Tag: comedy

COMEDY:
Aparna Nancherla (Netflix special, Comedy Central’s Corporate, Two Dope Queens, co-hosted the 2018 Women’s March Rally in NYC)
Luke Schwartz (The Comedy Store)

MAGIC:
Phil Van Tee aka El Ropo (The Magic Castle)

0 LA STORIES

June 12, 2018
by Liam
· Blog · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

Greetings friends, frenemies, comedy fans, comedy fanemies, and anyone else who checks their Spam folders on a regular enough basis to have found, opened, and read this e-mail.

As you who had been fans of the late, lamented, and forgotten Hollywood Hotel edition of my Tell Your Friends! show, I thought you might be interested in two free – FREE! – events coming up in the next couple of weeks.

And if you aren’t, here’s a live feed of a Kitten Rescue nursery you can look at instead:

No matter how cool and above-it-all you think you are, I dare you – literally, dare you – to watch for more than three minutes without getting completely sucked into these cats’ lives. Only, watch it with a safety buddy who can pull you out when you start commenting with baby talk.

As for shows:

One is a new FREE MONTHLY SHOW (where I will be buying FREE BEER and SODA for the audience – and it will be soda and beer of the FREEest possible quality) called “LIAM McENEANEY’S RED HOT INDUSTRY SHOWCASE. This happens THIS THURSDAY, June 14th, at 9:30pm, with Aparna Nacherla (Netflix, Corporate), comedy magician El Ropo (The Magic Castle), and The Comedy Store’s own Luke Schwartz (The Improv).

The other show is a FREE SCREENING of Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film! On June 22nd, 2010, I threw a super-sized concert version of my TYF! show in Brooklyn and invited some of my very best comedian friends to perform. Comedians like Reggie Watts, Kurt Braunohler & Kristen Schaal, Christian Finnegan, Rob Paravonian, and Leo Allen. On June 22nd, we’ll commemorate the eighth anniversary by having a little outdoor screening in Highland Park. Learn more by clicking on that picture above.

As for everything else, I still live in H’wood, CA. I’ve officially passed the honeymoon phase, and have transitioned into being a full-time resident. I think it’s tough to explain to people who don’t live here exactly how unglamorous Hollywood life is. As a rule, there aren’t too many celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. In fact, if you see someone you recognize in Hollywood, first be sure that they aren’t the out-of-shape posing-for-money-in-front-of-the-Grauman’s-Chinese-Theater equivalent of that celebrity. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference; if you take their picture, and they try to punch you when you refuse to pay them twenty bucks for it, they’re either a fugazi look-a-like or the real Sean Penn.

I live in a pretty nice section of Hollywood, but if you see a celebrity where I live something has gone drastically wrong in their life. Like, I feel very fortunate that I live in a great apartment in a happening neighborhood exactly where I want to be. But if I saw Adam Sandler shopping at my Ralphs, I’d think, “Poor guy, I hope things pick up for him.”

To be fair, I’ve been told that celebrities shop at my local Gelson’s (for New Yorkers, Gelson’s is a supermarket chain that sits on the quality scale about halfway between D’Agostino’s and Fairway – it’s not that nice, but out here in the land of the goyim…). But I’m actually not tremendously good at recognizing people, in person, that I only know from the TV or movies.

Also, I find that it really grounds me to do all of my grocery shopping at Ralphs at 1:30 in the morning. It’s where you realize that the opening scene of The Big Lebowski is pretty much a documentary:

Sure, Gelson’s caters to the “we might as well close at midnight because our customers are responsible adults whose careers demand they show up at the same time every morning, preferably with a minimum of face tattoos and brightly colored outfits that make them look like what a Marvel supervillain thinks a circus clown should be” crowd.

But what will profit a man doing his grocery shopping at 8:00 so he can be up for his job designing Adult Swim billboards, if it costs him his soul? Not to mention that there’s a tremendous sense of gratitude and equanimity to be gained in surrounding yourself with people who have made way worse life decisions than your own. Be honest: Buying your ten dollar bag of grapes in line behind the second lead from Supergirl will never fill you with an immense and lasting feeling of gratitude for the fact that you decided to say no to trying meth.

Maybe the Gelson’s-at-10pm crowd has “control” over things like “the amount of controlled substances one should ingest at any given time.” But there’s something tremendously bourgeois about the fact that when you hear an announcement over the in-store PA, that’s a voice you can be 100% sure that everyone else is hearing, too.

