Auggie Smith

14:04
“Hey Aug, you’re funny. Are you gonna be on Last Comic Standing?”

Good question, I’m glad you asked. Many of you I’m sure are under the impression that if I wanted on a show, I just have a member of Team Aug get on the blower to one of the suits that decide what kind of entertainment America will be digesting this ratings period. And that within a few hours the NBC jet is backed up to Aug Comedy headquarters to spirit me away to an awaiting microphone. Unfortunately it is a bit more complicated than that.

My audition took place at Zanie’s in Nashville on a hot and sultry Tuesday. When I arrived at the club the parking lot was filled with prospective LCSers, some of whom I knew. What struck me about the people I didn’t know, was their choice of wardrobe. Where I was wearing a newly purchased sport coat, most of them were under the impression that they were trying out for the circus. I was surrounded by women in fat suits and bouffant wigs, men in black unitards and straightjackets, and one guy in an Abraham Lincoln costume. It was like doing comedy in a commercial for a prescription sleep-aid. As I stood in a sea of juggling pins and facial prosthetics, I began to reevaluate my entire approach to comedy. I mean all I have are words and punch lines, these guys had makeup crews.

The audition process was threefold. At 10:30am I would do two minutes for the producers, and if that went well then you do an afternoon set for the celebrity judges. And if that went well, you do a night show in front of an actual audience. Then after all that, the same two producers that you did the first show for decide whether you make the next round in Las Vegas. I would like to state for the record that it never occurred to me that I would not make the night show.

Before the 10:30 am show, five of us were herded into the hot greenroom of the club to be taken one by one on stage. Who was right in front of me, but our sixteenth president, Abe Lincoln. To his credit, the man would not break character. I looked at his black wool suit and stovepipe hat in the 80 degree heat and say:

“Man you gotta be hot in that thing.”

And he says in what I can only assume to be a perfect Abraham Lincoln impression:

“I got used to the heat during the Civil War.”

He was rejected, if not authentic. Later, comic Mike MaCrea saw Honest Abe on the streets of Nashville, still in costume with the illusion only slightly shattered by the fact that he was behind the wheel of a Datsun B210 pickup.

I took the stage just before 11am in a club inhabited only by two producers and the broken dreams of the 50 or so performers that had gone before me. No big deal, I’ve played smaller rooms. At the end of my two minutes my critique was “we would like to see some different material for the celebrity judges.” No problem. The afternoon set was also two minutes and I had a slam dunk for that, especially when I found out the aforementioned judges were Norm and Cliff. That’s right, America’s favorite alcoholic and America’s favorite enabler. Now a lot of people might have a problem having their art judged by two character actors that have never done standup. But not Aug. After all, the preponderance of my material deals with drinking and other excesses. This seemed to be a perfect fit! So there I stood at 4pm in a comedy club that had been the scene of some of my greatest triumphs. A club that in the past had been packed with people chanting my name, pledging loyalty to my comedy, collecting my semen to start an army of SuperAuggies when they get the cloning right. And now it was just me, the cameras, and the Lucy and Ethel of the Eighties.

The bit I chose to do was one I had been doing for many years. I comment about our bar laws and how unnecessary they are. I delivered it flawlessly and came in at a minute fifty-three. Perfect. I stood onstage basking in the glow of my achievement, eagerly awaiting the praise of the Itchy and Scratchy of the Beer Set. Norm seemed to be amused, and commented

“If they could, they would make it illegal to cross the street!”

“I agree, good point Norm.”

Then Cliff piped up: “You know, a lot of this is a states rights issue. I think that if the Civil war had gone a different way, we wouldn’t be seeing a lot of these laws.”

I then interjected, “So let’s get this straight. You, John Ratzenberger, wish the South had won the Civil War?”

Claven backtracked: “No I just mean from a state’s rights…..”

I interjected again: “No we have it on tape, I can play it back for you!”

