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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Becoming emotionally healthy begins with forgiving the mistakes of others. To board with Group 1 is to forgive the ticket agent for accidentally printing “Group 4” on my boarding pass

I am responsible for my own happiness, and refuse to allow others to limit it. My state’s legal drinking limit doesn’t apply if I’m 10,000 miles above it.

Failure to plan is a plan to fail. The failure to plan this family vacation belongs to everyone on this plane. Therefore, we will all rearrange our seats so my family can sit together.

Full spiritual freedom comes only with the removal of physical constraints. Which is why I can’t put my shoes or socks back on until the plane lands.

Physical space is a construct of the mind. If I truly believe I can fit a full-size suitcase in the overhead compartment, I have already made it true.

Selfishness imprisons the spirit when it monopolizes pleasure. To wear headphones or earbuds is to deny other passengers the pleasure of the music I’m listening to.

The way other people see me does not define my true worth. If the flight attendant keeps warning me not to seat myself in first class, that does not mean I am not a first-class person.

The universe delivers emotional support through unexpected vessels. If I don’t have papers for my elderly incontinent chihuahua who has a tendency to bite, that doesn’t make her emotional support less valid than a “trained” animal’s.

Breathing through stress brings peace to the body and mind. Disabling the smoke alarm so I can have a cigarette in the restroom is an act of self-care.

Spontaneity is the essence of keeping the heart young. Grabbing the plane’s intercom and putting on a show is my gift to the flight.

Stillness is the garden, relaxation is the seed. Keeping my seat fully reclined from wheels up to wheels down allows that garden to flourish.

Today, in this moment, I own my own physicality. To shove people aside as soon as the plane lands so I can be first to grab my overhead luggage is a way of claiming my space.

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Lesson 3: If you want standup to be your job, you must treat it like a job.

Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “We are three lessons in and I haven’t learned how to write a joke, deliver a joke, get booked, or do crowd work. When do we get to the meat of the matter?”

The answer is:

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These are the final two in a series of three memos.

MEMO #2 TO: The Neighbor Whose Wifi Signal I’ve Been Stealing – I Mean, “Sharing”

RE: Constant Service Outages

Hey “Linksys Underscore AP Underscore 77.” What’s going on here? As a comedian and writer who works from his apartment, the bulk of my day is spent e-mailing people who could potentially hire me, then checking my Fantasy Baseball team, then my MySpace page to see if any young attractive musicians want me to come to their show at Union Pool, and then my blog’s statcounter to see who’s been Googling me.

Between that and all the music I liberate from their rightful owners through the Pirate Bay, your Internet connection is one of the most important tools of my trade. Perhaps in your selfishness you can’t understand this, but when you aren’t responsible enough to pay your bill in a timely manner, that affects everybody within a hundred foot radius of your wireless router.

As an adult I’ve learned to accept responsibility, and I’m here to tell you that it’s time that you do the same. If you don’t have the money for your high-speed Internet bill, perhaps you should get a second job. Or do what I do – call my parents and ask if you can borrow it. Don’t worry; experience shows that my parents are very lenient lenders, and won’t expect you to pay them back any time soon if ever.

Thanks for reading this memo; I was going to e-mail you, but I don’t know your address, and even if I did, well, our Internet’s down.

MEMO #3 TO: The Guy in The Apartment Whose Window Faces Mine

RE: Your Strict Daily Regimen of Blasting The Same Five Metallica Songs Over and Over and Singing Along at the Top of Your Lungs, Interspersed With The Most Disturbing Deep-Throated Hacking Cough Heard Outside of a 1920s TB Ward

Hey buddy, I understand that you need a job. I know, it’s hard finding work that matches your unique skill-set. After all, I’ve been on more than one interview in my life, and the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” is rarely followed with, “Now, can you do an impression of Lars Ulrich as if he were about to lose a lung?”

Luckily, aside from my work solving The Thrilling Adventure of Liam McEneaney and the Case of the Missing Doormat, I seem to be blessed with not a little spare time. So I thought I’d do the neighborly thing and help you come up with some career options.

At first I thought, “Join The Army.” But sadly, that thought was followed by the realization that America tends to send her best and brightest into battle against her foes, and let’s be honest with each other – the only opposing army that might be intimidated by an aging, phlegmatic metalhead would be the KISS Army.

Then it hit me - you could be a Wedding DJ! You’ve got the experience; by throwing your windows wide and sharing your love of mainstream speed metal, you’re already acting as a DJ for the entire neighborhood.

On the other hand, there’s only so many times that the happy couple will be able to listen to Enter Sandman before requesting that you play something a little more danceable, like Hey Ya! or The Beer-Barrel Polka. And when they do, you’re going to have to look them in the eye and say slowly and steadily, so they know that you’re completely serious:

“The first time ever I heard The Black Album, I knew I was put here on this planet for one purpose and one purpose only; to share the beauty of this music with the world, whether it wants me to or not. And by the Demon God of Rock n’ Roll Himself, if I don’t play these same five Metallica songs over and over., truly my soul will be Unforgiven.”

Then the groom will regroup, take a breath, and say, and say in the same gentle, patient tone of voice he would use were he placating a small child holding a loaded gun, that he completely understands where you’re coming from, but perhaps at the very least you would be so kind as to not scream along with the song like you were trying to awaken the departed souls of all the brain cells you killed smoking weed as a teenager.

And then if you could take just a few of the dollars you earn that night, and if you find it in your heart, in return for my advice, and my compassion and my care, and my taking the time to help a stranger in need, perhaps you would be so kind as to buy me a new doormat.

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This is the first of three memos.

MEMO #1 - TO: The Neighbor Who Stole My Doormat

RE: What the Fuck?

Okay, I know it’s been two-and-a-half years, but I honestly still can’t believe it. And so I have to ask; come on guy, you really needed to steal my doormat? My doormat?

And we’re not even talking about an ornamental, expensive doormat – the kind embroidered by a young child in a dark factory in the heart of Taiwan; the kind with the word “WELCOME” woven in over an irresistibly crude caricature of puppies playfully squirming under a doormat of their own, their big eyes staring straight through your soul; the kind that you can only find in an elegant, out-of-the-way specialty store like K-Mart or Target.

And I understand that not everyone has the rare combination of both ten seconds and six dollars that it takes to go out and buy one of their own. And if I had owned this kind of extravagantly decorative doormat, I would understand a working man’s need to steal it, to give his family a small taste of the same lavish, luxurious lifestyle that Doukhobors like myself enjoy in our rent-stabilized apartments in the heart of Queens.

