Adam Bozarth Enjoys the Internet

January 26, 2012, 5:22pm  Permalink

inothernews:

Haves.

“Not bad, huh, folks?”

January 25, 2012, 9:01am  Permalink

» Portlandia: The White Subcultural Equivalent of a Minstrel Show | Screen News | Boise Weekly

Or “Stop Making Fun of Me!”

I am fucking tired of “offended” standing in place of “you hurt my feelings.” Save your offense for discrimination and active hate campaigns and other things that actually keep us from evolving as a species. Things like this article aren’t even reverse-offensive, they are just highlights of both sensitivity and insensitivity.

If you don’t like seeing weirdos get made fun of, I suggest you stuff consuming comedy. People are weird. All people. Putting things “off-limits” makes an air of regulation that leads to well-intended ignoramuses to cry foul when nothing has happened.

I even like when people play with and subvert stereotypes. For a timely example, Eddie Brill saying most female comics lack the authenticity of a male comic is a pretty ignorant stereotype. It seems pretty specific to Mr. Brill, but it’s a general assumption he’s made after years and years of his own experience and lack of interest in changing his mind. However, the great Authentic Female Comic takes this specific stereotype of Mr. Brill’s and plays with it. It turns the sexism into a joke, using the stereotypes of sexism as context and the jargon of stand-ups as color and ignorance as it’s target.

Stereotypes and race are tricky subjects in comedy with good reason. Humans aren’t great at being accepting, equal-thinking beasts. When we do make the change in our collective perception to be right-thinking and kid, we still have a shameful history and painful memories. However, let’s let the collective audience be the guide on what is offensive and what isn’t. If a show has gotten two seasons on television, chances are people have seen it already.

Growing up, I was made fun of a lot (big surprise). Yeah, it sucks to have your feelings hurt. There seems like little alternative when you are a kid. You only have one school, and you have to go there everyday because it’s the law. One thing I did learn, though, as an adult you can decide who you spend time with. That’s a great day when you realize that. If people are being a dick, you can choose not to see them ever again, kinda like TV shows!

January 20, 2012, 5:48pm  Permalink

» "Keep giving them you, until you is what they want."

Lifehacker linked to this article on rejection from Psychology Today that I wish I had read sooner.

Rejection has always been quite a bugbear for me, which relatively recently learned to manage like a regular human. That is to say, I’ve started to accept failure as a learning experience and not as an indelible black mark on my living soul.

However, as Mr. Palumbo’s article points out, sometimes the reason for rejection is completely arbitrary. It never had anything to do with your talent, ability, looks, or charm. It’s a maddening prospect for a struggling, not-yet-professional type who’s livelihood is entirely dependent on improvement or the obsessive head-case who takes everything as a permanent value judgement. What are you supposed to take away from these kinds of rejections? How are you supposed to identify them? Mr. Palumbo suggests this:

Keep giving them you, until you is what they want. Which means, stay true to yourself, and keep giving the marketplace your best until it takes it.

Remember, too, that rejection comes and goes, but so does acceptance. For any artist, over the long haul, it’s mastery of your craft, wedded to the sheer love of doing it, that sustains. … the powers-that-be can accept or reject your work, you can do something they can’t: create.

I’m reminded of Marc Maron’s story of redemption in the eyes of the idustry, specifically how he described the years just before starting up WTF with Marc Maron. He tells a version of the events from his keynote address at the Just For Laughs Festival in 2011.

My manager: Nobody wants to work with you. I can’t get you an agent. I cant you get you any road work.  I can’t get you anything. …

I drove home defeated. 25 years in and I had nothing. I was sitting alone in my garage in a house I was about to lose because of that bitch—lets not get into that now—and I realized. Fuck, you can build a clown, and they might not come. …

Broke, defeated and career-less, I started doing a podcast in that very garage where I was planning my own demise. I started talking about myself on the mic with no one telling me what I could or couldn’t say. I started to reach out to comics. … I needed to talk. So, I reached out to my peers and talked to them. I started to feel better about life, comedy, creativity, community. I started to understand who I was by talking to other comics and sharing it with you. I started to laugh at things again. I was excited to be alive. Doing the podcast and listening to comics was saving my life. I realized that is what comedy can do for people.

You know what the industry had to do with that? Absolutely nothing.

Nearly a quarter century of trying to make the industry notice him, working constantly as stand-ups do, Mr. Maron found his biggest success in something he created himself. His manager didn’t tell him to do a podcast, and the world certainly wasn’t asking for more podcasts. The next thing you know, WTF gets a write-up in the New York Times, the show starts airing on public radio, and Mr. Maron delivers the opening speech at a comedy festival that he might not have been invited to had he not followed the creative impulse to create WTF.

Granted, it takes 25 years to amass the cadre of friends Mr. Maron relied on in the first months of WTF, his radio experience from Air America, as well as gaining the personal intelligence to speak thoughtfully and honestly with comedians in a way that makes people want to tune in. Could anyone else replicate the appeal and success of WTF? Probably not. There will be another hit new show eventually, but it will not be anything like what Mr. Maron has created.

Ultimately, the lesson of rejection is to keep trying and create because you love to create. Learn to improve by creating new things instead of twisting yourself into someone you aren’t to fit an ideal that doesn’t exist.

