I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I will be performing tomorrow at UCB Theatre’s School Night as member of the Suburburban-Virginia-and-Maryland-Themed improv group Beltway Bandits.

This is a red (line) letter day… I never do improv.

In 1957 the respected BBC news show Panorama announced that thanks to a very mild winter and the virtual elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop….. Huge numbers of viewers were taken in, and many called up wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. To this question, the BBC diplomatically replied that they should “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

(from Swilkes)

Despite the fact it may forward the curse, I watched the rest of Roadhouse this weekend, then followed it with The Great Moment (out-of-character Sturges heroic dentist biopic) and Real Life (showcasing Albert Brook’s horrifying shoulder fur)

My parents were in town, briefly, and I went to the Met (museum, not opera) with them. They’ve renovated the 19th/18th Century painting area (I can’t remember what the old gallery looked like… I probably could reconstruct the layout of the National Gallery in DC from memory, though). The three temporary shows were a parade of snooze and yuck though… Courbet,Poussin, and Jasper Johns: Gray.

However, on Sunday, I have found a new obsession. I’ve been a cranky snob about the last couple years about the revival schedules put up at Film Forum. They flipflop from being paint-dryingly dull retrospectives of the third-best forgotten masters of Japanese drawing room dramas where 2/3 of the movie is people emotionlessly staring at each other or, the UA screening coming up, so broad and mainstream that every movie on the ticket is available at your local blockbuster. Although, I really do applaud Film Forum’s ability to work my favorite movie “One, Two, Three” into EVERY series. Hooray!

Anyway, due to a listing in the New York Times (that I was only reading because my parents had a copy in their hotel room), I saw the New-York Historical Society (I don’t know why it’s hyphenated) was showing a double feature of silents. Turns out this group—Silent Clowns—has been showing extremely rare silents for the last 10 years. I finally found a film series nerdy/unpretenious enough to meet my specific film needs.

They seem to have a show once a month from fall through spring—there’s only two showings left this month. Next month is some guy with a mustache but the next one after that is Laurel & Hardy (meh) shorts AND a female slapstick duo and I’m intrigued. One is tall and one is short and in the promo picture they seemed to be tied together at the waist with a guilt look on their faces—that says “comedy” to me!

I’ve always liked the line-art “doodled in a notebook” style of Built-by-Wendy’s t-shirt series, usually showing scenes from cult movies (Birch Harms has the To Kill A Mockingbird one and someone else has the Bad News Bears dugout one, but I can’t remember who).

I checked their site recently, and they’re totally pandering to comedy nerds (or suddenly hipsters are all really into cusp-of-70s/80s comedy). Not only do they have a Gene Wilder/Gilda Radner shirt, but also a Bob & Doug MacKenzie shirt.

I just finished Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979, which AV got me for Xmas. I was doing a lot of reading back in January, finishing three books in two weeks, but I kinda fell off. I still have another book my parents got me and an old copy of

Pride and Prejudice

I’ll expand on this entry later; I’m going to go get a haircut now.

It cheapens the whole having-an-astral-body-named-in-your-honor for the other honorees.

Channel 102 is Monday night.

As if you need an additional reason to go… we’re showing a sneak preview of one of our new Cakey! episodes we made for SuperDeluxe. They won’t be online for a month at the very earliest, so the live screening is your first chance to see Cakey back in action.

After the regular Channel 102 program starting at 7, the special Cakey episode will be shown.

Channel 102
Monday, February 4, 2008
two shows—7:00pm & 9:30pm

at
Pianos
158 Ludlow Street (near Stanton)
New York, NY

If I recover, I’ll see you there. Still horribly sick.

Why am I wasting my time making internet videos, when this guy already completely mastered the form?

Silvija allowed me to accompany her yesterday, courtesy of Playbill press tickets, to see The 39 Steps on Broadway, gratis.

You can see the best and worst qualities of this play in my picture on the left—the fantastic poster and my post-show haze of boredom and underwhelmity. Like many other Broadway shows I’ve seen, I hesistate to criticize as my first through is always “I am not the audience for this.” But, this is a comedy stage adaption of a Hitchcock film classic. On paper, it’s 100% in my wheelhouse; however, in audience, I flipped between being apologetic for not enjoying it more to being angry about the camp winky-ness and telegraphed jokes to just being peeved.

