Blogging Behind Your Back

Let's call him Steve.  He was a pink-faced, bleach-haired college boy with hellzapoppin' energy.  Everyone in attendance at the coffee shop open mike standup comedy scene was grateful for his presence.  He spat out his anecdotes about fast food mishaps with an idiosyncratic flair, one arm gesticulating, both feet shuffling, a spastic marionette with a voice that sliced through aural clutter.  His twisty punchlines within punchlines unfolded in startling directions.  Fast food joints were a recurring subject, though he had less fat on him than I had in my knuckles.  Most of the regular or irregular performers at the Wednesday night open mikes could charitably be called weak; a few were solid.  Two regulars could really deliver the goods.  Steve topped them all, while inspiring them to fresh heights.  Steve was a comedy machine.  An HBO special someday?  Not too farfetched.

He repeated his material from show to show, but hey, who didn't?  That's how comics refine, and besides, for us regulars it was like hearing favorite songs.

Steve was really supportive.  I tried my hand at standup, and after my first night he told me I delivered the strongest first standup session he'd ever seen.  Maybe he said that to all the boys, but it made me feel floaty.

(Side note: one thing I learned from doing this is that when you do some weak standup, and a solemn-faced young woman approaches you to say "You were really funny," what she's really saying is "I am really lonely."  So be nice to her.)

I remember once he introduced a friend of his at the open mike, and proceeded to hang his head in embarrassment for said friend as the friend (oh, let's call him Chuck) delivered a puzzling attempt at humor.  He was a likable, gangly guy, but his jokes seemed like improvised remarks in the noble tradition of Mort Sahl only dumb.  I only remember one thing he said:

"It's hard to be a Christian in the South!  Everybody takes the Lord's name in vain!  Why don't they take someone else's name in vain instead?"  This is an oldie but a goodie on the Christian Comedy circuit, but that first line was perplexing.  Did Chuck mean southern Saudi Arabia?  The Southeastern US probably presents fewer challenges to Christians than anywhere else in the word 'cept maybe the Holy See.

After a while we began to wish Steve would cook up some new material, even if it wasn't as strong.  Once Steve delivered a new joke, but I'd first heard it from my friend J'miza.  I recounted this to J'miza, who muttered "That nigga loves to steal jokes."  (Steve's whiteness might bear a mention here.)

The open mike shows and I drifted apart as I got more involved in community theatre (tediously documented on this blog's back pages) and I didn't see Steve for a while.  Eventually my friend Chauncey told me, "I saw Steve doing a show out of town last week.  He's still doing the same jokes about fast food."  I began to wonder who had written Steve's original material.  Had a ghost writer crafted the stuff?  If Steve wrote it himself, why wasn't there more where that came from?

And then, years later, I got a Fecesbook friend request from Steve.  I accepted, and discovered that:

• He's a defense attorney
• He's a Ron Paul fanatic
• His Fecesbook posts aren't jokes.

I found his Paultard banner waving a bit tedious, but my own idées fixes are probably less than delightful to some of my FB friends.

He offered up a free downloadable album of his comedy.  I eagerly downloaded it, but found it less delightful than I'd remembered.  I find recordings of most standup to be a bit underwhelming (Minnie Pearl is an exception for some reason) so it may just be the lack of his physical presence.  I noticed, though, that a spirit of "Afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" rippled through the comedy; not consistently so, but it was there.  A lot of ethnic humor that didn't engage other cultures; not that a comic can't play that game, but a white male child of privilege might want to be thoughtful about it in a way Steve didn't seem to be.  Some slut shaming.  Some virgin shaming.  Some low-on-the-economic-totem-pole shaming.  All's fair in comedy, or so I thought in the mid-Oughts, but it wasn't sitting too well with me half a decade later.

And my lack of laffs wasn't directly tied to my politically correct objections; heaven knows I can still enjoy some down and dirty comedy.

I wound up deleting most of the album.  I kept a few golden bits to remember him, and then, by.

Steve posted an article about how his firm, with himself involved, got a man off charges of murdering his wife.  Were they saving a poor man who'd lost his spouse, only to be falsely charged with her death?  Or were they getting a killer off?  I don't suppose I'll ever know, but I suppose it was their job either way.

Anyway, this past week saw Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.  For the benefit of the not-impossible future reader of this epistle who isn't a scholar of corny sociopolitical brouhahas, the owner of Chick-Fil-A came out and said that he donates a portion of profits to anti-gay causes.  His choice, but some gay rights supporters called for a boycott, and in return conservative person Mike Huckabee called for "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day."  It became a thing.  Lots of anti-gay types, many of them politicians, showed up at their local branches of Chick-Fil-A to gobble down some mall food and photo-op it up.

