I perform maybe a quarter of all of my NY stand up sets at The Creek. Way more than on any other stage, I have learned how to be a comedian at The Creek. No other full time comedy venue allows the freedom and the stage time together that this venue provides.
There’s are roughly 10 open mics a week on two stages. There is a podcast network with roughly a dozen podcasts with tens of thousands of listeners. there are 20 independently produced comedy shows a week. Stand Up, Sketch, Improv, Short Films, Plays, Music, and any other relevant kind of comedy that exists is showcased here. If you look closely you can see The Creek in the background of dozens of comedy shorts made by people who know that whatever idea they can conceive, it can be realized within these walls…
I was going to write a post on this subject, but Nick says it better. If you support comedy in New York City, support the Creek.
The Cagots were a persecuted minority in France and Spain from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. They were considered unclean and cretinous, were barred from most professions, and could only receive Holy Communion on the end of a stick — all of this despite the fact that there was no discernible difference between them and the rest of the population.
Cagots were shunned and hated. They were required to live in separate quarters in towns, called cagoteries, which were often on the far outskirts of the villages. Cagots were excluded from all political and social rights. They were only allowed to enter a church by a special door, and during the service a rail separated them from the other worshipers. Either they were altogether forbidden to partake of the sacrament, or the Eucharist was handed to them on the end of a stick, while a receptacle for holy water was reserved for their exclusive use. They were compelled to wear a distinctive dress, to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose or duck (whence they were sometimes called “Canards”). So pestilential was their touch considered that it was a crime for them to walk the common road barefooted or to drink from the same communion cup as non-Cagots. The Cagots were restricted to the trades of carpenter, butcher, and rope-maker.
The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots.
Which goes to show that humans don’t even need a visible basis, much less a justification, to discriminate against one another, to create sub-groups of people whom we subjugate and disenfranchise — it’s just something that people do, a natural impulse that we need to work against. Xenophobia is so powerful that it can make us afraid even of those who are exactly like us.
Gotta say that this was a lot of fun. I’m shocked that over the two hours we were spamming Twitter with this nonsense, I somehow managed to gain three followers.
“You oughta knowsky, brosky! Let’s chomp into a clump of chewy pastries pronto.” Classic Sorkin dialogue!
The above This American Life piece on how Apple products are manufactured in Shenzhen, China, floored me, for the following reasons:
Mike Daisey, the storyteller to whom the bulk of the episode is dedicated, performs a piece of theatrical alchemy that’s absolutely amazing. He doesn’t justtell us about the bizarre, often awful working conditions under which our electronic devices are made, he places us there, mentally and emotionally. He makes the truly alien understandable, and gives us the ability to truly empathize with people we can barely imagine. That’s not only great storytelling — it also provides us with an intimate understanding his subject of a sort that journalism is often unable to provide, despite the fact that “intimate understanding” is so often the point of journalism.
Other shows — most other shows on NPR, even — would be content to broadcast Daisey’s story and leave it at that. But when the story is over, Ira Glass does something remarkable — he fact-checks it. The result? Most of it’s true, but a few details are unverifiable or were, perhaps, isolated incidents. But yes, the thrust of Mike’s story checks out. And finally,
Other shows would be content to say, “Hey, isn’t this horrifying?” and leave it at that. Instead, Glass goes on to interview a range of writers and activists, and gets a range of opinions on the issue — notably, Nicholas Kristof points out that factories like these contribute enormously to ending poverty in third-world countries. Finally, Glass notes in the close of the show that the entire episode you just heard was produced entirely on Apple computers. Which is to acknowledge, tacitly, how difficult and complex this problem is, because, after all, if it weren’t for the amazing yet troubling Apple products that brought you this program, you wouldn’t know how troubling nearly every piece of electronics you own is.
All of which is to say that the synthesis of storytelling and journalism that This American Life has developed and recently perfected is totally unique in American media, and immensely effective. I can’t think of another outlet that combines the intimate, empathetic aspects of storytelling with the rigorous chops of journalism, and to such great effect. Ira Glass and his contributors have been doing some amazing, historic work.
All of which is to say, go listen to this with the lights off.
Hey Los Angeles! Come to M Bar on Tuesday, where I’ll be telling a story at the fantastic storytelling show Public School! If you come, I promise the story almost probably won’t be about you.
What a year it’s been for Hollywood! There were so many great films this year, and the only thing more fun than watching them is debating, arguing, and writing about which were the best. So without further ado, here’s my official list of my favorite films of 2011, in order:
It’s the third year in a row, so let’s just call it a tradition: I’m going to post this beautiful, funny, heartfelt Tim Minchin song every Christmas. Those of us who love Christmas as a secular celebration of family need more carols that sing its praises as such! Let’s make this first entry in the new secular songbook.
We’re super-excited to premiere World of Bob, a new cartoon short we made with our friends at PUNY (the Akon Calls T-Pain guys). It’s about a guy named Jim whose dumb friend Bob has sex with a cavewoman, so now everyone in the future is a descendent of Bob. It’s weird, and gross, and we hope you enjoy it!
A ton of awesome people donated their time to this project — our friend Pete Berkman of Anamanaguchi did title theme, Farsheed Hamidi-Toosi did the music video theme, and our sound editor Craig Hillelson did a bang up job on the mix; and PUNY’s animation is, of course, as gorgeous as always. (Seriously, watch this in HD or at Vimeo if you possibly can — the art is amazing.) This project was a true labor of love for all of us, and we hope you dig watching it as much as we dug making it.
Holy shit — new Olde English video! I was head writer on this, but it owes its weird greatness to the hard work of about a dozen other people, not least the geniuses at PUNY. Thanks to all of them, and thanks to you for watching it!
In 2008, Olde English decided we were ready to have a TV show, and we started pitching ideas to cable channels. Most of our ideas were for themed sketch shows — my (Raphael’s) favorite was for basically a comedy version of TRL, full of original music videos, interviews with real and made-up celebrities, and youth-skewing commercials (we were about ten years too late for the format to have any cultural relevance, but we still thought it would be a lot of fun); we also pitched a road trip show where every week we film a batch of sketches in a new city as we drive across the country in a big van.
We put together the above reel as a sample of what we called our “vanilla sketch show” — just a bunch of sketches with no framing device. If you’ve seen all our videos, you’re not going to discover anything new here, other than the new intro and themed bumpers we filmed, but if you want to revisit a bunch of our favorite stuff all in a row, here’s a good place to do it. If someone had given us a TV show in 2008, this is more or less what it would have looked like.
Memories! Here’s a twenty minute package of our favorite sketches we put together way back in 2008. And while you may have seen a few of these before, I have to say that the special intro we produced for this package came out pretty cool.
A few weeks ago I wanted to audition for an upcoming Comedy Central Indecision web series. Since I was out of town, I was asked to “put myself on tape”, so I made this little video with the help of my good and very funny friends Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Frances Chewning, and Jeff Maksym.
And guess what? The next time I have an audition, I’m just going to lie and say that I’m out of town. That way, instead of going to an office building at 10 AM, waiting on a sweaty bench for an hour, fear-pooping five times, and finally being ushered into a hot little room where I am given thirty seconds in which to be as funny as possible for a bored casting assistant with a Flip cam, I get to spend an evening clowning around with my funny friends and making something I genuinely like. And then, when I don’t get the job, I still get to keep the video afterwards. Win win.
