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Top 10 Working Titles For My Feature Act Comedy…

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:

https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2304

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

How To Get Along With A Struggling Comedian

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.

Want to see me smile about comedy? It's unlikely, but these guidelines give it a chance.

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

Sets and The Cities

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

The Zero Barrier of Comedy

So I am approaching 9 years in the comedy “game.”  Since a new year is a great time for reflection I reflected on my relatively empty calendar, my even emptier bank account and my fully empty soul and realized that I am approaching the zero barrier of careers.  The term zero barrier, if I am remembering the term correctly, is from the film Armageddon (which failed to use Armageddon It by Def Leppard which is one of the great soundtrack omissions of all time) and it refers to the last possible moment they could blow up the asteroid to ensure it avoided Earth before it was too late.

Well, I am not sure if I am at the zero barrier of my comedy career, but I am close.  Now I will always be fairly employable – a Georgetown Law Degree will always qualify me for bagging groceries, cleaning toilets and substitute art teaching, but those will just be jobs.  The possibility of a career is slipping away though.  I have been at comedy for almost 9 years and doing it as my full time job for 3 years.  It feels like I have been released into the wild to be free and pure instinct, but now mental health and financial health seem to be calling me back to the controlled zoo of a day job as well as career ambition that doesn’t depend on the reactions of strangers.

But that has not stopped me from pumping out a ton of new content in 2012.  My weekly podcast has launched, just filmed two new comedy short films, I am in the process of putting together my weekly movie review show and of course my new CD Too Big To Fail will be out in February (along with the honor of having my voice doing the intro on Patrice O’Neal’s posthumous CD).  I also just got picked for a NACA showcase where I can potentially (but of course not guaranteed to) make a decent chunk of change doing college gigs.  The point of this is not to brag.  This is all the shit I am doing to keep even!  Just to keep people interested (because bookings have been slow, which are the comedy business’ way of helping you maintain a sharecropper’s status – go to a club, make a couple hundred bucks profit if you are lucky as a feature, get some Twitter followers, some Facebook friends, some YouTube fans, and then don’t get called back to the club for 2 or more years so that half of your fans are dead and the other half has moved on to supporting their local def poetry scene).

So thanks to the people who read this blog, watch my videos, listen to my podcast through early problems and generally put up with my shit.  I say this in part out of gratitude, but mostly because this is probably the year I go full on crazy, like become the 2006 Ron Artest of stand up or the Montecore of stand up and I will need at least a few of you at a sentencing to speak to the pressures of comedy and the joy I brought to you when you read this blog and realized – wait, maybe life is not so bleak because I certainly don’t feel as bitter and riled up as this meteor falling to the Earth.  Happy New Year!!!

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The 2011 J-L Cauvin Reader

With 2011 coming to a close I thought I would give fans, friends and new readers a Best of  2011 of my blogs.  I have divided them into 5 categories and the following blogs represent both my favorites and the ones that got by far the most web traffic.  The five categories are:

  1. The Comedy Business
  2. Road Gig Stories
  3. Politics
  4. Movies
  5. Sports

If you are a fan of the blog I’d appreciate you passing this along (or you can always pass along your favorite individual posts from within this blog) through Twitter and Facebook.  This is really a collection of mys best stuff so sending it to people could turn them into fans. Thanks again for reading.  2012 will be a big and new year for my on-line content and I hope you will:

  • become a fan of “Righteous Prick” on Facebook and
  • follow @RPrickPodcast on Twitter
  • Every Monday starting in January I will post my movie reviews to www.YouTube.com/JLMovieLife (subscribe today even though the page is not finished), and
  • look for my new podcast every Tuesday starting January 3rd on iTunes (Righteous Prick) and
  • and please continue to come to this blog on Wednesday and Fridays for new posts.

