From my 2005 comedy notebook
Standup that almost but didn't quite work twenty years ago
Twenty years ago, when the world was young and I was really in love with doing standup comedy, I had a discipline of writing for hours every day. If I had a crappy day job, I’d write during my downtime. I worked doing market research on the phone, and I’d write while the automatic dialer searched for a number that picked up.
When I was lucky enough to make money from comedy, I’d plant myself at Starbucks and write. I realized that if I couldn’t be the most naturally gifted comedian, I could at least be one of the hardest-working.
Sometime later this year I’m going to start publishing pages from my notebooks. In the meantime enjoy some jokes that didn’t quite work in 2005:
I used to be a professional restaurant critic.
I went into a seafood place once, and ordered “The Sailor’s Delight.”
They brought me a prostitute and a bottle of whiskey.
I gave that place four stars.
I was fired when my editor asked me how the food was, and I told him about how they gave me crabs.My friend Geoff works as a professor at MIT.
He’s pretty famous. He once wrote an article about how the Earth doesn’t revolve around the sun - it revolves around 3am when everyone’s asleep.
He conducted an experiment where he found out that when the cameras are turned off, Paris Hilton ceases to exist.
And he has a famous theory about the creation of the Universe. His theory is that right before the Big Bang there had been another event called The Huge Awkward Silence.
Someone had said something racist about black holes, and the Universe is a direct result of a build-up of huge amounts of what he calls “Nervous Tension.”
He came up with this theory while researching a paper called “Why Do Chihuahuas Exist?”He conducted a couple of famous experiments.
He put 20 career pickpockets in a room with 20 career lawyers, and waited to see who walked out with the most of the other groups’ wallets.
He also put twenty murderers in a room with twenty insurance salesmen, just to see who would crack first.
It was a bloodbath.
All twenty murderers died of extreme boredom halfway through a presentation on High-Risk Actuarial Tables and Process Management.Here’s a joke I wrote twenty years ago that I used in my special, West Coasting, which was released two weeks ago. You can buy or rent it here it at watchliam.com.
If you enjoyed this post:
You can subscribe to my Substack - for free! - for new stories, essays, and forgotten jokes from twenty years of notebooks — plus updates on new work, shows, and bad ideas I somehow make real.
