Back in 2003, I’d been looking for steady day work for several months. As a comedian, I needed a job that had enough hours that I could pay my bills, yet flexible enough that I could leave for a few days if something better came up. This meant spending a lot of time on the Craig’s List “part time/etcetera section”, competing with thousands of other people for the three jobs that sounded like they weren’t a complete scam.

If you weren’t old enough in the early millennium to have been broke and conducting business on the Internet, Craig’s List had replaced newspaper classified ads with a single website where you could arrange a date, a job interview, or to pick up a free sofa, all with the same probability that the ad was placed by someone who was going to murder you.

Out of frustration, I placed my own fake Craig’s List ad, claiming that I ran a company providing the service of sifting through organic waste for contraband that people had swallowed, or valuables that pets had eaten, thinking I had invented the one completely demeaning job that no self-respecting person would want. Forgetting who was looking for work on Craig’s List.

Within the first two hours, I received three hundred responses. Over the next month, I got hundreds upon hundreds more, over a thousand, all with resumes, many misspelled, many who ended up following-up because they hadn’t heard from me and they were very interested in getting started in the exciting field of sifting through shit for hours in search of something of value. Little realizing that, by searching Craig’s List for a worthwhile job, they already had.

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This is a famous quote often used in the context of learning the importance of meditation, of the benefits of remaining calm, and of maintaining an emotional balance. But it is also important to keep in mind in the context of learning to maintain focus on your job as a comedian, which is to make the audience laugh.

Here’s the setup:

You are performing in a club for two hundred people. Perhaps you are headlining. Perhaps you are the feature, or even the host. You hit a punchline that has always worked in front of every crowd you have ever performed in front of. The crowd is with you, and there is a large eruption of laughter and applause from every person in that audience, except for one woman sitting second row, on the right side, with her boyfriend who is laughing but also shooting her a look you find hard to interpret.

In that moment, you stop hearing the laughter and focus in on the one person who seems to think your joke is terrible. You wonder what her problem is. Then you wonder what your problem is. Perhaps you let this get into your head to the extent that you stumble on the next joke. Perhaps you decide to call her out.

This is when one must remember the importance of “stillness”.

What is stillness in the context of performing standup comedy?

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Dear Incredibly Cute Animals on Social Media

Let me start by saying I’m a huge fan. There is no way I’m staying up from 3–5 a.m. every night watching your videos for my health. In fact, my doctor has been pretty adamant that I need to stop. But it’s 2026, and it is no longer enough to simply be an animal on social media.

If I am to continue sacrificing the sleepiest hours of the best years of my life, I’m going to need you all to put in some real effort. Staring at your “spare hooman” and then swatting at him is no longer sufficient. There are cats out there dressed as baby chicks riding on their owner’s shoulders in Paris. The bar has been set. All I ask is that you put as much effort into your job as I would put into mine were I not showing up too exhausted to be productive.

Dear The “Watch Credits” Option on Disney Plus

Imagine this: I am sitting on my couch basking in the afterglow of a cinematic treasure like The Jungle Book, or Avengers: Age of Ultron, or The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again. The film’s score swells triumphantly as I reminisce on the romance, adventure, and laughs we had along the way.

Suddenly, a small box with the phrase “Watch Credits” pops up and I now have ten seconds to find my remote control before 102 Dalmatians begins playing at a louder volume than any other offering on your service. And if I do want to navigate back to the movie I had been watching before, say, to see if there’s a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson recruits The Apple Dumpling Gang into the Avengers, I have to scroll from all the way from the beginning of the movie.

Then, when I do reach the end, the “Watch Credits” option derails everything all over again.

Dear Jared Leto

Please forgive the informal salutation, which I know should read “Dear Mr. Jared Leto.” But I feel, having enjoyed your work for multiple decades, as if I have gotten to know you personally. My favorite role of yours was your Academy Award-winning turn as Rayon in The Dallas Buyers Club.

And my least favorite by far was your recent appearance in this panic dream I just woke up from. You were dressed as The Joker, and for some reason you filled in as my company’s Human Resources director, telling me that 38 years is far too old to leave my current job and search for a new one. When you began laughing maniacally, it made the act of chaining me to my desk feel personal. In future I ask that you stay in your own head and out of mine.

Dear Brain

We both know how grateful I am for the work you do. You know it because you had the thought, and I know it because you put the thought into my head. That being said, I’ve identified a few areas for improvement.

Specifically, please cease replaying the “spilled apple juice” incident from my senior year of high school. I understand that the combination of khaki pants, adolescent awkwardness, and the presence of my crush made it memorable, but I would very much prefer that it not be revisited during inopportune times: when I’m in the shower, or when I’m trying to sleep, or when I’m leaving my therapist’s office and finally feeling free of free-floating shame and anxiety.

Speaking of memory, I find it confusing that you’re able to bring up that moment without being asked, and yet you require thirty minutes to recall the name of the street I grew up on so I can recover the password to my bank account. I would appreciate it if you could prioritize accordingly.

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“I’m not borrowing money from my parents, I’m borrowing money from my inheritance.”

Take the collection of 9,000 Beanie Babies I bought when there was a bear market, dump them in the city landfill, and move into the storage unit I’ve been keeping them in.

Finally launch that crime scene-to-blood bank sales operation I talked about when I was 17 and getting drunk with my friends every weekend.

Aggressively trading in secondary-market pharmaceutical options. Or as the cops call it, “selling meth behind the 7-11.”

Gain 1000 pounds, make it physically impossible for my landlord to evict me.

Buying one of those Nirvana tees from Target, washing it fifty times, and selling it as “concert-worn vintage” to my kid’s dumbest, richest friend.

