Monthly Archive for May, 2005

This last week was one of the strangest I’ve had in some time and it hasn’t stopped either. The New York Frigging Post had an article that came out today about comedians and their relationships with the music industry, blah blah blah. I really don’t know what in the hell it was about, it really made no sense whatsoever. Anyway, they took a quote from Todd Barry, who is a funny comedian and put his quote on top of my quote and it looks like I said something that I never even said. Something that I would NEVER SAY too… That is just one of the many things that has gone wrong this week.

It started a few weeks ago as Craig Baldo and I were working feverishly hard on making a couple funny short videos for the big collegehumor.com national college tour, which was kicked off at Cornell this past Tuesday night. We worked our asses off trying to make these videos, making sure to add all these cameos with our comic friends that are all over television, stuff like, OH, I DON’T KNOW…. VH1!!! And oh, I don’t know… THE DAILY SHOW!!! Stuff like that. Not to mention an opening video with the guys from STELLA talking Craig and I up to get the collegic audience into a frenzy. (Stella is Michael Showalter, David Wain, and Michael Ian Black, for those who didn’t know… Kinda like the whole audience at Cornell it seemed) Anyway, it was a ton of work that we did to be ready to test out the night before at Rififi. (My home stage. The place that I feel the most comfortable to pour my heart and emotions out to anyone without the hint of nervousness at all. Love that place like nothing else in the world!!!)

Soooo, we get the videos and play them in front of a handful of friends. Nice little responsive crowd that would be a good test audience since everyone there was close if not all in their thirties. Just like your typical college crowd ya know… Now to the crappy start of a string of crappy things to happen to me. It was at the end of the Rififi show and we were testing out our last short video entitled The Pleaser Twins. The Pleaser Twins consist of Craig and I and all we do is go around the city and please everyone. Everything from a child in need of a balloon to homeless people in need of a warm shelter, basically the nicest people on the planet. Anyway, we were about halfway through the Pleaser Twins when out of the blue, the doors of the theater open up and all these people start to interrupt the show, setting up chairs and all of this loud and obnoxious crap in the middle of the video. This girl that plays a movie on Monday nights was apparently making a dramatic point that we shouldn’t be going five minutes over with our show and she wanted to let everyone know how upset she was and disrupted the shit out of something that we worked so hard on. It was literally TWO MINUTES past ten and it was the last thing we were doing on our show and then we were to clear out. So all of a sudden I’m dodging these people’s heads to see the video and I began to get highly pissed off at what was happening. My tipping point came when the girl grabs my coat and bag from off the chair beside me and put my stuff on top of a dirty and sticky table. Then I asked her, “Are you f-ing kidding me?” and then she said in her nineteen-year-old super too cool for school and cocky attitude, “Don’t talk to me like that.” and continued to disrupt the end of The Pleaser Twins. That’s when my eyes started to bleed with anger. First of all, I want to tell you that I rarely get upset the way I did that night and it takes something or someone to be pretty rude and disrespectful to set me off that. But she did, and when the end of the video was over, which was about five minutes after ten and was NOTHING to warrant her actions because I’ve been in this business for about ten years and you don’t start making rash decisions like she did until maybe twenty or so minutes over, not TWO MINUTES!!! Gees, I’m starting to get mad thinking about it… Okay, so after the video Craig and I got on stage saying thank you and goodbye and then I grabbed the mike and starting off calm, I said, “Thank you and goodnight I want to think these assholes for ruining the last three minutes of the video. ASSHOLES!!! I also want to say that I will be bringing in a bunch of people near the end of your show and completely F-ing up your show just like you did ours… F-ing assholes!!!” I said a lot more with lots and lots of curse words and anger. It made me soooo mad that someone could do that. Just that look in her eye like she could just do as she pleased and make so much racket and disrupt the end of our show. I still can’t believe anyone could do that… She’s young and made a mistake so I’ll let it go with that…

So it was pretty dramatic and it all started with The Pleaser Twins video… Never got a chance to see it with the blood in my eyes.

Now, cut to the next night at Cornell University in front of five hundred people. It was that time again to play The Pleaser Twins, finally after all our hard work it was time for the big payoff. All the cameos of the television personalities from VH1 and The Daily Show, they were gonna go wild with laughter! Finally, the time had come! So right when we said that we were going to show a video, a couple students yelled out, “Nooo!! No videos!!! We want comedians!!!” SHIT! That’s not a good sign right from the start. But the show must go on!!! They’ll calm down when they see all those VH1 personalities. Just you wait and see…”Ladies and Gentlemen… The Pleaser Twins!!!”

