🪞 Travis Kelce def gonna do a "shake it off" thing after a touchdown, you just watch.

🪞 It's weird how Liberals love tote bags so much more than Conservatives. Doesn't everyone need to carry stuff? Maybe a tote bag/holster could sway 'em?

🪞 I want to travel to Turkey to get a Brazilian butt lift just so I can tell people and have it be a geographical mindf*ck.

🎧 Why Always the Jews? Interesting podcast interview on why Jews are such a lightning rod for conspiracy theories.

🪞 Memory foam mattress? Uh, I don’t want a bed that remembers everything that happened there. I need an amnesia mattress.

🪞 Clinical depression would make more sense if there was also clinical happiness.

🪞 The problem with “be authentic” is interacting with other human beings requires pretending. You pretend to be in a good mood. You pretend that guy’s joke was funny. Pretending is the lube of a functional society. Without it, we’re all friction.

🗯 On the other hand, here’s David Foster Wallace on the power of authenticity.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality, and then if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🪞 Re: WaPo/Portnoy Pizzagate, "35+ plus [pizza] shops slated to participate." Literally don't understand the point of having 35 pizza places at a single fest. Ya going to eat 35 slices of pizza!? Go to one good pizza place and have a couple slices like a sane human. Another example of "good on the flyer/bad in person."

🪞 I heard the face a guitar player makes when soloing is the same face they make during orgasm. So I bought my girlfriend a guitar. I figured it’d be fun for her to make that face somehow.

🃏 My other newsletter, Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian, is all about doing standup. Recently there: How much can comedians lie? Also: Kurt Vonnegut's advice on telling stories and writing jokes.

🗯 Feminist Caitlin Moran believes feminists have become largely humorless and blames social media, which she argues is like a new religion.

The thing that I observe in younger women and activists is that they’re scared of going online and using the wrong word or asking the wrong question. As a result, we’re not having the free flow of ideas and questions that makes a movement optimal. We appear to have reinvented religion to a certain extent: the idea that there is a sentient thing watching you and that if you do something wrong, it will punish you. God is very much there in social media. 

🪞 My beef with pronouns has nothing to do with gender identity — it just seems really egotistical to introduce yourself by telling me how you’d like me to refer to you when discussing you in the future. (After all, that’s what third-person pronouns are all about.) I feel like you should have to do something interesting first. Eat 200 Tootsie Rolls while tightrope walking and then tell me you prefer to be called “they/them” – ‘cuz I’m def gonna tell someone about you after that. But if we’re just on a random Zoom meeting together, the whole pronoun dance feels more like a bizarre form of egotism.

🗯 16 lessons from legendary clown school instructor Philippe Gaulier:

1. Be ridiculous and sensitive

2. Be at ease with the audience (but don’t get too comfortable)

3. Feel the joy of pretending

4. Stand still

5. Look at the audience

6. Don’t take yourself too seriously

7. Be happy to fail

8. Be allergic to pretension

9. Nurture a childlike spirit

10. Have a sense of play onstage

11. Keep things light, present, and stupid

12. Find “your idiot”

13. Attack falseness

14. Get your ego out of the way

15. Do it with lightness.

16. “Always light. Even if you kill someone.”

🎧 Check out my Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby podcast.

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 28 episodes

Up ahead for paid subscribers: Boebert goes full Alanis, conservatives vs. libs as comedy audiences, Bari Weiss’ sexual revolution “debate,” the sneaky affirmative action in college admissions, Elon Musk’s forward motion, and the general who told Stephen Miller to STFU. ...