Don't Quit Your Day Job

Tried a few jokes at Trino's tonight, based on exaggerated incidents from my life. A little dark, but not nearly so graphic as some of the other comic's material. Got a few mild chuckles, but need to work on delivery.

A selection:

I grew up in a semi-rural area. That’s where people hoped they’d have enough money to move into a trailer.

Everyone in our neighborhood was a religious fanatic. We had fundamentalists on one side, Jehovah Witnesses on the other, and Catholics in the middle. We invited everyone over for a witch-burning, but no one had a match, so many of us were tied to posts.

Life was tough as an awkward kid on the playground. When they passed the football to me, I ducked. What do you give someone who makes fun of the way you through a baseball? A concussion!

First day of P.E. in junior high we were handed a list of clothes to get, which included a jockstrap. Scared the hell out of me: tough in front and totally exposed in the back. What was scarier was getting undressed for showers for the first time and discovering I was the only one wearing a jock strap.

The kids were merciless in the shower too. They would snap towels at me. One day I lunged at one naked kid, missed his towel, but grabbed something soft and vulnerable between his legs. In basketball, don’t they call it a ‘jump ball’? When the coach heard all the screaming, he came over, picked up a towel, and started snapping away at me too.

So, the hell with sports. I tried to harden my body through wilderness adventure. My friends and I went hiking, and we went caving too. One day in a cave we had to wade through an underground pool. We saw all these white balls on the bottom of the pool. What were they? We touched one ball, and the white coating popped, leaving a mudball-like core with what appeared to be little sticks poking out. We could see there was some kind of strange gas streaming away from the mudball. It took a long, long time, passing the mudball back and forth from hand to hand and sniffing the gas to finally realize that THIS is what happens when bats die and fall into underground pools.

Of course, adulthood hasn’t been that much better.

One day the neighbor lady came over to my house, screaming that someone in the alley had exposed himself to her. I locked her in my house for her safety, she called the cops, and I bravely went out into the alley – just in time to meet the cops looking for oddballs in the alley.

I read that there are edible plants called pigweed that grows in sidewalk cracks. But the book says pigweed doesn’t taste very good – it’s gummy and makes your mouth foam. I tried to impress a date with some sidewalk do-it-yourself salad. I think she’s in the witness protection program now.

I took my date to go dancing in a discotheque. Someone stepped on my foot, so I started boogeying away to find more space. My foot still hurt, though, and the pain was increasing. Finally, I looked down, and I was shocked: a woman's stiletto heel had slipped into the narrow gap between my shoe and my foot. I had wrenched her shoe off of her foot and carried it away. I looked up, and I was shocked again: a shoeless beauty was limping across the floor, frantically trying to catch up to me. I offered her shoe back (kneel, in illustration) but she ripped her shoe out of my hands and limped away in disgust. I turned around and my date stomped on my other foot for playing Cinderella with someone else.

I’d like to finish with a sign I saw posted on a community center door. The sign read: “Anger Management Class – Is Cancelled”.

I saw something the other night I’ve never seen before. I went to a dance club and saw two women in the club with heads covered - Muslim women. Later in the evening, I saw one of the women dancing in a go-go dancer's cage. THAT’S the future, man – go-go dancers in burqas! World’s going to hell, man! Young people are in trouble! You can put me out to pasture with girls in mini-skirts and black, leather boots. Go-go dancers in burqas – you can keep that!

And finally, a joke I stole from someone else. Two blondes put the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle, were overjoyed, and started celebrating. A fellow asked what was so special about that and they said they had been working on the puzzle for four months. "Four months!" he said. "Yes," they replied, "but look at the label on the box: three-to-five years!"