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Discover that my real father was a billionaire who left me in the care of the parents who raised me, in the hopes I would turn out “normal.”

Ride cross-country in a boxcar, living on delicious pies left on windowsills by kindhearted farmers’ wives.

Get rich… playing Minecraft on Twitch? That can’t be right, can it? That can’t be what the kids are really doing.

Sell one of every organ that comes in pairs on the black market, invest in medical companies that are working to grow new kidneys, lungs, and eyes in a lab.

Hang out in the dumpsters behind a nuclear waste storage facility. If I get bitten by enough radioactive spiders I should probably turn into a spiderman.

The Mona Lisa’s pretty valuable, so paint a bunch of those and sell them.

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Most comedians enter the stage beset by three devils:

The devil of pressure to succeed: You are paid to get the audience to laugh.

The devil of control: To give over the show to the audience is to allow chaos is to give a platform to failure.

The devil of ego: To succeed onstage is to prove oneself.

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Once upon a time in the long-ago year 2006, when the world was green - or at least, a less disturbing shade of crazy – I lived in a city on the sea called New York. Nowadays, every square inch of New York is priced too high for people to live in, but back in those days people willing to pay $2500 for a 248-square foot studio apartment hadn’t colonized every inch of the city yet.

And so, I lived in a magical neighborhood in the middle of the borough of Queens, which these people pretended not to know even existed unless they were in a neighborhood a short subway ride from Manhattan.

It was in this magical land we call Queens that I lived in an enormous two-bedroom apartment that was rent-stabilized. I had grown up in that apartment. When I turned 21, I informed my parents that it was time for them to spread their wings and leave the nest. They bought a house out by the Long Island border, and I held on to what remains the greatest deal in the history of New York City rent.

The neighborhood was named Venice Gardens after the Very Nice Real Estate Corporation which developed the area in the early 1920s, transforming vast tracts of unattractive farmland and foul-smelling forest into city block after city block of beautiful squat brick buildings.

The buildings that lined the streets, while old and maintained to the varied degrees that their owners felt it necessary to invest money, were all built in a time when architects took a degree of pride in making even the humblest structure attractive.

Saturn’s Court, the courtyard building across the street, built in the 1920s, featured ornate window frontage and turrets perched on the corner rooftops, as if to say, “Yes, this building has no elevators, and yes the steam radiators will make your apartment in the winter time (a period defined as October through May) as hot and steamy and impossible to live in as the Darien Gap. But it is still your castle.”

My building, having been built in the 1930s right before World War II, had a far less ornate massing, but nevertheless it did have elevators. And like every apartment in Venice Gardens, it had giant twelve-foot ceilings, a sunken living room, and large windows that captured the afternoon sunlight. The Long Island Railroad was three blocks away, and on a quiet night you could hear the train in the distance speeding down the track, blowing its lonesome horn.

Even in the year 2006 most nights were quiet, this being the year before the opening of the tropical-themed nightclub on Queens Boulevard and the weekend drunken domestic disputes that subsequently played out up and down the street every weekend.

I was the building’s eccentric. In the 1980s, when I was a child, the neighborhood teemed with eccentrics. There was the insane old woman whom we’ll call “Harris” at one end of the hall, who kept watch on the floor’s comings and goings through her peephole. One February when I was young, my sister and I were tasked with throwing away the last Christmas tree our parents ever bought.

It had transformed from a festive decoration to a dead brown firetrap that the family had agreed, without speaking a word to each other, to never look at or acknowledge. If anyone had wanted to know who the last family in the building to toss our tree was, it would have been easy to do the detective work. We left a trail of dead pine needles from our door, to the elevator, out the back door, to the trash area.

The next day, I came home from pretending to go to school to find a crazy letter, in a shaky hand, threatening to murder our entire family for the crime of leaving a trail of pine needles down the hall. It was signed “The Management”, an attempt to pin a murder threat on our building’s landlord.

Harris was our number one suspect partly because everyone else on our floor worked for a living, and mostly because she had been put into an institution for a year for attempting to throw her mother out of her apartment window.

But that was the old version of the United States, when an eccentric could work even part-time and make the rent and live a comfortable life in a major city. In New York, in Los Angeles, in Austin, we’re living on the cultural and financial inheritance of a previous generation.

By 2006, I was the “character” of the building, which by this point had become the global center of Bukharian Jewish life. The Bukharians are a sect of Judaism that fled Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic where, judging by my neighbors, the cultural heritage involved staring into the middle distance and also not talking to strangers.

My neighborhood, Venice Gardens, was home to every wave of immigrants that hit America’s rocky shores, and by the early 2000s had become the refuge for a generation of Bukharian Jews escaping oppression. By 2006 it had the highest concentration in the world, and every apartment in my building that wasn’t occupied by fellow rent control survivors was taken by an Uzbeki family.

They were fantastic neighbors. Nothing but quiet neighbors who followed the rules in a way that only people who do not want to be forcibly emigrated to the land of their birth will be. I would mostly see them in the halls bringing covered dishes to each other, and small talk was limited to the occasional elevator conversation about the weather.

One day, an old man was complaining about how cold new York gets in February, and I said, “Doesn’t it get colder than this where you’re from?”

And he replied, “Why do you think I moved here?”

They also carried just enough organized crime in their numbers that the streets, sleepy and suburban anyway, somehow even safer from petty crime. Although not from a Chinese burglary ring, which is another only-in-Queens story.

