My nephew added a joke: “how many joke book writers, I mean, comedians, does it take to change a lightbulb? One, if they’ve been to trade school as an electrician.”

Jay added some more too, like “I’m a meat and potatos guy. Like for instance, I meet people and they invite me over for dinner and I say, ‘what, dinner, tonite? okay that sounds great, what are we having?’ and they say ‘meat and potatoes!’”

My other nephew also told me a joke I thought was genuinely funny:

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Control freak - now you say ‘control freak who’”

I did the act for my friends Tom and Sarah (Sarah is controversial on the internet) two or three nights ago in Chicago, they showed me some youtube videos of Tim Heidecker, which is pretty close to the idea I’m playing with here - http://youtube.com/watch?v=u9F0svqEtw4

oh yeah, WO - let’s hang out soon!

And if you actually laughed then maybe it didn’t work…

I talked to Jay on the phone about it last night. The idea is to seem like a sincere attempt at comedy, but to fail. So that if people laugh they’re laughing out of pained sympathy or else laughing at me. It’s kind of like writing a character. I was thinking his name will be David Mueller.

“So anyway, yeah, my name’s David Mueller. It’s not a great name but it’s the one I got. Kids used to make fun of my name in school. It’s an old name, from the days when your name was from what you did for a living. My great grandfather used to castrate mules. So, mule-er. When I would complain that kids made fun of my name, my grandfather used to say, at least our name isn’t Castrater! Then they’d really make fun of you! But yeah, kids used to pick on me. They called me moolah. Moo-ler, like a cow. I used to say, whatever you’re just jealous cuz I’ve got lots of moolah cuz I’m rich! I’m not really rich though. I do okay. But if I was rich, if I really had a lot of moolah, I’d spent it in on crazy stuff that’s totally unnecessary. Like having an electrician come to change the lightbulbs when they burned out!”

Something like that. I don’t know that I would _actually_ perform this. If I did I’d have to pack the room with friends who were under orders to laugh really hard. Ang sugested that I have note cards that I fumble with and deliberately screw up the bit then backtrack, and Jay said that one could be smudged and torn, I could start a joke then just trail off then change jokes. He also said I should cough while performing.