Daniel O'Brien's Blog

Hey, did you know we were doing this?

So, once upon a time I worked for a comedy website and sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad and sometimes it was Great. There are way, way too many things that fall into the “good bucket” to remember or name right now, and the things that fall into the “bad bucket,” have honestly, blissfully, been mostly forgotten. So I won’t talk about those two buckets. But, one of the things that lives in the “Great bucket” is a show I got to make with my friends where we sat around playfully arguing with each other about movies and TV shows. It’s a little internet show I made with my friends that was seen by… some amount of people, and one that people still ask me about, three years after its last episode aired and (almost exactly) ten years after its first.

I’m not going to name the show— the show I did with After Hours’s Michael Swaim, After Hours’s Katie Willert and After Hours’s Soren Bowie— in part because I don’t want to run into any legal trouble by talking about a property I do not own, but also because I think being coy and sneaky is fun. Suffice it to say that Jack O’Brien (no relation) and I (relation) made a night time pop culture show with our pals and had a blast doing it.

A thing that is obvious to anyone who followed this show is that it ended, somewhat unceremoniously, when a bunch of nice people and also me all lost their jobs without warning. A thing that might be less obvious is that a soft series finale was actually written (and filmed) for this show. An episode where Katie, Michael, Soren and I get together to talk about pop culture one last time and say goodbye to each other (and, uh, you, I guess).

That episode never aired and there was subsequently never a plan to air it. Everyone went their separate ways, willingly or unwillingly and that, all assumed, was that.

But now it’s the present, where people are using their platforms big and small to try to make the world a better place and we thought, maybe, with everything going on, this might be a good time to use our platforms to read the series finale of Aft[Redacted]r H[Redacted]rs to raise some money for charity.

The details are in that flier. We’re going to read this script live on Twitch this Saturday and answer some questions from you, the audience. It will be free, but we hope that you donate anyway. It will be available on YouTube after and forever, in case you miss it (follow any of us on Twitter and we’ll tweet out the link when it’s available).

The warmth from the fanbase and community that sprouted up around this unnamed show was more surprising and incredible than anything else I’d experienced, before or After. Ours was a supportive community of spirited weirdos who could always be counted on to watch the show, travel to come see our live performances and occasionally stop us on the street to shout “Hey, I know you! CollegeHumor, right?” We hope you’ll join us one last time to say goodbye and hopefully raise some damn money to make the world a little less worse.

The script was written by me (though everyone contributes to every script) and the rest of the team was kind enough to allow me to make it as long as I wanted it to be. It’s about friendship and endings.

Hey Everyone!

My wonderful friends Samantha Bowling and Brittany Belland are launching a brand new comedy/live podcast show called Bipolar Fantasy Squad and I’m the special guest for the first one! It’s this Thursday, July 26th at 8pm at the Moving Arts Theatre.

The way the show works is that the special guest spends some time doing whatever he or she wants and then he or she will sit down with the hosts for an unfiltered conversation about art, comedy and mental health. There’s a Facebook event page about it. 

I’m doing a mix of stand-up, storytelling and reading (out loud). Come watch me do a live reading of excerpts from various upcoming projects about which I’m very excited. Be the first to hear an exclusive [REDACTED] from my upcoming [REDACTED]! Then we’ll do a live interview and maybe some improv? Who knows!

Anyway, it’ll be my first time performing live since loudly disappearing from doing public stuff since January. I hope I remember how to talk. Did I mention that the tickets are FREE?!

Once again:

Bipolar Fantasy Squad
Jokes. Live Comedic Essays. Improv. Interview.
Thursday, July 26th
8pm
Moving Arts Theatre
1822 Hyperion Ave, Los Angeles, California 90027

Here’s a thing you might not know about me: I can’t honestly remember the last time I haven’t watched the Tony Awards. I know it’s not for everyone, but I love it and it’s my very favorite awards ceremony. The social media era usually makes watching the Tony’s tough, because almost every single year the Tony’s are scheduled the same night as a crucial NBA Finals game, and both are equally important to me (I’m a very specific kind of person). I usually TiVo one while watching the other and avoiding social media entirely. This year, thankfully, Kevin Durant, J.R. Smith and the Warriors wrapped up their series in four and I didn’t have this problem.