But that’s not the kind of doormat we’re talking about, is it? The kind of doormat we’re talking about, the kind that you stole under the dark cover of night, is dirty and beige; it’s the kind of doormat that I got not from Wal-Mart, nor even from Kiki’s 99-Cent Emporium, but rather from the relatives of an elderly neighbor who had recently died, shuffling off this mortal coil in housedress and slippers, plastic bags clutched in her hand, a faded babushka on her head and a complaint about the heat left unspoken on her tongue.

To be honest, I’m not even angry so much as I am completely baffled; what, exactly, did you think you were going to do? Just put it down outside of your apartment, the only place you could logically use it, and hope that I wouldn’t go door-to-door through the building hallway looking for it?

In the annals of crime, stealing a neighbor’s doormat falls somewhere between mugging your boss in the elevator on the way up to the office and bursting into a police precinct, waving your shotgun in the air, and declaring that the next person who moves gets it.

Which is to say that it falls exactly halfway between being “poorly thought out” and “unbelievably moronic.”

And if you can’t use a doormat for its intended purpose, what exactly would you do with it? Sell it on eBay? Not that I would put it past you; after all, the person who would steal a used dime-store doormat is the exact same person who has undoubtedly, at several points in their life, had a small, swarthy man named Chico calmly inform them that “you ain’t can’t have the weed if you ain’t don’t gots the cash.”

And so I scoured Craig’s List, searching for the tell-tale ad: “FOR SALE,” I imagined it would say, “Doormat, gently used – NO QUESTIONS ASKED! Serial numbers have been filed off. Am looking for best reasonable offer – cash, food, or even MetroCard swipe into subway.”

Or perhaps this doormat was of some value to you, a value that I myself did not ascertain and could only truly appreciate once it was gone from my life. In my mind’s eye I can see you running through the building, clad in an Indiana Jones leather jacket and fedora, clutching your bleeding, gunshot arm as dark-suited thugs from the Russian mob close in fast. Trapped in a corner, desperate, you wheel around, revealing a Luger held to the head of a dirty beige doormat trembling in the crook of your arm.

“Don’t do anything we’ll both regret,” says a large man who steps from the shadows, a deep scar running down the side of his face, a gloved hand removing a pair of $500 Ray Bans, revealing one eye made of milky-white glass, the other filled with a mixture of hatred and respect.

You shake your head once: “No.” You pant for breath, swallow, then add, “Tell your men to step back and give us safe conduct, Vladimir. Now. Or the only place this doormat lies is inside the entrance of a mausoleum.”

He gives you the once-over; he knows that after what went down in Morocco, where he watched a small, frayed bathroom rug die in his arms, that you’d be just crazy enough to do it. He signals to his men, and they step back, warily placing their guns halfway into their holsters.

“You’ve won this round,” he says. “But I’ll return. Even you can’t watch forever. One day you’ll be napping, or drunk, or out of your house for ten minutes to get some milk from the store. And you’ll leave that doormat alone and unguarded. And when you do, I’ll be there. And I can tell you now, I won’t have to steal it away; it will come with me, and willingly.”

And you know in your heart that he’s right. You may have that doormat for now; hell, you may even love it as much as once I did, but you’ll never own it. The tread-worn beauty that makes it a treasure is also its biggest curse. This doormat was born to roam free, my friend, and no matter what kind of care you take of it, there’s going to be a morning when you awake to find it gone, and with only the memories to sustain you.

Part Two on Thursday

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Lesson 2: In order to perform standup comedy, one must first write standup comedy.

This lesson title might seem like advice so obvious it hardly needs to be said. And yet, many people who get into standup like to try as many shortcuts as possible. For some reason assembling an actual act is the step that they most commonly seem to skip.

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This week I watched the movie The Fugitive (in its beautiful 4k transfer) for the first time since it came out in 1993. It stars Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones in what was probably the grumpiest set in Hollywood’s history.

Ford stars as Dr. Richard Kimble, who comes home one night to find that his wife has been murdered by a one-armed man. He is the only person who believes this one-armed man exists, and so he’s arrested and convicted for the murder. When Kimble escapes custody in a train crash on his way to prison, Jones’ Deputy U.S. Marshall Sam Gerard is tasked with catching him and bringing him back alive.

Even thirty-three years later, this movie works and the reason is, despite its run time of over two hours, despite the fact that almost the entirety of the film is between two heroes and we don’t even meet the bad guys until act three, and despite the complex chain of events set in motion by Mrs. Kimble’s murder, the story itself is very simple and very easy to follow.

The most famous scene in The Fugitive is the climax of a chase through a series of tunnels that leads to a waterfall down a dam to a 200 foot drop. While the jump down the waterfall is, rightly, remembered as an iconic stunt, it’s the exchange between Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard and Richard Kimble right before that serves as the heart of the film.

Kimble is backed against the opening over the drop. He has Gerard’s gun, and is aiming it at him. He says, “I didn’t kill my wife.”

Gerard responds, “I don’t care.”

It is in this moment that the film turns. Up until now we’d seen Gerard the lawman, Gerard the hound dog hunting his man. In this moment we see something else: Gerard has integrity. He has a moral compass. And he has zero tolerance for even bullshitting his man to trick him into surrendering.

Because Sam Gerard is a good cop. We’re going to see an example of a bad cop when we discover the backstory of the one-armed man, and we’re going to see an example of a morally indifferent cop when the Chief of the CPD orders his men, in the climax, to shoot Kimble on sight without due process. But Gerard is not a judge, jury, or executioner. He is a U.S. Marshall and his job is simply to bring in his fugitive.

And so we get the fun of watching not only Kimble remain one step ahead of the law, but also watching Gerard slowly invest himself in Kimble’s case. We root for Kimble to get away, and we also root for Gerard as we watch him piece the clues together.

This is a movie with two protagonists and two heroes. It shouldn’t work, but again, the story framework is so simple that there’s room for something as unusual as a film where the audience can root for both hunter and hunted.

Classic American cinema often played in grey moral areas, even in the most basic stories of good versus evil. High Noon is one of the great American Westerns which is best remembered for Gary Cooper’s resolute heroism and for the impressive production feat that the movie takes place in real time.

But it’s the movie’s refusal, within this simple framework, to back away from uncomfortable moral questions that makes it an enduring classic.

In the film, Cooper’s Will Kane has just retired as the Marshall of Hadleyville, a small western town on the rise. He has just married Amy, played by a never-more-beautiful Grace Kelly, who is a devout Quaker and, for reasons we find out later in the film, an avowed pacifist. The movie starts with Kane and Amy loading a wagon to ride off to start their new lives as shopkeepers in another territory.

