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20041104

Charlie’s Standup Comedy Journal

November 04, 2004: Comedy in La Casa

You people have no idea what I go through to bring you this standup nonsense.

(Okay, maybe that’s a little bit dramatic. Still, I’m makin’ a point here. Don’t piss on my party, dammit.)

It’s bad enough to actually come up with the ridiculous material, and practice it, and make my wife

think I’m a fricking lunatic by using it on her. That’s no damned picnic, but I can deal with it.

And then, of course, there’s the matter of getting up in front of a bunch of strangers and making an ass of

myself for five minutes or more, just so you — and, hopefully, they — can have a couple of chuckles at my

expense. Ooh, look at your crazy little monkey do his dance. Whoo.

All of that is fine — I signed up for this shit, and I’m just perverted enough to actually enjoy it, so

no worries. Until — until! — technical difficulties start getting in the way, which is exactly what

happened at the show before this one (no link, for reasons that will become obvious in four… three… two… one…),

when my damned camcorder stopped working. Bitches!

One minute, whirring and whizzing away like a happy little gizmo. Or a computer. Or a vibrator. (How does it

always come back to the vibrators, people?)

The next minute, nada. Says it’s got ‘dew’ problems, like water just suddenly and magically condensed

somewhere in its innards. I don’t know how that can happen. Actually, I’m pretty damned sure it can’t happen.

But the bastard little machine thought it happened, and so it wouldn’t fricking work. Lousy technology —

‘HandiCam’, my ass. ‘ShittiCam is more like it. Loser.

Anyway, I didn’t want to miss two shows in a row — and heaven knows you people got nothing better on this site to look at than grainy video clips, so I had to do something fast.

(Well, okay, so technically, I didn’t have to act terribly quickly, given that there were two weeks in

between that show and this one. But since I’m a lazy, forgetful goober, I completely brain-farted on the whole

‘useless damned camera’ thing until the day of the show. So then, I had to act fast. It’s all about the

context, see.)

So, long story only marginally shorter, I checked up on the problem online and found that many other people

have suffered with the same problem. And a few were able to solve the bug with various harebrained ‘home remedies’. None of them looked particularly promising, but at that point, that’s all I had time — or the smarts — for, so I dove in. I opened every orifice on the thing and left it in a sunbeam. Nothing. I took the battery out — and

banged it on the table, just like the other guy said he did — then put it back in. Zilch. I blasted the thing all

over with compressed air. Bupkis. I took the thing to the bathroom, and — get this — blow-dried it with my

wife’s hair dryer.

And dammit… that frigging worked. Well, fuck me.

So, thanks to the power of the internet, an ingenuity borne from desperation, and the finest home salon

equipment money can buy, you now have the privilege of seeing me tell seven more minutes of dick jokes

onstage. Is that a tear-jerking damned story, or what, people?

In any case, I hope you enjoyed it. Frankly, this might be my very most favorite show — the audience was

pumped (kudos to the other comics for working them into the right kind of lather), I was comfortable onstage, and a

few people from my office were kind enough to come watch and cheer me on. This is what it’s all about, folks.

(Well, except for the whole ‘getting paid’ thing, and the ‘devoted groupies’ and ‘free beer’ perks. Really,

when you get right down to it, those are what it’s all about. But this is a good damned start, and I’ll take it. Enjoy!)

Download Clip of 11/04/04 Set —

Comedy Studio, Cambridge, MA (7 minutes, 2 seconds):

>

(Click photo to enlarge)

MPEG Format — 37MB

RealMedia Format — 11MB

Windows Media Format — 5MB