4 More Years...or 40 more posts...whichever comes first

Hello 'Redheads... Welcome to this blog's 40th POST SPECTACULAR!!...ok, maybe not "spectacular"...would ya believe "ok"?
For those of you who are part of the DC comedy scene, I'd like to start this post by saying that I know so little about how to succeed in comedy that my dearth of knowledge could fit on the head of a pin...my lack of accomplishment could be chronicled subliminally...my void of expertise is so vast that light cannot escape it.
That being said, this weekend marks my 4 year anniversary doing stand-up. I'm this big...

It was the end of February '02, when I tagged along with my buddy, Bill to the open mic at the now defunct Winchester's Comedy Club up in Baltimore...right across Light St. from the Baltimore Comedy Factory. It was there I learned the fine art of making ones of apathetic strangers chuckle once a week. Flash forward four years, and now I'm being paid to do the same thing. I'll be at the Baltimore Comedy Factory for 6 shows in two nights. I've never done three shows in one night before...I only have to do 10 minutes a show, so I don't expect it to be exhausting, but I think it'll be cool to experience three separate crowd reactions in one evening. Part of my enjoyment comes from seeing different peoples' reactions to my same jokes (this should, in no way, be construed as advice, direction, or instruction...the views expressed in the previous sentence are those of Jared Stern and in no way reflect how you should view the art, practice, or science of stand-up comedy). Should be fun.

In other comedy news, I finally saw The Aristocrats, the documentary about a joke that allows comedians to wallow in their own filth in the hopes that their telling is just a smidge more vulgar than the version they heard. It's like a game of telephone with incest, excrement, and donkey fucking. Many people have said that Bob Saget and Sarah Silverman are the highlights of the film. Maybe they were victims of over-hype, but I didn't think they were all that noteworthy. My favorites? The ventriloquist and dummy team of Otto & George made me fart, I laughed so hard. There's something about seeing a puppet say, "...then I fucked the bullethole," that warms my cockles. Also, Doug Stanhope telling the joke to his infant son touched me...in a bad place.

To be continued...