However, word has been passed down that Frank Miller, a man whose gang Kane broke up and who was sent to death row for murder, has seen his sentence commuted. He is arriving on the noon train to seek vengeance. Three members of his gang (including a sinister young Lee Van Cleef) await the noon train, and Kane knows that if he leaves town the gang will wreak havoc on Hadleyville and then hunt him down wherever he goes.

And so Kane must stay and face Miller. The tension for the runtime of the film, which is under 90 minutes, stems from the fact that nobody in the town wants to help Will. For some it’s a matter of cowardice. But for others, there are what they believe to be good reasons to see Miller shoot Kane dead.

There are those who liked Miller, and whose businesses did well when he ran the town. For others, there’s the prospect of incoming state aid to build factories and stores, and the fear that news of a shootout on Main Street will mean an end to the money. And there’s the matter of the men who helped him tame the town five years previously being older, having families, and more to lose.

In the end good triumphs over evil, but at a cost to all involved. Amy, who explains that she became a Quaker after seeing her father and nineteen year-old brother shot to death, saves Kane’s life when she picks up a gun and shoots one of Miller’s men in the back. The town cowers indoors and listens as Will, alone, risks his life to save their town one last time. And at the very end, Kane — who started the film proud of his career as a lawman and the work he did protecting Hadleyville — throws his badge in the dust and drives off in disgust.

And while the story remains as simple as any western — good Marshall versus evil cowboy — it’s the conflict within the story that is complex and often heartbreaking.

Thirty years later and three thousand miles away, The Fugitive is playing in the same sandbox.

When he finds the one-armed man Sykes’ home and in it proof that he was involved with his wife’s murder, Kimble calls Gerard — because thanks to the scene in the tunnels, Kimble knows that he can trust Gerard to come to Sykes’ home and objectively put the pieces together.

The audience also knows this because Kimble, when he calls Gerard, explicitly says, “Do you remember what I told you in the tunnel?”

Within the framework of the movie, Kimble uses this as a password to let Gerard know that this isn’t a crank call. Within the framework of the screenplay, it also lets the audience know that the film understands the impact of the tunnel scene as well as we do.

And when Gerard responds that he said that he doesn’t care, we have seen him asking the important questions too many times – “Why did Kimble risk his freedom to return to Chicago?” “Why is he still searching for this one-armed man that his own defense team says doesn’t exist?” – to believe this to still be true.

We’re excited because we know that he knows that Kimble might be innocent, and we are now rooting for him to trace the phone call and follow his instincts to the real killer.

There’s a bit of meme film commentary going around right now, in the form of a critique of Raiders of the Lost Ark as presented by one of the characters from the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. It postulates that Indiana Jones had no effect on the events of the movie, and that without Jones the Nazis would still find the Ark, open it, and die.

While it’s fun to look at films from different angles to try to dismantle the logic, this take is incorrect. In the film’s prologue, Jones defeats the booby traps in a South American jungle temple to steal a golden idol, only to have it stolen by a rival archaeologist/fortune hunter, Belloq. We see that while Jones is the better man in every way, Belloq is able to side with a dominating army and steal Jones’ discovery.

This is then mirrored in the main story that follows, when Jones saves Marion’s life and takes the medallion, Jones finds a translation for the medallion, finds the secret to the hiding place for the Ark, and most importantly, realizes that looking into the Ark will kill him. And yet, Belloq has the resources of the German Army at his back, and has the upper hand for most of the film.

But it’s not surprising that the writing staff for a classic multicam sitcom would have this take, and it’s strictly because that’s a form that requires looking at story in a different way than screenwriting.

A great sitcom writer works in the constraints of a form where, even with long-term arcs, each episode must see the characters resist any kind of change so as to have a hard reset for the next week’s story. In sitcoms, the point is the effect that the character has on the story. A conflict is set up, and each character tackles that conflict according to the personality that has been established since the pilot.

Whereas in great screenwriting, the point is the effect that the story has on the character. We start Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced to Indiana Jones the swashbuckling heroic adventurer stealing treasure for glory and science. By the end of the film, he’s seen the evil of the Nazis, he understands what they will do if they can harness the power of the Ark, and he has had enough of a spiritual awakening to understand that one could never truly possess the Ark, because as soon as one looks into it, the Ark has possessed them.

In being commissioned by the United States Army, Indy has been given a professional stakes. In his race to capture the Ark before Belloq, he also has a personal stake. But in realizing the true power of the Ark, and the very real holy power contained within, he is given something he never bargained for: spiritual stakes that no mercenary archaeologist ever expects to find at the bottom of a dig.

The Indiana Jones who we meet at the start of Raiders is not the Indiana Jones we meet in The Last Crusade. That’s an Indy who, when asked by a modern Knight Templar if he seeks the Holy Grail for Christ’s glory or for his own, answers truthfully, “I just want to find my dad.”

You cannot beat the experience of watching a movie like The Fugitive in a crowded movie theater full of people who have also never seen it before. When Kimble finally puts the handcuffs on the one-armed man, there was a big cheer from the audience. Because it feels like a victory.

And when Gerard finally arrests Kimble, this feels like a victory too — because he has explained to Kimble that he believes him, that he has the evidence to prove he’s right, and then Kimble reciprocates by saving him from getting shot by the ultimate bad guy.

The neat trick that The Fugitive plays with its dual protagonist structure is that Richard Kimble is the nominal hero of the piece, racing law enforcement and time to prove his innocence and bring his wife’s killers to justice. But the character that actually goes on the hero’s journey is Sam Gerard. Kimble remains basically unchanged by the end, while it’s the Deputy Marshall who is actually affected by the events of the film.

There’s a classic way of writing characters where you establish what they want and what they need. For Richard Kimble, these are identical: to prove himself innocent and bring his wife’s killers to justice. For Sam Gerard, these are two distinct things. He wants to do his job and bring in his man. He needs to see justice done.

And that’s demonstrated in the final echo of that scene in the tunnels. In the back of Gerard’s Lincoln Town Car, he first uncuffs Richard Kimble and then gives him a cold compress for the injury to his face. Kimble tells him, “I thought you didn’t care.”

Gerard replies, “I do care a little. But don’t tell anybody.”

By the end of The Fugitive he allows himself to care, because it’s the right thing to do. A complex moral journey that, ultimately, ended in a triumph of good over evil.

Thank you for reading this far; you’ve truly completed your own personal hero’s journey. Next week we’re back to the funny, so if you aren’t a subscriber yet and want a dose of weird comic essays, personal stories, and cultural critique every Monday and Thursday, you can subscribe at the link below.

