I really love working on this project, all the women are amazing improvisers and incredibly fun to work with. We are basically in love. And Leena is a great writer/director and she doesn’t yell at us when we goof and talk too much but she’s also stern, but like a cutiepants stern, but still a powerful woman, but also like adorable with an elfish face, but still an independent strong powerful woman like Beyonce, but like without the confusing mixed signals about women’s relationship to wealth and marriage.
It’s nice to do what you love, whenever it happens it’s such a huge surprise and delight to me because most of our lifetimes are spent on jobs we don’t like or want. Comedy and whenever I get to do it is a gift and a fucking joy. I’m going to eat ice-cream now because that’s what delight means, suckers.
I don’t know why I called you guys suckers earlier. I’m sorry. Don’t be mad, ok? I am mad with ice-cream power. I say things I don’t mean. I took your car. Your gym stuff and your baby were in there. One of them is here with me. It doesn’t matter which one. Let’s not make a big deal about this. I’ll see you around, suckers.
So, I have an 11 month old son, I take him to “Mommy (or Daddy in my case) and Me Movies” which is the phenomenon of taking your baby to the theater and watching a current movie with other parents and their babies. You’ve heard of that right? It’s a thing.
Anyway, I’m taking him to see What to Expect When You’re Expecting tomorrow because that’s what they programmed and I like to get out of the house.
This sketch is probably better than that movie will be.
Check out the So Natural! web series on Funny Or Die and follow them on Twitter.
I have two kittens named Benson and Stabler who are five months old and I love them what I assume to be too much, because I often daydream about harrowing situations in which I have to kill people to save them, and it doesn’t take me as long as you might think to make that decision and there are very few people that are not getting murdered. I wish I could tell you that all my aunts would remain alive, but I can’t, because it’s not true. I GUESS SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A LITTLE MORE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT MY GARDEN AT THANKSGIVING LINA
I also want to hug and kiss my kittens a lot. I assume it’s too much because I love them so hard I freak out at not being able to express it with just hugging and kissing and calling them made-up names and dancing with them in a kitten pile in my arms and eating their bellies like tacos and I feel like if I can’t get all this love out in any of those ways I may squeeze them to death. That’s when I take a time out. Maybe have a glass of water and not look at them for a while.
If this is how murderers feel we’ve been way too hard on them, you guys.
Come to this tonight if you live in LA and love weird fun funnytimes. If you don’t, The Client List is probably on you human garbage pillow. I’m very excited to perform with all these guys and ESPECIALLY about Dan Dringle. Please check out his Tumblr, you will not be sorry.
Tonight. The Also-Ran Comedy Hour presents “Dringle Comes Alive” at The Lab at the Hollywood Improv. DanDringle.com is brought to life by comedians Jim Hegarty, Jared Moskowitz, Josh Androsky, Brandon Vaughn and Sofiya Alexandra. My sick is inside them and tonight it becomes yours. Live.
I’ve got two words for you - Candice Cashmere. But before I tell you who she is, I want to gush a little about how wonderful I think Twitter is for spontaneous creative outbursts of the ridiculous. You send your little 140 character missive into space, and you are done with it. But the fun part is, that doesn’t mean everyone else is. People will send you their own versions of your joke, part twos of your joke, things that will make you laugh and occasionally wish their joke wasn’t funnier than yours. It’s a kind of surprise collaboration where you don’t get to choose the collaborator or the manner you collaborate in. You have inadvertently inspired someone. LIVE WITH IT. Of course, occasionally someone will get angry at your joke where you suggest that Jennifer Lopez sucks cock, musically and cock-wise, and tell you that you are the one, in fact, who sucks cocks, and you will be unable to dispute that claim. But in my two years of Twitter, the number of people who have tried to insult me and my cock-sucking are very few, and the number of people who want to play with me via Twitter is very high.
Onto Candice Cashmere. On Friday, January 27th at 2:39, as I was drudging through another soul-shattering day at work, I tweeted this random thing:
If even one of you was named Candice Cashmere my day would improve by like 1000%.
About five minutes later, I got an email that informed me that someone named Candice Cashmere was my newest follower. OH MY GOD I HAVE MADE A PERSON WITH A STRANGER AND NOT IN THE WAY I WAS ALWAYS AFRAID OF I thought to myself. Some beautiful bastard took my random thought and turned it into reality. I threw a penny into a well of weird, and my wish came true! PEOPLE ARE INCREDIBLE AND FUN AND MAYBE I WON’T DIE AT MY DESK AFTER ALL. I laughed out loud in my cubicle. I did the thing where you bounce on your squeaky chair and annoy everyone around you. I didn’t care. January 27th was Candice Cashmere’s birthday, and I would be damned if I let anyone ruin my daughter’s special day.
