Whenever a comedy controversy occurs involving a comedian’s joke upsetting an audience member, the one thing that sticks in my craw is when I hear another comedian say “I’m tired comedians getting criticized by people who know nothing about comedy.”

If the entire audience is clueless about comedy, then wouldn’t that mean their laughs mean nothing? If they know nothing about comedy, then why tell them jokes in the first place? 

Comedians who constantly defend bad rape jokes are a lot like gun nuts who defend assault rifles. They don’t want a real debate on the merits of some comedy because they don’t want to admit that some comedy has no merit, just like some guns have no merit. And just like the gun nuts invoke the Founding Fathers, you hear comedians citing the roads paved by Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Bill Hicks to help their argument. Newsflash: They’re dead, and they’re not here to vouch for you. They may have helped shape some of our ideas, but they didn’t issue us a blank check with which to pummel the audience with unfunny, “dark” material, so stop invoking them.

Just once I’d like to see a disgraced comedian admit that maybe their dumb joke about rape was indeed ignorant and that they could see where the offended party was coming from, instead of hiding behind the defense of friends and other comedians who weren’t there. Tell all the rape jokes you want, but at least own them. If the best comedy comes from truth, and you do a ton of jokes in which women die or get raped, the problem the audience has isn’t really that your jokes are “offensive” or that they didn’t “get it”, it’s that you come off as a creep with disturbing, violent fantasies, and you simply can’t force people to like that.

Seth Johnson and Shawn Wereley handicap the FPIA 2012 finals (cuts off at the end but totally worth it).

I’m headlining Live at Coldtowne Friday night. Hey, seriously, if you’ve never seen me do comedy, go see this show. It’s BYOB, and admission is less then the price of a drink on E. 6th. I’ve been called “comedian” by the Austin Chronicle, and Funny or Die told me “hello” in an email. 10pm!

PS This is how sad you’ll look if you don’t make it.

I didn’t upload this, but I did have this set recording off Comedy Central for years and used to watch it constantly. Bob Odenkirk does whatever he wants, and it’s amazing. It’s not even ruined by Sandra Bernard’s amateurish intro. 

I can’t believe he got on TV with this set, and that they even aired it. So strange and hilarious. The crowd barely gets it, but Bob is still having a great time. Very influential to me. 

This guy keeps me going, even though he’s no longer with us. 

Gonna spend my day revisiting some of his best work.

Next month. Very excited.

(August makes ten years in comedy for me)

Bill Hicks is one of the most influential comedians of the 20th century. He is often mentioned in the same breath as George Carlin and Richard Pryor. His style, they say, has been copied by hundreds of young comics who see him as somewhat of a mentor. That sucks.

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“And don’t forget to do ‘My Funny Valentine’ with the special lyrics about the moon landing.”

Here is the full-length broadcast of the June 22nd edition of KOOP’s “ReMix”, hosted by Matthew Johnson. He had me on to play some cuts off a mix I made (see my previous tumbl). We talk about the songs on the mix, plus a little about the processes of mixtape making and joke writing.

First joke I ever wrote. 

One day, I found this at a thrift store:

It’s a video that Kellogg’s offered for a handful of Pop-Tart UPC’s. It opens with Paula Poundstone doing roughly twenty minutes of mostly Pop-Tart material. She is talking about Pop-Tarts, while holding a box of Pop-Tarts in her hand, and on the brick wall behind her is an extremely large and distracting Pop-Tart sign. She opted out of dressing like a Pop-Tart, instead wearing what looks like what a nine-year-old would wear to a job interview.

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I want this show to be popular. I figured tumbling it would get the job done.

Groundbreaking, trend-setting, unique, brave, fearless…and not at all funny.