Comedy That Time Forgot, Vol. 1
October 15th, 2006 Posted in 2006
From around 2000 to 2004 I posted reguarly on a Yahoo Group called Bad Craziness with a group of old college friends and struggling comedy writers. Most of us had awful desk jobs and, because we had no interest in actually doing them, we dicked around all day posting funny stuff online for each other’s amusement. Sometimes when I’m not feeling particularly creative on a weekend I’ll comb through its archives and find a decent post: after I’ve changed the locations and product names from Canadian to American, fixed the spelling and removed roughly half of the copious swearing, I’ll put it up on the site as “new” material. I’m devious.
I’ve pulled this lazy scam more than a few times by now, and it’s always interesting to me when some ancient and long-forgotten Yahoo Groups post I’ve unearthed and thrown online ends up becoming a reader favorite. This was the case with She’s an Alcoholic, a rambling essay I’d never thought much of that sat on my hard drive for over six years before finally getting used on the site, solely on the grounds that I was hungover and didn’t feel like writing anything new. I’ve since received more fan mail on it than any other two posts combined on the site, which tells me two things: one, I unquestionably have no idea whatsoever what people enjoy in my writing; and two, there could be literally dozens of old articles sitting on my hard drive right now that could well be embraced as my best work if I’d ever bothered to put them online.
Hence the Comedy That Time Forgot archiving project. My wife Karla’s started going through the Bad Craziness archives (and with almost 13,000 posts to wade through, it’s no small task). Possibly she’s just interested in reading what amounts to my diary for a large portion of my 20s. Maybe she’s just skimming it to look for references to old girlfriends. Either way I’m glad she’s taking an interest, because it means I don’t have to; I’ve asked her to keep an eye out for any old writing of mine that was half-decent.
Here are a few things she’s unearthed so far. Think of “Comedy That Time Forgot” as a semi-regular feature; sort of a gradual unearthing of my C drive, for better or worse, and something I’ll be adding to as I go through everything over the next few months, if only so I can feel a sense of completion for finally getting it online. Between these and my Cubicle Blues archives, it’ll be nice to eventually have a big chunk of this unseen older stuff up, wedged in between the newer updates.
Essays
Cubicle Blues
Fiction
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