Sharp Wit and Bullet Holes
“And so capitalism being what it is jumps into action. These men of free enterprise build resorts. And the resorts, they’re not just for people that are in love, they are for people who might find someone to pretend that they are in love with.”
I went into the kitchen to feel the heat of George Carlin’s oven. He was roasting a few pet canards. Took a time machine way back to 1971 and caught Richard Pryor in the act of being a legend being born.
Seinfeld breaks it down into two buckets, you can do smart or you can do love, but you can’t do both. Compared to Carlin or Pryor it would first appear that Leno and Seinfeld opted for love. George was as the years passed driven to madness by what passes for civilization.
Comedy is commentary. It is sometimes observational. Some acts like Leno and Seinfeld anchor their material in social behavioral commentary. Other acts go further into the full anarchy of our systems tragic flaws. Carlin and Pryor do political satire on steroids where Leno and Seinfeld come up to the other side of the lake and rather than try to take the big fish settle for a more pastoral visit to this body of water.
Having spent the last eight weeks on stage working new material I have had to take measure of how far I might go. Topics I have been speaking about include: bachelors, honeymoons, vows, children, tequila, promiscuity, and lovemaking.
I have been dealing with stereotypes comparing what images come up in their minds when I explain that I am from San Francisco. They think of me as a German luxury car driving homosexual who smokes medically dispensed weed. If they are from Iowa I accuse them of being trapped driving “corn-pickers.” You got to give as good as you get.
The central fact of the times that we live in is that the narrative is up for grabs. The Berlin Wall falls and within two decades the victorious system called capitalism implodes, not once but twice. The oligarchs have been set loose on us and feudalism is like a mirage inside an economic crisis that’s birthed a radicalized survivalist movement driven to madness because they don’t want a country to be led by a black man. Can you disagree with any of what I just said?
And that my friend’s is what truth to power, comedy to an audience is all about. You had better well tell people the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the funniest entertaining truth you can. My work here is almost done. Now where the hell is my wine and who took my glasses?
“There’s no more playing around, no more hopping from bed to bed, all of that super-secret run silent bachelor life technology is soon to be nothing but useless scrap in a married man’s life.”
The Off the Cuff Links (I’m Not Making this Stuff Up)
The sovereign nation of the Sioux who just so happen to be located in South Dakota have had it with the Koch’s and their obsession with all things carbon. Have you ever heard of Little Big Horn?
But, damn it you see there is a little problem and it is called Iowa where a Republican Senator Chuck Grassley isn’t going along to get along, especially when it means taking the fall for the end of a renewable energy tax credit.
In a fact based world here we present to you the 2008 net worth of the Vampire Squid. Morally bankrupt now insolvent then. And speaking of insolvent. This just in from Kansas.
How to make sense of the scam called social media and the digital revolution. And let’s now explain why journalism has made a fetish of dumpster diving (what else is left?). Let’s jump across the pond and speak to a man in the Queen’s English where it seems there is something wrong with the narrative. This is of course is Robin Hood in reverse and let’s go to Sherwood Forest for the story.
And finally we give you a digitally stitched together decade in the making snap shot of our own Milky Way.
Get it Here
“This is a well written and amusing contemporary love story that touches every emotion. Dana paints a great story using wonderfully colorful characters in an unusual setting.”
