CHRIS COEN

I like the Olympics, mostly because America usually kicks a lot of ass.  I don’t care what the sport is, I’ll root for it if the old USA is involved.  Take that, country that hasn’t won a medal in 44 years!  Here’s the big stories so far (at least to me).

– Phelps gets cupped.  Michael Phelps, hero to drinkers and potheads everywhere for showing you can party and still dominate, had weird bruises and people went nuts.  I’ve been cupped before.  My wife had to use them when I knocked a ribhead out of my back playing in an alumni football game.  I was so dehydrated and inflexible, the cups helped pull blood into my back to push the ribhead back in.  I mean, I am basically ahead of Michael Phelps.  Hack.

– Who in the hell plans this thing?  There are at least 432 different swimming events.  Can we narrow it down to a sprint or a distance race?  There is so much going on in swimming, I’m shocked they can cram it into two weeks.  Canoe slalom?  Yep.  Rhythmic gymnastics?  Of course!  Wrestling?  Almost removed completely from the Olympics.  That makes sense, it’s just one of two sports that require amateur status and has been around since naked men grappled in the ancient Greece games.  OK, maybe I’m hurting my case for wrestling.

– Poop, dead bodies and steroids.  You try and be nice to an underdeveloped nation and they reward you with rivers full of feces and human remains.  Luckily, a sizable chunk of athletes were found to be doping, so they can survive the bacteria and disease covering every inch of the city.  The Russians were doing so many PED’s, they could have been – well, the Russians in about every Olympics.  Ever since Ivan Drago killed Apollo Creed, I haven’t trusted those bastards.

That’s it for now – US is winning medal count and it keeps people from putting up political posts for two weeks, so keep at it Olympics.  The sports, not the poop water.  Keep up the sports.

I used to host parties with some regularity when I was younger, especially Halloween parties.  The prep was buy a bunch of booze and put the same decorations I’d put up six straight years in a row.  Then I hoped no one pissed in my laundry room or chucked my furniture off the balcony.

Well, I got to host my first kid birthday party last weekend (which makes sense because I have a kid now).  It was a little different.  I actually cleaned.  This is a weird thing where you wipe stuff down and mop and sweep.  It was unpleasant, but seemed to work.  I’ll make a note of that.

Then I went to the store.  Four times in 24 hours.  We made this (by we I mean my wife).

Me going to the store with my wife’s list usually involves me aimlessly looking for something I’ve never heard of, like vegetables or fruit.  The last trip, though, I bought a batch of beers and ales totaling 72 drinks, plus ice and 3 gallons of ice cream.  Cashier: “Having a party?”  No, I am going for the funnest suicide ever.

We survived and my daughter had a blast, but if we get three more toys in the house, I’ll have to sleep in the car to make room.  It works, because I still have tons of beers left over and I tend not to care where I sleep after pounding a few of those.

I started doing comedy all the way back in 2007, not counting the one open mic I did years before.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  My timing sucked, I wrote way to much in the shock category and not enough in the funny category and I was very limited in what crowds I could do well in front of.

I really enjoyed comedy, when it went well and I hated when it didn’t.  So I worked at it.  I worked hard – I typed up every single joke I had written and rated them 1-5 to rank jokes for performances and sets.  I then moved them into categories like family, drinking, clean, etc.  I recorded sets on a shitty recorder I could barely hear and listened to up to a dozen times.  I took shows in horrible parts of town and did every open mic, whether four people were there or forty.  I worked on my timing and practiced telling jokes to my dog with a TV remote in my hand as a faux microphone, pacing around my condo like a loon.  I got better.

By 2010, I had won my third comedy contest at a major comedy club.  I was working for half a dozen booking agents and put 40,000 miles on my car in one year (some for work, but still).  I started a website shortly after and began posting on Twitter and a Facebook fan page.  I passed a feature showcase test to work at comedy clubs across the country and was even getting some headliner work.

