my first comedy bit and other surprises

happy new year! happy new now! happy now year! happy veganuary!

dear friends, family, fans, fellow folks, friends again, friends forever,

i’m grateful that you’re here!
welcome to the first THIS THING of 2024!
before i share my usual offering of a few jokes and thoughts, please allow me to share this short op-ed video i made for CNN that came out this week! it’s about Veganuary (vegan + January, and i didn’t name it!). i had a lot of fun making it! also it’s less than 2 minutes long so watching it is almost like doing nothing, and you might really enjoy doing this almost nothing! enjoy! (and also here it is on tiktok if you like to engage with your near-nothings over there!)

and now, for today’s jokes and thoughts!

A) staking a claim:

i like my steaks rare.
totally rare.
so uncooked the animals are still running free in the wild.
i’m vegan.

now, i suppose that the ending there might have been more surprising if i hadn’t told you about the vegan op-ed video up above, but perhaps it’s even MORE surprising how unsurprising the ending was! i’ve built a career over the past 20+ years where i end jokes in surprising ways, and it was all leading up to this very moment where SURPRISE, there’s no surprise! happy new year!

B) nice cream:

a vegan ice cream place called “Häagen-Dazsn’t”

and if you order 12 at once, then it’s cheaper by the Dazsn’t.

PS this reminds me of one of the first comedic bits i ever conceived of, when i was about 15 or 16. i went with some friends to a dunkin’ donuts (now only called “dunkin’,” i believe, but back in the day, they mainly sold donuts, as opposed to now when i believe they mainly sell donuts). i saw that one donut cost 50 cents, but six donuts was $2.49, which means that if you wanted FIVE donuts, it was cheaper to buy one more that you didn’t want! USA! USA!

my comedy bit was that if five people came into DD and bought single donuts, then the next person who came in to order one should be told “you get your donut for free PLUS one cent back.” i didn’t fully commit to the bit by getting a job there and implementing it, though i DID work as a cashier in the dining hall in college, where i would charge people for extra things if they had meal plan allotments that would have gone to waste, and then i’d give the extra things they bought to the needy (my friends), like a technically non-criminal robin hood!

pretty fun, right? and i wasn’t even a comedian yet! just imagine the kind of comedy i would eventually do! (writing jokes that end with surprising amounts of non-surprise. surprise!)

C) we will, we will rocket you:

in space, no one can hear you scream.
which is why astronaut ice cream never caught on.

whoever came up with “i scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” did a great job, no joke. and we’ll never know who it was. unless i google it and then find this information on wikipedia:

“"Ice Cream" or "I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream" is a popular song, first published in 1927, with words and music by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, and Robert A. King”

great work, howard and billy and robert! without you and the creators of Alien (the fine folks who came up with “in space, no one can hear you scream”), who KNOWS what my final joke here would have been! it would have been a different surprise. but it’s not. it’s the exact surprise it is.

and that’s all from me for right now! and now, some questions for YOU:

1) how are you doing? how are you feeling? what is new and good?
2) anything you’re planning for this year? how are you celebrating Veganuary?
3) ever heard anyone scream in space?
4) have you ever been a technically legal robin hood?
5) how are you doing NOW?

before we go, here are some upcoming headlining standup shows!

— Queens, NY at 3pm on January 6 (i do an hour! a rarity in NYC!)
— Minneapolis, MN on January 10-13
— Des Moines, IA on January 20
— Davenport, IA on January 21
— Ogden, UT on January 26-27
— Boise, ID on January 28
— Cohoes, NY on February 2
— Bethlehem, PA on March 2
— Milwaukee, WI on March 15-16
— Lafayette, LA on April 18

hope you can make it! to all of these shows! each one of you!

finally, here is flyer for my show in NYC this weekend that my wonderful girlfriend rini made by using art from ramin nazer and a photo by mindy tucker! hope to see you there, glad to have you here, love and thanks to all!