Blog
My big gig this weekend was performing for the alumni of University of Pennsylvania Law School on Friday. I wrote the recap for Comedians At Law on their website so check it out:
http://comediansatlaw.com/2012/05/14/penn-law-alumni-have-greatest-reunion-ever/
New podcast tomorrow on The Avengers. That’s all for now.
Blog
This is a very simple post. My new album has been available for free for a month on my website – you can download it here (still for free for another couple of weeks):
https://jlcauvin.com/?page_id=3578
But of more importance today is that my album is now available on iTunes right here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/too-big-to-fail/id523993775
If you have the free copy of the album, if you don’t have it or if you feel like being generous and buying it through iTunes please do me a favor as a reader of this site and presumably a friend or fan of what I do – go to the iTunes link and give the CD 5 stars (and if feeling generous with your time please write a nice sentence or two about the album or my comedy). Please do this as soon as you are able to and ask friends and family to do the same in this time period through Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. It costs nothing (unless you want to be nice and buy the album) except a few seconds and will really help me out.
That’s it. Thanks very much. And I hope you enjoy the album.
Blog
I am not a fashionable person. I was wearing flannel before, during and twenty years after the grunge movement of the early 1990s. I wear New Balance sneakers and sweatpants a majority of the week. I buy my suits at Jos. A Bank (how can you beat “buy 1, get 47” free sales?). But sometimes things are so awful that even my primitive fashion sense is offended. One thing that has been number for many years on my “fashion items I hate” are babydoll dresses, or as I refer to them “FUPA” covering dresses. The most misleading item in fashion basically begin at the end of a woman’s breasts and then finish at the conclusion of the woman’s flaws or bloating, depending on whether she is on a permanent or 4 day expansion, respectively. For several years this Trojan Horse of fashion has been my least favorite item of clothing, but over the last couple years it has been bumped out of the #1 spot buy New Era baseball caps with stickers on the brims.
I own a New Era baseball cap. It is a Yankee fitted (the game version, not one of the 477 varieties of Yankee caps that have been released – you know so that you have a specific Yankee fitted hat for every holiday from 4th of July to St Patrick’s Day to Arbor Day) and I have owned it for several years. It is broken in and lacks any price tags or stickers because I am not a fu*king moron.
I do not know the day the trend of leaving stickers on a cap began but I know it has emerged in the last couple of years. Here are the many different explanations I have seen on-line:
One explanation that a friend of mine had offered, not by way of knowledge, but just hypothesis, was that maybe it started as an act of civil disobedience. Since it is a trend that began among black people, the idea was that with mall security and store employees discriminating against black youth in stores (questioning, following around suspiciously, etc.) keeping the sticker on after purchasing would act as a deterrent to being questioned, or would at least make people who are eyeing young black men suspiciously could be made to look foolish. I thought this would be a great reason… if it were at all true. However, I could find no evidence that this fashion AIDS has any root in civil disobedience. Sorry, but when you look at Martin Luther King Jr.’s brim in any old photos you will not see a tag or sticker still on it.
Another explanation that I have pondered, (and at the risk of accidentally stealing material, I think comedian Yannis Pappas may have said this before I did in my presence at his show in Brooklyn), is that black people were simply doing the dumbest thing they could think of and seeing if white people would still steal/copy it. (If Yannis tells me he did not say this, consider it a new joke of mine).
But assuming none of these are true, all I can think is that this trend started out of sheer stupidity. It is this generation’s pet rock. But it is also evidence of the power black people have on influencing our culture. Enough talk about “Girls” on HBO, black people can take some (non-compensated) comfort that they still disproportionately influence the culture (and in most cases is good, but not in this one). Here’s is my brief, informal history of the sticker-on-brim phenomenon across racial lines:
There you have it – white people stole blacks from Africa, stole their music for Elvis and stole golf back from Tiger Woods. But now they have tipped their hand too much. It is now clear that white people will try to copy any trend from black people no matter how dumb. Just three years after a black man got the Presidency, a white dude is trying to take it back, despite clearly being an awful job. But the brim sticker phenomenon is inexcusable. No one can offer a legitimate explanation for why people do it and the people who do it refuse to acknowledge that it is absurdly dumb looking. So shame on you black people for starting a stupid trend and shame on you Latinos and white for copying it.
