Comedian Ari Shaffir

The people at the LA Comedy Festival (http://www.lacomedyfest.com/) asked me to write a promotional description for my page on their website.  So I went over all the best messages I’ve gotten over the last 3 or 4 months and I came up with this:

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Ari Shaffir is a standup comedian and actor living in Los Angeles, CA.  He is a regular at The Comedy Store, The Improv, and The Laugh Factory, and headlines all over the country. You might have seen him as “The Amazing Racist,” in a series of internet videos that have gotten over 30 million hits when they aren’t being pulled down by YouTube. Or maybe you saw him as he garnered rave reviews for his standup on the HBO comedy show “Down and Dirty with Jim Norton.”

The response to Ari’s comedy has been overwhelming.  ”I’ll fuck you in the ass when you least expect it.” proclaims Greg Rodriguez.  Idean, from Rancho Palos Verdes, CA has also caught the Ari Shaffir fan fever. “You fuckin shalom a bitch racist ass wenevr i see you in la i will fuckin jump your ass.” You may need to wait, Idean–Ari does the road as well. It’s no surprise, considering that he has fans like West Haverstraw, NY’s Miguel who raves, “I bet it wasn’t so funny when your relatives got turn into lamp shades or bars of soap, huh?”  Or Clayton Meeks of Red Lion, DE who hails “Die.”  And that’s just in America.  Ari’s appeal is quickly becoming international.  One new fan from Cihuatlan, Jalisco, Mexico named •°¤*(¯..°(F)( J¿Øø$Ûµ€ë)(F)°..¯)*¤°• sings Shaffir’s praises. “fuck pinche pendeje kome mierda joto te voy a matar.”

Yes, Ari Shaffir’s comedy has a broadbased appeal. He has teenaged fans: “i might only be 14 but im speakin up diz is da kind of shitt dats pisses me off ur a fuken az hole u think u might be funny but ur not ur just a stupid igorant dat dosnt kno anyting” notes ♥fUk fAke’s AnD MEssY BiTchEZ from Houston,TX.  And Shaffir’s comedy crosses over to women, as well. Just ask Edna from Arizona. “Me and my Brown homeboys are gonna find you and kill you. Im personally gonna fuck your wife and kill your son. Im gonna have a nigger rape it.”

But don’t take their word for it.  Come out and see for yourself why everyone is talking about the comedy of Ari Shaffir.
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Well, what do you think?  Of course I would never normally write anything like “…rave reviews” or anything else douchey like that, but I was trying to set up a typical self promoting paragraph like I’ve seen from Jeremy Hotz, or Dane Cook, or any other comic who does those sorts of things in earnest for their websites.  But that was only to mislead expectations for the next two paragraphs.  So don’t judge me, cocksmokers.

And, yes, those are all quotes from actual messages I’ve gotten on MySpace.  I tried to find their real names if I could.  Otherwise, I’d just leave their screen names.

I wrote back to one Latino guy who hadn’t written me in a year. Previously he had said that he was going to find me and shoot me.  This is what I wrote:  “Hey, so what’s going on with your plans to find me? It’s been nearly a year. It seems like you’ve been lazy. Hmm. That’s strange that you’d be lazy, huh?”

That’s one of my new pastimes.  I find old messages of people claiming that they would kill me and I write back to them, asking how their plans are coming.  Sometimes I’ll mention that I’ve already been to their city twice to do comedy since they’ve told me to expect my life to end within the week.  I like to remind them that my tour schedule is up on my page.  I think it’s important to check in with the people that have been affected by your art.  Oh, and they don’t like it when you call it art.  That’s something I learned a long time ago.  It drives them crazy.

It seems like I should have a paragraph here to wrap up this post, but I don’t have the energy to think of one and nothing is just popping into my head without me working at it.  The problem with this blog is that it didn’t stick to one idea.  Really, it was just about the promotional description for the festival.  But then I went into another semi-related topic about my death threats.  I spent too much time on that tangent, and never brought it back to the original topic.  So the result is a disjointed blog that might leave the reader without a sense of closure.  There’s no point, so there’s a greater chance that you leave this page thinking, “Why did I read that?  I didn’t grow at all.  I have left without a feeling of having learned something about the world in which I live.”

Now I’ve added a third, almost completely unrelated subject about writing in general.  This was not a good effort by me at all, and I apologize.  But please let me know what you think about the promotional description, because I think I’m going to use that from now on.  Okay, I’m going to poach some eggs and get back to cleaning my apartment.

