Life sure is wonderful

During the commercial breaks of today's White Sox - Cubs game there was a commercial that kept appearing. I have no recollection what it was for, but this guy is walking around a city and he sees smiley faces wherever he goes. Then he looks up at a huge building and sees a whole bunch of windows opening in the shape of a smiley face. Then some fuckhead announcer goes, "Who says life can't be wonderful?" Awesome question. Since you asked, here are some answers:

-Pretty much any child growing up in Africa
-Almost everyone living in Africa
-Most of the residents of the state of West Virginia
-Anyone who just got told they have terminal cancer and only have three months to live
-Sufferers of gonorrhea and syphilis
-A distressingly large amount of Asia
-Paraplegics, quadriplegics, and people paralyzed from the waist down
-20-year old girls from Ohio who came to Hollywood to fulfill their childhood dream of being actresses who are now sucking cock for heroin in a west L.A. ghetto
-Liza Minelli
-Danny Bonaduce
-Over 80% of the war, disease, and famine-stricken world

Have a happy summer!

Pizza Panic

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Training my dog

That dildo I own for the sake of comedy is now officially overused. It has reached its limit and I think I may need to retire it. For one thing, whipping out a dildo can only be funny so many times, and for another, it's really cruddy and nasty and it cannot be fucking cleaned. Because it's designed to be shoved up vaginas and assholes, it was a clean, sterile object. Although sterile objects are clean, they also get filthy very quickly. If you want an illustration, leave a giant load of urine in the toilet bowl for a day and see how many bacterial cultures have grown on it.

Anyways, because of that the dildo is now in a filthy, horrible state of ill repair. It's covered in dirt, black skid marks that I can't even identify, and newspaper headlines. Yes, you read that right. Here's a little fun fact about dildos that you didn't know: if you put it on a newspaper or any piece of paper with ink on it, it will pick up the ink like fucking Silly Putty. I swear to god, if you roll a dildo across a Marmaduke cartoon, the dildo will pick it up and the entire hilarious story about the rambunctious Great Dane getting her owner wet with a sprinkler will be emblazoned across the dildo clear as day. I wrote a script for a sketch and had the dildo rolled up inside the script because I didn't want anyone in public to see it, and imagine my shock when entire lines of dialogue on the page were completely smeared and printed on the dildo instead.

So yeah, it's got to go because it's disgusting, but more importantly, I realized I was scraping the bottom of the idea barrel pretty hard when I tried to train my dog to fetch and bite down on the dildo. Let me back up: I had this idea for a sketch that was just going to be me playing with my dog and having a perfect day with him. Really cheesy, happy music would play while we start by doing completely innocent activities that you would expect someone to do with a dog. Then the activities would turn darker and me and the dog would get drunk, do drugs, watch porn, etc.

I had this idea for a really fucked up shot where me and the dog would actually fight over the dildo with us having each end in our teeth. I remember seeing a really cliched shot where two dogs or a dog and a person would fight over a steak with one end in each of their mouths, and this would be a really bizarre take on that shot. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me get that fucking dog to take any interest in the dildo. This dog will eat, tear, and chase anything you throw in its direction, but this was the one exception where he would ignore it whenever I tried to get him to fetch it or play with it or anything.

Lord knows I tried every way imaginable. The thing smells like industrial vulcanized rubber, so I thought the smell was bothering him, so I tried covering the dildo in crunched up dog food, and I tried pouring steak sauce on it to make him think of it as food and presumably bite down on it. However all he would do is sniff it and walk away. I then rememered that he loves Goldfish crackers, so I took some honey and used it to stick a bunch of Goldfish on it, and all he did in that case was lick the crackers off the dildo and then walk away.