I left the stage thinking “Wow, that went well. I delivered my material perfectly and had a funny back and forth with the judges.” Now I stood in the greenroom where a bearded man in headset was to inform me of my fate. “What’s to inform? Just tell me what time to be here?” I thought.

Then he said: “Unfortunately, we’re going to pass.”

What do you mean pass? You don’t get it Craigslist Headset Intern, this is my destiny! A chance to do sets on TV every week for two months, showcase my talent to a country desperately in need of the power, truth and raw unbridled sexuality that is the Auggie Smith experience. And just when this wave of shock and disappointment was washing over me, some NYU film-school douchebag puts a camera in my face and says “Auggie, What happened?” “What happened?”

What happened was I put the fate of my career in the hands of Fat Sam from Fletch and a closeted segregationist. What happened was I don’t wear a polka-dot suit or speak through a puppet. What happened was I thought it was Last Comic Standing, and not Last Sideshow Freak Playing to the Crippled Attention Spans of a Perpetually Distracted Generation Standing.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t sour grapes, I’m not disappointed for me. I’m disappointed for you America! I’m disappointed that the selection of TV-clean five minute sets that I ‘ve prepared in my head will not be seen this viewing cycle. Because this weekend I’ll be doing what I do every weekend, pouring my soul out to an audience of the actual beer drinking every-man archetype that those two Hollywood Wine Spritzer-sipping-Hybrid Waxing-Botox Shooting-Spray Tanning- Flavor Flaving-TMZ Baiting-Laker Front Seat Having-Kabala Bracelet Sporting-Huge Sunglass Wearing-Obama Fundraiser Hosting-Tiny Dog Carrying- African Baby Adopting-Dalai Lama Loving-Grotto Frolicking-Velvet Rope Hopping-Bosley Hair Plugging pansies labored to reproduce against the backdrop of Trickle Down Economics.

15:55
Is it offensive?

A Supreme Court Justice once said “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it, mostly because when I see it, I’m in a theater called the Pink Pussy and there is a man sitting next to me masturbating.” Okay, that settles that. So how do we define offensive speech in general? I’ll tell you how…by the media’s reaction.

Don Imus got in trouble for offending teenage girls, which is normally a pretty tough thing to accomplish. The rinosaurus-like thickness of adolescent girl’s skin, coupled with her keen sense of spotting sarcasm, usually makes her impervious to the razor- sharp barbs of a gifted satirist. Not this time, however. This time, the offender used the one silver-hollow–tip bullet that will pierce a woman’s Teflon shield: he made fun of her hair.

I imagine as the Rutgers’s girls basketball team gathered around the radio for their normal morning ritual of drinking flavored coffee, talking about their periods and of course, listening to the Don Imus show, they were horrified to hear the obviously premeditated attack on their hair care and sexual ethics, which must have been especially hurtful, coming from a man who is such an icon in the college-age black female community. We all know that Don Imus’s two years of hosting TRL were their highest rated ever. Proving once again, that young people always pay attention to old white men in cowboy hats.

I have to admit that at first, I did not realize that this remark was racist. Here’s how dumb I am…I thought nappy-headed meant you needed a hair cut, and ho meant that you were a prostitute. Lucky for me, there are a litany of group’s in America that have declared themselves moral watchdogs, and can tell us, when something is offensive. (PETA, The Anti-Defamation League, Al Sharpton, The Catholic Church, Barbara Streisand, The Organization Aainst Anti-Asian Depictions In The Media, Jesse Jackson, Dr. Laura, NOW, Dr. Phil, The 700 club, and The FCC) All very accurate moral compasses. Well I don’t have to tell you that when one or more of these ethical heavyweights tells me to be outraged, well then, hand me a sign and tell me what entrance to block, because if you don’t find nappy-headed ho to be racially insensitive, then you are obviously, a racist.

I know that there are Imus defenders that say “well why wasn’t Jesse Jackson fired when he said Hymietown.” Well that’s easy morons…he doesn’t have a job. He is far too busy deciding what the rest of us should think and feel, then to show up at an office everyday.

