When I submitted to write for Saturday Night Live last year, I wrote a sketch where Donald Trump was the mayor of Amity in the movie Jaws.
SPOILER ALERT, they didn’t hire me, but I was rereading the sketch today and I still like it. And somehow, it’s gotten a thousand times more current than it was last year. So I figured I’d share it with all you lovely Internet folks:
Show starts 9:30pm. Set time TBD
Email me at liam@heyitsliam.com for guest list.
9:30pm * FREE! + FREE BEER
At the Clubhouse, upstairs.
1607 Vermont Ave.
in the shopping complex next to Jon’s
HOSTED BY: Liam McEneaney
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)
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.
Reading what Mandy Stadtmiller had to say about me in her new memoir “Unwifeable” (best part of the book) reminded me that I’ve appeared in several other memoirs that I’ve never read. I found one on Amazon, called “Stand Up or Die,” written by Andy de la Tour. Andy was part of the vanguard of British “alternative” standup comedians of the 1980s.
They’re called “alternative,” because American-style solo standup was a big left turn from the British sketch and musical hall tradition that dominated their comedy scene for so long. He came to NYC when I ran my Tell Your Friends! show in the basement of Lolita, and when he told me that he was coming to NYC to get back to his standup roots after a multi-decade absence, I booked him immediately.
Andy wrote “Stand Up or Die” about his months in the New York indie comedy scene, and turned it into a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe.
He has some wry and almost complimentary things to say about the New York comedy scene as a whole, and a lot of nice things to say about my show, where I tried to make comedians who were a little more obscure feel as important and wanted as the big names I had like Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Lewis Black.
PS: If you know any other books I’m mentioned in, please message me. I can’t remember any more.
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:
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.
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
Liam McEneaney: Comedian, Writer, Producer 