I like biographies too much

More at Vooza.com.

Seth Meyers vs. groans

Fun to watch Seth Meyers test out jokes in front of a not amped-up/giddy crowd.

How jokes are like magic tricks

The Honor System is a really interesting look at Teller and the thief who tried to steal this trick from him:



The article mentions how Jim Steinmeyer, one of the greatest inventors of magic, compares jokes and tricks in his book Hiding the Elephant.

In it, he writes that the best tricks are a "collection of tiny lies, in words and deeds, that are stacked and arranged ingeniously." Like jokes, tricks should have little plots with a twist at the end that's both implausible and yet logical. You shouldn't see the punchline coming, but when you do see it, it makes sense. The secret to a great trick isn't really its method; the method behind most tricks is ugly and disappointing, something blunt and mechanical...The value of a trick lies mostly in how much it stokes that battle between your head and your heart, and how badly it makes you want for your heart to win.

I like the "implausible yet logical" concept. I often think of a great joke as being the hard-to-find combination of truthful yet surprising.

It was also interesting to hear Teller discuss how hard it is to hone a trick:

The real point of magic, Teller said during those lectures, is "telling a beautiful lie. It lets you see what the world would be like if cause and effect weren't bound by physics." It's the collision between what you know and what you see that provides magic's greatest spark.

So Teller rigged a thread in his home library, and he put Abbott's ancient instructions on a music stand — pages that had been miraculously saved from a trash fire years before — and he went to work on making the impossible seem real. Eventually, he decided that the ball shouldn't float but roll. That would look simpler, but it would be harder. He practiced some more at a mirrored dance studio in Toronto, and at a cabin deep in the woods, and on the empty stage in Penn & Teller's theater. After every show for eighteen months, he would spend at least an hour, by himself, trying to make the Red Ball obey. ("Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect," Teller says.)

"I have to screw around," he told those four audiences, "to sniff the scent of an idea and track it down like a wild boar in the forest.

"It's still the hardest-to-execute piece of magic I've ever tried. In six months or a year, it will start to settle into my bones. In ten years, it'll be perfect.

Telling a beautiful lie, eh? Reminds me of a tweet I wrote a while back: Comedy is the most beautiful way to complain.

Btw, Nate Bargatze talked a lot about how his dad was a magician during his great WTF interview. Here's a clip of Nate's dad performing. Funny guy!



Related:
Teller and the magic of surprise
The brotherhood of magic and comedy

Photos from the SF Comedy Contest

I'm back from doing shows in SF. Here's what that looked like:

Marin Center, San Rafael

Montbleu Casino (Stateline, NV)

Crow’s Nest (Santa Cruz, CA)

The Purple Onion (San Francisco, CA)

New video: Amish Cop Hasidic Cop

Two New York City detectives, one Amish and one Hasidic, lose their partners and are forced to work together to catch a bank robber. Make haste!

WRITTEN BY AND STARRING
Detective Singer - Matt Ruby
Detective Fisher - Mark Normand

ADDITIONAL CAST
Police chief - Dan Soder
Robbery Victim - Victoria Harrington
Gorilla - Robert Dean
Costume shop employee - Erik Bergstrom
Cop #1 - Nick Maritato
Cop #2 - Sean Donnelly

Director - Matt Lawrence
Editor - John Schlirf
Cameraman - Robertino Zambrano

"A few things in common"

Sometimes aspiring comics read this blog and then send me emails about doing standup. Here's an excerpt from one:

I'm writing to you because you seem like a good guy who genuinely would like to help new comedians and I have a few things in common with you. For example, I'm 30 and have already lost a lot of hair, I can't go out in the sun either, because I get a new permanent mole every 15 minutes, and I have a Jewish stepfather. I'm not Jewish and I don't have any jokes about Jews, but I've been racking my brains to think of one.

Nice to know we've got a lot in common! I told him there's no way to make it in standup without jokes about Jews.

Bill Clinton riffs a lot

What Bill Clinton Wrote vs. What Bill Clinton Said looks at Clinton's convention speech and shows how much he went off script (a lot) from his prepared remarks.

Most experienced public speakers know how to deviate and alter and add flourishes to their prepared remarks on the fly, but few do it as well as Clinton. (Even if you disagree with what he's saying.) As you can see below, from a purely rhetorical standpoint nearly all of his changes enhanced the text in some way and brought added emphasis to arguments. Notice his frequent changing of "should vote for Barack Obama" to "must vote." And his even more frequent use of "Now" and "Look" when beginning a point. Many of his best lines — like his "bloodsport" quote — were either ad-libbed or added in back in at the last moment.

Related:
The Bill Clinton speech that Louis CK calls "one of the greatest things I ever saw"
How Bill Clinton handled a heckler back in the day

Unfunny success

In a piece on slow comedy, Matt Shafeek relays some advice UCB instructor Michael Delaney once gave him.

“If you create a world with ridiculous characters, you may discover something funny in your scene. But I believe the stronger decision is to play real, grounded characters that are vulnerable and affected by the world around them. You take your time, perform at the top of your intelligence, and react realistically to what happens. Now, this won’t always lead to a hilarious scene. Sometimes you’ll have a scene that won’t be funny at all. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. Sometimes you’ve just made some interesting theater. And if that sounds awful, know that the audience will not hate you like they will if you try to force something funny on them and it falls flat.”

