Goodbye, Richard Jeni…
I found out today that comedian Richard Jeni passed away over the weekend, from a gunshot wound to the head that is believed to be a suicide (still pending autopsy).
Richard Jeni was probably one of my favorite comedians of all time, right up there with Jerry Seinfeld and George Carlin and all of the other “big dogs.” But he didn’t really consider himself a big dog – just a really funny guy who was at the top of his game. I first learned of him from his appearance at Comic Relief 7 – by far the funniest four minutes of the entire 6-hour show. Matt and I went on to listen to every sound bite we could get our hands on from the guy – we could both probably have recited his HBO special, “A Good Catholic Boy,” from memory! Eventually we did go on to even see him live one summer’s night down in Detroit and we thought it was great just because even though we thought we’d heard pretty much every piece of material the guy had ever written, that show was still filled with all sorts of brand new material and needless to say, we realized that we still had a lot of memorizing to do…
Here’s a link to the official story from the AP:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_en_tv/obit_jeni_18
Also a few of his more “syndicate-friendly” quotes, from CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/12/jeni.quotes/index.html?section=cnn_latest
And finally, that very first bit from 1995 that turned me on to one of the most brilliant comedians of his time:
Somebody should be honest with the large people of America. You know who should have a late night diet infomercial? Some idiot from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn – a guy who’s too stupid to be diplomatic – the Joey Falco Diet Plan…
The guy comes right out on TV in a t-shirt, “Hey folks – how ya doin’? Thanks for tuning in. Listen, my name’s Joey Falco and if you’re overweight, I’ve got a diet plan that’s worked for millions of people. It’s called Stop Eating, You Fat Bastard! Let me explain how it works over here on this chart – these are proteins, these are carbohydrates, therefore stop eating, you fat bastard!”
“Now some of you have been writing in saying, ‘How do I know if I’m a fat bastard?’ Well here are some ways to tell:
- When you go to a buffet, do the waitresses put on riot hats?
- Do you find yourself winded after combing your hair?
- When you stand up to pee, do you have to move your chin out of the way first?”
Chances are, you have become a fat bastard. So send only three bucks for my tape – it ain’t video tape or audio tape, you know what it is?! Scotch tape – take a piece and put it over your mouth so the fucking twinkies can’t get in! Hey, try it for 30 days, if it doesn’t work, fuck you – you’re not getting your money back! Because you lied – you kept eating, you fat bastard…”And stay tuned for my next tape, Stop Smoking, You Stupid Bastard…
What a guy – truly a legend, at least in this fan’s eyes. Thanks for the laughs, Sir. Thanks for the laughs, indeed…
Sick, twisted, but also funny…
NBC Dateline: To Catch a Predator
Yes, the subject is horrendous and some of the things that this dude asks his “fourteen year-old friend” to do are just mental, but if anything, skip ahead to about 5:45 in the video and watch the dude get arrested by … wait for it … a tree monster!
Comic gold.
V for Vacation
I’ve been waiting for this week for a long time!
The next 7 days should be nice, relaxing, refreshing – insert adjective of your choice here. Mom is down to visit until Friday – the first time she’s been to Florida since I moved here back in 2003 – so it’s fun to finally show her my new home and how things are going at the warmer end of the country. After getting Sara’s car fixed today, we picked Mom up at the airport and pretty much just had a little dinner before bed. Tomorrow she’s going to help me salvage / re-pot the plants that are still alive out on the balcony, and then Tuesday & Wednesday we’re going over to Disney World for a little vacation inside a vacation. After today, I’m afraid that the time is going to go by a lot faster than I thought – I suppose that it always does – but in the meantime I’m just enjoying having the family around my neck of the woods for a change.
Lori – you’re next!