A picture of me reading makes sense since this post is caled the J-L Reader.THE COMEDY BUSINESS

  1. How To Fail In Comedy While Really Trying – A Breakdown of the Breakdown of the Traditional Path to Comedy Success (with an epic battle with “Bob Hellener” – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2304
  2. In Re Bob Hellener – Comedy hack and all around douche Dan Nainan is revealed to be the coward behind Bob Hellener – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2596
  3. Charlie Sheen – The Comedy America Deserves – A Breakdown of Charlie Sheen’s 2011 “Comedy Tour” – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2254
  4. Comedy One Hit Wonder – A self-depricating take on my career after 8 years – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2771
  5. A Tribute To Patrice O’Neal – A Eulogy For One of My Favorite Comedians – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=3099

ROAD GIGS

  1. The Best & Worst Fan Mail From Des Moines, Iowa – A Series of Fan/Love Letters From A Homophobic Self-Proclaimed Blow Job Queen (watch the video)- https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2210
  2. The Hills Have Eyes Wide Shut – A Swinger Party Overshadows My Show in Allentown, PA – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2165
  3. Cleveland Extremities – The Loss of Lebron James Apparently Caused An Unusually Large Number of Men in Cleveland to Masturbate in Public – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2665
  4. 30 Hour Train Ride From New Orleans to NYC – Of All The Train Rides I’ve Taken For Comedy, This Was The Most Epic – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2867

POLITICS & ECONOMICS

  1. Economics For Dummies – 9 months Before Occupy Wall Street I wrote this – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2178
  2. 3 Non Partisan Things America Should Do – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2742
  3. Occupy Wall Street – A Follow Up to #1 in light of the Occupy Wall Street Movement – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2987

MOVIES

  1. Review of Super 8 – I Expose JJ Abrams As Hollywood’s Bernie Madoff – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2537
  2. Someone Must Stop Adam Sandler – Title Speaks For Itself – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2710
  3. Return of the Planet of The Apes – My Favorite Movie of the Year (and a funny write up) – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2752

SPORTS

  1. The End Of The Diet Jordan Era – My Summary of Kobe Bryant’s Era as Diet Michael Jordan – https://jlcauvin.com/?p=2412
Blog

Minnesota Recap – Cold Weather, Warm Reception

My headlining stint was a rousing success at Joke Joint in Lilydale, MN (a few miles from St Paul – one of the twin cities, so Lilydale is like the chick that St Paul has sex with when Lilydale thinks it is actually having sex with Indianapolis).  Of course on this blog, the phrase “rousing success” is a relative term.  It means I had three really excellent shows, one decent one and one that was eh.

Joke Joint is a comedy condo club, meaning that you live in an apartment that the club owns or rents, versus a hotel.  But unlike most condos, the Joke Joint one was pretty damn cozy.  It features a full kitchen stocked with snacks (and tons of bottles of 5 Hour Energy – in case the headliner is a raging douchebag), a television and DVD player and two bedrooms – one for me and one for soon-to-be dead hookers.

Being a big walker and non-owner of a car I like when accommodations are near eating and shopping areas.  Well, the condo was a mere 1.7 miles from a Walmart/Panera Bread/etc. and considering that I once walked 4.1 miles each way in a suburb of Denver to see a movie each day, this was no problem.  Except that was Denver in springtime.  This was Minnesota in Winter (think Game of Thrones and how terrified those dues are of Winter).  Each walk would start with me having a penis and by the time I arrived at Panera Bread I was using the women’s bathroom and removing a finger dead from frost.

I managed to see one movie while in Minnesota.  The feature – a woman named Wendy – was given the unenviable task of chauffeuring me to and from the shows each night agreed to bring me along to the movie she was seeing with the two teenage daughters of a friend.  Of course this felt like some sort of set up.  I thought I was getting Silvio Berlusconi’d.  But something far more offensive was to happen. We went to see Hugo.