Somewhere around there I had probably the biggest "What the FUCK am I doing right now?" moment of my life, and trust me when I tell you that I've had plenty. Sometimes when I'm coming up with or doing weird things in the name of my comedy I take pride in it. It makes me feel good that I'm stepping off the beaten path to chase my dreams. This, however, was not one of those fucking times. Screaming at strangers in the main dining area on your college campus or getting the entire photo lab covered in fake blood is cool. Feeding your dog cheese crackers off of a sticky dildo designed to enhance lesbian sex or be shoved up assholes is not.

So fear not. While the dildo makes a three second cameo in our newest sketch, from here on out I'm going to try my hardest to put this part of my comedy behind me.

RIP George Carlin

George Carlin, 1937-2008.

Let me start by telling a quick story. When I was a junior in high school, a fellow student of mine from Hong Kong was legitimately depressed by what was going on back home. SARS was in full effect and popular actor Leslie Cheung had just killed himself. When she told me that both of those things were significantly bothering her, I understood the SARS, but didn't get why she was so bothered by the actor. I was sure that something unimportant like a celebrity dying would ever significantly affect me. After George Carlin's death I now know I was wrong.

Has has been a huge influence on me my entire life. My high school required that every student participate in a schoolwide speech contest. I chose to perform George Carlin routines for two of those years, and one of them earned me a first place win. He is nothing less than the sole reason why I have any interest in comedy at all.

In a completely practical sense it hardly came as a shock to me that he died today at the age of 71. A man with a lifelong history of heart problems and drug dependency isn't exactly the type of person you would expect to make it to 100. However, this really hit me hard and made me confront my sense of mortality because this is a guy who viewed every aspect of life in a rational and grounded way. By taking such a hilarious, intelligent, irreverent, and enlightened view on such subjects as death, he always seemed to be above it. It just feels wrong and out of place for a guy like him to succumb to it at any age.

I have always wanted to meet him and have him bestow his wisdom upon me. He is more or less completely responsible for my pursuit of comedy, and I regret that this will never be possible. Although he was old and far from in the best health, I feel the same way a Reds fan would feel if Ken Griffey Jr. were to suddenly drop dead. I'll move on and offer commentary on videos soon enough, but let me take this night to remember one of the most important men of my life.

The Megaphone Gorilla Man

Don't let the miserable view count fool you, this could very well be the greatest comedy sketch that Ron Mexico Productions has put on in its short existence. The making of this sketch is a perfect example of the greatest thing about making amateur comedy films with your friends, and I'm sure I'll miss it if I ever do this work in a professional capacity. It was a Friday night and I realized that I haven't been as productive with comedy as I should be, so I vowed to make some sort of comedy sketch that weekend come hell or high water. I wrote up the script for this drunk at 2 a.m. on a Friday night, we filmed Saturday afternoon, and it was finished and online Sunday night. This is the type of creative process that really isn't possible in a more legitimate setting.

I wrote this as a response to a documentary I made about a man who lives in Muncie named Cocaine Wolf. He's a local mysterious legend renowned for his bizarre behavior. He may or may not be homeless, and he's known to walk around the downtown area wearing an army jacket, riding a child's bike, and rocking out a leather dog collar. I thought he was hilarious, so I grabbed a camera and made a documentary about him. Then I found out that he's a grubby pedophile who buys alcohol for little boys in exchange for blowjobs, and he has a long history of fucking any of the boys in the neighborhood he could get his hands on.

The whole story suddenly stopped being funny. I have kind of an odd sense of humor, but let me be clear on this: FUCKING LITTLE BOYS IS NOT FUNNY!!! I soon found that the wonder and amusement that he invokes in the Muncie community is a completely inappropriate reaction. So this sketch about people being inspired and touched by this clearly deranged moron who contributes nothing meaningful to the community is based on my time studying Cocaine Wolf.

