My Wife calls lawyers law-yers; most people say "loy-yers" she says "law-yers." She claims she's pronouncing it correctly. At any rate, lawyer jokes are fun, especially when you string together a couple dozen and split the telling with your Dad (whose voice is similar to your own... in this piece there are two deep voiced guys telling jokes). This is from circa 1999, when I was doing a lot of work on goofiness.com (I have since sold the domain name). There were a couple of times we were laughing too much to tell the jokes right and I had to edit it down. It was a lot of fun doing this, especially with my Dad helping.
Lawyer Jokes
I've been learning guitar so I could do spontaneous audio... I tend to overproduce some of the audio, spending a lot of time tweaking. This is okay if you have time, but I don't. I also like the spontaneity and energy of doing it once and leaving it at that. So, after a couple of years of guitar, I had a story happen, wrote it up and laid it down, quickly. This was really a test, just to see how it would sound. I think it is a good format. The actual quality of this audio isn't good -- there is some clipping in about a half-dozen places -- but the format is good, and I've used it again, on a George Carlin-esque "Dirty Words" piece I'll post someday.
I've been inspired by many different forms of storytelling and music and have a vision of what I think would be interesting on stage and through a car stereo. I don't have much time to pursue them right now, though. But, here's an early version of a few jokes strung together with music. I was thrilled with it at the time, because I was just playing around with Band-in-a-Box, my new Roland Sound Canvas and Cool Edit Pro. I'm not as impressed with it ten years later and my wife just rolled her eyes at me when she heard it.
Listen to "Tree Elephants"
I remember putting a lot of these up on mp3.com, back in the heyday when you could make money for people listening to your stuff. The "Star Wars Gangsta Rap" was huge on mp3.com, even making something like $40k or $50k one year (probably about 1998 or 1999). I was trying everything to come up with something different and cool. Hey, not all experiments work, but you don't really know it until you try it.
I don't remember for sure, but I probably played around with "Tree Elephants" for hours. And, yes, what you hear there was the result. But, it was better than watching TV!
I've made a few mockumentaries, simple ones. The best are the more elaborate, involving actors. I will do those one day. I have many, many ideas. Not short of ideas. Just time (and a trust fund) to do them.
3. My third mockumentary, a mockumentary about a diarist with his own revelation of strange humanity (the diarist, not his neighbors): Garbage [mp3] by Hans Anderson
2. My second mockumentary, of people with a personal risk story: SHARK! [mp3] by Hans Anderson
1. My first mockumentary, of the over-the-top first person essay: Switched Bags [mp3]
I've made some audio I don't have, or have on cassettes somewhere (I got to get my old demo tape online sometime!). But, this is the first piece I did for my goofiness.com web site (which I sold a few years ago... I kept the content, sold the domain name). It's called Darrell and God and basically fulfilled one of my concepts... that a good joke can be turned into an audio "story" pretty easily. All the things that make a decent story are there.
Click here to listen to Darrell and God
Hey, it's not hilarious, but I wanted to show something early.