You might not have watched the Tony’s, which is fine, but you most likely know about the thing that happened that made and continues to make headlines: Robert De Niro said “Fuck Trump,” twice. Do we have a clip?

[We DO]

Lots of people are saying lots of things about this. There’s the typical, disingenuous articles from the right, where they holler and clutch their pearls at such profanity (while hypocritically either justifying or wholesale ignoring similar bouts of profanity from the president/members of his administration). You’ve also got a lot of people on the left complaining too. This comes from an OpEd from Frank Bruni:

“When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves.”

It’s a variation of the “when they go low, we go high” refrain that the left wants to claim as its identity in an ideal world where things are equal and people behave normally. (And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.)

There are still different people on the left who look at OpEds like that and retweet them with comments similar or identical to “If you think it was inappropriate for De Niro to say ‘Fuck Trump,’ well then guess what? FUCK YOU.”

These are people who are as frustrated as they are passionate, and maybe they’re jaded by the lack of success they’ve experienced in the Higher Ground strategy. Maybe they think the “they go low, we go high” thing would only work under normal circumstances, and the circumstances aren’t normal so we need to adjust. Or maybe they don’t think any of that, and they just enjoy the catharsis of saying, hearing or watching a famous movie badass say “Fuck Trump” to the sound of near-unanimous applause. (And I suppose I’m pretty fine with those people too?)

But, I guess, here’s my thing. The Tony’s was already a “Fuck Trump.” It was tough and loud and somehow still elegant and understated but most definitely a “Fuck Trump.” Let’s talk about a lot of things (but really only just one thing).

Back in January, President Trump was quoted asking “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” It was a rhetorical question, obviously, because Roy Cohn is quite dead, but what the president likely meant was “Where’s the guy who is going to make my problems disappear while making me look good and clean in the process?” The president was in trouble, and in the past, Roy Cohn was the guy who made the trouble go away. He also saw Roy as a mentor, and you can see how much Donald Trump appreciates Cohn by the way he handles himself, in that brash, throwback-tough-guy, New Yorker sort of way.

A bit about Roy.

Roy Cohn was an attorney who among other things was the personal attorney/fixer for Donald Trump during his early business days. Here are some of those “other things” he did:

-Worked closely with McCarthy during the Red Scare, a bizarre quest to find and remove people they believed to be secret communists in Hollywood and Washington DC (a smokescreen to advance their own agenda through threats and intimidation, capitalizing on the nationalist, anti-communist spirit in America at the time).
-Worked as hard as he could to get the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (it is largely the consensus of historians and legal experts that Julius and Ethel were “guilty AND framed,” and certainly did not deserve the death penalty).
-The Lavender Scare. It’s very similar to the Red Scare, it just didn’t get nearly the same amount of coverage (even though it harmed way more people). It involved Cohn and McCarthy successfully pushing for the mass firings of government officials suspected of being gay. Smear campaigns, intimidation, threats, etc. Fire the gay people, and threaten to “out” and ruin anyone who got in your way.

That’s Roy Cohn. That’s Donald Trump’s mentor. And so, in January, during whatever scandal the president happened to be going through at the time, President Trump asked “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

This year, the Tony’s had an answer. The proudly out Nathan Lane who plays Roy Cohn in Angels in America, welcomed his Tony win by kissing his husband and closed his acceptance speech by tearfully thanking him as his “greatest blessing.”

A bit about Nathan.

It’s been a strange road for Nathan Lane. At 21 when he told his mother he was gay, she said “I’d rather you were dead.” He wasn’t necessarily in the closet, but he dodged questions about his sexuality for years and didn’t publicly come out until 1998 following the murder of Matthew Shepherd (a young, gay man who was tortured and beaten to death in Laramie). A mother says “I’d rather you were dead.” Then you spend years hiding yourself from the world. Then a 21-year-old gets murdered for being gay. Then you come out. Fast forward, you kiss your husband before accepting the Tony Award for Best Actor for your portrayal of Roy Fucking Cohn. Strange road.

