People familiar with my comedy have been trying to get me to start writing a blog for years and I have resisted up until now.
But a couple weeks ago I launched a totally revamped web-site, courtesy of my brilliant web-designer friend Marcel Ollmann, and Marcel has incorporated a blog post into the new web-site, so here we go.
To be honest, after my initial reluctance to begin blogging, I have had a change of heart because, as I began to look back over hundreds of pages of thoughts, premises, personal stories and unfinished comedy routines in my computer, I realized that I have an incredible source of material from which to draw on.
It bothered me to know that I had so many good ideas on my hard-drive which were not fully developed and/or were not shared with my audiences… but the blog would force me to make those previously obscure comedic concepts both viable and available.
Besides developing those unfinished ideas into product, I recognized that writing a periodic blog would also motivate me to seek out new sources of humor to supplement the material in my live stand-up presentations.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1996 and the experience pretty much started to suck from day-one, I soon realized that it would take a significant amount of time to “get my foot in the door” of the Hollywood comedy scene and generate stage time on a consistent basis, so I needed a creative outlet.
Because I regretted my failure to make notes during my eleven year career as an Assistant District Attorney… losing so many valuable memories in the process… I thought it would be a good idea to keep a daily diary of my struggle in L.A. so I would have a chronological account of my certain rise to stardom when I would inevitably “make it big.”
Well, after about four of my six years in La La Land, I had six 200+ page accounts that I titled the ‘L.A. Misérables’ series… and not a whiff of success.
But the diaries served their purpose.
The need to generate material on a daily basis made me more aware of everything that was going on around me as I was constantly searching for something that I could turn into comedy and, as a consequence, I became a better writer and a better comedian.
I’m hoping that the blog will do the same for me.
The other motivating factor was the release, and success, of my new book, ‘Stories I Tell: A Comic’s Random Attempts to Make Some Sense Out of Nonsense.’
The format of the book was a big hit because it was basically an eclectic collection of one humorous short story, comedy skit or anecdote after another, which made it an easy, quick read and something a reader could pick up and put down at their convenience.
People who loved the book asked when there would be another.
As I began to compile some of the initial blogs, it occurred to me that the individual blogs were not unlike the components of my book… a bunch of funny stories told in the style of my comedy act.
That’s when I realized that, as I accumulated stories for my upcoming blog posts, I was also creating the necessary elements of a follow-up book to ‘Stories I Tell’… in the process killing two birds with one blog.
So, after this initial, totally unfunny but informative, blog I will start posting on a regular basis.
I already have thirty written as we begin… so I have been chomping at the bit.
I hope we can both get something out of it.
So let’s do this…