I was lukewarm on Hugo.  On the plus side it was directed by Mr. Eyebrows Martin Scorsese and has been receiving rave reviews.  On the downside I had no real fu*king interest in it.  But the critical mass was so good that I decided I wanted to see it.  Whoops.  Here in as concise a fashion as possible is my summary of Hugo:

  • Well acted
  • Boring
  • Really boring
  • Fell asleep boring (literally)
  • Nice looking movie
  • Takes place in Paris, every actor (both English and American so it was intentional) using British accents
  • Long
  • Too long
  • Never cared very much about the characters
  • Every revelation of past events that have led our characters to be the way they are fails to deliver as much significance – it is as if JJ Abrams decided to direct a boring family movie (and critics – please stop calling this a family film – no kid, let alone a kid from the ADD 21st century will enjoy this or have the patience for your ode to cinema)

But the point of this whole trip was not to see movies or experience shrinkage on an unprecedented level – it was to do comedy, or as I described it to the crowd to run a Ponzi scheme on myself.  And the crowds were really good.  The Thursday crowd and the two early Friday/Saturday crowds were great.  Enthusiastic, smart and great laughers.  The late show Friday was tough and featured a lot of Usain Bolts (this is what I call a person who sprints out of the showroom, for fear that even looking at me may force them to acknowledge my existence or buy a CD).  The Saturday late show was tough, but still a net positive.  Here is one of my favorite newer bits I dropped on the crowds:

So I managed to sell a few CDs, got a lot of laughs, avoided junk food at the airports (Midway one of the underrated airports in America – can’t beat Potbelly for airport food!), did not get arrested, did not die in a plane crash and immediately sent every penny I made to the credit card, phone and cable companies!  Comedy!  Thank you to the fellow comics, staff and audiences at Joke Joint.

Blog

Minnesota Journal Part I – Bet on Half-Black at…

A fun week (I hope) started yesterday as I flew from New York to Minneapolis via Chicago.  I am headlining the Joke Joint just outside of Minneapolis tonight through Saturday, but to sweeten the pot the booker for Joke Joint also booked me to headline the Black Bear Casino, a small, but nice casino located a mere 11,000 miles from Minneapolis.  The Black Bear show turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, but I am getting ahead of myself.

The Travel

I flew Southwest from LaGuardia to Midway to Minneapolis.  I always used to assume O’Hare was the better of the Chicago airports.  I just assumed Midway was a place where prisoners were transported and rats and abandoned animals fought for the  pleasure of waiting passengers.  Turns out Midway is nice.  First off, unlike O’Hare, I’ve never experienced awful delays at Midway and more importantly they have a Potbelly sandwich shop, which allows me to eat a large healthy turkey sandwich that I know tastes good, instead of my usual airport diet of $13 dollar half pound bags of peanut M & Ms and shame.

The flight from Midway to Minneapolis was uneventful.  But the earlier flight to Midway from NYC was much creepier, both because of my occasional urine spritzing when we travelled over a storm system and because of the people behind me.

Sitting behind me was a skinny, fairly attractive woman (she had a clear look of cu*tiness which made me instinctively downgrade her) in the window seat and a scruff looking guy about 12 years her senior sitting in the middle seat.  And for about 20 minutes before take off he just kept whispering words to her like “pussy,” “fu*k” and “bitch.” If she had been engaging him back I would have been less worried, but she just kept looking out the window.  Because I do not need any more reasons to feel nervous on a plane I just assumed he was a crazy person, probably not a terrorist, but possibly some sexual pervert who would make our flight awkward and possibly force it to be diverted.  But just be before I was about to push a call button she finally responded!

And for the next 45 minutes they spent cursing at each other (I think she may have fu*ked someone else, or she was a cu*t and he was angry and possibly crazy, probably because he had reached that point where a guy realizes he is with a hot chick, but he hates the fact that she is an awful person and resents her and himself for being in a vicious circle of cu*titude).  Then the lady tapped out of the argument by… wearing a sweater over her face for 30 minutes.  The guy then lifted it up and whispered something to her and then put a sweater or jacket over his head.  But he grew bored of this and left his seat and went several rows back for the last hour of the flight (possible ad campaign for Southwest’s open seating policy!).