It’s from this cool dude.  www.myspace.com/lifttillwedie

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Date:  Mar 28, 2009 7:26 AM

I dont think u will live much longer if you piss people of like you are doing right now, someone is going to find you

so i thought id let you know amazing racist
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Here’s what I think most people who write me the nearly exact same letter
don’t seem to understand.  I love it.  I love the hate mail.  The people who
write them are nearly always dimwits.  And they’re crazy.  I want to read
those letters in the same way I love talking to homeless people.  It’s
entertaining on an “I know I’m supposed to be no better than anyone else,
but you clearly prove that’s not the case” level.  I won’t even explore the
misspellings or the need to shorten you to u when using a full keyboard,
because they’re too obvious.  Nor will I go into what irony is, and how if
you can’t tell that I’m not really racist, by the way I yell at a Latino man
to “Go back to Africa.” then maybe you’re not really examining those videos
fully.  I am a clearly Jewish man wearing a Klan outfit.  Do you maybe think
I’m not really in the KKK?  Perhaps I am, but think about it for a bit, and
you’ll probably have your answer.  Nail salons aren’t known for giving out
“happy endings,” yet there I am trying to get one.  Perhaps I did that on a
comedic level.  Interpret it however you want, but is it possible that these
videos done for National Lampoons were done to elicit laughter and they
shouldn’t be interpreted as an actual random day in my life?  Again, you
interpret it however you want, but it’s something to consider.

As for this particular letter, this would be my response.  It WOULD BE my
response, because, like 50% of the people who write me angry messages, they
have their profiles set to not allow return messages.  It’s very brave to
write a hate filled message to someone you don’t know and will never meet
while making sure they can’t even let you know how dumb you are.  Very
brave.  So this is what I would have responded to him had he allowed it.

“Well, those videos have been around for 5 years and my tour schedule is and
always has been on the front of my MySpace page and my website.  Why would
it be more likely to happen now than it has been over the last half decade?

And faggot is an offensive term.  I’m glad to see you set the line at hate
speech for only certain people.  It really shows how you don’t think all
groups of people are born equal, which is at the core of any racist belief.”

Please look for yourself at how awesome this guy is from his profile.  You
can’t see the pictures unless you make friends with him, but I’m almost
positive he’ll be showing off how rad he is in at least one of them.  And it
will not be ironic.

My favorite messages are the ones that carry hatred inside of them, while
decrying seemingly hateful acts.  Here’s the deal.  I’m Jewish, but I don’t
care about it.  I make Holocaust jokes when they fit.  I take no pride or
shame in the fact that my parents are Jewish.  It’s just something that is.
So you’re not going to make me angry, by making anti-Jewish jokes.  Well,
you’ll make me a little angry when they’re bad jokes, but that’s only
because it offends me on a comedic level.  The same level of joke about any
subject would offend me the same.  And it seems that a lot of people also
like to try to insult me by referring to me as a homosexual.  Which, I’m
sorry to say, is not something I find insulting.  I believe around 8% of the
population is gay.  It’s not a positive or a negative.  It’s just something
people are.  My best friend in college was gay.  Gay Andrew, we called him.
Or Gandrew for short.  When we wanted to insult him, we wouldn’t just call
him gay.  If we did, he would just respond, “Yeah, I’m gay.  I know.”  And
trying to insult a heterosexual by simply insinuating that he or she is one
of the 8% of people born as a homosexual, is akin to calling me a Chink.
It’s NEVER going to make me feel bad.  I’m not infallible.  It’s just that
insulting a heritage on which I place no positive or negative value or
placing me into a percentage of the population who has done nothing to find
their way into that population is not going to do it.

Here’s why I think that they think those things will hurt me.  I think those
are the things that would hurt them.  They only know their own experience.
And they try to to project that experience onto others.  But that doesn’t
always work.  Often people share the same experiences, but it’s not always
the case.  If a professional skateboarder tries to insult me by saying that
my kick flips look like a little boy’s if he had cerebral palsy, well,
that’s not going to sting as much as if I really worked on my kick flips and
took pride in their quality.

I think I’ll start posting more of these letters in the future.  Unless I
get no response from them.  But if people like them, I’ll put up more and
I’ll try to explore (much shorter than this.  Sorry) specifically why each
letter fills me with joy.

I just got home from a really fun trip to Atlanta, Georgia. I was there with my friends Joe Rogan and Brian Redban. We did standup at the Punchline Comedy Club. We drove around looking at the Atlanta scenery. We went to a few radio stations on Friday morning. And we ate.

