3 Things: Susanna Vagt, Elna Baker, and How to Fall in Love
1 Thing I Think Is Great:
In college, I had the good fortune to work with Susanna Vagt. She's an illustrator and an artist who's supremely talented and I love checking in on her website. Susanna creates these beautiful moments, a combination of an illustration and a short bit of text. They're unlike just about anything else I've seen and they tend to stick with me, bouncing around in my head while I go about my day. Here's her most recent (one of my favorites): Shared Time Capsules
1 Thing That Made Me Laugh:
Elna Baker works for This American Life, so you know her storytelling skills are top-notch. She also happens to be a single Mormon woman living in New York City. That's a combination she mines to great effect in her book, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance.
This book is one of my favorite memoirs I've ever read. It's laugh out loud funny, but it's also fascinating and touching. Elna is the rare person who believes strongly in something bigger than herself but is also willing to talk about her doubts and struggle with that belief. Her book is full of such unique adventures, for example when she got a job facilitating "doll adoptions" at FAO Schwartz. You can hear Elna read that chapter here: Babies Buying Babies
1 Interesting Thing:
"More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man's eyes for exactly four minutes."
This Modern Love column was so thought-provoking that I'm positive that it's only a matter of hours before every bar in Brooklyn is filled with couples running through Dr. Aron's questionnaire. To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
Ok, thanks for reading! More details on shows and my full schedule online atwww.chrisduffycomedy.com/calendar/
Have a great weekend,
Chris
3 Things: Jo Firestone, Josh Gondelman, and the King of Clickbait
1 Thing I Think Is Great:
There is no one else like Jo Firestone. Very rarely, you see a performer who is totally unique. Even rarer is for that performer to be unique and a joy to watch (after all, it's a lot easier to be idiosyncratically terrible).
Jo manages to thread the needle with her seemingly endless supply of new shows. Here's a recent sampling of ones that I've had the privilege of being involved with: 1) A show where the last remaining audience member won a cash prize and nearly fifty comedians deliberately told terrible jokes to try and make the crowd leave. It lasted six hours. 2) A silent synchronized dance show where all the performers had their faces painted different colors of the rainbow. 3) A show where 6 comedians competed to improve the life of one sad audience member. The strategies involved a crystal cleansing, winning a recreated version of America's Next Top Model, and learning how to walk like the president.
If you're in NYC, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go to Jo's solo show "Try To Love Yourself" on January 30 at Ars Nova (tickets on sale soon). If you can't make it to the show, check out Jo's website or this interview I did with her for Wag's Revue.
1 Thing That Made Me Laugh:
Famous Writers Play Taboo is just a perfect humor piece. Thank goodness Josh Gondelman provided us with the jokes about Ernest Hemingway and Emily Dickinson that we didn't even know we needed. If you're not familiar with Josh's other work, you should check him out. He works on "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" and he's an all-around source of kind-hearted hilarity.
1 Interesting Thing:
"A Katy Perry song was playing on the radio. 'Art is that which science has not yet explained,' he said. 'Imagine that the vocals are mediocre in an otherwise amazing song. What if you could have forty people record different vocals, and then test it by asking thousands of people, 'Which ones is best?' To me, that's a trickle in an ocean of possible ways you could improve every song on the radio.'"
Andrew Marantz goes inside the operations of the viral internet and discovers a future that's almost literally out of a dystopian George Saunders novel. The King of Clickbait
Ok, thanks for reading! More details on shows and my full schedule online atwww.chrisduffycomedy.com/calendar/
Have a great weekend,
Chris