Sometimes as a standup, I feel like laughter is holding me hostage. Like there's stuff I want to be talking about but I can't because it doesn't get laughs that are as big/frequent as stuff that I don't want to talk about. Should I talk about my mom's illness which can get tense or should I talk about sex stuff which hits hard? Your job is to get laughs and things can go south if you try to get to deep so it's tempting to take the path of least resistance.

Finding that balance between "interesting theater" and big laughs is a challenge. I guess it also depends on how you define success. Is it by laughs per minute or is it how engaged an audience is or is it how much they remember what you said afterwards or something else?

The ideal is to have it all. To create funny and interesting stuff that's deep, soulful, or whatever your ideal is. But if you do fail, it feels a lot better to fail talking about what you really want to talk about. There's nothing worse than selling out without ever actually selling anything.

See me at Comics to Watch, CSL, We're All Friends Here, SF/Boston fests, etc.

Comics to Watch
Tonight (Sep 5) I'll be performing at Caroline's on the “Comics to Watch” show.
Tickets are free and available here.

“Comics to Watch” is a live stand-up showcase featuring the very best new talent from across the country, hand selected by Comedy Central and the festival producers. This show was created to launch the careers of the next generation of comedians by putting them in front of industry executives and comedy fans.

CSL
Tomorrow (Sep 6) I'll be doing the CSL show at Kabin. Always one of my fave shows to do. Starts 9:30ish.

We're All Friends Here
Then on Saturday (Sep 8), We're All Friends Here returns...

Lineup:
Mad Dog Mattern
Jono Zalay
& Special Guest

Sat, Sep 8 - 8pm
FREE
The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY

Past episodes of the show available at iTunes.

More
After that, I'll be at the San Francisco Comedy Contest and Boston Comedy Festival...

9/5 - 8:00pm - Comics to Watch @ Caroline's
9/6 - 9:00pm - CSL @ Kabin
9/8 - 8:00pm - We're All Friends Here @ The Creek
9/8 - 11:59pm - Underground Americana @ UCB Chelsea
9/11 - 7:00pm - New York’s Funniest Stand-up Competition Audition @ Caroline's
9/14 - 8:30pm - Marin Showcase Theatre - San Rafael, CA
9/15 - Time TBA - Montbleu Resort Casino - Stateline, NV
9/16 - 9:00pm - Crows Nest - Santa Cruz, CA
9/17 - 8:00pm - Purple Onion - San Francisco, CA
9/18 - 9:00pm - Boston Comedy Fest @ Davis Sq Theatre - Boston, MA
9/20 - 9:00pm - Fresh Out @ UCB-East

All shows listed here. I also send out updates to my email list if you wanna sign up.

Brass Eye Episode 04 - Sex

Charlie Kaufman's first speech ever

Really enjoyed this talk: Charlie Kaufman: Screenwriters Lecture.

Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope. It’s done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it. It has profound importance in my life. Give that to the world, rather than selling something to the world. Don’t allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do. Try not to.

This is from E. E. Cummings: ‘To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.’ The world needs you. It doesn’t need you at a party having read a book about how to appear smart at parties – these books exist, and they’re tempting – but resist falling into that trap. The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind...

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

If you're a fan of Kaufman's, def check out the whole thing.

Comfort food

At Time, Grame McMillan argues the plots of 2012's blockbusters were increasingly weak and tangential to their movie's appeal.

The secret ingredient, I suspect, is comfort. It may sound counter-intuitive to describe such movies as The Bourne Legacy, The Dark Knight Rises or The Avengers as “comfortable,” exactly — aren’t they all meant to be edge-of-the-seat experiences, after all? — but that’s exactly what they are. The overwhelming majority of successful blockbuster movies are the cinematic equivalent of comfort food, giving us exactly what we both expect and want with the minimum of fuss, and using characters or concepts to which we as an audience already have some form of attachment. Even once you throw out the sequels, prequels and reboots of existing movies, you still have all of the movies based upon toys we played with, comic books we read or television series we watched as children. There’s definitely an argument to be made for this comfort-led approach: The audience gets to know what to expect from their entertainment before they pay for it, and the studios are making less of a gamble with their investment in developing and making the movies, because, hey, known quantity and all that. Less cynically, of course, there’s an opposing argument to be made for the value of pleasant surprises and new ideas, but in almost every clash between culture and commerce, it generally pays to be cynical, sadly.

Reminds me of what "industry" (and certain clubs) look for from comedians too. Comfort food. Someone who's giving the audience a character they already know/get. Minimum of fuss. Unfortunately that leaves the more challenging/intriguing acts with a steeper climb.

The problems that come from civilians retelling jokes

At 4:26 into this video, Patrice O'Neal defends rape jokes:



When the woman tries to recreate Patrice's angry pirate joke, it occurred to me that a big part of the problem with these "I'm offended" conversations is people who aren't comedians trying to explain/retell what they heard a comic say. The source is usually not an actual tape/recording, it's some blogger or other third party recounting what was said onstage. When a civilian who isn't a comic tells you about a joke they heard and tries to retell it, it's almost never funny. It's a bastardized version.