When we finally arrived in Minneapolis I had a bit of a wait for my ride, so I ate a yogurt and blueberry parfait (I will not allow airports to destroy my fitness dammit) and the Marty showed up.  He is a young comic from Minneapolis who agreed to drive me the 19 hours back and forth to the Black Bear Casino in exchange for a guest spot and a room for the night at the casino.  Now that is dedication.

The ride was really only about two and a half hours, but what shocked me was that until we were about a mile from the casino I had not seen a single sign for the casino.  With that kind of reach I fully expected the casino to have at least 30 people in it (or however many immediate neighbors the casino has in the empty darkness that is Carlton, MN).  Turns out I was right.

The Show

So Marty and I walked into the casino and I could see that we had just increased the audience total by 20%.  We checked into our rooms, which were nice and luckily equipped with Nintendo 64 controllers, in case I found a time machine and want to invite 14 year old me to play some games.  After dropping my bags off I checked out the casino.  It is basically slot machines, a black jack table and the room for comedy/music.

When I walked in there were 4 people sitting (room seats probably 100-120) and 8 people at the bar with their backs to the stage watching hockey – I am in Canada basically.

As the show progressed more crowd came in which was nice, but I was still not sure of the crowd.  Especially when the following exchange occurred:

Emcee – “… Maybe Herman Cain should just wave the white flag”

Angry bar heckler: “As long as it is a black flag”

Emcee (slightly later) – “Herman Cain was found with a another woman!”

Angry bar heckler: “And her name was Ginger White – how ironic is that?”

Yes it is ironic if miscegenation laws are still on the books in Carlton, MN.  Otherwise it is not ironic UNLESS you are coming from a non-ironic stance of racism.  And the “black flag” comment was just dumb.

The it was time for me to go.

And the set actually turned out great.  Other than the guy who answered his ringing phone (if you are a man and you have a cell phone and it rings you are not a real man – vibrate or silence – save the rings and ring tones for women and Puerto Ricans on NYC buses) 8 feet from the stage. But I felt awesome during this show, with every minute surprising me.  I riffed about 30% of my set and all the material that I prepared worked.  I really felt like I had accomplished a victory.  Granted it was a moral victory.  And granted moral victories are usually the result of an actual loss, but I still felt good.  Sure I handed out only 5 cards and sold zero CDs, but the moral victory of not sucking (and even having a good set) in the middle of nowhere in front of a bunch of people that think Obama was born on Mars felt pretty good.  Sure I had to split my meal ticket with Marty (I won’t big time a guy who drove two and a half hours and pull the diva move of “This $14 meal card is for closers only!”), but it still felt good eating a prepackaged grilled chicken salad after a job well done.

The show taught me a valuable lesson – I was in a room of mostly conservative, some racist, white people in the middle of nowhere, but these people had what some liberal crowds and some conservative crowds don’t have – the ability to let go for the sake of a comedy show.  I insulted various members of the crowd and their town repeatedly in between bits.  Now they may not have known that Hawaii is a state, but they knew that when you come to a comedy show you come to laugh and have a good time.  So even though they may be beating their wives or committing hate crimes today, I am glad that they were a good audience last night.

Joke Joint tonight – spread the word to people.  Check back tomorrow for the movie of the week (if I can find a movie theater) and Monday for the full Minnesota recap.

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Syracuse Recap: 6 Shows, 5 Botched Intros, 4 Good…

The title of this post is basically the Cliff Notes of what you need to know. But for further detail here goes something:

I arrived in Syracuse on Thursday after a relaxing, and by J-L travel standards quick, 5 ½ hour train ride at 3:50 pm and was greeted by the welcoming weather that calls central New York home:

Thursday’s show would turn out to have the smallest crowd of the six shows this weekend, but they were not half bad.  And the show was also notable because it was the only time my intro was said correctly in all six shows.  I will give you the correct into and then the not so correct ones I got:

  • This guy has been seen on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and performs at clubs around the country – J-L Cauvin (correct)
  • This guy, he was on The Late Late… which one is it The Later Night Late Show?  J-L Cauvin
  • You may have seen this guy on The Late Late Show his name is… what the hell is his name? (picks up my card) J-L… Cauvin
  • Give it up for D.L Cauvin
  • You have seen this guy… he just did a guest spot on Leno… J-L Cauvin

I messed up one intro as an emcee in my life at the Cleveland Improv.  I was mortified and would have been OK if the headliner told me to fu*k off and asked me to be bounced from the lineup.  That said, I of course never messed up the intro the rest of the week.  But Wise Guys this weekend had three different emcees for the four nights. And none of them had a perfect record. I don’t really care except when your intro is messed up (especially on purpose as one emcee did twice because I think he thought it was funny) it just diminishes the modicum of energy and respect the crowd may have for the entertainer.   It’s like instead of having the dignity of a stripper, he was demoting me to Hooters waitress.

Friday I went to the Mall and joined Bally’s for three days.  I always enjoy my interactions with gym personnel in different towns.  I usually say “I am a comedian in town for the weekend and was hoping to use the gym for a few days,” and they always respond, “Oh really, what’s your name?” And usually I say, “You have never heard of me.”  See, as a feature you do all the travelling of a headliner at a fraction of the pay and much more pride swallowing.  By the end of a typical day on the road it becomes a battle of how many people will I have to tell I am a non-famous comedian that does not play pro sports while enduring looks of disappointment in people’s faces like I threw the 1918 World Series versus how much to I still want to live.

So working out in Syracuse I realized that the same way small town girls seem to have taken to tattoos and oral sex as their singular identity in a post-industrial America (I am guilty of looking at well-inked women the way many white women look at black dudes – Sure I find you attractive and want to have sex with you, but I will probably never introduce you to my parents), men seemed to have embraced the MMA model for life.  Everyone in the gym looked like they were working out to be extras in a sequel to Warrior.  It would be nice if America could start employing people and creating things so that our only inspirations are not from reality television  America is quickly becoming a land where men and women either look like they belong on Jersey Shore or The Biggest Loser.

Anyway, like I said only four of the six shows at Wise Guys went as well as I wanted (which based on Twitter account reading will now be known to all comedians performing in Syracuse as “pulling a Jason Good”).  The early show Friday and
the late show Saturday had all the fun of a Tea Party rally watching Obama fu*k their white daughters.  But the other shows were great, especially Sunday’s crowd, which provided me the rare opportunity to leave a city on a high note.  Normally I leave gigs the way Shooter McGavin was forced to run at the end of Happy Gilmore.

Not only that, but I sold five CDs Sunday night, which brought my total for the weekend up to five.  Thank you to three people that bought those five CDs (two went for one copy of each of my CDs) – your money has already gone to purchase breakfast for a starving comedian.

As far as non-comedy entertainment I saw Puss In Boots and In Time, which were both great ideas for movies towatch on TBS on a rainy Sunday afternoon on the day a year where the only sports on television are cheerleading competitions.  And also a note to Regal Cinemas of Syracuse: You are a town with a Mall. How dare you charge $10 per ticket or $8 for a matinee.  You are a $6 movie ticket town!  At least Indianapolis had the decency to know that their matinees should only cost $5.

I also had a lot of fun hanging out with headliner Jaime Lissow, whose name I had heard many times, but never actually met.  We even managed to kill at Denny’s late Friday night.   We went in after a late night of shows and drinking.  I was immediately drawn to a stuffed toy plane in the claw machine (the impossible ones that take people’s money without mercy) because I am immature and Jaime said “I am going to get that plane for you,” which is slightly more impressive than calling a home run if you can pull it off.  I turned my back and walked toward the table and following behind me, to the awe of two customers up front, was Jaime with a the toy, which looked sort of like what an airplane would look like in a Pixar film.  So, to the delight of a few waitresses and patrons I re-enacted 9/11 as a Pixar movie using the stuffed toy as one of the hijacked planes.  Might not have been my finest moment from a decency standpoint, but was one of my best improvised
moments of comedy for sure.