Then we get off stage and the video is playing. Baldo and I are thinking about the introduction to the other video we were to play next and blah blah blah and then we stopped in our tracks when we heard the sound of booing coming from the audience… My very first thought was, Shit! The video must’ve stopped or a technical problem just happened. But no, the boos got louder and I could still hear the video. Craig and I were like, “Are they booing The PLEASER TWINS? Gees-us! Are you kidding me?” Then we see our booking agent running full speed down the hall and making a slashing gesture across his throat for us to stop the video. Unbelievable!

The crowd began booing at the point in the video where we gave a homeless man all of our money. Apparently that was not PC for them and they didn’t like the fact that we used a real homeless man in the video. Not to mention the fact that it was already planted in their brains that they didn’t want to see any sort of video at all and anything to give them an excuse to start a riot, they were gonna jump on it. . (By the way, the homeless guy was practically begging us to BE in the video and we gave him more money that we would’ve made in a week of panhandling. Which I honestly don’t know how much that would be but you get the point) So now we have five-hundred people booing and screaming out that we suck and it’s all happening to a couple guys that just want to please. How frigging ironic is that!

That is when I realized the curse of The Pleaser Twins was no fluke. It had to have something to do with how weird this week has been for me. Last night at the show, I can’t tell you how happy I was to be back in front of my people at Invite Them Up and talk about the curse of The Pleaser Twins. I brought a clip from the Cornell show at the part in the video where they started booing us. It was hard to see it again but at the same time, I had to embrace the fact that that experience will be stuck in our memories forever. Part of this crazy business that I got myself into. One of the strangest experiences I’ve ever been through in comedy and I’m sure not the last.

So, many more things happened after that that I will talk about later when I have more time. It’s just one of those weeks. I am now trying to think of way to reverse the curse of The Pleaser Twins so I can get on with a normal life. A life where newspapers are not miss-quoting me and a life were I don’t have five hundred college kids booing a piece of video art.

In a week or so I will have The Pleaser Twins posted on my web site so you can see for yourself where the curse began. I’ll keep ya posted… Have a better week than I did!

It’s 4:47 in the a.m. and I just needed to write something down so I can get really tired and go back to sleep. I also was a little anxious because I will be in extreme work mode for the next week straight and I feel like I won’t have a bunch of time to write a DD for you guys to read and love.

My nose is stopped up and I just blasted a few rounds of Afrin into my nose holes. I want them to become blowholes ASAP so I can breathe out of them. Right now I’m having a difficult time getting oxygen into my blowholes without the sound of a rape whistle going off every two seconds. It sucks so that’s why I’m up at this hour. The bottle of Afrin tells me that everything will be all right in a minute or so, so I hope to be back to breathing right pretty soon. I do know this: Afrin is addictive and I best be careful not to rely on this stuff for too long. But it’s the only thing that’s been working- BOOOOOO!!! There I go again, BORING myself to sleep again talking about my friggin’ allergies… Geez! I’m sorry to do this to you…. I guess I could’ve just deleted the last few sentences and we would all be still awake, right? That’s why I’m leaving it as it is for now because I need to bore myself into a sleeping frenzy for a few more hours so I’ll have enough energy to wrap this DD up.

It’s now 9:47. Perfect! Got some more sleep and now I can quickly finish this Diarrhea and get on with my day. In my five hours of sleep I dreamt that I bought two baseball stadiums and owned two baseball teams and their names were the “The Aways” and the “The Homes”. The Homes played a block away from me and The Aways played in a small town near Woodstock. The aggravating thing about the dream was we had the exact same uniforms and I just couldn’t figure out a solution to fix the problem. People in my dream came up to me and kept on asking over and over, “The uniforms need washing and half of them don’t fit. The uniforms need washing and half of them don’t fit… The uniforms need washing and half of them don’t fit…” and on and on like that. It was driving me crazy because all the uniforms were yellow and black and I hated the colors but once again as team owner couldn’t find a solution. Not to mention that both of my teams had the same color uniforms… But now that I think about it, that would make sense for two teams named The Aways and The Homes to have the same color uniforms… So, I feel better now about a dream that at the time was bugging the shit out of me. Need to change that juntas color though. I look horrible in yellow. Why yellow? Geez-us, dream!!!

Maybe someone out there that knows a lot about dreams will get in touch with me and let me know what’s going on. For now, I’m gonna assume that I just have a great future in baseball and not in color fashions.

See ya soon!