The problem gets bigger when people wind up judging this bastardized version. I'm offended by this woman telling that angry pirate joke. Because when she tells it, it's an awfully delivered joke.

Imagine if you tried to pick apart another artform this way. Imagine if some layman grabbed a guitar, attempted to play an Eddie Van Halen solo, failed miserably, and then said that proved that Eddie Van Halen is offensive and not musical. We'd all reject that argument as silly. All that proves is that THIS dude doesn't know how to play guitar. When people who don't know how to play an instrument try to play it, it sounds offensive.

Similarly, judging a comedian based off what an audience member says that comic said is a silly way to get to the truth of the situation.

Phyllis Diller on The Ed Sullivan Show

Using a spark file to solve the problem with hunches

Author Steven Johnson on the importance of keeping a spark file:

Most good ideas (whether they're ideas for narrative structure, a particular twist in the argument, or a broader topic) come into our minds as hunches: small fragments of a larger idea, hints and intimations. Many of these ideas sit around for months or years before they coalesce into something useful, often by colliding with another hunch. (I wrote a chapter about this phenomenon in my last book, Where Good Ideas Come From.)

The problem with hunches is that it's incredibly easy to forget them, precisely because they're not fully-baked ideas. You're reading an article, and a little spark of an idea pops into your head, but by the time you've finished the article, you're checking your email, or responding to some urgent request from your colleague, and the next thing you know, you've forgotten the hunch for good. And even the ones that you do manage to retain often don't turn out to be useful to you for months or years, which gives you countless opportunities to lose track of them.

This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy--just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I've managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.

Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that's why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I've tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file. And it's not an inconsequential document: it's almost fifty pages of hunches at this point, the length of several book chapters. But what happens when I re-read the document that I end up seeing new connections that hadn't occurred to me the first (or fifth) time around: the idea I had in 2008 that made almost no sense in 2008, but that turns out to be incredibly useful in 2012, because something has changed in the external world, or because some other idea has supplied the missing piece that turns the hunch into something actionable. Sure, I end up reading over many hunches that never went anywhere, but there are almost always little sparks that I'd forgotten that suddenly seem more promising. And it's always encouraging to see the hunches that turned into fully-realized projects or even entire books.

I keep ideas in notebooks and a notetaking app but probably don't go and review the old stuff as much as I should. There's often good stuff buried in the weeds at the junkyard.

We're All Friends Here tonight (Wed) with Sherman, Benincasa, & Wayne

We're All Friends Here is back tonight with a special Wednesday version. The guests:

Micah Sherman
Sara Benincasa
Matt Wayne

Wed, Aug 15 - 8pm sharp
FREE
The Creek and The Cave
10-93 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY

Past episodes of the show available at iTunes.

Thoughts on the Olympics, metrosexuals, and McCarren Park Pool

I dislike the word tweets. But that's what these are. Follow me @mattruby and you can get stuff like this flung at you on the regular:

Someone should figure out a way to mix the Olympics with advertising.

Men's skeet. Olympic event or Lil Jon song?

Little known Olympic fact: When Jewish athletes get medals, they're actually made out of chocolate.

My big move on the dance floor is texting.

Game show pitch: Lesbian or German?

Can't wait for someone famous to die soon so I can come on Twitter and make it all about me.

If you see me wearing my chewguard, it means either 1) I don't care at all what you think or 2) We are in love.

Public Rest Room Evacuated After Kid Uses It As McCarren Park Pool

I so wish the first rule of Burning Man was "Don't talk about Burning Man."

"Metrosexual" makes it sound like you want to have sex with a city.

Can't tell whether this soy milk has gone bad or just tastes like soy milk.

The not paying attention disease: ADD. The paying too much attention disease: Depression.

My parents really connected over wanting to be left alone.

Watching couple at comedy show debate whether or not to sit in front row. It's like deciding between joining the Marines or Coast Guard.

Drinking white wine and pissing in a trough. Pretty much sums up my life.

Liam Neeson wants to do comedy

Mitch Hedberg on writing and daydreaming

Lynn Shawcroft (Mitch Hedberg's wife) talks about Mitch. Whole thing is great but I especially liked the bit on daydreaming at 2:22in. "He considered hanging out and thinking an extremely valuable way to spend your time."



More videos from this cool series by Scott Moran.

Thursday night = Hot Soup with Joseph, Laker, Gondelman, & Patel

Thursday night. We chow down at Hot Soup. Still an early start time (7:30pm sharp). Reservations recommended. The lineup:

Jeffrey Joseph
Chris Laker
Josh Gondelman
Nimesh Patel

Thursday, Aug 9
HOT SOUP! at UCB-East
155 E. 3rd Street (at Avenue A)
Doors at 7:15pm, showtime at 7:30pm. $5 tickets.
Produced by Mark Normand, Sachi Ezura, and Matt Ruby.
Make a reservation.