We went to Fogo de Chao, and pounded down Brazilian steak and fried bananas until it was overflowing from our rectums. We went to some awesome Chinese place (I think the Canton Restaurant or something like that) which had some of the best General Tsoa’s, eggrolls, and hot & sour soup I’ve had in my life. We had Arby’s, which is always good. We got shakes from Wendy’s. We got sandwiches from the supermarket. We got lox and bagels with cream cheese from Einstein Bagels. And we got sausage links, eggs and biscuits from some delicious airport restaurant. And above all, we got fat.

Or rather, I did. I don’t pay attention to the other guys’ bodies. But I came home and weighed in at a whopping 203. Now, I realize a lot of you might not think 203 pounds is very big for a towering man of 6 feet 3 inches. But you have to understand, you only think that way because you’re fatter than I am. Kill yourself. I should be somewhere between 180 and 185. In high-school, I was 6′3″ and 165. Granted I was too thin, but remember 2 things. One, it’s better to be too thin than to be too fat, and two, don’t forget that I just called you fat, you fat fatty. 182 is perfect.

So this week I’m going to try a completely fad diet. It’s not really a fad, since I’ve never heard of it before and it’s not popular in any way. But it is a fad diet in terms of its almost inevitable result in failure.

I’m going to eat nothing but meat for 7 straight days. I can have any kind of meat I want. Beef, chicken, fish (for my inner gaywad), ham/bacon/pork (for the nail in the coffin of my bid to get into heaven), ostrich, buffalo, turkey (for my inner gaywad’s inner gaywad), and all the others that I’m too tired to recall. It’s kind of like the Atkin’s diet, but waaaaaaay unhealthier.

Of course I’m going to let myself drink, but only water. And I can have any seasonings I want on the meat. Right now, I’m looking at a dry rub I got in Dallas last year. I’m not going to eat any potatoes, or string beans, or broccoli or anything else with the meat. The only thing I’ll allow is sauteed onions or mushrooms if it’s supposed to be served on top of the actual steak, and hot peppers if I see them. I’m going to count each of those as a seasoning. The same goes for hot sauce and ranch for chicken wings. But bleu cheese does not count, because bleu cheese contains a nutrient I call vitamin suck.

I won’t have any buns. I won’t have any side dishes. I won’t have any other dishes. I won’t have any snacks (unless you count a 6 piece of McNuggets). I won’t have any popcorn at the movies. I won’t get some ice-cream or a Slurpee on a hot day. I won’t finish the last fry off my buddy’s plate. I won’t even eat the pickle slice off a hamburger patty before I throw away the bread, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes. And I won’t eat any McDonald’s hamburger patties because they contain at least 70% cardboard and cowfeed. Meat and only meat for 7 days.

I just went to Ralph’s and found a whole bunch of t-bones and porterhouses on some super 50-60% off sale. So that’s where I’ll start.

I honestly don’t know if this is going to cause me to lose a small amount of weight, or gain a humongous amount of fat, but it should be delicious either way.

Oh, and obviously, I’m going to allow myself to brush my teeth, smoke pot, chew gum, and take pain killers, but I can only wash them down with water.

I’ll try to leave updates on how it’s going and how weak I’m getting (from lack of nutrients). I’m assuming I’ll pass out at least a couple of times. And I’m already positive I’m going to need to buy a new toilet on Monday.

Good luck to me. May God have mercy on my stomach.

 These are some pranks I did called “The Amazing Racist.” Some people know me from these. Keep in mind, I’m a standup comedian. That should answer any questions you have. I won’t tell people if I’m “really racist or not” or if “I know I’m Jewish” because they’re both very stupid questions.

These pranks make many people laugh and many people angry. If you’re cool, they probably won’t make you angry. If you can’t see the irony or comedic value of a Jew in a Klan outfit who yells at a Latino man to “Go back to Africa.” then I can’t help you on your life journey. You’re already lost.

Hooters Sucks

There was a time when I got really excited when I got to go to a Hooters Restaurant. I remember wanting to catch any glimpse of cleavage and the waitresses there always had it in abundance. And those leggings they wore! Whoa! They stretched the entire length of the leg and made their legs seem as tan and smooth as humanly possible. It’s kind of like what Batman did for his physical performance, they did to their legs.

But years passed by and I’ve fucked a lot of women. Some ugly, some hot. And more importantly, I’ve watched a TON of porn. It’s free on the internet now. No more driving down to the adult bookstore, or going into the back room at Erol’s Video where you had to push apart the beads as quietly as possible so no one saw you go back there. And then waiting till there was no line at the counter before placing your pornographic videos on the counter so the clerk can look at you like the degenerate you are. Now you just click a button that promises a robot that you’re over 18 years old and you can find all the porn you want right on your laptop. Redtube and Youporn are my sites of choice. You might have your own favorites. What I like to do, is load up a bunch of choice clips and then rest my laptop on my chest, as I reach around it to play with myself, all the while trying not to move to much to keep from waking up the girl sleeping to my left. The headphones I got from American Airlines keep her from waking up when some country farmgirl gets impaled on her neighbor’s cock. Then I just shut the laptop, throw the inside out sock to the ground and fall asleep.

