Improv-ing The Travel Experience

I thought I’d share this video from a Face2Face Improv show a few years ago that was recently posted online:

This game harkens back to the ‘old days’ when slides and slide projectors were common fare when visiting relatives. More often than not … they tended to be boring.

Here, the show moderator receives from an audience member a description of their recent trip. After a basic, uneventful interview, the moderator chooses an actor to pose as the audience member, who then proceeds to show everyone the slides from the trip.

In this clip, Jen Lohrman Britton narrates a trip to Haiti. Thus the benign description, thanks to Jen, transforms into a much larger calamity of laughs.

We do shows every Tuesday night at Sam & Greg’s Pizzeria/Gelateria on the square in downtown Huntsville at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5; children 8 and under are free. I’m there almost every week, usually hosting the show. Come check us out.

Happy Birthday, John Glenn

In honor of John Glenn’s 90th birthday, a comic strip Lain, Jesse and I did many years ago before his return to space. For more comics, go here.

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And in other space-related news:

— Here’s pretty awesome gallery of recent launches that a friend shared with me.

— I may write more about this later, but a flag flown on the first shuttle mission was left on the International Space Station by the last shuttle mission, and will be awarded to the first U.S. company to fly astronauts to the station. That’s pretty cool.

— Joy of Tech did a final undocking comic that’s not bad.

— Did you know astronauts can’t whistle on spacewalks? Learn something knew every day.

Classic Lines From Face2Face

For years now, I’ve been saving great lines I’ve loved from shows and rehearsals of the improv troupe I’m part of, Face2Face Improv. For the longest time, I’ve had the idea that I would design a t-shirt with some of the best of them. And now I have. I thought I’d share the results here.

A lot of stuff we do really has to be in context, and, with the nature of improv, if you’ve missed the context once, you’ve missed it forever. But these were some that I thought were amusing even without context. (Or that really make you wonder what the context was.)

(By the way, you should totally come see us. You can check the Web site for our schedule, or you can just come to Sam & Greg’s Pizzeria and Gelateria in downtown Huntsville on any Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. Tickets for that 40-minute show are only $5, and kids 8 and under are free.)

Here are a few more that I didn’t have room for:

Dear Starbucks Marketing Folks

Dear Starbucks Marketing Folks,

I doubt I could be the only person in the world who sees your new coffee and thinks, “This is not the greatest coffee in the world.”

Just wanted to make sure that’s the message you’re wanting to send.

Love,

David

Low-Carb Snowstorm Survival

I Feel Funny … And Contagious

This is the latest in my series of blog entries taking a fresh look at a variety of topics. I’ve set up a page on the blog explaining the project and linking to my entries. This post’s topic is “Your Sense Of Humor.”

Caden:
“Three hundred ninjas walk into a coffee shop.
The breester says we don’t serve your kind here.
And the ninja says, maybe we should destroy your whole building!”

David:
“That’s kinda extreme.”

Caden:
“And the ninja says, maybe we should destroy your whole building …
And make a better building for the coffee shop.”

David:
“Oh, that’s nice!”

I’ve always been proud of my sense of humor.

Even if I couldn’t tell a joke to save my life.

For me, a good sense of humor is not really about being funny.

It’s about not taking things too seriously.

I’ve always been proud of the fact that, no matter how bad things may be, I can always laugh about it.

The truth is, there’s humor all around us. Life is funny, you know?

But most of the time, we take it too seriously to notice that.

When we stop, we started seeing the humor in things that we’ve been missing.

To the extent that I can be funny — and by now, I can be funny — it’s not so much because I can come up with funny things, it’s that I see the funniness already in things. Or see how to defy the expectations that we have in order to make things funny.

That’s the secret to a lot of improv we do. Sure, sometimes we’re funny because someone says something clever. But frequently we’re funny because the scene shows funny truths about life, and, because they’re pretend and on stage, it’s easy to let them be funny. Sometimes we’re funny because in our day to day lives, things happen in a consistent and logical pattern, and we find it funny when a scene deviates from that pattern.

If you can recognize those same things when they’re not on stage, the world becomes a happier place.

