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Live shows
NEW YORK:
Wednesday, June 29 at 7:00 p.m at The Annoyance Theatre. I'm hosting The Sensible Show and we've got Sasheer Zamata from SNL, Roy Wood, Jr. from The Daily Show, Jo Firestone, Alingon Mitra, Michelle Buteau, and Emma Willmann. Truly unbelievable how good this lineup is. Link
Sunday, July 10 at 7:00 p.m at Under St Marks. My variety show You Get A Spoon! returns from a brief hiatus. Come see writers, musicians, and comedians share their work and then give out prizes to the audience. It's a budget version of Oprah's "My Favorite Things" show. You definitely won't get a free car but you might get a salad spinner. Link
You can also find my full up-to-date show schedule online here.
This week's list
1 Thing I Think Is Great:
The mark of a well-written joke is how quickly you get to the punchline. Paul Kirchner's comic strip The Bus wastes no time at all. Kirchner isn't just going for laughs though. He's using his art to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. Every strip of The Bus starts with a man waiting for a bus, but then "turns a completely conventional situation into a world where it is impossible to refer to the usual categories of logic, scale, and dimension." The fun of Kirchner's work is how many new ways he finds to take the same premise and still make the punchline surprising. Here's a collection of some of his best work: Paul Kirchner's The Bus (h/t Bianca Giaever)
1 Thing That Made Me Laugh:
For as much as I love a good story or a perfectly crafted joke, I can't deny that I laugh the hardest at things going wrong. Simone Giertz is consistently the best at the slapstick of disaster. She creates elaborate robots that are terrible at their jobs. They slap her in the face, spill milk everywhere, and then self-destruct in the most spectacular ways. I can't watch her videos without laughing. One of my favorites is her Applause Machine but you can see all of her crazy robots on her YouTube channel.
1 Interesting Thing:
Shane Bauer just published an amazing investigative look at the world inside America's private prisons. He worked undercover as a guard for four months and documented how he was trained, what he saw, and what the inmates and guards told him. It's one of the most incredible pieces I've ever read. It absolutely should be turned into a movie (and also a Supreme Court case against the private prison industry). This story would be worth reading no matter who wrote it, but the fact that the journalist is Shane Bauer, an American who famously spent two years in Iranian prison, adds another layer of depth. My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard
Ok, thanks for reading! More details on shows and my full schedule online at www.chrisduffycomedy.com/calendar/
Have a great weekend,
Chris