The first official improv scene I ever did was, by all accounts, brilliant. And that’s not meant as a brag but as a setup to my eventual downward spiral. It was the summer of 1995, and I was a 29-year-old professional standup comedian taking my first improv class at the Improv Olympic Theater in Chicago... Continue Reading →

Wanted to follow up on the funny Frog Bank riffing session that happened during Chief Chat #109 last Friday. For those who missed it, you can check out the replay here (the bit starts at @49:14) but in a nutshell we were having fun combining the world of FROG with the world of BANK in order to... Continue Reading →

What if I told you that even if you’re not terribly funny, you can still effectively punch-up whatever you’ve just written? In the film and television industry, they pay humorous writers a lot of money to make scripts even funnier – it’s called ‘punching up the script’ – but any writer can do the same... Continue Reading →

At one point during my old job voice-writing news captions, I had to choose whether to sign a pro-union email. It’s a complicated story that I did a six-part blog series on, click here if you care to read all the gory details. But bottom line, my employer wasn’t treating the employees right, and when a... Continue Reading →

On a recent trip with my kids to the Walmart to buy my wife’s birthday gifts, I got angry. Furious, really. And as much as it pissed me off to have to shop at one of those lousy Sam Walton emporiums whose mere existence in a city forces all the local mom-and-pops to whither and... Continue Reading →

Every game day since he was a high school football player, NFL slot receiver Cole Beasley has gotten so nervous about what he’s about to do that he literally throws up. I can relate. Despite the fact that I love the IDEA of meeting and socializing with new people, it also totally makes me want... Continue Reading →

For twenty-four years, I toured the world as a comedy entertainer, and every night of it, there was a decent chance I’d get heckled. Hecklers are some comics’ worst nightmare, but not mine. I started out doing standup performing at small town bars that did comedy one-nighters and weekends. From Toledo and Peoria to Valdosta... Continue Reading →

Quitting your day job to become a full-time freelancer is rarely a smooth transition. A lot of brand new freelancers get trapped in something called the Day Job / Freelancer Endless Loop, which typically starts when you have a decent (yet uninspiring) day job but also have a side-skill you’ve always been good at, been passionate about... Continue Reading →

Worse thing you can do as a potential freelancer is quit your day job before you’re ready. For a lot of people in this modern economy, the dream of being a boss-less freelancer has become more than just an ideal preference, it’s become a situational necessity. Whether it’s because these days ‘real jobs’ are scarcer... Continue Reading →

One interesting thing about Bud and Ben Mufflers in Oak Cliff is that there is no Ben. It’s not that he’s dead – Ben was never alive in the first place. Over a few decades ago the sign actually read, “Bud and Ken Mufflers” because those two were brothers-in-law and they were in business together... Continue Reading →