But thank you Jeremy Lin for not doing it. Yet.
Blog
This Saturday I made an exhausting trip back and forth to Valparaiso, Indiana to perform comedy with Comedians At Law (it was a two person show with me and CAL member Kevin Israel). I wrote the recap on CAL’s website so here it is for you if you visit my site:
That’s all for today.
Blog
Everyone clamors for a book by star comedians who reflect on their rise to success. They usually sell well because they are funny and they give readers a latter-day Horatio Alger story: comedians always seem to start poor or at least unhappy and then rise to a position of fame and wealth and slightly less unhappiness. But what about feature comedians – the stop on the way to headliner success for some, or the purgatory of comedy for many? As a national feature act (meaning underpaid, underbooked and under the radar) I have thought about writing a book on the experience of travelling America and seeing the country through the lens of comedy’s middle class. As I have written before, I think the feature act is an unexplored bellwether for (or at least a microcosm of) the disappearance of America’s middle class:
So as I explore ideas for a memoir here are the ten titles I am considering (I am far too lazy to follow through on an entire book). Keep in mind these are based on my own experiences. Some comedians may feel the same, some may not. I applaud those of you that feel the same because you are right. And a message to my civilian readers – I know I can sound bitter – think of my posts (sometimes) as a darkly humorous look at how the comedy sausage is made:
1) 25% Off a $4 Order of Mozzarella Sticks – Nothing feels quite like a kick to the balls than the food discount, especially when the food item is dirt cheap to begin with (not to mention seeing the headliner eat that $7 hamburger free of charge – why don’t you blow your nose with $100 bills while you are at it!). $1 off a $4 order is not so much about savings as it is about sending a message. The message? “You ain’t sh*t” (another possible title). That is why I now travel with homemade coupons for free back rubs. If I have to pay for appetizers then the club is going to have to earn my money… the hard way (Rodney Dangerfield blog voice).
2) Trying Not To Get Hit By A Car While Walking On The Side Of A Highway – For every four day trip on the road, I spend about 5 hours on stage and 20 hours walking around towns where the lack of sidewalks help to explain the high levels of obesity. I am 6’7″ and anywhere between 240 and 290 pounds, depending on how despondent I am over my “career,” but even at my fittest I have this fear that a murder will occur in any number of the towns I perform in and witnesses will say “we saw a real big unhappy sombitch just walking along the highway. And we ain’t never seen him before.” And my only alibi will be “Google Maps told me there was an IHOP two miles down the road.” Either that or a car will simply hit me as I dart across a highway to get to a Starbucks with WiFi. Headline the next day: “Tall Stranger Killed Trying to Check Facebook. No One Had Any Idea Why He Was Here Or Who He Was.”
3) Why Do All These White People Find This Mediocre Black Comic Hilarious? – If anyone wants to know why large pockets of America think President Obama is a Muslim, just go to a comedy club across America. This country, for all its progress and love of Denzel Washington, is still an incredibly segregated place, where people of color still possess an exotic aura for many white people. And no job is easier in comedy, in my estimation, than to be a mediocre opener of color (the darker the better) in front of a white audience. The white audience in America is often times self-selected (my native Bronx is by no means the only place that has experienced white flight) so no line ever does better (or is more repeated by black comics) than “I must be in the wrong club!” The goobers in the audience are simultaneously thinking “That’s a funny joke!” and “That’s true!!” I was emceeing shows recently and a feature, who was black, told me after a show while we were chatting, “Every time I talk with white people from here after a show, they always want to tell me some ‘black sh*t,’ like some story about a black guy they met or a black person they hooked up with. Maybe I just want to talk about some other sh*t!” This is not even necessarily a mean thing (ignorance is not necessarily evil), but it does explain a high tolerance for bad comics of color in America (the gentleman I am speaking of was not in this category). Now there are terrible comics of every race working out there, but the large parts of this segregated country that still think American black people only exist in prisons, rap videos and sporting arenas (because our president is Kenyan) are giving refuge to a lot of terrible comics of color. I don’t know which came first, the sheltered/ignorant white crowd or the black comic with way too high a swagger-to-talent ratio, but both need to stop.
