Home » Posts tagged 'comedy'

Tag Archives: comedy

INTERVIEW: Michael Ian Black, Sketch Comedian, and Feminist Poet.

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of speaking with sketch comedian, author, and feminist poet, Michael Ian Black. I became a fan of his work when The State popped up on MTV, and then an even bigger fan during Michael and Michael Have Issues. There are not many who posses the dry, sarcastic wit of Mr. Black, and if you’re unsure what I’m talking about, take a glance at VH1′s I Love the 70′s, 80′s, 90′s, and New Millenium. Or, simply read the interview below. Enjoy!

***************

TPQ: What are your earliest memories as a reader? Were there books that you remember being read as a child? Was there a favorite reading moment? Maybe a light bulb moment where you realized that you were reading a text that would define your life?

MIB: Earliest memory is being about five years old, sitting on the bed in my mother’s room sounding out the word “brontosaurus” to her. Nailed it. That might also be my single greatest moment as a reader. My favorite series as a kid were “The Great Brain” books, which seem to have gone out of favor and possibly print. They were about a pair of brothers in, possibly, Utah (?) around the turn of the century. The older of the two was a genius and amateur detective. The younger lived in his shadow.

TPQ: Do you remember your first jokes? How old were you when you started writing? When did you begin to develop the style upon which you’d build your career?

MIB: First deliberate comedic writing I can recall doing was in high school. A friend and I sat down and wrote plot synopses for the next hundred and fifty “Rocky” movies. They mostly involved hot air ballooning mishaps and a cheese-loving midget named Quacky. I haven’t matured much since then.

TPQ: Who were the comedians that most influenced you when you were starting out? What was it about their work that made them an influence?

MIB: I started as a sketch comedian and was most influenced by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. Belushi for the myth-making aspect of his performance, and Ackroyd for the verbal dexterity and focus.

TPQ: How has the culture of comedy changed over the course of your career? Is it a good change, or a bad change?

MIB: Comedy has become a lot more risk-oriented, a lot broader in scope. This is a direct result of there being so many avenues through which comedians can display their work. Whether it’s through video on the internet, or over Twitter, or doing live performance, or blogging. It’s a fantastic change because there are no longer any gatekeepers. There’s nobody preventing young comedians from getting their work seen.

TPQ: You wrote a Children’s book called Chicken Cheeks. I don’t know how many people actually know that you’re a children’s author. Are there other books in the works? What inspired you to write that one? Who was your favorite children’s author? Mine was Maurice Sendak. In the Night Kitchen was definitely a defining book during my childhood.

MIB: I’ve actually written several children’s books, with another one called Naked! due out in the summer of 2014. In addition to that, I’ve written a few “grown-up” books. My favorite children’s author as a kid was either C.S. Lewis or Judy Blume. I didn’t get that C.S. Lewis was trying to convert me to Christianity, and I didn’t get that Judy Blume was “a girl’s writer.”

TPQ: Do you feel there are similarities between comedy writing and the writing of poetry? Timing obviously plays a huge part in both, but what else?

MIB: The best poetry and the best comedy share a couple things: rhythm, timing, and (like all writing) a satisfying or unexpected ending. Also, all comedy rhymes.

TPQ: How does writing stand-up comedy differ from writing for screen, or for a children’s book? What’s your process like?

MIB: My process is simple: commit myself to a project. Don’t do it, and then panic and get it done all at once. I wish I had a process, a simple repeatable strategy for getting work done every day. I try, Lord knows I try, but writing is hard and I am lazy.

TPQ: How do you see the comedy culture evolving over the next decade?

MIB: No idea.

TPQ: Is it true that you had an affair with Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich? I know your love for feminist poetry stretches way beyond the bounds of reality. The twitter rumors are running rampant.

MIB: “Affair” is a loaded word. We shared some intimate times, but they were both distant emotionally, so while I was able to give my body, our minds remained somewhat distant. The rumors about my radical feminist poetry are true. I write under a nom de plume because I want my radical feminist poetry taken at face value, and not as “the radical feminist poetry of Michael Ian Black, basic cable comedian.”

TPQ: Finally, if you could choose one comedian, or author, living or dead, to have a glass of scotch with, who would it be, and why?

MIB: James Joyce because why the fuck not?

Bill Hicks : What Are You Readin’ For?

(CAUTION: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS SOME SALTY LANGUAGE)

One summer, when I was ten or eleven, my stepbrother came into my room with a very serious question.

“Are you sick?”

