So, here I am, in lock down, with time enough at last to write some fresh comedy material. But on the other hand, with all the theaters shut down, there's no where to send it to. Oh, well. Good thing there's an internet, right? So, watching the news, it's almost like the whole virus response thing is being run by the Three Stooges or something. And that's what was the inspiration for our next sketch, which is some repurposed Stooge bits with some new jokes. Give it a read and let me know what you think. And if you're producing a comedy show, drop me a line...
 No gown? No problem! Well, if this pandemic has taught me anything, it's that I'm not nearly as driven creatively as I would have liked to believe. When I was younger, I was writing all the time; on the train, on the ferry, on my lunch break, and to be completely honest, at my work desk in lieu of actual work. But lately, I've grown lazy about it. I spend too much time on Twitter. It's like a creative fix. Knock out a dozen pithy and/or snarky remarks and I'm spent. Sure, I was turning out a skit once a week, some jokes and the occasional prose piece, but those venues have been closing all around me. I had done some "industrial"-type work last year for a Chinese company, but we all know what kind of shape they're in these days. I'm barely updating this blog.
I hear and read about these people binging streaming shows, cooking, baking, streaming their own shows and I'm perplexed by this. My day job has me working from home. I'm doing like a normal 8-hour shift at my PC. And when I leave my work station in the basement and commute upstairs, I still feel spent. And, of course, I want to spend time with my wife, and that's when we do our TV viewing. But instead of writing my next big screenplay, I'm clearing out the basement. When the weather improves, my wife will have me cleaning up the backyard. There's chores and whatnot. So even in a lock down, I'm still not able to carve out any major writing time. This post may be it for the day. I know, I know, people are suffering and dying out there. People's lives are being turned upside-down. But my ordinary life moves along in extraordinary times. I'm trying to keep in contact with my family, spread across the east coast. I'm trying to stay informed. But if there's an occasion to rise to, I don't feel like I'm rising to it. So, I post my anxiety on a blog no ones reading and try to vent it out of my system. Thanks for the moment. One of my odder writing gigs was a freelance job I had from 2007 to 2013, writing for the conservative news site, Newsbusters.  I have to say, that even though the series was seriously bias (because, you know, everyone else was too bias the other way) Newsbusted did do a couple of things right. They often ended the set with a general pop culture or neutral current events story, so that gave me some wiggle room on submissions. They were open to more absurdist punchlines that came from a less stringent angle. And they let me do some self-referencing jokes about doing the show itself and how little everyone was making. Sometimes just making a joke about the item, inside of being against it, was enough for them. I was going to to their site every day to check the "news stories" that were making them angry. Then I started following some other sites they linked to find out what was annoying them as well and turn it into a joke. There are some scary rabbit holes out there. I wrote about the fine folks over at Gateway Pundit about it once... Even by September I was doubting my ability to keep working for them. I wrote "Saw the bit on "Newsbusted" The guy's delivery is okay. Material is weak. Even my NBC news/illegal immigrant line was stupid. Plus--I'm still kicking myself for not including the topper--"Not only should it increase ratings, they work a lot cheaper!"
In October I write that I got the latest check. "I feel dirty, but" it's a check!  One of my odder writing gigs was a freelance job I had from 2007 to 2013. I was writing jokes for Valleyheart Productions in LA. What was Valleyheart Productions? They produced a weekly comedy video for the wacky folks over at Newsbuster.org, the home of irrational political discourse.
Now, how did I, a NPR-produced, Garrison Keillor-style tax & spend liberal, wind up writing conservative comedy for a humorless Tea-Partisan organization? Easy, I responded to a Craigslist ad. A gentleman, whom I came to know as Eric Peterkofsky, was hunting for comedy writers who could write jokes from a more conservative perspective. I'm not a very political person, but if I'm annoyed at something I can come up with some jokes. And, I'm pretty good at reading a room and designing jokes to fit it. So, I submitted some sample jokes. Probably some anti-Hillary jokes. That was like catnip for them. I took this as a challenge. I don't think it's bragging to say I can write good comedy. But trying to write right-wing comedy? It's like capturing a unicorn or a compassionate conservative; does it exist? And, to be honest, I really didn't have much going on at the time and a gig's a gig. My sample worked. Eric did a demo for the Newsbuster site and he was brought in to produce a weekly "Weekend Update" style video, joking on the liberal follies of the day. Here's the thing, conservatives (Bob Hope, Milton Berle) can do great comedy, but conservative comedy is not a thing. First, it's very hard to create comedy solely by agenda because the comedy will always come in second. Bob Hope was famous for poking fun at everyone. Conservatives will not poke fun at other conservatives (unless they go rogue). And what they do go on about sounds like a sermon. I'll also note here that comedy is best when it punches up, speaking truth to power. Making fun of women, civil rights and immigrants really isn't "punching up." I quickly learned that Conservative comedy usually was simply a matter of putting the words "Hillary" or "Obama" as the punchline and turning up the laugh-track. Look, not everybody in politics is right all the time. Not every program is a good one. So, I was able to find things to mock. Also, sometimes, it's very, very easy to pander to and mimic the audience. Once they got the green light, I began submitting material. At first I was submitting it daily, going to the Newsbusters website, seeing what their latest outrage was and trying to turn it into a joke, with an actual punchline. And I was hitting the mark. I was getting 2 to 3 jokes a week in. And not to brag, mine were the most solid ones in the videos. And also, mine actual jokes.  This month marks the 9th birthday of my blog. Happy blog-iversary to me! Still not sure if anyone's reading it, but it keeps me off the street at night. It's been a good place to recollect and reminisce about my writing career (such as it is) and pull out some material from the hard drive that never got a shot.
