6/30/15

Chicago shows this week

I'm coming to Chitown...

Jul 1, 2015
8:30pm CYSK @ Timothy O'Toole's
9pm The Blind Bet @ the Pony Inn

Jul 2, 2015
7pm Congrats @ Uncharted Book
9pm Parlour Car @ Bar DeVille
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6/29/15

How to be that guy with the Apple Watch who everyone hates



More at Vooza.com.
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I guest it up on "It's Not You, It's Us" podcast

"This week on It's Not You, It's Us our guest is Matt Ruby! We learn what it means to be 'thirsty,' why it may be to your advantage to have a poor sense of smell, & discuss why we may attract what we are attracted to. Also, Matt helps us break down some break up guidelines and we find out there may be another reason to see your gynecologist, plus an all new Love Machine segment with Andy. Get to it..."

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6/18/15

Jokes that need narrative and emotional undergirding

Deep dive on Comedy Central and how it's "in the middle of a creative renaissance — and a business-model crisis." Interesting bit: This discussion about how comics who are good at getting laughs still need help with narrative and character development.

Gifted comedians might excel at creating tone and finding novel laughs, but they often need a hand reconciling these skills with the mechanical and structural demands of a traditional series...“We had never written anything” for television, Abbi Jacobson said, “so Comedy Central needed someone there with us in the writers’ room.” She added, “They wanted us to focus more on the characters’ drives, and to learn how to work within the structure of act breaks.”

Jokes land most satisfyingly when they’re supported by narrative and emotional undergirding, Alterman says...Jargowsky, characterizing Comedy Central’s priorities and proclivities from the producer’s end, explained that “when I go to pitch them on a workplace comedy, they’ll ask really specific questions, like, What is the characters’ relationship to their work? Are they successful? Why do they hang out with each other?” There’s good reason for this, he said: “When you pitch a movie, you’re telling a story, but when you pitch a TV show, you’re kind of describing a game like chess, where the characters are the pieces. Let’s have a rook that moves this way and a bishop who moves that way — but what if a knight showed up? You’re creating this interlocked network of gears that you can wind up and, if you’ve done it right, you have a comedic perpetual-motion machine.”


Read the full article.
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6/12/15

Colin Quinn, Kurt Metzger, and punching up vs. punching down

I find most of the dialogue about outrage culture tiresome. But Colin Quinn and Kurt Metzger? I'll listen to those two.

Colin Quinn on race, comedy and political correctness is a solid interview.

And punching up, punching down! Once again, these terms were not created by humorous people. Activists are activists. They are great and a big part of American society. Humorists and activists don’t very often meld. Humorists and activists have two very different mentalities. Activists are very sincere, very positive. That’s how activists should be. Humorists are supposed to look at everything and see the bullshit in all sides. This is my opinion. We are not supposed to see 100 percent right and wrong. Everything is middle ground. Everything is hypocrisy in all people and all situations.


And you hear Metzger on WTF? Good stuff. He has an interesting exchange with Maron (around 15:30in) about how people who talk about “punching up” are actually condescending.

Jokes, to me, there's no moral component whatsoever. It's merely funny and that's its own force. I know for a fact that something that's absolutely not funny and terribly wrong can be the most hysterical thing in the world in the right context. That's just a fact.

So people who don't get funny, there's a lot of people who feel punching up and punching down comedy and all that shit. It's a very telling thing to say. You hear that "punching down comedy." That's the most elitist [thing], that's saying, "There's a caste system and I'm on top of it and I will not deign to punch downward at the people lower than me." You think people are lower than you and you think that makes you more moral than me? I thought we were all equal so I'm punching straight ahead. But it turns out that I'm supposed to buy into that I'm on top of someone.


My reaction to the recent discussions around offended audiences...

