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I was recently voted best standup comedian in Chicago by the readers of The Chicago Reader (very confusing award to type out).
I’d like to thank my fans for 1) being more organized than me (I didn’t even know about the poll) and 2) (more importantly) enjoying my comedy.
…And, hopefully I will see you at my one man show in August: “Never Been To Paris” (starts the 20th, at the Lincoln Lodge). | |||||||||||||
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06/28/2010 09:52 pm |
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Another Just For Laughs Show that I’ll be a (minor) part of:
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“For one night only, the never-produced Super Fans movie will come to life as performers from the legendary SNL sketch and Mike Ditka reunite for a live reading of the 1995 script written by Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel. The epic script, both a freewheeling examination of the Chicago sports fanatics and an absurd satire of big money’s influence on sports, will highlight the charity event for Have Dreams: Helping Autistic Voices Emerge and the Gridiron Greats Assistance Fund, along with several Super Fan sketches and a Q&A with Da Coach himself. Odenkirk and Smigel will be joined by original Super Fans George Wendt and Joe Mantegna, along with several surprise guests.” |
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The Visitors Locker Room, namely CJ Sullivan and myself, will be contributing writers (along with VLR regular guest Prescott Tolk!) for some of the sketches before / after the script reading. …I’m very excited to have Mike Ditka leap frog my great uncle as the most successful person to ever repeat one of my jokes (my great uncle won $10,000 grand in a settlement against a grocery store that didn’t have its frozen food aisle properly maintained… …that made him, up until next Friday, the most successful man I know). |
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06/11/2010 09:26 am |
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My one man show, “Never Been to Paris”, will debut at the Lincoln Lodge on Friday August 20th. The show runs on Fridays (9 PM) through the weekend of Sept 12th. It’s $10. The show mixes stories –which are mostly about me nearly killing myself on accident– with multimedia- photos from the stories, animation, audio, and more. If you like my stand up, I think you will very likely enjoy this show. I’ll publish more detailed info on the show, along with links for buying tickets online, later (this is kind of, a ’save the date’ I suppose). |
Also… speaking of my one man show-
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| I’ll be performing a short selection (15-20 mins) from “Never Been To Paris” next Tuesday at the TBS Just For Laughs Festival.
Chicago Underground Comedy presents:
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And… staying on the festival- | |
| I’m also performing in “Memoirs of a Man Child” during Just For Laughs: Thomas Middleditch and Jordan Vogt-Roberts share their short films with the help of hilarious stand-up special guests.
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Other shows coming up:
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* Comedy Comedy, Auro IL (this Friday 6/11 and Saturday 6/12)
* Zanies Vernon Hills (this Thursday 6/10 with TJ Miller) * Red Bar Comedy Club (Friday 6/25 and Saturday 6/26) | |
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posted in
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06/08/2010 11:05 pm |
 | Former actor Peter Weller now teaches Roman History at Syracuse University and hosts the History Channel’s “Engineering the Roman Empire”. |
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Most Common Questions from Professor Peter Weller’s Roman History 101 class:
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posted in
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05/19/2010 08:19 pm |
The other day, I meant to tell Jessica that I won a coupon for a dozen free doughnuts in a way that Colin, our two year old, would not understand (since, if he heard the word –which he recognizes– he would insist on doughnuts). I tried to spell it aloud, as my parents did in such situations, but misspelled “doughnuts” so badly, Jessica had no idea what I was talking about:
“I have a coupon for a dozen free D-O-N… O?.. T.. …hmm… …hold on…” Eventually, I spelled “C…A…K…E” and cupped my hands into a circle, as though I was describing doughnuts to a foreigner, who had never seen them before and speaks no English. Jessica was so baffled that, when she finally did figure out what I was talking about, she blurted out “Doughnuts!!”, as though it were the answer to a Jeopardy question. “Doughnuts?!”, Colin responded with enthusiasm. Colin repeated “doughnuts” for ten straight minutes, walking throughout the apartment to find them. We eventually went to the store, to redeem the coupon.