Anyways, I took all of next week off from work so that I could spend as much time with my Mom as possible while she’s here, and I think the time away is really going to do me a lot of good. I’ve been so stressed around that place lately that I’ve been needing a break for a while – it’s just too bad to see all of my vacation time slip away so quickly. When I do return, the new product that I’ve been working on for the last four months will finally be launching and things will likely get pretty crazy for a while – probably just enough to suck up every ounce of time until Sara and I go away in May. The good news is, I have been writing a little more lately … emphasis on little, but still more than nothing at all. I wrote about a column and a half worth of “humor” on a legal pad while I was waiting at the auto shop for Sara’s car, so I’m hoping even if I can only write a single thing each night over the next week, maybe I can kickstart this whole writing career again and actually entertain the possibility of eventually shifting over from one payroll to the other. I know that it’s still a long ways off, but I really need to crack down and start somewhere if I’m ever going to give it a worthy try…
Of course, Sara recently reminded me that there are a whole lot of things that I’ve failed at starting routines for over the past six months – diet & exercise, watering plants, writing – so clearly I need to change my approach somewhere, but we’ll talk about that in another post. This week is my week to relax, enjoy some time with Mom while she’s here, and if a bit of work gets done along the way, then that’s great. When she heads home on Friday, that’s when I’ll start trying to get the chaotic aspects of my life back on track.
🙂
dudes pounding on the roof
I can see how Sara got a little upset that they were keeping her awake while she was trying to sleep yesterday, because I’m already awake and all of the noise is still pissing me off!
(Downstairs neighbor claims to have a leak somewhere, so they’re pounding on our roof at eight o’clock in the morning…)
this is so bizarre…
Yes, it’s 3:36 in the morning.
I just finished putting my 2006 tax return through Turbo Tax and they claim that I’ve got $765 coming back to me.
I should be elated, and yet I’m more confused than ever because I haven’t gotten a refund in years. Remember, I just finished paying a penalty for 2005’s return and gave the government $400?!
Really weird, but the more I go over my numbers, I can see that I made more at my day job, they took out significantly more taxes – probably due to my bonus, and it looks like I made so little for writing last year that my deductions completely ate up any income that I had, to the point where I don’t even have to pay self-employment taxes. Crazy…
I’ll have to double-check these darned things tomorrow after I’ve gotten a bit of sleep, but if it’s actually true, then that’s pretty sweet! It’ll all get sent to Chase Manhattan to help pay down credit cards, but still, pretty sweet indeed.
Good night.
Tom Mabe is a hoot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X8BkuFQBOo
This video got a lot of negative comments on digg because Tom was allegedly “impersonating a police officer,” but I think it was pretty swell the way it all turned out nonetheless…
back hurtie very muchie
The good news is, I didn’t go to work today.
The bad news is, it was because I had to go to the doctor.
I spent most of yesterday in utter hell, feeling like somebody was cracking me in the back with a baseball bat. It didn’t feel very good, and by the end of the day and with a handful of tylenol behind me, I almost went home early it hurt so much. I came home and spent the remainder of my night lying flat on my back with a heating pad underneath me (which I was told by my doc today is only supposed to be for short doses), and by midnight I knew that I wasn’t going in to work the next day. Luckily, my doctor is awesome and got me in at 11:30 this morning, so Sara went into work a little late and took me in to find out what was going on with my back.
Fortunately, it turned out that I just have a couple of inflamed muscles in my back, which apparently is more common than you would think for people who just sit at desks all day, so he just gave me a few drugs and sent us on our way. One was a muscle relaxant, which I was told might be “fun” because it usually put the doctor out for twelve hours when he took it for pain relief, but I took the first one about six hours ago and aside from a quick nap, have been up all day. Maybe it’s just that I slept from 7pm last night through 9am the next morning, but regardless I was happy to see that I’ll be able to take it at work without it kicking my ass too badly.
So with the drugs doing their thing, I’ve actually been able to get some things done today – I’ve slowly been catching up on things around the house in between episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy, and with any luck everything will be semi-back to normal by the time Sara gets home tonight. My big task is going to be figuring out dinner because I was supposed to go shopping last night and I couldn’t because I came straight home as fast as possible, and obviously I don’t want to go anywhere tonight at this point, so we’ll see what happens for that. I think I’ve still got stuff to make homemade pizza, so that might just have to do. Anyways, I’ll be back to work tomorrow, so clearly after work I’ll be going straight to the grocery store!
Don’t worry, I’m “taking it easy,” too. At this point I’m just happy it wasn’t something far more serious… :O