CHRIS COEN

I got a chance last night to open up for Pauly Shore.  I jumped on it, noticing immediately the club was a sell out.  I met the “handler” who was basically the sound guy and problem solver.  He was very nice, but from the West Coast, so I don’t know if we communicated well.  “Are you the opener?”  Yes.  “Who is the emcee?”  I am.  “Then who is the opener?”  Ummm.  Me.  I’m both.  The feature is after me.  Can I have his intro?  “He doesn’t have intro music.”  Right.  What does he want me to say when I bring him up?  “Oh, that.  Not sure.”  Then again, my voice is very deep and mumbly.  Maybe he couldn’t understand my slack-jawed yokel accent.

I am not much of a picture guy, I’m not very comfortable meeting big names, so I wasn’t sure how my meeting Pauly would go.  He walked in, right before I hit the stage.  “Are you the opener?”  Yes!  “Have fun.”  Cool, thanks!  Holy shit, I am a dud.  Way to wow right from the start.

The show was sold out, so I stood and watched some of it, then after dodging the swinging kitchen door I figured I was better off just sitting at the ol’ bar.  I have a joke where I mention the way my career path is going, at the age of 50 I’ll be running the scrambler at your local county fair.  I then rub my hairy belly and say, “You kids quit pooshin’!”  This apparently created a kinship with a middle aged lady who approached me after the show and poked me in the gut way too hard.  “THAT BELLY MADE ME LAUGH!”  Then she walked away.  I need a handler, I feel violated.  Security!

I had a show Saturday night with my buddy Troy Hammond.  Troy is, I believe, the only blind comedian in the U.S.  Strangely, any disability is actually an advantage for material writing in comedy.  Turn lemons into lemonade!

We went up to the show outside of Youngstown and I realized having a blind navigator isn’t ideal when you are trying to find the place.  We shot past it and as I turned, a hockey masked psycho was chasing cars up and down the street.  I naturally did a double take and it was in fact a haunted house.  Then again, we were near Youngstown so it may have been an average Saturday night.

I thought of great joke about how the government had been shutdown for five days and people were already resorting to violence.  As I prepared to take the stage, the emcee said exactly what I had thought almost word for word.  I realized at that moment great minds think alike or I am an unoriginal turd.  Probably the latter.  I threw out another line instead that bombed horribly and got off to bad start.  It took me about three jokes to win them back.  That’s what I get for leaving the script.  Fire my cue card holder!

At the open mike, anyone can sign up, so a bar regular did it (see last blog).  He hit the stage, and I hadn’t seen it before, but he had pre-planted several notes on the speakers.  I used to carry a cheat sheet onstage, but this was the ultimate boy scout move – putting notes on before the show even started.  He did eventually pick up the sheets and shuffle through them.  Not subtle, but good work.  Then he fired it up.

Surprisingly, he wasn’t awful.  Long-winded, borrowed a lot of old premises, but had a few original punches.  I was disappointed for the purposes of my blog.  I was wrapping up the show, when suddenly, like a dream, a second bar patron came up to me.  “Hey man, I want to go up.”  OK, I handed him the mike.  “You ever hit it doggy style and stick your finger up there and put it your mouth?”  He then did four minutes of eating poop “humor.”  I was watching it and laughing so hard (not WITH him, but AT him) that I nearly had a stroke.  Comedy is fun.  Bad comedy is legendary.  I now want to encourage more new comics to show up every week.

I think at least 85% of comedians are drunk or high the first time they do comedy.  OK, I’m exaggerating.  83%.  I know I was good and lit up when I first did it.  I pounded nine beers and did two offensive minutes, much to the delight of the seven people who came to see me…and to the horror of the other seven ladies trying to have a girls night out.  (I’m pretty sure one of those ladies would stab me to this day; I can still feel the hate in her eyes almost a decade later.)

Fast forward to my open mike show Monday.  There’s a guy that I discuss sports with each week that decided to sign up out of left field.  “Hey, I want to sign up.  Let me know what’s going on, I want to tape it and put it on YouTube.”  First bit of advice from someone who has done a few hundred shows – don’t tape your first set, cowboy.  Relax.  Trust me, I watched my clips on MySpace a couple years ago from my first feature set.  I nearly got facial reconstruction surgery and changed my name.  Shame is a stink you can’t scrub off.

I led off the show and did my BS, then turned it over to a rather new comic who cracks me up because every week he starts off his show assuming everyone in the crowd has seen every set he’s ever done.  “If you were here last week, you might remember my girlfriend called me gay.”  Everyone just kind of stared, I don’t think anyone other than me was there the week before.  Then my rookie took the stage…

Now that Breaking Bad is over, millions of Americans will have a hole in their weeks that Super Fun Night just can’t fill.  (Holy shit, that show looks awful – Rebel Wilson is hyper and wacky!  For 30 minutes!  Blah.)  Since spinoff shows pop up like weeds and they usually stink, I thought of few, other than Saul’s, which has already been scheduled.  (Don’t read if you haven’t watched the finale.)

1) Mike decides to…wait he’s dead.  2)  Gus runs into the Mexican cartel for one last shootout.  Oh yes, he’s dead also.  3) Todd; dead.  Never mind.  OK, all of my ideas are going to have to be in the past.  Mike as a cop, pre-Gus Frane.  A lot of pistol whipping and dirty cop stuff.  No plot necessary, Mike kicking ass is enough.  The only thing is that Mike is pretty old, start shooting soon please.

That’s about it.  Walt Jr. can’t really carry a show and Marie having a show would be like Joey from Friends doing his own gig.  Oh, there are the hitmen twins.  I could watch any show with those maniacs.  At least Walking Dead is almost back on.  My NFL team is 0-4.  Throw me a bone Sundays.

(continued from last blog in an effort to keep my blogs short enough to read while on the toilet at work)

I told my pal the Wop we needed to get the last 20 partygoers out to keep them from being arrested.  When my efforts of reason couldn’t help out, he grabbed one the stubborn ones and slammed his head into the oven light cover, threatening to break his legs.  He left, which was good.  He was part of a team of 30 college athletes, which was bad.  They called the house about 20 minutes later and said it was on.

A normal, rational person would’ve locked the door, perhaps skipped out or called the cops back, but my buddy’s brother took off in a fit of rage to dispatch the entire bunch.  Nobly, yet stupidly, we ran after him to prevent a terrible beating.  As the rowdy mob of well trained 18-22 year old young men surrounded us, I hoped every Steven Seagal movie was possible.

I got suckerpunched and went down, but amazingly, about half the bros awarded me a pardon and let me get up…almost.  The douche threw another punch at me and some animal reaction took over.  I swung, knocking him flat.  Take that!  Then I felt hands dragging me to the earth.  I broke loose and ran faster than should’ve have been possible for an intoxicated has-been, but unbeknownst to me, someone had sawed off a tree, leaving the stump for me to trip over at a full sprint some months later.  What happened next was I realized unlike a Seagal movie, the attackers don’t come one at a time, they bumrush you and call you homosexual slurs while stomping on your face.  Thanks for nothing, Steven!

In a rather basic conversation the next morning with the Wop, we both determined we only fight chess teams or foreign exchange students going forward.  When I got to a mirror and realized I had a shoe print in my face, I recalculated and surmised I wouldn’t fight anyone.  If getting beat up by seven guys is fighting, that is.  The only bright side is that my face was so smashed, I got nearly a week off work!  Maybe I should kick my own ass…