Comedian Ari Shaffir

I’m performing at Crackers Comedy Club in Broad Ripple, Indiana.  It’s my first time performing in Indiana (I know, right? How could I not have made it to this bastion of progressive liberals?) so I’d love to have some fans come out to make me feel more at home.

Crackers Broad Ripple Or just call for tickets. (317) 255-4211

It’s a really sweet club. And the tickets are shockingly cheap. It’s me and my friend Tom Segura performing and he’s hilarious so it’s a good show to catch.

February 18, 2010 8:30 at the Improv Lab 8162 Melrose Avenue.

Tickets just 5 dollars.

Steve Agee
Dylan Brody
Joey Diaz
Dan Madonia
Marc Maron

host, Ari Shaffir

I think I’m gonna try to go 50 hours without saying a word at some point soon.  With all the social networks I’m on, I don’t think it’ll be that big a deal.  The only problems will be if I get an audition or if I have to do standup.  So I have to pick a two day period when I don’t have any spots.  And I have acting class on Tuesdays.  And I meet with my suicide doctor on Thursdays.  There’s almost no weekend where I don’t get on stage at all.  So it’ll have to be on a Sunday and Monday.

I can do this.  Not this Sunday and Monday because I have to shoot a web series about a porno college with Mo Mandel on Sunday.  Maybe next week.  I’ll try to update things as I go through them.  If you have any tips, please feel free to Twitter me or figure out a way to comment on this blog.  The latter would be cooler.

I can’t fix anything on here to work right.

This review is going to be particularly difficult for me for two reasons. First of all, I’ve never written a movie review before. As with any new endeavor, there is a learning period one has to withstand in order to properly understand the techniques to use and the format to which to adhere. The first jokes and bits I wrote for the stage were underdeveloped. The first script I ever wrote was horribly unfunny and without form. And this movie review probably won’t seem like too well written. Second of all, the movie I’ve chosen to review, District 9, will be particularly challenging for me to critique since I haven’t seen it. Not only that, I haven’t seen a preview for it during other movies. I haven’t even seen a commercial for it on TV, mostly because I torrent everything and watch it on the computer with no commercial interruptions. It’s a much quicker way to watch television but it proves a liability when you’re trying to write about a film you haven’t seen. In any case, those are my caveats. You are not going to see anything in the way of reliable spoilers. Reliable, because I’m probably going to include some spoilers but they’ll be based off my knowledge of the movie gleaned entirely from billboards and bus stop signs. If any what I write actually spoils any parts of the movie for you, I think I should get some sort of award for being so randomly rad at guessing.

Peter Jackson’s 8th film is by far his grandest vision of the future. (I also am not going to do any research on anything, so I’m probably wrong about all the stats I include, too. For instance, I doubt very much that this is Peter Jackson’s 8th film. I know about the 3 Lord of the Rings, and King Kong (which su-u-ucked) but that’s all of what I’m aware. I get the sense that he’s done other stuff, though, right? I mean they’re not going to let him direct The Lord of the Rings if he hadn’t done some other stuff first.) It’s quite easy to see why the haute of our society have given him the mantle of “The next Gene Roddenberry.” Jackson amazes us with an ephemeral glimpse at a world most noticeably driven by the production of goods. Though the aliens are the tool by which he builds his vehicle, it is the predictions of a globalized economy that has Mr. Jackson so noticeably worried about the coming decades.

As the film opens, we see little or no conflict between the intelligent species on Earth. For their parts, the aliens seem little more than metaphors for Asians of pre-American involvement in World War II. And though everything seemed fine and dandy for a few years, like they were finally being accepted as equals, we all know what’s about to happen. Distrust, greed, and fear drive a wedge in between the alien leadership and the Earth government. The Earth President, as played wonderfully by Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Not only do I not know if he’s in the movie, I don’t even know if that’s how you spell his name.) decieves the aliens, also colorfully referred to as “Bindles,” into gathering together under the guise of an Earth parade. Little do they know, they’re actually being brought together so they can be rounded up and placed into a high tech internment camp known as “District 9.” To this point, the acting was wonderful with the only weak spot being Peter Jackson’s incessant need to cast his wife in every film he touches. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but she can’t act, and physically, she’s no longer believable as a high school cheerleader/debate team chairperson. In everyone else, however, Jackson has instilled a sense of awe mixed with a casual complacence that I haven’t seen in a film since Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, “2001, or 2010 or whatever.”

