The Ultrablog

Too sassy for the printing of my latest. Questions 1-14 are “how many characters? No really, how many characters have you got?”

15. Are any characters modeled after real life or historical figures?

Mrs. Bogan is based on my good college friend, Claire B; Giula Nord is based in a tertiary way on the same woman all my shy-funny female characters are based on. If Josefina was real, she’d be fascinating to hang out with. The real Sandler Quemere I don’t talk to anymore, and it’s been that way since college.  My real gym teachers were cooler than Mr. Bellhorn; one was the director of a summer camp I went to.

16. What inspired you to write this play?

I’m constantly accused of being outgoing, but sometimes I feel really shy. Why speak up when you have nothing to say? Why is this conversation about me again? Why is everyone at this party, in this elevator, or in this meeting from another plane of existence? And how does knowing that not help me conquer it?

The play doesn’t solve a single one of these issues; I came up with a cool title and wanted to write a Thanksgiving piece.

17. Was the structure of the play influenced by any other work?

This play (when you exempt stage directions) is a word-for-word retranslation of Hedda Gabler. The chief difficulty was my inability to speak Norwegian, which resulted in several (very minor) inconsistencies.

18. Have you dealt with the same theme in other works that you have written?

You’re asking me if I’m a hack. You can ask me, you don’t have to be afraid. 18: “YOU GOT INTO CHILDRENS’ THEATER FOR THE MONEY! YOU FINK! SEE? YOU EVEN SPELLED IT ‘THEATER’ INSTEAD OF ‘THEATRE’.

This play is somewhat similar to my previous work, A Doll’s House.

19. What writers have had the most profound effect on your style?

I guess at this point in reading my answers you’d expect me to say “the guy who writes the shampoo bottles”, which is what Steve Martin might answer at this point. Well, I’m going to be honest; it’s Breaking Bad for the violence and Community for the facial expressions. If you need any other source of writing and communication, why not read your Congressperson’s website? It’s probably bristling with fun information about your great state/desperate pleas for money!

20. What do you hope to achieve with this work?

This work is a desperate plea for money.

21. What are the most common mistakes that occur in productions of your work?

Not paying. I (or Jimmy “The Pitbull” ) will hunt you down like The Most Dangerous Game, which was an unlicensed prequel to “The Hunger Games”.

22. What inspired you to become a playwright?

My mathematical skills peaked after exponents. 2x(Original Formula)+C is about as far as I got in my non-writing education.

23. How did you research the subject?

I was a kid, so that was easy, but I had to do a ton of bullying.

24. Are any characters modeled after real life or historical figures?

Wait a minute, you asked this one! This was #15! I may be dumb, but I have control+F.

25. Do any films/videos exist of prior productions of this play?

No. If you make one (and I mean quality, not “back of the room with a shaky camcorder talking to your wife”), I’ll give you ten shiny bucks. I am legitimately 100% serious.

26. Shakespeare gave advice to the players in Hamlet; if you could give advice to your cast what would it be?

Have fun with it. And if you’re a school child excited to be getting into the 5^th grade play, and instead of being the Tin Man you end up being cast as a Kindergartener, well, it happened to me too, and I only grew up to be an embittered playwright!

27.  How was the first production different from the vision that you created in your mind?

IRRELEVANT. I WILL TOLERATE NO FURTHER QUESTIONS.

This week was a really good one. Pulled a double (8:30pm to 5:30am, 10:30am/7:30pm) on two sets, and met a producer who’s looking for rewrites.

Currently on a TV-movie spec and a sitcom spec, as well as a full 78 page rewrite. Soon to be working on a sketch pilot.

When it rains, it pours, but it doesn’t rain in LA too often.

Annie Dillard, in her amazingAn American Childhood,spends two chapters on the premise of being awake.

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride…to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

I’m not one to emptyquote (at least I’d hope not), but there’s something tragically beautiful about this.

We’re all alive, in the sense that we’re not dead. But we spend a tremendous amount of time distracting ourselves from that necessary, beautiful peril; a lot of time dulling ourselves to the fact we’ve got a lot of time left.

For me, it used to be videogames; now it’s Youtube videos, or articles on screenwriting, far more than I’d actually need to get started and write.

Don’t be dead.

Hey everyone. Long time, no write (unless you count approximately 250 tweets, but so what?)

I’m closing in on the final draft of my submission for the Nickelodeon Fellowship. I specced A.N.T. Farm. Now, this may be a bit of a mistake, since the show won’t enter its second season until my draft is sent out, but when you love a show, you have to do it.

