The Super Bowl

I really missed out on American Football as a kid. My dad never took me to a game.

At school playtimes, while all the other kids were having fun, using jumpers for goalposts, putting on shoulder pads and crash helmets with walkie-talkies built into them, taking steroids and running into each other, I was getting sand kicked in my face, sitting in a corner, all alone with my guitar.

Then I had an idea. I talked the jocks into letting me do a half-time show.

People were sceptical. The first show was a real baptism of fire. My music wasn’t really connecting with anyone, but then in a blinding flash of inspiration, I got the idea of letting my clothes slip down during the gig.

Soon it was all over the school newspaper, and audiences to the game skyrocketed. Some said my half-time shows were more of an event than the games themselves. It got to the point where there was a lot of lunch money riding on what colour outfit I would wear, and at what minute of the performance my clothes would slip down.

These were good times. I got special treatment at the school tuck shop. The kids who were good at needlework all wanted me to wear their clothes. The kids running the lemonade stand wanted me to encourage the other kids to drink lemonade. Sure, I had my battles with weight, there was a lot of pressure, but it was pretty sweet.

Unfortunately, by the the time I got to secondary school, they only played soccer, cricket and rugby, and I looked like a right idiot trying to interrupt the games with my half-time shows. I couldn’t fit in. No matter how many times I “accidentally” let my nipple slip out.

I lost all my sponsorship deals. I don’t want your pity, so I won’t bore you with my struggle with chocolate. Suffice it to say, I’m down to two bars a day and I go to Chocoholics Anonymous meetings regularly.

In the interests of furthering Anglo-American relations, here’s me doing Jon Bon Jovi singing “My Old Man’s A Dustman”

PS. I would love it if you came to my show at the Leicester Comedy Festival on Valentine’s Day. I promise to keep my clothes on!

Whatever You Do, Don’t Look At This Thing I Made.

To mark the rebirth of of Pirate Bay and Justin Timberlake’s impending parenthood, I went to Pirate Bay and searched “Justin Timberlake”. Then I searched on “Total Recall (2012)”. Pages of torrents, seeders and leechers. Oodles of people unwilling to help Justin and Jessica Biel support their new baby!

…That’s the old fashioned view of “piracy”. The new model, as described by many a business guru is that the mp3, the mp4, the ebook, etc. are ideas, and the DVD, the CD, the paperback, etc. are the souvenir of the idea. Ideas that spread win. Free ideas spread the best. Illicit free ideas? Well, just look at “The Interview”. It was actually hard not to.

It all reminds me of being a parent. When you can’t get your kid to eat their greens, just dangle a forkful in front of them and say, “Whatever you do, don’t eat this piece of broccoli, because I’m just about to eat it…” Look away. Look back. Hey presto. Broccoli eaten. If you want experience the real joy of parenthood, act frustrated that your broccoli has been stolen. This results in a giggling child. Repeat until your child is brimming with nutrition. Priceless. You’ve made them do something they didn’t want to do, and made them happy about it! For more Machiavellian parenting/governing tips see here.

So with that said, I would certainly hate it if you went to this link and downloaded my latest album for free.

PS. I’d only ever use BitTorrent for educational purposes.

PPS. I would hate it if my stuff ended up on Pirate Bay. So whatever you do…

How To Run a Country… In Seconds!

You get quite a few ideas from being a parent.

When you can’t get your kids to get dressed, you turn it into a race. “Let’s see who can get dressed the quickest… Go!”

Or you give them a choice. “Do you want to wear the red top, or the blue top?”

Both of these tactics will result in the kids doing what you want, not what they want. You’ve taken the option of not getting dressed off the table with competition and choice.

Food for thought in an election year!

Here’s a song I wrote about this topic. It’s the history of civilisation in two and a half minutes.

P.S. I’m staying with old friends this weekend. The guitar and the picture were created by the genius Keira (aged 10), who amazingly made them because that’s what kids do when we’re not bugging them!

Andy Counting Murray

I’m trying to read more on this counting Andy Murray swearing story, but all the coverage is littered with references to counting tennis. WTF did his counting girlfriend say?

I mean, if it’s not autocorrect censoring my counting blog posts, it’s the counting BBC pussy-footing around, referring to Andy Murray as “British number one”, when they really want to say wee.

It’s hypocritical, pretending you’re all down on swearing, but really using it as clickbait. I hate hypocrisy in other people.

I think Adam Bloom did the best joke about swearing, let me know your faves, you aunts.

Bruce Springsteen And Extreme Weather!

Here’s every single Bruce Springsteen song in 50 seconds. Sorry I could’t boil it down any further, but he has quite a body of work. I love Bruce Springsteen, by the way – it’s just there’s a lot of it, and I figured you might be busy.

I’m all about saving you time.

Hopefully, you’ve been following my time-saving tips and haven’t bothered looking at any mainstream climate change coverage, so I’ve put a little reference to it in the Springsteen clip.

If you watch environmental stories through the news, you will see the opinion of 99.99% of climate scientists (that climate change is real, human-made and perhaps should be mitigated through policy) given the same air time as the opposing view (that climate change is a leftist hoax). It’s all in the name of balance, but the back and forth of it is time-consuming!

Better to not to get bogged down in the whole debate. To save time, let’s act as if climate change isn’t real. Then when Al Gore finally jumps out from behind the scenes and goes, “AHAHAHAH! You should’ve seen your face!”, we’ll be able to hold our heads high.

I’m kidding of course. There’s no such thing as Bruce Springsteen (B.S.? Wake up, people!). Springsteen was dreamt up by an ad agency to stimulate tourism in New Jersey.