The only problem with District 9 is that the Earth government didn’t round up all the Bindles. There were pockets of people who were either too sick or too cool to go to the Earth parade. The too sick were quickly rounded up and slaughtered so they can be turned into food. This food will be fed to the prisoners of District 9 in order to demoralize them with the news that they cannibalized the infirmed of their people. The too cool were, however, were too cool to be captured by Earth police (that’s what they call police when there’s just one country of Earth even though we don’t call them American police now) so they go into hiding in the only place the Earth police can’t find them: Broad daylight!

Fuck yeah! The plot thickens and shit. Here’s what had happened. The cooler Bindles have been trying to score sweet hot Earth sluts for years now, and a few have recently developed a technology which covers their Bindle looks and allows them to blend in with native earthlings at clubs and discotheques across the globe. The cool Bindles form a resistance movement led by the coolest of the cool aliens, Faheem (played by gorgeous young newcomer Antonio Acevedes). Faheem blends in perfectly with the Earthlings. He wears black pants and a black shirt with the first 3 buttons undone to display his chest hair and a gold necklace. He drives around in a Silver Mercedes convertible that his father bought for him through his hard work. The older generation of Bindles actually had a great work ethic and strong family values. But they’ve spoiled the children and now the younger generation acts horribly, going to clubs every night, wearing Drakkar-Noir to excess, keeping Ed Hardy in business walking around with a sense of entitlement, and just generally acting like fucking Persians.

Faheem hatches a plan to turn District 9 into an actual working space station, fully equipped with proton torpedoes. That was the one weakness that the floating internment camp had, that it could too easily be turned into a battleship. But in his hubris and haste the Earth president overlooked that risk and rushed into this plan. The movie moves on, with some very interesting shots that have become staples of a Peter Jackson project. He enjoys shooting large landscapes and continues to show a fascination with the environment around us. I wish more directors would take time to smell the roses, as it were. (No idea what that meant)

I don’t want to spoil anything for the readers, but I will say that there is one amazingly shot sequence in which Faheem, now completely in charge of a working space battle station, is firing proton torpedoes at every major city on the planet, forcing the Earth people to go into slavery for their bindle masters. And from that point, until 10 minutes later as Phillip Seymour Hoffman is trying to still maintain his composure as he signs his people’s freedom away in a peace treaty, we can see the brilliance of Peter Jackson as he directs Faheem to reveal a slight smile right before he stabs the Earth President and announces to the world that the treaty is denied, but they will live in peace as brothers.

Overall, I’d give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. The story is good, but the special effects were riveting. If you don’t like SFX because you’re a mindless hipster or a stupid fucking bitch, I’d suggest checking out Julia and Julia this weekend. It’s got wonderful pacing and an understated charm. If that last sentence sickened you, then you’re a normal person who isn’t too douchey to appreciate flashing lights and sweet God damn explosions. If so, I would definitely give District 9 a chance. And make sure to stay to the end of the credits. They play the new Ace of Base music video. The video sets up the sequel, letting you know that the Earth President survived the knife attack and goes underground on a Rambo style killing spree that’s the bloodiest sequence I’ve ever seen in cinema and quite frankly made me question my ability to feel love. Also, they have bloopers.

I’m on a plane headed to Montreal for my first experience at the Just For Laughs festival they have there every year.  I’m gonna be there for 12 days and I’ll try to write a blog or record a video every day while I’m there.  I’m either going to edit them and rewrite them to make them good, or I’m just going to post a first draft.  This is going to be one of the non-rewritten ones.

Today, I woke up at 8, snoozed till 8:30, and then had 30 minutes to get dressed, make b.m., and pack for 12 days.  I’m sure I forgot something.  I know I forgot my roll shorts.  But I’m probably not gonna train while I’m there anyway.  My knee’s too fucked up right now.  Anyway, I got all packed and out the door by 9:20.  My friend David Taylor drove me to the airport.  We stopped by an audition at 10am sharp so I could try to do this callback before I left, but my call time was at 1:20 and they didn’t even have a morning session, so I skipped it.  Fuck you, Progresso, you’ll have to find another patsy to sell your cancer soup.

