Today it was my turn to do Health and Happiness at the Columbia Rotary Club. For you nonRotarians, that’s where a member gets up and talks about personal member news (who’s in the hospital, who has a new child or grandchild, etc.), and then tells jokes.
There are basically two ways to do that latter part of the presentation — either search the Web for “clean jokes” (with a group like this, you have to avoid a lot of potential sources of edgy humor), or you can look at the news. Given my background, I prefer to do the latter.
You may recall what I did last time — my little one-man skit that envisioned what would have happened if Gov. Mark Sanford had told Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer that he was leaving the country last June. This time, I was a little lazier: I essentially mined the blog from the past week or so for material. So you regulars will have heard most of this stuff. You might want to watch it anyway, in case you’re curious to see how the same material works as a monologue.
And no, I don’t think Leno or Conan or Letterman have anything to worry about — especially not Conan. But I’m proud that at least I managed to get through the whole thing in one take.
Oh, yeah — the link I mention during the clip is https://bradwarthen.com/?p=3034.
And that’s the way it is…
I need to work on the shifty-eyes thing. I thought it would look OK if I put my script on the screen, near the top (where the camera lens is), but it didn’t work quite as elegantly as I’d hoped. There’s a HUGE difference between when I’m reading and when I’m looking into the camera. And the shifting back and forth messes with the timing of my delivery. I guess there’s no substitute for a real TelePrompter.
Now you know why “Avatar” took so long to make.
You left out the big opening laugh line–it went something like “let me tell you about Andre Bauer.”
[huge laugh]
Isn’t it sad when the mere mention of one’s name constitutes a joke?
Maybe you could do stop action animation, with a clay Brad doll?
No, that’s what I said. In my script, I had “lieutenant governor Andre Bauer.” But once I was at the microphone, some instinct told me to say, “you can learn something listening to our lieutenant governor,” and then pause. I was rewarded with a big laugh, which gave me a lot of momentum as I continued.
As Kathryn can tell y’all, this was funnier live. This kind of thing is better with audience feedback. Laughter feeds on itself. I killed, Jerry, I killed!
Also, expectations help. My fellow Rotarians enjoyed my last H&H, so they were predisposed to laugh at this one.