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They Might Have Infiltrated the Government at All Levels

My representative, Congressman Mike R. Human, recently won the election following a fierce town hall debate where he scratched his opponent’s eyes out. The press called it a “strong showing for his position on waste management”, but in my opinion it was an overreaction to opposition to a plan to reduce garbage collection to once every other month. Also, there’s the Supreme Court’s recent decision in The State of Maryland vs. Yummy Delicious Expired Fish Heads LLC, that it’s legal to sell garbage as food.

All These New Movies Seem Geared Towards Raccoons

I know it was a big hit, but I sat through Ryan Gosling Attempts to Open A Padlocked Garbage Bin and three hours of that goes a long way. Don’t get me wrong, I found it very suspenseful when he spent twenty minutes trying to open a can of dog food. But as good an actor as Gosling is, when he started screaming “I’ll do anything you say just don’t scratch my eyes out”, it felt less like a character and more like a hostage situation.

My Boss Promoted His Cousin Gerald Over Me

Yes, I was caught coming out of the bathroom once without washing my hands, while Gerald will sometimes sit on the edge of a full sink and bathe his face for twenty minutes. But we were recently called in for a companywide meeting because customers have been delinquent in their payments during this economic slowdown. I recommended that we institute a penalty structure, while Gerald suggested that we chew through their roof and make a nest in their attic insulation. Guess which proposal the boss went with! And yes it worked, but that’s not the way we do business. But as we say in the office, “Better to get your work done than end up in HR getting your eyes scratched out!”

The New Neighbors Have No Sense of Privacy

I’m not going to pretend that my old neighbors, the Tankfords, were my best friends. But building a fence between our properties really helped our relationship, so I don’t see why the new neighbors need to keep climbing over that fence and across the power lines over my yard when they want to go anywhere. Sometimes they sit on that fence and just watch while we eat which is very uncomfortable. Other times I catch them washing their hands in my birdbath. Then again, after the eye-scratching incident, nobody steals Amazon packages on the block anymore.

My Wife Might Be Cheating on Me With a Raccoon

I got suspicious at first when Susan started collecting shiny objects. Then I called her while she was out on a “girl’s night” and I could hear the sound of chattering and hissing in the background. The other night I came home from work an hour early and a raccoon was sitting on the couch watching SportsCenter and eating a bowl of fish heads. After I kicked him out, Susan said if I ever embarrassed her like that again she’d scratch my eyes out.

I’m 90% Sure My New Therapist Is A Raccoon

I had one therapist who constantly fell asleep while I was talking, and I had another who would take phone calls during our sessions. But I’ve never caught any of them chewing through their chair to eat the padding inside. Also, when I started to explain that I was seeing raccoons everywhere, he jumped on my head and clawed at my eyes while screaming in my ear. On the other hand, all he charges me is a bowl of fresh berries and my insurance covers that.

Lesson 1: If you want to be a standup comedian, you must perform standup comedy.

“Practice is enlightenment itself.”
— Dogen, from Shobogenzo (“Bendōwa”/“On the Endeavor of the Way”)

In my thirty years of standup comedy, the question I am most often asked is this:

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Early autumn mornings give way to a brief period, from late August into October, when the weather in New York City almost feels hospitable. As vacations fade into work, the winds in the early hours blow with a razor’s edge, and the blue skies of summer fade into the grey concrete clouds of the city’s brutal winter.

For the Queens of my childhood, it meant the green leaves fade to a brittle brown, and color slowly seeps out of the world surrounding. There developed a clinical sterility in the winter months, and it’s this sterility that led young residents with any kind of ambition to get out and see the wider world as soon as they can manage it.

By junior high school, I was cutting for months at a time. I didn’t need much of an excuse other than I was miserable and bored, and so by the age of twelve I was ducking out of junior high school to go to FAO Schwartz and play on their wall of Nintendos for a couple of hours.

From there I would sit by the Lagoon in Central Park and contemplate the ducks and the tourists feeding bread to the ducks and, quite a few times, the park’s rats as well.

I would wander through the park if the weather was nice, or up past the northern end and walk the streets of Harlem, or take a stroll to the west side and the river. On snowy days I’d explore the rest of the city, getting out at the World Trade Center and, one time, taking the PATH train to the end of the line and disembarking for a two-minute adventure into (and immediately right back out of) Newark.

By the time I reached high school, I was pretty brazen, and there came the day I told my mother and my high school guidance counselor that I would be taking the next day off to catch the first showing of Jurassic Park. I recognized that this was a movie that was going to change everything, and I wanted to be among the first to witness it.

I didn’t so much drop out of high school as I opted out.

It’s no coincidence that the area of Queens where I grew up was the birthplace of punk rock, of the Ramones and the Dictators. These were bored teenagers and young adults who looked around and saw the same thing I did. The lives of adults around us.

Waking up at the same time every day. Eating the same breakfast. Eight hours a day at jobs they didn’t care about, nights at home watching television. Going to the movies on weekends, or the bar. Vacationing in the Bahamas for a week, having kids, getting older, dying in the tiny aluminum-sided houses they lived their entire lives in.

Legendary manager Bernie Brillstein in his memoir talked about moving to my neighborhood when he was young, of living in the apartment building that neighbored my Elementary School.

Within months, he wrote, he realized that if he wanted to be successful, he had to move out and into Manhattan.

The scariest thing about that life was watching the adults wistfully staring into the distance and talking about the dreams of their youth. Ambition seemed like a sand castle washed away by the rising tides of financial security. It was a good life, yes, but it all seemed so claustrophobic when I was a child. So many people settled.

And I opted out of that, too.

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INT. APARTMENT COMPLEX HALLWAY - EVENING
SEAN, a man in his early thirties, dressed for a fun night out. He’s walking, slightly tipsy, with FRANCINE, his girlfriend, also in her early thirties, also dressed for a fun night out, also slightly tipsy. They’re laughing at a joke that someone has just told.

They reach an apartment door.

SEAN: This has been the best birthday in a long time. Exactly what I needed after the past few months.

FRANCINE: I’m just glad I could help you forget your wife ...

SEAN (uncomfortable): Uh, yeah.

FRANCINE: Oh. Oh geez, I’m so sorry.

SEAN: No, it’s all right.

FRANCINE: Oh God, I shouldn’t have brought it up. I know it’s been hard on you.

SEAN: No no, let’s just get your purse and go to dinner.

He opens the apartment door.

CUT TO:

INT. APARTMENT - CONTINUED
Inside it’s dark. We see SEAN and FRANCINE silhouetted against the light of the hallway behind them.

MAN’S VOICE: Hold it right there, Sean Murphy.

