new open mic 6/22

My name is Benjamin Idle and this is my first time performing stand up.

I have a few friends who are comedians and when I asked them for advice for my first open mic, they told me to avoid writing jokes about how nervous I am, or how anxious I am. The problem is they also told me that I should write what I know, and these two bits of advice are contradicting. If I can’t write about anxiety, all I have left is smoking pot and watching reruns of Whose Line Is It Anyway; there’s just not much else to me. Plus, the advice, “write what you know” only serves as a reminder for how much I don’t know. I shouldn’t be nervous anyway, because even though this is technically my first time doing stand up comedy, I used to play trombone in a ska band…and that was essentially the same thing. I was standing; people were laughing…generously too. If you don’t know what ska is; don’t worry about it. I assure you it won’t come up again.

We didn’t call ourselves a ska band; we just told everyone we were a punk band that happened to have a trombone and a trumpet and a saxophone. But no, we were punk rock. I was very punk rock when I was younger. When I was a teenager I used to rebel against everything; now I just rebel against my waist line and my slowly forming insanity, but I digress. When I was like 15, I decided I would shock my conservative, Bush loving parents by coming out to them as gay, which I mostly wasn’t, but whatever. It ended up backfiring on me though, because my mom was just like super accepting and supportive and she told me that she loved me and that all she cared about was that I was happy and that she loved me no matter who I loved. And my other mom was also cool with it. I think I might have misjudged the vibe of my household.

I was driving through Cincinnati the other day, because I have the money, and I passed a traffic sign that read, “Dangerous Intersection Ahead.” That’s not how you fix a problem. The city just put up a sign warning people instead of actually putting an effort into making the intersection less dangerous. That’s like if fire fighters showed up to a house fire and just placed a sign in the yard that reads “Warning: Fire!” and drove off. Or the police just show up on the scene and stick a sign in the ground that reads “Murder Ahead.” Not only is that not resolving the problem, but it is also grammatically ambiguous and could be read as the police encouraging people to go out and find some heads to murder.” So anyway I finally approached the apocryphal dangerous intersection and bears with machine guns jumped out from behind bushes and took me hostage. I guess the government doesn’t have the resources to deal with militant bears, so I ate my words, and then the raw fish that my new bear brethren taught me to catch from the rivers with my bare paws, err hands.

If you’ve ever had a job interview at like Kroger or McDonalds or Speedway or some other innocuous conglomerate, you’ve experienced one of the most curious moments one ever experiences in our country, which is being asked the question, “why do you want to work here?” It took me multiple interviews to figure out how I’m expected to answer that question. The answer is of course, “because I need money and am willing to essentially whore myself in order to get even the smallest of amounts.” But that didn’t get me a job at White Castle. I realize that they expect me to say that I love the company I’m applying for, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say that. Maybe it’s the anarchist punk side of me that hates capitalism, but the best I’ve ever been able to come up with is, “I have a few friends who have worked at one of these places, and they said it wasn’t the worst job they’ve had, so…”

I read a book on animal intelligence recently, the first one I’ve read since Charlotte’s Web, and in one chapter the author wrote about these elephant researchers who demonstrated the elephants’ ability to remember their fellow elephants by blasting old recordings of familiar, dead elephants out of their Humvee stereo, and when they broadcast the dead elephant’s roar, a bunch of the elephants that knew the aforementioned dead elephant would respond with excitement at the surprising return of their old friend. That is pretty fucked up. I get that these kind of discoveries are pretty crucial to our understanding of evolutionary processes and whatever but seriously, playing a dead elephant’s roar in front of all its old friends and family? Elephants would never be so cruel to us. Picture just lying in bed one night and suddenly hearing your dead grandmother shouting from outside, and then you draw the blinds to look out your window and there’s some douchebag elephant holding a boom box, John Cusack style. You can tell that elephants don't watch horror movies because if I heard a dead relative's voice, I would shit my pants and hide under my bed.

I don’t believe in God, but I am somewhat certain that there is something unexplainable out there that gets off on making an ironic example out of me. For example, the other night I was really high and I couldn’t find my weed. I spent two hours looking for it before I remembered that I had smoked it.

I used to not believe in ghosts, but that all changed recently when I realized that I’m being haunted. I was talking to a friend of mine and he told me about how he believes that his whole life he’s had this paranormal entity following him to every house he’s moved into. I asked him why he thinks this and he told me that he always sees shit in the corner of his eye and that he’ll set his keys somewhere and when he goes to find them they turn up somewhere else. I was like, holy shit; I think this guy’s ghost is cheating on him with me because this same shit always happens to me. This whole time I’ve been blaming marijuana for my tendency to lose my keys, but it’s actually just because I played with a Quija board when I was a kid.

A lot of older, specifically male, comedians tell jokes about getting prostate exams, because for men of a certain age it is a universally relatable topic. Unfortunately I am only 24 and haven’t had any bladder or bowel related issues so I’ve never received a prostate exam, but I still want to get in on that demographic so when I get home every night I shove my finger up my own ass and try to think of something funny. That joke could have been stronger… so I know what I’m doing tonight. Going to lock my bedroom door and work on more material.

Thank you for listening to stuff that I wrote down while I should have been working, my name is Ben Idle; you can find me on the internet if you want.