The Black Fridays

I went to a birthday party on Saturday night.  I input the directions on metro.net and they told me it would take like three buses to get there.  Then I put in the time I'd actually be leaving and this time it was only two, and the second bus ride was only for a few minutes, so I figured I could walk from there.

 

But originally, I was told that the house was not far from my place so I figured I'd be able to input the address, find out where it was and stumble home.  This place was probably not walking distance.

 

The party was more fun than I thought it would be.  I walked down the street the house was on and it was dark, but looked like a good neighborhood.  I saw a friend and we walked to this poorly lit house with a light shining on a poster with some balloons.  "That must be the way," said my friend as we went in.  For the first few minutes I just hung around talking to the two comics at the entrance, but I hung out for some time and mingled.

 

I chatted with a TV writer for some time and formally met some comics I've performed with over the past few weeks.  There was a children's pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey game on the back fence (The party was confined, almost comically so, to a small part of the backyard).  The party seemed over, so I took a piece of tape and a napkin and "won."

 

But pin-the-tale-on-the-donkey was something of a headlining event for those still there.  The guest of honor was wasted to the point of casually flipping beer bottles over the fence and not wearing pants properly.  So spinning blindfolded wasn't the most fun thing for him.

 

It was 2:30.  Buses don't start on that route until 7am.  I walked home.

 

On Sunday night I went to IO West as I was scheduled as one of the guaranteed spots.  I grabbed some slices of pizza and hung out downstairs.  The guy that runs the show at Groundworks was there and expressed shock when I told him how long I'd been doing stand-up.  "That long?  Really?  I thought you just started!"  I expressed shock at seeing him anywhere other than that open mic.

 

The first name picked out of the hat (metaphorically speaking.  It's easier than saying cute-sy wootsy Easter basket), was the question-and-answer guy.  This time he didn't tell the audience to ask questions.  He just stood up there for a few minutes until someone started heckling.  He got angry that no one had any good questions, despite not having prompted us, and started arguing with the host.  When he went back down, he started heckling comics and set the tone for the show.  There were other comics that referenced this outburst and one that even attempted the same tactic when she ran out of material.

 

I got up and sort of represented a halfway point in the show.  I told jokes.  I got some laughs.  I got off stage.  I went home after the show.

 

On Monday I got an IM from a friend, "Did you hear about Michael Richards?"  I hadn't.  I'm glad the story broke when it did so I could reflect before saying something.  In fact, I saved this part for last when writing this week.

 

First of all let me state something so there's no confusion:

 

As an audience member, don't talk to the comic on stage unless he specifically addresses you and asks you a question.

 

There.  Now that that's out of the way, what Michael Richards did was way out of line.  I've seen comics handle hecklers poorly, so my instinct was to give him the benefit of the doubt and not think he was racist.  In the past couple of days, however, I think I've realized that he is.  He's just not racist in a way that he knows of.  It's part of human nature to categorize and label.  It's also in the nature of someone being attacked (and I don't know exactly the nature of the heckling before the tirade) to cut hard and deep so that they hurt.  That's what he intended to do.  If it was a guy with another obvious trait he would have thrust into that.

 

But the mess started when he used race, and especially lynching, as his attack.  To use the words he used was not to realize the power they still have, and might always have, to do excessive harm.  On Monday night his friend Jerry Seinfeld invited him to apologize on the Late Show with David Letterman.  To the cynic this was an act of damage control as the Seinfeld seventh season DVDs were about to drop in stores soon.  That might have been true, but I also thought it was a kind gesture to a friend in need.  I thought that the whole incident was blown out of proportion, to an extent, but I'm not, as Michael Richards would clumsily say, "Afro-American," I don't have the right to make that judgment.

 

It also demonstrated the difference between Richards and Seinfeld in the context of stand-up comic.  Seinfeld tossed off a line, after the apology, to the effect of "Now let's try to segue into being funny," which he knew he could do effortlessly.  He has a talent for dealing with hecklers in a smug way that shuts them up and keeps the audience on his side.  I actually look up to him for that, among other things (Here I'll put a shameless plug up for my video on YouTube and MySpace for an example of how I like to think I'd be able to handle hecklers in most situations.  Of course the heckler in this case was quite harmless, but in other situations, I've handled them in similar fashion.).

 

Now I love the show Seinfeld.  It was a brilliant exercise in post-modern entertainment and advanced the form of the sitcom in innovative new ways by incorporating more than two plots and increasing the pace to about thirty scenes in an episode.  But there was an episode that made me uncomfortable with regard to race.  In the sixth season Jerry meets a woman through crossed phone lines that he thinks is Chinese.  "I like the Chinese."

 

Elaine questions this by asking, "Isn't that a little racist?"

 

To which he replies, "If I like their race...how is it racist?"  to which he got an applause break.  But it is racist just as much as if you called someone lazy because of their race.  But it doesn't mean you're full of hate.  You probably discriminate in some fashion though.

