I Need to Work Up Some Rage to Get My Comedy Back

The oddest thing has happened to me: Suddenly, I don’t care.

I used to care. Honestly, I really did. I used to get mad – infuriated, even – about the damndest things: politics, school, stupid people… well, really, that’s about all I would get mad about. But that anger often resulted in Taftese comedy classics, including approximately 84 columns about George W. Bush. Obviously, most of those columns are unpublished. Here’s a clip from one of the lost George W. columns:

The biggest problem I have with George W. Bush isn’t his stupidity; it’s his international policy that threatens to enlarge the already wide gap between the United States and the international community.

Ha-HA! ZING! I should have published that one just for that line, but the rest of it is pretty dry. Ho, man: “International community.” God, I kill me.

However, my brilliance aside, I can’t seem to find that touch of anger that made me so damn brilliant. When I was at Boston U., I got good and angry about an institution of higher education that treated their students with a level of respect typically only relegated to pre-schoolers handling mealworms or baby chicks.

I arrived in fabulous Columbia, Missouri with just a few months until the very angering 2000 presidential election, which infuriated me to the point of publication with echo/MU Student News.

When I got out of school, I was mad about the job market. So I wrote a column about it. But then I got a job, and ceased to be concerned about the job market. You may call that short-sighted, but I just call it American. I’ll probably get mad at old people in a few years when I have enough work experience to try to take their jobs. Then I’ll write a column called “Old People: Why Won’t They Die?”

Now I have my own apartment, too. So I can’t even complain about living with my parents. In fact, there’s very little I have left in my life that I can really, genuinely bitch about (except for bitching about the fact that I have nothing to bitch about, apparently). Let’s review:

• Job: Okay, I don’t love my job, but I certainly don’t hate it enough to go all willy-nilly with calling it names and what-not. My job has feelings, too.
• Apartment: Renter’s market. Lots of space. Nothing to complain about here. Except for the light fixtures, maybe. We have some weird-ass light fixtures in that apartment. But I can’t fill a column up about light fixtures. Indeed, the only applicable adjective I could really apply to our light fixtures without actually learning something about them is “weird-ass.” Roommates: My roommates, I’m sorry to report, are awesome. Stupid non-crappy roommates not infuriating me about something…
• Class: I’m taking a sketch comedy course at the Second City. It’s lost my interest, but not because of the people or the class. I think it has more to do with the fact that it is a class. Thanks to my special Low-Effort-In-College-Plan™, the culmination of which was me stepping into only six different classrooms my entire senior year, I became quite turned off to classes and what they tend to involve: being awake, paying attention, taking notes, and just learning things in general. A warning to recent grads: Unless you’re one of those types that “loves to learn,” I would avoid the shock of re-entering a classroom environment anytime too soon. You think it’s going to be “I’m learning because I’m interested in this subject, and that’s why I’m taking an out-of-work class” when really, it’s all kinds of “Oh, God, this is why I wanted to get out college in the first place. I’m supposed to work on this during the week? But I work during the week.”
• Love life: You know, some people might think a small warehouse full of multiple angle DVD porn isn’t a real love life. To those people I say, you're absolutely right. God, I'm socially awkward.
  

So, to sum up, things really aren’t all that bad. And that just pisses me off.

Original Post Date: November 29, 2003