I’m taking classes at the Gotham Comedy Club in Manhattan. Our first assignment was to write and perform three minutes of original comedy. I went over the time limit and rambled a bit, but I managed to look a lot less nervous than I felt.
Things to work on for next week’s performance:
- hand out of pocket
- “um”
- watch for the red light, and don’t go over time
- get to the funny faster, and do less rambling between punchlines
- other things?
… I bet opening a refrigerator outside is bad luck, too. We just haven’t figured it out, yet. Think about it: you’re at the beach, and you open up a fridge. And then, six months later: BOOM, cancer. I mean, why would you ever put those two things together?
Jenka Gurfinkel writes:
It’s like stills from the third act of a Roland Emmerich movie, except it’s not. This is the future, now. Decry globalization all you want, but to me this is the true significance of the word. A tragedy in a place of no real political or economic interest, can literally overnight mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world. According to TechCrunch, within just a few hours of the earthquake the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the relief effort. By January 14th, 2 days after the earthquake, the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, with donations said to be coming in at the rate of $200,000 each hour. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has also been running its own text donation drive, and by Thursday had raised another $1 million, According to ABC News. Albe Angel, founder and CEO of Give On the Go, the company helping process the Yele Haiti donations, said, “Never has so much money been raised for relief so soon after a disaster. This is a watershed moment. It’s historic.”
It’s also intensely futuristic. Six years ago, when natural disaster struck Indonesia, what’s happening in 2010, in the support effort for Haiti simply did not exist. Even by 2008, text donations raised by charities only amounted to $1 million total. Yele Haiti got that in one day.
- Jenka Gurfinkel, The Cyberpunk Future of… Now
