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The Best Man Holiday, the Dwyane Wade Sitcom and…

I do not have a daily podcast (believe me, the people are barely clamoring for a weekly one), but today is a day where I have a series of miscellaneous things I want to share that do not warrant a full blog treatment, but are bigger than mere tweets.  Well, since I am bored out of my mind with a bunch of 141 character thoughts I thought I would drop them here.  Enjoy this pot pie of comedy nonsense.

1)The Dwyane Wade Sitcom – the life of Dwyane Wade, Miami Heat star and alleged giver of an STD to his ex wife has a sitcom based on his life.  My guess it will follow the lead of Michael Strahan’s 4 episode sitcom on Fox, but who knows.  Obviously this could be a golden opportunity for exceedingly tall comedian/actors to get roles.  Here is the preliminary cast I have put together:

 

  • Wade – Romany Malco
  • LeBron James – Terry Crews
  • Greg Oden – Morgan Freeman
  • Chris Bosh – the raptor from Jurassic Park
  • Pat Riley – Michael Douglas
  • Erik Spoelstra – Joseph Gordon Levitt (or Bruno Mars – as someone suggested on Facebook)
  • Commissioner David Stern – Jon Lovitz
  • Shane Battier – J-L Cauvin

2) The Best Man Holiday – I pre-emptively ripped it on this week’s podcast after only seeing the first one.  Well the sequel was very enjoyable and noticeably better and more substantive that the first.  Here are the takeaways:

  • Morris Chestnut should be a bigger star.  It has been 20 years since Boyz in the Hood and he has gone from playing a talented, emotionally nuanced football player to playing a talented, emotionally nuanced football player (at least as far as mainstream/crossover success is concerned).
  • Morris Chestnut and Terrence Howard are very good criers.
  • Morris Chestnut’s character is basically Adrian Peterson professionally (#28), but Tim Tebow personally.
  • Movie was pretty damn funny, especially Howard.
  • The woman that plays Mia looks too much like a female Derrick Favors to me.
  • I have liked Nia Long since that movie with Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg in the 1990s and she has aged great, as in barely.
  • Tyler Perry doesn’t understand why people like it.  And is writing his own movie called The Better Man Chooses Christ Over AIDS.

3) The new episode of Chappelle’s Show that is needed  – I watched the Mike Tyson show Undisputed Truth on HBO yesterday and one of my favorite stories is of how he beat up Mitch “Blood” Green in a Harlem street fight.  I have known about the story since it happened, but hearing Tyson flesh out the details only grew the legend.  Not of Tyson, but of Green.  To call Mike  Tyson, “the baddest man on the planet” in his prime, a “fa**ot” in the middle of the street, get beat up and keep coming back for more is the kind of courage-stupidity combination that I secretly wish I had.   Though as a struggling comedian I guess I am closer to it than most people.  Now instead of Charlie Murphy telling stories about Rick James for an episode have Mike Tyson telling the story about the night he fought Green for a full episode with Chappelle playing Green. Start engraving my name on an Emmy.

Check out my web series fund raising campaign here – http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/comedy-academy

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My First Day As A Stuntman

A couple of days ago I was asked by College Humor in partnership with the NY-based sketch group Elephant Larry to be an extra in one of their on-line videos.  The video itself is basically a re-imagining of a generic action film if the DVD commentary were actual dialogue during the movie.  I knew I was an extra because my character’s title was “Thug.”  Despite only taking acting classes for 9 months it is good to see that I have already found my niche in the acting world: silent, intimidating, large background character.  The pay was only $50, but to take a couple of punches in the background of a scene and eat free snacks in the green room, it seemed like a no-brainer.  It seemed like that because I had not met Lucas, the professional stuntman who I would be sparring with.

When I got to the warm rooftop to shoot the scene I met Lucas – a man who wore all black and looked how I would imagine Vladimir Putin looked in his physical prime with the KGB.  Sort of like a light-middleweight Taekwondo  world champion.  The Elephant Larry guys asked us if we wanted to “work out our fight sequences.” This certainly seemed like a set up for something more complicated than “I will fake punch you and hit my chest at the same time so it sounds like I hit you,” which is the level of fight choreography technique that I was bringing to the table.