Casting this thing was pretty easy. This sketch comedy group was my idea and I'm in charge of it and I would feel horrible if footage of fucking a big stuffed gorilla would ruin employment opportunities for one of my friends, so I cast myself as the Megaphone Gorilla Man. For the role of an MLB pitcher Shane was the only sensible choice because he's the only one of us who actually has the physique of an athlete and he plays pitcher for a club team. David Boyer was the most logical choice to a play a guy with cancer because...... well, just fucking look at him. The real acting prize, however, goes to Carter for this one. I still hadn't shot the scenes with the unemployed character and Carter came home from work with a grease-stained shirt and hit hat on backwards and looked completely perfect for the role. We filmed in the kitchen of our fraternity house and I gave him the gist of his lines and had him improvise them somewhat, and we ended up with the best acting job he's ever done in a sketch. I praised him for his acting so extensively that it prompted him to ask, "Jeez, do you want to blow me already?".

What else is there to say? The scene where I talk to the gorilla wasn't in the script and was improvised by me. I ordered the Ultimate Trio at Applebee's the night before and I was pretty pissed by the number of Mini Burgers they gave me (3. What the fuck?) so I think I just wanted to incorporate my anger at them into a sketch somehow. I'd also like to mention that I look really skinny in this sketch. A lifestyle of busting my ass to finish all of my senior level classes and doing nothing but write comedy and drink beer with my fraternity brothers in my spare time doesn't lend itself to much exercise and I have a rapidly expanding gut to show for it. It also doesn't help that when I don't have any homework and I can't get inspired to write comedy I spend my time bitching at Patriots fans on the GameFAQs NFL board and watching the White Sox instead of jogging. However I look really, really fucking skinny in this sketch because there's a huge gorilla head covering up my gut, and despite the stupidity of my character, I actually look kinda cute.

Cross-Country Part 4

And at long last here is the fourth and final section of Cross-Country. The "Totally not Ashland Street" graphic is a dig at the fact that we obviously never went outside the bounds of Muncie, Indiana to film any of this. Instead of trying to fake it or make something that laughably doesn't have a single establishing shot of Nebraska, Charlotte, or anything in between, we decided to just acknowledge it in a joke and move on.

My fight with the hat is my personal favorite editing job that I've ever done. In filming all I wrote in the script was "Murph fights the hat, gets into the car, and runs it over." All of the shots were essentially improvised in a span of about 15 minutes. The sound effects are all really awesome. My only beef is that I wanted to set the fight to Ace of Spades, but I looked through my audio library and found that I actually had a crappy live version instead of the actual studio version, so I had to settle for Blur.

I could bitch about the overall quality of the acting in the scene between Mark and his ex-girlfriend, but I really didn't do them any favors with the quality of my writing. It was really just horribly apparent that semi-serious exchanges between two people in love probably isn't what I'm cut out to do. The role of the girlfriend was actually supposed to be played by a former winner of the Miss Ball State pageant, but she stood me up for meetings twice, and she stopped responding to e-mails. I was excited because she was beautiful and an acting major, but I really have better things to do than get ignored and jerked around. Actually, there was supposed to be a casting director as well. A member of the theater department volunteered to work as my casting director and claimed she was going to organize auditions and discuss the casting of all of the roles with me. I was overjoyed that maybe I would film something and not have to goddamn act in it, but lo and behold she broke off all contact with me too. I was on a strict deadline because I was turning this in as a final project for a video production class, so I had no choice but to forge ahead the way I've always worked. Quite frankly I'm lucky the film even got done since I delayed filming a full two weeks waiting for them to come through. The unprofessional treatment has pretty much turned me off to working with anyone from the theater department, and that's the reason why they received special no thanks in the credits.

Overall I like how this turned out. There are clear issues with certain continuity errors, certain lines weren't acted as well as they could have been, and the sound is severely fucked up in certain scenes, but I still think it turned out very well. The response from those who have seen it has been overwhelmingly positive. I'm actually in the process of adapting this decidedly PG-13 script into a longer R-rated feature film script. Let's hope it turns out well.