As I said, I had become the eccentric character in the building. Due to my lifestyle as a comedian, my neighbors would see me coming and going at all hours, falling down drunk sometimes day or night. I’d be coming in with different women, different friends, different roommates moving in and out at irregular intervals. Doing my grocery shopping at 2pm. Calling the locksmith in the middle of the night.

From their point of view, I was the guy you meet, or even avoid, in the halls, and ask your friends, your neighbors, and your group chat, “Who is that guy and how does he support himself?”

Then one day, one of my neighbors, a middle-aged Uzbeki lady, casually mentioned during elevator chit-chat that she had seen me on television. After that, the building’s attitude towards me became relaxed. Neighbors whose faces had been as cold and stoic as the edifice of Lenin’s tomb became marginally warmer, even hinting at notes of friendliness. Conversation became less forced. And I realized that I’d provided them with the one thing human beings desire about each other and rarely get: An explanation for the way they behave.

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These Film School Graduates Know Everything About Movies Except How to Make One

Divorced Guy Living in a $50,000 Condo in Tampa Explains the Secret to Getting Rich

This Middle-Aged Virgin Sure Knows His Jazz!

We Are Parents Which Makes Us Bigger Medical Experts Than Some Dumb Doctor

Political “Centrist” Whose Politics Are to the Right of Donald Trump When it Comes to Women’s Rights and to the Left of Tommy Chong When It Comes to Drugs

Tech Guy Praying for the Singularity to Bring His Hair Back

Baseball Stats Expert Who Seems to Hate the Actual Game

Music Expert Who Knows Everything About Bob Dylan and Nothing About His Own Kids

Real-Life Married Couple Whose Bickering Makes Everyone Uncomfortable

Hustle Culture Guy Who is Definitely Going to Prison Next Year

The True Crime Podcast Where the Host Sure Knows a Lot About How to Get Away with Murdering One’s Spouse

Dream 1
I have the ability to fly just by spreading my arms and jumping. I get into the upper atmosphere, and am immediately approached by a Delta flight attendant who reminds me that I paid for a coach seat. She then straps a standard airplane seat to my back, the weight of which causes me to plummet screaming to the ground. I land at LaGuardia airport and am forced to spend all eternity at Baggage Claim watching an endless parade of identical black suitcases, none of which are mine.

Dream 2
I am nine years old and am sitting in a Broadway theater for the musical Cats. Only the Playbill says “Cows”. The actors are in the aisles squirting milk from their udders on an ecstatic audience. I run into the theater next door, where Cats is playing. The Cats are in the aisles, terrifying an unsuspecting audience. They smell the milk on me and begin licking me to death with their giant sandpaper tongues. The last thing I see before I wake is Magical Mr. Mistoffelees’ cold dead eyes staring through me.

Dream 3
The year is 0000 AD, in Bethlehem. I have snagged the last room available at the only inn in town, much to the consternation of a pregnant lady and her husband in line behind me. I pay with my last check, which bounces when I absent-mindedly date it 0001 BC. I find myself lying in a bed of straw in the barn out back with three disappointed men looking down at me.

Dream 4
It’s my first day working for a New York City public high school. I’ve been hired to teach the Gifted and Talented Driver’s Ed class. I’m behind the wheel of a car, with my principal in the passenger seat explaining what the course entails. We get to the intersection of 48^th Street and 7^th Ave., and I try to stop the car but the brakes don’t work. The principal tells me, “We don’t believe in forcing students to stop.” I scream that we’re about to run through a red light. He smiles condescendingly and says, “We don’t see any difference between the lights.”

Dream 5
I’m reading a book when I suddenly remember that I have a pet cat, a British Shorthair, that I haven’t fed for months. I search frantically all over my apartment in terrible, guilt-inducing fear that it’s dead. I finally search the bedroom, where I find a set of papers suing me for divorce on grounds of neglect. When I get to court, I see the judge is also a British Shorthair. The jury is composed entirely of British Shorthairs. My lawyer tells me not to worry. The trial ends when someone hears a bag of treats being opened three rooms down and the courtroom empties.

Dream 6
I watch the news on TV. Devils and madmen make laws, thugs enforce them. Everyone is confused and angry. I wake up in relief—but when I turn on the TV, I see the same news. A pelican with a man’s face appears at my window. I realize I’m still dreaming. I try to wake up again, but I can’t tell if I have.

Dream 7
The year is 1935 and I’m an editor for Simon & Schuster. I’m at the White House for a dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein as part of a media tour promoting Stein’s next book, 30 Days to Catch a Man. Things go well until Stein turns to me and asks my thoughts on the use of semicolons. “Well, Gertie,” I reply, “I don’t know how you do it in Paris, but here in the U.S. we get our best writing from a full colon. Mine certainly works overtime.” Stein says, “Your output does have an excrementary quality.” I thank her for what sounds like a compliment. Mrs. Roosevelt coughs in embarrassment.

Dream 8
I am working at a call center job where I hold a phone to my ear and listen to an eternal monster from a dark dimension growl wordless noises. When it stops, I then ask, “And on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is amazing and 10 is the best, how would you rate your wireless carrier service?” I ask my supervisor, a faceless demon named Redd, if I can use the bathroom. He fires me – through a window into a featureless void where I am condemned to spend the next 20,000 years navigating New York State’s unemployment system.

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It started, however, with my 30^th anniversary of beginning standup comedy, a momentous occasion by any standard. I’d intended to do something to mark it, and my plans shrank from “shows on both coasts” to “maybe a show in LA” to “a Substack post about it” to “posting some pictures on Instagram.”

That’s fine. I’m busy. I’ll do something for my 31^st anniversary instead. But for right now, I would like to share one of my favorite memories from doing standup comedy.