SEAN: Okay, you caught me. I killed her.

FRANCINE: Sean?

SEAN: No, honey, it’s over. They finally caught me. (to the MAN) Yeah, I killed her. And you know what? I’m glad I killed her. I couldn’t take it any more. All the nagging, “Sean take out the garbage,” “Sean, stop raising chickens in the bathtub.” Until one day I just - snapped. I killed her and I dumped her in the river and you can do what you want because I don’t care any more.

A light switch is turned on. Inside, the apartment is filled with all of Sean’s friends, half-crouched in hiding places, with stunned looks on their faces. Many are wearing party hats. There are streamers and balloons all over the place. A big banner reads: “SURPRISE!!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!”

In the forefront is the MAN, who is Sean’s best friend. His mouth is wide open in shock.

SEAN: Um, just .... kidding?

His friends start to file out past him in awkward silence.

THE END

In high school, I was quite the “card.” That’s why my teachers “hated” me.

In Mrs. Jones’ creative writing class, we were asked to make a presentation, so my friend Bill and I, being fans of Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall and Monty Python, did a little three-minute sketch comedy/music revue.

And me being an aspiring comedian, and being that we were teenage boys given zero guidance beyond making our writing creative, did not allow the bounds of good taste to dictate our material.

This is that old comedy routine, recently unearthed from an old notebook, followed by the unique way our teacher graded a presentation she hated.

Act One: Lobotoman

ANNOUNCER: Lobotoman! [theme song] The Most Mentally Absent Superhero!

[Lobotoman sits and does nothing for 10 seconds.]

ANNOUNCER: Stay tuned for the next episode of Lobotoman!

Act Two: Vaudeville Act (Mrs. Jones’ Mother)

NOTE: Act Two is just described in my notes as “Vaudeville Act (Mrs. Jones’ Mother).” I’m not sure what it was supposed to be, but I remember we had the wisdom to not actually finish writing it let alone perform it.

Act Three: Chuck’s Poem

NOTE: CHUCK (not his real name) was this guy in our class, the kind of guy who carried around drumsticks and a drummer magazine, not because he played drums but because he thought that appearing to play drums made him cool. He was the one whose family eventually tried to send me to prison for prank-calling them. That’s another story.

Anyway, Chuck had written a poem for a girl at some point that started, “The ocean and I are blue today.” It was pretty wretched, even by high school poetry standards. I don’t know why he let us read it, he definitely shouldn’t have done that.

And because high school kids are the most awful people on Earth, we decided to perform a parody. In a class where Chuck was sitting there. Watching us.

The ocean and I are blue today,

For my love, my love she went away.

Your face is like the finest rope I’ve ever seen,

Your eyes are like two crystal balls, where I can see the future.

Your arms, oh your arms, are like two slender sticks, where I would love to be a little bird... perched.

Our love is like a spiral notebook, where the spiral of our love interweaves

With the pages of our memories.

Oh, your bosom is like a Danish Moo Cow’s Udders,

Oh your buttocks, just like my mudder’s.

Oh your Nose, how it sticks out of your face,

Oh your teeth, like two spearmint chiclets.

Oh my love for you is infinite, like outer space

Where we are two Martians,

Sailing,

Sailing.

(sailing)

Act Four: Bill’s Song

We sang this in public:

If you play with feces,

You get diseasies,

That’s what my mother told me.

If you drink from the toilet,

Make sure you boil it,

She would always scold me.

And wash your hands when you wipe your ass,

And never pick your nose in public.

Act Five: Mr. Happy

Picture this if you will. Me, with a Senor Wences face drawn on my hand, standing in a corner, facing away from the class. As Bill sang the following theme song, I unzipped my fly and stuck my arm through it:

BILL: [singing] Come with me, as I whip out, Mr. Happy!

From there I used my amazing improv skills to carry the rest of the sketch, as we didn’t finish writing it, but I don’t remember how it went.

I do know that it didn’t matter what I did or said at that point, because the entire class was dying of laughter.

Mrs. Jones hated it, because she was first, and foremost, a lady. But Mrs. Jones was also, above all else, an awesome teacher. And to be fair to us she had two other students sit down with her, and the three of them secretly graded our project, and she averaged it out.

Mrs. Jones gave us a very low score, and the two classmates gave us a very high score, and between the three our grade was an 85. And in a way, I think my career has continued that trajectory ever since.

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There is no aspect of the wedding that is creakier or more old-fashioned than the exchange of the vows. For centuries, couples have been promising to love, honor, and obey each other in a blatant series of lies before their friends, family, and God.

Make no mistake. There’s no more beautiful tradition than dressing up in an expensive and uncomfortable outfit that you will wear maybe five times in your life, sitting in a church with no air conditioning, and watching two young people make the biggest mistake of their lives.

But the time has come to update wedding vows to reflect modern relationships in the year 2026. Happily, I have come up with a modest sample, which I share below.

I vow…

…if you arrange the dishes in the dishwasher incorrectly, I won’t start a fight or even comment on it. I’ll just wait until you walk out of the room, open the appliance mid-cycle, and arrange the dishes correctly for you to find when it’s time to put them away.

…not to like or comment on pictures of attractive young people on Instagram, at least not from an account you know about.

…if you look like you’re angry, and I ask if everything’s okay, and you say “I’m fine” in a tone of voice that makes it clear that I pissed you off, I won’t immediately say, “Okay good, as long as everything’s okay,” and then walk out of the room whistling a jaunty tune.

…not to shove my phone in your face and tell you to check out a “great” video and stare at you while you watch it and then get mad when you don’t laugh at the exact moment you were supposed to.

…not to methodically cut out any of your friends from your life, unless it’s one of the ones I especially hate.

…on my honor, on my parents’ souls, on the lives of our yet-to-be-born children, that if we’re watching a show together, I won’t watch ahead when you’re out of the house.

…furthermore that if I do, I won’t be mad if you commit a spouse murder straight out of a Lifetime movie.

…when I walk into a room and see you’re cleaning even though it’s my turn, I promise to try to sound really sincere in my offer to help.

…that I won’t install a phone tracker app on your phone without telling you.

…if I do install a phone tracker app on your phone without telling you, I won’t abuse it. I will only use it for emergencies, like if you don’t text back within thirty seconds, and are therefore probably cheating on me

…if I do install a phone tracker app on your phone without telling you, I will only lightly abuse it, like if I need to make sure you’re going to the right stores to buy me my Christmas presents.

…if I do install a phone tracker app on your phone without telling you, and I do abuse it, I will only show up where you are unannounced if it would make a funny TikTok.

…to hire a professional mediator to help us decide peacefully the exact temperature to keep the thermostat on.

