This. Now.

I perform improv. I have written and/or directed for Childrens Hospital, NTSF:SD:SUV::, & The Hotwives and more. And I like to drink milkshakes. Now you know me.

[ferniecommaalex]

2023 songs that are good

Firing up the old Tumblr machine to had a place where I can put my favorite songs of the year with easy links to where to get it... mostly Bandcamp.

(Spotify is the devil, buy your music don't just rent it, etc etc)

All of these songs rule.

Alex Lahey - You'll Never Get Your Money Back

Auditorium - Cedars-Sinai Cafeteria Breakdown

Black Belt Eagle Scout - My Blood Runs Through This Land

boygenius - Not Strong Enough

Chris Farren - Cosmic Leash

Frankie Rose - Sixteen Ways

Fucked Up - I Think I Might Be Weird

Indigo de Souza - You Can Be Mean

Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven

The National - Tropic Morning News

New Pornographers - Pontius Pilate's Home Movies

Olivia Rodrigo - ballad of a homeschooled girl

The Tubs - Wretched Lie

US Girls - So Typically Now

Vagabon - Can I Talk My Shit

Yo La Tengo - Sinatra Drive Breakdown

[ferniecommaalex]

Last week, we did the 16th Annual Thanksgiving Feast Show at the Elysian Theater! Here are pictures from it!

All photos taken by John Roiniotis.

[ferniecommaalex]

I had stopped using Tumblr before I became a dad, so here is a picture of the main source of joy in my life the last 4 years.

[ferniecommaalex]

Looks like people are coming back over here as Twitter implodes so fuck it, I'll bother you all with self-promotion too!

My favorite show of the year! An improvised, dysfunctional family Thanksgiving dinner live on stage, with food for the audience too! And this year's cast is bonkers: Suzi Barrett, Vic Michaelis, Alex Berg, Lou Wilson, Julie Brister, Angela Giarratana, Deborah Tarica, Drew Difonzo Marks and me! Come join us!

11/23, 8pm at The Elysian. Get tickets here!

[ferniecommaalex]

Hey, remember tumblr?

[ferniecommaalex]

Del Close Marathon 18

I’m doing a bunch of shows at DCM18! If you’re in New York, maybe come check ‘em out?

CONVOY - Friday 6:30pm Magnet Theater

DIERKES & FERNIE - Fri night/Sat morning 12:40am Magnet Theater

HEY, I CAN’T FINISH THIS PIZZA - Fri night/Sat morning 3:30am Chelsea (this is a fun, lighthearted show that’s super positive and involves free pizza! Everyone leaves this show feeling really good about themselves!)

JAH - Saturday 1:40pm Theater For The New City Cabaret

EAST COAST/WEST COAST - Saturday 4:30pm UCBEast

SENTIMENTAL LADY - Sat night/Sun morning 12:45am SVA (You can buy tickets to this separately... no lines!)

SEESO’S SEESHOWS BY THE SEASHORE - Sat night/Sun morning 2:00am Chelsea (This will be important to see so you can understand the future of streaming subscription-based app-oriented comedy.)

PLAY BY PLAY - Sunday 5:00pm Chelsea

[ferniecommaalex]

One time, I was occasionally on a TV show that literally no one except for TV reviewers watched. It was very cool. Except the part where no one watched it.

AV Club wrote up a new thing about it now, 6 years later! Check it out!

[ferniecommaalex]

I Will Watch Anything Once by Mark David Christenson on iTunes

Download past episodes or subscribe to future episodes of I Will Watch Anything Once by Mark David Christenson for free.

I was a guest on the I Will Watch Anything Once podcast talking about one of my favorite movies from the 1990s, Risky Business!

I really like Risky Business, so give it a listen as we talk about the charming force of nature that is young Tom Cruise, the killer supporting cast, the movie's indictment of Reagan-era "profit at any cost" ethos and fuckin' on a train.

Here is the trailer that does not accurately convey how interesting this movie is:

[ferniecommaalex]

Oh no! This is the only song I have any interest in listening to for the next month!

[ferniecommaalex]

This US Government produced cartoon about the 1976 Bicentennial is exactly what government should be doing. When did we decide psychedelic noodly jams wasn’t what America was all about?

Make America Trippy As Fuck Again

(1976 seems like a weird time.)

[ferniecommaalex]

The last few months, I’ve worked as a writer and director on Bajillion Dollar Propertie$... and here’s the first episode!

If you like it, you can head on over to Seeso (don’t pretend like you don’t already check Seeso every 20 minutes!) and sign up to watch the whole series.

For real, the cast in this is great, and the show is really really funny. The AV club gave it a B+, and that’s a scientific rating! Plus, an insane stream of guest stars show up like Patton Oswalt, Nick Kroll, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Rash, Kerry Kenney Silver, Horatio Sanz, Cedric Yarbrough, Randall Park, Weird Al, Adam Scott, Tom Lennon, Ben Garant, Casey Wison, Jack McBrayer, Dave Foley, Jason Mantzoukas, June Raphael, Paul Scheer, Matt Besser, Danielle Schneider, The Birthday Boys, Paul Rust, Steven Yeun, Scott Aukerman, Betsy Sodaro, Andy Richter, Josh Groban, Adam Pally, Neil Campbell, Rich Fulcher, Drew Droege, Craig Cackowski, Wild Horses, Busy Phillips, and more. Check it out!

