JWhiting.com

Last night I debuted the first of what I hope will evolve into a series of funny lectures about the future.

Broadly called “Future Tense”, the premise is that I’m a normal dude who has traveled to the not-too-distant future and back. Now I show up at comedy clubs to tell everyone about the strange things they will encounter 10-20 years in the future.

I’m pretty jazzed about the idea. Think it has a great potential for hilarious satire.

In this segment of “Future Tense” I talk about how in the future a group of tree planters stumble into a Sasquatch and the profound impact that has on the entire human race. Humanity’s capacity to love is only matched by our capacity to hate. In this age of political correctness, all the nations and religions of the world will never be able to come together until we can find a common enemy to hate the shit out of.

Click on this link to download an mp3 recording of the first performance of The Sasquatch Solution. (Host, Dave Ackerflug mistakenly calls it The Sasquatch Adventure.)

(UPDATE: The audio is broken and I don’t know why…)

Like Christophe said last night, you need to use the open mic nights to work out your comedy, not just to flex in front of the mirror. I’d never done any of this material before, so I was happy that people laughed during the test run.

Now that the inagural set is done, I’m going to work on the dynamism of the whole thing. Get much higher energy with it. Have a stronger comic point of view, etc. Looking forward to fine tuning it. Thanks to Jeanne who found the perfect music for the series.

I would love to hear your feedback.

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Ever wonder what exactly being a hack comedian means? Wonder no longer my friends, because Steven Rosenthal’s great The Hack FAQ is a mere click away. Filled with wonderful nuggets like:

When comics deny their homophobia or racism before a joke, you can be sure that they are trying to soften the blow of one of the most homophobic or racist jokes you’ll ever hear. “I have a lot of gay friends…” is usually followed with something extreme not unlike “But fags suck don’t they? And they should all be put to death!”

[UPDATE: For some reason (I think because it has ‘hack’ in the title) this post generates the most auto-spam comments on the site, so I’m going to disable commenting on this post. I don’t imagine this will affect (effect?) anyone too adversely…]

I grew up on a long country road where the homes were spaced too far apart to attract a cable TV line. Those were the days before the $5000 NASA-style shed-sized satellite dishes. Long, long before the pizza-sized DirectTV jobbies. So my family had to resort to a huge antenna that towered over our house. You could rotate it back and forth with a controller that was installed in the master bedroom. For all that, we could pull down three channels: CBC, CJOH and if the weather was good, WWNY, a CBS affiliate broadcasting out of Watertown, New York. One of those three stations used to re-run some pretty great old comedies including “The Honeymooners” and “The Andy Griffith Show”. I’m glad I got to watch Don Knotts‘ Barney Fife. Hats off to Mr. Furley. He died on Friday. Don Knotts dead at 81

My buddy Dan recently moved to NYC to start writing for The Onion full-time. Before that he was a long-time Onion headline writer, working out of Montreal. You know how that gig works? You send in like 30 headlines per week and then the main Onion staff writers sit around in a big pow-wow and vote on the headlines they want to work on. If they want your headline, you get $20 for it. They used to call Dan “The Machine” ’cause he’d crank out shitloads of good copy every week.
Anyhow, in classic Onion style, Dan is posing this week as a random dude, in this case, Aaron Henschler: Voices In Man’s Head Make Great Point About Time Management

Dudes. This is equal parts hilarious and heart-breaking. Everything satire should be right? This is what’s known as reality satire, check it out…

If You’re Nervous and Hungover, Do Not Go on Live TV

Great comics, like great musicians, were raised on the audio knee of the masters who came before them. Invariably when you hear a great modern comic talking about his/her childhood, they’ll mention the albums they listened to as kids. It was as true for Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks as it is for guys like Stephen Colbert.
It goes without saying that a good way to get into the head of your favourite comic, is to hunt down the movies, albums and books that they list as influential. If you haven’t already, check out Colbert’s great interview that was up on The Onion last week.

People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?