4) Why Do All These Black People Love This Asian/White Comic – The pendulum swings both ways and if there is something that annoys me it is when a member of a group gets respect from an audience comprised of a different group, simply having the guts to show up. I have seen this in black rooms almost as often as I see it in white rooms. Now this is not to denigrate comics with real skill and talent who happen to be different. Rather it’s the ones who coast on their appearance as if that alone is a “voice” or “perspective” (often times these guys DON’T have a voice or perspective, which might make their job more difficult if they are not truly skilled). Of course #3 and #4 are just a prelude to my personal gripe…
5) Why Do White and Black People Judge My Biracial Ass For Making Humorous Commentary On Race – If you can tell from #3 and#4 this is personal. I have the comedic misfortune of being opinionated and sharp on race in my material while looking like an Italian in the winter and an Egyptian in the Summer (my Dad is black and my mother is white). In other words, black rooms (not necessarily black people individually, but rather comedy clubs with a classic urban sensibility) require me to be more forceful in asserting my blackness before I am “allowed” to speak on it, while many whites don’t like being lectured to on race by some guy who looks mostly like them. In conclusion I hate you both.
6) Please Let It Be a Hotel… Dammit It’s a Comedy Condo – I would lick a Las Vegas Holiday Inn comforter with more mental peace than I have when I get into a comedy condo bed. “Hey, I like your choice to go with a white comforter in the comedy condo – really brightens the room!” “Huh, that comforter is navy blue.” Cue Jim Carrey crying in the shower in Ace Ventura.
7) Jack and Jill and Other Things I Am Ashamed Of On The Road – I love going to the movies, but it can reach the point on the road where I am seeing a movie just to avoid staring at a wall or becoming Jack Nicholson in The Shining. That is my official explanation for why I saw Bucky Larson last year.
8 ) Why Am I Getting Paid The Same As A Feature in 1985? From several accounts I hear the actual dollar amount is less (especially when considering that travel was sometimes included during the comedy boom), but the fact is that in adjusted dollars features are making far less than their counterparts 20+ years ago. Any other profession work that way? Is a partner at a law firm in NYC going home to his family saying, “I just made partner! How does $50,000 a year sound? What? That is how much our daughter’s private school costs? OK, well, let me get back to my managerial position at Best Buy where I can make some real cash.”
9) Dear Booker, It’s Me J-L, Please Read My E-Mail – Being a comedian without management is sort of like being Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. You are just sending messages out into space with the faint hope of receiving a reply. (My June and July are open – call me!)
10) Yes, I can Explain That 4 Year Gap on My Resume… I Was In Jail. This is the excuse I have come up with if employers start asking me about my tweets or YouTube videos. “No, that is not me – my accounts were hacked. I was actually in prison for those four years, but in no way, shape or form was I performing stand up comedy.”
J-L’s New Stand-Up Album “Too Big To Fail” is Available at www.JLCauvin.com for FREE until April 30th. His weekly podcast “Righteous P***k” is available for free on iTunes with a new episode every Tuesday.
Blog
I will be writing a new post Wednesday, but I wanted to share two new videos from last week’s killer show at Gotham Comedy Club as Comedians At Law concluded our Lawmageddon Tour. Enjoy (really one of my best sets – thanks to all who were there)
My Career as an ADA
Starving Kids vs. Depressed Kittens
Hope you enjoy and please share. Don’t forget – my new CD is FREE on my store page for the month of April and a new episode of my podcast goes up tomorrow (all this before a new blog on Wednesday). Thanks for the support.
