Life Moves Pretty Fast...

Carlin, Provenza, Forrester Show Notes

So this past episode of the podcast is maybe one of the coolest I’ve ever done. To set this whole thing up we have to go waayyyy back to Twitter circa 2011. You know, the version of the site that everyone pines for to this day.

It was a magical time. More magical for me I think than most because at that point in time I was a full-blown agoraphobic of the worst order. Not in the vein of “I get very anxious when I go to the market.” I had long passed that. I mean more like, “I have not walked to the mailbox in five years.”

Pretty depressing, right? But this was also the era of the Internet, which means I still had a whole world open to me. I went to school online and got my Bachelor’s Degree. I read dozens and dozens of books and hundreds and hundreds of articles and blog posts.

When I first got started on Twitter it was mostly for that reason, to follow the news and authors and publications. But Twitter wasn’t quite that yet. It was, or seemed to me to be, much more entertainment based then. And who doesn’t like to be entertained, right?

But then something crazy happened. I started talking back to the people who were being entertaining. At that point, reply guy wasn’t a negative thing. Replies were part of it, much like a chat room. And these people would reply back, or like, or RT, or whatever.

I was entertaining!! Not just that, I was entertaining the professional entertainers!! One of those entertainers was someone named Kelly Carlin. I never even realized in the beginning that her Dad was George Carlin. Maybe because ‘George Carlin’s Daughter’ was too long to fit on a nametag, or maybe because, ya know, in a lot of ways, that’s a heavy cross to bear. Not one of those Styrofoam deals that some children of deities use (I’m talking to you, Jesus). But I digress.

So I’m talking and laughing with Kelly and Dylan Brody and Paul Myers and a lot of others. And even outside of just the human connection and good vibes and good times, I started learning how to be funny, and how disarming comedy could be as a tool for in-person interaction. Instead of worrying about how this person at the market is looking through me and seeing my anxiety, I could just crack wise and that would lower the pressure.

Before I move on to the next part of the story, two years after my whole Twitter 2011 experience, my agoraphobia had lifted. I was back in the workforce. I was driving. As I write this now I have a Master’s degree in Legal Studies from WashU Law and am Director of Operations for a company with five office locations across western North Carolina and almost 200 employees. Ain’t that a kick in the head!

Other things that happened in the meantime, Kelly wrote a book, A Carlin Home Companion. Here is a picture of me and Kelly while she was in Virginia on her book tour. I still hadn’t quite learned the art of how to pose for a picture.

And a picture of me holding the book (posing in private was a little better).

Something I’ve talked about before some is that Kelly also let me curate the official George Carlin Twitter account. This was one of my first lessons in the more toxic aspects of social media. Everybody had their own take, and would want to argue with the goddam Twitter account. Even something innocuous as “a house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff” was met with shit like people posting dictionary definitions of a house. And whether a modular home is also a house. And then the camper people would chime in and start arguing with the house people.

But I enjoyed it, and it was an honor. And it led to a chance meeting with a person named Paul Provenza. Paul had been a writer, producer and director of The Aristocrats, a documentary about the dirtiest joke ever told. Or some would argue a mockumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told that never actually existed.

True story: The guy in this video gave me and one of the greatest professional wrestling promoters of the 1980s a ride to our hotel like three weeks ago. More about that later.

Paul had created, produced and hosted a show called The Green Room with Paul Provenza that I found right in the middle of that Twitter 2011 era. The premise was that this was a behind-the-scenes peek at what comics talk about backstage with other comics. The hilarious shit behind closed doors that maybe isn’t quite ready for public consumption.

But it was much more than that. It was about language and the craft of understanding and breaking down language. The differences between self-awareness, the ignorance of self-awareness (willful or otherwise), and how sometimes a sense of self-awareness can be cranked up too high.

It was smart and funny and silly and tense and continues to have a cult following today. Especially among comics. It is very hard to find a stand-up comic who has not seen The Green Room, and is impossible to find one who doesn’t love it.

There are so many timeless moments that still make me laugh every single time.

Right now you’re probably saying, holy shit! I have to hear this podcast episode and watch The Green Room (which Kelly also produced). But wait…there’s more!

Let’s get back in the time machine and jump forward to Twitter 2017/18. I had taken a break from the platform because there was a thing that happened between 2015 and then where liberal-minded people decided to go to war against each other and conservative-minded people just lost their goddam minds. (And by take a break from the platform I mean stopped being funny on there and started just being pissy all the time).

Around that time though I discovered this comic named Corey Ryan Forrester. I had known of “The Liberal Redneck” Trae Crowder, who I didn’t really like at the time because I thought it was all a gimmick. Like, okay, just say some liberal shit with a southern accent and make a ton of money. I found out Trae was the real deal later on but we don’t need to get into that now because he wasn’t on my goddam podcast was he.

But I really liked Corey. The crew (along with low key big hog Drew Morgan) released an album called Live From Lexington which I live-Tweeted.

https://twitter.com/Crobama/status/1120084467836702720?s=20

Here are some clips of Corey doing his thing.

Now later on, I found out that Corey was also a fan of professional wrestling and I wound up subscribing to a podcast network he was a part of called Ad Free Shows, which led to this..

And also led to why I am writing this today.

I have known for a while that Kelly is a fan of Corey, and Corey is a fan of Kelly, and Paul is a fan of Corey, and Corey is a fan of Paul. So I was at this wrestling event in Hunstville, Alabama recently and Corey was also there. So I took him out to the parking lot, initially for a blowjob, but when he reused that I said, hey, let’s do a FaceTime call with Kelly and Paul!

So we did that and we are all catching up and talking about comedy and politics and our mutual love of each other but, like the blowjob I so richly deserved, the whole thing lasted around five minutes.

An idea was born. Let’s do this on a podcast. Talk about how we all know each other, talk about The Green Room and issues like “cancel culture” and language and speech and social media and how comedians and touring artists are supposed to promote their wares with the fracturing of social media.

We also talked about how Kelly won an Emmy for the documentary George Carlin’s American Dream. About her new Substack called Story/No Story

Corey and Trae Crowder (aka the other guy who I didn’t like at first) have a new travel book out that we talk about called Round Here and Over Yonder, available for pre-order now. And a key theme of that book is, no matter who you are, or where you are, what ties us together as human beings on this planet trying to figure this shit out.

This episode is just four humans from all walks of life and all kinds of experiences, just sitting around, shooting the shit, trying to make each other laugh, and trying to make fucking sense of the world.

I realize this post has been lengthy. But knowing the backstory I think will make listening to the episode even more special. It is up now on all podcast platforms. I’m posting the Spotify one because it embeds best on the page. I don’t make money on this thing, it ain’t about that for me. But I hope a billion people here this because it shows that sometimes, the best way to find out about what unites us, is to just sit around and talk about it as opposed to type at each other about it.

As regular readers know, I always tend to have a song in mind either before I do a podcast episode or in retrospect. This one was both.