Cross-Country Part 3

This part of the short film is distinctly different from part 2 because it didn't make me want to completely kill myself. For the fantasy scene with Mark I didn't even bother trying to hide the fact that I'm playing the role of the microphone's voice. My favorite part about this scene is the inappropriately long take of Mark making out with the microphone. It's amusing enough that there's video evidence of telecommunications eqipment being mistreated, but what's better is that when we filmed I actually got David to make out with that thing for about ten or fifteen more seconds until he finally stopped and asked me if he was done. I responded by saying, "You were good about fifteen seconds ago. I just wanted to see how long you would do it." It was just nice for something fun to happen on set.

As for the second fantasy scene, this will probably look familiar to people who have watched my other sketches. Please note that the script for this film was originally written as a short film project for a video production class and not written specifically for a Youtube audience. That's why I rehashed two of my better sketches for this project.

There isn't really much else to say here. I told Boyer to kiss the stick and he opted to kiss it and eat it out as well, which was a pretty cool ad-lib. I'll also give props to James, because his role as the Crazy Drifter was acted pretty well.

Cross-Country Part 2

And now we have part 2 of our adventure. The obsession with Michelob Ultra has to do with a time I was at Wal-Mart with my mom and she bought a six-pack of that crap. My character's lines in that first scene are basically what I said to my mom verbatim when she put it in the cart. The in-car scenes were pretty easy to write and instead of some elaborate camera rig I just put down the seats in the back of my car and had Carter lay in the back and hold onto the tripod to make sure it didn't fall over. It's a primitive setup, but it worked.

The nighttime stuff was tough to shoot because we picked the worst possible time to do it. During the shoot a motorcycle crash happened literally less than a block away. You can actually see during one of my close-ups the lights of a squad car turning on. That was when police first arrived on the scene. Traffic had to be rerouted away from the block and toward the corner where we were shooting, so headlights would show up and mess up the shot approximately every minute.

However, that's pretty minor to what the real problem was: editing this scene was possibly the most unpleasant experience of my life. You see, on the original tape you can clearly hear the motorcycle rev up, then you can hear it crash into a house, and then you can hear the rider screaming in horrible agony and begging his friends to call an ambulance. At the time we were filming I was focused on getting the shot so I didn't even notice any of that, and when I was editing as far as I knew we were the closest people there. The guy eventually died, and as far as I knew he died because I was too focused on my stupid comedy video to pay attention to what was going on around me and call 9-1-1. In my emotional devastation I grabbed a bottle of vodka, got completely hammered, destroyed furniture and sent some extremely mean-spirited text messages (if you're reading this, you know who you are, and I'm very sorry). I later found out that he crashed because he was doing a wheelie to impress his friends, so there was a half-dozen people or so who were closer than I was and immediately called an ambulance, so while I don't feel like I killed the guy, I still feel pretty awful whenever I think about it.

The campfire scene was completely miserable too, but for different reasons. We wanted to build a fire in a hurry, and we didn't have enough sticks and logs and shit to keep it going long enough for filming, so we had the brilliant idea to just fill a gas can and use gas to start the fire and keep it going. It worked at first and we got most of the Crazy Drifter's lines shot, but a mistake in applying gas to the fire resulted in an explosion that turned the entire set into a hazard site. After the gas fire finally burned out, we were out of fire and still had to film two thirds of the scene, so I just pointed a light at myself and Boyer, the other actor, and tinted the scene orange in post so it looks kinda like they're at a campfire. It doesn't look perfect, but I think it was close enough.

In addition, there were also about eight people hanging around and drinking that didn't need to be there who felt the need to talk and crack jokes BETWEEN EVERY FUCKING TAKE. There are dozens of takes of people fucking up takes by talking, dozens more of people fucking up the next take by saying, "you don't have to be mean about it" in response to me telling them to shut the fuck up, more than a few ruined by phones ringing, and about 10 ruined by the sound of one of the guys on set constantly spitting chewing tobacco into a can. For future reference, when I say, "If you don't need to be here, go away," I'm not making a joke. I'm very seriously telling you to fuck off.

Suffice to say, these scenes didn't represent the most fun shoots I've ever had.