With porn I can choose between amateur stuff, black on white (meh), blow jobs, milf (usually gross, but sometimes awesome), white on black (totally not interested), bondage, barely legal, big boobs, creampies (no thanks), foot fetish (not interested), anal, Asian, 70’s, pissing (not hot, but interesting), Latina, Lesbian (what’s the point), squirting, and a whole bunch of others I don’t have the energy to think up. Then you can also pretty much pick out any room of the house and you can find internet clips of two people fucking in it. And that includes an awesome one in a garage I once saw, and one on a roof that wasn’t bad.

And then with all that swirling in my head on a nightly and afternoonly basis, you’re going to send me to Hooters to get worked up? Are you kidding. It’s a bunch of chicks in orange shorts and white tank tops not fucking. They don’t even make fuck noises. All they do is get my damn order wrong until they finally manage to deliver wings that are way too breaded and never spicy enough. There’s an 8 year old boy sitting over there with his mommy and daddy. And you want me to care about some vapid chick moving from his table to mine because she drew a heart over her name and wrote it on a piece of paper when I sat down with my golf buddies? Kill yourself.

Fuck you, Hooters, you fake strip club.

They’re all idiots.

Here’s the deal. When some random stranger lets you down it’s not the biggest deal in the world. When a friend disappoints you, it’s way worse. Here’s why.

Everybody sucks to a degree. People you know and love as well as people you don’t. After you’ve spent some time on this earth, you’ll start to gravitate towards certain people. It’s pretty random that you’ve ended up gravitating towards the people you now considered friends and loved ones. But once you’ve ingrained someone in your life, you tend to give them the benefit of the doubt on almost all things. When they’re heartbroken, it always seems like it’s the other person’s fault. When they get too drunk, it’s funny, not repulsive. I had a girlfriend once who was as rude to wait staff as I’ve ever seen anyone. And she was a waitress herself. I don’t know how I convinced myself it was OK but because I loved her, I managed to ignore the fact that she was a cunt. That’s what endearment is all about. Seeing the best in your flawed loved ones.

But when someone you don’t know acts abhorrently towards a waiter or waitress, you get angry and wonder if they act that way because they’re compensating for their white trash upbringing. When a stranger gets drunk and starts acting like a retard, it’s not funny or cute. It’s annoying. When some random person gets their heart broken, you tend to see the situation with an unbiased eye and you can pretty evenly tell (knowing all the facts) who was to blame.

So you usually see the good in your friends. Even when their behavior is not up to par. I have a friend named David Taylor who most everyone else describes as one of the biggest assholes in America. That may or may not be true (I haven’t met all the other leading assholes), but regardless, he’s my friend, and I usually negatively judge the person of the day who is accusing David of being what he almost certainly is. “They’re being weak.” “They started a fight they couldn’t finish.” “They’re misinterpreting his lack of facial expression and social skills.” My other theories on life dictate that if many, many, many people have the same independently derived observations, it is almost certainly true. But because we’re friends, my views on David have been positively clouded. If I didn’t know him, I would probably see what everyone is talking about. It’s kind of the same as when a mother tries to defend her murderer son. Nobody likes a murderer, but since the mother loves her child, she looks past a little killing. Now that I think about it, I could see a lot of people justifying the behavior of a murderer if David Taylor was the one killed. You really have no idea just how many people hate this guy. It’s kind of amazing. But my point is, even with all that, he’s still my buddy, and I still see the best in him. David is just one of the people I’ve invited into my life. Almost all of them are douche bags in some way or other, but I can barely ever see it because I have connected with them on an almost kindred level. They are friends.

The problem with trusting a friend, is that once they’ve betrayed that trust, you no longer see them with those rose colored glasses any more. Their negative behavior is judged for exactly what it is. Their neutral behavior is no longer viewed as a positive. And because you know them so well, it’s tough for them to only show a good side of themselves. You’ll know what they’re not showing you.

And it’s all because you of that one broken trust. That’s the moment that starts you judging them differently. It’s not the same as when you get angry. It’s deeper. When you get angry, you still love the person you’re angry with. When a trust is broken, you start questioning yourself as to why you invited them into your life in the first place, or why they’re still in your life. So you end up losing not only the thing with which you trusted them, but the actual friend as well.

