Rooftop Comedy

Just checking back in. Views for a few of my videos have jumped up pretty hard lately because I've gotten them embedded on some other busy sites, so that's exciting. By jumped up I mean a few of them have cracked the mighty threshold of 2,000 views, but it's a start. I'm not bitching. However, I will bitch about Rooftop Comedy, a company of some sort that held a stand-up competition at Ball State earlier in the week.

I don't know what all they do, but right now they're holding a collegiate nationwide stand-up comedy competition where they get eight comedians from 32 different colleges who advance to the regionals and so on until there are four left at a national competition in Aspen. I got an e-mail about the competition because while sketches have been my main focus, I still have a passing interest in stand-up. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it, but I was drunk on the computer one night and signed myself up, so I pretty much had no choice but to do it.

The rules were that no comic can go over 3 minutes, and the only content restriction I was told was no nudity and no hate speech. Fifteen people entered for a shot at being in the top 8. The first indication that this wasn't going to be what I expected was when I received an e-mail telling me that the winners would be determined entirely by audience balloting, so I should try to get as many of my friends to show up as I can. Okay, so the top 8 will be determined only by which eight people brought the most friends and the actual quality of the comedy will be irrelevant. Cool, Rooftop Comedy. Really cool.

I wasn't very aggressive with telling my friends to show up, because they have things they would rather do than sit through about two hours of mostly shitty comedy (Opening acts and the emcee's stuff ended up stretching the whole thing out to about that long) just to see me tell three minutes of jokes. I've performed onstage and written enough comedy that I think I've gotten past the point of expecting my friends to be amazed by the fact that I'm able to get up in front of people and not die of a heart attack. I sent out an e-mail basically saying, "come if you want to but I won't be pissed if you don't".

I get to the venue for the competition and I find out that the ballots actually have three spots. I think, "cool, the people will vote for their friends and they'll vote for me if I'm actually funny. Maybe I'm not wasting my time". We get headshots taken, and the chick in charge gives us a running order. I went 12th. As the other students competing do their acts, I start to realize that although they're cursing, they're for the most part doing relatively clean humor. I wonder if they were all told that extremely racy material was going to result in disqualification and nobody told me, because I've seen some of these guys perform much filthier material before. I'm pretty worried now because what I have prepared happens to be the three filthiest minutes of stand-up comedy I've ever written.

Most of the other performers sucked, but a few were pretty good. The first guy to go went over pretty well. He had kind of an absurdist slant and randomly broke into anti-humor, telling intentionally horrible jokes and laughing at himself. It was pretty funny. Another good one was a freshman who did a hilarious George W. Bush impression. Especially impressive was that it was his first time ever doing stand-up. However, the acts were for the most part pretty tough to sit through. It gets around to my turn. I take the stage, grab the microphone, and tear into my act. This is pretty much my act verbatim. [Some of the humor requires you to be from Muncie to get it, so notes will be provided in brackets]

"Alright, let's give it up for Rooftop Comedy! Getting college kids exposure, it's great! [NOTE: I retract this statement. Fuck Rooftop Comedy] When I signed up online for this competition there was a comment from a student from Indiana University that he left on our page. It said "Ball State, you suck! IU's going to kill you in the regionals!" I'm trying to think of how to express how I feel about this eloquently.... Okay, here goes: Fuck IU! Fuck IU in the ass with a giant rusty metal dildo. I hope you fuckers get anal tetanus!

What I don't get is why those shitstains think that their piece of shit school is so great. We all know Ball State's better. They're proud of their sports teams. They're proud that their baseball team led the Big 10 in stolen bases. You think that impresses me? Our football team led the nation in stolen laptops! [NOTE: Two Ball State football players were arrested and kicked off the team for stealing laptops. Apparently full-ride scholarships weren't enough] They have.... [An ambulance with its sirens on came speeding by the bar] Holy shit.... [I stop the act to watch the ambulance] Okay, they're not here for me. Good. Anyway, They have buildings that are specially designed to be durable against water damage. Fuck that shit. Ball State has lightposts that are so durable not even a speeding police car can take them down. [Last semester a campus police officer took some freshman girls on a joyride in his squad car. He lost control of his car and slammed into a lightpost right in front of the biggest dorm. Then he told the girls to bail out. A few hundred people saw it happen, so they didn't get away] You can shove your specially designed buildings up your ass until they bleed.

But IU has made some progress lately. They now have over 100 undergraduate programs in the top twenty in the country. But you know what? Ball State has made some big advances too! Just recently we let black people go here for the first time. Jo Ann Gora is going to be pissed. [Jo Ann Gora is the president of Ball State University] She would kill me right now if I wasn't sending her child support checks. That's my version of Sarah Silverman's song. [I get in a sing-song voice] I'm fucking Jo Ann Gora!

My time's almost up, but I have a story I want to tell. I was talking this girl about movies. Really fucking stupid bitch. She said, "I love the Sixth Sense! Lee Harvey Oswald was so good in that movie." I'm thinking like, "What the fuck?" Then I realize what she means and I say "You mean Haley Joel Osment, right?" She says, "Oh yeah! I'm so stupid with names. Lee Harvey Oswald's the guy who killed Lincoln." [Now somebody from the audience remarked, "What a stupid bitch"] Okay, here's the thing: When you're a girl and you're that fucking stupid, the only thing you have to contribute to society is holes. [A combination of shock, boos, and massive laughter erupts] My name is Cody! Vote for me, fuckers!"

I wasn't in the back so I don't know what the reaction was back there, but from where I was standing, I fucking killed. Most of the other comics had to talk over conversations that people in the audience were having amongst themselves because they were bored, but I had everyone listening with rapt attention. Literally every joke went over well. I was sure I had no shot at getting in, but now I felt pretty confident. Impartial observers told me that I was by far the funniest person onstage.

At the end of the show, they called up volunteers from the audience to get up and talk to fill time while votes were counted. A girl who was completely wasted gets onstage and just crazily rambles about how her roommate doesn't know how to laundry. By that point most of the people left and others were having their own conversations, but I was transfixed. I fell in love with this wasted wordsmith. By the time she told the story about how her roommate thought the washing machine was a large metal storage bin, I wanted to ask her to marry me.

Much to my dismay, she was kicked off the microphone so the emcee could announce the winners. I was happy for some that got selected, and some made me throw my hat down and yell, "What the fuck?!?" But in the end, my name didn't make the list. I was pretty upset at the time, so I took my entry form, burned it, and pissed on the ashes that were left behind. Later, I looked at the rules, thought about how relatively clean the other acts were, and poked around Rooftop's website and now I'm about 98% sure I was disqualified from the competition. Anyways, either I was disqualified for my stand-up comedy act being too dirty (Are you kidding me? Stand-up comedy is traditionally the dirtiest form of self-expression on earth), or I lost because I didn't bring enough friends, rendering the actually quality of the act irrelevant to the outcome. Either way, Rooftop Comedy is a joke, so fuck them and fuck them hard.