Comedy Lazer Camp

Japan 2003 Pt. 2: Kyoto

In the first part of this video, you not-watched as Amanda and I said “sayonara” to our L.A. malaise. After Tokyo, we took the train down to Kyoto, which was equally incredible in different ways. The climate was a lot like Berkeley at a time when we really missed the SF Bay Area, and it was gorgeous and had good food and we were in a swank Westin that had just been remodeled.

After watching these tapes, I realized that I sounded like an idiot with my banal comments, effeminate coos mumbled asides (one would be hard-pressed to believe I am a voice actor and standup comic based on my mumbly manner of speaking). Instead of running and hiding from it I decided to showcase it. To me the most hilarious part is the stupid noises I am making and the unchecked vitriol both Amanda and I spew at the industry (and it all still holds true [wah wah]).

Oh and as you can see I cut my hair from the horrible Michael Douglas mane.

One of the things I for some reason didn’t get any footage of was a gaggle of geisha girls walking along the street toward their assignments. But I did head to Nintendo, where this occurred:

Repost from Facebook:

“I love Nintendo. I mean, I really really love Nintendo. Until the time when they are bought by a huge, awful mega-conglomerate that turns them into just another shitty widget-producer, Nintendo stands for everything that is great and innovative about video games.
In Oct 2003 I was planning a trip to Japan and I called Nintendo of America trying to get a tour of the Nintendo HQ in Kyoto. There was none, I was told, which seemed like a load of shit. Nintendo is a global entertainment company, with tons of beloved characters, and they hadn’t gotten a PR plan to have tours? Finally, while in Kyoto, I set aside time to take a taxi to the Big N HQ (it looks like an old NES) and with my video camera I thought I would tape a “hilarious” segment (I imagine my life as a series of filmed segments) wherein the wacky American walked around the building making sardonic, off-the-cuff observations.
When I got to the gate there were two armed security guards in a little kiosk, one dressed as Princess Toadstool and the other dressed as Luigi. They didn’t speak English, and they were really flustered by me and my video camera. I saw Suits in the building crouching down under half-closed blinds and looking sternly out at me. Princess Toadstool called the building, no one was smiling, and they brusquely shushed me away (or maybe they were saying “Come in, we love Gai-jin!” but Japanese is a really difficult language).
The worst part of the whole thing is that I was not funny, charming, or off-the-cuff on camera, I didn’t get any zingers in, and I sort of just slunk away feeling chastened.
I guess I thought Big N would be flattered that a 30-something man-child from America came to pay his respects and they would roll out the red carpet. Nintendo if you’re reading this I understand and I still love you!!”

Another great memory I have is walking back from a temple to the subway train, through a residential neighborhood. We were starving and decided to pop into a hole-in-the-wall food place (it had a picture of Gyoza on the sign). It must have been an after school joint b/c it was filled with effervescent teens, lightly hopping on each others’ knees and tittering with wispy gorgeous strait hair. We were the only white people in the room, but the kids and cooks were genuinely surprised and happy to see us, even though the language barrier was impenetrable. I had brushed up on my Japanese—a cool-haired waiter in Tokyo told me my Japanese was good, which made me blush—so I ordered two simple bowls of fried white rice and gyoza in broken Japanese. It was really good, one of the best things we ate on the entire trip, and we felt the Japanese hosts were really concerned with our enjoyment of the food.

After we ate, we walked across the street and stumbled on something we were hoping to get but having trouble locating: a DVD kiosk in a darkened hallway with pornos and sex toys. One of our Japanese dreams was coming true—vending machine panties! (Prior to the trip, I had even asked a Japanese friend to help me locate some ahead of time, sort of direct us to where they might be. She blanched and said she couldn’t help. I guess she didn’t get that is was for kitsch and ironic masturbation and smelling. She won’t respond to emails anymore.) Anyway, we found them in one row of the vending machine—a box with a picture of a coquettish Japanese “youth” shyly pulling down her panties around her knees below her school uniform skirt. We shelled out a mere 4000 yen and I stuffed them into my pants, simultaneously laughing and aroused.

Later, Amanda loudly munched a bag of snack chips at a sacred shrine.

Kyoto in general was more “Japanese” and there was far less English spoken and fewer English signs, so it was a little scary and disorienting (pun intended) and more exciting. One of my favorite things about Japan is that it is similar to things I know, but I feel like I am in a different world where there are no consequences and where America can do what it wants. For instance one could assault schoolgirls and develop Yakuza ties and drug addictions and rape and kill innocent people and become sort of an “SF connection” for organized crime, and it wouldn’t matter because it isn’t “real” it is in a different country where real things don’t exist.

This set illustrates a common occurrence with me: In the beginning of the set, the audience hated me. Or maybe I just hated them. Or maybe they feared me and were thrown off by my strange and newly-bald head. Or maybe I feared them, and they sensed it. Or maybe all of the above were true.