It’s kind of like not leaving money in your car. Because if your car ever gets stolen, then you lose your money, too. It’s better to just lose one. It’s the same advice I used to give for people picking a college roommate. Don’t live with a buddy. You’re inevitably going to fight about roommate stuff no matter with whom you live, so you may as well just fight with a stranger and have your buddy live next door so you can talk to him about it.

My overall point or advice is, just don’t trust your friends. It’s not worth it. Most people aren’t very trustworthy to begin with. They lie to you. They lie to themselves. They justify and bargain and convince themselves of any number of details in order to help them look out for themselves rather than look out for you and your interests. You only have so much trust to give out, it’s better to place yours in the hands of a stranger. Trust people who, if they ever break it, won’t cost you a friendship.

I feel like writing one, but I can’t think of anything to write about. So please help me come up with a topic. Obviously anything I write about will be filthy and probably a bit cynical. There’s little I can do about that. But I’ll leave the rest up to you. And if anybody gives me a good idea, I’ll dedicate my blog to you. That’s worth exactly nothing.

That is all.

P.S. Pussy, fart, God doesn’t care about you, period blood.

I have a theory that insomnia doesn’t apply to me because I never have to wake up for anything. I sleep when I’m tired and I wake up when I’m done being tired. On Friday of last week, I woke up at 7:45 pm. Well, really I woke up at 7pm, but then I went back to sleep for another 45 minutes. I had slept for 11 hours. I guess that’s what I needed that “night.” And then when I finally did get up, I got up quick, because I had a set at the Improv at 8:20. So I nearly overslept the 12 minutes of work I actually had to do that day.

GOD I love being a stand up comedian!

In my feeble mind, here’s how I think most people’s days begin.

You wake up at 7:10 then hit snooze and sleep till 7:19. Get up; shave; shower; brush your teeth; take your Propecia for your male pattern baldness; take your Adapin, Nardil, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Effexor, and Ludiomil for your crippling depression; roll on your Old Spice High Endurance Red Zone Solid Anti-Perspirant Deodorant with the Mountain Rush scent; get dressed in your acceptable but unimpressive work outfit; get in the car which you purchased only after weeks were spent trying to figure out which make and model would most impress the girl you were interested in at the time based on your limited budget, but within 6 months you stopped even thinking about which type of car you drive and it blends into the earth tone fabric of your life, until you get hit by a drunk and have to get a different car to impress a different girl, this time with the inadequate insurance settlement, as your downpayment; then you drive to McDonalds for McGriddle, hashbrowns, and a medium coffee, which you consume in the car during the 40 minute commute while listening to whatever local morning DJ replaced Howard Stern in your life since he switched to pay radio; and pull in to the work parking lot at 8:53 am.

As you wait for the elevator, Tim Johnson or Jim Thompson (you can never remember) walks up holding his own coffee.

“(yawn) Good morning,” you say.

“(yawn) Good monring, Bill” he responds. He’s been calling you Bill for the last 6 months for some reason. Asshole can’t even bother learning your name.

“(yawn) Do anything fun last night?” you ask.

“(yawn) No. You?” he asks back doing that nervous laugh thing people do when there’s nothing funny to laugh at but they’re too uncomfortable not to fill their sentence with any emotion.

“(yawn) Just watched the game a little.” you answer.

“”(yawn) Yeah, I watched till the 6th inning then I had to get some shut-eye.” he says as he chuckles again.

“(yawn) 4th inning for me, and then…” You let the sentence trail off because the elevator has arrived, saving you from any more time spent connecting with this human.

You ride up together in silence. Tim/Jim and Not Bill. Both staring at the floors changing while thinking about exactly nothing until the doors open on 6 and you both step out.

“”(yawn) Have a good one” He beat you to it.

“(yawn) You too, buddy” you say as you walk in the opposite direction, making sure to hurry to your desk to actually start working before 9:00 so you can say you started on time when you get caught fucking off and talking to your “real” work friends at 10:15.

That’s pretty much what I think my life would be without stand up comedy. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t care that everyone calls me a degenerate for consistently waking up in the pm hours. It’s now 10:39 in the morning. I haven’t slept yet. I’m almost tired. I’m gonna watch episode 13 of season 2 of the Sopranos. I never watched an episode and now I’m gonna watch all 6 seasons in 2 months. Then i’ll probably sleep for a while. Then I have to wake up for a poker tournament at 6:30.

Anyway, so the point of all this was to say that just because I can’t fall asleep doesn’t mean I’m an insomniac.