Trail Of Breadcrumbs

The Philip Kolas Story

While I was involved with the skate shop my friend and business partner kept a meticulous finance, weather and going-ons log each month. Personally, I hate mathematics and dreaded the end of the month reviews and future quarter forecasts. But if there’s one thing I took away from those six years it was an odd appreciation for the story numbers told. Not so much the dollar amounts as the quantities sold and sales dates. For example, why did we sell eighteen sets of bearings this week as opposed to four the following week, when it was much nicer outside? Could it be due to the rise in crow farts and the cause and effect they have on the different lubrication levels or was it just anxiety spending? Sometimes the answer was obvious and other times it remained a mystery – an open field of possibilities.

“373, as of 7:33 pm 2-25-12. I’ll be at Ricky’s tonight, so there’ll be another one by the end of the night.” – Phil Kolas

This is one of the reasons I love the scan of Phil’s tallies. There’s the proof that he was there performing at those places, but where was there? And on what date? Did he barf that night or get laid or have one of his arms broken? How much time was spent rehearsing for that blue one there? Did he get heckled? And so, therein lies my favorite part – the speculation. 373 marks, each one representing a different story and set of circumstances, acknowledged and celebrated with a simple scratch.

Fuckin’ awesome.

Smells Like A Funeral

"Shit, let me down, I'm up!"

So I got all boozy before a set for the first time the other night ‘ala the big Sauce show. I had planned on doing the open mic but it wasn’t until the very end – which considering that you have seven comics each doing twenty-minutes followed by a metal band (DOOMSTRUCK!), you run the risk of getting drowsy. So instead I decided I would indulge in a couple of beers and enjoy an anxiety-free evening.

So 1:00 a.m. rolls around and I’m informed by the host that I’ve magically made the list. I immediately get scared and tell him no way – I never drink before a set because I read a book once that said not to. But rather than spend the next few days feeling like a total puss I decided to go with it. Besides not drinking beforehand is just some old superstition concocted by a bunch of square old timers right? That’s just as silly as saying that walking under a ladder or pissing in the face of a black cat on Friday the 13th is going to bring you a lifetime of lousy luck.

And so I end up going last and was actually doing okay. But just as I’m getting to the punchline of my final joke this lady starts bantering with me and I go completely blank. Like someone-threw-a-bucket-of-White Out-over-my-brain blank. Retrieval of a safe word or phrase-trigger is futile. I guess on the bright side I can finally cross closing out a totally awesome show with an apology to the audience that embrace me with a big, fat silence off the list. You can come fetch me now death, I’m stoked.

So, alcohol: inhibitor or enabler? Personally, I’m the type of person whose first faculty to go is memory. Introduce me to someone after two beers and you may as well forget about it. But it was nice to meet you and I’m sorry for wetting your bed. Loss of speech and directions usually attach themselves around five. At the same time there’s those dudes who have the ability to be half in the bag and still turn a room inside-out. I’ve talked to a variety of other comics about this, and really, it all comes down to how you handle your liquor. You’ve heard of a functioning alcoholic right? Well if you manage to get plastered way to often but have no outstanding cable or electric bills, by all means go for it – you’ve got skills. On the other hand, if you have a slow reaction time combined with a staring problem, it’s probably not a good idea to go bathing that puppy in beer.

 

Sometimes I Cut Myself.

It’s hard to imagine any one type of performer who puts themselves through the emotional wringer more than a stand-up comedian. I thought of this Wednesday night at Grumpy’s after a fellow newbie I met the previous week didn’t make it onto the night’s list. Of course I felt bad because the guy was visibly bummed, as is any comic who spends whatever free time they have writing, rewriting and nervously rehearsing only to drive to the gig and then not be able to get on, because there’s thirty-some-odd other retards looking to torture themselves in the same manner. A normal person would shout out with glee if they showed up to work only to find that their big presentation had been postponed because the boss fell out of a tree that morning and couldn’t make it in. He’s hurt. Instead, we get all twisty inside when we’re not allowed the risk to stand-up in front of a bunch of strangers/drunkards/much-funnier-people and try not to bomb.

Really though, everyone should try it.

Dear Diary: Am I Gay For Keeping A Diary?

Yes it’s true, I do in fact keep a diary. Not like a personal one –  that would be total homo. Okay fine, I do have that kind too, but I only write in it if something totally kick-ass happens that I want future races to know about (like getting my driver’s license back after five years) or some super shitty shit goes down that I figure my kids could take as a lesson after I’ve bitten the dust. Anyway, it’s my other one that I want to talk about – My Stand-Up Diary.

