10/31/11

You get good at farming and then they want you to cook

An Afternoon with Neal Brennan has some cool illustrations and good talk on standup and writing for TV.

Everyone wants to know why you don't do a TV show. It's 'cause they're hard, and I'm not curious as to whether I can do it or not. I know I can do it. It comes down to the specifics of who and when and what and where. I did it. I'm not curious. I don't even want my own sitcom. I see my friends that are comedians going in. It's like people who are single and like, 'Oh, I guess I've got to get married.' No! You don't have to get married. If you're a comedian, you don't have to be...Hedberg used to do that joke about, "You're a farmer, you wanna cook?" No! I like farming. That's how I feel about stand-up. I got into it late. I feel like I have some ability at it and I think it's a wildly noble profession. Not because it can be hard and it's grueling. It's noble because if you're doing it right, you can affect change a little bit. Or you can certainly affect the way people think. You can do it in a way that has long-lasting effects. The people that have affected my thinking the most in my life are f*cking Hicks, Chappelle, Rock, y'know, Carlin. These guys really affected the way I think.


He also talks more about smiling onstage...

I figured out another way to smile onstage. Look at the audience laughing. If you look at the audience laughing, you will laugh. [...] The face has mirror neurons. Whatever you see in someone else, your face will subtly do. Laughter is really contagious, as corny as that sounds. It's worth doing.


...discussed here previously.

Here's the Hedberg bit he refers to:



Might be the most inside baseball joke about the comedy industry to ever air on a CC special. Mitch could really get away with anything.

Speaking of that, I dug Gary Gulman's line at his recent We're All Friends Here appearance when I called a discussion we were having "inside baseball." His response: "The term 'inside baseball' is inside baseball."

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