He asked it with an expression not of concern, but of genuine confusion. You see, it was a beautiful afternoon, and I had repeatedly declined his suggestion that we go ride bikes in favor of sitting on my bed and reading a book.
For my part, I didn’t understand why my explanation of “I’m almost done with this book,” wasn’t enough to explain my reluctance to go do something else. In my head, that sentence should still be enough to get me out of anything, including jury duty.

Now, his confusion had more to do with my preference at that time for reading to going outside and causing minor property damage like a normal suburban boy. I think Bill Hicks is talking about something else here, an active anti-intellectualism in the form of a preference for passive entertainment to active.

Bill Hicks was one of the best comics of the 20th century and he responded perfectly.
“I’m not reading Hee Haw the book.”

(Hee Haw was a TV show. Google it.)

The experience is different, and the biggest difference between reading a book and watching TV is that the book won’t move on without you. It requires 100% of your attention 100% of the time you are engaged with it. You can leave a TV on and leave the room. Not so with a book. Unless you’re right in the middle of it it’ll just flip itself closed.

And look up more Bill Hicks. Because sometimes hilarious anger is the logical reaction to the things around you.

Reading Guides for the Dumb One in the Class

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Before you start reading this, let’s get one thing perfectly straight, this post is not just about the students in your class, or the kids who say they don’t like reading; this post is very much for the teachers who stand in the front of the class, attempting to hide their sweat, and the fact that they are on the exact same page as their students – that they have never read the book that they are in the middle of teaching. It’s way more normal than people might think. Frankly, the first time teachers hand out an assignment, it’s not unusual for them to have never gone through that assignment, and be absolutely clueless as to how it’s supposed to go. Unless they were assigned certain texts in high school – and let’s face it, most teachers, myself included didn’t read everything they were assigned – they’ve never even considered opening the book that they’ve already placed on their classroom desks.

Last week, one of my students returned from a two weeks pre-arranged vacation. He was aware that we would be smack dab in the middle of reading Catcher in the Rye, and had been given all of the assignments ahead of time, as well as a reminder that the assignments, and the actual text of the book could be found on my classroom website. When he showed up in my classroom to ask what he had missed, it was more than obvious that he hadn’t followed through with any of the work we’d spoken about before his foray into the sun. We were just about to start chapter 20, and his response to me was, “Well, I read through the Sparks Notes last night, so I know everything that’s happened in the book.” Yikes. It took me a moment to figure out if he was serious. I mean, Sparks Notes were the hidden way to catch up when I was in high school, and not something that you openly bragged about having read. I told him that while I was glad he had a brief overview of the text, he had missed out on a book that might have taught him a little bit about his life. I mean, come on, even Holden Caulfield got A’s in English.

I did a lot of thinking about what my student had said, and it brought me back to my first couple years as a teacher, where, much like I mentioned earlier, I had not read all of the books that I was going to teach. I remember scrambling for “themes” and “meanings” and “symbols” and any possible “teachable moments” in the text just before the morning bell. That’s why, while I was not happy about what the student had done, I had to laugh it off. Frankly, the kids only mistake was telling me about his venture through the yellow and black.

There are some really good aspects to reading guides like Spark Notes, and sometimes it’s just the push we need to actually figure out what we are supposed to be gathering from certain texts.

For an example of what I’m talking about, RapGenius.com, has published a guide for The Great Gatsby. The movie is coming out this week, and a lot of American Literature classes are scrambling through it because teachers know that their students will soon be forking over their money to watch Leo DeCaprio portray the famed liar. It’s not the easiest book to understand, and it takes some time to truly grasp the depth of all the symbolism. This is a fantastic guide, and honestly, I’ll probably use a good deal of it when I teach this book next year. I’ve read Gatsby several times, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t use a refresher course.

Sometimes it’s not just the students who feel like the dumb ones in the class, and it’s okay to admit that, as a teacher, you don’t know everything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby (Chapter I) Lyrics

QOTD: What the Hell Do We Do Here?

Posted on by | 5 Comments

We’ve been at this whole website thing for a little over a week now, and we’ve amassed over 500 followers. That’s incredible. This little thing that started as a classroom project, has turned into three old college friends who have finally decided that they were ready to give their all to this mess called writing. We want to inspire people to write, to read, to think, and to talk to each other about what they are writing, reading, and thinking. But, how the hell do we do that?

We think our posts have been pretty good, and it seems like enough of you have found something to enjoy on the site so far, but we’re still trying to find our groove, and figure out the exact direction of The Poetry Question.

We truly need your help with today’s question:

What the hell do we do here? What would you like to see on this site?