Do you know what a “Fuck you” to Donald Trump looks like? It’s out-and-proud Nathan Fucking Lane winning a fucking Tony Award for playing Roy Fucking Cohn in Tony Fucking Kushner’s Angels in A-Fucking-Merica.

When you’ve got a Vice President who thinks you can electrocute gay people into straightness, a gay man playing Roy Cohn (Roy Fucking Cohn!) and getting a fucking award for it is a massive and eloquent “Fuck you.”

(Also, student survivors of the Parkland shooting came out to sing “Seasons of [Fucking] Love” from fucking Rent [super gay] in the middle of the show. De Niro’s “Fuck Trump” was not just the ugliest condemnation of the administration, i t was also the tamest.)

I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this. I don’t actually think it matters that Robert De Niro said “Fuck Trump” at the Tony’s, by which I mean, I don’t think any Trump voters who were watching the Tony’s (lol) watched De Niro say “Fuck Trump” and realized “Hey, he’s got a point! I’m gonna vote for the Democrat next time!” in the same way that I don’t think any Democrats or lefties who watched De Niro say “Fuck Trump” would then decide “Oh, that’s so vile and vulgar; that’s it, I’m voting for Trump next time.”

I guess I think of the existence of the Tony’s at all in a time like this as a political statement. We’re living in a pretty scary time right now, and instead of retreating or hiding, a bunch of insanely talented and bizarrely underpaid people put on Once on This Island, The Band’s Visit, Angels in America and Children of a Lesser God and Three Tall Women and many others, eight fucking times a week and last Sunday they got to celebrate and perform for each other. It’s all a statement, and the statement was already “Fuck Trump.” I don’t think Robert De Niro took away from that, but I absolutely can’t fathom what he thought he was adding.

Anyways. Watch the Tony’s, support theater, be kinder to everyone around you and have a good day.

wgladstone:

Here it is. The 100th & final episode of Hate By Numbers. Thank you for a wonderful 10 years. Be sure to watch the whole thing for info on my new patreon and please share with anyone you ever knew to be a fan of the show. I made it for them.

Thank you.

End of an era! Also reblogging because Gladstone’s “neighbor” Johnny has grown SO MUCH in ten years and is like a full person now.

I’m not one of those AGGRESSIVE East Coast pizza snob purists and I kind of find those people insufferable to be honest, but I do have the following two strong opinions:

1) Deep dish Chicago-style pizza is trash. I had it at one of the famous places you’re supposed to have it at in Chicago and it takes forever and is bad and wrong, and I am honestly not interested in learning more about it or taking any steps in the direction of changing my mind on this subject.

2) The best pizza in the world is in a place in Jersey that was called Mack and Manco’s when I was a child, but I recently learned that as of 2011 they changed the name to Manco and Manco’s following the suspicious disillusionment of the Mack and Manco relationship which may or may not be related to the current owner’s tax evasion crimes for which he is now serving a 15-month prison sentence. The pizza is very good.

As of now, I have no official plans of returning to YouTube and have been thoroughly enjoying not putting my face on the internet all the time. Things about making videos that I do not miss:

1) Wearing makeup, which always made my face itchy for the rest of the day.

2) Getting sweaty under the hot lights that exist on film sets.

3) All of the invasive touching. I don’t like being touched in general, and being in front of the camera means a very well-meaning and professional hair and make-up person gets right the fuck in your personal  space and stays there for a while. It also means a very well-meaning and professional sound person gets right the fuck in your personal space to run some wires and a microphone through your shirt for a while.