I blame the century, not the man. |
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04/30/2010 09:13 am |
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Camping, as a 30 year old man, with buddies Frank: “watch out, there’s some poison ivy back there” Me: “I’m immune to it, it doesn’t matter.” Frank: “Really?” Me: “Yeah, I found out after I was the only person in my boyscout troop to not catch it after a hike. I can touch it as much as I want and not get a rash.” John: “You know, you can lose the immunity.” Me: “What?” John: “Yeah, I heard it comes and goes at random times. You may not be immune anymore” Me: “Only one way to find out.” I disrobe to only my underwear and roll around in the patch of poison ivy I roll for minutes- to the distant eye, it looks like I was training everyone on what to do if they catch fire. I stop rolling and stand up. John: “You know- you could have just touched it, with your pinky.” That never occurred to me. ▢▢ I once helped a friend move into his first house. We entered it, carrying his couch, reasoning that we should start immediately on the hardest task. It became stuck half way up the staircase. It took hours to unwedge it. We sawed inches off its legs. At one point we seriously considered lighting it on fire, to weaken it enough to break it and at least free the staircase. It was evening when we finally pushed it to the second floor and into his living room.
Upon entering the living room, we realized: the house was built on a hill- the second floor opened straight into the backyard and, had we simply walked around the house, we could have entered through the sliding door, carrying the couch like it was nothing more than a tray of summer tea.
We saw the huge, easy-to-access door together. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon, or a great work of art- we were both silent –almost dumbstruck– and yet we knew exactly what the other person was thinking; the exact words that were going through his mind: “Jesus, this is why other people plan shit”.
▢▢ I felt that same sensation –the same experience of everyone reading your thoughts; of everyone realizing, immediately, there was a much easier way to do some thing– when I emerged from the poison ivy and heard, “you could have just touched it”. Fuck. It hit me: “maybe I don’t have this immunity anymore”… and, rather than learn this lesson like a normal person (in a small, controlled fashion), I just guaranteed myself two weeks of unimaginable pain. ▢▢ I am still immune. Not a single dot –not a single scratch– developed on my body. My friends and I then drank like I beat a cancer sentence, on that camping trip. It was an uproarious good time… Come to think of it- Tom and I finished a bottle of whiskey, after that move, and ended-up at a hilarious Caribbean themed bar in the middle of Ohio. We drank like we defeated that couch, rather than just moved it. It was great time. Had we just gone around back (with the couch), we probably would have finished six hours earlier; shaken hands and called it a day. It would have been like any other afternoon. Which is why –to this day– I proudly, never think. The stories are better. “Life is too short to think“, that’s what I tell people my motto is. It usually ends job interviews, at once, but for most things you want to get done on a weekend- it makes for a good time. |
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04/27/2010 08:47 am |
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I’ve always felt that Mob documentaries are the funniest shows on TV, mostly from the (hilarious) ‘code’ they speak in, when talking over phones that might be bugged. I suppose it’s a bit like ‘hit signs’ in baseball, where the goal is to muddle your message, but –at the same time– it’s not like you have high level cryptographers working for you, so it can only be so complicated, given the abilities of your employees.
Today’s Sun Times has a great example of these hilarious, easy-to-crack codes, in an update on the Frank Calabrese, Family Secrets Mob trial. According to FBI wire taps, Calabrese hid so many real estate assists in his mother’s name that she (his mom) started to become annoyed at all the paperwork. In a secretly recorded call, Calabrese’s wife then warns him, in code, that his mother is refusing to sign anything until she gets copies of the documents:
(the entire article is pretty funny…. …Frank Calabrese’s attorney, for example, is Joseph “The Shark” Lopez- that detail alone –having a defense attorney who goes by Joey “The Shark”– makes it worth the read)
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posted in
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04/07/2010 12:24 pm |
| All new episodes of the Visitors Locker Room, my sports comedy podcast with CJ Sullivan, can
now be downloaded (for free) via iTunes:
in short –for regular listeners (who always complain about this)– the iTunes feed is finaly working |
posted in
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04/04/2010 05:37 pm |
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I was recently interviewed by Timeout Chicago for an article on the
Just for Laughs comedy festival:
“Die Meisterzingers: The city’s comics gather for a high-stakes audition” (by Jason A. Heideman). | |||||||||||||
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04/04/2010 03:02 pm |
 | I’m excited to announce that the first comedy album by The Visitors Locker Room has been released. “Sports Combat Comedy” is now
available for purchase on both iTunes and Amazon .
