The Audience And The Bible

I spent twenty minutes on the phone between shows tonite at the Funny Farm in Atlanta with someone who'd called to complain about my first show. I happened to be walking by when the booker was laughing and pointing to the phone so I took the call.

Weird how you will argue with an insane person forever, hoping to win.

I'd opened the show reading Corinthians 13:5, or maybe its 5:13, that says you should not associate with drunkards and the sexually immoral, etc. just letting the good Christians folks know that now was the time to leave.

Of course, no one did. Not right away.

About ten minutes in, when they found out I wasn't kidding, they started leaving. And then, between shows, they started calling. The guy that I talked to told me, as he'd told the booker, that I wasn't funny because I had to walk out with a Bible and a newspaper rather than "just making trees funny" or what-have-you.

I argued with him. Laughingly, but I still spent time arguing.

I am no different than the audience I disdain. I get off on being angry. It's a hobby and it's not a hard one but at least I know why I'm angry.

I don't really know the Bible. Enough of the ridiculous parts have been pointed out so that I can get to them to make a point. The parts that condone slavery, rape and death to just about anyone who does anything from cheating to sucking a dick. You don't have to read the entire Warren Report to figure out that the JFK assaination wasn't the way they played it off. The problem is bringing it out in a way that makes people aware of the obvious flaws rather than simply being bombastic and making people double back and clutch to the bullshit they were weened on.

People don't believe in the Bible as a whole work. Most people who say they do have never read it beyond the shit that makes the bumpersticker. But if you push em against a wall, they start crying faith.

I've yet to find the way to make it funny and do it in a way that actually does make people reconsider that nonsense they have taken as fact. Until I do, I'll continue to take calls between shows.

It isn't that I want to make folks pissed off - not that it hurts me when they are - but that it makes me absolutely and uncontrollaby fucking nutty when people can't understand how obvious it is in it's duplicity.

You believe in this nonsense why? Because you sought it out and it struck you as sensible?

Trust me, if I had a vision from Jesus right now - telling me that all that shit is on the up and up - I would buy it. If a green spaceman beamed me up to his ship and told me that we are all clones, I'd start a cult. But that doesn't seem to happen to anyone but inmates and addicts - the ones religion tends to discard first.

Any religious belief without basis is limiting at the expense of the soul. The moments of true spirituality I have had have been awe-striking and better than love or having money on the dog. The times I have spent seeking it have always felt like the most important and rewarding work you can do. To write off those moments with the most applicable scripture passage or to manage all your highs and lows by sitting on your knees and quoting some Biblical passage is lazy and cheating yourself from finding something real and all your own.

You believe? No, you don't. Someone told you that you had to believe and you believed them so you say you believe. But you don't.

I have no reason to believe so I don't. I prefer child-like wonderment. If I believed what you claim to know for fact, I'd make sure to pray and die early. Until then, I'll continue taking calls from bile-spewing rednecks tween shows and arguing until I can't stop laughing.

stanhope

Merry Christmas And All That

A quick update and then I gotta take a shit.

My regular Alaska holiday trip was cut short because of shit going on in LA but we still got in enough abuse in to call it Christmas. The annual "X"-mas party, although teetering on over-production, is still my favorite place to be in life. You guys make everything worthwhile, mostly by not giving a fuck at all.

Thanks to you, the bored and angry emailing public, I finally got most of my money from that booker in the UK.

 

"X"-mas Party 2002

He's still short about 250 bucks. A lot of people would be satisfied with that after this long. I am not one of those people. No need for you to email him anymore. If he hasn't squared up by the time I go back to Edinburgh, I will title my show "Jon Keyes is a Rat-Fuck, Deadbeat and He Still Owes Me Money."

 I'm almost hoping that he doesn't pay me just for the fun I'd have with the press.

On the other hand, there are people in the world who will send you money for no fucking reason.

Since I've asked for money for no fucking reason, I have brought in a grand total of $51.67. Paul Dekort from Canada sent in 26 dollars yesterday and is now my new best friend.

That's right, you can now buy my friendship right now through PayPal. Just ask my best friend Paul Dekort - that is, until someone outbids his 26 dollars.