True Stream of Consciousness: Brought to you by Google

Posted on by | Leave a comment

“Nope. Can’t use that reference. No one knows who that is.”

I don’t care anymore if you’re immediately familiar with my references. I don’t have to care about that anymore. You want me to Google that for you? You’re an adult, look it up.

This was the original draft for this post, in its entirety.

Then I thought that maybe it could come off as a bit terse. Rude, even. This is, of course, is not at all my intention. I love you guys, in almost totally appropriate ways. But I have been thinking lately about my favorite style of writing and the constraints that traditionally came along with it.

When, as a young man in a high school writing class, I first heard the words ‘stream of consciousness’, a great weight was lifted off me. I hated cramming my ideas into premade forms. I wanted to open up my head and show people my thoughts, and this seemed like the most direct way to do it.

It was also the end of my solipsistic delusion that my thoughts would make any sense at all to the rest of the world.

“I don’t get that reference.”

“Who is that?”

“I’ve never seen that show.”

My mind has always worked by jumping from one cultural reference to another. It’s a kind of shorthand. If I can invoke a feeling by reminding you of a movie that already has that feeling associate with it, it’s a real timesaver. But it soon runs into obstacles. Not everyone watches or reads the same things I do. If you have never seen ‘Over the Top’ with Sylvester Stallone, my college admission essay might not make any sense to you, for example. You’ll at least miss a lot of levels.

Luckily, Al Gore came along and invented the internet, and somebody, (Santa maybe, or Steve Jobs) invented Google. And, baby, did that change the game.

Suddenly, people weren’t so afraid of things they weren’t already familiar with. The ability to look things up on your phone no matter where you were had the simultaneous effect of making people less afraid to do so. They weren’t demanding to be written down to anymore.

I think references are vital to writing, and I doubt anyone would disagree. I’m also not saying that allusion and context hasn’t been always been important to literature. Most people my age were introduced to Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ by Bugs Bunny. Just look at all the footnotes in your poetry anthology, providing context so you can figure out what the hell Samuel Taylor Coleridge is talking about. Referencing the outside world makes your work better and makes your audience better.

What instant access to information has done is cut down on popular resistance to the act of looking things up. Finding information used to be homework. Surfing the internet has made it recreation, and so made people way more likely to do it.

I’ve never been afraid to embrace the ‘stream of consciousness’ style, but now I don’t have to ask myself whether or not anyone else knows who Nick Cassevetes is.

Google knows.

Google knows all.

Doran Simmons

Doe, a Deer, a Female Deer

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The deer in my neighborhood do not find me as funny as I do.

Perhaps I should explain.

I live in out in the woods, and there is a small herd of deer that roams my neighborhood all year round. They eat flowers and cross the road at unexpected times and look you right in the eye while pooping. Visitors gawk and stop their cars and take pictures of the exotic animals that, thanks to the large birds of prey in the area, are more common here than cats. It’s mildly irritating, but also allows me a lovely sense of superiority.

I only bring all this up because, lately, as I pass the little herd on the way to and from my home, I have been finding it hilarious to ‘mistake’ them for other animals. “Hi horsey,” I’ll yell out my window as I drive by. “Baaaaa,” as I ride by on my bike, bleating like a sheep and then laughing like a maniac as the deer bound away. They don’t seem terrified as much as annoyed. I get hilarious and they just leave. I’ve been in this situation before.

The thing is these deer and I have known each other for years. They should get me by now. I’m gonna make that joke every time. If you don’t laugh, I’ll take it as a challenge and keep it up if only because I’m obnoxious, and if you do laugh I’ll keep doing it because I assume you love it, EVERY TIME.

In many ways comedy, like language, is dependent on the audience. If it doesn’t convey a message or get a laugh it can’t be called effective. Those deer don’t get the joke, so logically I should stop doing it. It isn’t effective. But I can’t. Because I need joy in my life.

“All experience is fleeting, but that you have experienced it is not.” I’m paraphrasing, and I can’t remember who, but it sounds pretty good. There is something about life that begs to be captured by language even though we know it never really can. At times, if you’re lucky, you may find that the perfect sentence seems to spring out of your mouth at the perfect time, cracking everyone up with exuberant laughter or bringing awestruck silence. Sometimes this happens when you’re all by yourself, driving through the woods and chuckling at the deer. It’s no less important.

So, am I saying that hanging out a car window making farm noises at wildlife is poetry? Sometimes. Poetry can be an urge.

It’s also sometimes called a nervous breakdown.

Funny. I’m not at all nervous about it.

-Doran Simmons