Bear's Place

Ah, Bear’s Place in Bloomington, IN. This is such a fun room because the IU college kids make a great crowd. I performed with Mark Klein who is another clean comedian that has been doing stand-up for a long time. The campus was buzzing more than usual because they had just won the Old Oaken Bucket Football Game, beating rival Purdue 27-24, assuring them their bowl game since 1993.

INtake Weekly Feature Article

INtake Weekly did a feature article on me today. I even got to go to the Indianapolis Star offices and stand on some cubicles for a photo shoot. Here are some of the pictures taken by Danese Kenon (The Indianapolis Star).

Open-mic Heckler

The open-mic shows are never intended to be really good shows. They are used by comedians to get more experience or try new material. One of my biggest pet peeves is when some ignorant moron decides to heckle a comedian, especially during an open-mic.

That is exactly what happened tonight.

The crowd consisted of about 70 people, most of which were there to see a guy going up for the first time. They were not really interested in anyone else that came up so the show suffered. Right before I was about to go on, a guy (ends up his name is Tony) in the audience decides to heckle a newer comedian. He tells the kid that he sucks and calls him a coward for not wanting to engage in a verbal battle. The comedian then introduces me and it couldn’t have played out any better.

I ask Tony what his problem is and why he would ever heckle, let alone at an open-mic. Tony then tells me that he could show me how comedy should really be done. So I called him out and brought him to the stage. I then proceeded to sit in the front row and heckle him to no end. I was absolutely ruthless, not letting him get a complete sentence out of his mouth without yelling "You suck!" or "That was hilarious!" or "Nice try!". It was made easier by the fact that he was wearing a sweater that looked like something Bill Cosby wore in 1987.

The best part was when Tony told me that he can be funny about anything and asked me for a topic. Naturally, I picked something not funny at all – abortion. I jumped all over Tony for not being funny before finally getting back on stage and explaining to him that he had no punchlines and should never heckle anyone, especially at an open-mic.

I doubt that he learned his lesson but it was an amazing feeling to take out a heckler by putting him on stage and watch him go down in flames.

San Fracisco Trip

After doing a show at Gold Country Casino in Oroville, CA, I was able to stop at In-N-Out, the greatest fast food restaurant in the country.

Then I took a few days to visit my brother in Berkeley, CA. He is on the Cal football staff so I was able to watch them prepare for their game that weekend against usc. It was pretty easy for me to be excited about this game because I really don’t like usc.

The highlight of the game was watching the Cal student section “card stunts”, where, during halftime, each member of the student section holds up a colored panel to make a patterned design. My favorite one was when the student section spelled out usc and then slowly changed the “s” to a dollar sign. Classic.

After the game, I was invited to go to a reception in the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame. Adam Duritz, lead singer for Counting Crows, was there since he is a Cal alum and famous, so he gets what he wants on campus. The other cool thing in the Hall of Fame was the trombone smashed during “The Play” (video). As a former trombone player in the Notre Dame Marching Band, this was genuinely cool to see.

While I was in Berkeley, a container ship struck a support for the Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay. Anyone driving near the Bay received a warning to stay away from the water. I thought it was interesting that they had to define ingest for those that were tempted to drink black water with “toxic goo”. Yes, that is what they were officially calling it.


I guess I should finish on a positive note, so here is something that everyone should do once in their life: walk the Golden Gate Bridge during sunset. It was a little cold but what an amazing view.