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LapTopping – The Bit Long, Official E-zine of The Bedroom Philosopher
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ISSUE 76
Monday March 22, 2010
**Songs From The 86 Tram at Melbourne International Comedy Festival Starts Thursday. Click HERE to book**
**Album out April 16 through Shock**
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LT BIRTHDAYS

Happy Birthday Reese Witherspoon 34 today!
Happy Birthday William Shatner 79 today!

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WORLD CLASS JOKES

Q. How many cool kids does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. One, but they liked the old one better.

Q. What do you get if you cross a high school reunion with a computer virus?
A. Facebook.

Q. What’s the most dangerous part of a budgie?
A. The seedy underbelly.

Q. How do horny office workers communicate?
A. Booty fax.

Q. Why did the secretaries get in trouble for doing their nails?
A. They were file sharing.

Q. Why did the Internet cross the road?
A. Something to do with porn!

Q. What’s Ben Lee’s favourite CD?
A. Claire Danes.
(credit: Josh Earl)

Q. How many iphones does it take to iphone?
A. iphone.

Q. What do vegan’s read their children?
A. Clarence and the carob kingdom.

Q. What’s Peter Garret’s least favourite Midnight Oil Song?
A. Beds are burning (due to faulty insulation policy).

Q. What do you get if you cross a graphic designer and a performer?
A. Half of Melbourne.

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TINY LEGENDS – Moments that fell down the back of the couch.

From Shannon Barnett.

JB Hi Fi shop assistant: Can I help you?
Me: Yes, do you have the new Metric album, I can’t find it.
JB dude: Um, I’m not sure, let me look it up. That’s M-E-T-R-I-K right?
Me: Um, no.
JB dude: Oh! M-E-T-R-I-C-K?
Me: Um, no. It’s M-E-T-R-I-C.
JB dude: Wow bands and their weird spellings these days huh?

EMAIL US YOUR TINY LEGENDS.

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INANIMATE OBJECT BEREAVEMENT NOTICES

******
SICK
******

From Daria Wain.

“After recently scouring a vintage fashion market for any item that was both within my price range and from an era earlier than 1990, I discovered a little mustard yellow, german made, analogue clock, complete with two alarm bells on top. And it worked! After carrying it home super carefully, I got it out to find that it wasn’t ticking. I wound it up. It ticked for about thirty seconds. Thus far, nothing has been able to revive the poor thing.”

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WE PRAY FOR THEIR RECALIBRATION
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SEND YOUR BEREAVEMENT NOTICES TO: laptopping at bedroomphilosopher dot com

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GET A WRIGGLE ON GOOGLET!
Phrases people have typed into Google to land on my website:

“remove ribena from carpet”
“the bedroom philosopher norcott”
“how to unsubscribe to the bedroom philosopher ezine cos justin removed me as a friend on facebook! boo!”
“are cruskits suitable for baby?”
“albury centrelink scam tammy”
“girls on bed with slacks”
“buy bleaching for your bum in Hobart”
“overcoming a broken mind”
“the funny of a philosopher about disappointment”
“maroon cardigan”

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TIME IS CHEESE AND MOUSE IS HUNGRY!

The Australian National Anthem?

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A GIGGLE OF GIGS

MELBOURNE
25 March – Being interviewed by Richard Watts on Triple R’s SmartArts. 11am.
25 March – Performing at the Festival Club, Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Hi-Fi Bar, from 11pm.
25 March – 18 April (No Mondays) Songs From The 86 Tram – Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Acacia Room, Victoria Hotel, 215 Little Collins St. 9:45pm (8:45 Sundays). $23.50/$19.50.
April 2 – Live performance on Triple J for Melbourne Comedy Festival. Trades Hall, between 12-2pm. Free.

NORTHCOTE (SO HUNGOVER) SINGLE TOUR.
All gigs solo with Josh Earl except Brisbane.
All gigs $12 on door only except Sydney $15 plus b.f. or $15 on door. Brisbane free.
Doors 8pm except Brisbane, 6:30pm
CANBERRA 28 April.The Front.
SYDNEY 29 April. The Vanguard. (Bookings sydneycomedyfest.com.au 02 9020 6966)
ADELAIDE 5 May.Grace Emily.
HOBART 6 May. Alley Cat.
LAUNCESTON 7 May. Royal Oak.
BRISBANE 9 May. Brisbane Powerhouse.