4) Holding for sound.

amuzed1:

Janelle Monáe has announced a new album: It’s called Dirty Computer and will mark her first album since 2013’s The Electric Lady. While a release date has not been set for the album, a trailer for the project, which includes an accompanying “film narrative,” will air in select theaters before screenings of Marvel’s Black Panther, which is now showing. (She’s calling the project an “emotion picture.”) Today, Monáe has shared the first online teaser for the project, in which she stars alongside Tessa Thompson and others. [x]

NEW ALBUM ALERT

Janelle Monáe Janelle Monáe Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  Janelle Monáe  

A friend just recently re-sent me an interview I did seven years ago. Back in 2011, when asked what I thought about the future of online content, I thought it would either be an amazing destination for artists to express themselves or:

“it’ll be someplace terrible, full of videos that get shorter and shorter and jokes that get more and more alienating and esoteric, until memes are the only form of ‘content.’”

For starters I think it’s pretty unfair of Past Daniel to hedge his bets so thoroughly that his answer was “I think it’ll either be perfect or it’ll be terrible!” You always had a problem with commitment, 2011-era Daniel. But as a recently-unemployed-person on the internet who is looking at the current content landscape and trying to see how a young writer or writer/performer could establish him or herself, I get concerned. Not for myself (because I am not young); just for the next generation. A lot of the people in my class of internet writers and performers and directors had the benefit of time and space to fail. I won’t say we had it easy, but we were lucky because algorithms hadn’t fully consumed the internet when we started making stuff, and people still believed in the promise of the internet enough to let us clowns try some shit.

I don’t worry about the daily vloggers  or prank artists or social experimenters; I worry about the thoughtful kids who need time, encouragement and some gentle nudging to make something cool, the things I got when I was starting out here.

I don’t know. I don’t want to make a new website, because I’m out of the website-making business, but I want to know that there are still places out there for curious and optimistic kids to try shit out, the way my class did. Anyways.

Also, if you click through to that very-dated article, just uh… just ignore the pictures.

cockenblog:

Start reading from the top and you let me know at what line you think these band names start being fake

You’re not gonna fool me, Marina. Bassnectar is made up.

thisdanobrien:

thisdanobrien:

Hey Friends!

I don’t expect everyone to follow me on every little social media platform I have, so some of this might be news to you, but if you’ve been even tangentially following me on Twitter or Instagram, you’ve maybe heard a whisper or two about the following two items:

1.) I and a number of my talented coworkers are no longer working at cracked.com, a comedy website that was my professional home since 2007;
2.) I am now a shower-at-night person after years of being a shower-in-the-morning person;

Both of those things are true. I shower at night now, and then I sit around in my Parachute robe that I love so much and I go to sleep smelling and feeling great. I know that showering in the morning is a great way to wake yourself up, but honestly showering at night is just more pleasant and turns something that could seem perfunctory into some luxurious. Also, Cracked the site continues (and has my full support), but a bunch of its employees were laid off, and it was sad for a little bit. I was sad for a little bit.

Everyone processes sadness in their own way. The day after being laid off, I contacted the Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica and requested a slot to make a live comedy/variety show, because my instinct was to create a showcase for me and all of the other amazing people who were also laid off to create comedy and music and to say goodbye to (at least) our Los Angeles fans. I reached out to Westside to say “Everyone I know got laid off and we want to make comedy,” and they instantly responded “Sounds great. Does January 5th work?”

It does.

My instinct is to take something negative and build something positive out of it, so I’m taking advantage of the fact that a lot of my favorite comedy people suddenly have free time to make comedy and bring some magic into the world. It’s silly to think of comedy as magic, but I’ve always thought about comedy as magic, because I’m a pretty silly person. So I wanted to create a night that could only exist under very specific and unrepeatable circumstances, which makes it magic to me. It’s the only thing I know how to do.

The result is a one-night-only comedy event we’re calling:

Broked Dot Com Presents a Night of Legally Non-Disparaging Comedy

TOM REIMANN
KATIE WILLERT
CODY JOHNSTON
DAVID BELL
ADAM TOD BROWN
JACK O’BRIEN HAS PROMISED TO DO “SOMETHING”
TERESA LEE
ZORA BIKANGAGA
KATIE GOLDIN

LOTS LOTS MORE, SOME I CAN’T EVEN MENTION, IT’S GONNA BE NUTS

I’m hosting. We’ve got stand ups. We’re going to do some jokes. We’re going to do some music. We’re going to have some INSANE special guests. I will also try to arrange cupcakes or donuts or something. This isn’t going to be a bunch of jobless people sobbing or complaining; it’s going to be the funniest people I know making jokes and music for you. Whatever else, I promise that we are going to create a once-in-a-lifetime experience to celebrate an amazing website and the people who no longer work there.