Blog
I am in the middle of a media blitz promoting my brand new stand up album “Too Big To Fail” which was released today at 12:01 am – how dramatic! And by media blitz I mean a Facebook invite, an e-newsletter, and some tweets. The biggest decision for me was to make it free to download for the month of April. I did this for several reasons. One, Louis CK charged $5 for his last special and I’ll be damned if he is going to get the “nice to his fans” credit over me. The main reason is that I have sort of given up. I am literally doing everything I can to build a brand, to get my name out, to share as much comedic content as I can and nothing seems to have broken through.
For example – my YouTube videos. Most are really good, well-written and have a strong production value. None has gone “viral.” My Tax Masters spoof is the closest at around 19,000 views, but other videos have just not blown up. I have no idea how to make that happen (www.YouTube.com/JLCauvin if you want some laughs).
My blog and podcast are small successes (the blog more so) and I am hoping an opportunity to share my comedy blogs with the Huffington Post will yield more traffic, etc. but I still don’t know the logistics of doing this or if the opportunity is still open (a few days before my website went down for 6 weeks I was asked to share my comedy writings with the Huffington Post – great timing by me to have my site down).
For the first time in five years it appears that I will have fewer bookings than the previous year. For anyone not in the comedy business allow me to explain what that means: my career is now going backwards – at least as far as the traditional comedy trajectory is concerned.
So that brings us to the ironically titled “Too Big To Fail.” When I was organizing and writing my material for the CD I wanted one of the themes of the CD to be a snapshot of a struggling comedian before he either quits or makes it big. So the idea of Too Big To Fail, even though it is not explicitly stated on the album, is that I am at the point where something has to hit to make me big or I am going to have to figure out how to live a life without comedy as my future (or at least the driving force of my future). So I thought, what the hell? If I have nothing to lose, why not just make the CD free for everyone? I have already gotten some great feedback so maybe it will work. Work for what do you ask? I have no idea. I don’t know what my goals as a comedian in 2012 should even be. The path to success that I want to exist seems to not exist anymore. So maybe some guy or gal will hear this CD and forward it to someone who will forward it to someone, etc.
But now that I have the blog back, the podcast humming along and the CD out I feel like I have given it my best shot. So now it is time to look for a day job. If you are so inclined to listen to a free comedy CD (and forward it along to friends and colleagues) here is the link:
https://jlcauvin.com/?page_id=3807
I have done all I can to put my material out there so I guess now I need your help in getting more ears listening to it. I am writing to all 8 of you that read this.
Blog
Hello everyone. It has been eight weeks since I last posted and I have been itching to write. My new site is finally up and I am very proud of it (www.JLCauvin.com). I have been touring cities at a relatively exhausting pace (by the end of the month it will be 11 cities and 10 states in under 40 days – consider it my Lenten wandering in the desert of comedy), reaping little financial benefit and even less comedy industry credit. To give you a glimpse of my current comedy pessimism, two nights ago I dropped a pitch perfect George Lopez impression on stage for the first time and all I could think was, “Well there is another thing I can do that will go to the grave with me.”
I usually spend a lot of time, when I do write about comedy, complaining or critiquing aspects of the business, whether it is bookers, managers, clubs, or monolithic groups of comedians. But I realized it is not just them making comedy more difficult, it is regular people and everyday individual comedians who make this such an annoying journey at times, even if they don’t intend to. So, inspired by the “Broken Windows” theory of crime prevention, which theorizes that swarming and fixing little problems will lower overall crime, I present the “Broken Compliments and Questions About Comedy” theory on making comedians, who are struggling in the increasingly weakening middle class of comedy, happier day-to-day. Obviously these are my own personal theories, but I doubt I am the only one for whom these will resonate. Some of these apply to fellow comedians and some apply to regular folk. Enjoy:
1) Re-Tweet, don’t Favorite. And don’t email or direct message me that I am funny. I am a reluctant abuser of social media. If I did something else I would avoid it, but it is a part of entertainment so I try to immerse myself in it. But the reward is very simple – if someone likes something, share it. That is how I can advance my reach and audience. Treating my material like a black guy that a white girl secretly dated in college is helpful to no one. I am sure there is some benefit to favoriting. I just don’t care.