Speaking as someone who makes his living using words, it is very important to know which words are okay and which ones are not. I refer to it as “the do not call me that” list. Ann Coulter and Michael Richards got in trouble for using words that have been on that list for some time. Well we can all add Imus’s “nappy-headed hos”, George Allen’s “macaca”, and Joe Biden’s “clean” to that most sacred of scrolls. So, to my fellow comics, writers, talk-show hosts, DJ’s and karaoke singers, when in doubt, just remember, “I can’t define offensive, but if anyone, anywhere finds what you say to be offensive, then it is.”

Glad we got all that cleared up.

14:25

YOUR NEW CREDO

I was on stage at a bar called Dante’s in Portland Oregon, It was the end of the weekly open-mic and about 6 of my fellow comics and I where on stage performing drunken improv for the two dozen or so customers that remained. Dante’s is an interesting kind of bar, it’s the kind of place that on a given night the entertainment may be a lesbian rapper, cowboy poetry or naked women on a trapeze, in short it’s the bar Stanhope plays when he comes to Portland. . To add to the ever present weirdness the bar management employed , and by employed in mean gave free drinks to, “Prozac The Alcoholic Bunny”. Prozac’s job description consisted of two things,#1 sit at the bar and consume alcohol, and #2 wear a full length pink bunny suit including head, that’s it, no standing on a street corner handing out fliers while wearing a sandwich board during lunch hour, just drink and wear the suit. I would say that out of all the jobs that exist that require warring an animal costume this was a pretty good one in fact I would guess that in the animal costume wearing community the prospective applicants for this job probably rivaled the Packer season ticket waiting list. The only potential shit-end to this vocational stick is that there are members of the dinking community that when presented with a 6 foot pink bunny take the opportunity to wrestle it, which leads us to our story.

Around midnight the staff from the local comedy club rolled in. At the time Portland boosted only one week long club ,which for the purposes of this story we will call “Harvey’s“. A few members of the staff have remained consistent throughout the 15 year life of “Harvey’s” one is the manager-bartender who we will call “Tim”. The thing about the staff of comedy clubs is that they work there for the same reason the comics do, we are not 9-5 type people. We are night people, the type that like to drink too much, consume illegal chemicals and hangout at bars that employ giant human stuffed animals. I guess their is a case to be made that Tim’s assault on the bunny was just an overly friendly greeting gone awry ,but in any case this is what I witnessed.

I looked in to the crowd to see Tim holding Prozac in a headlock yelling “you got to get up there, you got to get up there“, the sight of a grown man doing battle with a mascot was something that I shant soon forget, then a ruckus as bar security moved in pushed all the action out of the bar and into the street, I leapt from the stage and out the door to find people pushing each other, Prozac’s head was completely off now breaking down the third wall of disbelief ,or is it fourth wall, anyway I found Tim his shirt ripped bleeding slightly from the lip and I asked him what happened. His response was simply

”I was just fucking around and then the bunny got serious”

It took a moment for the sublime beauty of this statement to pierce my consciousness .The subtle perfection, it was Bukowski meets Gump, who among us has not gazed into the bathroom mirror and had that same thought. Your bunny may be your relationship or your job but at one time you tried to give your bunny a bear hug and things got out of hand.

So heres to you America, may you never stop fighting that bunny.

15:00
“Win a Dream Date With Aug,” first of a 3 part series…

Rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated. If you look closely at the dates on my road diary, you will notice the last entry was made somewhere in ‘05. My lack of correspondence has nothing to do with lack of actual activity, simply an inability to sit at this machine and notate it all. Since that last entry, I’ve moved to New York (city as well as state), signed with an agent, shot two television shows (keep your eyes on Comedy Central), had sex with a porn star and attended my ex-girlfriends wedding with a blind date. Each of these events individually are worth an entry, but today we will be concentrating on the wedding of my ex-girlfriend. You have been warned.

