My birthday. 63.
Doesn’t really seem that long. Started standup three and a half years ago and I feel I have been doing standup half my life. New material still comes hard - I can sit down and try to write for hours and have nothing happen and then get a good idea when I’m thinking of something else. I am beginning to see movies as nothing more than elaborate setups for punch lines. Sideways spent 48 minutes setting up the drinking out of the spit bowl scene but it was worth it. Little Miss Sunshine spent half the movie setting up the corpse scenes but again it was worth it. I bet the writer thinks of the funny scene first and then writes the rest of the script to set it up. Scoop sets up a lot of great Woody Allen lines - I’m not sure it works in any other dimension. It sure seems a lot easier to set up a punch line that way than on stage as a standup comic. I wonder who was the first standup comic - I wonder if the first standup comic was intentional - maybe it was just a guy who got up intending to be serious and broke everyone up unintentionally - leading others to come up with the idea of standup as an objective on its own. Oh well - three more years until Social Security - I wonder if it will help me in social situations.
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