Better book a trip, before it gets wiped out by extreme weather!

Pornocracy!

Have you ever noticed when, say, Rupert Murdoch or Alan Sugar do another deal because they want to be in the position of people who are wealthier than them, they’re being ambitious?

When people join a trade union to achieve the same, they’re just jealous.

I like performing at Stand Up For Labour events, because it means being around engaged people who are in an earnest, grassroots effort to improve the lives of working people.

They’ve got their work cut out for them. By the time Tony Blair had finished with them, New Labour were a bit like soft porn. People who like porn don’t like soft porn. People who don’t like porn don’t like soft porn. Who is it for?

So, with that said, here’s a totally one-sided, polemical song about Margaret Thatcher. I think it’s okay to be one-sided and polemical. Like historian Howard Zinn used to say: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train”!

Songs like this are just here to make you feel a little less alone if you feel the way I do.

Schrödinger’s Joke – Observe With Care!

Here’s a joke involving Schrödinger’s Cat*. Let me be the first to comment that the act of observing the joke might kill it.

The joke also involves the work of Black Lace, who wrote the song “Agadoo”. I think both “Agadoo” and Schrödinger’s Cat are hard to grasp, but hopefully I’ve made some sense of them for you.

Everyone loves science these days, but it’s a mixed blessing. Without some kind of Hippocratic Oath, it’s only a matter of time before scientists come up with another nitroglycerin, another uranium-235, another file format to share the music of Justin Bieber with…

In Power Systems, Noam Chomsky says that back in the day (around the early 1600s), if you were holding a cup of boiling water and then let it go, the steam would rise to the ceiling and the cup would fall to the floor. I’m not a scientist, but I think the same would happen now. Anyway, Noam’s point is that back in the day, actual scientists would’ve explained the cup-steam phenomenon thusly:

“The cup is going to its natural place and the steam is going to its natural place”.

There were some pretty clever people around, but no-one knew to be puzzled about why the cup and the steam were doing different things. And then Galileo got puzzled about it and all hell broke loose.

Makes you wonder what we’re not being puzzled about these days, doesn’t it?

*My big regret with this clip is having to leave out the final punchline (due to an audio drop-out), which is Morrissey singing, “Girlfriend in a conga, oh you’re so embarrassing…”

P.S. There’s some great Chomsky here and some great Schrödinger’s Cat here.

How To Be An Informed Person In Less Than 20 (!) Seconds.

Here’s me adding to my treasure trove of time-saving tips when it comes to understanding the “news”. Sorry for not posting this earlier. When I wrote “How To Be An Informed Person In Less Than 30 Seconds” on Friday, I thought I did you a bit of a disservice, so here’s how to take an extra 10 seconds of your life back.

Depending on how far into your life you are, I’ve just added about two to three days to it with this last tip. Why not give this gift to someone else, by sharing the video?

How can you repay me for this? You can’t. It’s my gift to you.

I only ask that you spend those two days I just gave you wisely. For instance, you could come to my Leicester Comedy Festival show and still have the majority of the two days I just gave you left over. Call it a tithe. If Leicester is too far for you to travel, but you’d still like to feel the joy I can bring, my new album is free to download.

Have a great rest of the day. Remember, stay away from the news!

How To Be An Informed Person In Less Than 30 Seconds.

We spend too much time consuming news media, or newzak, as I’ve heard it more aptly described. It’s not making us any more informed or engaged. For a better life, my suggestion is:

1) Briefly glance at the newsstand as you’re taking a walk to somewhere nice.

2) Today will be the same as yesterday – unless – a picture like this appears on the majority of the front pages:

3) If you see something like this, you’re about six months away from losing your job. Otherwise, as you were! Now you’ve got all that free time to start a social movement, walk your dog, watch my awesome videos, whatever.

You’re welcome!

(Ps. Only joking! CounterSpin’s weekly podcast is a great way to start.)

Rich Hall Knows How To Throw (A Party)

It’s throwback Thursday! Here’s a picture of me with Rich Hall in the year 2000, backstage at the studios of Late Night With Conan O’Brien in New York City. I forget who the lady in the middle is – as you can tell by my appearance, I was pretty out of it in those days.

Other guests on the show included William Shatner, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and (I think) Jason Statham. Well, we’ve all gone on to do pretty well for ourselves. Especially William Shatner. The Conan show was a real launchpad for us all!

It’s possible to get really nervous before gigs like this, but Rich always knew how to lighten the tone. As we were waiting to go on, Sarah Michelle Gellar was on the couch, earnestly saying to Conan: “I think it’s a bad idea to get a bunch of actors together in room to talk about themselves”, I distinctly remember Rich muttering, “You’re in a room…” at the offstage monitor.

Rich still knows how to party backstage. Last night at the Hoedown, before he went on, he threw a roll of gaffer tape from one side of the dressing room to the other, the idea being to make it sound like there was a commotion going on just before he walked out. The gaffer tape bounced, and smashed a pint glass. It was loud. I hadn’t been paying attention (I’m pretty out of it these days), so when the Soho Theatre folks came in to clear up, I told them that he must’ve lost the plot and started trashing the place. That’s what it looked like to me.

My thanks to Rich for the guest spot on his fabulous show last night and thanks to the ace band headed up by Rob Childs, for rocking, as usual. Here’s a recording of me playing with the Hoedown Band from the Edinburgh Festival.

I’ll be doing my show, Lost In Music, at the Leicester Comedy Festival on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know if William Shatner’s doing a show there this year.

Christian Reilly

musical comedian and MMT-lover

Tag Archives: comedy