At 1:30 in the morning, Ralph’s becomes a true egalitarian paradise – nobody is better than anybody else, everybody is equal in the understanding that there’s more to life than conforming to society’s traditional standards of success, or hygiene, or acceptable public behavior. Everybody is gathered together in celebrating all that is freezable, microwaveable, and filled with enough salt to mask the chemical compounds that make up your dinner’s basic ingredients.

Much like worker paradises like the former Soviet Union or the current North Korea, you may find yourself standing in line for far longer than one would expect, living in the civilized West, to buy toilet paper. But the people there have character. They have rich inner lives. They’ve lived, and lived fully, and every minute of every year is written across their faces. Sometimes literally, with the tattoos, and sometimes metaphorically, with everything else.

And that, kids, is how I met your mother.

0 {SAN ANTONIO} Craft Comedy

February 3, 2018
by Liam
· Events · Uncategorized

at Freetail Brewing Co.
2000 S Presa
San Antonio, Texas 78210
7:00pm
ADMISSION: FREE OR $5.00 VIP SEATING W/ FREE PIZZA
Tickets and info at EventBrite

with LIAM McENEANEY
BRIAN GUTIERREZ
ABBY BENES

$5 gets you:

all you can eat pizza from pizza classics
premium seating
free raffle ticket to win prizes like Freetail beer & merch!

0 25 Things You May Not Know About Me

October 12, 2016
by Liam
· Blog · Liam's Notebook · Uncategorized

25. I had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War. Joe McDonnell McEneaney. He led a valiant attack on Passaic, NJ, and lost 350 men before taking the town. It was an achievement marred only by the fact that the British Army was nowhere near Passaic, and in fact, my uncle was a janitor who liked to get drunk and steal officers’ clothes.

24. I have an IQ of 210. Now, the so-called “experts” want to tell me there’s a decimal in there BUT I AIN’T HAVIN NONE OF DAT

23. I was a professional stuntman for three years. My stage name was “Lawful Good Knievel.”

22. I love blueberry pancakes so much, I have married them.

21. In high school, I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and it gave me the powers and abilities of a guy who has been both poisoned and given cancer.

20. If you tell women you’re a doctor, they will take their shirt off and then get an insurance company to pay you. If you then say, “Actually, I’m a doctor of Philosophy, and I’m in this examination room also waiting to get seen” they will start yelling and punching you.

19. My work in the field of mathematics involved splitting the check at restaurants until I not only didn’t put in money but always managed to get five dollars back. This earned me a Nobel Prize in the field of Creative and Possibly Illegal Sciences.

18. My eyes are so open and innocent with wonder, I try to have a stranger teach me one new thing every day. For instance, yesterday a New York State circuit judge taught me the difference between “freelance adoption” and “kidnapping.”

17. I’m a much better fighter than most people think. The last time I got into a fight, it resulted in a black eye, a bloody nose, and a broken arm. The other guy was unhurt, but my point is I was in there.

16. I have the ability to talk to animals. However, I do not have the ability to have them understand what I say or understand what they are talking about. That’s because i have the ability to talk English to animals who only speak Chinese.

15. I love gambling. Which is a fancy way of saying I eat chicken from those street carts.

14. I answer every single email I get, especially the spam. You may laugh, but last week I went on a date with a beautiful woman name Mandarin J. Respectfully who is going to help me refinance a mortgage on my penis.

13. I wouldn’t say I love coffee, but I have had sex with it.

12. I wish I had time to watch more truly great movies, but for some reason pornhub.com doesn’t have “Citizen Kane.”

11. I taught 50 Cent everything he knows. Unfortunately, I taught him everything he knows about algebra.

10. I’ve always found the best part of hanging out with a really tight-knit group of close friends, is when one of them doesn’t show up and then you all have someone to make fun of.

09. I’ve found the secret to happiness is waking up every day and seeing a beautiful face. And yet, some people think it’s creepy that my bedroom is just wall-to-ceiling mirrors.

08. I was sick the day we learned counting in school, and have trouble with numbers.

07. This is where I was going to omit number 7 in what is the punch line to what is surely the oldest “nerd joke” on record. This is because as a writer, I am prolific, but sometimes very lazy.

06. Sure, when you’re young it’s always hilarious when someone says, “What has two thumbs and loves blow jobs” and then point their thumbs at themselves and says, “This guy.” Or they say “Have you ever seen an elephant?” and then unzips their pants and pulls their pants pockets out. Then it’s all fun and games.