Comedians: I'm annoyed at uptight crowds too. I get it. But my .02: You're not entitled to get laughs on your jokes. No one's banning you from saying stuff. They're just not laughing. If that bugs you, start performing in front of different crowds. If you want to be edgy and offensive, don't perform for liberal twenty-year-olds. This idea that every audience needs to dig your set is a weird comedy-centric thing. A punk band doesn't get mad when an opera crowd doesn't enjoy their music. They play a dive bar instead of an opera house. The internet is turning us into a bunch of niche cultures and insisting on a one-size-fits-all approach to comedy seems antiquated. I love Dave Attell. I listen to NPR all the time. But Dave Attell probably shouldn't perform at an NPR fundraiser. That doesn't mean anyone is wrong. It's ok for us to enjoy different things.

Joe Derosa had some smart tweets about all this...


Also, the "it's a free speech issue" and "people shouldn't get fired" comments seem a bit hysterical. No one's passing laws against these jokes and it seems pretty rare that anyone's actually lost a job due to Twitter outrage. There are drama queens on both sides here.

Minority groups: A lot of minority groups are making great strides lately. That's awesome. If you buy that punching up/down does matter: Part of the deal of gaining a more powerful position in society is that people are entitled to make fun of you more. You gain power, you become a legit target for comedy. If legit comedians wanna try to make good natured jokes about your group, it's a sign that y'all are coming up. Gaining power but claiming immunity from mockery doesn't add up. You can't have it both ways. If I'm gonna have to say L.G.B.T.Q. instead of gay, you may have to deal with some jokes about that being too many syllables.

People on either side who get outraged: Here's how the internet works...

1) You think something is terrible.
2) You blog/tweet/whatever about it.
3) People click on it.
4) Clicks means ad revenues for the publisher.
5) So they publish more like it.
6) Voila, the internet gets more terrible.

By publicly hating on something, you are ensuring it will happen more often. Congrats!

Also, if you're gonna summarize a Seinfeld episode, at least be in the goddamn ballpark with your summary.



Related:
The big story here isn't rape culture, it's social media culture
I don't understand being offended
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6/4/15

The Jenner hype

this entire Jenner thing is so ridic. it’s all self-promotion by Jenner and rubbernecking by the rest of us in the disguise of “transgender awareness.” carnival sideshow turned into faux political cause. the ultimate Kardashian checkmate...until one of them commits suicide to promote their final project. now if you'll excuse me, i'm gonna go watch "Network" again.
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5/29/15

A weekend on Ayahuasca

I recently spent a weekend on Ayahuasca (hallucinogenic brew from the Amazon) and it was the most significant spiritual experience of my life. (No joke!) Here's what happened.
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5/13/15

"Look at this fish I caught" photos

Run your online dating profile photos past someone of the opposite gender. Because dudes, no girl wants to see your "look at this fish I caught" photo. And ladies, no guy wants to peep your "look at me with a fake mustache" shot. Either of those is basically just screaming, "I don't understand the opposite sex!"
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5/8/15

The best comedy on TV is the Wendy Williams show

Wendy basically reads Us Weekly and the whole crowd boos or cheers like it's a church sermon. Now Wendy is telling the crowd she needs silence in the airport bathroom when she's trying to do her business. *wild applause* She can tell us that because we KNOW EACH OTHER. *more applause* Lesson: Do NOT ask for Wendy's autograph when she is on the toilet. Time for a commercial break... *dancing* Wendy audience is getting 50 Shades of Grey box set. *standing ovation* Guess what? Wendy loves chocolate! *nods all around* Also, she does NOT think Eva should get back together with Tony Parker. *crowd agrees* Now Wendy is giving advice to the crowd. An audience member found another girl sending her man photos! Red low cut v-neck top & red lipstick. *shocked gasps* And that's it. Now it's time for some show called The Real. I'm sad Wendy is over, but The Real also features an audience that is *dancing* so I'm pretty sure it's gonna be a good time.
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You can't say that on television

John Oliver going after Bud Light, HBO moneymakers, and Time Warner in same episode was cool: Why John Oliver Is Even More Badass Than You Might Realize.

Part of it is not worrying about advertisers. It's why shit on HBO is so much more interesting than other networks.

Thought of that while reading this too: Asking "who's the customer?"

It turns out asking "who's the customer?" is a great way of thinking about when certain companies or industries do things that aren't aligned with good customer service or user experience.