[ferniecommaalex]

This month, Required Viewing has Will Hines presenting The Bad News Bears!

This Sunday, 9pm, UCB Inner Sanctum! FREE! Come watch a movie with us!

[ferniecommaalex]

Oh hey, by the way, the song absolutely crushes.

[ferniecommaalex]

More Than The Presidency

Either Democratic candidate will be unable to do anything they're promising with a Republican senate.

Sanders/Clinton is super fun to argue about, but there are are a ton of crucial senate races that, with probably 3 supreme court seats on the line, are as important as the presidency. And it's possible to win the Senate, but nowhere near a sure thing... there is no “revolution” that just involves the White House.

Another fun fact: any dollar you give to a state senate race does way more good than a dollar to a national presidential race! And congressional house races, even more so! And local/state government races even more than that!

If you're gonna donate money, consider throwing some to these folks... I think, this election cycle, any money I give to a presidential candidate, I’ll at least match with money to state and congressional elections. Maybe you would too?

http://tammyduckworth.com/ http://russfeingold.com/ http://maggiehassan.com/ http://www.tedstrickland.com/

[ferniecommaalex]

Here is an unasked for and incomplete list of perfect songs.

Thank you for your time.

Academy Fight Song - Mission of Burma

All My Friends - LCD Soundsystem

Are You That Somebody - Aaliyah

As - Stevie Wonder

Autumn Sweater - Yo La Tengo

Back on the Chain Gang - The Pretenders

B.O.B. - Outkast

Burning Airlines Give You So Much More - Brian Eno

Dancing On My Own - Robyn

Dangerous Type - The Cars

Entertain - Sleater-Kinney

I Saw Her Standing There - The Beatles

I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend - The Ramones

I Want You Back - Jackson 5

I'll Believe In Anything - Wolf Parade

In The Meantime - Spacehog (fuck you, I don't care)

Inwards - Big Country

Johnny Hit And Run Paulene - X

Life on Mars - David Bowie

Let Forever Be - Chemical Brothers

Love and Communication - Cat Power

Mass Romantic - New Pornographers

The Metro - Berlin

Move On Up - Curtis Mayfield

Mr Blue Sky - ELO

Oh Boy! - Buddy Holly and the Crickets

Precision Auto - Superchunk

PYT - Michael Jackson

The Rain - Missy Elliott

Sukie in the Graveyard - Belle & Sebastian

Tangled Up In Blue - Bob Dylan

This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) - Talking Heads

White Riot - The Clash

[ferniecommaalex]

Check out this sneak peek of Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, the show I’ve been working on for the past few months! It’s gonna be really funny and has an insanely good cast/constant stream of spectacular guest stars! Created by Kulap Vilaysack!

It premieres on Seeso, the number one all-comedy-based-streaming-television-service-with-a-silly-name-that-also-has-movies-I-think?, on March 17th!

[ferniecommaalex]

I really like watching exploratory tags (where we kind of expand the world) because I feel like those can still surprise me, but I feel like most tag runs that just hit a game repeatedly get boring and really quick. I have also seen good ones of course, but is there something that separates successful from unsuccessful tag runs? What makes them work and lets you stay ahead of the audience.

You’ve basically got the answer right there in your question… I know it seems too simple and commonsense, but in a good, exploratory tag run, you need to make sure that you’re constantly surprising the audience AND your fellow performers. A few tips to help with that:

Avoid Mad Libs tags. Those are moves that just swap out a noun, be it a character or a location, for a different character or location, and then just do the same scene. So if its “Weird guy that wants to marry a giraffe in a restaurant”, now it’s “weird guy that wants to marry a giraffe in a movie theater.” That tag doesn’t give us anything new, it’s just the same scene with a different coat of paint. Those are the boring tag runs you describe.

Instead, look at a tag as an opportunity to play the game in a DIFFERENT WAY. A good rule of thumb is, if the scene got muted and the audience couldn’t hear what you were saying, would they know that it’s an entirely different scene? Does it look and feel different? If so, great! You can do that by looking at what the game is/what you think is funny about the scene, and then trying to play that from a different angle, do something different with it. If that weird giraffe guy really wants to marry a giraffe, and the previous scenes were people saying no, then what happens when someone says yes? What happens when we see the Giraffe justifying to his friends why he wants to marry a human? What happens when we see the guy now wanting to divorce a giraffe? Anything to play that same funny thing but in a way that is new. Also, this is obviously a VERY good scene that I’m describing. Probably the best of all time.

The simplest way to do this is with emotion. Is the character happy in scene 1? Then make them either be happier or a different emotion in scene 2. That will help you explore the world and the characters by giving you different types of scenes and reactions. Also, it’s important to let tag run scenes stack. If someone is mildly annoyed in scene 1, by scene 5, they should be furious! Let that build and build and it will lead to new discoveries.

Also, if you’re the person that is staying in these scenes as the other characters get tagged out, find different reactions to things. Don’t just do what the audience knows is coming… react honestly and with emotion with each and every tag.

But, there are tons of ways to pull it off, emotion is just one of the simplest. Too often, when people do tag runs (or second beats of a harold), they just repeat the exact same scene: “It’s like the scene before, but now…we’re in space!!!” And that’s boring. Explore what you think is funny and find different ways to show it off… do the MOST fun option, which will rarely just be a new location. And remember that every scene, no matter how short, should bring something new and vital to the show… if it’s an idea that you would cut out of a second draft of a script, don’t do it. Push yourself further.