Standup comedy

I would love to do standup comedy at some point in my life. I actually wrote some over the summer, but I doubt I will ever actually perform this because I think ultimately, it reads better than it would perform. Curious what you think.

I was eating dinner with someone the other night, and I was telling her my jokes. And she tells me Mike, your sense of humor is an acquired taste. Now, the really shitty thing about that tonight in particular is that this is the first time I've ever performed. So I think it's safe to say that every one of you are going to think I suck. For those of you with the power to do so, now would be an excellent time to change your phone to vibrate and your state of mind to Taste Acquisition. For those of you who don't have much practice in acquiring tastes, let's talk a little bit about how it's done.

The best way to discuss such things is with examples, and fortunately for my chances of being funny here, the acquired taste that I am most familiar with is beer. I don't care what you say, or how much of it I drink: beer does not taste good. No normal person is going to taste beer for the first time and want beer-flavored bubble gum or a beer float with ice cream. When I drink it, I still sometimes tilt my head back and just pour it down my throat. I guess you could call that cheating actually. The fact that people drink non-alcoholic beer really boggles my mind. I understand it's for recovering alcoholics who like the taste, but to me that's like cruising the 405 during rush hour just cause you really love to drive. The taste is certainly not the end in and of itself. It's a necessary evil to get your buzz on. Anyways, my point being, the way you acquire the taste for beer, at least in my experience, is by putting yourself in a series of incredibly awkward social experiences with complete strangers. It's like teaching a girl to swim by throwing her in the water, or teaching a boy the joy of butt sex by putting him in prison. Beer is a taste you're forced to acquire as a male who wishes to have a social life in college. That's not to say that I don't know guys who had social lives despite being sober.

Wishes isn't really the right word as much as males hell bent on going out come the weekend. I'm talking about the kind of college guy, and I'm not going to name names, who, come Saturday night, will do whatever it takes to party. You gotta party. College isn't college otherwise. If people possessed the kind of determination that these guys do in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, his beard would be on eBay right now selling as the most controversially kitschy Halloween costume ever. You want to party so badly that you'll climb in the trunk of the SUV of some person you've just met, walk into a complete stranger's house, and spend the next couple hours either begging for booze or waiting in line for a nice cup of warm, disgusting foam from a rusty keg that you'll of course chug quickly then do it again. It's the awkward necessity of the former that forces you to develop a taste for the latter.

I think what it means is basically, by the time we hit college, most of us are already damaged goods. And the only way of escaping this is by not being in your dorm room on Saturday nights. Be anywhere--a house party, a bar, down the hall in someone else's room, anywhere--but in your room. There's this cultural idea, somehow, that college is the heaven we get to by spending time in the purgatory of high school. If you don't like high school, people tell you it doesn't really matter. High school doesn't matter in the grand scheme. No one is going to care when you're dead. Now, first of all, the idea of me being dead and no one caring was pretty much the sum of all my fears back in high school so that didn't help. I know what they meant was the way the majority of people are remembered is by their actions later in life, but tell me this: who the fuck are you to tell me what part of my life is more important than any other part? In the grand scheme of things, the four years you spend in high school are not as important as four other years. That doesn't even make any sense. If high school sucks, and to be honest it was a mixed bag for me, that is one eighteenth of your life that sucks. No publisher is going to tell a first time writer who thinks one eighteenth of his book sucks that it's not an important eighteenth. He wouldn't just be like oh well, it's early on and by the time you get to the end you won't remember it so fuck it. That's called coping, and God bless the people who have to do it, but don't tell people it's okay for life to suck now because you can retroactively cope with it forever afterwards. That's just not a healthy way of approaching life.

I don't know if it's a cultural thing or just human nature, but there's this tendency we have to assign these arbitrary values to things we want to believe have less value, because it's convenient to do so. It's probably cultural, cause of Native Americans. The Native Americans are always fucking up my universal truths. Whenever I think I've come up with some universal human limitation, like communism just doesn't work, somebody gives me a Native American counter example. I'm sure some Native American tribe practiced true objectivism. In some ways, and you might hate me for this, I feel like the Native Americans are the lucky ones. They're like the John Belushi of cultures, cut down and always remembered as the peak of talent and potential, while the rest of us are Dan Aykroyd coming to terms slowly and painfully with our limitations and dealing with our responsibility for what happened to Belushi.

But I have discovered the secret to finding peaceful objectivism, and I'm gonna let you folks in on it here tonight. It is the Infinite Universes Theory. I don't know if it's what you would call commonly accepted science, but the idea is that there are an infinite number of universes, all with minute differences so that every possibility for existence exists somewhere in this spectrum. Like in some alternate dimension right now, I'm wearing a blue shirt, or came on stage five minutes later. In another dimension, human beings have never heard of belly buttons. I think this is fucking fantastic. It's beautiful. In some universe, I am not just up here talking, but I am also getting a deep tissue massage while eating Swedish fish, and you guys think I am the funniest sex machine you've ever heard. So logically, in lots of other universes, things are a whole lot worse than they are in ours. It just has to be that way, objectively speaking. Naturally, you work to make our universe as good as possible, but if you can't, someone's gotta be the universe where six million people died in the Holocaust. So it's just us. You're not escaping from our reality, but taking solace in the existence of the other. Our universe is just "that guy" at the inter-universal party.

And speaking of fried chicken... I think it’s interesting how when you go into KFC, and you order your chicken, you can get the original recipe, or you can ask for "extra crispy." You can’t get it cooked well done or anything, but if you love your crisp, you are set. Let me tell you this: there are not many food items where you can request the texture. Particularly one so completely unrelated to, you know, presumably the food itself. You don’t look at a chicken and say, fuck, that is a crispy delicious-looking bird. Can I get some fluffy nachos? And can you make me a leathery milkshake while you’re at it?

I'd like to thank you all for sitting through my first ever performance. My name is Mike Litzenberg. Good night.