January 19, 2012, 12:42pm  Permalink

Don’t leave the cube. If the cold don’t git ya, then it’ll be the wolves.

January 13, 2012, 2:19pm  Permalink

improvnonsense:

Watching the Improv Jam two weeks ago, sitting with Neil Casey while a scene started where someone did a tag out that transported characters from a fast food restaurant to a police interrogation room. Neil leaned over and said this to me:

“I’ve noticed that for students under 25 a lot of them walk on or tag out as the police coming to shut things down for being out of line. These kids either live in a world or they think they live in a world where if you step out of line the system comes crashing down on you like a ton of fucking bricks.”

After he said that, it started to stand out. Someone in an improv scene starts cheating on their company, security comes crashing in to ask them questions. Some tag-outs were just people being police. Other were smarmy investigators who came in with a sort of “good cop” attitude: “Hey, we’re just here to ask a few questions.”

Once you start thinking about this, a lot of improv gets really creepy.

…

Am I just more sensitive to such things now that Neil has made his observation?

OR IS THE WORLD TURNING INTO A TERRIBLE PLACE?

Read More

I would say that it has a lot to do with the type of TV we’ve grown up with (I’m 28, but I definitely relate to this phenomena).

Cops has been on for nearly as long as I’ve been alive. As Bill Hicks pointed out, the theme of Cops has always been that if you dare to step out of line, the Force will crack down on you so fast, you’ll be in a holding cell wondering why your eyes have been set on fire before commercial break. 9/11 has only made this worse, especially in New York where I assume these improvisors all live.

I would also blame it on unfamiliarity. The kind of people who do improv are cooperative by nature, or at least social on some level. People with more anti-social tendencies tend to go into the solitude of the stand-up world. This is a big generalization, but I am not saying any of this is fact. My own interactions with real police have been sparse (2 speeding tickets, an accident report, and nearly being busted for fireworks). Lacking any real familiarity with law enforcement, the point of reference moves to TV and movies where the police are allowed to do whatever they want for dramatic effect. It then comes across on stage as broad and vague since the player has no real point of reference for how cops usually behave.

Lastly, I think it also has to do with the improv tenant of status. High status people are usually the most fun to play, and who is more high status and as prevalent as the police? It’s why a car scene can’t go for longer than 4 minutes before someone comes in as a cop pulling over the driver, even if the driver wasn’t behaving recklessly.

It’s fun to play policemen because it’s fun to play authority figures, and they do seem to be everywhere. Speaking from my own experiences in improv, there is a tendency to want to try to make sense of the scene, and quell weird behavior. A lot of our first 1000 scenes have problems at their root, and the urge is to solve these problems. Slowly, over time, we are working to not have a problem in a scene, but an idea at it’s heart, so we won’t need the police to help solve anything.

January 13, 2012, 1:36pm   Permalink

» McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Monologue: I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.

Font pretensions are the worst pretensions.

January 13, 2012, 11:07am  Permalink

jakefogelnest:

Only one of my favorite lines EVER.

(Source: imonlyhumansometimes17)

January 10, 2012, 8:52pm  Permalink

healywu:

streeter:

This Jest video is sooooo good. It’s like a scene from a really funny movie or something. I’ve watched it 3 times already and you should, too!

BOOOOZARTH! Also, like Christopher Meloni or WHATEVER.

This is fucking amazing.

This was a lot of fun to work on, especially all the times when Christopher Meloni was yelling at children.

January 04, 2012, 3:29pm  Permalink

January
A massive blizzard shut down most of the East Coast. New York City was in a total shutdown as sanitation workers were barely able to clear the roads for days. I think that was in January. Wait, that happened in December 2010. No, wait, there was another in January, right? I just remember walking to a party in Williamsburg and there were still huge dunes of snow.

February
The Packers won the Super Bowl.

March
Is March when the Oscars is? I think so. I didn’t get to see a lot of Oscar winning movies. I had no interest in seeing Avatar, but that’s more 2010 stuff creeping into this 2011 list. I think this is also when I finally grew a beard for real.

April
Not much happens in April, does it. It’s usually when the weather is nice. I think this is when Charlie Sheen went cuckoo-bananas. I’d have to look that up. That was really weird, right? Everyone was paying attention to a coke-addled, bipolar sitcom star. And why, cause he had catch-phrases in real life and not just on a show? Anyway, I felt bad for Jon Cryer, who seems like a decent dude.

May
Matt and Danielle got married.

June
Things get fuzzier for me here because this is when I started working on The Earwolf Challenge with Left Handed Radio and my hair turned grey.

July
America celebrated it’s 235th 4th of July!

August
I think this is when Hurricane Irene happened. I remember I had to buy a lot of supplies in case New York was destroyed. I bought a bunch of dropcloth to cover the windows, which became makeshift curtains for a while. I also bought a lot of water in WIlliamsburg where everyone kept talking about how they didn’t prepare for the hurricane at all. That seemed pretty stupid to me at the time.

September
Man, am I on September already?

October
I went to the New York Comic Con a few times. Then it was Halloween, which was fun. Oh, it snowed? That was really weird.

November
I feel like there might have been a big news story I miss. When did we kill bin Laden? Was that in April and I forgot? Anyway, we took down the dropcloths and got real curtains.

December
I definitely remember that we killed Kim John Il. That was before Christmas.

December 30, 2011, 10:56am   Permalink