En Garde, Society!

Last night was ADAM FRUCCI’S improv show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Improv isn’t really my thing, but it was funny enough, I suppose. OK fine, I fell asleep during the second half of the show. In my defense, it was, like, 2:00 in the morning and Adam’s skit was already done. Also, this is a girl who fell asleep during the final Star Wars and the same goes for X-Men. Bygones.

I think I don’t really have a thing for improv because I truly value the art of a real joke. I like the set up and I like the punch line and I like the ‘huh?’ that follows. I do appreciate the way improv theater forces the performers to think on their toes, but I still wish they could slip a couple of solid, old fashioned (yet not outdated) jokes in there.

Adam sort of achieves this in his writing. He is a paid blogger. That is, he gets money to maintain his blog -- isn’t that nice? Yeah. The Sci-Fi channel pays him to write about all of the newest gadgets, like an iPod that can hold every single song ever made in the entire world, and other mind-blowing scrap that nobody really needs, but, nonetheless, everybody secretly wants. If you look at some of his posts, you’ll notice that you can skip through the bulk of mumbo jumbo techie speak and cut right to the final line. I mean, I would never do that, but you could if you wanted to, just to see what a good punch line looks like.

Besides, I laugh at Adam all day long. The key ingredient to holding down one of these office jobs is that you must have a friend who is willing to shoot the shit with you all day, back and forth, through e-mail. This cannot be any friend, though, no. This friend has to make you laugh and he must be able to do so on-call, no holds barred. Without a friend like this, you will not survive. And there’s nothing funny about that.