The 50^th birthday party show for a Quaker life coach in his living room

I think he found my blog by literally Googling “standup comedian”, and hired me for $125 to come to his apartment near Union Square. I lived in Queens, so while he apologized it couldn’t be more, it was a great deal for me – getting paid that much to do 15 minutes and be home in bed by midnight is always the best deal as far as I’m concerned.

The place was packed and the audience was lovely. I followed his son’s rock band, which included the son of the actor Tim Robbins, who I was warned might be there. He was. The group was great for a group of teenage boys and really who cares, the night was a celebration. There was a 15-minute break while the band broke down.

Here are two important facts to help you understand what came next:

1. Tim Robbins, being a great and successful actor, found a seat in a chair in a spotlight behind the stage, where he could be seen by all. This is part of a skill set all great and successful actors possess – knowing when a camera is pointed at them, and knowing exactly how to be in the public view in every room they enter.

2. Nobody but me, the host, and his wife, knew that there was going to be a standup comedian going on after the band. As far as everyone was concerned, the band was the evening’s entertainment.

So after the break, while the crowd is drinking and talking, our host jumps onstage and announces me, the comedian. Everybody stops and pays attention, where they are standing or sitting. The actor, Tim Robbins, the most famous person in that room, is now trapped directly behind me, in a chair, under a spotlight.

Meaning that he and I are both now trapped in a situation where everybody knows the guy who is not onstage performing and watching him, while they are also very respectfully watching the guy who is onstage trying to entertain them.

Before I continue, let me say this: I am a full-on Tim Robbins fan. I saw The Shawshank Redemption in the theater and liked it so much that I saw it again the next day. I watched Jacob’s Ladder on VHS with my dad, and it blew my mind so wide open that when I was visiting LA to do some shows before I moved here, I canceled a gig I’d been very much looking forward to so that I could go see it at one of this city’s revival houses.

I own the Criterion 4k of Bull Durham. I still occasionally quote the movie Bob Roberts in conversation with my mom, and when I went to the 2000 Ralph Nader election rally at Madison Square Garden, and Tim Robbins came out as Bob Roberts, I cheered.

And so here I am onstage, sharing focus with Tim Robbins. A part of me said, “Don’t mention it, just do your set and go.” Because it was a great crowd. I love a house party show, because everyone is just drunk enough to be mellow but nobody’s drunk enough to heckle in a serious way. Everyone likes each other there. Everyone is on the same wavelength. It’s a recipe for a kill set every time.

And I was doing so well that I felt emboldened to tease Tim Robbins just a bit. My concern was that it would go badly, because this guy was a friend to a lot of people in the room, but my instinct was actually right. Something was weird in the room, and I acknowledged it.

I couldn’t see Tim Robbins. But there was a guy up front, right in my eyeline, and every time I made a remark about him, the guy would glance over, see something positive, and start laughing. So I knew That Robbins was either enjoying it, or making a show of enjoying it understanding that he was the real star of my show.

I finished my set, and the show was over and the party was in full swing. I stood in the kitchen, and thought about approaching Tim Robbins, just to let him know I was a fan and I hoped there were no hard feelings. But he was being mobbed – it looked like he was being congratulated for my set.

Sometimes you’re a performer at a party and you’re encouraged to hang out and meet people. Other times you get the energy that it would be preferred if you took your money and left. This was one of those situations. It didn’t matter to me. Because my motto in standup comedy is always, “Any time I get paid, it’s a great show.”

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Since you will bomb, you might as well enjoy it.

When you bomb, you have two choices. The first is to fight the audience, which can be like a knight going into battle with a dragon that has a thousand heads. The knight can cut off one or even a dozen heads, but he will be left is a very angry dragon that hates you more than ever. And that dragon will fight you with its most potent weapon:

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Thank you for reporting the mice in your apartment. In response I’ve assessed a $25 pet rent to be added to your ledger.

Starting on the first, rent payments must be direct deposited into my DraftKings account.

If the IRS calls, I’ve been writing off your apartment as an office for my Amway distributorship so just be cool.

As part of our upgrade of the building’s plumbing, all toilets will now be “pay as you go”.

Good news! As a new security measure to prevent home robberies we will institute a rent increase effective immediately, cutting down on the number of valuables that you can buy to attract burglars.

Are you the owner of the blue 2024 Toyota Corolla in spot 19, and can I borrow your car to run some errands? And also, I’m already at Target if you need anything,

Just a reminder that it’s your turn to host Thanksgiving dinner this year.

As a heads up, the painter will be working in your apartment next Thursday. Just so you can prepare, you should know he specializes in nudes.

This is a reminder that the meth processing lab is for ALL tenants, but you MUST make a reservation with Chico 24 hours in advance.

If you see a 23-foot boa constrictor, do not let the blue uniform or name tag “Handy” fool you; she is NOT part of the maintenance staff.

Several of your neighbors reported loud music and people coming in and out of your apartment last night, and I thought after your last all-night party we agreed that you would invite me to the next one.

It’s been three months of hard work, but we’ve finally finished ranking all residents on our 1-10 “hot or not” scale which is now available on the building’s tenant portal.

I can’t help noticing you haven’t followed me back on Pornhub.

I would like to introduce José both as your brand-new building manager and also as required under Megan’s Law.

Hit the like (heart) button.

Hi! I see you’re interested in joining the Church of the New Day Star. My name is Coyote, and this is my Sister-Partner Minora. Oh, sorry, you’re waiting for the booth next to us. Absolutely, J.P. Morgan Chase is the “safer” career option. But since you’re standing here, I’d ask you to consider whether devoting yourself to a holy prophet might be just as fulfilling as a career in banking.

