Comedian Ari Shaffir

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:

=============================================================================================
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.
=============================================================================================

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.