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STORYTIME

Ladies and gentleman, please drink up your intellect suppressant and welcome our next psychological case study to Narcissists Anonymous. He’s going to share with you some lightly connected thoughts about things that I’m going to blindly recommend. Please bang your hands together like a patronising school assembly for adults as you prepare to be partly responsible for the performance trajectory of Guy Blokeman!

Another Comedy Festival and I’m not cynical at all. I’m just as fresh faced and optimistic as I was back in 2003 when I did my first show at the Butterfly Club dressed in my Nan’s sky blue 70’s ski suit. In one bit I read from my grade seven diary about a girl I had a crush on. One evening that girl came along. I said hello awkwardly after the show, still wearing my ski-suit, saturated with sweat. She smiled kindly. Her boyfriend looked like at me like I was a wasp. They say humans can’t remember anything about being a baby because it was so traumatic that our memory has suppressed it. That’s how I feel about my early 20’s.

And now we enter the mirth pit with the sparkly eyed manicness of people who have spent too long mining their own souls to fuel these artificially constructed refrains of humour. The reward for this adulthood of sacrifice and instability? To be judged by strangers brandishing the power to validate or dismiss the relevance of our emotional truth with lilting laughter or scarring silence.

I’ve always thought of comedy as the poor sucker of the arts community. For starters, the psychoanalytic structure of the form itself is flawed – ‘there’s nothing funny about someone trying to be funny.’ Second, technically it’s the most difficult of all the artforms – trying to make an audience laugh. Thirdly, the audience are permitted to heckle! When I think of the amount of times I could have sworn at an actor ‘you’re not convincing’ or a waffly muso ‘Jack johnson called, he wants his chords back.’ Fourthly, comedians are the only artists who are starved of a basic mental function to fall back on during difficult times. For a humourist, the sense of humour is the tapped vein central to their craft. After a bad gig they find that there is simply nothing there. I believe this is the reason there is a cliché of the depressed comedian.

Fifthly, unlike musicians, who can not only get away with, but are encouraged to keep playing their old stuff, comedians are constantly under demand to produce new material. This pressure creates unnecessary anxieties in the performers mind. They are often paranoid of people being in the audience who have heard their stuff before. Sixthly, comedy isn’t cool. Despite things like Boosh and Flight of The Conchords, comedy as a genre is usually placed last for media coverage behind movies, music, books, art and theatre. Unlike the UK, where people see comedy like they see films, there’s no infrastructure here for comedians outside comedy festival. Apart from the big names on TV and commercial radio, there’s a general wasteland of sporadic comedy rooms and one off theatre shows. This also creates a lack of critical debate, while music is analysed beyond all space and time, comedy is rarely lauded as a culturally valid artform.

Knock Knock.
Who’s there.
Local comedian.
Local comedian who?
Exactly. Get a publicist.

Okay, okay, how about this. Early next year we pack out the MCG. Every comic in Australia gets one minute to entertain the crowd. The crowd are all fitted out with voting devices, like the worm in the political debates. At the end, the top 20% are allowed to do Comedy Festival. The bottom 20% are legally required to never perform stand up ever again. The middle 60% write for Hey Hey It’s Saturday, which Channel 9 has decided to make a 24 hour, round the clock show with Daryl at the helm, except between the hours of 5-8am when he’s briefly replaced by Agro.

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself, and f**king up a stand-up routine.”
Mary Mackillop.

Two nights before my first ever Comedy Festival show, I had the most profound and vivid dream. In it, I am sitting in a lounge room watching the Muppets on TV. Chris Martin from Coldplay is on. He’s playing a sweet, sombre song but is dressed as a clown. He also has a bunch of cockatoos tied to him. They start flapping and he is slowly lifted off the ground. He looks worried and keeps glancing to his manager on the side as if to suggest this isn’t part of the act. The camera follows him, as he’s being lifted higher and higher. He is terrified now and signalling frantically for someone to get him down. He is taken up near the roof of the studio where there are two candelabras on the wall. The cockatoos fly into them and catch fire. I turn away at this point and burst into tears. I walk into the kitchen to tell everyone what I’ve seen but there’s no-one there.

THE END

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LAYTOPING IS MISPELLED, AND FREE! WHAT A GREAT GIFT IDEA, AND IT’LL CUT YOUR ENERGY BILLS IN HALF! SEND IT TO A FRIEND!
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