We got back in the car and drove straight down Lincoln to the airport.  Straight through all the cool, rich, white neighborhoods, and on into the poorer, black neighborhoods.  We saw tuckered out crack dealers heading home from a long day of slinging rock and violently driving off competitors.  “Slinging rock,” by the way, is street slang for when crack dealers sell crack rocks to people addicted to crack cocaine, or people becoming addicted to crack cocaine.  I learned terms such as that one and many more by watching television.  I’m cool going through neighborhoods like that because we had power locks and David has a low level of respect for traffic laws and human life, so I felt pretty safe.  We were able to relax and talk about the UFC 100 fights from which I had returned the previous day.  Fun car ride overall.  Uneventful and we were plenty early for the flight.  Usually, I’m swerving in and out of traffic when I’m on my way to the airport.  My anxiety level is usually through the roof as I try to somehow defy the laws of time and space yet again and somehow make whatever flight I’m late for.

At the airport, I took a half a THC breath strip.  It’s marijuana concentrated and mixed into one of those Listerine breath strips that dissolve on your tongue.  It takes up almost no room.  You can put a pack of two into your wallet in between credit cards.  Half of one is enough to get me super baked for 5 hours.  The only problem with them is that, like most edibles, they take a little while to kick in.  Usually around 2 hours.  This is just getting going really strong in me and it’s been 2 hours and 15 minutes.  So now the next 5 hours will be a lot more interesting.  That’s kind of perfect, because that’ll last me until the cab ride from the airport to the hotel.  Another problem, is that sometimes they last longer than 5 hours.  Me, The Cuban, and Death Squad Tech Support each took a full one right before UFC 100.  And then for some retarded reason, we then took an additional 1/3 of one about 2 hours later.  So usually 1/2 of one means you’ll still be high 7 hours after you take it.  For this 1 1/3, I swear to God, I was high 23 hours after I took my first strip.  It was crazy.  I woke up the next morning feeling hung over.  But I only had one beer with dinner, so I couldn’t be hung over.  I thought it was from all the food.  I ate a full dinner after the fights and then went to my room to watch Breaking Bad and eat and eat and eat.  Gummy bears, chocolate covered chocolate chip cookie dough balls, and sour cream and onion Pringles.  I literally came home 10 pounds heavier than the morning I left.  5 pounds of that weight went away during yesterdat’s shitfest 2009, but still, 5 pounds is a lot to gain in 2 days.  Anyway, back to the story.  Once I saw Tech Support, we realized that we were both still high.  We took a ride to the airport, ate, got on the plane, I slept for half an hour, and I woke up still high.  I took that first strip at 4 and the last strip at 6 and I was still high at noon the next day.  And I was still high for the next 3 hours while I did all my chores before I had to leave.  Eventually I got back to normal, but you gotta admit, that was pretty awesome.  I know it was fun and weird.

So I took half of one of those strips at the airport.  I’m feeling good right now.  I’m gonna land and sign contracts and then walk around Montreal for a little bit.  This should be a fun, relaxed road trip full of booze and trouble.  I brought 8 Viagras and 3 condoms, you do the math.

Dan Bialek made it.  It was for a show in LA.  Maybe 5 people were in the audience, but it was still a great show.  The comics were all fucking with each other, but in a good-natured way.  David Taylor found a law book in the back and read a passage about a rape case.  Pete Carboni interviewed a guy who I thought was wearing a Willy Wonka costume, but apparently was just dressed in normal “macabre” attire.  Dan Madonia went on and was interviewed by the crowd about the time he fucked two chicks outdoors that he met at the Comedy Store the same night he met them.  Boon Shaka Laka, the resident gay homeless used goods salesman/used goods thief from the Store fucked up probably every introduction.  Mike Black and I were there too, but we didn’t do anything too noteworthy.

It was a fun ass show.

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

——————————————————————————–
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
————————————————————–

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.