MC MR. NAPKINS

Check out the “Video” page to see clips of “Street Cred” and “Plush Pig.”  Enjoy!

Hot off the BCF, I am now performing in the BIF – the first annual Boston Improv Festival, which is being produced by ImprovBoston.  They should have called it the “Boston Improv Festival at Improv Boston,” because then its acronym would be BIFIB, which is a palindrome.  OK, ok, ok, o – come see me perform at the following times:

Friday at 10!
Saturday at 11!

I’ve advanced to the semi-finals of the Boston Comedy Fest.  Semifinal Round 4 is this Friday, 9 PM, at the Hard Rock Cafe in Faneuil Hall.  Come support!  You can get tickets here.

This weekend I’ll have the privilege of opening for David Alan Grier.  He was one of my boyhood sketch comedy heroes when he was on In Living Color, and now I’m going to get to do some raps so that audience members will be more ready to hear his stand-up.  Grier and I last crossed paths at the Montreal Comedy Festival in July – here we are with comics Shane Mauss and Maggie Macdonald, as well as Shane’s little brother Justin:

DAG and I will be at the Chicopee Comedy Connection on Friday night, and the Wilbur Theater in Boston on Saturday.  Come to our (his) show!

I’m pleased to be opening up for Mike Birbiglia at the Newport Yachting Center in Newport, RI this Saturday night, as part of his “I’m In The Future Also” tour.  I have dug Mike’s work since way before I was MC Mr. Napkins, and this is going to be a really cool show.  If you live in New England, you should come to this!  Showtime is 730 and tickets are available here.

Recently, The Dollar $tore, a Chicago-based live lit show, came to the Brookline Booksmith.  Here’s how the show works, according to the Dollar $tore website:

…Each writer is given an item purchased at a local dollar store (mundane to insane) and a month to craft a story (fiction or non-) that involves the item as directly or obliquely as the author wishes. The item is then put on display during, or incorporated into the performance.

Through a very kind friend who works at the Booksmith, I was invited to perform on the show (except instead of writing a story, I was asked to do a rap).  Here is a picture of my dollar store item:

Lucky me!  I already have a rap about the USA and the states in it.  But in addition to “Official State Mottoes,” which I’ve been performing for over a year, I wanted to take up the challenge and write something specifically for the occasion.  So I challenged myself to solve a different 100-piece puzzle: creating an anagram of the two-letter postal abbreviations for all fifty US states.  Here are those abbreviations:

AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY

And here is the anagram I came up with – it’s in the form of a dialogue between Person One and Person Two.

Fact: Many-state land is world’s most rocking.  Know which land?
I know!  Hmmmm…  Damn.
“Damn?!?”  Ninny!  Putz!
J.K.!  Viva America!
Exactly.  Viva.

This weekend, I will be performing at the All Points West Music & Arts Festival in Liberty State Park, NJ.  Headlining the day I’m performing is the God MC himself: Jay-Z.

This will be the first time he’s gotten to perform with me, and it’s a big opportunity for him.  While I’m glad to be sharing a bill with Jay, I’d rather be sharing it with the act that was supposed to perform that night: white-guy rap icons the Beastie Boys.  The B’s have cancelled their tour because Adam “MCA” Yauch has developed cancer of the parotid gland.  Maybe putting the word “Ill” in all those album titles was not the best idea.

Yauch, get well soon.  You’ve been one of my hip-hop heroes since I was 13, and I know I’ll get to perform with you someday.  Meantime, everybody else, come see me rock the comedy stage on Friday night, and keep an ear out for an upcoming Napkins joint tentatively titled “Motherf*ck MCA’s Parotid Cancer.”

The Just For Laughs Comedy Fest in Montreal is in full swing.  This is Victor, the JFL mascot:

This cartoon is a prettied-up representation of a real monster who lives in the hills of Montreal and frequently descends into town and eats people.  Artists are afraid to depict his true appearance, so they present this cleaned-up cutesy version, but he is in fact horrible to gaze upon as well as omnipresent.  Yesterday I watched him ride down a city block crouched on top of a bus, leap off, and eat a child.   Then he picked his teeth with an umbrella he broke off a nearby cafe table.

For those of us who have managed to survive, the shows are awesome.  Here’s another blog post by Sara Faith Alterman, who is blogging the hell out of this and who says it better than I can.  Read!

Hey everybody.  I’m in Montreal, Canada right now (this Web IS world-wide!), performing at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival.  I’ll have more updates soon, but in the meantime, stay current by reading journalist and friend Sara Faith Alterman’s account of our road trip: “Of (driving to) Montreal.”

The June 24th issue of the Improper Bostonian featured five local comics in famous pin-up poses.   I was dressed up as Mena Suvari from “American Beauty.”