I’m getting more comfortable on stage; I still feel nervous as hell before I go on but now when I’m out there I don’t even think about it. I think the routine and the material this week were a lot closer to what typical stand-up is, because I covered a lot of different stuff, and I was pretty pleased with my transitions from one thing to the next. I think the biggest thing is that I knew my material better this week than I had before, which doesn’t make sense since I just wrote it all this week like I had the rest of the weeks, but whatever, I’m not knocking it. Also, the past few weeks I’d had what I was going to do printed out and I’d taken that on stage and when I felt stuck I tried to look at all that and find my way back. This week, I still had the whole thing printed out, to help my preparation before I was on stage, but I also had an outline with highlights to remind myself of the jokes and I looked at that when I got lost and it worked a million times better.

So, being comfortable and knowing the material went a long way to doing better, and I was rewarded at the end of the night by being named the crowd favorite. Of course, a huge portion of the crowd was made up of folks who were there because of me, but whatever, I was still funny. So I have to thank my folks who came out, Elizabeth, DeWayne, Kristina, B-Done, Michael, Katya, and, of course, the best bartender ever, Stephanie. She had a Diet Coke waiting for me when I got off stage!

Like I’ve said, I don’t know how long I’ll do the stand-up thing, but it’s nice to feel like I’m getting better at it, and like I’m understanding better what works and what doesn’t.

When I was up there I thought I was doing terribly; I was uncomfortable, didn’t know my material that well, and didn’t feel like the audience was really responding. But, only two-thirds of that is true. I didn’t know my material that well, which made me uncomfortable and unsure of myself and led to me giving up. Sure, the audience wasn’t responding exactly how I’d want, but that’s all part of the stand-up; if you’re funny enough, if you’re on your game, if you know your shit and are delivering it well, they’ll laugh how and when you want them to. The reason I sucked in this set, and the reason I sucked in the other set a week and a half ago at New Belmont, is I gave up on the set and let myself suck.

I don’t know how long I’m gonna keep giving stand-up a try; I’m not sure I see it as a long-term thing that I want to keep doing, I don’t know that I’ll ever feel very comfortable doing it. But, I do think it’s something that I can be good at, I’m funny and smart and there’s no reason I can’t be both on stage and make folks laugh, so there’s no reason for me not to do the best I can at it in the time that I’m doing it. So this was a good lesson and one I’m going to take to heart. It’s hard to keep plugging away up there when people aren’t reacting the way you want because it really is all cyclical, you feel better and funnier and everything flows better when people are with you and laughing. But, in classic catch-22 style, it all starts with you being comfortable and funny. If I get off stage and feel like I sucked I want it to be because I didn’t make people laugh, not because I was unprepared or unsure of myself or because I gave up.

And, as always, I have to talk about how awesome the other comics are. They’re ridiculously supportive and they really want everyone to come out and do a good job. You can see in the video when I wasn’t doing well some of the other comics were trying to help me out and when I gave up and left several of them made sure to tell me I did better than I thought and not to give up. All this makes it so much easier to get up and try at something that’s incredibly hard and I can’t begin to say how much I appreciate it.

Neither the name of the buyer nor the seller were revealed, but apparently both are well known and respected in the rare comic collecting world. In fact, the buyer had previously bought another copy of Action Comics #1, but for a lesser price because it was graded at a lower number. The grading process, on a scale from 0 to 10, is used for all kinds of collectibles, from comic books to baseball cards, and takes into account the quality of the item, it’s wear and tear and how it has held up over the years. The book sold yesterday was an 8, which is extremely rare for a book that old. Comics back then were produced in much smaller number and rarely taken care of, so to find on in what is considered “very fine” condition after eighty-two years is nearly impossible. And to have one go on sale is just as rare, which is likely why the buyer was so willing to pay such a steep price, in fact, the highest price ever paid for a comic book.

When I started writing this I almost called Action Comics #1 one of the rarest comics, but that’s not true at all. Off the top of my head I don’t know of more rare ones, but it would only makes sense that there are. Like I said, fewer comics were produced back then and they were rarely taken care of by their owners. The only reason a book like this one ends up in any kind of shape today is because it has Superman in it. I’m sure there were all kinds of comics with completely forgettable stories and characters, basically anything without super heroes, that, if found at an 8 grade today, would be much more rare than Action Comics #1, because there wouldn’t have been much interest in keeping them in good condition. More rare, but not more valuable though, because who really cares about some detective story or horror story compared to the first appearance of Superman?