But then some people get older become parents, and then it’s all like, “Liam, we hired you to be a clown at our three year-olds’ party” and there’s nothing but screaming and crying as you realize that they’re not going to pay you. This I’ve learned from bitter experience.

This is a joke I tried doing onstage many many many times when I was young, despite the unanimously terrible reaction from every audience who heard it. I hope you enjoyed it, although experience tells me you didn’t!

05. There’s a fine line between “laughing with someone” and “laughing at someone.” But there’s absolutely no line between “angrily glaring with your arms crossed” and telling your girlfriend her new haircut isn’t all that great. And I am a man who knows.

04. I own a hamster. I hate hamsters. But I love taking him to the zoo and holding him up at the snake cage and watching the snakes slam their heads against the glass enclosures over and over.

03. I absolutely cannot even stand horseradish sauce. But I’ll have sex with it anyway because I like to drink.

02. I took myself out on a date last night, and it was so awkward at dinner, when the check came, and I sat there for twenty minutes before I realized I had no intention of paying. Especially since I’d already split the check so I didn’t owe anything.

01. I don’t like to tell people my age, but let’s just say I’m finally old enough to date college girls.

Buy my latest album, Working Class Fancy, from Comedy Dynamics.

0 LIAM’S COMEDY RESUMÉ (2019)

October 10, 2016
by Liam
· Liam Promo Posts · Uncategorized

0 10 GREAT NAMES FOR YOUR IMPROV GROUP

January 21, 2016
by Liam
· Blog · Liam's Notebook

Unsolicited advice is the sweetest advice of all, because it’s the kind that feels better to the person giving it than the person receiving it. That being said, after a lifetime performing and watching improvisational comedy, I feel like I’ve gotten really good at naming improv groups. That being said, here’s some suggestions for your group you’re welcome:

Three Years Before We All Start Pursuing An MBA

Breaking Up Onstage Tonight!

Six Characters In Search of a Casting Agent

That One Guy Whose “Character” Keeps Trying To Make Out With Every Woman On Stage, And They Have To Yes-And It

Community Theater Minus A Script

Instagramming Themselves Onstage

NYU Students Whose Parents Are Paying Six Figures For Them To Be Doing This Shit

4 People With Ideas + 1 Guy Who’s In Every Scene

An Hour of Their Lives Your Friends Will Never Get Back

0 Liam McEneaney: The Number Four Comedian in Queens

January 13, 2016
by Liam
· Blog

You can read it here.

It's Queens article

0 HOW I PUT TOGETHER MY FIRST ALBUM, ‘COMEDIAN’: A Track-By-Track Guide To Constructing A Decent Comedy Record

January 4, 2016
by Liam
· Blog

I’m recording my next album on January 10^th, a Sunday in the year of our Lord 2016, at a live show at The Bell House in Brooklyn. As I am a lucky ol’ fella, my buds Colin Jost, Dave Hill, and Rob Paravonian will be opening for me. It will be recorded for release by Comedy Dynamics, a wonderful record label.

My first album, Comedian, which was released two years ago by ASpecialThing Records, was not only a professional milestone, but a personal one as well. I know that as a young comic in the 2010s, I’m supposed to be all about the TV or Netflix special, but when I was a kid I would go to sleep almost every night listening to the Richard Pryor, or the George Carlin, or even Cosby albums. (I know, I know. I never thought I’d describe the late ‘90s as a “more innocent time,” but there you go.) To me, the comedy album was the real Big Time.

And especially to release an album on AST, the same label as releases the albums by some of my favorite comics, including Paul F. Tompkins, Jen Kirkman, and on and on, was–and still is–a huge thrill.

That being said, putting together a full hour of material is not as easy as just “saying funny stuff into a microphone.” I had a whole philosophy about the material I wanted to present, and it’s a process that a few people have actually asked me about. I always warn folks, “Comedy is way more boring than you’d think.” And then they insist and then I proceed to prove my point because, what the hell, talking about myself is one of my favorite activities after all.

So for your elucidation, and to save myself breath the next time I’m at a party and someone asks, “Oh, what do you do?”, here is a track-by-track breakdown of how I put an hour’s worth of material together for my first album. (You can listen to it for free on Spotify right here.)

POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS
This recording was the first time I’d performed the bit live in probably three or more likely five years. When I actually made the deal with AST Records, I decided I didn’t want this to just be a “Greatest Hits of Liam’s Standup.” I had a specific vision for Comedian, something a little jazzier, a little more mid-early Nighthawks/Blue Valentine/Heartattack + Vine Tom Waits.So I went through my archives and while doing some digging, I remembered my positive affirmations, which I had originally specifically written for an appearance at Eating It at the Ludlow Street rock club Luna Lounge. When I started standup, “alternative comedy” was the hot term for “anything that isn’t recognizable “didja ever notice?” comedy club comedy. The big show in New York City that all the press and industry and in-the-know fans went to was Eating It at Luna Lounge. If you were a newer comedian, the pressure was always on to kill there, and showcase your “range” by not just doing polished comedy material (even though the TV bookers and agents there totally wanted to see nothing but your polished comedy material). So I came up with the affirmations, which was originally three times as long. I workshopped it at an open mic around the corner, called “Faceboyz Open Mic.” It went really well, but there weren’t too many other shows I could really feel comfortable busting it out.

But clearly it was, as Willie Nelson says, always on my mind. I thought it might be good to have Heidi Vanderlee play something meditation-y behind me on the cello. She picked a Bach piece. “Love is beautiful but porn is easy” is always one of my favorite, not jokes, but laughs I get on a joke. When this bit was played on the Dr. Demento Show, it was, to me, like receiving a Nerd Grammy.

LIVING SINGLE
This is just a collection of one-liners I like that I was opening my set with at the time. If you can open with a handful of killer one-liners, you can lead an audience down any road you like. While I was definitely ready to retire them by the time I recorded Comedian, I thought it would be nice to get them all in one place. They’re interspersed around Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film! , but I’m proud of having written these jokes. For instance, writing the “Sex/Olympic Athlete” was SO. MUCH. WORK. I have a notebook where I have three pages of bad comedy writing trying to write a very strained and hacky bit about the Olympics and gay dudes, and I plucked this one line that was almost funny, reversed it, made it about me, and it was like a bright light descended from on high while a holy chorus sang and hit the paper.Also, yes, I named this track after the ’90s sitcom.

THE DOUG DATE
The problem with this bit has nothing to do with the bit. But it sets up a callback that works very well in a bit I have about karate. When I had my set list that I would work out around town, I decided to do this material in the Doug Date bit early in the set, and then call back to it in the Karate bit towards the end. But the karate bit never ended up on Comedian, which I didn’t even realize until I went over the set list for this blog entry. I’m not sure if I did the bit in the live show, and just didn’t end up cutting it for time (unlikely) or just plain forgot to do the bit both nights we recorded (far more likely). In any case, I’ll put it in the set list for my second album, which means I can use it to close all these shows I’m doing to warm up for this album recording show, but man, I’m flummoxed I didn’t put that there.

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT WOMEN
I thought it would be funny to have a track titled “Everything I Know About Women” and make it as brief as possible. My original thought was to make it a blank 30 seconds, but I quickly came to my senses and instead I put the title on a track under four minutes. It’s tough to do material about relationships, because it’s a meal picked over by many comedians before you, so whenever you get a new take, or a new way of delivering an observation, it’s very exciting. Framing the way women talk about men as a witch’s coven isn’t the most flattering way, but it was fairly original and people seemed to dig it. I’m actually pretty proud of the way it came out.

THE BALLAD OF JOHN AND RACHEL
Rachel is the name of my ex, and John is her new boyfriend of many years, who is a very very cool guy, and they are not the couple in this bit. Seriously. I just liked the way their names flowed together. I like to write bits with crazy structure; beginning, middle, end, callback. I consider it to be like architecting a building. Some dudes are Brutalists, and just want to do the job no matter how ugly. Some dudes are Functionalists, and they want their jokes to do the job with nothing fancy. I like to try for a Frank Lloyd Wright; even if not every part of it is functional, it’s still interesting to look at.The bit (and the whole set of dating jokes in general) ends at almost exactly a third of the way through the album. I like to start a set with relationship material because it’s something that literally everybody on earth can relate to, and once the audience is with you, knows who you are, and trusts that you can make them laugh, it’s a lot easier to do the esoteric, weird, and fun stuff that I enjoy doing. I’m not putting my dating bits down when I say this. JOHN & RACHEL is one of my favorite bits on this album, and the fact that I made it work in time to record it made it feel like I had just pulled off a magic trick that involves spinning plates while balancing cups and saucers on my chin while yanking a tablecloth out from under a place setting.

