I prepped a 15 minute stand up routine with Zack and C.Nic last night, with C as my writing partner and Zack as an "Audience". We did 5 minutes in an "Audition" sort of thing over the phone with a manager for (SHALL BE UNNAMED). She said it was good, but the problem wasn't what I expected.
In years past, the main problem was my age. I was 16 when I started doing this $#%^, and my last gig was in May. 17 years old! Now, I'm 18, and its still awkward to preform in bars. I'd like to think I do OK, but the pity laughs do get on your nerves. When I hit 21, the awkward should end. But, until then, I have to convince barkeeps that I'm just planning to preform, and I have no interest in drinking.
That's not the problem here, she said. She's seen my act one time, at the C[UNNAMED]e. It was decent, she said. The problem was the political content.
In the C[UNNAMED]e act, I made a joke about John Boehners' face having the same physical qualities as a tree stump covered in moss (To put it nicely...). Idaho, being the 2nd most conservative state, generally doesn't like that kind of language. However, downtown Boise is a democrats dream. Its all indie filmmakers and entrepreneurs selling hipsters "Fashionable" clothing. It terms of political action, well... hipsters, man. They really don't do $#%^. But they like my act, in general. And it seemed a lot of people liked the joke, especially when I went into details, comparing nostrils to knotholes, branches to noses (Pinocchio, anyone?), etc.
The fear here was that in this crowd of hipsters (And its really all of them, to be frank. Its not hard to tell a regular person apart from a bearded lady covered in tacky clothing from Goodwill) there was a Republican who would be offended. And its a sane and rational fear; they really cannot take a joke. Look at Palin and David Letterman. As soon as he made that comment about her daughter, people were demanding he be fired. The joke:
"One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee game: during the seventh inning, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez."
Now, her daughter is a slut! And a hypocrite. You can't just slap the word "Born Again" on anything and hope it'll convice everyone while lying through your teeth. Thats like me taking a bottle of painkillers and selling them to hobos, then disguising myself as a hobo and selling them back to myself! Or, worse than that, thats like breaking into a police station and planting evidence you were there by leaving your memoirs on the Captains desk! (Its midnight, I'm off. Shut up.)
But getting back to the original point, Republicans cannot ever take jokes lightly. Everything is an attack. When Trump was being roasted by Seth Meyers at the Correspondents Dinner, his face was so scrunched up if someone would have punched him in the nose he would have exploded like one of those slow motion balloons. Its insane how insane these people get when they can no longer differentiate joke-from-reality.
But, as I witness the slow decline of every major political party in America, all I can do is joke. I agree with the manager: Making jokes like the one I did on Boehner is totally inappropriate. Right now. Comedy is always evolving. One day, Lincoln gets shot. Two hundred years later, "Hey, shoulda seen it comin!" Monica Lewinsky blows the President, Bill Clinton, and millions are spent trying to impeach him. Now, we mock how stupid that whole deal was. Columbine, Cheney shooting a guy, Virginia Tech, Bowling for Columbine. In less than 2 seconds, I came up with 4 examples of shooting related deals. Which one made you laugh or at least crack a smile? Cheney, of course! Hes a crazy right oilman who not only shot a friggin guy, but then the guy who got shot APOLOGIZED for the "...trouble he caused". Thats power. And if you can't see the humor in that, where are you, emotionally?
So, I agreed with the manager: No right wing jokes. For right now. We'll all know when its right to mock the Republicans for being stupid. It took about 4 years for us to get the facts straight on 9/11; now Bush is considered the biggest idiot since Paris Hilton's boyfriend (The 12th one, I mean.)
And I should be playing the clubs soon. September 19th, if everything goes according to plan. Name to be released later, should I get the gig. In the meantime, C and I have to figure out how we can make computer speakers seem funny.