What I find amazing is webseries. Everyone who isn’t writing one is directing one. The best time to make one was probably 2003 (when Lonely Island and Derrick Comedy were getting started, and Aubrey Plaza did the one with the mom driving around.)

I’ve currently got one I’m writing, one fully drafted (although the director took a sabbatical) and another one concepted. Will at least one of them make it out?

Yes. The 3rd one, it’s really easy to film.

A short one for now. These are things that are intuitive after you go up a few times, but hard to put a finger on.

1: Prep - Don’t say a joke for the first time on stage. It won’t go exactly right, and it shows. (Feel free to improv or riff, but that goes in the middle, once the crowd is kind of on your side.)

2: Move the mic stand - Don’t stand behind things. It makes the audience wonder, when are you gonna move the stuff?

3: The rule of three - Don’t do two examples. A friend of mine (now a popular blogger!) had the weirdest pace to her standup, because she did TWO examples of everything she explained. Sure, you can be iconoclastic, but it’s like writing a sentence without verbs. Hard. The hardest thing to subvert is what someone expects from a comedy performance, and it’s even harder when you give less than you should. (Four jokes are better than 2).

The brilliant Peter Lundquist wrote a facebook post, on his military friends’ response to the recent corpse-pissing scandal. Read his response (it’s well formatted and well written), and my post will make more sense. It’s a tertiary argument, but it’s informed by his. I also comment in that thread, but I’ve copied, pasted and improved everything I’ve written there.[1]

Now, when anyone blames The Media, it gets my goat. One, because I was hating “The Media” starting in high school, and got over it; I got my bachelors in performing and appreciating it, so any criticism seems rather infantile and bland. It’d be like if I was a theater-studies major and heard “TV is better because you can watch it when you want”. The argument may be amazing to some, but I’m just as tired of it as the Harlem Globetrotters are tired of being told to face another team, if they’re so good.

So I’m a bit tired of people blaming the media for reporting on people doing bad things.

That’s the argument you always hear, right? “The media is biased. They don’t know what it’s like.” Of course they don’t know what it’s like! If they knew what it was like, they couldn’t be unbiased.

They also couldn’t report, because they’d spend all their time “learning what it was like.” Apply the argument further: food critics should own their own restaurants, business columnists should moonlight as Fortune 500 executives, and crime reporters should break into houses. It’s hard to understand a criminal if you haven’t had the thrill of escaping from police. Reporters do their jobs by learning a little about everything, and ideally a lot about ethics, and no other methodology would result in a daily newspaper, instead of a series of tweets from sous-chefs and corporate bankers.

That’s one argument defeated, and I flatter myself to think you’ll quote me when someone accuses the media of “not getting it”, of “being biased against [whoever]”. Journalists are motivated by getting their stories done, and that is their bias; whoever calls back before deadline, whoever gives a better and more interesting interview will come off better. That’s the business of news, that news has to be sold, and to be sold it has to appeal to readers. That is the fundamental slant of news; the slant toward salability.

That wasn’t their only defense of the corpse-pissers, though. The other was that somehow being at war made one a patriot-monster, with the prefix justifying the succedent.

The long and short of it, the people who train warriors are severely skilled. There’s no question that with equal numbers, equal recruitment circumstances, and equal weaponry, today’s soldiers could kick the asses of our boys from WW2, Korea or Vietnam.

It’s because of their psychological training. Modern military training is about companionship, the unit, and the in-group in a way the ancient Greeks would be jealous of. Your enemy isn’t fighting for his beliefs, his land, or his country; he’s going to kill your friend. Everything he does is to murder your best friend, who’s just a nice guy from Iowa. And you aren’t killing the enemy; you’re defending your friends. (Even the language is swept of that bitter word, ‘kill’; targets are ‘confirmed’, all enemies are ‘hostiles’.)

The mythology hasn’t changed, or at least it pretends it hasn’t. Western tradition emphasized people tired of war, who sought to become agrarian rulers. Their killing was a necessary evil, one that damaged them, and through war, they wanted for piece.

Now, war is sold as badass. Many of my generation will remember the commercial for the Marines that featured a man running through a series of perils and at the end slaying a firebreathing dragon. A current one played before movies features two soldiers using their powerful imaging goggles to rescue another marine, who’s lost in a forest. They have guns, but don’t use them, and what a single soldier is doing in a forest is never explained, since the U.S. hasn’t fought in one for forty years. It’s basically “we, a heroic rescuing force who take care of each other, have awesome equipment”.