It’s just that I’m a bit of a risk-taker, and it interests me more to figure out how to make, say, my love of Irish folk music relatable to a wider audience. But the dating stuff is my price of admission into the audience’s good graces.

THE McENEANEY FAMILY HOSTAGE SITUATION
I got the title from a joke I thought of immediately after the second show was over and was mad at myself for not making in the moment. I couldn’t even tell you what it is anymore. In any case, this was strictly there because I liked the bit, and it represented what was a turning point in my comedy for me, and I thought it might be nice to make it the turning point into the rest of the album. I wrote it when I worked at a market research firm, making minimum wage making survey calls to strangers. It was a truly miserable time in my life, and it was, after reading a biography of Woody Allen, when I realized that if I wanted to actually be the comedian I always believed myself to be in my heart, and not just a guy who’d done Premium Blend once and disappeared, I was going to have to make an honest to God job of work out of this thing.I was reading a great piece about greeting cards in the New Yorker at work, and realized a bit about Hallmark Cards would be relatively unique. My friend Veronica Mosey heard me do it at the Irish Arts Center and fixed it for me afterwards (by suggesting I put my cuh-razy greeting cards in contrast by giving an example of a regular card first). This was the point in my life, and my career, when I went from being a guy who could do well through sheer tyranny of will into a comedian who was able to write actual bits from my point of view without any reliance on shock value. So while it’s not a groundbreaking piece of standup, per se, it was a turning point for me as a comedian. And also for this album in a bit more literal sense.

MY HACK PAGES
Another concrete pillar bit that I knew would hold up a section of my set; it was part of my standard set whenever I was getting paid for performing. It’s definitely one of the oldest bits on this album, and it is a young man’s joke. But I’m glad I could stick it in there, and it helps bridge into some more autobiographical material.

MEOW MEOW MEOW
Ah, everybody’s favorite bit, and another one I was writing all the way down to the wire. It started with a couple of different things; I had a half a joke about my parents’ cats and I fighting for space in their will. It was an amusing idea with a line I liked, but had no real weight to it. I was also hanging with my dope-as-fuck friend Dr. Leona Godin a lot, and whenever our conversation would hit a lull, I’d go “meow meow meow” like Henrietta Pussycat from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. It really is, no joke, the funnest thing you can randomly say out loud. Try it some time!But it wasn’t fully complete as a joke, and I was doing it onstage at these weird little shows in New York, and I just improvised the idea of throwing it into uncomfortable situations, like a Jesus guy approaching you on the street, but I couldn’t quite get into it. Then I hung out with parents the week before recording, and, as you hear on the track, my mom said something she didn’t realize was hilarious and weird, and I decided it would be a good way to get into the joke. I recorded the show over two nights at Union Hall, in Brooklyn, and the joke worked great except for the bit about sassing a religious guy. It just was a little too on-the-nose. While walking around Park Slope the second morning, I started thinking about a shitty encounter I’d had with one of those “Do you have a moment for the environment” guys. It occurred to me that was the perfect time to have actually said “Meow meow meow,” and I realized I’d just finished the joke. So what you hear on the album is the first time I ever performed the whole joke correctly, which isn’t bad considering that that morning I’d decided it wasn’t worth trying to salvage.

One final note: It’s funny to me to realize that the newest bit on the album was sandwiched by the oldest.

DROP OUT!
This is also material from when I was young. I always liked these bits, and that’s pretty much it, except, the only reason it’s its own separate track is because Tom Waits has a ton of songs that have their own little funny musical intros on Nighthawks at the Diner and I wanted to do that, too. I promise I’m not as pretentious in person as I am when I discover my thought processes.

THE TRUE STORY OF FAST EDDIE (THE BANK ROBBER)
I wrote this entire seven minute set, beginning to end, literally over the course of my entire career. The beginning bit, about Hector the ice cream truck driver, was a true story that I tried for the first time my second or third time onstage. The rest of it was written and perfected within nine months of recording. People always ask if these stories are true, and they aren’t always, but this one is, more or less. I changed a lot of stuff around, I asked permission of one guy to joke about him, and I condensed a lot of stuff to remove the parts that were sad or unfunny or just plain not believable as biography.By the way, the use of parentheses in the title is strictly because shitty pretentious bands did that a lot on their albums when I was a kid, as a way of showing that they were serious artists, and I never stopped finding it funny.

