I didn't really see it coming.

In retrospect it seems clear, but this is a true story. In 1998, after helping what seemed like every doomed indie band in San Diego put out their first and only records, I made one of my own. At the time, I had reached the point of revulsion over the techniques used to create pop/rock/alternative records. For those of you that have never done it, it basically amounts to doing take after take of the exact same song ad-nauseum and then later spending an additional week or so in Pro Tools correcting all the errors.

So I made a folk album and recorded every song using one take. That's called a reactionary, but not necessarily intelligent, response. Or some might say contemporary musical suicide.

Later, I was at an open mic in San Diego promoting my record. I sat down at a piano and played what I thought was a quirky, touching little love song. The entire house burst into crazy laughter. I didn't get it.

Then one day, ten years later, I was watching Comedy Central and this really, really bad comedian got up and did a half-hour special. He wasn't funny at all.

I was like, "I could do that."

UPDATE: It wasn't Daniel Tosh. Comedy is subjective. Which is why anytime a bad comic comes on Comedy Central I cue up Bonnie MacFarlane or Maria Bamford. I have their CC specials on permanent keep.

I had a class assignment to write a short parody sketch. Because it's hard to find actors in L.A. that actually keep appointments, I scripted it and filmed it using my own lame self. The segment included a dry context, a very dry setup followed by a dry delivery. And then I put in a weird sequence that involved masquerading around in a pink jelly dildo before cutting back to the dry closing.

When I screened it in class, all my jaded comedy peeps went glassy-eyed during the ironic parts. They didn't get any of the irony about the cult of the beautiful, articulate television personality. They didn't get the pun on the name. But the dick joke, which was just retard humour, got major laughs. Class feedback: get to the "jokes" quicker.

So when I re-cut it for brevity, naturally, I took out all the dick joke material and left it totally dry.

Unfortunately, also on the editing room floor is a really swell history of the Russian space program starting with Sputnik and culminating in Lunatik. And a bit about the Europeans at the ISS running low on cigarettes.

But that's not the funny part of the story.

Come to think of it, there's nothing funny about this story.

But not too long ago Jimmy Fallon had a Japanese guy delivering his monologue with subtitles. That was f*cking hilarious. I'm sure if my dad even knew what a Jimmy Fallon was he'd have loved it too. AFAIK still no Fallon on the CBC. So it was lost on him. Lots of broken Engrish in my childhood. Rock on.

I had a nightmare the other night. Yeah, I dreamt I woke up in a white office wearing a suit and was getting paid WGA scale to write something funny every day. I was like, "That sounds hard. That's harder than figuring out the exact formula that gives Nancy Pelosi an orgasm!" If I'm going to figure out the exact formula required to give a girl an orgasm, you can be sure I won't be scratching it out on a yellow legal pad with a Flair pen. Let's get roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty, people!

By Monday I could have recanted this and everything else in my life philosophy.