No, what makes Action Comics #1 so valuable is that it introduced the world to the super hero. There were several attempts at making heroes that we would today consider super heroes, including The Phantom, one of the few from that era that lasted at all, but none came close to breaking the kind of boundaries that Superman did. He was the son of another world, truly unlike anything anyone had seen before, with more powers than he knew what to do with, and he completely changed the hero archetype. A year later Batman appeared in Detective Comics #27 and the super hero age was in full swing, as slews of heroes debuted one week after another.

While I do think that owning a copy of Action Comics #1 would be cool, it’s not the kind of thing I’d ever pay big bucks, or even small bucks, for. That’s just not how I like collecting. I collect baseball cards, but I only care about getting the ones that I can get signed. I’m simply not going to pay more than a dollar for any card, because it’s not worth it. I want to get the card to have it signed, not to just keep and look at. I guess to somebody who doesn’t collect, there’s not really any difference, but when you get a card signed you have an experience with it, you get to meet the player and have an interaction, something that doesn’t happen when you just own something. Even when I collected comics, from when I was 9 until about 15, I didn’t care about having or getting anything valuable, I just liked the stories. The reason I’m a writer now is because I loved reading comics, I liked how the stories worked and I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Kind of ironic since I’ve never even attempted to write a comic book.

As someone who still has all the comics he ever bought, and still has them in outstanding, if not mint, condition, this story about a comic selling for an huge amount only frustrates me, because I know I’ll never be able to get anything for my collection. Yes, I loved reading them when I did, but now, well, I’ve read them and they just take up space, so I’d love to be able to get rid of them and get something out of them. Unfortunately, that’s just not possible. For the last 20 years people have believed that things like comics are valuable, so they’ve made a point to take care of them, to keep them pristine and thus more valuable. Of course, this is in opposition to the reality of why an old book like Action Comics #1 is valuable. It’s only worth a lot because so few of them were maintained in good condition. So if all modern comics are taken care of, they’re basically all worthless. This is made even worse by the fact that the comics companies produces millions and millions of each comic, making the likelihood that any of them will become rare even more remote.

A few years ago, when we were about to make our first failed effort at making a movie, I looked into selling my comic collection, hoping to be able to fund things. I collected for six or seven years, mostly X-Men and all the various X books, and I have some huge runs of various books, including the first 75 or so issues of the newer run of X-Men that started in 1991, with all the various cover permutations and all. But still, when I looked around a little, I found folks who had my entire collection and more, usually older, better stuff, who couldn’t sell what they had, even at prices that I thought were ridiculously low. The reality is, none of us are getting rich off our comic boos unless Doc Brown shows up in his Delorian and takes us back to the late 30s.

As sad as this is, I don’t feel cheated by my comic collecting days, mostly because I never really believed they’d be worth anything monetarily. I was reading to read, and I still get comics, though mostly only in graphic novel form, to read them, because I love the medium. Frankly, investments of any kind have always struck me as being a foolish prayer and I’ve always thought that if you can find immediate enjoyment out of the things your ostensibly collecting you’re much better off than the folks who are hoping for the day when all that pop culture junk is one day valuable. So if you’ve got some old comics sitting around in mylar bags, open them up and read them, if you’ve got some Starting Lineup figures still in the box, open them up and place them on your window sill, and if you’ve got some original Star Wars figures still in the package…well, some things are actually valuable.

First, we’re back to the fairly poor video quality again. This time my friend Liz taped it for me and I guess she didn’t get a good focus from the start. It didn’t help either that my other friend Ashley was in front of her and the camera was auto-focusing on several things the whole time. But, as I always say, it’s not her camera and she was awesome enough to video it for me so she’s under no obligation to make it perfect. You can hear me and you can see me well enough to get the performance, so if that’s not good enough, well, you’re kind of a jerk.

I’m definitely getting more comfortable on stage; I still feel like I want to throw up before I go on, but that’s getting a little better and at least now when I’m on the stage I feel somewhat comfortable. Anyway, I don’t feel my legs shaking as bad. The last two thirds of this set were mostly what I did on Sunday so it was nice to see they actually are funny and it was the situation on Sunday that hurt me. This is the first time I’ve done something a second time on stage and I definitely see why people do the same jokes again, you get better by doing them repeatedly. Still, I want to make sure I’m doing mostly new stuff as much as I can, if only because it’s forcing me to write and to try to be as fresh and funny as possible. My friend Stephanie, who works at 37th actually thanked me for doing different stuff each week; she said she’s gotten a little tired of hearing the same stuff from the same comedians each week.