I hope you're enjoying it. From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...  Well, here's another sketch I had long forgotten about. PHC went to broadcast the show from Germany. I knew they often liked to gear their material toward their hosts, so I came up with this bit. I bet you didn't think I could squeeze this many wall jokes into one sketch but I did! Again, the material is so specific, when they rejected it, I was walled in (I did it again!) and couldn't conceive of any secondary markets to submit it to. After that, they went on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Berlin Wall-NutsFrom 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...  Here's one of those bits I totally forgot about. As I noted in my writer's journal, PHC was headed to Europe for some shows in March. I figured that was as good a premise as any, so, apparently, I wrote this. I can't even begin to imagine where I came up with this. It starts as an auction featuring various cast members' organs that segues into a parody of the Seqway inventors news announcement of "IT," the next big thing, using one of PHC's more obscure regular characters, Larry of Larry Dotcom.com. The jokes are solid. The pacing is good. And I always enjoy trying to take cast members and create a "character" for them. It's just a pile of silliness firing on all cylinders, that was just too unique to try and re-work to submit elsewhere. Then there were all the typos. Maybe that put them off. Fundraising for Europe
Well, we did preview the short back on Halloween 2019. They've put together a trailer and we're now in the process of drumming up business. So, if anyone has a drum, let us know!
STEAMED! Trailer from Jacob Maximillian Baron on Vimeo. From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...  Another sketch from the slush pile. I had written this earlier for a workshop and enjoyed it. I noted in my journal that I was prepping it and two European-theme sketches for PHC, as they were going to to a couple of shows from Germany. The sketch was a Siskel & Ebert set-up, but I was really mocking Rex Reed, a NYC film critic of the time. I didn't care for him. He spend entirely too much time and effort denouncing Blake Edwards' films every time a Pink Panther movie came up. I loved the Pink Panther movies so I always wondered what bug was sticking up Reed's rear-end. I re-worked the to be audio (of course, but it was very dialogue heavy to begin with). I recast the roles to allow the PHC players to each take a part and then I had the set-up simply be, as GK often did, a segment on the show. "Titanic Panic" is a title from a prose piece I did pitching new Titanic sequels. In retrospect, this has WAY too many pop culture references in it, in addition to being a parody of a TV show, to really be considered for the show. And I was too lazy to keep updating it to submit elsewhere. But I always loved the ending. I felt like I put my BFA in Cinema Studies to good use. SNAP PREVIEWSFrom 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...  As I noted way back when, the first bit that got on PHC was my skit "Abbott & Othello." And as I stated elsewhere, Abbott & Othello became kind of a cottage industry for me. Now, my journal for February 2001 doesn't record much about this time. It says I was skipping a week (the grind must have been getting to me) and prepping a movie review sketch for the next show and a couple of bits for their shows that were going to be done in Europe. And I have those sketches in the queue. No mention of me pulling a sketch out of the draw and re-working it for PHC. But, that's what I did. I took one of my Shakespeare bits and adapted it into a radio sketch and send it. The sketch was "The Road to Hamlet." I have to say, I love this sketch, I always have. I got to do snappy dialogue and song parodies all in a genre I created. It's an epic sketch and has yet to be put on its feet. I thought it was perfect for the stage, but converting it to radio worked; I changed some sight gags into audio gags (what was originally a stage manager handing out props as needed now becomes the sound effects guy), and where I couldn't convert the gag, I put a hat on it to acknowledge it. I have to say, despite the strong nostalgia factor and its relationship to Abbott & Othello, I really couldn't imagine GK using it, even adding mouth trumpets to mimic what they did in their version of A&O. And, by gum, he didn't. So, I present the radio version of it here: The Road to Hamlet |
Dan FiorellaFreelance writer, still hacking away. 
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