Okay, I can tell by the tone in your voice that your professors at – what was your major? – at MBA school have indoctrinated you into believing that a life in service to an international merchant bank is going to lead to personal fulfillment.

But think about it for a moment. Let’s say that out of the thousands of applicants, you get picked for that internship. If things go well, you spend the next ten years working your way up to middle-management. If you’re lucky you might get to meet a Vice President at a lunch one day, but you’ll always be dozens of layers beneath the CEO.

On our mint farm, your boss will be the Prophet Josiah Provenance-of-Angels Kutnetzov (blessed be his loins), and he talks directly to God. Think about that. Do you want to be thirty-six layers under some CEO, or do you want to be second-in-line to God?

Okay, thank you for the follow-up question and to be fully transparent, the answer is no, you won’t actually start out second in line. You’ll have to work your way up like everybody else, planting and harvesting on the mint farm. But if you show some team spirit at the mandatory Sunday group confessions, do a little bit of networking, and really show us something spectacular at the New Moon orgies, you’ll see that in no time at all –

That’s right. “New Moon orgy.” We find it’s a great way to blow off some steam after working ten hour days planting and harvesting mint. That might sound like a lot, but look at it this way; if you take a corporate internship you’ll find yourself working fourteen hour days, sleeping under your desk if you get one, and taking home no pay.

We reduce that workload by four hours, and if you work really hard you’ll even get your own key to the toilet shack. If you join the Prophet Josiah (blessed be), you won’t have to worry about making enough to cover rent because you’ll be living in Barn Seven with eleven roommates you will come to know very well, on your very own bunk.

And when we say you get job security, we are not kidding. Our members wouldn’t quit if they could.

I can see you’re really eager to get back in line for the other booth. But let me just run down our list of benefits. We offer free meals, and our chef has a gift for working with mint. He makes everything from mint stew to mint fricassee.

As far as a health plan is concerned, we offer an HMO to rival any other – the Farm’s own in-house 24-hour access to our Doc. Which is his name, we’re not sure if he’s actually a licensed doctor. And Doc makes this brew from these mushrooms he cultivates that will make you forget you’re sick. In fact, we add it to a lot of our meals so we can forget we’re eating mint.

Excellent question, and I’m going to ignore what sounds like a hint of sarcasm to answer, no. We do not offer a 401k. We do invest the money we raise selling our new members’ belongings right back into the farm, buying work gloves, hand trowels, sun hats, cotton robes, and a 2026 Jeep Wrangler for the Prophet Josiah Provenance-of-Angels Kutzenzov (blessed be his loins) to tour and inspect the mint farm.

Also, members who stay with us for a full year receive a thousand shares in our New Star Tea Corporation. That’s right, we run New Star Tea.

Right, the one your Nana buys at CVS. Every bag is made with mint hand-cultivated by our members right here in Southern California, that’s why it tastes so good.

No need to be embarrassed, a lot of people don’t know we’re a publicly traded company. Mint tea is surprisingly big business.

Yes, I was just about to say, in addition to the shares, after the introductory farming year we place our members in corporate positions according to their strengths.

Well, thank you for your interest. I’ll just place your resume on this pile.

And if we’re interested we’ll send some people around to find you.

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Zhuangzi was one of the founding philosophers of Taoism in the 4^th century BCE, and is the closest thing to a comedy writer that early Eastern philosophy produced. His book, Zhuangzi, is a collection of stories, jokes, and philosophical dialogues that became one of Taoism’s central works. It features stories where wise men laugh at tragic circumstances as a way of demonstrating how arbitrary everything is.

The above quote is often attributed to Zhuangzi although there’s no written proof tying him to it. However, it illustrates the theme of this lesson quite nicely:

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Yesterday marked my thirtieth anniversary in standup comedy, a milestone that sometimes feels like a millstone.

I almost wrote a reflection on my thirty years, how I started, where I am now, what lessons I learned along the way. But I’m currently putting that energy into my weekly Philosophy of Modern Standup series that I expect to turn into a book.

This Friday, May 15th, I will be graduating from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, the number one film school in the world. Like the rest of my cohort, I will be emerging into the world trained for a business that is currently making headlines for being in a frightening state of flux.

I’m being warned that the work isn’t there, sometimes by well-meaning friends, sometimes by professionals who found the business changing while they were mid-career. Weirdly enough, I’m not scared.

I started standup after the collapse of the standup comedy boom. The people I started with were some of the smartest, funniest people I knew. As yesterday’s headliners clung to their spots in the city’s clubs, and the “road” became a tangle of bad-paying gigs, we found new places to perform in nontraditional venues.

And while none of us got paid $10,000 for a weekend in Boston, our audiences found us. My friends who were the most disciplined writers became successful award-winning writers. Those who were able to work out three times a week and watch what they ate became actors.

And we all did television.

I guess I’m saying I’m not afraid of carving my own path in the business. I’ve done it before. Although I will admit, I am preemptively exhausted.

USC held an open call for SCA commencement speakers among the graduating class. What follows is my submission. It did not get chosen.

Good evening, my fellow Trojans. I’m Liam. Since I don’t officially enter the entertainment business until the very second this commencement ceremony ends, I can, for one last time, be fully, completely, and openly honest about my age. I am 25. Sorry, that’s my entertainment business age. I’m 49. In three months I’ll be 50. I am probably older than most of the fathers in attendance.

My brief for this speech is to inspire. So if at some point you get bored, just remember that in the Trojan football program’s long and storied history of greatness, Sam Darnold was the first starting quarterback out of USC to win the Super Bowl. It’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about, but it’s inspirational.