For starters it’s not like a play-by-play recalling every glorious/painful detail of every performance. It’s more of a quick summary: gig number, venue, date, audience reaction and set list. By far the most useful of these have been the audience reaction and set list. It’s interesting to see how one joke can slaughter an entire room in one spot but leave you standing in a pitiful silence in another. Sometimes it can be blamed on any number things – a waitress dropping a glass, drunk lady puking on her baby, etc. –  and other times it’s just a goddamn mystery. You can really get down to business in this aspect if you’ve taken to recording yourself. You’d be surprised what kind of little shit-bits you can find cross referencing the two. I rarely do this but one of the few times I did, I found what my ears took as a man saying something congratulatory, only to find he was actually responding to the host’s “That’ll do it for Jack Boyd…” with an enormous “ABOUT TIME!“. So I wept a little as I had to scratch that one out, but hey, it’s a learning process.

Now the set list, this one is a gold mine. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to reference this to make sure I’m not repeating the same list in the same order at the same venue the week prior. And this is coming from someone who only makes it out twice a week. So if you’re hitting the open mic circuit three to five times a week, even just recording this little bit of info can be helpful.

So is keeping a diary a must? Not really – more or less I do it because I think it will interesting to look back on what those early gigs were like while at the same time serving as a useful purpose now. And sure, saying you keep one might make you feel like a puss but that only depends on how serious you take the presentation of your manliness to others. In fact, you don’t even have to call it a diary – just call it “Set Notes” or “Awesome Observations” or whatever it takes to fool yourself into believing you’re not actually keeping a diary.

Recommended Reading: The Official Barf Book

So far this blog has been all about living and laughing without an ounce of puke (unless you count this old posting that was before the fact). So to be fair to all parties involved I stuck my fingers down my throat and here’s what came up – The Official Barf Book. It’s actually a perfect bathroom read, more so if your pooping, less so if your puking. Its author, Craig Yo, left no stone unturned in his search for interesting barf factoids which include, but are not limited to, animals, aliens, celebrities, professional athletes, presidents and other historical figures who have heaved at the most inappropriate of times. Of course no book on this particular subject would be complete without a list of the rock stars who died tragically attempting to produce and chew cud without the proper training. In this regard the TOBB doesn’t disappoint. It even sheds light on an interesting conspiracy theory that Elvis’ death was actually the result of shitting through his teeth and not the heart attack as the official coroner would have led us to believe.

Obviously, this book is only for the strong of stomach so if you got the guts, you can find it here. As an added bonus, it comes with free fake vomit, which when sprinkled with water, looks pretty doggone real. A real treat for those of you cat or baby owners with a sense of humor.

The Dirty Dozen

"This isn't what I signed up for!"

I hit the big number twelve last night and it went pretty good. It was sort of surprising because the microphone was broken and I had to shout all of my jokes. And as you know, the last thing drunk people like is to be yelled at. If I recall correctly that’s usually the part where bitches start getting smacked. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I was performing brand new material and was put on first (the microphone was, of course, fixed two comics later.

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t get scared and run away – go with the flow . That’s certainly what I felt like doing but was glad I stuck it out. This was in part thanks to the advice of a certain local comic we’ll just call Mike Linden, who once told me that the best nights to go out are the ones where things don’t seem to be going your way and you don’t feel like being funny. Well sprayed.

Comedy Corner Underground Triple Feature Show

CCU will be hosting its brand new Triple Feature Show this Thursday. Gah – how’s this work?!  Simple – every month they bring three experienced comedians, in this case Brandon Reynoso, Nate Abshire and Sam Spadino, to the stage to make you laugh.  It’s not all bubblegum and farts either, because their failure to do so will result in them being tossed into the Mississippi from the bridge. Okay, maybe not that last part but you gotta admit that watching people flail and bellyflop from high perches is as entertaining as it is funny.

You can check out all the truthful details for the night as well as short bios on the comics here. Now get them tickets!

Recommended Reading: I Killed: True Stories from the Road of America’s Top Comics

I usually don’t have any money so I’m pretty dependent on my library card when it comes to finding a good comedy related book. I Killed: True Stories from the Road of America’s Top Comics was published in October 2006, but it still remains a heckuva bugger to get your hands on, especially if you’re depending on the timely return habits of fellow citizens. In any case when I seen it’s abused spine staring back at me an unexpected, clearly audible “FUCK YES!” escaped my lips, spooking a poor elderly woman sharing the aisle with me. She smiled. Maybe she was just happy to see proof that some  young people still get excited about books. Or maybe she just thought it was funny I said “yes!” instead of “yeah“. You have to admit it sounds pretty stupid hearing it spoke in its proper form. At any rate, here’s the short hand:

“Even funnier and far more bizarre than the stories standup comedians tell onstage are the road stories they tell each other: of being attacked by homicidal audiences, ingesting mass quantities of alcohol and narcotics, and staving off loneliness through dizzying sexual excess.

