I’m not one for celebrity autobiographies. They have a tendency to be to self-gratifying and in most cases boring. Most that are published (e.g., any Osmond sibling’s tell-all, or any book with the subtitle “In […]
Author: Nicholas Hulstine
E-Book, or E-Suck
I recently received a gift from a friend in the form of an e-book. E-books are electronic versions of print books displayed either on a computer or an e-book device, which is about the size of a […]
Kicking the Legs Out
It’s rare in this day and age that films move us to tears. With movies like Beverly Hills Chihuahua and High School Musical 3 topping the charts, the majority of American films do little to […]
Plumbing Further
My post last week, “Plumbing the Issues,” has raised what I think is a very welcome discussion because it is an important one. Two readers commented. The first discussed my remarks about people who I […]
Plumbing the Issues
My interview for this week fell through so I thought I would just touch on a few issues that have recently been making my hairline recede even more than it already had before this election […]
Comic Oil
East Village comic and writer Chris Sifflet touches on the essentials, including politics, the future of crappy celebrities, Steve Fossett, and what it would be like if Sarah Palin didn’t look like Sarah Palin.
12th Street: At 12th Street we work to promote literature as an engine of democracy, with fiction, poetry, and non-fiction as “oil” to that engine. Where does stand-up comedy fit in?
Chris Sifflet: I heard Jerry Seinfeld talk, after George Carlin’s death, on Larry King. He was talking about politics and how comedians tell the truth, and he said “comedy is a little truth and a whole lot of lies.” I think now, especially in New York, comedy has kind of taken a shift. I only go for honesty. When I first started it wasn’t about that, now I’m totally honest, I talk about stuff that actually happens.
12th Street: So you swing more toward the non-fiction realm?
CS: Yeah definitely more toward non-fiction.
12th Street: Do you think stand-up fits in with poetry?
CS: I do think it fits in with poetry, I think it fits in with music too. Poetry and stand-up are very much aligned. The both can be improvised: poetry slams, things like that. It just depends on the comic.
12th Street: What would you be doing if you weren’t a comedian?
CS: I’d be a nurse. My mother was a nurse and my Dad’s a doctor. My parents would have conversations at the dinner table, you know, my Mom would be telling my Dad, “Oh yeah, I opened a man’s chest today and grabbed his heart and had to pump it, and then his eye starting spurtin’ blood, so I had to close that, but then his nose started bleeding so I had to close that.” So it was basically like a cartoon where she was plugging holes and blood would keep spraying out somewhere and it hit her face. That was, like, every conversation she’d talk about. Like removing light bulbs from people’s—
12th Street: Okay!
CS: And that was everyday, man. So that’s partly where my humor comes from. The very dark, graphic conversations my mother would have with my Dad. Strangely enough though my Dad’s afraid of blood.
12th Street: Your Dad’s a doctor—
CS: He faints when he sees blood.
12th Street: So what kind of medicine does he practice?
CS: Internal Medicine.