When I was younger than you, I got work as a standup comedian and dropped out of college after my first semester. And I will tell you, now that you’re all graduates and I can no longer be a terrible role model — I don’t regret it. While my peers back home in Queens, New York, were beginning their lives and careers, I was embarking on an adventure.

I had my first writing job, for a website called Joke-of-the-Day.com, at 24. I did my first TV spot at 25 — when that was my real age. I worked dead-end jobs and met people from all different backgrounds. I made friends with poets and musicians, filmmakers and rock club bookers, journalists and the editorial staff of The Onion.

I produced my first film fifteen years ago on a microbudget, with the help of all those same friends. I say this not to brag, but because it’s my experience.

They say that with advanced age comes advanced wisdom. I’ve felt old every day I’ve been surrounded by 20-year-olds, but I must not be as advanced in age as I feel, because I only have one piece of truly earned wisdom: Make your life an adventure.

When you leave this oasis and are thrown into what is, with increasing absurdity, called “the real world,” pressure will come from every direction. Your parents will want to know what you’re doing with your expensive degree. Your peers will announce amazing careers. Some of them will even be telling the truth.

When my friends were making big moves, I worked my way through Europe. When they scored impressive jobs, I produced and starred in a film that toured big fancy film festivals. And now, at the end of the day, I am graduating from USC, and we are all on LinkedIn looking for work.

The work I’ve done, the career I built, the times I’ve suffered and prospered — all of it has informed my work and enriched my life. The world you are graduating into is confusing, scary, and infuriating to a historical degree. But that’s the world. Your life is what you make of it. At your age I thought that was a corny cliché. Now I know it’s a corny cliché with a lot of truth behind it.

Thirty years ago, I was a GED recipient with a semester’s worth of college. I am now a graduate of what is objectively the greatest film school in the world. What comes next — for me, for you, for the world — is not entirely for us to say. I can only tell you that if you put one foot in front of the other and say yes to adventure regardless of reward, you will profit a thousandfold.

Thank you. God bless, go Trojans, and find me on LinkedIn.

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Lesson 5: Have fun. It is the only thing you can control.

The following lesson can be boiled down into this one simple paragraph:

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For the tourists, there is no better show in New York City than a big budget Broadway musical. But for native New Yorkers of my generation, nothing beats good old street theater. A crazy person engaging an angry person at the wrong time can provide upwards of ten minutes of entertainment.

For those ten minutes, New Yorkers will stop what they’re doing to enjoy the spectacle of two ostensible adults screaming at each other. After that, you’ll see the crowd peel away as they realize that nobody’s going to actually fight anybody, and if there is a fight they don’t want to be stuck talking to the cops.

There are other classics of the form, of course. There’s “Messy Drunk Girl Breaking Up with Her Boyfriend at Three in the Morning at the Top of Her Lungs”, which enjoyed nightly repeat performances on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side for a decade in the early 2000s. Truly a crowd pleaser, with a Rocky Horror audience participation aspect as people who live above the lucky couple scream at them to shut up, followed by the throwing of eggs at the players.

I once had the pleasure of witnessing a production of “This Boy Who is Clearly an NYU Student Thinks He Can Fight These Three Bouncers Outside This Bar.” It was a cold winter night, and I was the only audience member. The bouncers enjoyed the show as much as I did, and they allowed the kid to keep rushing at them for a while and letting his punches bounce off of them.

Eventually, he rushed at one who shoved him back as hard as he could, throwing the guy into one of those half phone booths the city used to have. The kid then stood up, and whining so loudly that it may have been heard all the way back at his home in Westbury, Long Island, “YOU PUSHED ME! THAT HURT!” I laughed harder in that moment than I have at any George S. Kaufman comedy.

But the absolute classic of New York street theater, the show any person must catch once when they are in town, remains “Idiot Playing Three Card Monte”. When I was a high school dropout, my burnout friend Ricardo (not his real name) starred in a production, but with a twist. The Monte dealer allowed him to win the first round, and then Ricardo, thinking he was smart, took the money and walked. He was followed by one of the dealer’s friends and mugged a block away.

Which brings me to one of the greatest ongoing productions of street theater in New York City: “The Sidewalk Press Conference”.

2. His Coworkers Call Him: MEGA-MEANIE

This was the headline in the New York Daily News, and the story was that a NYC Hospitals worker was the “designated buyer” for an office lottery pool, for the Mega Millions jackpot. He had a ticket that came in second place - winning a grand total of $175,000. His contention was that this was a ticket that he purchased individually, not in the office pool, and therefore he had no obligation to share any of the money with anyone. And so his coworkers did the rational, adult thing; they sued him.

This would ensure that one way or another, all the money will end up in the right hands - the lawyers’.

Keep in mind that after taxes, the man’s winnings came out to $107,000. That has not been enough to retire on since FDR was President. So win or lose, this guy was going to have to keep working with these people.1

One fine day, I was taking a break from my at the call center. It was interesting work, because it was part of an ongoing project to see how rude people across America could be to a stranger on the phone before hanging up on them.

I mean, that wasn’t literally the job. I was calling people up and seeing if they would answer survey questions. But it amounted to the same thing.

My walk took me by the Empire State Building where I saw a cluster of news reporters in front of the McDonald’s across the street. Everybody was there, the Channel 9 Eyewitless News van, microphones from 1010 WINS, NY1, CBS, Channel 5, all in a rack in front of two men in suits.