…if we make a compromise on the thermostat, and you catch me changing it to my preferred temperature when you’re out of the room, I will try to look sorry.

…not to wait until you’re out of town and then drive your shitty cat who constantly bites me fifty miles away and drop it off in a park and then pretend it ran away and help you look for it when you get home. Especially not if it has a tracking chip.

For richer or for poorer, as long as you keep your credit score above 650.

In sickness or in health with the understanding that I’m not signing up to be a full-time nurse.

‘Til death, or ‘til this becomes boring, do we part.

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I don’t dwell much on the supernatural. When it comes to psychic phenomena, I’m very skeptical. But then again, I’m a Leo, so I would be.

I do believe in aliens, and I do believe in UFOs, although I worry that they will first land in Passaic, New Jersey, decide that we are not an advanced species, and leave without looking back.

I have faith in general, but not in the specific. When asked for my religious views, my answer is usually, “From a distance, if at all possible.” An eternity in Heaven surrounded by True Believers sounds amazing in the abstract. But if you want to know what that actually feels like, spend a weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah.

If I’m going to spend my afterlife in Heaven, I will need to be around my people. People who get why I’d ask an angel playing harp if they know any Skynyrd. It’s not to say I don’t want to go, I just don’t want a neighbor who’s going to get mad if I ask the Archangel Metatron if they’re a Transformer.

And I’m told that when I do, I’ll be reunited with all past generations of my relatives. Some of them, let’s be honest, were very difficult people. I don’t relish the idea of explaining to hundreds of judgmental Irish, German, and Polish immigrants why they risked everything and sacrificed so much to build a new life in America, just so I could have the freedom to make fun of them decades after they were gone.

The truth is, I just can’t see a reason to wait on the supernatural to reveal itself when the natural world around us is so fascinating. There’s a species of bloodworm that has copper teeth. And not the kind you have to have a great dental plan with no deductible to afford. They develop organic copper teeth. Why would I fear demons that may not exist when something so weird and terrifying can be found by just digging in the dirt?

Having thus established my bona fides as a skeptic, I can now tell you truthfully that I have had two out-of-body experiences.

The first happened when I was newborn, and I was sick, and I had spinal meningitis, and the doctors believed that I might not live. And I remember watching my own little body in the nurse’s gloved hands as it was placed into the foil-covered incubator, and this more clearly than I can remember whatever I watched on television last night.

I never really thought this was unusual. When I was a child in the 1980s, nobody really talked about “out of body experiences” for fear of being labeled a lunatic. After all, you could get ostracized from polite society and end up spending your life in social exile – which, coincidentally, involves moving to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The second instance happened on a summer night, when I was sick with what turned out to be cellulitis, which is what you get when the strep you get every year because you can’t afford health insurance finds its way under your skin.

I was so hot and so dehydrated that I could barely sleep from the burning under my skin. And I lay in my bed, and my breathing slowed, and I felt my physical body slip away from me, and I was frightened that I was dying and yet I was so at peace I could feel no fear, could feel nothing but the hum of the Universe passing throughout my soul as I floated up and up away from the world, into the great void, and I became one with everything, even Passaic.

And then a great voice Spake unto me – and that is a pretentious way of phrasing it, I know, but this was such a grand voice that reverberated through everything I was and ever will be as if I was some sort of cosmic Marshall Stack, that truly only the overtly grandiose words of the King James Bible can do it justice.

And it spake unto me thusly, and I am quoting exactly, and I swear that this is a true story, and it sayeth unto me, “Appreciate Beck while you can, because he won’t be with you forever.”

And then gradually, the cosmos and the forever of eternity slipped away and I came back to my physical body, and the only way I can describe the feeling is as the exact opposite of candles melting into wax; slowly slipping back into my body like the fingers of a small child’s hand entwined in those of its mother’s. I found no great surprise there, in the discovery that, once again, the world had left me with more questions than answers.

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As a standup comedian with almost thirty years of professional experience, multiple TV credits, a concert film, and a recent special, you’d be surprised at the number of people who ask me for advice about the business. Unless you thought that number would be zero, in which case you’d be right on.

Like many comedians before me, I know that advice isn’t something you give to the people who want it. It’s something that you spring on that young comic who just had a great career break and needs their confidence torpedoed. Or that attractive young comedian after you’ve had a few bottles of Confidence by Anheuser Busch.

Or, if you’ve committed to a Substack schedule and have absolutely nothing to write about, because your life revolves around standup and you have zero other interests or hobbies or friends in any other business. So here is some great standup advice for comedians of all experience levels, whether you’re just beginning or you’ve been doing it for a while and haven’t had the success that the Universe owes you.

Send Them Home Angry: Mastering Crowd Work

Crowd work isn’t just a lazy way to build up your TikTok presence; it can also help kill twenty minutes when you only have ten minutes of material.
Many road headliners supplement their twenty minutes of killer comedy about hating their wives by implying that audience members hate their wives, too.

But the real crowd work geniuses know it goes deeper than asking really original questions like “Where are you from?” and “What do you do for a living?” You have to take the average chump who came to see you perform after a hard week of working a real job and make them regret that mean high school students made your adolescence miserable.

The following are good launch points:

• Ask a man in a relationship, “How long have you two been together?”
  If he pauses even a nanosecond because you’re embarrassing him in front of a roomful of strangers, that’s when you pounce: “He doesn’t know!”
  There’s nothing funnier than watching a relationship fall apart in real time.

• “What’s your credit score?”
  Do not let up until you get a number.

• If there’s a group of women together, ask, “Which one of you is the whore?”
  If they’re friends, they’ll humiliate the one they all secretly hate by pointing her out.

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Steal From the Best: How to Write Jokes

The trick to generating new material is digging into your own life.
Since your life revolves around sleeping all day, putting on the cleanest clothes from the laundry pile next to your bed, and shuffling out to do an open mic or show, there’s not much to draw from.

So here’s an expert level tip: Watch standup specials all day. Take note of the comedians that make you the angriest – they’re the ones who are the most successful. Then steal only their setups and write new punchlines around them.

Nobody can call you out for only having half-original material, because that’s called “parallel thinking.” Remember: Finding an original premise is the hardest part of writing a joke, so don’t bother.

Public domain premises to get you started:

• My wife and children stand between me and happiness

• Despite what I just said for the past ten minutes, I can’t be prejudiced against gay people/trans people/Jews because I know one.

• White people, am I right?

• I am an alien from another planet and so every step of the process of ordering at a restaurant is amazing to me.