The catalyst of the majority of my comedy has always been current events; there are many reasons for this. When you write a joke about Congress trying to change the constitution so an enormous Austrian bodybuilder can become president, you are dealing with relatively virgin territory . When you write a joke about the differences between men and women, the ground is not only not virgin, it is in fact the equivalent an elderly crack whore that started in porn in her pre-teen years and who could no longer get the pleasure she needed from typical old multiple penetration scenes, so she had to sell herself into sexual slavery in Thailand in order to experiment with the stuff she really wanted to get into. Artists have been commenting on relationships since the first organisms crawled from the primordial ooze, so what do I have to offer to the discussion? That being said, a guy like John Grey can still become a household name as late as the 1990’s by making the groundbreaking statement, “men and women are different.” This proves we are still looking for someone to bring something new to the table, no matter how incredibly obvious, to answer the ancient question, “how do we get and stay together?” So, being your fearless leader, I shall weigh in on the issue:

My breakup with Edie was actually quite amicable; many breakups are not. I ran into a great example of a bad breakup while working in Louisville last year between a radio DJ named John Zigler and a television host named Darcy Divita. It seems Mr. Zigler and Ms. Divita had been on a dozen dates, which Ms. Divita decided was a nice, even number. Mr. Zigler did not take the rejection well and went on the air to shout his feelings to the world, or at least to Louisville proper, that Ms. Divita didn’t wear underwear, has breast implants and was “well kept down there.” Despite the compliment, Ms. Divita took umbrage and sued Mr. Zigler for two million dollars. “Defamation of character,” she clamed. Mr. Zigler countered it was not slander, because it was complete truth. In other words, he intended to prove, in court, that Darcy Divita shaved her pussy. U.S.A!! U.S.A!!

The problem is all this happened two years before the trial, so I would imagine Ms. Divita is probably in disguise by now, like a fugitive forced to grow a beard to avoid recognition. Or maybe she went all Scott Peterson and died it blonde. Either way, the FBI may have to create one of those computer generated time lapse photos they use for missing kids. You know, a “this is what the pussy would look like today.”

Ever since the trial, whenever I see a TV newswoman I think about her vagina and wonder how she keeps it. I imagine Connie Chung sports the Divita, Katie Couric probably has the partial Divita, Barbra Walters the anti-Divita, with all that long grey pubic hair, her vagina probably looks like Einstein’s head.

But I digress. About a year after my breakup with Edie, she announced she was getting married. Since we were still friends, she sent me an invitation that read, “Auggie + 1.” I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to explore the nature of new relationships and announced, on The Bob & Tom Radio Show, the contest, “Win a date to my ex-girlfriends wedding.” Like most things in my life, I did not think this out. The prize that was being offered was a free trip to Portland, Oregon and of course a chance to accompany me to Edie’s wedding, therefore creating the most awkward first date possible.

I set up a website and waited for the entries to trickle in. I assumed that out of the four million or so Bob & Tom listeners, maybe twenty women would be interested. I received over two hundred submissions (U.S.A!! U.S.A!!). Now, I know a lot of you have a fairly grandiose view of Team Aug and how the funny comes to be. I’m sure you imagine a compound, set on a property deep in the mountains, or perhaps a giant bubble, deep under the ocean, complete with dozens of employees constantly bustling with the every day activity of creating setups, punch lines and sight gags. In reality, Team Aug is on a bit of a skeleton crew comprised of myself and whomever I can talk into doing my typing. So I had the pleasure, and at times horror, of sifting through all the emails myself.

The rules were simple: Number one, all entries had to have been born (and continue to live as) a woman. Number two, all entrants had to be at least twenty-one years of age. Number three, all entrants had to be comfortable in the presence of drinking, occasional drug use and all other forms of blatant debauchery. You’ll notice in these rules I neglected to include anything involving not being married, which would come back to haunt me, but more on that later.

