Be authentic? I'd rather you pretend.
Musings on Travis Kelce, tote bags, Leonard Cohen, camo, boomboxes, Lauren Boebert, Dave Portnoy, and more.
πͺ Travis Kelce def gonna do a "shake it off" thing after a touchdown, you just watch.
πͺ It's weird how Liberals love tote bags so much more than Conservatives. Doesn't everyone need to carry stuff? Maybe a tote bag/holster could sway 'em?
πͺ I want to travel to Turkey to get a Brazilian butt lift just so I can tell people and have it be a geographical mindf*ck.
π§ Why Always the Jews? Interesting podcast interview on why Jews are such a lightning rod for conspiracy theories.
πͺ Memory foam mattress? Uh, I donβt want a bed that remembers everything that happened there. I need an amnesia mattress.
πͺ Clinical depression would make more sense if there was also clinical happiness.
πͺ The problem with βbe authenticβ is interacting with other human beings requires pretending. You pretend to be in a good mood. You pretend that guyβs joke was funny. Pretending is the lube of a functional society. Without it, weβre all friction.
π― On the other hand, hereβs David Foster Wallace on the power of authenticity.
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and then if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
π I post clips of my standup (and more) atΒ Instagram,Β TikTok, Threads, andΒ YouTube.
πͺ Re: WaPo/Portnoy Pizzagate, "35+ plus [pizza] shops slated to participate." Literally don't understand the point of having 35 pizza places at a single fest. Ya going to eat 35 slices of pizza!? Go to one good pizza place and have a couple slices like a sane human. Another example of "good on the flyer/bad in person."
πͺ I heard the face a guitar player makes when soloing is the same face they make during orgasm. So I bought my girlfriend a guitar. I figured itβd be fun for her to make that face somehow.
π My other newsletter, Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian, is all about doing standup. Recently there: How much can comedians lie? Also: Kurt Vonnegut's advice on telling stories and writing jokes.
π― Feminist Caitlin Moran believes feminists have become largely humorless and blames social media, which she argues is like a new religion.
The thing that I observe in younger women and activists is that theyβre scared of going online and using the wrong word or asking the wrong question. As a result, weβre not having the free flow of ideas and questions that makes a movement optimal. We appear to have reinvented religion to a certain extent: the idea that there is a sentient thing watching you and that if you do something wrong, it will punish you. God is very much there in social media.Β
πͺ My beef with pronouns has nothing to do with gender identity β it just seems really egotistical to introduce yourself by telling me how youβd like me to refer to you when discussing you in the future. (After all, thatβs what third-person pronouns are all about.) I feel like you should have to do something interesting first. Eat 200 Tootsie Rolls while tightrope walking and then tell me you prefer to be called βthey/themβ β βcuz Iβm def gonna tell someone about you after that. But if weβre just on a random Zoom meeting together, the whole pronoun dance feels more like a bizarre form of egotism.
π― 16 lessons from legendary clown school instructor Philippe Gaulier:
Be ridiculous and sensitive
Be at ease with the audience (but donβt get too comfortable)
Feel the joy of pretending
Stand still
Look at the audience
Donβt take yourself too seriously
Be happy to fail
Be allergic to pretension
Nurture a childlike spirit
Have a sense of play onstage
Keep things light, present, and stupid
Find βyour idiotβ
Attack falseness
Get your ego out of the way
Do it with lightness.
βAlways light. Even if you kill someone.β
π§ Check out my Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby podcast.
Up ahead for paid subscribers: Boebert goes full Alanis, conservatives vs. libs as comedy audiences, Bari Weissβ sexual revolution βdebate,β the sneaky affirmative action in college admissions, Elon Muskβs forward motion, and the general who told Stephen Miller to STFU.
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