I am thirty-two years old today. My friend Kevin posted this video of me doing stand-up on Facebook to commemorate this.
I hadn’t thought about this stuff in a long time — the video is from 2004 — but I just watched it and I was not mortified, so what the hell? I may not make all of these same jokes if I were still performing today, but give it a look if you want, birthdays are a time to be reflective.
Now off to get in a canoe, then watch THE AVENGERS again.
Is this an unusually bad time to be a person of color in America, do you think?
In general, as a black person, it’s hard to say that this is the worst time to be a black person because the further you go back in time, it gets worse and worse and worse.
For example, I like the fact that I’m not owned by anybody. I find that to be pretty good. There’s always a fight, and what sucks is that the fight gets uglier and more insidious, not as obvious. When you were owned by a guy, you knew what the fight was: “I gotta get un-owned.” That was the fight.
But now, I feel like people are treating me badly because I’m black but I can’t really tell because they’re not saying it out loud. If Santorum had the courage to say “Obama, the government nigger,” it would be like, thank you for at least being honest with what you believe. But now it’s this weird thing where it’s like, I think he doesn’t like black people, but he won’t say it directly. But I’m pretty sure because he doesn’t have a lot of black people around him.
You have to be some sort of cultural anthropologist to figure out how to be black in America or how to be not a white man in America. It’s the same with women — I think women and black people have a similar struggle and I think black women have that struggle twice. If women and black people and undocumented workers and trans people and gay people, if we all got on the same side, there’s tons more of us than there are of the other people.
Sometimes we fight our battles individually, and we need to find a way to pull it all together. And that’s hilarious.
Sometimes, my job is just the best way I can think of to spend my life, and sometimes, it gives me the opportunity to do things that are just flat-out fucking fantastic. Last week, I got to have a really fascinating conversation with W. Kamau Bell; over the weekend, I wrote it up and found that my editor was willing to let it run at length in two parts, so all of the smart shit that he said could run in full. Then last night, I got to see At The Drive-In play their first show in 11 years, and I woke up this morning in time to chat with Marc Maron for half an hour.
It’s impolite to brag, but sometimes I really feel like I am genuinely living a dream, and if you can’t say shit like that on your own blog, where can you?
Hi again, Tumblr. SXSW fully took over my life the past nine days, but I’m back. Sore and tired, but who wants to read someone complaining about the week-plus of fun things they were watching, doing, and writing about? Instead, here is just a list of all of those things, mostly for myself so I will remember it all, but also for you so you can be jealous. I will probably write something with more context to it later.
MOVIES:
The Cabin In The Woods (A)
The Babymakers (N/A — walked out after ten minutes)
Safety Not Guaranteed (B)
America’s Parking Lot (B+)
King Kelly (C+)
Lost & Sound (C+)
Wonder Women! The Untold Story Of American Superheroines (B-)
Electrick Children (B)
The Last Fall (C-)
Bernie(A-)
PANELS/TAPINGS/TALKING PERFORMANCES:
Kelly Carlin’s A Carlin Home Companion
Curing A Rage Headache panel with Sady Doyle and J. Smooth
Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast taping with Jeffrey Tambor
Bob’s Burgers comedy showcase with Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal
MUSIC:
Jay-Z at ACL Live
Michael Kiwanuka at Radio Day Stage
Dessa at Scoot Inn
Foy Vance at Central Presbyterian Church
M. Ward at Central Presbyterian Church
The Low Anthem at ACL Live
Alejandro Escovedo at ACL Live
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at ACL Live
Blaqstarr at Cedar Door
B.O.B at Cedar Door
The Heavy at Cedar Door
Counting Crows at Auditorium Shores
Alice Smith at Vice
Hollywood Holt at 1100 E. 5th St.
El-P at 1100 E. 5th St.