Then there was the Henry Winkler sighting, which was probably the most surreal experience I have had in a while.  If you don’t know who Henry Winkler is you are stupid, but I will let you know anyway – he played the Fonze on Happy Days and most notably to me, played the Bluth Family attorney on Arrested Development.  I was at the Syracuse Amtrak station on Saturday waiting for my girlfriend to arrive.  Once she did we got on line to exchange our Monday return tickets for an earlier train.  And then running through the door of the empty train station is Henry Winkler.  I just stared at him and elbowed my girlfriend to look.  It was not that I was star struck as much as it was, “What the fu*k is Henry Winkler doing in Syracuse looking frantic at the train station.  He seemed to be in a hurry to get on the train that was about to leave.  He was with who I believe was his assistant or a colleague, but he was incredibly polite.  He was not technically cutting us, but he seemed concerned that we not think he was a dick so he apologized and then thanked me and my girlfriend, giving her a gentle tap on the shoulder, which I was OK with (I believe that is the first in a long line of steps that ends with asking a large black man to fu*k your wife while you watch during a mid-life crisis) as he ran off to the train.  And then the station was empty and quiet again.  The only person more in awe than us was the train clerk, who looked sort of like the nerdy guy from Party Down.  He had to be a big fan of Arrested Development (and probably comic books and Dungeons and Dragons also) and it was nice to have shared the moment with a mutual fan.

 

I am sure Henry Winkler was on the train going, “That was crazy!  We just cut The Rock and he was so nice about it!”  Thanks to the Wise Guys staff, the staff of the Maplewood Inn and the 5-15 fans I made this weekend.  Now off to San Antonio.

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Baton Rouge Journal Part 3: The Fedora & The…

So Saturday night seemed like it would be a tough night, following a very strong Friday night of shows. LSU had their first home game of the season Saturday night, which I feared would mean that the only crowd we would get would be disgruntled LSU fans, sort of resembling.  It turned out that the 8pm crowd was fantastic.  The material killed and the incredibly high percentage of plus size women (they were so plus-sized I thought about referring to them as multiplication sized women) were very forgiving of me mocking them.

So after three shows, which I was very proud of under my belt, all I had to do was get through the 10pm show unscathed and I would have
a perfect weekend.  I think you know where this is heading.

The 10pm crowd rolled in and did not look any different from the other crowds.  Decent size and just one drunk big girl who was trying to make the emcee’s set about her.  So I got on stage and felt pretty sure it would go well.

First two jokes – barely a response (admittedly I forgot to try a new one, with local flavor, about how I cannot eat catfish because it feels weird eating something with a mustache that isn’t an Italian woman).  I think one woman laughed really hard at one of the jokes so I said, “Hey everybody, she’s right, just to let you know.  That joke is awesome.”  Then The Bitch In The Fedora started talking (sounds like a companion play to The Motherfu*ker With The Hat) and so did the table which seemed captained by the aforementioned drunk big girl.  At that point it became sort of a war.  The Bitch In The Fedora kept saying things and stepping on punchlines like I actually wanted her opinion.

I should note that women in fedoras are a particular pet peeve of mine.  All women who wear fedoras should be forced to marry all men who wear sunglasses indoors and they should be forced, with all of their offspring, to move to an island which will be called Douchebag Island where their collective delusional sense of cool cannot infect normal people.  When I worked at the Bronx DA’s office if I were receiving a domestic violence complaint I would ask the woman one question: “This is awful, but before we proceed I need to know one thing, were you wearing a fedora when your husband punched you?  Oh you weren’t?  Phew – great to hear!  We will nail that son of a bitch!”

So when you take a dumb and rude southern woman and place a fedora on her head it is as if you have just made me an awful sundae and it now has its cherry.  So the set went on and I won constant laughs from about three tables and stares like I was speaking Arabic to the rest of the crowd (actually if I was speaking Arabic I probably would have at least gotten booed which would have been a reaction of some kind).  I did get one boo from another woman when I mentioned Obama even though I specifically requested no one boo or cheer.