2) Don’t ask me about how my comedy is going. And definitely don’t refer to it as “my comedy thing/skits/sketch/hobby.” If you think it is so trivial then don’t ask about it. But if you are actually curious then speak of it like it is a career or a job. No one ever asked me how the “legal thing” was going when I was a practicing lawyer.
3) Don’t tell me about your friend who is hilarious unless they are a comedian. Otherwise you are insulting and degrading what I have sacrificed to be skilled at what I do. I was the funny asshole at the cafeteria table and have been since I was 10. But now I make strangers laugh and have done so with an economically crushing, relationship harming, career risking, trial and error process. So your friend can go fu*k himself.
4) Don’t say you want to go to a show or to let you know when I am in town unless you mean it. You owe me nothing. I mean it. I am doing comedy whether you support it or not. It is like a story I shared from a couple of years ago. A decently connected manager was very interested in working with me to find a way to publicize my Obama impression. We met several times over several months and then he told me that he decided not to commit to it. The lesson – don’t say anything unless you’ve made the decision to act, not just because you think you might act. That way expectations are not raised. Simple and thoughtful. If I don’t know, then I can’t care.
5) If a joke goes up on Facebook, “Like” it – don’t piggyback on the joke. There are a few egregious offenders of this – the person that never acknowledges a good joke, but then just takes the 95% of thought that the writer created and then simply attempts to add to it. If you like a joke, like it. If you don’t ignore it. But if someone beat you to a concept, don’t try to pull yourself up by their bootstrap.
6) Try to make famous people work for it on social media. Comedians and civilians alike – try not to kiss too much ass, especially of funny people, unless they are actually being funny. They do not care about you or how many times you suck their twitter di*k.
7) Don’t ask me why I don’t have an agent or a manager. It is not by choice. I don’t want to be a struggling freelance unknown, unappreciated comedian. And to answer your follow up, yes, my career would be easier if I had people booking me for shows and auditions and gigs. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
8 ) If you do nothing do not ask me to follow you on Twitter. I will follow friends and fellow comedians that I like either personally (which pains me because sometimes I feel like I am giving positive reinforcement to a mediocre product) or professionally, but every so often a person from a show will ask for a “follow back.” Why? Did you just travel 100o miles to entertain me with your writing and performance and I will receive more of that? OR are you just someone who tweets random personal thoughts and opinions with way too many pronouns, which make even your mundane thoughts hard to process (“This book is great!” – what fu*king book?!!!). But thank you for equating my career of making people laugh and trying to build a fan base that will purchase tickets to see me and raise my minuscule profile with your desire to brag to your friends about how many people checked our your twitpic of your salad at Panera Bread.
Ahhhhh, feels good to be back.
Blog
It has been a whirlwind of emotions over the last few days based on the shows I have had. Surprisingly the emotions were both bad and good, which differs from my normal emotional responses to comedy of bad and worse. I will start with the bad news, since that is how it happened chronologically.
Saturday night I was co-headlining a show at the Triad Theater in the west 70s of Manhattan. Comedy crowds come in different bunches. Sometimes you get hardened comedy fans. Those are great crowds – they want good comedy and understand the medium and are not easily offended. Then you have tourist-type crowds that generally want to hear the most basic comedy and are easily offended. But then there is a third, wild-card crowd, that one can see in Manhattan, which is a crowd consisting of other comics’ friends. Now if those friends are comedy savvy people then they tend to embrace all types of comedy. In other cases, they are groups of people who are prepared to laugh at their friend, because their friend is mostly their only exposure to stand up comedy and everyone else to them ranges from unamusing (because you are not their friend) to shockingly inappropriate (because they think stand up comedy is what CBS comedies do). Well guess which one I got Saturday night?