Something most people don’t know though is how completely exhausting it is to do all this.  I was blogging five times a week to get my web hits up and realized I wasn’t putting good stuff online.  Most of my blogs still are written off the cuff and very late the night before.  I have had to work full time, 40-45 hours a week or more the entire time, plus traveling on weekends for one night gigs that barely pay gas, missing time to catch up on house projects, watch the game with your buddies or just recharge your batteries.  I used up all my vacation for three years traveling to gigs.  You get to the city and the bar forgot to book your hotel room.  The crowd doesn’t like you, but the other comic who sings parody songs kills it and you hate everyone.  Your GPS can’t find the gig and you have a stroke trying to get there on time.  Oh and the whole time you’re supposed get Facebook likes and retweets on Twitter, after all, that’s supposed to be important.  Oh and the booker that said they could use you hasn’t returned your last five calls or ten emails.  Sometimes you get shows booked and have to go on when you don’t want to.  My first ever comedy club hosting week?  My grandpa passed away.  I went onstage the day after the funeral and had to act like I was happy to be there.

That’s a long way to go, but this week, some insignificant internet troll decided to attack me on Twitter.  No profile pic, no name, no info, because he or she is such a brave warrior that hides behind a fake identity like a nipple baby.  I’m not looking for sympathy, trust me and I am actually pretty sure it’s another comic, which is even more pathetic (they went after another comic also in the past with this profile and another one that hit us both a few months back).

I could have blocked them, reported them or ignored them, but I’ve worked too damn hard and put up with too much shit to lie down and take it, so I went after it.  If you care to see it, check me out at chriscoencomedy on Twitter.  Or not.  In all honesty, I’m too tired and have a family and a job, so I don’t spend 3 hours a day working on my Twitter game or posts for my Facebook fan page (search Chris Coen, it’s the one with the caricature picture).  If you like a laugh, I always try to be funny and try to post to both once a day.  If you don’t like my humor, don’t check it out.  I appreciate those that follow me and don’t give a red shit if you don’t.  It’s free either way.  If I worked through lunch, came home and did two loads of laundry, balanced my checkbook and then put a mildly funny post or tweet at 11:00 pm, I’M SORRY I RUINED YOUR LIFE.  Also, no one gets booked from Twitter likes.  Hate to break it to you, worm.

And to the person trolling me, and other good comics, while being a vag boy, I will just say this.  If you are such a great humorist, why do you have one follower and zero likes on anything?  Do you have a real profile?  One thing you learn about wrestling a pig in the mud, after a while you find out the pig likes it.  Be a big boy and show your identity or sulk back behind mommy like you’re used to doing your whole pathetic life.

One question you get asked a lot as a parent is do you want to have a boy or girl?  As a young man, who knew nothing about women, I said if I had a kid, I hoped it was a boy so I could relate to my offspring.  Then I became older and got the news my wife was pregnant, although I still knew nothing about women, I just hoped my kid was healthy.  As I reflect back on nearly a year of raising a girl, I realized I should thank the good Lord I had a girl and here’s why.

A conversation arose at the office about what we did as kids.  I remembered my friends playing “one pump” BB gun tag.  That’s where you were allowed one pump only before shooting your pals, since one pump can’t break skin.  What actually happened is every boy with a gun pumped it until it nearly exploded, then buried pellets into everyone’s skin.  Co-worker: “Yeah, we did that too, until some guy lost an eye.  Now he has a glass one.”  Me: “My buddies used to buy .25 cent sunglasses to protect their eyes.”  Co-worker:  “We weren’t that smart.”  Well, no one was, because gas station shades don’t exactly pass OHSA tests.  I doubt there’s too much impact testing for BB’s in the R&D also.

More you say?  We went cliff jumping, rode on the hoods and roofs of cars, and tried to make a flamethrower once from household products.  I did a front flip over a balcony in college and shot bottle rockets at each other.  We boxed using socks as boxing gloves and one time had a wrestling tournament in a room with blacked out lights where two guys got the wind knocked out of them.  In college, my buddies handcuffed another friend of mine to a toilet for six hours after covering him in shaving cream and aftershave, then turned all the showers on hot…for no reason at all.  We shaved a guy’s head, exactly half off including his facial hair and eyebrow, like Two-Face from Batman…for no reason.  I awoke one time because my fraternity brothers had turned on a Shop Vac that was suctioned onto my crotch.  I lost my boxers in the struggle and chased them down naked throwing darts at them.  I hit my friend Donnie Digital in the leg and he went tumbling down a staircase head first.  Oh, and I was co-valedictorian in high school.  I was supposed to be smart.