So after my set I went out to the bar connected to the club and watched the locals.  I have said this before, but there is a real degradation of our culture going on.  We are rotting at the core.  Hollywood exports so many ideas and cultural trends to the rest of the country, which now lacks any kind of identity.   The small towns and cities of America truly feel like testing grounds for reality show fashions and trends.  Like instead of testing makeup on monkeys, we now market test the power of The Real Housewives, the Kardashians and Jersey Shore on ignorant small town folk, who are all too eager to adopt someone else’s identity.  I was particularly disturbed by a woman who appeared to be grinding her daughter on the dance floor, apparently trying to entice her daughter’s friends to get with her.  She was very surgically enhanced and appeared physically fit so to me she was just another cougar a/k/a awful parent.  Then the emcee told me something remarkable.  This woman was not the mother.  She was a friend.  She was 31 and her younger friend was 26.  I honestly thought the woman was 50. So on one hand I was happy that she was
not the girl’s mother, but on the other hand I was looking at a 31 year old woman who had literally tanned, implanted and hair-dyed her way to looking like a mash-up of Pamela Anderson and Richard Harris.

But just as I was deep in my analysis of the Benjamin Button of southern whores I was then approached by The Bitch In The Fedora.   She offered me the following gem (while still wearing her fedora):

“Hey, I thought you were good.  But you’re from New York right?  See that’s probably it.  People probably didn’t get you so that is why
no one was laughing.”

I said, “Oh, maybe, yeah ok, well thanks I am glad you liked it.”  That took all of my energy.  90% of my trip was fun and a success (I ate IHOP, I worked with a great headliner, Rahn Ramey, and had three excellent sets), but as comedy can do, the last note was a sour, fedora-wearing one.

I went back to the hotel after that because I had to be awake at 400 AM for my shuttle to the New Orleans train station to take The Crescent – the 30 hour train from New Orleans to New York City.  So after 2 ½ hours of great sleep I made my way to New Orleans for the longest continuous trip in my life.  But unlike my other long train rides, this one I prepared accordingly.  I reserved a roomette, which is basically a closet with two seats that convert to a small twin-width bed and a tiny toilet located in the space where a full size-width bed would end.  It may actually have been possible to take a shit and still be lying down on a majority of the bed.

Just as I thought I would be the world’s most comfortably buried alive person fate intervened.  The door to my roomette was missing a large pane of glass, which means that even with the curtain pulled over people would be able to hear me speaking to myself in different celebrity voices as well as the sound of my sh*t hitting a steel toilet.  Naturally, this was unacceptable so I asked for a different roomette.  None were available, but fortunately a room (no ette) was available.  The rooms are literally double the size and include a separate bathroom as well.  I felt like such a lucky baller that once all my stuff was in my room I immediately went to the peasants in coach and began offering women the other bed in my room (“that’s right I got a bed to spare motherfu*kers” was what I was yelling in the snack car) in exchange for favors of the flesh.  It did not pan out, but I think they at least respected me even if they didn’t outright love me.

For some of you the idea of being in a small room on a train for 30 straight hours may sound like torture, but to a comedian living in a studio apartment it just sounds like another 1.25 days.  So perhaps if comedy doesn’t work out (it’s getting there) I could have a future as a CIA operative in withstanding torture tactics.

So thank you very much to Rahn Ramey, the Baton Rouge Funny Bone, the first three crowds and small pockets of the fourth crowd, and the
people of Amtrak.  And everyone else I spoke of well in the first two parts of this Baton Rouge Journal.  God help the rest of you.

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A Comedy One Hit Wonder

I realized this morning that in a few months it will have been four years since I appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, my only modest claim to fame.  I think at this point I may be able to call myself a comedy one-hit wonder.  And being on Ferguson is not like having a #1 one one-hit.  It is more like I peaked at #27 on the charts back in late 2007.

