Month: April 2006

I Wish I’d Majored In That

I was at the bookstore today and looked at a copy of The Jesus Papers. Well, really mostly just read the inside front-cover and back-cover blurbs. It’s by Michael Baigent, one of the two authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, whose version of Western history was adopted by Dan Brown for the wildly successful DaVinci Code.

This blew me away — on both the front and back cover blurb Mr. Baigent was described as “a religious historian and a leading expert in the field of arcane knowledge.”

Arcane Knowledge is a “field”? Dang, my college advisors never even told me. I would have had hella fun in that department. I suppose as a Classical Languages major I came as close as anyone to majoring in “arcane knowledge.” But still.

Comedians of Comedy

I went to see the Comedians of Comedy last night, with Joe, in Lansing.  It was pretty awesome.  The venue was the “Temple Club,” which is an old church converted to a club, with much churchly accountrements still there (stained glass windows, a few pews, hanging lamps, and so on.

Lineup: Patton Oswalt, Maria Bamford, Eugene Merman, Brian Posehn, and a little extra Patton.  I knew Patton Oswalt’s comedy pretty well, the others much less.  They were all very good, in completely different ways.  Patton’s friendly, personable, active, but with a razor wit.  Maria has a gift for voices and sound effects and a kind of self-effacing but intelligent nerd-girl comedy, pretty autobiographical.  Eugene’s comedy is simultaneously Funny-Ha-Ha and Funny-Strange, in differing proportions. Brian’s is mostly dirty jokes, but delivered with a kind of simple, intelligent sincerity — locker-room jokes, but told by someone as smart as the nerd who gets towels snapped at him.

The thing they have most in common is that they’re smart people, largely doing comedy for smart people.

Bits that stick in my mind —

Patton trying to coin a catch-phrase that he can sell on T-shirts and make millions, like Larry The Cable Guy’s “Git ‘R Done!”  I think “put the puppy in the bucket!” was one of the contenders, but he also tried “blacks are inferior!” which he thought would play well with Larry the Cable Guy’s audience, who are apparently big spenders on slogan merch.
Maria describing being belittled and terrorized in Target, in her home town of Duluth, by a woman who was one of the mean girls who tormented her in high school…  A skit which ends with the woman saying “Now push Credit or Debit.”

Eugene and the actual recorded phone conversation with the telemarketer.  That and his “driving around” sketch both made such an impression I can’t really remember his standup stuff.

Brian and his first prostate exam, and his discussion of the problems that would arise in filming a sex scene with Kate Beckinsale.

Those are just a few bits that stick in my mind.  Lots more.  It was fun.  It was really cool to meet the four of them at the merch table afterwards, get a poster signed, talk to them briefly.  Good stuff.

Someday I may get around to going through the post and putting link tags in for all the zillion linkable things in this post.  Not now.  Gotta get back to work.