• Anything Brian Regan said on one of his albums. Seriously, that guy has a lot of material and even if he ever found out he wouldn’t mind if you borrowed a joke or five.

Screaming into a Live Mic: How to Have an Electric Stage Presence

Back in the old days, comedians spent years, sometimes decades working on a stage persona, learning physicality, taking acting lessons, all in the pursuit of becoming better performers onstage.
You don’t have that kind of time. Marijuana isn’t going to smoke itself all day!

That’s why you need to take that all-important shortcut:

• Scream into the mic. Comedy is about beating the audience into submission by completely overwhelming their senses.

• Forget that the microphone you’re speaking into is connected to a sound system that ends in speakers.

• The louder you are, the more likely you are to trigger a primordial fear response and get them to laugh out of a panic instinct. Any laugh counts!

Some comics cheat by resting the mic on their chin for their entire set. This is good, because if you weren’t lazy you’d be learning how to be a better comic instead of taking a shortcut by reading this article.

Stand by for more tips

I’ll be continuing a regular comedy column until I’ve compiled enough material to pitch a lazy book. Look for upcoming practical advice every comedian needs to know, like how to borrow money from the people in your life.

Liam McEneaney is a comedian who taped his first TV appearance two months before September 11^th and has been rewriting the same three jokes since. His most recent credits include headlining an open mic at a dispensary and also sitting in the audience of a bunch of TV shows that he lists as his credits when he does the road.

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Back in 2000, Bill Clinton was such a bad president that even I, whose highest level of education was obtaining a GED, had a great-paying dot-com job. It was a time of high wages and low rent in New York City and I was a writer for a company that owned a series of comedy websites. The job took me forty-five minutes a day to complete and, to the point of this story, gave me the best health insurance plan you’d ever heard of.

For me, health insurance acts more as a magic totem. For some reason, I have serious medical emergencies either right before or right after my period of coverage. After I was fired from this dot com job, I decided to let my insurance lapse due to the COBRA payments being almost equal to my unemployment payments. I had been let go during the summer and had decided that I wasn’t going to even look for another job for a couple of months.

The next day I shredded my hamstrings from overworking them at the gym. For a full year straight I had spent the generous lunch break I gave myself to work out for two hours every day without stretching first. It was to be another year before I could walk, or extend my legs, without pain.

This story happened the summer before. I was at a friend’s beach house in Connecticut and I noticed that my finger was swollen right under the nail to a genuinely alarming degree. By the time I was on the train home, the finger under the nail had swollen to three times its regular size. I got back into Manhattan at two in the morning and went straight to the Mt. Sinai Hospital Emergency Room.

My insurance was so good, I got to see a doctor straight away.

If you don’t live in the U.S., it might seem a bit obvious. “Of course, you went to the hospital with a medical condition, and you got to see a medical professional for medical care. What kind of third world medieval nightmare would the United States be under any other system?”

Emergency Rooms in this country act as a place for those who can’t afford or who legally can’t obtain insurance or afford to see a doctor to receive sometimes basic healthcare. And while President Obama’s Affordable Care Act alleviated the worst of it, in the late 1990s hospital emergency waiting rooms were famous for being great places to catch up on things you always meant to do – read Moby Dick cover-to-cover; knit an entire scarf; build a civilization and watch it crumble into dust three generations later.

But like I said, my insurance that year was excellent. I was called in almost immediately, and I was treated by an intern, a nice young fella who told me that the swelling wasn’t anything to worry about, it was just an infection under the nail and that he was going to prescribe antibiotics.

Then he said, “I’m also going to prescribe you a painkiller. What do you want, you want some codeine?”

And I said, “I don’t know.”

Then he winked at me, pointed, and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you something good.”

He then prescribed me a month’s worth of Vicodin, with two months’ refills.

This was the tail end of the 1990s, after all, and the only people who really understood the long-term harmful effects, not to mention the short-term harmful effects, of what is now affectionately called “hillbilly heroin”, were the pharmaceutical scientists, manufacturers, and reps who pushed the drugs, along with the doctors who handed them out like candy.

And indeed, Vicodin is a top-shelf painkiller. It kills pain caused by infections, caused by thinking, caused by feeling emotions. In fact, the only pain it doesn’t kill is the pain caused by not having Vicodin in your system, and within a week the window between taking the pill and feeling its effects had grown alarmingly short.

By the second week, I had to give it away to a friend who was excited to try it. The next day when I asked how he’d found it, he told me he took one pill and flushed the rest down the toilet because, and I quote, “That shit is the devil.”

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I’ve been fighting this RSV illness for the past two weeks, and when I use the word “fighting” I mean it in the same sense that the French Underground did during World War II. I’ve been quietly expressing a moral objection to being sick while lying low and hoping this cold or virus or whatever I have will go away on its own.

I haven’t talked to my doctor, because I figure it’s easier to lie on my back and feel sorry for myself and Google my symptoms. Especially when the alternative is to drive to my doctor’s office and park and wait in a waiting room for thirty minutes until it’s my turn to wait in an examining room for a further fifteen minutes and talk to a doctor so that he can then have his nurse Google my symptoms and tell me to stay in bed and not go anywhere.

In that spirit, here’s a partial list of questions I asked the Internet instead of a doctor:

Number of people with RSV annually.

Number of people who die from RSV annually.

Can you die from the common cold?

Can you literally die from loneliness?

Can I hire someone to read me a bedtime story and tuck me in?

Escort service + bedtime story.

Escort service + bedtime story ONLY.

Escort service + bedtime story only NO SEX

How often do escorts steal a wallet while you sleep?

How often do escorts steal your kidneys while you sleep?

How much mucus does a human head contain?

Head completely filled with mucus.

Tiny vacuum to stick into nostril and suck mucus out.

Who can I sue for giving me RSV?

Soup-based diets.

How many people have literally died from boredom?

When someone leaves everything to their cat, is that legally enforceable?

Lawsuit + heirs + cat + will

Has a cat ever known they were in someone’s will and killed them?

Do cats get allergic to people?

Make money without leaving bed.

Make money without leaving bed no results about being an escort.

Humans evolve from fish?

Can I evolve through sheer willpower?

Evolving into superhuman incapable of contracting viruses

Normal bowel movement color

Normal bowel movement shape

Abnormal bowel movement

Abnormal bowel movement crazy stories

Is there a thing that’s like body shaming but with bowel movement color and shape?

Which ingredient in daytime cold medicine do they use to make meth?

How much daytime cold medicine would I need to take to feel the effects of meth?

How to become “Heisenberg of Dayquil”

Can Google searching meth ingredients land you on an FBI watchlist?

If you’re going to raid my apartment can you bring soup?