I am now in Roswell, GA - in spite of America West's best attempts to keep me from making it here - and am once again lodged at a Motel 6 next to a Waffle House on a freeway off-ramp with nothing to do but contemplate a more extensive update, probably having to do with suicide or quitting comedy.

Keep those calls and letters coming.

stanhope

Post-Thanksgiving

Driving home from Thanksgiving weekend in Austin - through the Tohona O'Odham Indian Reservation in Arizona, we passed a dog eating a dead sheep on the side of the road in Why, Arizona. If we were on mushrooms we could have watched all day. But we had to get home.

Now we're home.

Another day, another 45 dollar street-sweeping ticket, another day somebody needs to die.

But they never do.

I'm sure today that assholes thrive. The guy who has that double-long pick-up truck and takes two spots is cashing in a lottery ticket as I'm circling the block looking for a spot like it's the meaning of life. The jizz-bags of the world win and never die tragically or not often enough.

 Happy Thanksgiving, Native America

I told the girl from Capital One bank tonite that I was praying to Jesus that her CEO's children get cancer in the back of their necks and die on Christmas morning. She almost broke down in tears before she told me to have a great night and hung up. I don't like to fire on the front lines but those are the folks taking 5 dollars an hour to fall on the barbed wire. I let her know it was nothing personal.

It's been one of those lives where you just have to vent.

This life has been so odd, so day-to-day in every possible venue that I forget everything moments after I think of it. I forget the people who need the beating.

In August I did a couple of one-nighters in Ireland on the heels of the Edinburgh Festival. We desperately wanted to cancel them after the stress of the fest but it's just not right to do to someone a week out, shit gig or not.

The guy I was working for, Jon Keyes from www.UKComedy.com, had me booked for two nights in the most remote fucking places on I've ever been and in the worst "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" travel scenarios I've dealt with in my comedy career.

It was among my worst comedy experiences in 12 years. All for shit money and a chance to see Ireland, I thought. Seeing a bus for 9 hours in any country is just seeing a bus. Getting treated like shit at the gig - I can get that down the street.

But one thing I never got - on the worst of gigs - is fucked out of the money.

Since the gig I've emailed this cocksucker at jon@ukcomedy.com and had other people call and email this low-rent cocksucker to get my shit money. Not a word back. That was August. This is December. Nothing.

Another shit bag that needs to die and is probably on top of the world. Him and the cunt who gave me the latest street sweeping ticket, sitting in a PT Cruiser somewhere finger-fucking each other and laughing through the stink of it all.

I will now play the UK as often as possible just on the off chance that one day I'll be able to publicly humiliate this mudhole. If I remember, that is. Until then, I count on the fictional Jesus to put cancer on the tips of his retarded childrens tongues so that it should spread like dandelions across the groins of their uncles.

But enough of my troubles.

Last week we went to Austin for the release of my new DVD "Word of Mouth", which I still can't bring myself to watch for fear of hating it like everything else I've done, and also for the demise of the once proud Velveeta Room Comedy Club. The Velv has been a staple of Austin comedy forever and has now been taken over by some schlubs who are booking the dregs of 1980's stand-up medocrity so as to save them from another corporate gig or Wendy's commercial audition.

Velveeta, it's sad to see you go.

Thanks to all the Austin people who showed up - to Kevin Booth and www.sacredcow.com for all the work on the DVD and especially to Don King, the Austin tittie bar grand potentate who continues to bring droves of loud drunks to my shows down there. I actually got complaint email about your party. Those ass-buckets will never get the beauty of chaos but it's nice for once to get the comments sent to me about the audience rather than the visa-versa.

Remember that, before you fire off your comments. I stopped doing this for you years ago.

Check out this message board Joel set up.

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No, I can't get you tickets to the AVN Awards. I have never been asked for comps so much as this event. But it's 225 bucks a seat so you can see why they might get cunty about errant freebies. Maybe one of you rich cocksuckers could buy a 10-top for 2000 dollars and leave it open for my people. Or maybe you can just send me $2000 via Paypal and I'll do it myself. You really have no excuse not to. Phil Mielke from Wisconsin sent me 25 bucks for no fucking reason and you know what I did with it? Not very much. But it was still really nice.