The customer for network TV shows isn't viewers. The customer is the advertisers. The viewer is just a means to an end. AKA "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product."
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5/4/15

I spoke at a marketing conference about Vooza, humor, and native advertising

Here are some photos of me onstage at the Country Music Hall of Fame. I sang Jolene along with Dolly...er, not really. The real deal: Last week, I gave a talk at the Marketing United conference in Nashville. I showed some of our Vooza videos, made some jokes, and then gave a legit presentation on how we work with advertisers at Vooza and how brands can make stuff that doesn't suck. Here's some of the crowd response on Twitter (and some related links at the end):

















Some of the stuff I talked about in case you're interested in more info:

1,000 True Fans [Kevin Kelley]
The Economics of Internet Comedy Videos [Splitsider]
Jerry Seinfeld Aces Product Placement [Brand Channel]
12 video sharing triggers [Econsultancy]
How Publishers and Brands Can Measure the Value of Native Advertising [Content Standard]
Brands as publishers [Curve]
Brands as Publishers [Huge]
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4/28/15

Editing tip: "Matching is for sissies"

The Man Who Makes the World’s Funniest People Even Funnier is a look at the man who edits Apatow/Feig movies.

One of White’s mentors at Sundance was Dede Allen, who cut “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” Allen instilled in White an unfussy approach. “You run into editors who say, ‘I can’t make that cut, the glass of water is in the wrong place in that take,’ ” White said. “But I’ll say: ‘Who cares? The performance is strongest in that cut!’ Why would you match the glass and take on that worse performance? ‘Matching is for sissies’ — that’s one of the things Dede would say all the time.” White argues that as audience members, we “look at actors’ eyes most of the time, so as long as they’re engaging, you’re going to be connected to that person, and whatever happens elsewhere in the frame is less important.”


Reminds me of one of Airplane creators David Zucker's rules:

That didn`t happen: Completely defying logic is bad, but something that is on and off the screen so fast that we can get away with it is OK. Example: Robert Stack in ``Airplane!`` yells to Lloyd Bridges, ``He can`t land; they`re on instruments!`` And of course we cut to the cockpit and four of the actors are playing musical instruments. Seconds later, in the next scene, the saxophone and clarinets have disappeared. If it`s done right, no one in the audience will ask where the instruments went.


We used that as a guiding rule during edit of this Vooza episode...



...At 1:20, Steve's gums get all bloody. In the next shot, they're all clean again. "That didn't happen."
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4/24/15

"How do I market to your fetus?" and other bits from my Vooza talk at The Next Web Europe conference

Yesterday I spoke at The Next Web conference in Amsterdam in character as an idiot startup CEO (spinoff from our Vooza show). It was fun. The venue looked like a combination of a spaceship and Qbert. Video coming soon.

















Here's a clip from my talk last year:

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4/17/15

David Foster Wallace: "90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked"

Doogie Horner passed this along and wrote, "I read this David Foster Wallace essay about an author's relationship to his work, and it applies to standup as well."

In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works - and it's terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually start to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the a.m. subway by a pretty girl you don't even know it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which - since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow - is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive. Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing - your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal...

At some point you find that 90% of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will cause you to be disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double-bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which period you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone...

The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation — fun. And, if you can find your way back to fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double-bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the extreme unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you’re now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is...

The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you’d first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn’t any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the rewards of strangers’ affection is as dust, lint.


Ah, the old conundrum: Wanting to be liked ➜ shitty work ➜ not being liked

This line stuck out to me: "Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel."

Reminds me of something Howard Stern has said (paraphrasing): "The thing that you least want to talk about is the thing they most want to hear."
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4/15/15

Jamming econo

Some cool excerpts from Michael Azerrad's book "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991."

Corporate rock was about living large; indie was about living realistically and being proud of it. Indie bands didn’t need million-dollar promotional budgets and multiple costume changes. All they needed was to believe in themselves and for a few other people to believe in them, too. You didn’t need some big corporation to fund you, or even verify that you were any good. It was about viewing as a virtue what most saw as a limitation.