And again, as far as the other comedians, those guys are awesome. They’re so inviting and open and supportive and it really makes you want to come back and keep trying.

It’s also worth noting that Travis went up and performed both on Sunday and last night. On Sunday, well, there’s no other way to say it, he was not good. And it wasn’t as much a function of the setting as it was of him forgetting to actually tell any jokes. He did the same stuff last night and actually remembered to tell jokes and it went a lot better. I took a video of his stuff but he’s too much of a wuss to let me put it up. Maybe one day.

Apparently MTV has just know figured out what the rest of us have known for the last decade, and possibly longer: that they don’t show music videos any more. In fact, they have almost no programming whatsoever devoted to anything even remotely related to music. I guess by removing the “Music Television” from their logo MTV is saying they’re through the lie that they’ve become and they’re going to fully embrace themselves as the purveyors of, mostly, reality television. Yes, the horrible trend that started in the 90s with The Real World and Road Rules, continued to be blight on the world with The Osbournes and The Hills, and finally jumped the shark with the inexplicably popular Jersey Shore, has finally taken over the network that was once the most cutting edge thing available on popular TV.

For me, this is the ending to what has been a sad transformation. I gave up on MTV a long time ago, but it’s still sad to see something that was so vital to my teenage experience morph into an unrecognizable mess. MTV was beyond innovative, and what made it so likable was that they did something nobody else did, played music videos. As a kid, the great thing about MTV was that they played videos literally all day long, so you could just put it on and have it playing while you were doing whatever it was you were doing that day to entertain yourself. It didn’t matter if the video currently playing wasn’t something you liked, because you knew that in a few minutes something you would like would be coming on. I was watching the first time they showed the Thriller video, in its original eleven minute long version; it’s not only the greatest music video ever made, but, despite the fact that he transformed into a degenerate pervert, it featured the coolest person on the planet, Michael Jackson.

With this new MTV format great things like that will never happen again. The channel used to have shows devoted entirely to genres of music, and none was better than 120 Minutes. Every Sunday night you could sit and watch videos of up and coming rock/alternative bands and know about the next big thing before anyone else (or so was the thought, really you’d know about them roughly the same time as the other million or so viewers). Every huge name band from the late 80s and early to mid 90s was shown to the world for the first time on 120 Minutes. I’ll be honest, without a show like that, I know I miss out on a ton of great music. Sure, it’s all out there in the world for me to find, but I’m just not that savvy, I need a little help.

Not only is it sad that there haven’t been any videos on MTV for years, but the stuff they’ve been replaced with is awful. I’d rather have someone poke my eye with their finger for six hours than have to watch a half hour’s worth of current MTV programming. The stuff is just terrible; it’s a collection of assholes, bitches, crybabies, spoiled brats, and, well, assholes and bitches. They never show anyone likable, intelligent, funny, or interesting, and they never show anything that has even the slightest bit of redeeming value. Now, I’m sure that there was plenty of crap on back when I was a more than regular watcher of MTV (pretty sure I already mentioned The Real World and Road Rules), and I know it reeks of errant nostalgia to say “things were better in my day”, but the fact is, it’s true, MTV not only had it made with all the videos, but they had truly original, often brilliant programming as well.

There were a number of live action shows that were great, including the admittedly awful but undeniably enjoyable Undressed, but the cream of the crop was the sketch comedy show The State. Not as well remembered or beloved as The Kids In The Hall, though often just as irreverent and hilarious, The State was one of the most innovative and, frankly, weird sketch shows ever and it launched the careers of a number of comedians who would later create such shows and movies as Reno 911, Role Models, Stella, The Baxter, and, surprisingly enough, Night At The Museum. The show had the kind of talent and entertainment and complete lack of regard for convention that is just absent from current television. Here’s a great example of the show.