It’s a strange feeling being a grand prize. Keep in mind, I’m a man who did not actually kiss a girl until eighteen years of age. When I was fifteen, I got my first drivers license and no kidding, the stats were 5’ 140lbs. Trust me, the 140lbs was not muscle. My formative years were spent on the speech team, and lets face it, normally, to be surrounded by that many teenage virgins you need to participate in a suicide bombing. This did not make for a lady killer. But take heart, young pasty fat boys (my fan base), twenty years and a successful comedy act later, women were quite literally competing for me.

As I read through the emails, I was struck by how many truly appealing women were interested in this endeavor, especially considering the prize, and how many articulate and thoughtful emails I received. Thankfully, crazy was also well represented, which means these two factions would be running neck and neck.

The stage was set. In future entries, you’ll go deep inside the selection process, followed by the actual date and its aftereffects. This ending is called a cliffhanger. I learned this literary tactic from years of sitting home on Friday nights watching “Falcon Crest” while the rest of you losers were wasting your time dating (and kissing) girls.

19:44
2005-07-11

Dear President Bush:

How are you, I am fine, I know it has been a long time since we talked, but lets face it, ever since you stopped drinking you’re not that much fun anymore. Any hoo, now on to my point.

Firstly, I want to thank you for reminding all of us of September 11th in every speech you do. Sometimes, I, like most of America, forget that it ever happened. Why just last week I found myself not being vigilant, just hanging around thinking unvigilant thoughts, wearing non-vigilant clothing, eating food that was completely void of any vigilance, what so ever. But then there you were, like a vigilant candle in the darkness, vigilantly remind America that we are at war, I thank you for that.

Secondly, I know you don’t read the paper so, maybe you didn’t know one of the Supreme Court Justices is retiring. I think it‘s one of the chicks and you have to pick a new one. Well sir, I would like to throw my hat in the ring for this position, I know at first glance I may not seem like the most likely candidate, first there is my age, I’m only 34 and the average age of the current bench is infinity, but I would like to point out that I live a very unhealthy lifestyle and will probably only outlive a few of the current guys.

Another problem may be that I never went to law school, this is a good point, but in my defense neither did Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman and they ran the whole Justice League of America, which ruled in such ground breaking cases as

Mixiplix v Grundi, and the famous Wonder Twins Monkey Custody case Zan v Jayna where it was decided that Glekk would be awarded to Jayna because, lets face it the form of water just does not a parent make.

What I lack in legal education, I make up for in real life experience. Fifteen years doing standup would make me the perfect justice, at least the most entertaining. When a lawyer made an objection, I could say something clever like, “Counselor, maybe we should fit you for a full bodied condom, because if you are going to act like a dick, you should dress like one”. Or when writing a dissenting opinion I could refer to the other justices by saying “ I’ve seen younger faces on cash”, or “ I wouldn’t screw Ginsburg with Souter’s cock”.

As far as my interpretation of the law goes, well you and I have very similar views. I also believe in a strict interpretation of the Ten Commandments also known as the Bill of Rights. I believe that people should have the right to worship as they chose, as long as they believe that I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt not have any Gods before me.

I believe that Thou Shalt Not Kill, unless it’s Capital Punishment, Abortion,

Doctor Assisted Suicide, part of a War, self defense, a guy trying to steal your car stereo or a dog that’s been left at the pound for more than a week. But besides all of those, we should err on the side of life.

I believe that one should Honor His Father and Mother, you did by following in your fathers’ footsteps, becoming president, I did by following in my fathers’ footsteps and becoming a drunk.

I also believe you should never Covet My Neighbors Goods, unless he has a country that you want to run, then it’s on like Donkey Kong.

I also believe that people should not make themselves Idols that should be left to Simon Cowell.

I also believe you should not take the Lords Name in Vane, unless your Gods’ name is cocksucker.

We may however disagree on this No Adultery thing, I mean if you think about it, doesn’t that commandment infringe on our right to freely assemble?

But I guess my best argument for being considered for the Court, is damn do I look, good in black.

In closing, Mr. President there are those that would disagree with my appointment to

the Supreme Court, but maybe those people don’t remember September 11th..