Steve, who had seemed to be slightly sympathetic to bullied gays in his standup, posted something to the effect of "This Chick-Fil-A food is as delicious as freedom!  Long live Christianity and Chick-Fil-A!"  And no, it wasn't a joke.  He didn't go for that brand of irony.  Fed up, I commented "Kil Mor Homos" in response.

He deleted my comment, and I finally defriended him.  Was I trying to goad him into giving me an excuse?  Maybe.  I'm sure he'll be fine.  I'm sure I will too.  It's a long way from being the most regrettable relationship conclusion in my 38 years on this earth.

Scenario

You meet an old friend from days gone by. You remember him as smart, creative, funny and kind. He is dear in your memory. He tells you that he's a musician now, an aspiring professional. He is terribly frustrated that he hasn't been signed yet, but he's got a band and he's performing tonight at the Yellow Stain Lounge. It hasn't been a lucrative gig, he says, but they let him play what he wants.

"It's the music I was born to play. No compromises, no pandering."

You eagerly agree to attend the show.

That night your friend takes the stage.

The band strikes up "Brick House."

Then they play "Freebird." And "Stairway To Heaven." Followed by "Margaritaville" and "Play That Funky Music White Boy". The band is ragged, sloppy, lackadaisical. Flubs abound; not charming ones. Lazy ones. Occasional flashes of mild inspiration suggest themselves, but never quite make the gig light up.

After a dishwater rendition of "Louie Louie" the band takes a break and your friend finds you.

What do you say to your friend?

Hollering "Uncle!"

We saw a double bill of live entertainment last night. Part one was a folk music group with a former theatrical partner in crime on lovely lead vocals. Veddy nice, and well worth driving to Charlotte for. I'm no music critic, but tuneful, dulcet guitar picking, sweet vocal harmonies, the occasional burst of skilled violin playing... a joy.

Part two was a performance of Uncle Vanya. I should have known what it would be, because the crew that was doing it had made a name for itself with bootleg theatrical adaptations of nerdcore movies. As a recovered Monty Python and Tarantino reciter, I'd rather have bowel movements in public than subject myself to that kind of unimaginative nerd indulgence, but Uncle Vanya, I figured, just might bring out the ambition in Charlotte's budget theatre scene. The useless theatre opiner of record in this town wrote a typically slippery review of it in which he failed to come out and say that the show was a tedious misfire, so... there we were.

Stunt casting! A duo of brilliant local improv/theatre clowns were in the show, one of them playing Uncle Vanya, both of them providing the only relief. They knew how to suss out what their parts were about and inflect their performances with rocknroll manic brilliance that served, rather than undercut, the dramatic possibilities of the text. Everyone else delivered amateur theatrics in the saddest sense. I don't blame volunteer actors, though; they all seemed to be striving to the best of their abilities for something real, and good directors can get something real out of most anyone. Inept shmuck directors, though, becalm the actors and create the kind of artless phoniness we left at intermission last night. Chekhov's words can be dazzling if the actors discover the words and the meanings as they speak it while remaining focused on what they as the characters desire. This production, though, consisted of actors declaiming with no sense of interiority, waving their arms around, engaging in cheap pratfalls that didn't grow organically from or serve the material. Imitating humanity abominably. It often seemed that the director was conducting an R&D experiment, trying to find new ways for theatre to suck. I'm sure the director would try to pitch the whole mess (in fact he did, in his self-serving program notes) as pomo subversion, or Grotowskiesque, if he'd heard of Grotowski. Bollocks. Injecting jokes and pratfalls only works if it's done with Laurel-and-Hardy virtuosity and some sense of counterpoint; some sense of how the gags can illuminate Chekhov, even if only through artfully considered contrast. It was the worst theatre I've seen in Charlotte, and I've seen a few stink bombs.

As we drove home in the dark, a possum appeared in our headlights. It was neither crossing nor dead. It was writhing on its side, streaked with red wet blood, looking miserable. I swerved to miss it; probably would have been kinder to hit it and let it sleep. If I'd had wishing powers at that moment I would have wished for the possum and the director of that evening's theatrical entertainment to change situations, so the possum would be doing what it wishes in good health and whatever company a possum desires, while the director would be ending in unalloyed terror and agony. Too harsh? Yes. But it's what I would have wished.

Edit: Greetings, friends of the director who have found my blog! Yes, my last paragraph is way too nasty, and no, I don't actively wish suffering or death on the director; that was a description of a passing fancy, not a statement of long-term position. Beyond that, hey, it's a negative review. I've gotten 'em too.