Thursday, February 01, 2007

It is hard out here

Since you asked:

Go ahead, call me one pot Lex, I don’t mind. No, not that kind of pot, Snoop Dog, a cooking pot.

As we have been having what passes in San Diego as a frigid winter, temperature dipping into the high forties and low fifties with rain and clouds, this is a perfect excuse to make winter foods.
One pot cooking is classic Lex style. Easy, easy to clean, flashy and good.

Yes, I made my famous Lexter Dexter chili, but the night before I made a ripping red wine beef stew.

Tonight? I am going with my Paella with a big change. Did the beer butt chicken last night on the mesquite Weber and man did the chicken pick up the smoky flavor well.

So tonight I am going to substitute chicken thighs with fish. Going to roll the fish in a seasoned flour, quickly fry it brown on both sides, remove, sweat the chopped onion and bell peppers and garlic, add the andouille sausage, let the sausage fry a tad, then add the chicken stock, rice, fish, simmer hard for fourteen minutes then throw the shrimp and go another seven minutes and then the carrots and peas with a couple minutes to go.

Badabing, badaboom, badabiddly, Bob is your Uncle. Serve with a nice crusty French bread and chilly white wine and I am so money I don’t even freakin’ know it.

No, I don’t add clams. AC and Virg are not big clam fans.

Hollywood is a lot smarter than it looks.

Hollywood has eliminated the possibility of screwing up and replaced it with a reason to go into rehab.

Drive drunk and yell anti-Semitic remarks? No problem, Mel, Mad Max your way over the rehab. Yell anti-gay or racist epithets in public? You’re not an idiot like we thought Isaiah Washington and Michael Richards first appeared, they are simply in need of rehab. Do a lousy job on a movie by showing up late and being too hung over to do something as easy as reading other people’s words? Poor Lindsay Lohan needs to go bye-bye for a while.

When I was a bond broker on Wall Street, if my customer yelled into the phone that he wanted to buy twenty five million bonds issued on one date but he actually meant bonds issued on another date, guess who got charged for that mistake? You got it, me. Not that I needed any help, I was pretty good at screwing up as a bond broker all my own.

The fact is without any accountability nobody learns from their mistakes. As a comedy writer, when a jokes bombs it is easy to blame it on the poor delivery of the performer or a surly audience. The fact is if a joke dies it wasn’t written well enough. Period.

When I perform stand up and it is a rough night, I can blame the crowd. Or the guy who bombed in front of me. Truth of the matter is that if it was Steve Martin or Robin Williams up there, that crowd would have cheered.

That’s it. Next time I write or tell a joke that bombs, I don’t suck as a comedy writer. I just need to go into comedy rehab.

Top Ten treatments at comedy rehab:

After brushing your teeth in the morning, do ten spit takes into the sink.

When your roommate goes to use the bathroom in the morning have two or three “My god, chew your food” or “Go see a doctor” or “An alien died in there” cracks ready when they come out.

Anytime a guy uses a urinal next to another guy he must have at least one “Hey, that looks just like one only smaller” jokes ready to go.

At breakfast, be the first one to tell the “What’s the difference between eggs, wives, meat and oral sex? joke and you get out of that day’s funny bone exercises. (You can beat your meat, your wife, your eggs, but you can’t beat oral sex)

After breakfast, go on a long walk interspersed with three to four good prat falls. Mud puddles always a bonus.

Get on the computer and fill in the blanks on five “Paris Hilton is such a skank (blank) and two “Kevin Federline is such a loser” (blank)

Take the picture on the front of the local paper and come up with a funny caption. For example, if it is a picture of Hillary Clinton write “Global Warming Worsens. Another Chunk Falls From Hillary.”

For lunch order the soup and have at least three “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” jokes ready when it comes.

That afternoon watch all the old “The Cosby Show” reruns and memorize everything they do and say and never, ever repeat any of them.

Late afternoon jog interspersed with four or five fake running-into-a-sign-or-tree takes.

At dinner order the hot roast beef sandwich and point to the words aus jus on the menu and ask the waiter what that is, when he says it yell gesundheit.

At night read anything by David Sederis or watch anything with Amy Sedaris in it.

And I know that is more than ten. Math rehab is next month.