I was the third bald white guy in a row, and I failed to make a mention of it, something like “Third time’s the smarm!” or “Comedy comes in threes!” Damn, that would have been good.

Whatever the case, this set started out with mostly silence from a seemingly disinterested and judgmental audience. As I have said, this is common with me. It is something I have learned to deal with: digging myself out of an instant hole (real or perceived). It is a little tiring, and it wastes valuable time especially in a short set. First impressions are one of the most important things in comedy and life, Non-Eyes.

Ha, I just had a cheesy idea for a stupid show: First Impressions, made up of the very first impressions I used to do as a kid. It would pretty much be all Shatner, Caine, Heston, and Spectreman. Maybe some Lee Marvin and Darren McGavin thrown in. Sounds like marketable gold!

Anyway, when a comic senses it is going south they have to decide “I want to live” or “Ah, it’s a good day to die.” Since I spent so much of my early non-career “who caresing” it, I force myself now to “Fight on, Megaman, fight on!” It’s all a confidence game. I have convinced myself it is noble to soldier on in the face of adversity, like the British guy in Inglourious Basterds. This time, the audience came around and by the end someone shouted “More!” as I got off stage. Why can’t that happen during a showcase set or during other important sets? Doomsday Logic (that is the thing I made up that is similar to Murphy’s Law, but different. For example, the law of Doomsday Logic state that if you are walking along the shoulder of a country road late at night, you will not get passed by or even see any car until you get to the narrow bridge without a shoulder, at which point speeding cars will come from out of nowhere and recklessly pass you until you are off the bridge and onto the shoulder again, at which point you will once again be completely alone.)

I am still recovering from this cold/flu, which always makes performing a little dicey. However, by the end of the set I was high-fived by all of the drunk guys in the corner of the room. How often does that happen?

However, one guy made a point of saying, “You’re Bruce Willis is perfect” which is a backhanded way of saying everything else wasn’t.

The Vancouver Comedy Festival: 09_25_09

This trip was almost a complete and utter disaster. As it turned out, it was just a mild catastrophe. In this video I take you on a magical musical journey though my hotel room.

The Hitler Roast was asked to be a part of the Vancouver Comedy Festival. Immediately I decided the family would come up with me for a mini-vacation. Vancouver in September! Awesome.

After my last performance on Sunday the 20th, I began to feel really sick. My daughter had come home with something after her first week of preschool, so I was pretty sure I had gotten it. I hoped to keep it under wraps until after the festival.

Alas, the cement wave of chest flu hit us like a concrete tsunami. I was scheduled to take Thur and Fri off from work, but I ended up leaving work early Monday and staying home sick Tue and Wednesday. From the job I had only been at for three weeks.

My daughter was a snotty crying mess, I could barely get out of bed, and my wife crumbled Tuesday after staving it off longer than the rest of us. It was basically a sick mucus hell.

I wanted to wait until the last minute to cancel, as we had been looking forward to this trip for months. All the while everyone involved with the show was being stressed-out douches and making me feel bad about it. I ended up canceling Thursday, missing Thursday’s shows, then flying out Friday by myself as my sick wife stayed home with our sick daughter. As I sat in my hotel room coughing and hacking, my wife was having a terrible time feeling really sick herself while taking care of our sick daughter.

All sacrifices we willingly love to make for the glory of the art.

Still, it was pretty awesome when I had enough cough medicine to keep myself dry and hack-free. And to assuage my guilt I went on a shopping spree and got Amanda way too many fancy things from Vancouver’s toniest shopping district.

So everybody won! Especially Mastercard!

SF Playhouse: 09_20_09 

Does any non-eye really care? Here I performed my one-man show ReMaking It! to 12 or so tourists. The show went pretty well considering I am fat, lazy, and was getting sick.

In case I didn’t not-tell you Non-Eyes, I am creating a new one-man show that will blow the socks off of reality and cause the entire comedy world to come begging for forgiveness on bended knee. As for ReMaking It!, I’ll perform it only a few more times and film it so I can make a special version into which I insert animated backgrounds illustrating everything I say. Then, I will sell it on the internet and gain a million dollars.

This show was the first time I had been on stage in about a month. This was leading up to the Vancouver Comedy Festival, so this is me getting refocused on comedy. The world can rest easy now.

Comedy@Home!® #1

From now on, everything I blog will be a brandable sub-category, e.g. SNL 2003, Japan 2003, Delightful Story™ and Comedy@Home!®.

I think any Non-Eyes who are not-reading this are not-savvy enough to not-understand why: If even one of my Blogegories© becomes a websation I can leverize the recontent into some form of monetary recompense.

This is the first of a new Blogegory© called Comedy@Home!®, which will just consist of any old video I have filmed while in front of my computer. The quality of content doesn’t matter, only the quantity and brevity — “quantevity” — of the vids.

In this Comedy@Home!® I am sitting with Zellie, who is ignoring me while I do a series of voices. I wanted to edit this down to two minutes but I was having a dickens of a time with FCP. So now it is too much of a good thing.