Sadly, for comedians there is not the same effect of being a one-hit wonder as there is in music.  I remember being in Birmingham, Alabama back in 2009 and hanging out with some guys after one of the shows who were in a rock band.  Their claim to fame was that they were opening up for Hinder (a one hit-wonder band from the mid 2000s).  The conversation consisted of them telling stories of what their favorite threesomes were.  In other words they had had enough threesomes (and from a comedian who knew them – the women they had were quite attractive, which is not surprising since southern women only come in two varieties: women who love pastries or women who look like porn stars/beauty queens) to then rank threesomes.  And they were the opening band for a one hit wonder a few years removed from their one hit.  Meanwhile in Ferguson land, the closest I ever got to sex for fame was when a buddy of mine told a girl that I had been on TV in a bar, asked her if she wanted to see the set and then got a blow job from her in his apartment.

In all fairness I was engaged when I did Ferguson.  I remember after I did Ferguson I got several MySpace friend requests and comments (see how long ago it was) and one was from a woman who said “When will you be back in LA?” because Ferguson is filmed in LA and this woman had no reason to believe that I was a lawyer and not a full time comic at the time.  My significant other at the time told me she found the comment overly suggestive (especially when she read it back to me over the phone in a 1-900 sex hotline voice).  I replied – “I think she was just a fan – I have never met this person.”  She responded: “You don’t have fans.”

And of course I got a great response from a then-up and coming comedian who is now pretty well-established who decided to sh*t on me (behind my back of course, but overheard by a friend) about me getting Ferguson (“who watches that anyway?” I believe was the mocking statement he made).  Of course his success as a comedian should dispel any notion of karma.

So that was basically what I gained from a Ferguson appearance – a blow job for a friend, an insult from a comedian and a piece of humble pie intended to choke me to death.

If this were music I could look forward to that retro-comeback reality show bullsh*t world that exists for them, but no one is wondering, whatever happened to that guy from that one appearance on Ferguson?  And of course without management that is most likely the outcome for me.

I do have something to do with my one-hit wonder status (here is the cautionary tale part for all you newbies or people starting to get some heat).  After getting Ferguson and another regional tv spot (both of which I did well on), my manager parted company with the management agency (a big outfit well known in comedy).  Being new and nervous I decided to stick with the management company and learned too late that it had been the individual manager who had pushed for me, not the company.  So like Don Corleone after the strangling of Luca Brasi, I was left unprotected.  Without him I was worthless to them.  So after one mediocre showcase and one admittedly awful NACA audition (but I did not think that eating it in front of a few hundred college students from Montana could derail a budding career) I heard nothing for about 6 months (every 4th e-mail I would get a useless response from the person who I had been assigned to).  They then told me at the end of a fruitless six months that I should seek representation elsewhere.  I don’t know how I would have had the foresight to make the right decision there, but obviously I will be more careful in the future.

That is it folks, in those few easy steps you too can become a one-hit wonder in comedy.

So this Fall I will be making a big attempt at getting management again.  Some people may say that management is not necessary, but those people are often those who got a head start thanks to management or are just full of sh*t.  For example of the “New Faces” at Montreal, only two of the comedians were without representation.  They are the gate keepers to a lot of this industry.  Whether you like me, love me or hate me, I am objectively a much better comedian than I was 4 years ago.  Significantly better.  So it should stand that having been on television already and having had a very good set, it should not be that hard to get back on, right?  All I can say to that is I will not be looking for the television cameras at Wisecrackers Comedy Club in Scranton this weekend where I will be performing.

This may sound bitter and it some ways  it is.  But I am happy with some areas of improvement – I am a better comedian and I have gotten more gigs each year than the year before for four straight years.  I really want to get more TV credits to just increase the bookings I get because the life of the up and coming feature is not economically sustainable and not mentally healthy.  So hopefully efforts I make this Fall will pan out, but if they don’t my experience is still no less instructive to up and coming comedians.

Now let’s crank up some Hinder!