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Colleagues,

After March 15th’s vigorous senatorial reprimand of Julius Caesar, public trust has dipped. Please use the following approved language in all statements, scrolls, and conversations in public baths.

1. Terminology

• The stabbing twenty-three times will now be called a “series of strong no-votes.”

• Refer to the event as “Caesar’s removal from public life,” not “murder in broad daylight.”

• Avoid the word “conspiracy” (mostly for Brutus, but let’s all keep this in mind). Instead use the phrase, “swift and thorough senatorial reprimand.”

2. Messaging

• Frame this as a continuation of Caesar’s decisive leadership style.

• Thank you, Senator Casca, for the brilliant “doing this out in public in front of hundreds of spectators” optics. Nevertheless, we can spin this by reminding the rampaging mobs: The Republic values transparency.

3. Arts & Culture

• The mob’s accidental killing of Cinna the Poet in place of Senator Cinna will now be referred to as “a major reduction in public arts funding.”

• Emphasize fiscal responsibility and bipartisan support for fewer poets.

• Tie into popular support for cutting the Republic Endowment of the Arts entirely.

4. The Marc Antony Issue

• Credit Senator Trebonius for distracting Antony with sewage funding.

• Encourage Antony to keep his eulogy politically neutral. Suggested phrasing:

  “I come to bury Caesar in dirt, not in compliments.”

• “Brutus is an honorable man” appears sixteen times in the script for Antony’s speech. Please cut by half.
  Note: A plurality of senators support cutting it entirely.

5. Media Relations

• Remind reporters that Caesar’s last words were not “Et tu, Brute?”

• Official quote: “I was just about to raise taxes on orphanages.”

• Any historian who writes otherwise will be subject to a thorough Senatorial reprimand.

6. Moving Forward

• Highlight our commitment to stable leadership and clean togas.

• When in doubt, pivot to infrastructure, our hatred of the Greeks.

End of memo.
The Committee to Oversee Dictatorial Affairs thanks you for helping Rome heal.

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I’m sick. I have the cold that’s going around, but it’s a cold in the same way that The Rock is an ordinary dude with a regular workout routine. When I was a kid, getting the cold meant you picked up a runny nose from one of your equally disgusting friends at school, came home and gave it to your family, and everyone was better in two days.

The cold I have makes me feel like someone gave me a going-over with a riding mower. In fact, I’m writing this the same way Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn; in bed, on my back, 16-inch laptop hovering over my head.

I used to have a successful blog, in the time before short-form social media. Not successful like I had millions of readers, but relative to my contemporaries I had a relatively high readership. It coincided with my time on a popular show called Best Week Ever, and got featured regularly on Gawker’s blog roundup.

I’d like this Substack to be successful, and so this week I took the time to read some of my old blog entries. It was very much a first draft joke notebook, but I was surprised twenty years later at how honest it got.

I told stories from my life to a readership of thousands that I don’t think I’d tell to a close friend today. It was messy, raw, and only guarded in how self-lacerating it could get. I’m appalled at who I’d talk about and how openly. But that was the world of blogging, and that was what consistently got eyes, and it was also a time when what went on the Internet didn’t go on your Permanent Record.

I spent a lot of time being hard on myself not turning that blog into a book deal. In hindsight it would have been an easy way to make the money I needed back then. But I think the book that would have resulted would have been expensive for me. Considering that I’d have to have at some point bought every extant copy and burned them.

Did I mention I was a “problem drinker” at this point in my life?

I’ve been priding myself on keeping up with the pace on my Substack now despite school and deadlines on other writing projects, and I think this week is the first time I’ve really gotten in trouble. I usually have a backlog of pieces that have, at the very least, been rejected by professional outlets.1

But this has been a week when writing has been impossible. In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut would drop story ideas in the form of brief descriptions of a library of books and stories his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, had written in his metafictional universe. One of these was about telepathic beings whose ability to communicate was blocked when they had a head cold. That’s how I feel every time.

Anyway. I’m not complaining about this. Usually, I’m in a situation where I have to work through an illness. For the first time since I was a child, I’ve been able to actually spend the week in bed taking care of myself. It turns out that feels great. I could get used to treating myself with love and care.

I’m trying to be a better writer. Like, consciously trying to take the kind of writing I enjoy and give it the kind of literary bent that I enjoy reading. It’s been tough, and part of the price I’ve been paying is watching myself sanding off some of the rough edges.

The rough edges are what make me a good blogger, and if I remove too many of these rough edges I remove the personality from my work. At which point, I might as well drop a prompt into ChatGPT and let it produce this post.

Part of where I feel torn is that there is a part of me that misses the messiness of my wilder younger years. Of not understanding long-term consequences and just saying what’s in my heart. Of “living life out loud”.

I was reading Lena Dunham’s Substack. When Girls was a thing that the media couldn’t shut up about, millions of words were wasted trying to figure out why she was capturing a moment. And the truth is, she captured the blog culture zeitgeist in a way that none of her contemporaries did.

The early 2000s was a time when life style columnists on big blogs would chronicle their debauches and drug use and whatever detritus they left in their wake. And their devoted fans would fill comment sections with hate posts picking apart the details of their lives.

Dunham did that writ large with her show and her interviews and her memoir and the people who identified with the characters of her show defending her on social media with the same passion as the people who hated her posting about how much they hated the characters on her show. And conflating their sense of self with politics in a way that made the two inseparable, and therefore impossible to debate.

This is how politics changed so quickly.

Don’t worry. I have a polished humor piece already in the chamber for Thursday. It’s technically a current events essay rooted in ancient history. I’ll be better by then, I think, and writing again.

Dunham’s Substack is refreshing in the world of celebrity Substacks in this sense. Some took to the platform to write a few essays about the things that they feel really strongly about (themselves, their careers, their critics and haters) and never posted again. Others hired a ghost writer to do some hagiography on their behalf.

But Dunham’s is messy and personal and very 2005 blogger-coded.

I’ve been publishing a lot of stories about my early-aughts self on this page. It makes sense. I’ve never been one for nostalgia, but also a person reaches an age when it’s not just normal but preferable to look backwards and sort out who you used to be.

When I was a child I would look around at the adults who settled for small lives, because those were comfortable and safe. I could never relate to that; it scared me to think that might be. And so I lived as much adventure as didn’t scare me.

I’m living a new adventure now. Those stories won’t come for a while. I’m getting my Bachelor’s in May. I’m approaching ten years in Los Angeles.

I’d like to find a graceful, literary way to exit this essay. Something that ties it all together. I’m still sick enough, and congested enough, that this might provide more energy thinking than I want to expend.

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