So for the next 15 minutes I worked out various punch and kick combos with Lucas, with me receiving all shots to the face and abdomen (this was as much a fight as Mike Tyson versus HurricanePeter McNeeley was).  I only got punched in the face once and kneed in the face once so I guess it was not too bad, but I knew we were off the reservation when the College Humor and Elephant Larry people started looking at Lucas and the damage he was inflicting the way Steve Buscemi looked at Peter Stormare in Fargo when it was revealed that Stormare’s character was actually a homicidal maniac.

So we acted out a few fight sequences, which I was told looked great (and all ended with me rolling around, thrown to the ground on a filthy, tar-splattered Brooklyn rooftop).  At one point I actually had the real feeling of being choked and caught a kick to the nose, but overall it was quite fun and convinced me that if I really need money I could always be an MMA sparring partner.  And for future casting, Lucas will definitely be played by Jean Claude Van Damme in a humorous cameo.

Afterwards, my right arm and neck have the appearance like I cheated on Elin Woods with a Hooters’ waitress, but College Humor ponied up an extra $100 for cleaning bills and emotional damage.  I actually though this would be a great idea for a hybrid show of Jackass and Punk’d – you tell someone that they’ve been picked for a sketch on a comedy website, only to find out they are actually going to be subjected to physical punishment.

Most importantly  the shoot had an incredibly therapeutic effect on my mood, proving that sometimes getting your ass kicked can make you feel a lot better about losing in a comedy contest.

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Two Big Basketball Victories

Last night was a night dedicated to basketball for me. My corporate league team (I am know as corporate emeritus on the team) had a game at 7 pm and the Magic-Lakers game at 9.

In the corporate league game I was playing like crap (which considering my pregame meal of a Crumbs cupcake is a huge shock).

We we were losing by double digits with 14 minute left, but then two things happened that have always helped me compete: I got into an argument with my teammate and then got into two scuffles with the other team.  After that, despite not liking Kobe Bryant I turned into an out-of-shape, back to the basket version of Bryant, complete withscowl.  We ended up winning by one point, but the end of the game was the best.  With 3 seconds left a player on the other team drove the lane and missed a layup.  The other team believed he was fouled, which was true if you believe a foul occurs automatically when you miss a layup (also known as NYC playground rules where every missed shot requires a debate that begins with “YOU FOULD ME!  I DIDN’T FOUL YOU” and ends with “FU-K YOU NIG-A!”).  Well, this one was no different, except for one player on the other team.  He was built like Mike Tyson in The Hangover, muscled, but also fat and ugly.  He took special offense at the non-call (he was not the one who actually took the shot – the guy who missed was not very upset) and said to the ref in what a nursery school teacher might call his “felon voice”:

YO! CALL THE FU-KING FOUL MOTHER FU-KER!  YOU BITCH ASS NIG-A!  YOU BEEN A BITCH ASS CHEATIN’ NIG-A ALL GAME!  FU-K YOU YOU AIN’T A REF NO MORE!!  YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET OUT OF THE GYM!!

The first thought I had was, what corporation are you guys from?  I am pretty sure whatever it is would not be ok with misdemeanor menacing charges.  Secondly I thought, this is the first time since watching a black cop harass Cuba Gooding Jr. in Boyz In The Hood that the N word sounded just as racist coming from a black guy as a white guy.   My third thought was let’s get the fu-k out of here.

Well, after that it was time to watch the Lakers versus Magic game 3.  I was very happy to see Kobe and his band of underachievers and Eurotrash lose to the Magic.  The game was a little too close for my comfort, but it was still a win for the good guys.  Although there was a foul late in the game called on Dwight Howard, the 18th bailout call for Kobe Bryant in 3 games (Kobe is like a large financial institution – unlikeable, full of douchebagginess and getting bailed out by the establishment) that upset me greatly.  I think my exact words were:

YO! CALL THE FU-KING FOUL MOTHER FU-KER!  YOU BITCH ASS NIG-A!  YOU BEEN A BITCH ASS CHEATIN’ NIG-A ALL GAME!  FU-K YOU YOU AIN’T A REF NO MORE!!  YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET OUT OF THE GYM!!