 

Race is used effectively in comedy though.  This is often in the form of ironic racism.  A few years ago Sarah Silverman got in trouble for using a joke about escaping jury duty.  She said that to get out of it without seeming racist she'd write on her form, "I love chinks."  I barely did justice to the joke by paraphrasing.  I wasn't be offended by it because it was such a clever joke and it offered some level of commentary on race.

 

But too much of it, and even a little of it, is racist in its own way.  I've even been guilty of using the word "chink" too much.  It was rarely on stage, but in conversation when I've attempted to make jokes and take it as my own.  I say guilty because I'd do it to abuse the power I have to take ownership of slurs of my heritage and attach an ironic meaning, because I could, for no greater purpose.

 

Some people think that's what Michael Richards was trying to do.  Perhaps he was going for that, something like it.  But probably only after he realized exactly what he said.  It, like the initial outburst, was a defense mechanism.  He had more at stake given where he was in his career.

 

I don't even know if I have a point with all this.  Even the most casual of comedy fan among you probably has heard enough analysis on the incident to be completely sick of it.  But I had to write something for the same reason I write anything here: to be purely and completely self-indulgent.

 

For example, Michael Richards wasn't the only entertainment news story this week.  Robert Altman died.  For a film major, I didn't see that many films, in retrospect I should have majored in television, that's more where my passions lie.  But I did catch some of his work.  And I absolutely loved the reality of the dialogue.  I loved the sound recording techniques, like when I read about how he had the actors in M*A*S*H wear lavalier microphones to record the rustling in the clothing and the subtleties of the dialogue.  I'm certainly not alone.

 

At my interview for the internship at David Sutherland Productions, I got into a discussion with him about Altman and realized the influence on his style as a documentary filmmaker, especially with regard to sound design.  Both Altman and David Sutherland had influenced me in dialogue and sound editing.  You could make it the flawed improvisational dialogue of real life.  You could also create an atmospheric film with a world of characters and situations.

 

But anyway...

 

Tuesday I went back to Westwood Brewing Co. for the first time in about a month.  It was as I remembered it, a fun little show in a part of town that's just far enough away that it's still barely worth it.

 

Unbeknownst to me, the show before Thanksgiving there is traditionally one in which comics imitate each other.  So the veteran host, Vance Sanders, dressed as Rob Yasumura (sp?), complete with horn-rim glasses, blazer and tie.  I went up and Rob introduced me as "the deepest voiced Asian guy I know," so I walked up from the audience and as I took the mic from the stand I looked down and, before I turned around, I said, "I'm...George...Takei."  I got a pretty good-sized laugh from that and continued, conspicuously, reading my new jokes, with requisite commentary.  To close I decided to play Pick-a-Beatle in which I would do the corresponding impression by request.  it was an audience of comics, so I got "Pete Best!"  To which I replied, "I'm a trivia question!" and got off stage.

 

In marked contrast with most of the other acts I didn't make jokes about Altman or Richards.  I just didn't think of any.  I think I tossed off a line about Altman and overlapping dialogue and how I wanted to imitate Michael Richards, but this was before the show.

 

I got another ride to the UCB from Vance Sanders.  I caught the end of See You Next Tuesday, it was a larger show than I remembered it being.  It was more like Comedy Death Ray in a way.  It was a hip sketch filled alt/stand-up showcase.

 

The rest of the week was quiet.  Although there was a show at Synergy, I didn't go out on Wednesday.

 

This was the first Thanksgiving without my parents and brother.  My uncle, aunt, cousin, and grandparents took me out with them to Dim Sum, so I hung out with some family.  I forgot what little I knew of Dim Sum etiquette.  There's a thing you do with chopsticks.  When grabbing from a plate in the center, turn them around so that you don't get germs all over. 

 

After, we perused Chinatown, for me maybe the first time ever.  I know I haven't been there in years, if I had at all.

 

That night I went to see if I could get some take out and eat in front of the TV.  I settled on a run to Rite Aid for some microwave lasagna and Coca-Cola and half-watched Solaris.  Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Black Friday was about as slow.  I went to Groundworks and IO West for the two open mics.  I signed up at Groundworks before going to IO West to hang out until the comics got there.  But I went around back to the mainstage and saw that the Black Box was dark.  I guess people wanted to go home and be with their families or something.  I don't know.

 

So, I went back to Groundworks and the host was a bit down since there weren't that many people there.  I was the last comic on.  I wrote my name down on the 16th spot as usual, but there was no one after me.  In fact, I was 12th.  I bombed hard.  I went to the Karma Cafe nearby and read with a piece of cake.  After I was done with the magazine, I hung out where I sometimes do, the Borders on Sunset and Vine.  It seems not much has changed in the years since college when I would spend my lonely  Friday nights walking down Newbury Street and settling on Virgin Megastore and Trident Booksellers & Cafe as my hangouts.

 

But now I'm watching a marathon of a Canadian sitcom called Slings and Arrows about a theatre company putting on a production of MacBeth, or "The Scottish Play" for those inside theatres.  It's like The Office with Mark McKinney in the Steve Carell role.

 

Thank you, I'm Eric Cheung.  I'm on MySpace and Live Journal.

 

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