I knew nothing about the show beforehand. I actually thought it was going to be a straight adaption. Silvija said it’s a monster hit in England. The history in a nutshell is: there was a 2-man cast adaption of the film first (like Irma Vep or Gutenburg!, I suppose) and the producer of this version expanded to a central actor in the lead, a woman who does 3 female roles and 2 clownish-looking swing guys who play everything else. I’m fine with that (though it’s a missed opportunity the female actor never played any other swing roles and no male roles; the two buffoons play a variety of arch “bad drag” roles), but the majority of the show there’s no joke beside “look it’s crazy how many roles these guys are playing… oops! he’s gotta find a reason to leave so he can play that other guy again! Oh, the wackiness.”

Silvija, at intermission, still in apologetic mode, said she wished the script was funnier. It seemed like a second draft of a show, in desperate need of punch-up in the long talky scenes where there was no physical comedy. The pacing overall was weird and you could feel real impatience from the crowd when a physical bit was outstaying its welcome and repeating over and over without really growing or changing. That said, there are a handful of moments of vaudeville-y stuff that do deliver—a guy takes a punch to the face and literally falls over backwards, rolls up onto his head and over and another scene has some “comedy sleeping” that I will embarrasingly point to as something that delighted me on my deepest, dumbest level. There is some great object work and miming, but it’s constantly brought down by mugging, winking, breaking the reality with 4th wall call-outs. They shoehorn in the names of 5 Hitchcock films into the dialogue, which is fine… groanworthy… but every time they do there’s a take to the audience, rewarding them for “getting it” and grinding the proceedings to a halt. The “games” of the show that made me the angriest were the endless mugging and pointing out how hard it is to do a whole movie with four actors, which by the second half had become a recurring gag of “You guys stop wasting time… you’re not a river/pile of rocks/10 policeman, you’re just a man waving a sheet around and get on with it.”

I mean, this show didn’t make me want to kill myself (as other Broadway shows have… I’m looking at you, second act of Spring Awakening) and there was enough interesting stagecraft to pull me through. Should YOU get free tickets (or cheap tickets), it’s worth a look. But steel yourself for mugging.

Welcome to my Study is currently on the front page of FunnyorDie.com. Please vote “funny.”

I almost wrote “FurryorDie” which would be a different sort of site.

If you haven’t already read it, check out Mitch’s blog post about performing at the Andy Kaufman Awards in Las Vegas in which he was a finalist based on the Andy-ness of Study.

I am not a member of the Writer’s Guild, but there’s currently a strike going on. I hope to be a member (soon) and I am currently unemployed, so I went out.

Today I walked the picket line at Chelsea Piers on the west side of Manhattan where they make Law & Order. I didn’t know they made Law & Order there until today. It was pretty cold out, something picketers in Los Angeles don’t have to worry about. When you’re picketing two things happen… trucks honk at you showing support (truck drivers like unions and they like honking) and people give you free cookies and coffee all day.

Do picketers in Los Angeles get free coffee? They don’t need it, it’s hot there. Maybe they get free sunblock or something.

The show-runners from Law & Order (a Show-runner is like a combo producer-writer that manages the day-to-day of making a show and as a result they’re kind in the middle of this writers vs. producers stalemate) kept sending out boxes and boxes of really fancy cookies and brownies for us. (Like from Elenis and Fat Witch… fancy!) Then as I moved from one area of the picket to another I saw The Belz handing out hot meatball subs to people on the line. THE BELZ

The Belz did not call anyone “cutie” but he referred to his two dogs that had with them as “children”—“C’mon, children,” he said as he walked off. Dick Wolf was also there, also walking a dog.

We also had a big inflatable rat, but its eyes had been rubbed off. Everyone was really nice and a good time was had by all. The End.

I’ve been sick for a couple days. I even skipped work today.

Rob Lathan’s blog reminded me that there’s an Andy Kaufman award thing happening and that Mitch put Welcome to My Study in as his submission. So, if you want to see it again, here it is:

http://www.ziddio.com/oneVideo.zd?dispatch=fetch&artifactId=33437

It’s unclear as to how viewer ratings play into which 5 minute video is the Kaufmaniest, but you could vote for it if you want. I have to say the flash-video on the site is a lot crisper than the dreck on YouTube. And somehow, despite having NO ratings, it says Study has been viewed 22820 times, which I doubt is true.

If Mitch is a finalist, he has to perform live. Live Welcome to My Study?!