In summation, maybe having a girl is not only great, it may be the only sane way to raise a kid.  Then again, my daughter may date some animal like me some day.  OK, I’m back to neutral, but I think I will childproof the house every other week from now on to be safe either way.

I went to the zoo with my family this weekend.  My daughter is one and every time we go to the zoo, the sun lurches closer to the earth just to make it miserable, so we don’t stay long.  Seriously, every time we go, it’s between fry an egg on the ground hot and your grandparents’ house on Christmas hot.  We saw some animals, but the people are always more entertaining.  Here’s a rundown.

The “Yeah, I’ve got five kids under seven, but I still got it mom.”  This is the lady with an army of kids that rivals a Nike shoe factory, but still is showing off her stomach and chugging a Bud Light.  She’s ideal for the next person on the list.

The “Hillbilly immune to heat”.  Hillbillies will NOT wear anything other than work boots, jeans and black t-shirts with cattle skulls on them, even if it’s hot enough to jump into the alligator pit to cool off kind of hot.

It’s 95 in the shade, lose the full body camo, kemosabe.

Finally, the rare, but most annoying zoo person, the “I don’t know shit about animals, but I’m loud, so you’re going to hear about it.”  We were looking at leopards and some guy was telling his ladyfriend how shy the leopards were and other fun facts.  The leopard was about six feet from the glass just staring at us, not caring whether we lived or died.  I then realized my dream one day job would be a zoo tour guide that just made shit up the whole time.  It would only be one day, because I would be fired very quickly.

“Well, as you can see, the penguins are tame now, but in the wild, they kill an estimated 350 people a year.”  Is that real?  “Oh yes, then they defecate on the corpses.  VERY aggressive in their natural environment.  Very territorial.  Moving on to the eagles, did you know all know the eagle was picked for the US symbol because their eggs are red, white and blue?”  That’s not correct.  “Well, thanks to people like you not believing in freedom and eagles, they’re only white now.  Hope you’re proud of yourself now, you pinko son of a bitch.”  I need to work on making this happen.

Dada is on a “staycation” this week.  That means you are getting long overdue things around the house done.  If you don’t own a home, you’ve probably never heard on this oddity.  I painted, I cut down trees and bushes, I pulled roots, I nailed and I laundered like a barbarian (OK, barbarians don’t launder).  I finally met my match though, with the Little Tykes Treehouse/Playgym.

My dad and I were smelling like – well, go to the BMV in July, like that, but sober.  We began assembling this plastic Rubik’s cube of a swing set.  We felt proud until we realized the part numbers we could find were on the bottom and we had to start over from scratch after ten minutes.  Then we forgot the washers and had to unwrench the whole thing.  Then we stopped to rag the dripping sweat off our faces, only to realize we lost a locking nut somewhere in the abyss of the backyard.  20 minutes later, I’m at Lowe’s, stuck in fairgrounds dairy farmer traffic.  I began to think – didn’t kids used to play with sticks and dirt?  They turned out alright, I think.

I got to step 12.  It called for STRING, SCOTCH TAPE (not scotch, I would be all for that) and A PENCIL.  I’m assembling a swing set.  WHY IN THE BLUE HELL DO I NEED STRING, SCOTCH TAPE AND A PENCIL – NO ONE USES PENCILS, IT’S 2016.  I had to tie a string to an eyebolt, tape off the bracket (I did the wrong order because the pictures were wrong – thanks team that did the manual) and push a pencil through a hole 9 inches deep.  OH WAIT, I HAVE NORMAL MAN HANDS SO IT DIDN’T FIT BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE HALF HANDS LIKE MORDECAI BROWN OR A ONE YEAR OLD.  I had to use needle nose pliers and a piece of rebar to finesse it through.  I used curse words I had forgotten years before.

I was pumped, we were halfway done.  Then I realized the bar for the swings was not in the box.  I blacked out for a minute, then came through and realized I had survived a rage stroke.  I called Toys R Us, which fixed the problem…by offering me to pick up the  bar, after putting me on hold for 20 minutes with Radio Disney.  I am broken.  I plan now to teach my daughter the wonder of…IMAGINATION!  Let’s pretend there’s a swing set!  YAY!  FUN FOR ALL!