But where MTV really used to shine with original programming in the old days was with their animated shows. Long before Cartoon Network came up with their Adult Swim concept MTV was perfecting adult oriented animated content with series like Liquid Television and Bevis and Butthead. Aeon Flux is one of the most visually stunning cartoons ever created and as a viewer in my early teens the subject matter was so far ahead of my knowledge that it was nearly incomprehensible. It’s a show I’d love to watch again and see if I could understand because I’m fairly positive that the content was as intricate as the artwork. Here’s the opening credits, with the super cool fly in the eyelashes thing:

Another cartoon that was visually amazing, it changed animation style depending on the naratorial perspective, and ridiculously ahead of my time was The Maxx. As a fourteen year old watching this show I barely had a clue what was going on, but I was positive it was worth watching. I always had the sense there was a lot going on in the show that was never explained and it turns out (as I learned through some research) that that was the case. There were all kind of subtextual issues that might have been explained if there had been a second season. Still, The Maxx was an fantastic show and, like Aeon Flux, one I’d love to watch now as an adult. Just the preview for the show if fairly stunning:

This change of focus for MTV is sad, but it’s also sort of a non story, since the network’s ability to create interesting programming faded out over a decade ago. It hate to be the old fogey dousing everyone with nostalgia, but any time you’re forced to examine the demise of something that was an integral part of your personal experience, that’s just bound to happen. I guess now that I’ve gotten all this off my chest it’s time to wonder what exactly the ‘M’ in ‘MTV’ stands for now.

I guess I felt a little more comfortable this time than I did the first time, but still, very, very nervous. It didn’t help that the whole mood of the place was completely different; there weren’t even half as many people and the folks that were there didn’t seem very inclined to laugh. One of the other comedians, Derek Williams, told me about an open mic he was at a few weeks ago where there were six comedians and two audience members. So, I guess it could have been worse.

Now, obviously, I wasn’t as funny this time as I was the last time. One thing that I don’t think mot people realize about stand-up comedians is that they perform the same material pretty much every time they go out. Sure, they’ll come up with new stuff and work it in and dump some older stuff gradually, but for the most part they’re doing the same bits over and over again. JoAnna was definitely surprised when all the comedians were doing the same jokes they did last week. But, even though I know that the Friend Zone bit I did last week would get laughs, and that it’s probably the funniest thing I’ve thought of so far for the stand-up stuff, I chose not to do it because I really want to force myself to try to come up with new things and to have to be continually funny. This isn’t to say there won’t come a point where I’ll do the same stuff over again, of course I will, but at least for a little while I feel like I need to be writing stuff and trying things out and figuring out what’s funny.

For instance, while there were some laughs in what I did last night, the reality is that the vast majority of it is too personal to me and not universally relateable, which is never as good. Ideally you want things that everyone can hear and say, “I know how that feels” or “I do that too”, but I didn’t have that element in what I was saying. So while some stuff was funny, I need to keep that in mind for whatever I do next week. I also cursed a lot, which was just weird. That sort of snowballed. I don’t really care, it was just kind of odd.

Travis and JoAnna said they were going to go up this week and both turned out to be liars. Travis worked about seventy hours this week, so he didn’t feel like he’d had any time to prepare to go on. That’s fair. Of course, he’s had the several months we’ve been talking about doing stand-up to prepare, so it’s also bullshit. Hopefully he’ll go up next week. The day after JoAnna said she would go up she changed her mind, but, she did actually end up getting on stage. Ken Phillips, who teaches comedy classes at The Muse, needed a volunteer for an improv bit during his act and JoAnna, completely ignorant to what she was volunteering for, jumped up on stage:

It’s funny that because JoAnna is a musician she took the choosing of the songs way too seriously. Most of us would just sing whatever song first came to us and go but she was working through her mental rolodex to find just the right song. Still, she was great. And it’s funny that the song she chose was a reference to our most popular (to date) short:

It’s crazy, when you’re a kid, they teach you stealing is wrong, and it’s not just wrong because it’s wrong (which is the weakest kind of wrong), it’s wrong because it hurts others (which is the worst kind of wrong), and we all essentially understand that. Sure, there are people who still go out and steal, but even those people generally understand that what they are doing is wrong. I guess that’s the most baffling part of the rampant digital theft in our society, that the people who do it, and do it frequently, not only don’t see illegally downloading things off the internet as wrong, they don’t even see the act as stealing.

A few weeks ago, a guy I know was telling me about how he get photographs of athletes off a website that sells them. The site is basically a subscriber site, with different price tiers that allow the subscribers different amounts of downloads. A friend of his bought the cheapest subscription, figured out some kind of work-around to get by the download limit (don’t ask me how, I’m honest so I wouldn’t know anything about stuff like that) and sold the code the website gave him to as many people as he could, not only recouping what he paid for the access but turning a profit. The people he sold it to, including the guy I was talking with, used the access to download as many pictures as they could, without the website being paid for their access. As far as I know, this is still going on. This same guy told me about getting a complimentary gift card from an online company for purchasing a certain amount. By playing with the serial numbers on the back of the gift card he was able to figure out the numbers of a bunch of other gift cards, eventually ending up with over six hundred dollars worth of unauthorized free money to use at the web site.

