Dan Bialek Loves Kittens

If you haven’t already please feel free to forward this video to a friend or embed it on your Facebook page.

It’s almost 2 am. I got home a couple of hours ago from performing in a dive bar in Northridge in front of two people. Well, two people sitting in the audience section of the bar and another six or seven drunkards sitting in barstools 40 or 50 feet away from the tiny poorly lit stage on which I stood.

Not that I’m complaining. I got to do 15 or 20 minutes. I don’t really know how much time I did but I was up there for quite a while. Performing for two people with a cacophony rabble rousing bar talk filling more of the room than the shoddy PA system (that was turned up so loud that it made all the performers’ voices more annoying and useless than they would have been without it) which is a lot tougher and a lot less fun than you would think.

But, like I said, I’m not complaining. Stage time is hard to come across in LA. And a 20-minute set on a Thursday night is a lot more than most comics in this town could ask for or ever hope to get. So I’m grateful.

Standup comedy is hard. Not the actual act of standing up in front of strangers and trying to make them laugh. That’s easy. You either do well or you don’t. Not like it really matters either way. After you bomb a few hundred times and then subsequently kill a few or a few dozen times you realize that none of it is really matters too much. If you eat it nobody cares. If you do great it’s not like a bunch of confetti shoots out of the walls and a giant over-sized check drops from the ceiling. Either way five minutes after your set you pack up your shit, thank the host or booker and live on to fight another day.

No, it’s the waiting around and the 90 billion other things that have nothing to do with performing that are really a pain. Especially all the shows you do that really should have been called off in the first place.

One thing that has always strikes me funny is when civilians (non-comedian people) ask you if you’re afraid of getting heckled.

After you do standup (particularly open mics when you’re starting out) you realize that to get heckled would mean that you were actually performing in front of enough people that someone thought it important enough to call something out and challenge you. The first shows you do are usually in empty rooms at bars and coffeeshops and you’d love nothing more more than for someone to yell something to prove that at least somebody was listening and possibly even paying attention enough to realize that you were doing standup comedy. Even if they were pointing out that you were failing at it, at least they’d be validating the experience in some way.

Personally it’s a dream come true to get a heckler at a show. Once some idiot pipes up and decides to make the show about them instead of about you it instantly means that you have carte blanche to unload on them every horrible thought you’ve ever had about an ex boss, co-worker, roommate, lover, friend or anyone else you’d ever been wronged or slighted by. Plus, you have a microphone and they’re more nervous than you are most times (because you’ve at least failed in public dozens of times before and this is usually their first big attempt at it).

Hecklers aren’t the problem. It’s the two or three audience member shows that really take the wind out of your sales and fill them with dog shit.

So why is life such a mystery?

I don’t know.

Lately (or for a long time actually) it seems to me that every human endeavor on this planet is kind of pointless. We go to work, drive cars, build skyscrapers, get married, have kids, fight wars and eventually die. But to what end?

I don’t ask that question in a rhetorical attempt to say that life is pointless. I believe that there is a point to everyone on this planet’s life. That point is usually whatever you make of it.

Some people want to make a lot of money, accrue a lot of possesses and amass a lot of power. Others just want to settle down with someone, have kids and ride life out until they get old, their kids have kids and then they die. Still others want to change the world, invent and create new things, new ideas, new ways of seeing the world.

Unfortunately, most of the time these people aren’t very good at these things. They just end up cluttering the world with all of their useless, lackluster, whimsical bullshit, giving a bad name to those few rare people with actual talent and insight worthy of sharing with the world.

I’m most likely one of the useless, lackluster clutterers. At least I can be honest about it. Which is more than I can say for 99% of my ilk.

I recently got fired from a job because I wrote a blog about how evil, demeaning and functionless to society I found it to be. Having had time to reflect on it for the last couple of days I’ve come to the conclusion that I was absolutely right. The sole purpose of this position was to gather and accrue, by any means necessary, as much money as possible just to ensure that the people doing it would be able to achieve whatever goals they deemed most important. Whether it was amassing wealth for the sake of amassing wealth, or to feed their families, or to prolong their pursuit of their creative endeavors.

Few if any of these endeavors included changing the world for the better or bringing forth any new things or ideas that would help anyone in this world except themselves.

Again, I’m as guilty as any of them of having nothing to contribute to this world of any value or having the ability to change this planet in any capacity for the greater good.

Thinking on the subject a little further I came to the realization that the only pursuits really of any intrinsic or extrinsic value on this earth were those of medicine and agriculture. Far too many people on this planet (I’d dare say a majority if I knew which website to look up right now to back my words up with facts) are going to die earlier than they probably should from either disease or starvation.

Considering how far we’ve come technologically there really is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to provide every person on this planet with at least enough food, clean drinking water and basic medicine to live to be at least 60 or 70 years old. Of course there are diseases to which there is currently no cure like all the various forms of cancer. But still, millions of people die every year from simple things like lack of nutritional foods, potable drinking water and simple vaccinations and antibiotics.

We spend billions of dollars each year as a race building weapons that enable us to destroy life with the touch of a button, pull of trigger or even with the assistance of satellites hundreds of miles up in space. However, we can’t even adequately feed all of the people that we are killing and that are trying to kill us.

To me this doesn’t make sense. I doubt there’d be any need for a military, an Al Qaeda or for smart bombs if people had enough to eat and knew that they would be cared for if they got sick.

However, come tomorrow morning not you, I or very many other people are going to care about this fact.

It doesn’t put people in seats at comedy shows, it doesn’t put food on our tables, nor does it put money in our pockets to purchase the goods and services that we see on television, in magazines and even in the margins of this website.

I spent three hours hanging out in a strip mall in the San Fernando Valley tonight so I could talk for twenty minutes about the trivialities of my life in front of a high school basketball coach and his date.

This time would have been much better spent studying to become a doctor, scientist or writing letters to world policy makers asking them to increase food production and distribution for the poor.

But it wasn’t.

And that’s why life is such a mystery to me. Anyone of us can sit down at a computer and sputter out 1,400 words about the few small things that should be done to make this world a better place for everyone inhabiting it. And as soon as we’re finished we don’t trouble ourselves to think of it again.

I’m no different. As soon as I publish this entry and close this window I’ll be opening another to check my Facebook messages.

In this episode Nikki talks about baby sitting for “Funny People” director Judd Apatow and her recent painfully Brazilian wax experience.

Andrew waxes poetic about the Conan The Barbarian DVD extras commentary section, cheating at choose-your-own-adventures books, and inscrutable spot-on Halloween costumes.

This episode of the Robot Werewolf Ninja Deluxe podcast was hosted by Dan Bialek and features the following segments:

Road Head with Nikki Glaser

Medieval Adventure Friends With Some Fantasy Elements with Andrew DeWitt

You can read and respond to the comment below by following this link:

http://ibearfalsewitness.com/?p=69

Comment:
Why would you stay at a job you don’t like?
Why would you worry about other people’s families buying something they requested information on and not think about your family first? You need a job right? Find one you like. You are a liar and two-faced. That’s worse than selling warranties.

You are very sad. It’s sounds like you have a huge chip on your shoulder. No one must have given a damn about you when you were younger.
Get over it and sac up! No woman wants a pussy as a husband, and that’s what you are being.

You need help, get some.

-Larry, Charlotte, NC

http://ibearfalsewitness.com/?p=69

Hahaha.

Too bad when she’s elected president in 2012 that he’ll be rounded up and shot in the head along with Keith Olberman, Jon Stewart and Tina Fey.