I’d be picking nits if this wasn’t an overarching strategy. America’s Army, the hit videogame, constantly barrages players with recruitment information. It glorifies war for points, was widely sold at Wal*Mart and Gamestop. The idea of a similar game (made by Afghani game developers, where U.S. soldiers are the targets) is appalling, though a few have been made. Those are our guys[2] 

These videogames promote the idea of the heroic, conquering, constantly killing hero-protector. Though army promotional videos give lip-service to the idea of being a Citizen-Soldier (an idea that says when one fights, they’ll be rewarded as a high-paid kick-ass civilian operator), the main appeal to prospective members is through an appeal to righteous violence. Marine Training is heraldic, filled with tales of bravery. They’re leather-necked heroes, who fought actual pirates on the shores of Tripoli.

Their history of just wars is not just a great legacy, it is a sign of future fulfillment.When others are Scared, Marines are Right. When civilians are too squeamish, Marines are Strong and will Get the Job Done.(Peter’s friends seem to have this attitude of internalizing their actions as Army Actions, and therefore necessary, and therefore right).

It’s a hard way to live, and it’s not as if the army invented rationalizations. But as we see repeatedly - Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the gleeful mortaring of Al-Jazeera journalists, the desecration of the dead, the AC-130 gleefully firing on civilians. At worst, these are explained as bad but necessary, or part of the fog-of-war, or misconstrued by the Evil Media to attack our Heroic Boys. What’s amazing is how well this argument worked for years and years and years, from the run-up to Iraq to mid 2007 when the “we haven’t won yet” began to turn people’s minds.

They are The Heroes. And nothing I say, and nothing they do, will change that.

I know a comic named Sammy Tropin. What’s amazing is about his set is that every time I’ve seen him, it kills for the first two or three minutes.

Then something changes.

The air shifts, maybe.

Well, first you have to understand what his set is.

Sammy is unattractive (as are many comedians), and his jokes are about his love of masturbation and his hatred of Hindus. That’s the long and short of it; when he goes up, people clamor for his Neil Hamburgian parody of shock-jock comics. But after two minutes of this, the audience catches on. The curtain falls, and the great wizard of Oz is just an oversized raciste.

You can get far with prejudice, as long as you have your chops and make yourself a target as well (see also: Artie Lange, Lisa Lampanelli, Sarah Silverman). But your material may betray you; bad jokes in the guise of bad jokes can work for a while. But if all you have is unbearable puns, you are in trouble.

If This Is You: Audiences love the recognizable. Be the underdog of your stories; let egg show on your face. Pick on the high and mighty (the ancient Greeks did this); have a bit of pity for those under hard times. They just might be your audience.

Also, wanking jokes are for professionals. EVERYONE wants to tell fart/poop/rape jokes when they start out. Move away from your safe zone.

If you want to continue the discussion or ask a question, you can always reach me on twitter at @AdamUltraberg.

Alright. It’s time to rebrand and reenergize. Enough geopolitics in my google cache. Look here for some true stories of standup along with theater and comedy writing.

(The petitions call for an overhaul of the constitution that would require the school newspaper to be funded at the whim of the SGA, which it reports on.)

BLOOD ON THE STREETS OF THE LB!

ECHOING UKELELE CHORDS OF THE REVOLUTION 

NO LAUGHTER AT THE SWOMO SHOWS. ONLY FINGERSNAPS AT REVOLUTIONARY LINES, ONES THAT QUESTION BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF THE I/THOU RELATIONSHIP

MEANWHILE, LEE PELTON SIPS WINE AT A MOVIE HOUSE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE NATION

ANOTHER YEAR, WE’LL HAVE WORK THEN’ SAYS THE EDITOR OF THE FIREBIRD. ‘WE HIRED THAT GUY ON, REMEMBER?’ SHOUTS HUB SHOVEL. STAFF POSITIONS COLLAPSE LIKE THE FOAM OF A CHAIN-STORE COFFEE DRINK. ‘CHECK OUR TWITTER. FOURSQUARE HAS CAUGHT ON.’

THIS IS THE FRUIT BORNE OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION MAJORS. THESE ARE THE SHARPEST KNIVES, SAVED FOR THE SMALLEST OF STAKES.

Currently, my play Sidekickin’ It is opening in Washington, Illinois. That’s awesome.

Working on a pilot, a music video, a new play (Thanksgiving themed), some really excellent tweets. Will post about my standup dates when I get some more.

Congratulations on your mission, but please buzz up.

Kind of a cool thing about me. I have a tumblr and I drive a V8. I can’t imagine that’s a common combo.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1563981739828.2039870.1243891022&type=1&l=719f05aa08

As a side effect, I outed my real name, which is also on the business cards.

I’m not ashamed of anything on this tumblr, so it’s no worries.