I enjoy laughing. I enjoy making people laugh. I do like being funny, because I like funny things.

I love sharing them with others.

Humor is one place I’ve been able to see that Finn and Caden are picking things up from being around me. They’ve come to several improv shows, and enjoy watching them, but they also want to do it themselves. They love giving suggestions during the show, but then they’ll want to play the games themselves afterward.

Finn was the first, completely on his own, to start telling the “101” jokes we do in the shows. When Finn started, Caden had to as well. Finn understands why my pun punchlines are funny, but struggles to make his own. Caden doesn’t get it at all, but finds the whole conceit of the joke funny. But it really doesn’t matter. Whether it’s because they came up with a good punchline or because their joke was totally random, the results are funny. And it’s fun to see them wanting to share that with me.

I hope that I can also teach them the truth in some wise words from A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

The Demise of the Newspaper – Unintended Consequences (via Idle Ramblings)

I wrote a post a few days ago about the future of newspapers. My good friend Joe Gurner has taken the issue and gone in a very important direction with it — the impact of the potential death of the industry on superheroes.

If you’re still in the newspaper industry today and you take a long, hard look around, things don’t necessarily look good. The hard economic times of the past few years have taken their toll. They come on top of the fact that the industry as a whole has been slow to adapt to changing technology, changing readership and changing business models. In many ways newspapers have become dinosaurs, but the industry itself played its own role in keeping t … Read More

via Idle Ramblings

What You’re Looking For

Image via CrunchBase

So one of the benefits of the traffic increase of having been Freshly Pressed twice is that Google takes me more seriously now, and I get a lot more search engine traffic on the blog now that I did three months ago.

My old blog used to get more search traffic than this one did until recently, and I used to do an occasional post about searches that had brought people to the blog. A lot of the searches on this one are pretty straightforward queries related to a handful of posts, but I’m starting to get enough traffic that I’m starting to see some amusing searches show up.

That said, interesting search strings on SIMP in the last month:

• where can i get me a machine that i can carry in my pocket to spell words
• mississippi billboard “we are all losers”
• crude palm oil will hit to myr 4200 by the end of the month december 2010
• forest in my pocket
• my laptop cords powerpoint is like beside my bed sorta thing, and somehow it fell out, and a bit of it was hanging out, and sparks were going everywhere! i was like s—! quickly turns power point off .
• sam flynn smile
• www jazz hitt com
• whats a good lego set
• transformers imagine 20 years from now get in the car
• bay town texas makes incence illiegal
• stone and water in iphone
• read this sentence from the passage: they both cost the same, and if the two salads decide to get married, they can have a bunch of little salads and send them all off to salad school to take reading comprehension tests.in this sentence, the author is explaining how
• thas wat made me myne crazy high but i spot a traitor out my lazy eye lady spy i’m tha one they wana hav thea baby by maybe i’m beta off alone keeps me in my zone
• which are things in that needed in the notice of petrol pump notice on no smokina for what?why?
• bears in my pocket
• ugly guy mullet moustache
• teachers book writing reports on future robots tigers laser lemon limit major minor and valid
• & i’ve changed? i dont have lighters in my bra, i’m not asking people for ciggs, i don’t have smoker hands, and i don’t believe in cutting myself to ease pain. i have nothing to hide. you can’t find a boy, maybe because you hang out with bad people? i know i get heart broken, but i bounce back. pills, they’re also not the answer, so if you wanna tell me ive changed, then your blind
• how to make lego armor with play doh
• clint eastwood my mull
• give us small topics over usefulness of forest to mankind in hindi font
• embarrassing incident at harry potter movie and projector
• what would happen to the demand curve for metallica cds if they became unpopular?
• piggly wiggly/mississippi
• what is the meanning of this proverb”he who brings kola brings life but i think you ought to break it
• show me a picture of a mullet haircut on a woman
• photographs of squatters living in batcave in brooklyn in early 1980s before closed
• diluting concentrated sulfuric acid with water can be dangerous. the temperature of the solution can increase rapidly. what are the signs of dh, ds, and dg for this process?
• what i should do in my house if i am bored and i also dont have any pets or tele and i am bored sitting on the computer too i am a primary student
• ole miss improv
• the “chocolate or vanilla” rule
• soviet futures stories
• birds take so long to die + angry birds
• lori skylab
• i’m david hitt, am i on meth?
• johnny depp what am i to do? then i recall, in my pocket i have a sketch of something rustic, with limbs; i put it out, and deliver…
• preacher from huntsville wrote a book
• well wookie
• people dying because of facebook stories
• a nation that loses the _______ of honesty loses its __________.
• if you were a purple monkey and your dad was a yellow starfish could you drive a limo up a pole at sundown?
• if your parents not give you 4 presents and everyone elas does what do they do after christmas
• nasa village of santa
• a movie then go back farm time of insulin to kill him
• kid deleted angry birds from ipod touch can you reload
• grisham’s the confession banned in boston
• babies have their whole lives ahead of them
• david hitt cigars
• what is the luxury of knowing about keith urban