LIAM vs. THE AUDIENCE 1: “MY FIRST TIME”
Christine is a very nice woman I’d met in the East Village art open mic scene. She is a lovely young lady who really had never been to a standup show before. As soon as she spoke up, I got really excited because I knew that whatever was about to happen was going to go onto the album. My original plan had been to record an hour of material and cut it down to the best forty-five minutes.All my favorite comedy albums when I was young had been, on average, no more than forty minutes, and I really believe that there’s a reason they’re considered unimpeachable classics. But of course, the best-laid plans, so the album includes 15 minutes of audience participation. The label wanted to edit a point halfway through where I declare my intention to be mean, which was entirely meant to stop me from sounding like an utter dick, but I thought that would be completely unfair.

NEW YORK STORIES
My goal for this album was to do longer bits. I really tried to stretch these out to ten minutes, but the most important part of writing is editing, and it’s better to just cut four minutes than make an artistic point. I’d originally conceived the middle third of this album as almost a “suite” of longer bits that thematically flowed from one to the next. Of course, that went out the window with the previous track, which is fine. By the way, this is named after the Coppola/Scorcese/Woody Allen film about life in NYC. I genuinely put that much thought into each and every detail on this album.

NEW YORK I LOVE YOU BUT YOU’RE BRINGING ME DOWN
Just like Track 8, this was a bit I was bombing with all over town, trying to write it into decent shape. It just never shaped up the way I’d hoped, and my plan was to leave it out and rewrite it into a better bit. But Ryan at the label liked it a lot, and he convinced me to let him edit it. I don’t think it ruins the album by any stretch, and he was so passionately behind this track I genuinely didn’t have the heart to cut it.

AN EVENING WASTED WITH LIAM McENEANEY
First of all, this was my original title for this album. It’s a total rip of Tom Lehrer’s An Evening Wasted With… album, and when I decided to go with a complete throwback jazz theme to Comedian, I realized the title didn’t fit anymore. I did keep it for the bit, though, as a tribute to one of my favorite comedians.This is the bit that people always ask me if it’s true. Yes and no. The basic facts of the story are true. But structurally, the joke is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster. I originally had a joke about taking my first AIDS test, with the idea that the wait for your results is way more frightening than any scary movie you could watch. A funny idea, but it would require more and I didn’t want to be the guy with a killer five about AIDS. So I put it in the vault and forgot a out it and about five years later, I was watching a comedian on TV talk about asking a woman if she was pregnant. That’s happened to a lot of people, and it’s a super hacky used premise. But it had, as I say, actually happened, and so the challenge for myself was to figure out a way to take a hacky premise and make it fresh and personal. As I was trying to find my way into the subject, I remembered the AIDS test joke, and reappropriated it for this bit. It was one of those bits, just the first time I ever tried it at my Tell Your Friends! show, I knew I’d made the right move.

LIAM vs. THE AUDIENCE 2: “SHANNON’S BETTER”
I went back and forth on this one. On the one hand, I didn’t want this to be a crowd work album, and I definitely didn’t want to encourage people to talk to me during a future show. On the other hand, this woman automatically arguing that a lesser-known Irish airport was “better” was about the most Park Slope thing I could imagine.

DUBLIN AIRPORT AND IRISH RAIL
I’d talked about my dad’s family being Irish Catholic earlier in the show. There was actually a lot more stuff about religion, but it was material that, when I started performing it, got very strong laughs, and then kind of just started getting less and less as the years went by. I’d hoped that a friendly album taping crowd would mean I could get it on tape one time. But as Ryan at AST Records pointed out, we had a LOT of material and we had the luxury of cutting anything that came off as weak, so at least you know that every laugh you hear on this is earned. Other than that, these are both true stories, and the people who’ve liked them the best have been Irish people from Ireland.

HOW TO WRITE A TRADITIONAL IRISH FOLK TUNE
My next album isn’t going to be as custom built; it’s going to involve less storytelling, and is going to have a very different structure. But as you may have noticed, there are a lot of musical references in the track titles, and I wanted to bookend the show with a second musical number to provide a big finish and bring the whole thing full circle. I wrote this as a silly blog entry 15 years ago, and my mom bugged me and bugged me to perform it as a live bit. She was right.

That’s it. I kind of can’t believe you made it all the way through, but thanks for doing so. And if you’re intrigued, please feel free to let people know and buy a copy why not, I’ll autograph it for you at the next show.

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