My initial material dealt with interracial porn and how we could never be a racism-free society as long as there were people in America that believe whites and blacks having sex together represents a taboo in keeping with some of the other more anatomically shameful porn genres. I got nothing (obviously this concept was presented in more joke form and not as a graduate thesis). The few laughs I got were from a few comics and a few people, but the mention of race and sex, even in a sanitized way, seemed to elicit a “We didn’t know a comedian was going to discuss race and sex! Well I never!” So in what is becoming an increasingly annoying flaw in my stand up I took the uptight comedy stupidity of the majority of the crowd and looked at them with disdain the rest of the show. I made sure to be harsher and more care free with my material, which actually won me about 12 of the 45 people in the crowd. However, the remaining 33 seemed to genuinely hate me. Which actually felt good. They were only ruining one evening with their response: mine. But I was ruining 33 evenings with my routine.
Confirming the depth of the hatred some members of the crowd had for me was a story told to me by the date of a friend of mine in attendance. After the show, she was in the bathroom and heard a woman say, “I liked the show, but I wanted to stab that last guy in the face.”
In case you are wondering, I was the “last guy.”
But redemption was only a few days away. I had a private show for Comcast at Helium Comedy Club in Philadelphia last night. I kept my set clean (not one curse in 45 minutes is the longest I have spoken, let alone performed, curse free since I was 12 years old), I riffed about 20 minutes of political material that went over well and as of today no one has made an official complaint to my knowledge. So it was good to wash away the bad taste of Saturday with a strong showing last night. But the cherry on top was sharing a train ride home from Philadelphia with Samantha Jones a/k/a Kim Cattrall.
I am very well versed in Sex and the City. An odd admission perhaps, but the same way Malcolm X was knowledgeable of the Bible, I felt it necessary to understand the white devil in my own fashion. But let me tell you, my seething disdain for the culture that Sex and the City spawned (or at least greatly augmented) all but melted away when I saw Kim Cattrall. I actually did not think it was her because she looked much younger than what I assumed her age was (dead). But she had not one, but two personal assistants (gay man and hipster looking chick) with her so that settled it for me. In all honesty it is pretty intimidating when you see a woman from television that you never found THAT attractive relatively to other women on television, but then you see them in person and it opens your eyes. I felt the same way when I was in the same green room with Teri Polo (Greg Focker’s wife in Meet The Parents) several years ago. All I could think was “If Greg Focker’s wife looks this good in person, then Macy Gray must be a fu*king knockout!”
Kim and I rode in the same car (we agreed that I could be on a first name basis with her), so hopefully everyone else in that train car realized the star power they were surrounded by. And just in case I thought that Sex and the City was a horrible show for a generation of young women it was refreshing to see one of the show’s stars travelling the same way as the miserable King of Greyhound Comedy. Hello gorgeous.
Blog
Having given up on making money through comedy I have dedicated myself to creating tons of free content to you, my 11 fans. Because I have nothing to gripe about specifically (sorry) I am hoping you will help me out. There are some free ways you can support my comedy endeavors that would make me moderately happy.
FOLLOW MY PODCAST & SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNES
My podcast has been going nicely and all I need for you to do is click the link below and:
1) Click the “become follower” of the podcast – the numbers help and then you receive a notification as soon as the new episode is up.
2) Use the “subscribe through iTunes” link on this page (it is not in the iTunes directory yet, so if you search in iTunes you won’t find it yet) to get it downloaded every Tuesday directly into your iTunes account.
http://righteouspk.podomatic.com/
WATCH MY NEW VIDEOS, FORWARD THEM TO FRIENDS & SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE PAGE
Simple and free steps. These two new ones are really good and gaining subscribers, like podcast “followers,” helps me (for free)
FOLLOW MY PODCAST AND ME ON TWITTER AND BE A FAN ON FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/#!/RighteousPrick
Sorry for the self promotion blog, but these are all free ways you can support what I write and what I produce so if I cannot make money I might as well feel slightly validated. Thanks for your support and I wil be back spewing venom at the comedy business next week.