Cumulatively, these road stories throw open a hilarious and often shocking — window onto the real nature of telling jokes for a living. Yet, until now, the off-stage life of the standup comedian was a world hidden from the public, accessible only to comics who’d paid heavy dues.”

The authors of the book, Ritch Shydner and Mark Schiff (accomplished writers and popular stand-ups in their own right) conducted hundreds of interviews, reaching back over four decades to bring not only the stories from familiar comedians who went on to achieve sitcom fame (Seinfeld, Jeff Foxworthy, Tim Allen, Roseanne, Larry David, Drew Carey), but also includes dozens of nearly unknowns, forgotten gems (remember Brett Butler of Grace Under Fire?) and old, expired road warriors that have nearly vanished without a trace (Ollie Joe Prater, sadly). The book also includes tales of deceased legends such as Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison as told through the lips of friends and those that made it out alive, including the recounting of a spontaneous set delivered by a deathly ill, nearly immobile Milton Berle that alone is worth the price of the book.

Although I may not own the book, it’s easily at the top of the list. It’s one of those you can pick up and open to any page and easily end up reading three to a dozen stories in one sitting. With stories so crisp and clear in detail your heart will race and your armpits will sweat, whether you’re a practitioner of stand-up or not. In other words, keep the Old Spice close.

You can learn more about the book and it’s authors here.

“You Gotta Push Play and Record At The Same Time, Dumbass.”

If there is one piece of advice that’s a constant for new and old stand-ups alike  it’s record yourself.

I had wanted to do this from the very beginning, but was paranoid that I would be so preoccupied worrying about the stupid thing, that it would screw up my concentration and I’d blow my lines. I think the real fear though was having to face a scary truth: What if I sound like a blubbering doofus? 

I finally felt comfortable enough to try it out at Lucky Set #7 last week, and I’m happy to report that only one of my fears was confirmed. Not the one about blowing my focus, that fell away immediately – in fact I almost forgot the cotton-picking thing up there. But as suspected, the sound of my own voice was painful to endure. It wasn’t so much that it was “blubbering”, it was just that I sounded like a cheap voice-over of a Sunday morning cartoon mutt, too generic for Saturday consumption. I told this to a friend and he laughed and advised me that I just wasn’t used to the sound of my own voice. Which was true, as strange as it sounds being that I’m the one doing the talking. So I listened to the recording again and again and sure enough, it eventually started to sound normal.

After getting over the voice aspect, I found the information invaluable. I had myself convinced before that the little mental notes I was taking onstage of crowd reaction (if any) would be sufficient. Dead wrong. When my set was over I wrote down my usual afterthoughts and observations and compared them with the recording later that night and found a number of instances where I mistook someone talking as positive feedback, when in fact they were making light of my accent and overuse of the phrase “ya know?” Cocksucker. But that’s okay, that’s what you’re looking for. And it wasn’t all bad, there were some upbeat discoveries, too. Like an improv’d afterthought that got twice the laughs as a punch line. The best find though was hearing how much of a difference the speed and pitch of my voice made in the delivery of a joke. I told the same joke the week before in an more upbeat, relaxed manner at another open mic where I’ve grown fairly comfortable and it did really well. Not this time boy, that fucker bombed – dead on arrival.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to say that if you’ve been on the fence about recording yourself, by all means do it. If you can film yourself, even better. Most cell phones come equipped with a voice recorder app, so give that a try if you can’t afford the investment of a digital recorder. For my set, I used the basic Voice Memo app on my iPhone and set it on the stool next to the mic. It picked up everything great – just make  sure the speaker is facing towards the audience. And try not to be too bummed out on the sound of your own voice, you’ll get used to it. If none of your friends or family have complained about it up to this point, you should be fine.

Recommended Reading: I’m Dying Up Here

I read this about a month ago and have to admit it played a big part in helping me decide to finally get onstage (or in one case up front, on the floor with disco lights flashing around). Check out the summary and if you’re feeling it, follow this link for some interesting interviews and some other in depth info about the book, its author and the comedians featured.

Book Summary

In the mid-1970s, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Richard Lewis, Robin Williams, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen, and several hundred other shameless showoffs and incorrigible cutups from across the country migrated en masse to Los Angeles, the new home of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. There, in a late-night world of sex, drugs, dreams and laughter, they created an artistic community unlike any before or since. It was Comedy Camelot—but it couldn’t last. William Knoedelseder was then a cub reportercovering the burgeoning local comedy scene for the Los Angeles Times. He was there when the comedians—not paid by the clubs where they performed—tried to change the system and incidentally tore apart their own close-knit community. Here he tells the story of that golden age, of the strike that ended it, and of how those days still resonate in the lives of those who were there.—From publisher description.