Back to the mainland

Leaving Hawaii was tough but we bounced back pretty quickly upon returning to California. We drove to San Francisco and stopped off in Palo Alto to see Dan’s old friends. The conversation covered all the usual ‘catching up’ beats. A lot of “what’ve you been up to’s?” and where’ve you been’s?”.

The conversation was perfectly ordinary - almost boring even, yet a few of the people said “Uh oh, this is gonna end up in your standup!”. It underscored another unwritten rule of comedy: The less interesting the topic of conversation, the more people think it’ll end up in your act.

Everyone thinks their lives are far more interesting than they are. We’ll be talking about something mundane like mortgage payments and they’ll be like “Uh oh, we’re giving you material!”. No. No, you’re not.

Expecto Patronum

In this case the conversations actually were interesting because I got intel on Dan from back before we knew each other. I knew he was a huge Harry Potter fan, but I didn’t know that his friends made fun of him for it. I was eager to hear the roasts, and they didn’t disappoint. Given that 95% of his body is carpeted by hair, the first name they gave him was Hair-mione. When that name lost its edge, he became Fagrid.

While we’re on Harry Potter … why did everyone trust Hagrid with children? He’s a slovenly 800 pound monster who lives in a shed. His favorite hobby? Raising spiders. His favorite outfit? Trenchcoat. His strongest talent? Gaining the trust of children. You couldn’t formulate a more precise mass-murderer profile.

He’s so dangerous no one will even teach him magic. His sneeze could snap a child’s spine, yet every adult is like “Go play in his bedroom! He loves being tickled”. It’s like they’re trying to get the kids killed. He’s one leather vest away from being a Hell’s Angel -- he’s already got the motorcycle.

Just two guys

San Francisco is a great comedy town but we didn’t have time to contact hosts for shows. They book pretty well in advance and we hadn’t done any outreach while in Hawaii. With standup out of the picture we instead shot a series of photos parodying girl photos on instagram.

The goal was to skewer ladies who post clearly staged photos and act like they're spontaneous. To lambaste those who are always cheesin’ hard and cracking up at nothing. To make fun of users desperately trying to depict a glamorous and interesting life even though they’re just eating lunch or sitting in a park.

You can check out the full video here .

Did you catch that?

Under the ‘fun times’ surface of the slideshow lurked a dark subplot where we kill a guy, and no one noticed. The photos below were interspersed with happy ones.

To make the post authentic we added wholesome hashtags like #positivevibes, #yoga, and #beach and several family friendly businesses ‘liked’ the post. They probably saw the first pictures and figured we were a happy gay couple sharing our weekend getaway, not comedians fucking with everyone. We’d have loved to see their faces when corporate chewed them out for associating with scum like us.

I was here before it was cool

With San Fran out of the picture we decided to do standup in San Jose. We thought San Jose was a nice city with a lot of cool little places to grab drinks. The locals, on the other hand, were less enthused. Apparently the city had lost its edge and become sanitized since the tech boom.

One of the guys we talked to had lived there for a while and said “Ten years ago, if you moved to San Jose, you had an interesting backstory. Now, everyone’s the same. Everyone programs”. Put another way, programmers are to San Jose as basic bitches are to Tinder.

Get with the program

As a programmer, Dan understands better than anyone how boring it can be. You can tell how boring a job is by how hard they try to make it look cool in movies. For example in the movie Swordfish, Hugh Jackman has 60 seconds to hack into FBI servers with a chick blowing him and a gun to his head. Think about that. Think about{" "} how far overboard the screenwriters had to go to make programming interesting.

And who casts these hacker movies? Who’s the guy that’s like “We need a computer programmer … how about Wolverine?”. If these movies were even remotely realistic, every computer hacker in every movie would be played by Paul Giamatti.

Hollywood seriously doesn’t understand programming at all. There was another movie called ‘Blackhat’ where Chris Hemsworth (Thor, the god of thunder) plays a hacker. The FBI pulls him out of prison after 25 years to catch an even more dangerous hacker. He’s had zero access to technology for two decades -- what does the FBI think he’s gonna do? Hack everyone’s AOL account?

Showtime

We reached out to the host pretty late - just a few days before the showcase. We expected a ‘no’ because of the timing but the host was awesome and threw us on. He said he saw our website (this very one you’re reading!) and thought “Ok, these guys are serious. I’ll put them on”.  It was gratifying after so much time and effort that the website helped us get work.

The showcase was at a brewery - and those are always good rooms. All of the features were great, so was the headliner. After the show we all went out to grab some food and shoot the shit.

We had a good time in San Jose. One benefit of constant travel is never staying anywhere long enough to develop a negative impression. Every scene has drama in some shape or form, but as outsiders we have no dog in the fight. We come, meet people, do shows, and move on. It’s awesome.

The only disadvantage of constant travel is not being able to stay long enough to do more shows. We’re always grateful for stage time but occasionally our schedule is too tight to stay longer in town. We love meeting comics and building relationships, so it sucks to have so many goodbyes. The good news is we usually see each other again in one city or another.

From San Jose we worked our way North to Portland, Oregon.