Monday, January 30, 2023

HECKLER'S DOCTRINE #1:


Go to the stand-up comedy show. It can be an open mic or a touring superstar or a booked showcase or a filming of a special for cable or streaming or a podgrift recording or what have you. At some point during the proceedings, you will stand up, yourself, and begin performing your own stand-up set. If you so desire, you may assume the role of host, and therefore start calling your own line-up to the mic, each one in turn-which may require you to coordinate with others, so keep that in mind. If you are part of the line-up you may also spontaneously choose to be a host and start calling your own line-up one by one or even two by two or three by three. Audience members inspired by this chaos may decide to impulsively go into their tight five and thereby become part of the show. It is even possible to get on site security operators to abandon their posts and pursue their showbiz dreams. I have even seen chairs and tables and toilets and beer cans and beer bottles and marijuana joints and cocaine lines and cocaine baggies and hotel pillow mints and little airline liquor bottles and ticket stubs and condoms and microwave nacho cheese cups and salty tortilla-adjacent chips all come alive and start working out their sets. Even the yellow legal pad filled with names of striving hacks may self-animate to workshop its topical political humor.  The goal, obviously, is to see how many stand-up comedy shows we can create within each stand-up comedy show, all happening at the same time. Ideally, all becomes comedy, and then, um, giant meteor hits the planet . . . with its reactionary but wry observational material about the inauthenticity of state-funded artificially constructed relativistic kill vehicles-hey, giant meteor skews conservative, but it's all in good fun . . .