(No filming will be allowed.)

Do you like Cracked? Do you want an opportunity to see some former Cracked folks and their hilarious friends make jokes and say goodbye?

Get tickets here:

http://www.westsidecomedy.com/events/event/booked-com-presents-a-night-of-legally-non-disparaging-comedy/

January 5th, 2018.

Westside Comedy Theater (Santa Monica, LA)

11:30pm-1:00am

Hahaha you beautiful babies I made a Tumblr post at night on a Wednesday and the show sold out in under ten hours hahahahaha you beautiful babies thank you..

The theater says if you didn’t get a ticket, you can get on the waitlist by getting to the theater early and hoping that people who bought tickets don’t show up.

Thank you thank you thank you.

UPDATE

The show was so much more fun and successful than I ever dreamed possible. It was the most enthusiastic crowd I’ve ever been able to perform in front of and I’m so thankful that they came out to support me and my friends while we made some magic. Also super appreciative of the Westside Theater, who let us just, like, keep going. We were running super long and Emily, the manager, told me we could keep going as long as the audience was there and happy and drinking (they were!). Emily also introduced herself to me at the beginning of the show by saying “Are you Dan? What the fuck do you need from me?” Thank you, Emily, and it probably goes without saying but I prefer ‘Daniel’ and also I’m in love with you.

And I mentioned this on Twitter, but I don’t imagine everyone follows me everywhere, but we didn’t film it and won’t release any breakdowns of it, and that was always the plan. Me and my friends have lived creatively online for free for, in my case, a decade. So I wanted to make something personal and immediate and impermanent, and I know that it alienated and bothered some people who didn’t live in LA or have the luxury to travel, but that was never my intention, I just happen to live here. I understand the internet has conditioned everyone to believe that everything should always be available and everywhere and free and forever, but that’s just not how magic works. The best musical performances I’ve ever seen have been my friends drunkenly doing karaoke in a cabin in Pennsylvania, ya know? 

Someone on Twitter said “I can’t find any links and videos to the show; just a bunch of people talking about how amazing it was after the fact.” They were frustrated. That is my favorite review of anything I’ve been a part of in my entire life.

But now that show is over! And my birthday happened right in the middle of it, and I generally hate birthdays, but this was the best I’ve ever had because I spent it with all of my funny friends making jokes and magic with an intimate group of supportive strangers.

It is, uh…. weird for me to suddenly not have anything to do. I started planning the show the day after the layoffs, talking about it every day with my former coworkers and building a slate with Cody, essentially operating in a way that was not all together different from my day-to-day at The Old Place. One day I was walking into an office saying “C’mon, Tom, I need pitches and videos to make,” and the next day I logged into our slack channel and said “C’mon, Tom, I need five minutes of stand up material.” Today is the first Monday of my adult, professional life where I didn’t wake up in pursuit of answering the question “What funny stuff can I make with this incredible group of people?”

There’s both a panic and freedom in not being responsible for answering that question anymore. I need to come up with a new question that will hopefully carry the same degree of possibility and experimentation and joy. It might be something new in the comedy space, it might not involve comedy at all. It will definitely not be more of the same. (So, sorry to anyone who has been saying “Just do a Kickstarter to make more After Hours under a different name.” The day before you first saw After Hours, you didn’t know you were an After Hours fan, you just trusted that, when given time, we would come up with something you would like. Dig into that same trust now and give me time to come up with the NEXT thing you might like.)

For now, thanks! Thanks for following and supporting, thanks for coming to the show and lining up an hour and a half before we were scheduled to start, thanks for clapping, laughing, reading, watching, thank you for caring about us enough to ask what happens next. I’ll let you know what I end up doing just as soon as I end up doing it.

This is a perfect, optimistic show.