the blossoms have burst open on the trees. Up North, we're less fortunate, must always wait a little longer.

Fortunately the first two true signs of spring have occurred. This weekend Susie saw a pair of robins. And then yesterday I saw an eggplant.

I was walking out to the mailbox to get the morning paper. Off to my right, I heard a rustling in the bushes. At first I didn't see anything, but then -- expecting to see a rabbit -- I saw the eggplant and ran back to the house to grab my camera.

As I neared the place where I spotted him, he slipped out from hiding and went up to the edge of the road where he then stood to look both ways, making sure there were no cars coming. Using my zoom I captured the eggplant standing there, then ran up as he squirmed across the road and slipped up the other bank.

For me it was a very exciting moment. I have never been so near an eggplant in the wild.

The three pictures here will hopefully add to our understanding of why the eggplant crossed the road.

More Eggplant Mysteries

Q: Why did the eggplant cross the road?

A: Nobody knows. That's why it's so scary. When, or if, anyone finds out, please let me know so I can post it here. There are a lot of people losing sleep about this problem.

PHOTO CAPTION: Nesting eggplant on forest floor in Central Florida. The eggplant is especially fond of Spanish moss. Please do not disturb. And if you come across nesting eggplants while hiking in Florida, please do not be disturbed. Most eggplants are generally harmless.

Floridians Alarmed By Growing Eggplant Violence

A battle has been raging in recent years between environmentalists and government leaders here in Florida regarding the rapidly increasing number of eggplant assaults. Yesterday’s death of a woman boater has officials under pressure to take action regarding the matter. The woman was killed by a head trauma after colliding with a flying eggplant off the coast of West Palm Beach.

Dr. Eldon Hoffman, an environmental advocate who has taken up the cause, insists the incident was accidental and that the flying eggplant struck the woman without malice. “It was simply a matter of wrong place, wrong time,” Hoffman stated. “The eggplant is an extremely gentle vegetable. Up until the past few years there have been very few instances where an eggplant will assault a human.”

Allison Nichols was riding in a boat at approximately 50 miles per hour when the flying eggplant struck her on the side of the head. The force of the impact killed her instantly.

Although media reports of such encounters appear to be rare, numerous phone calls to Florida news rooms indicate that eggplant attacks on humans have been rising significantly. Statistics reveal that in the ten years preceding 2000, there were approximately 1.4 eggplant assaults reported per year in Dade County. In 2007 there were 47 assaults reported in Dade and more than sixty in the communities surrounding Tampa Bay. This was the first known death caused by an eggplant.

Hoffman insists that more research should be undertaken to determine why Florida eggplants are going bad. Hoffman is currently lobbying the legislature for funding to determine the cause of this outbreak of violence in recent years. “The media is as much to blame as anyone,” said Hoffman. “They downplay the problem because they do not want to adversely affect tourism. If there were more stories on the situation, we could raise awareness and help fund the necessary research.”

Critics say Hoffman is going too far in his defense of the purple vegetable.

Hoffman, whose hobby farm outside Orlando includes eggplants, couch potatoes and a menagerie of small rodents, has long been considered a kook by his neighbors.

PHOTO CAPTION: Eggplant nesting on roof of a home near Sun City.