‘Twas The Night Before Nerdmas

(This is something Lain and I wrote years ago for our comic strip, Hatbag, It appears in our collection, Bagged & Bored.)

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‘Twas the night before Nerdmas, when all through the house Only Seth was stirring; he was clicking his mouse. The network was primed through the router with care, In hopes that St. EveJobs soon would be there.  His buddies were nestled all snug in their cribs, With visions of Mountain Dew, Skittles, and ribs. And Seth in his PJs that showed Mr. T Had just settled down in his unique IP. When out in the street there arose such a ruckus, Seth sprang from his chair, knocking over his Zuckuss. Away to the window he flew like The Flash, A complete run of whose comic was safe in Seth’s stash. The moon on Seth’s car, all Dr. Who-stickered, Gave a glimmer like magic as off them it flickered. When what to Seth’s wondering eyes should appear, But a flying DeLorean with robot reindeer. With a little old driver, such a tech-laden elf, That Seth knew it must be Mr. Apple himself. More rapid than broadband his coursers they came, And, linked to them with Bluetooth, he called them by name! “Now, H4x0r! Now, Lucas! Now Shatner and Tolkien! On Gygax! On Torvalds! On Bendis and Whedon! To the top of the porch! Don’t mind the firewall! Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!” As back issues that in the big comics sale fly, Before collectors raise their price to the sky, So up Seth’s house-top the coursers they flew, With a bunch of nerd swag, and St. EveJobs too. And then, in a twinkling, Seth heard on the roof The prancing and pawing of each nerdy hoof. As he reached for his phaser, his face Yoda-green, Down the modem came Jobs, and right out through the screen He was dressed casually, from his head to his foot, And his mock turtleneck was as black as the soot. With a bundle of toys to dole out from his sack, As quick as a row of Xserves on a rack. His eyes – how they twinkled! His glasses how trendy! His smile was like Mork, his composure like Mindy! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, And his cool six-day stubble was flecked as with snow. A tiny iPod he had tucked in its sheath, And the white earphones circled his head like a wreath. His West Coast physique had no hint of a belly, And he radiated cool like Arthur Fonzarelli. He was techno and hip, a right nerdy old elf, And Seth laughed as he showed him his figurine shelf. A wink of Jobs’ eye and a twist of his head Told Seth that his love of toys soon would be fed. He opened his pack and brought out many things, Complete sets of both Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, A soldering kit, and a Wi-Fi detector, And a cardboard stand-up of Hannibal Lector. A Trinity doll, in all her skin-tight black finery, And a set of droll T-shirts, with slogans in binary. A new MIDI keyboard, a case of Diet Cokes, And The Omnibus Big Book of Microsoft Jokes. As the last of the nerd loot piled up on the floor, He brought out the batteries – fifty or more! And then, turning the switch on his belt back to Play, He gave Seth a grin, and beamed back to his sleigh. Jobs booted his team, and as they leapt towards the moon, Seth saw a bumper sticker: I (Heart) Kakrafoon And he heard Jobs exclaim, as he warped into night, “One more thing: Happy Nerdmas, and to all an iSight!” –Lain Hughes & David Hitt

 

 

The 12 Days of Christmas