People ask, “You are so funny, Michelle. Where on earth do you get your ideas?”
How real life informs my comedy act.
Doesn’t Quite Get It
Walking with their dog, a young couple.
The dog, a terrier, is off leash. Terriers were originally bred to hunt rats.
The dog leaps on a ground squirrel, breaks its neck and chomps it down. Licks her lips.
The young man yells, “Bad dog.”
I stop jogging and yell at the young man. “No, YOU are a bad human.”
Breaking the Rules
At an audition for “Noises Off,” a hysterical modern comedy about a community theater putting on a play and everyone sleeping with everyone else’s spouses backstage.
An actress shows up for audition and gives as her monolog a piece from Medea, an older-than-classical tragedy about a woman who murders her own children. For god’s sake. What kind of business sense is that?
Yet…she was so REAL; she blew everyone away and they cast her.
And not me.
Can You Die of Irony?
A traffic school for punishing OOPS I mean for “retraining” drivers who have gotten too many tickets.
They hire comics to teach the traffic school because they think they can lure more students if they promise entertainment instead of boring statistics or gory movies OOPS I meant they hire comics “because they think the lessons will sink in better with a lighthearted approach.”
Between the time I got hired and the day I taught my first class, I got three tickets and had to go to traffic school myself. So egregious were my tickets that I had to go to one of the really bad classes in which all the students were alcoholic drunks, mostly of the hit and run variety. But the school did not consider my conviction as a bad driver to be an impediment to my teaching other, lesser, bad drivers; and I had a long, successful OOPS I mean “short and horrid” career.
Pervs
An indie short. The director’s dad was producing.
We were put up on location in a motel, two to a room. Somehow I got stuck with the director’s dad, Perv-o-matic Man. While I was on the phone with the FX guy, Dad was walking around the motel room with nothing on, wagging his dick. Willy. Johnson. Rod. Wang. Woody.
I packed my suitcase and moved next door with the stoners (DP and Video Village.) There was no beer allowed on location, so the stoners were toking up. Seven of us spent the night in the stoner room (DP, Video Village, Mixer, Gaffer, PA, UPM, AC) and no one walked around wagging his tool.
Technology
After I typed this commentary, I spell-checked it. Microsoft Word did not recognize the word “toking.”