If you are a fan of the show, please consider purchasing the album (or a track or two), as it helps us immensely in terms of traffic. More importantly- please submit a review of the album and share the link / album with friends. And, don’t let the title scare you away if you’re not a fan of sports: as with everything my friends and I discuss, it continually bleeds into drinking stories. We hope you enjoy the it. |
Full Links (for sharing):
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/sports-combat-comedy/id356544284
http://www.amazon.com/Sports-Combat-Comedy/dp/B0038W5VYC/
posted in
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03/25/2010 10:14 pm |
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Chicago Just For Laughs Auditions
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posted in
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03/19/2010 07:09 pm |
| Unlike most standup comics, I believe that political correctness has –on whole– done more good than bad. But, man, it has also made some conversations a lot tougher than they need to be.
This was such a conversation (from a previous job):
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posted in
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03/01/2010 10:18 pm |
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Sorry if you were reading this website or any of my feeds and weird, random posts reached you. There was a bug in my RSS feed and a few drafts, that only contained future ideas, were published. So, no, I am not purposefully publishing insane, half-complete comedy manifestos directly to the net. Yet.
Sorry about the confusion, if it reached you. I think the problem is fixed now. |
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03/01/2010 10:17 pm |
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Ungoogleable was featured today in Gapers Block, a popular Chicago Web Magazine. The full article is here . Also, the website now has an easier address to remember: ungoogleable.info, so, if you like the site, please link to the new address and check back often (as it continues to be updated daily). If you have not checked it out, here’s an explanation of the site, with all the relevant links |
posted in
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02/24/2010 08:19 pm |
Ungoogleable was launched after a great, drunk argument I had with friends on the world’s gold supply.
| BACKGROUND INFO: Most people believe that gold is rare, the same way diamonds and oil are rare- meaning that, it is scarce and therefore valuable, yet still found all over the world, and pumped out of the Earth daily. This is not, however, true. Gold is unimaginably scarce. Every day, for example, we pull-out a volume of oil that is 300 times larger than all the gold ever mined (308 mil gals of oil each day / 1 mil gals of gold, ever). National Geographic once noted that all the gold on Earth could not fill two Olympic swimming pools. |
There is no way to know (like everything at a bar) how we got started on this topic, but I made the following comment:
You know, in all those spy movies, they use a convoy of trucks to rob Fort Knox, but the truth is: you could empty it with a brief case.“What?”
Sure. There can’t be more than a couple of bars there. It would be like stealing two very heavy VCRs.
“What are you talking about, Flannery? There are rooms, ten feet high, filled with gold at Fort Knox. It’s an entire base, of gold!”
No… there isn’t that much gold, in the world.
Hell, I could probably fit all the gold in the world, in my car.
People are now starting to become angry: “what kind of car do you drive?” / “Honda Civic”. Fury. Strangers join the argument:
- “what about gold coins? Jewelry?”
They’re diluted- not pure gold. - “they say the jewelry is all gold, in commercials”
Impossible. Pure gold bends like warm chocolate- you wouldn’t even want it, as jewelry
| ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND INFO: Unlike most people, when I encounter resistance during an argument, I actually increase the absurdity of my point, rather than tame it, in order to find a middle ground. People are normally so perplexed by this move –like a cop who just heard a driver insist on a harsher ticket– they drop all balance (dumbfounded, in fact), and the argument is then mine to close as I wish. |
- “what about the California Gold Rush?”
I could fit all the gold found during that rush in my mouth.