I “directed” a sketch show that’s having a work-out on stage this week. That means the sketches are all done but we haven’t had a lot of time to rehearse or nail down the cosmetic particulars of transitions and cues… we weren’t planning on debuting the show until next month but the opportunity presented itself. I made a party hat for one scene and a harpoon prop for another; my “directing” has mostly consisted of complaining and making them buy me sandwiches.

The sketches are pretty good—about half are from a show done a couple of years back and half are new. Two of the sketches are my favorites of all time from any sketch show ever, see if you can detect what they are.

It is appearing on Wednesday, July 11th, around 7pm at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The cost is five dollars.

The show features Matt DeCoster and Will Hines. The title is “Seven Fights: A Sketch Show About Winning,” but the title doesn’t actually refer to anything in the actual show… it’s a bunch of sketches.

You should come and see it.

I’m directing a sketch show for Will Hines and Matt DeCoster and we had a meeting yesterday. It’s a lot of old sketches from their show “Chronicles of Riddick,” the performance of which was attended by less than 10 people at the Red Room. Five of them were their friends, five of them were random drunk people lured up from the bar who spent the entire show talking loudly and making cell phone calls. Brett Gelman (one of the “friends”) nearly got into a fistfight with one loud drunk lady, who later came back after the show to alternately complain about Brett to the performers (“he must have been related to you because he was laughing at stuff that was’t funny”) and damn them with faint praise (“Some of your stuff was OK. You could play at Funny Bones in Staten Island.”)

During our meeting, Matt DeCoster brought up his favorite online video series, declaring every creative decision made by the creators to be perfect in every way and that he’s watched every episode over and over. I was skeptical at first, but it does grow on you—
ZeroTV’s adaption of Mary Worth

I decided I want a cool robot costume. I made one more than ten years ago, and I think I could probably do a better job now. I don’t specifically have a show or sketch or anything to use it in, though I’ve discussed it with Silvija.

When I suggested doing a video where we played robots, she said “Isn’t that kind of hack?” I disagreed. I think the hackiness of robots in comedy has gone full cycle (peaking in 2000-1) and now it’s more Zombie that are hack. (Despite my argument, I admit that robots still might be slightly hack so the material has to be extra good… and the costume has to be extra good.) On the pro side, Silvija noted that we both kind of talk like robots naturally, so we won’t have to modify our voices.

I will probably do a head in paper-mache using some kind of helmet as a base… maybe a cheap plastic mask stapled to the front to give it structure. If I could get a very cheap used bike helmet I’d use that. I did a short peruse of Halloween Adventure, but they didn’t have any plain plastic “helmets” to use. The ones they had were kid-sized—too small! I’m probably have to get a bodysuit to wear under it… which is just the slippery slope excuse I need to get into the confusing/claustrophobic “zentai” fetish!

So, I don’t want to do the tinfoil box with dryer vent arms—that really has been done to death—or anything really boxy. I checked the internet to see if there were any robot tutorials, but I haven’t found anything that fits the kind of robot suit I want to make which is on the more art-deco tip. Like somewhere between the “False Maria” from Metropolis and the Will Smith I Robot robots (I didn’t see this movie).

Here’s what I found online:

• The unholy union of “furry” and “robot” which I posted in my blog years ago.

• CloroxBot step-by-step which also uses stilts (people think robots are tall), but the real prize on the site is this insane cardboard Boba Fett helmet.

• A French-Canadian who makes Transformer costumes (in cardboard, no less) that actually tranform….
  ... but of course the Japanese still do it better

Someone start a comedy group under this name:

Make sure you have a really tall guy in the group who dresses like a cop all the time. Maybe he can do all your edits by lurching onto stage in this position.

A lot of comedians are teenie-weenie in real life.

Found while researching sideshow banners and posters for a Coney Island-themed CD cover I’m working on. If’n you’d enjoy that sort of thing, here’s two sites worth visiting:

Johnny Meah, Czar of Bizarre (contemporary artist working in the style)

Vintage banners (40s-50s) from the Hammer Gallery

Stay up all night 3 days in a row and you make shit like this.

I’ve often thought about doing funny valentines with my characters from various projects… variations on the pun-based innocuous crap that kids share… but never felt motivated to do it.

Thank goodness for Brandon Bird—

See more Law and Order Valentines on his site (but the rest of them are all SVU and that’s the worst franchise)