But They Don’t Need Cooking Sleeves Anymore
Posted on | April 30, 2006 at 12:40 pm | 6 Comments
Frequent blog commentar InfK was town in this week from the land of lost angels. He’s a big-time standup comedy buff, so we had arranged to take in Jim Gaffigan’s show at the Paramount on Friday night. I wasn’t all that familiar with Gaffigan’s standup act, though I had seen him around on the tube from time to time. I most remember him for his role of Toby on that late, lamented TV show Ed. I had no idea his standup act was so popular – it looked like the show was sold out, and the Paramount is huge and holds a lot of people. I got the (reserved seating) tickets a few weeks before the show, and we ended in the back of the balcony, a few rows in front of the back wall. So it was a little hard to see what was happening on stage.
But I had a good time. Gaffigan is pretty much a “clean” comedian in the mold of Seinfeld et al. No blue material and little profanity. I guess humor doesn’t always have to be dirty or edgy. I did get a bit tired of the way he would do a running commentary on his act in a different voice (i.e. a pretend audience member). Kind of like how Margaret Cho keeps going back to imitating her mother, something else I grow tired of. Luckily, those bits were usually pretty short, and I got the idea he was maybe using them as transitional devices while he got his thoughts together.
For some reason, I really got off on his bit about recycling, especially washing out soda cans before putting them in the bin (which is something I do). “Why wash it out, IT’S GOING IN THE GARBAGE”. Hey, it’s to keep the flies away, or something like that. Besides, the garbage company tells you to do it.
By far, the part of his act that got the biggest response was his diatribe on Hot Pockets and how bad they are. Several people around me seemed to have it memorized and were doing the act along with him. I did not know this, but apparently Hot Pockets had their genesis in Colorado. There was a large contingent of noisy people off to one side whom InfK and I speculated might be Hot Pockets employees or something, even though the Colorado company that made them was sold to Nestlé a few years ago. They brought him a giant pizzabox-sized Hot Pockets box on stage – I couldn’t tell if it was real or a mockup or a marketing thing or what. But Jim seemed amused by it. I now know more about Hot Pockets than I ever dared dream.
And yes, they are nasty. I got a few Lean Pockets back when I was sick, hoping it would be something I could get down. I think they made me sicker though. The cheese had the consistency of paste and tasted very artificial. I can barely look at an HP box now without gagging…
Here’s a link to his Wikipedia entry, which has some of his one-liners.
Anyway, thanks for getting me out of the house, InfK!
The other big event of the weekend was my nephew/godson Connor’s First Communion on Saturday. The little guy did well and didn’t look too nervous. Pictures will probably show up soon on the Flickr page when I get the time. I bought a new Canon PowerShot SD600 camera this week and used that. The pix for the most part aren’t as good as the ones from my Sony DSC-P200, though it’s easier to get non-blurry pictures with it. And it’s so tiny!
Latre.
Comments
6 Responses to “But They Don’t Need Cooking Sleeves Anymore”
April 30th, 2006 @ 7:33 pm
I checked the back of the box (I’m not too proud to admit that I like a hot pocket now and then – especially the BBQ flavor, which has no cheese) and it says they’re distributed by a company in Englewood. And you didn’t mention the weirdness at the end of the show, with all them pro-marriage frat boys…
See you next time! Unless I don’t! Someday maybe we’ll go see someone even funnier.
April 30th, 2006 @ 7:49 pm
Gee, thanks – just when I had managed to block the whole marriage proposal thing from my mind, you had to go ahead and remind me.
April 30th, 2006 @ 10:57 pm
OK, now you have to explain the “marriage proposal thing” for all of us that didn’t get to see the show.
May 1st, 2006 @ 9:12 am
At the end of Jim’s encore, he said that Ticketmaster (the vile, hated Ticketmaster – they of the outrageous surcharges) had a new thing where at each show they would give away one of Jim’s CDs to a random ticket holder. He called the name of the winner, a guy, and told him to come up on stage “with your girlfriend” to collect the CD in person. I was suspicious right then, because it assumed that every guy attending had come with his girlfriend. The two of them finally arrived on stage after a long wait. After giving him the CD, Jim handed him the microphone and left the stage. At that point, the guy got down on his knee and proposed to his girlfriend. She of course accepted. She didn’t look very surprised. Awww, it was so sweet. *Gag* As Ben mentioned, the frat boys in the audience (which seemed to be a majority of the audience) were really getting into it.
May 1st, 2006 @ 7:16 pm
You’re right, that is weird. It really doesn’t seem very funny at all. I can only assume that somehow the guy sweet-talked Jim into setting the whole thing up so that he could propose on stage (thus making it really difficult for her to say “no”).
And now that you brought up Ticketmaster, we went to Jazz Fest in New Orleans this weekend and it’s the first time in years I think that I’ve had to buy through Ticketmaster. Good Lord! Not only did they have *two* different surcharges (they must have learned something from the phone company), they wanted to charge me extra for the privilage of using my own ink and paper to print out the tickets! I went the cheap route and let them mail them to me, and sure enough, they waited until the last possible moment to send them.
May 1st, 2006 @ 9:57 pm
I think the general reason to do the marriage proposal in front of an audience is so that the woman won’t say no. Although one of my co-workers was saying she recently saw one (I think at a sporting event) where the woman did say no, and got mad to boot.
Ticketmaster is Evil. Now I know why so many rail against it. $25 tickets became $37 tickets after all the various fees. Seems almost like false advertising. If only there were some other way to get tickets…
Kudos on making them do the the mail thing. Weird that they don’t charge more for that, like the airlines and travel websites do.