Tom Morello at Swan Dive
Graffiti6 at Peckerhead’s
Rhett Miller at Peckerhead’s
Sleigh Bells at ACL Live
Nas (w/DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and AZ) at ACL Live
Nikka Costa at Buca
That’s everything, I think. Best surprises included America’s Parking Lot, Kelly Carlin, Graffiti6, Bernie, and the fact that Nikka Costa wasso fucking good. Best expected things were Kristen Schaal,The Cabin In The Woods, Bruce Springsteen, Rhett Miller, and Dessa.
Now to spend all day writing about it so I can justify my presence and earn some money. Drop me an “ask” if I missed anything this week that didn’t happen in the streets of Austin. I hear Mike Daisey is James Frey now? And the guy who made the Invisible Children video decided to respond to his critics by literally pulling his dick out and waving it at them? Anything else I should know about?
ETA: Oh! And I scored a sweet pair of Oliberte shoes at the Style X event on Friday at a great price, which is good because I’ve wanted some since I first learned about the company, but balked at how much they cost. As an editor I know put it, it’s a good time to be Dan Solomon, y’all.
As a comedian, I have tons of stand up comedy heroes — but none I really see myself in. There are plenty of doughy, mean white guys out there, but they talk about their girlfriends or their wives or their kids; they never talk about their boyfriends or their partners or their kids.
When I sat down to write this, I was ready to write about the dearth of openly gay male stand up comedians in the world. Because when the hilarious Todd Glass came out on WTF, my immediate reaction was “Yes! We got one!”
One. Like I was living in a drought of gay comedy, and Glass coming out was the first non-ANT drop of water since Charles Nelson Reilly.
It’s curious because I can name a dozen lesbian comedians off the top of my head. And there are superstars of stand up like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho who gay men spend big bucks supporting, but from what I knew, there were no gay guys telling jokes outside of gay bars.
Turns out: I’m wrong and I’m part of the problem.
Kat and I caught a press screening of Bridesmaids the other night, and it is pretty fucking funny. After leaving the theater, Kat said, “A lot of the time when I’m coming out of a movie, I’m trying to figure out who it was made for. This one was for me.” It’s not, as Bust points out, a romantic comedy — those aren’t usually very funny, and Bridesmaids is at least as weird and gross as The Hangover. (weird + gross = funny.)
One thing that stood out to me in the Bust review linked above, though, was a comment on what I thought was the funniest scene in the movie — the sure-to-be-famous food poisoning sequence. (Note: the clip in the link cuts off before the action really starts.)
There is a scene in particular where Lil and her bridesmaids get food poisoning that left me cringing, mostly because seeing people vomit makes me wanna vomit too. Is this an example of female comedy trying to keep up or out-gross the boys? There are critics and viewers who will argue that.
And maybe it’s just because I am a dude who thinks that gross-out stuff can be funny, but I actually thought the food poisoning scene was kind of groundbreaking. Because whatever else that scene is about, it is absolutely not about giving anybody a boner. And seeing it like that, you realize just how rare it is to see women in a movie who are decidedly not sexy even a little bit. That’s not a new comment or anything, but it’s definitely in sharp relief in Bridesmaids.
If the movie were otherwise bad, it wouldn’t be worth discussing much. But — aside from being probably 15 minutes too long — it’s really funny and satisfying. And since that — combined with the fact that no studio thought to counter-program it till The Hangover 2 opens in two weeks — means that Bridesmaids is probably gonna be a monster hit, I expect we’ll see people considering this more seriously. And that’s cool, because it’s a conversation that’s been needed for a long time. With our without the puking and pooping.
Also, here is a picture with him and my wife, because it makes her happy when she looks at it and she will probably see this post on her phone while she’s on the bus ride home! Hi, Kat!
Anyway: This time out, we talk about his IAMDONALD tour, the fact that he hits on Rashida Jones in his songs kinda a lot, and the six years he spent working hard to become an overnight success.
(My previous interview with Glover ran on MTV Hive earlier this month, if you’re interested.)