About my daughter? Oh, she’s a disgusting pervy weirdo whose profile photo is a blow-up doll. She must take after her father because I find genitals distasteful. He’s letting his freak flag fly and that’s great. And the wonderful thing is, I don’t have to like Candice. I didn’t make her. But she wouldn’t exist without me, Twitter, or her dad, and that’s fun as hell.
Some of my favorite @CandiceCashmere gems:
We used to play Old MacDonald’s Farm in the living room growing up. Grandpa would make me and my cousins suck his utters while he grazed.
The Fog rated NC-17 (under my comforter right now)
I still don’t get why people in the olden days used to grow cotton on their farms and eat it.
Yauch’s life and career are a testament to the possibilities of emotional, creative, and artistic growth. A man who rose to fame peddling a proudly obnoxious form of adolescent nihilism grew up to be a man whose life and career were defined by idealism and integrity. Adam Yauch wanted to make the world a more compassionate, loving, and funky place. He succeeded. The world is poorer for his loss but richer for the contributions he made.
I’ve been meaning to do a series of entries talking about Twitter and the wonderful, interesting, or weird things that have happened to me because of it. Twitter has really helped my comedy and weirdly, my life, and I hope to chronicle my coolest experiences here in this series. My hope is it will make it more appealing to try for people who haven’t, and also help me remember and appreciate how cool and unexpected life and art can be. And yes, I think Twitter is incredibly conducive to art, fuck off.
A lot of people hate Twitter for a myriad reasons: “I don’t care what random thing you’re doing with your day,” “I hate watching people have private conversations over a public medium,” or my favorite, “I don’t get it.” Personally, although I am always curious about new things, I’m rarely an early adopter of technology. It took me years to consider the butter churn, and frankly, I still don’t completely trust it. I’m just cautious about new things that take my time, energy, and/or money. I’m usually second wave, or later, depending on how intimidated I am by the technology. Pasteurization, for example, gives me the creeps plain and simple. Like I always say, no milk lumps? it’s goin’ in the dumps! It’s not a great saying, but it really works.
I’ve only been on Twitter for about 2 years, I think, and I was a real hater before I joined. After much grumbling I finally joined “for me,” to practice writing jokes in a particular format, to see if it would spark ideas for jokes to do on stage, and to keep me from killing myself when I was unemployed. For a long time I tweeted into a vacuum, to 20 followers who were often spambots or people who never use their Twitter accounts. I had no idea how to engage other people and felt their jokes were infinitely more clever than anything I could come up with. I didn’t get a direct message for a year or more. It was so lonely sometimes I would cry cyber tears and my circuits would rust right up. The loneliness was well-deserved though, since my early jokes were awkward and jammed into the 140 character format the way I jam clothes into my drawers - desperately, with a dash of resignation. But you know what? I got better. I made myself laugh after a while. What started as a forced exercise for a standup comic who was trying to keep her mind limber while not on stage turned into an activity I looked forward to every day. Me, who procrastinates to keep from procrastinating. Me, who has played with my kittens and checked Facebook and Twitter about 5,000 times and made tea and googled “bitters” in the last 5 minutes. This was a major win.
Twitter turned out to be something very different from what I imagined it to be. For one, I never use my Twitter jokes on stage. My standup has been evolving in a theatrical direction, longer bits that involve a lot of character work (really excited to use “character work” here! especially after “butter churn” and “pasteurization”! you guys are so goddamn lucky). My Twitter has become increasingly shorter, more absurd, weirder. I notice that the recurring themes are things I’m truly concerned about - the portrayal of women in our culture, the psychology of advertising, our political system, how much I love catchy rap despite its very obvious misogyny, my awe/hate of horses, parent/kid relationships, and most importantly, BUTTS. It feels really really good to be that honest in an area of your life when so much of life is trapping our fears and anxieties under words and activities so we all feel like we’re not lonely terrified loonies. OR THIS IS JUST ME YOU GUYS YOU’RE ALL DOING GREAT.
The point is, Twitter is a place you can fly your freak flag proudly, and that’s probably the number one reason I would recommend it.