This guy has a decent job, a house, a wife, and a baby; from all outward appearances he’s a perfectly upstanding person, but there he was, casually telling me about hundreds, possibly thousands, of dollars worth of theft that he had committed, all without leaving the comfort of his living room.

One of my good friends is just about the most polite, nice person I know. He’s very concerned with doing and acting right and being a good person. Yet, his iTunes library is filled with thousands upon thousands of illegally downloaded songs taken through file sharing sites like LimeWire, which while not illegal in and of themselves, basically exist to facilitate illegal downloading. They’re the online equivalent of a store next to a bank that sells ski masks, guns, and getaway cars. My friend would never, in a million years, walk into a music store and just grab some CDs and walk out, but he has absolutely no problem doing the exact same action through his computer with music, movies, and whatever other kind of digital material he can get for free.

What’s even worse than the fact that most people don’t consider digital theft to be theft are the reasonings that people give me to argue that it’s perfectly Ok, and not wrong in the least. One of the weakest arguments is that if the content is so easy to acquire, it must be alright to take it. Well shit, I could probably take a ton of produce right out of the super market, or pretty much anything I could fit in a pocked out of Wal Mart (if I can’t find an employee I damn sure won’t be able to find any security guards), but does that make it alright for me to do it? No, and the same rule applies to digital content. Another classic is that all the stuff they’re downloading is too expensive to buy. Tough shit, man. Lamborghinis are expensive too, but I can’t just go and take one because I’d rather not pay for it. The unfortunate nature of things is that if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it. It’s not your place to put a personal judgment on the price that someone chooses to place upon their product; if you don’t like the price, you don’t buy it, and you definitely don’t just go and take it without paying later. The furthering of the too expensive argument is the one that states that it’s Ok for someone to illegally download the content because somebody paid for it originally. Sorry, but that one is bullshit too. Is it Ok if one person pays to go to a movie then goes and opens the back door and lets in their friends? No, it’s not, and in the case of downloading things it’s more like letting in a few million of their friends. Just because a few people paid for something before you doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to piggyback their transaction and get the same product. If you don’t pay for something that has a price, that’s stealing.

The last refuge for people hopelessly arguing that illegal downloading is acceptable is the personal attack, which is pretty much the last refuge for any failed argument. “You’ve never downloaded a song without paying for it?” No, actually, I haven’t, I pay for the songs I want, which causes me to be more selective. “You’ve never copied a CD or made a mix tape?” Alright, yes, of course I have. Back in the day I copied a ton of cassettes and I’ve copied some CDs in my day as well. Really, I’ve loaned out more CDs to be copied by friends than I’ve copied for myself. So yes, I have to admit, this is wrong, and it is essentially the same thing as the illegal downloading. The difference is, I’ll fully admit that it’s wrong. I’m giving someone something for free that they should pay for, which is just as good as stealing it for them myself. But, I would argue that there’s a huge difference between giving a CD to a friend to copy for his or her own personal use and putting a CD on a website so that an infinite number of people can have access to it. The guy who stole six hundred dollars worth of gift cards tried to argue that I was just as bad as anyone who downloaded anything without paying for it because I had burned and allowed others to burn CDs, and in one sense he’s right. Both are wrong, but, on the spectrum of wrong, I’m a lot closer to right. Basically, you have to move past the argument over what’s right and wrong, it’s all wrong, and argue which is worse. Going out of your way to take thousands of dollars worth of digital content is much worse than occasionally copying or allowing someone to copy a CD that was directly paid for, and anyone who could argue that it isn’t, well, they’ll probably end up making a personal attack because that’s a futile argument.

What’s more troubling to me than just the general blase attitude toward theft is what kind of effect it has on the moral compass of a society. If we decide that digital theft is Ok, what’s next? When it becomes acceptable to take from others things can only snowball from there. One of the basic ideas of our society is that of the individual, that we have the right to our person and our property and what this attitude toward illegal downloading is saying is basically that there’s nothing wrong with taking someone else’s property. If this acceptance of ephemeral personal theft becomes an ingrained part of the societal psyche then it’s only a matter of time before physical theft becomes acceptable. And once the sanctity of the person and his or her right to property is degraded, the outlook on the person him or herself is degraded. It’s not a far cry from devaluing a person’s property to devaluing a person.