March 2013
14 posts
Steveland
One of my favorite pieces of music trivia is that Stevie Wonder’s real first name is Steveland. (“Wonder” is also a stage name.) It’s just… such a fake sounding name. It’s not a name for a person. It’s a name for a fake country a kid makes up for a social studies project.
Not everyone knows that, but a fair number of people do. Here are some more obscure...
February 2013
2 posts
Consider it this way. Let’s say you’re a comedian with the basic respect for his or her craft to write jokes that reflect your own opinions. Jokes that appeal to intelligent, conscientious people — jokes that appeal to your friends, and your family, and the people you like. And every time you invite one of those people to a show, you’re wracked with anxiety that...
"Jeff" (working title: "Fundamentally Decent Guy...
Just once, I want to see a TV drama about a guy whose home life is stable and fulfilling, but he’s terrible at his job.
(Cut to his boss saying, “I know he’s… orthodox, but he doesn’t get results, damn it. Not a shame about his wife, though…”)
In season 3, he gets demoted back down to fry cook, and all the episodes are about how he takes pride in the...
November 2012
4 posts
I've been married for four months, and learned...
Wives walk on two legs.
Left to her own devices, a wife will build a makeshift nest out of branches and large leaves. (In tropical climates, palm fronds tend to figure heavily in these nests.)
When threatened, a wife will emit a low-pitched buzzing noise. This noise is actually produced by the wife’s upper arms, which she rubs furiously against the sides of her thorax.
Wives hunt in...
You don't get to be Christmas music, Mr. Grinch.
I mean, the Grinch himself is a seasonal character. I know that. We all know that. But outside of that context, that song is just about how some guy is a jerk. It makes no reference to Christmas, or to any attempts to steal Christmas, or any of that. It is just a series of increasingly elaborate insults addressed to a man named Grinch. It is not inherently a seasonal song.
Let me give you some career advice, Willy and the...
You’re a band. You’re a band with a member called Willy. You’re a band with another member called Poor Boy. And you’re a band with TWO OTHER MEMBERS. So you can’t call yourself “The Poor Boys”. That’s like if the Beatles were “John and the Georges.”
Furthermore — FURTHERMORE — you play all your shows on the same street...
Nielsen vs. Estrada vs. ?
I always assumed that, in order to become the most famous Erik in America, I would have to surpass Erik Estrada. This is literally a thing I have been thinking about since… at least since I started doing comedy. Maybe before that, when I wasn’t doing anything that might make me particularly famous anyway.
But I just looked up Erik Estrada, and it turns out that his real name is…...
September 2012
1 post
Bad news, guys. I just got cast to play Manimal.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/manimal-tv-series-movie-sony-animation-370769
I mean, it makes sense and all — if Manimal just turns into birds and cats all the time anyway, it’s not really that relevant what he looks like when he’s a guy. But still… Manimal. You never see that kind of thing coming, do you? I mean, it could be worse. I could be in the ALF...
August 2012
2 posts
My worst show ever.
Five years ago, I did a corporate Christmas party — they said they were going with a vague vaudeville theme, so they decided to book a couple of magicians, a mime, a juggler, and yes, a stand-up comic. I got there, and it turned out the stage was 20 feet away from a DJ booth, and music was blasting at full volume throughout the night.
Now, you’ll note that a mime can perform in...
I'm just worried that I'll wake up with four kids....
One morning, I’ll walk into the living room and run into four kids I’ve never seen before, all calling me dad. And I’ll turn to my wife, and I’ll say, do you know these kids, and she’ll say, yes, these kids are ours. These are our kids. And what am I going to do? I can’t leave my wife — I love my wife. I can’t put them up for adoption. If I go to...
July 2012
6 posts
WEDDING UPDATE: Socks
Veronica has told me many times about how her father, on his wedding day, accidentally wore mismatched socks. I’m wearing one sock as I write this, and I’m mere feet away from the sock drawer. It would be very easy for me to pick a mismatched sock out of the drawer, thereby ensuring that my children, and their children’s children, and so on will be expected to do so. It’s...
A PRIME-TIME NEWS MAGAZINE INTRO
“In 1980, Mario was the 108th-most-popular baby name in the country. This was before the name became associated with Nintendo’s heroic plumber. Americans, perhaps wary of seeing their sons bullied, turned against Mario. By 2011, the name was only 224th. But there’s one name that, perhaps paradoxically, has suffered an even steeper decline. Since the introduction of the Sega...
I know I'll never be as famous as Mickey Mouse....
I don’t even mean Donald Duck in Sweden, either. That’s too ambitious. Donald Duck here. I think that’s the exact level of fame I’m looking for. Everyone knows who I am, even kids. Most people feel vaguely well-disposed toward me. But if someone were to tell you “hey, I’m really into Erik Charles Nielsen,” you’d think “Hey, that guy’s a...
Can we stop giving publicity to the concept of...
Heckling is (thankfully) extremely rare, actually. I know it’s portrayed as some kind of common thing in the media. I’m not sure why non-comics are so obsessed by it as a concept. I’ve been doing stand-up for a decade, and I’ve been heckled somewhere between zero and six times, depending on what counts.
Three times, someone in the audience was just drunk and talking...
We're out of food.
I mean, aside from a truly uninspiring assortment of canned and dried goods. I suppose it’s time to go to the grocerage and get some delicious meals.
…ah, did you notice what I just did there? “Grocerage”.
Not even a real word.
How are you going to stop that? I bet you thought “oh, he’s using an obscure and/or obsolete word, possibly for comic effect.”...
Let's talk about apes, people.
I don’t know who decided we needed a collective word to describe only four things. But here we are anyway: “ape.” It’s like someone sat down and said, “well, we all know chimps, and we all know gorillas, and we all know orangutans, and what the heck, let’s throw gibbons in there too. Let’s make up a word that describes all of those animals and nothing...
June 2012
4 posts
"Jim Livestock: Professional Dad"
I’m writing a pilot. It’s about an accountant who loses his job and is forced to stay at home with his kids, while employing increasingly wacky schemes to earn money on the side. It’s not a very realistic portrayal of unemployment.
I’m also working on an hour-long drama called “Law Lawyers.” It’s a cop show.
Dreams of fake money
I frequently have dreams where I receive money with obviously bogus denominations. Then I just spend a minute of the dream thinking, “oh, no, that guy gave me a fake $7 bill!”, or “maybe I can fool someone into accepting this $12 bill as though it were an actual thing… but who?” It’s a real source of worry.
Last night, I dreamed I went to an ATM that gave me a $75 bill. This is a new...
How about secret authors?
How about people who die, and when people go through their belongings, it turns out they had spent decades working on some vast interlocking network of novels? Sometimes I wish I was one of them — I would have done so much writing by now, and I would be able to say, “look, everyone! Look at all the books I wrote while you all weren’t looking! I’m amazing!”
The fact...
"Now and Then" (1995)
“So… wait. Christina Ricci AND Thora Birch are in this movie? What happened — they couldn’t get Christina Ricci, got the next best thing, and then it turned out they COULD get Christina Ricci after all?” “Christina Ricci isn’t like Thora Birch.” “They’re… the same person. Thora Birch is fake Christina Ricci.” “No,...