I have a wonderful bird’s eye view of the corner of Astor Place and 3rd Avenue on the most magical day here in the city. So I’m in a good mood for now. Lots and lots of hotties of all ages and colors. Lots of browns and tans out today. A hint of pasty white from time to time to add a little brightness to the people art… Speaking of art, I’m now officially in the market to rent a loft or very small one bedroom apartment in the city or Brooklyn. There has to be a great deal out there. And when I mean a great deal, I don’t mean quantity, I’m talking about a little golden nugget of a deal just waiting for someone to hook me up with. All those eighty-year-old fans of Dear Diarrhea, turn up the hearing aids and adjust your vision helpers, I need you to dust off that top floor of your brownstone and get ready for old Bobby T to move into the neighborhood. My goal is to be into something by the first of July. Sooooo, if you know of something, PLEASE email me directly and let me know… I’ll even throw in six FREE thirty-minute conversations with yours truly at your coffee shop of choice. All of this and more if you help me find a good deal… I don’t want to pay more than $1,200 so figure that in too. Shit, for that I should just go in with a few people and buy a place. That’s one of my all time dreams anyway, buy a big brownstone and make like six or so apartments in it and have a bunch of my favorite people live there and all they do is split the taxes and maintanence and they clean my portion of the place anytime I want, along with cooking me food and all the other needs I might have… That’s a great deal if you ask me. Cheap rent and a common area to hang out in. Oh, I forgot to add that too, the basement of the building is actually a private bar slash club that we all work in to make money. The private club will be called “Gerald’s”, because that’s what I just came up with and there will be sixteen private bathrooms, one for each person to use throughout the night. Sixteen by the way is the maximum capacity of the place. Bathroom Bar! Shit, that’s a good idea for a New York City bar. I don’t think there has ever been one of those bars. Just a beautiful bar with a bathroom theme. All the seats are toilets. The bar stools are really tall urinals made of oak. I think it could really work and I’m not kidding either. I mean, the toilet seats will be welded down so drunk assholes don’t try to use them that probably will come up from time to time. And there will be a sign at the bar saying, “Please Don’t Pee in Solid Oak Urinal Stools… They Aren’t Real, Thanks…Mgmt” I think the ironic part of the bar will actually be the real bathrooms. They should just be super plain and dilapidated, always dirty and overflowing with a sign reading, “We Apologize For The Condition of The Toilets. We Spent All of Our Money on The Fake Ones in The Bar, Thanks…Mgmt”… How exciting!!! Who wants to be one of my business partners?! Fax or email your rez and send me a check or money order in the amount of $5,000 for processing fees. (I promise I won’t use the money on a down payment for a brownstone building…) Sooooo, send in the money!!! Gerald’s, a great place to live and part ownership of The Bathroom Bar, all for $10,000!!! (I just realized that five G is too little for a processing fee)

I need to go now and daydream about color schemes and other toiletry visions…. Yay! Gotta hire a good bartender as well to mix all of the exotic drinks in the diarrhea room. Got a feeling I’ll be selling a lot of mudslides and black russians. Shit! Lots to do!

So, to keep with the promise, here’s another Double D! I’m about to drive upstate to work with Mr. A.D. Miles on this radio show that I’m helping him with. Should be fun because I’m in charge of the sound effects. I’ve already mastered the “Franticly brushing of the teeth” and “Combing a cat’s tail in the shower” sound effects and I’m currently mastering the “Stapler going through a magazine” and “Spraying air-freshener” sound effects. If people want to listen to the radio show, you must go to the taping which is at The Marquee, on Bowery and something something. (Near seventh or eighth Street… Maybe fourth street, I really don’t know) But, it should be a lot of fun and the goal is to make this a Pod Cast show that you can download onto your iPod. The future is soooooo bright, I must wear protective eye gear so not to injure myself!!!

What else… quickly. Ummm. Had a pretty good sleep last night…on, OH, I DON’T KNOW!!! SATURDAY NIGHT!!!! Totally stayed in both Friday and Saturday night and it felt GREAT!!! No drinking or partying at all… Just me and the cat, dodging each other as much as possible. Actually, I was the one dodging Twillow. Her master is out of town at the moment and she is all over my shit double time. With the allergies and cat dander floating around, I’m not a happy camper to be around. Especially if you happen to be a cat that is craving affection. My feet and legs are doing 90% of the petting and I think she’s taking offense to it. She needs to know that I can’t get her dander anywhere near my face or my eyes- BOOOO!!! I’m boring the shit out of myself talking about cat dander. Sorry, just had to start somewhere.

What else should I end on… I paid off all but one of my credit cards!!!! YAY!!! One more to go and I’m ready to buy some land!!! Speaking of land, does anyone out there know anything about the New Paltz area upstate in the Catskills? I want to start a comedy commune and buy a couple of acres up there and plop my Airstream on it. Maybe someone knows the area and a good place to live in the area. Let me know…

So, I have a thirty-seven dollar store credit at B&H Photo and I think it would be fun if I had thirty-seven of my friends meet me there and we can all buy some electrical tape or something for a dollar. But it all has to be the same thing and we all have to wear red t-shirts and jeans with a certain face paint thing going on. I want to look like a freakish cult and see what happens after that. Could be really fun to start a cult at B&H Photo in the near future. I’ll keep a certain thirty-seven people posted, so keep your ears peeled back in a receptive position, ‘cause the Cult Of Silliness, AKA COS, is coming your way!!!