The Minutemen called it “jamming econo.“ And not only could you jam econo with your rock group — you could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living. You could take this particular approach to music and apply it to just about anything else you wanted to. You could be beholden only to yourself and the values and people you respected. You could take charge of your own existence. Or as the Minutemen put it in a song, “Our band could be your life.”


Great quote here too:

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
—William Blake

More like this: Steve Albini and rock 'n roll philosophy and Thinking like a comic: Fran Lebowitz, Steve Albini, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, etc.
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4/14/15

The mile high startup!?

Our cast at Vooza (along with some other great comics) just made a weird/funny video of tech geeks taking over a plane for Turkish Airlines. Includes ping pong table, fixie bike, selfie stick, and lots of self-important "we're changing the world" BS!

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3/31/15

Special People and Spit Take Comedy interview me about music, tech, satire, and more

I had a good deep dive with Tom Cowell on his podcast. We talk satire, tech, Tom Petty, and more: Special People Ep. #06: Matt Ruby | Mr. Tom Cowell.

I think Matt Ruby is a brilliant mind, a superb creator of comedy, and a great guy. He's the man behind Vooza, a start-up tech company that satirizes start-up tech companies. He also runs Sandpaper Suit, a comedy blog that, in ways large and small, changed my life. We had a conversation that speaks for itself. I think you should follow him on Twitter @mattruby and watch/buy/pay attention to everything he does.


Also a good time with George Flanagan on this Spit Take Comedy episode on BTR. Cue the sound effects!

Comedian Matt Ruby pays a visit to the Spit Take Comedy lair to discuss his transition from the music world to the comedy world, as well as to fill George in on what it was like to grow up with two parents who had opposing lifestyles. Also, in a new installment of "Topical Topics." both Matt and George rip the Grammys a new one.


Here's a video excerpt:

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3/12/15

The n-word and tolerance theater

Punishing a bunch of drunk Okie teenagers or a senile old rich dude for using the n-word makes us feel good but it's really just a form of tolerance theater unless we examine the deeper, more insidious forms of racism in our country (i.e. the unequal enforcement of the war on drugs and the for-profit prison system).

We watch that SAE bus video over and over and we gloat about how much better we are than those idiots but none of that does anything to address the real problems outlined in "The New Jim Crow" book or "The House I Live In" documentary. The high-horse response to this stuff reeks of "I'm one of the good ones because I cried during that John Legend song at the Oscars!" It's just a distraction, not a solution.

Anyway, what I'd really like to see is a video of drunk black teenagers on a bus singing songs from Oklahoma. "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" please!
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2/18/15

My San Francisco shows this week

I'm in SF. Get ready to pitch me on your app that I don't want to download! Here are shows I'm doing...

Wed: 8pm - Dark Room
Thu: 8pm - Doc's Lab, 9pm - Lost Weekend
Fri: 8pm - Doc's Lab
Sat: 8pm - Doc's Lab

Fri and Sat nights I'll be doing extended sets along with the very funny Andy Hendrickson. Tix for those shows available here.
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2/16/15

Jarvis Cocker on finding your voice and being specific

Interviews: Jarvis Cocker. He's the frontman from Pulp and a funny lyricist (e.g. he starts a song with "I am not Jesus though I have the same initials. I am the man who stays home and does the dishes.") Here he talks about finding your creative voice and the power of being specific.

I’ve never thought, “Oh, I’ve got to write songs about normal people or real life.” When people set out to write a song aimed at the common man—I mean, I don’t even believe that that person exists—that’s when you get really horrible, preachy, vague, waffly songs. I hate those songs. If you want to be a creative person, the big thing is to locate your own creative voice, which can be quite difficult. When I went to art college, I would read books about famous artists of years gone by and think, “Oh, well, if I went and lived in Marrakech and ate only oatmeal and bananas for a year, I’d become really artistic,” as if there’s some kind of recipe. But instead of looking off into the distance, try and concentrate on your immediate surroundings and you will find that you already have a unique take on the world. It’s just that you might not recognize it. The key to locating it is by being specific and writing about the details of situations, because a detail proves that you were actually there and lends authenticity to what you’re writing. And the weird thing is that, by being more specific, it opens things up and makes it universal.


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