No one was able to find a google query that settled the question, so the debate continued until closing time; the old fashion way: with us yelling at each other. And, say what you will about the bad facts that were probably being thrown around that night, but –by the end of the evening– every one at the bar knew each others name… and a rough idea of their thoughts on metallurgy
When I arrived home, I started this email chain (Time Stamp = 2 AM):
Thanks, to Prescott Tolk, Adam Burke, CJ Sullivan, Nick Vatterott and (my beautiful wife) Jessica for letting me reprint this exchange…
posted in
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02/17/2010 06:13 pm |
I hate Google. I consider it an arch nemesis; a kill joy. Google is the dork in the back of a class, who –just as everyone is enjoying themselves– reminds the teacher that a quiz is scheduled. Google is a teacher’s pet. Why do I hate Google so much?- well, in a way, I am a victim of habit destruction. Google has invaded bars. Now, when a man runs his mouth at a bar (as I love to do), some vanilla with an iPhone immediately disproves him: “ah, no Sean, I’ve just googled it and ‘Ben Hur’ did not cost more to film than all five space shuttles cost”. They are bringing google into bars! We already work (as near drones) in a world of facts and forms, and dates and exact names- now they want to make bars that way. Bars –the last place where we can still have brassy, exaggerated conversations; even lie to each other– are under threat. Swagger is going the way of the dodo bird. It was not, of course, always like this. Twenty years ago, every bar had a couple of men who were completely comfortable lying about their role in a war; drunks proposed solutions to the gas crisis based on half-memories of grade school physics; old men flat-out invented baseball stories- placing hitters inside stadiums that never existed during their career, hitting home runs that are impossible. And, best of all, disproving them was a social event. Back then, the entire bar would join together –much like how the Amish build a house– to disprove a loud mouth. Almanacs were passed around; people introduced themselves after overhearing the argument; the bartender would even phone the library, for answers. You met people. You worked it out socially, spending the time laughing, talking. Now, some one types a dozen keys into a phone and shuts down the entire discussion, before it even started. But, THERE IS HOPE. Just as the coyote now prospers (after changing its eating habits when its original habitat was lost), I too have adapted. I have moved beyond the world of exact dates and dollar figures, of country names and treaties, of public records and statistics, in my arguments. I have moved into the world of ungoogleable. I now combine real technologies, with unreal uses; I talk in quantities that are too big (or too small) to have been calculated; I put extinct animals into the present day, and current civilizations into the very far past. In short, I only argue –at bars– about things that can not easily be put into a a single google query. I argue in the margins and shadows- where google can not find me. This blog chronicles that effort. One man’s journey, to argue in a world with google: |
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02/15/2010 05:07 pm |
112 versus 242
The first number is the number of times I have had to explain to my wife that men do not find Julianne Moore as attractive as other women find her. The second is, the number of times I’ve had the same conversation about Diane Lane.
(I think that Jessica –my wife– could hear that I lost my job, or wrecked the car, easier than the Diane Lane line; she still refuses to believe it)
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02/11/2010 08:01 pm |
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I can’t claim to have the best celebrity doppelganger photo this week- but I may have the most personal relationship –on all of facebook– with the word “doppelganger”. It was part of the dumbest, least-glorifying lie I ever told:
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02/09/2010 12:58 am |
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Yesterday, I had to pickup groceries and realized, for the first time in my life, I could not name a single person on a single magazine they sold:
I walked home smug. “I have finally joined the intellectual elite”, I thought. “No longer do I have the time to learn these shallow celebrity names- I, like the rest of the elite, am too busy with complex, weighty thoughts.” Then, this morning, I woke up forty five minutes late for work and thought, “Shit, I’ll only make it, if I multi-task; I have to get ready by doing two things at once”. So, without a putting a moment’s more of thought into it, I tried to put my socks on, while taking a shower. My brain simply picked to two tasks –at random– and combined them- no additional thought. My foot –thankfully– stopped this nonsense by immediately sending a signal to my brain- a sort of, “hey man this does NOT feel right” remark, as I tried to slip on a black tube sock, in the middle of a hot shower.
Well, it was a good, nine hour run, as a member of the intellectual elite. Obviously, when your best thoughts come from your foot, you are still some where in the middle of the country’s aptitude. |
posted in
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02/02/2010 08:30 pm |
Tonight:
PBR Presents, “Please Enjoy Yourself”
Underground Lounge, 8 PMSaturday:
Red Bar Comedy Club- Opening Night
Inside Ontourage Nightclub, 8 PM, $10
posted in
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01/11/2010 11:51 am |