Here is a ranking of public press conferences, as sorted by location:

THE BEST: In front of the courthouse.
Usually you’re going to see a criminal and his lawyer, neither of whom is innocent, tell bald face lies to a press corp who know the score.

USUALLY PRETTY GOOD: In front of the police precinct.
Sometimes you’ve got the upper brass defending a bad cop, sometimes it’s announcing a “who cares” community initiative.

SOMETIMES GOOD: In front of City Hall.
These can be good for seeing the Mayor, or occasionally a celebrity receiving a commendation.

BEATS GOING BACK TO WORK, BARELY: In front of the McDonald’s across the street from the Empire State Building.

One of the men in a suit begins to speak; he’s a lawyer for the Mega-Meanie. As I stand, straining to hear him, my mind wanders trying to figure out exactly why they chose this spot for their press conference. I guess they wanted the Empire State Building for their background? Which would be an extremely cool visual, only everyone’s standing on ground level, so all you really saw was the majestic and soaring Houlihan’s on the first floor.

Inspiring stuff, I grant you, but not exactly a lawyerly concern. Personally, I like to hold all my press conferences in front of Señor Swanky’s, but that’s me.

Anyway, as the first lawyer speaks, the second, on cue, unrolls a big Xerox copy of the lottery tickets Mega Meanie had bought for his coworkers. It was their habit of copying the tickets he bought, and having all the people in the pool sign it. To avoid the possibility of hard feelings and messy lawsuits.

Then the reporters started asking questions and I realized - I’ve seen press conferences on TV many times, and I never thought I’d get to ask a question. Yet, here I was on the street, a part of the scrum, and I could not let this moment go by.

The problem was, the only question I really had for the attorneys was - “Did you guys actually rehearse that moment when the stripe suit guy unrolled the huge Xerox? Also, how did you decide who got to speak? Coin toss?”

Alas, at that particular point, I had not read about the case. My M.O. when reading the Daily News in those days was to read every section - Sports, the comics, the Op-Ed - except for the news, which was pretty useless as a focal point for gathering information. And I know what you’re thinking - “Liam, clearly any paper that treats an office lottery fight as front page news clearly is the only news source you’ll ever need.”

But I raised my hand and the man called on me, and the entire story of what was going through his mind was written in the passing emotions on his face. First, I watched him register that I was not holding a microphone, a notepad, a tape recorder, or any other tool of the journalistic trade.

Then I watched as he took in my outfit, appropriate more for a bathing-optional environment like a call center than a professional journalist hoping to appear on television. By this point, he had clearly passed into resignation, as the journalists all turned to look at me, excited, as I opened my mouth to ask:

“But what about the children?”

He then chuckled and continued the press conference, and I turned and walked off in search of the next distraction.

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One of the underrated benefits of aging in America is that there comes a time when nobody wants your attention but pharmaceutical companies and term life insurance programs.

If you’re wondering if you’ve reached that point, here are some signs I’ve recently noted that I’m not the person anyone is looking for anymore.

• Tubi will stop a commercial three seconds in, say “Not this guy,” and skip back to the episode of Columbo I was watching.

• I tried to sign up for a new social media platform, and a window popped up that said “No thanks!” before redirecting me to Facebook.

• The security guard at Macy’s stops me at the door and frogmarches me to the middle-aged guys polo shirt-and-khakis section.

• I rate movies and TV shows based on how many times I roll my eyes over what young people think real problems are.

• Ticketmaster now lists concerts by how much time I’ll have to spend standing on my feet.

• I told the Porsche salesman I was thinking about buying; he offered me a test drive and dropped me off at a Toyota dealership.

• I tried creating a dating profile on Feeld. It asked me for who.

• Planet Fitness offered me a membership tier where, for an extra ten dollars a month, they’ll back me up when I stay home and lie about having gone.

• I asked a hotel concierge for advice on where to go for a good time, and he suggested straight to bed.

• The young man handing out nightclub flyers downtown ran three full city blocks before giving up and letting me take one.

• LinkedIn announced a time-saving feature for recruiters where it automatically deletes my resume for them.

• I walked into Departamento and asked a salesman where to find clothes that would upgrade my wardrobe, and he gave me directions to J.C. Pennys.

• I rate new music based on how many songs I get into an album before putting on The Very Best of Prince.

• The guy who runs the Kiss Cam at the baseball game told me to move so he can film the attractive siblings behind me.

• Cult members recruiting on the street ask if I have a younger, slightly-more-impressionable sibling at home.

The kind of attention I really appreciate comes in the form of people reading what I write, so thank you for supporting this Substack. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can do so below for free. New posts (almost) every Monday and Thursday. This Thursday, I’ll take a look at every New Yorker’s favorite form of live entertainment.

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Lesson 4: Study every comedian.
The ones you like will be your guides.
The ones you hate will be your best teachers.

To be a great author is to read every book. To be a great artist is to go to museums and take in every painting, sculpture, and engraving. To be a great poet is to be able to quote poems written by those who came before you.

And so, too, if you wish to be a great standup comedian you must do this:

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Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague

- Joan Baez, Diamonds & Rust

In a week-and-a-half, on Mother’s Day, I will celebrate my thirtieth anniversary of doing standup comedy. Thirty years is a long time to do anything consistently, and at the end of that week I am graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. The program is so notoriously rigorous that it’s been unironically compared, in terms of workload, to medical school. I have been too tired to plan anything special beyond a Substack post commemorating the occasion.

Last year I recorded my debut solo special, West Coasting, which was released this year. It was a mix of bits that I wrote after moving to Los Angeles almost a decade ago, and I’m proud of it. You can rent or buy it here: writeliam.com.

I’ve been getting serious about my standup comedy again, consistently writing new material and getting onstage. This is not healthy behavior – I have a screenplay to finish writing and a short film to begin prepping, and standup comedy is one of my creative stalling tactics. Yes, I am a productive procrastinator, the kind that other people hate. Blame my ADHD and the fact that I come from a family with an insane work ethic.

I’ve been getting serious about my standup comedy again... This is not healthy behavior

My great-grandfather supported his family and kept his tailor shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, open during the Great Depression by also working a full shift at a clothing factory a mile away. Every day his wife, my great-grandmother, would take tailoring orders, lay out the clothes, and every night Benny would get home from the factory and do the tailoring all night. I can’t imagine he did the world’s greatest job sewing and stitching, but it was the Great Depression. People weren’t wearing suits to too many job interviews.

My other set of great-grandparents on that side of the family ran a luncheonette in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. They were hardworking immigrants, and after the cops busted up their slot machines they could never forgive Mayor LaGuardia. My grandfather used to babysit Buddy Hackett.

When I was a hip young comedian, I would sometimes walk into a store in Billysburg, wondering what my ancestors would have thought of charging ten dollars for a bottle of kombucha. Or I would stumble to the L train, drunk, at 2 a.m., after a night of standup comedy and partying. I would walk past the spot on Bedford Avenue where their luncheonette once stood and wonder if they could possibly have been proud of me.

So when I work on something that feels as trivial as a new joke, I work hard. Part of my process for generating new material involves going through all my old archival materials. I parse ancient Word files, stream-of-consciousness blog entries, and handwritten notebooks, trying to find old ideas and jokes and see if I can rewrite them for today.

When I look back at the Liam McEneaney of the first decade of the 2000s, I marvel at what a good joke writer he was. This is not giving myself too much credit; I was such an unhappy, angry alcoholic at the time that writing standup comedy was literally my only escape from that headspace. As a result, I had a writing discipline like no other and I would tackle the problem of setup/punchline like my life depended on it.

My great-grandparents worked through the Great Depression. I do this.

Maybe it did. I used to call it my version of writing crossword puzzles, because it was a pleasure to create the puzzle of writing the setup, and then solve it by figuring out the best possible punchline or punchlines. I’ve written about this on this Substack before so I won’t go into it here, but this compulsion eventually got me out of a destructive work environment.

The jokes are great, but the voice they are written in is not one I would recognize. I was writing my standup to escape myself, as I said, and so while they are written from the point of view of someone who is snarky, observational, kind of angry, they also have a generic quality.

Standup comedy is, when done well, such a personal expression of the comedian that one should be able to hear the voice of the performer while they’re reading their words on the page. I was working so hard to disconnect myself from who I was, my standup was neutral, generic. Funny but it could have been written by anyone.

Which is ironic, because the performers I would have told you I was patterning myself after at the time would have been Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, two guys who figured out how to take their natural personae and turn them into onstage characters. While Bob was notoriously guarded, he deliberately took his true self and hid him behind veils of myth and poetry.

I used to call joke writing my version of writing crossword puzzles

Bruce took the young man he was from the working class suburb Freehold, New Jersey, and built a larger-than-life blue collar mythos around himself. While neither man was transparent, once you knew where to look you could see how nakedly autobiographical their best work was. Whereas I hid myself behind a solid wall of bullshit and denial and punchlines.

What follows, then, is a set of jokes I wrote around 2006 I think, and I have been tempted to try them onstage. And maybe I will figure out a way to integrate them into who I am and what I do twenty years later. But more likely, I think I’ll just enjoy these as a moment frozen in amber, an artifact of who I was. Not that you would know who he was from what you’re about to read below.

I was in K-Mart last Christmas, and I saw the worst gift idea - four salamis in a gift box for ten dollars.

What kind of friend are you giving this to?

“I drew your name in the office Secret Santa. Here’s to another year of no eye contact. I found it while shopping for extension cords.”

Those gift foods are never for eating. It’s like you’re saying, “Hey, imagine what it would be like if you had food you could eat.”

Because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to eat gift meat, but it always tastes like it came from rubbery dehydrated cows,

And why give fruit baskets? “Here’s twenty pounds of fruit - enjoy the gift of uncontrollable shitting. When you spend three days on the toilet, I want you to think of me.”

Fruit baskets are the only present that goes rotten after two days. Except for the pears, which will stay nice and hard and unripe until the Judgment Day.

It’s like guest soaps - those seashell-shaped nice-smelling soaps that you’re afraid to ever use.

They’re called guest soaps, but no one actually wants their guests to use them.

They’re actually “guessed” soaps, as in, “We guessed you would find the soap you’re supposed to use on the sink.”

If you want to buy your friend a ton of food he can’t eat, just go balls-out and go to Costco and buy him a 40-pound tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Which is the greatest name for a food ever, because that thing’s been on the market for 25 years, and I can’t believe that guy still can’t believe it’s not butter.

I imagine him in his factory, tasting spreads: “Mmmm, okay, that’s gotta be - whaaaat? Are you kidding me? NOT BUTTER????? Okay, how about this - this is definitely - NO WAY! THAT’S NOT BUTTER EITHER! I mean, here I am in the factory I own where we make non-butter spreads all day long, and none of this stuff is butter!!!!”

He should make other foods that he can’t believe what they aren’t. Like, he could make Budweiser, but the label would say, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Horse Urine.”

For more fresh takes on classic standup topics like gift foods, trips down memory lane, and pop culture takes you can subscribe for free right here. Next week I’ll be looking at a secret all-star album recorded by a major band of the 1980s before they hit it big.

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