Why Cointantly.
In fact, it was great.
Moe Howard wrote most of those original shorts, and was the driving, creative force behind the Three Stooges. And when his brother Shemp left for more serious roles, and his younger brother, Curly, came on board, the Stooges found a natural, comedic genius.

If Curly couldn’t remember a line, he just dropped to the floor, and started spinning around, spewing those famous Curly sounds (“nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,” and “woob woob woob woob” ) until his line – or one of the other Stooges – hit him.
I should try that next time I draw a bank when doing new material.
Pop-culture snobs need not apply – they’re the ones who didn’t like the Stooges in their heyday to begin with. And if you’re a Three Stooges fan, leave your expectations at the door, and just have fun.
I can tell you that  when I watched the movie in the theater, every eye poke, and every “Hey Moe” had the audience howling.
Larry David playing a nun didn’t hurt, either.
It’s your typical “fool triumphant” kind of story where the nitwits go out on the road to raise money to save the orphanage where they’ve spent their lives.
But what it’s really about, the deeper theme, is loyalty and friendship.

Comics want to make people laugh, but we also have a burning need to communicate. Most of us weren’t heard as children, or even as adults, and we need to be boisterous, spewing our thoughts in the form of finely-crafted jokes into a microphone.
Many comics write material from their sources of pain and anger and embarrassment. These things we would never say out loud in front of our friends and family are the universal truths we can share with a room full of strangers — and they laugh because they recognize these qualities within themselves.
For non-comics, the beauty of social networking is that it gives everyone equal opportunity to communicate with the world, filtered only by the option their friends have to “hide” their posts.
That’s not so good if you’re a comic. Sure, for comics, Facebook can be a great promotional tool, and it is a fun way to keep in contact with other comics and audience members. I even enjoy throwing a one-liner out there every now and then to test the reaction.
But if you’re a comic, and you find yourself pontificating into the echo-chamber of Facebook, you may want to reconsider how you spend your precious writing time.
Would you rather get a “like” from someone you haven’t see since third grade, or would you be better off filtering those thoughts, and honing the best of them into some killer material you can use on stage.
After all, laughter is the best “like” you can get.

But there are other times when the open mic crowd is hot, and my new stuff is cooking, and it’s just as great as a weekend show. Either way, it’s a learning experience, which is important for a comic to remember after every open mic — successful or otherwise.
The biggest learning experience for me has probably been running my own open mic, which I’ve done for nearly three years now.
Every Thursday night, I host the Open Mic Comedy Night at the Harrisburg Comedy Zone. I’m quite proud of it. I’ve been to open mics all around, and I think we run one hell of a show, thanks to a great club, great comics and, a lot of times, a great audience. Great audiences are as rare as a Bigfoot siting in the world of open mics, but we get them quite often.
More experienced comedians usually run open mics, but I was just starting out as an emcee when the club let me take over. I was way in over my head. My first night, a fight nearly broke out between two huge drunk guys and a comedian who  overreacted to their heckle. It wasn’t even a heckle – I don’t allow that at my open mic, and it’s rarely a problem to begin with – it was just an innocent comment, which was met with a barrage of F-words and nearly a “Roadhouse” type of situation (just much, much less macho).
See, as an emcee, you’re still a developing comic trying to come up with new material. Sure, running an open mic gives you plenty of worst-case-scenario emcee experience, but it makes working on new material difficult because you’re always opening in front of a cold crowd.
It’s been a challenge, and it still is at times. But when I get on stage on the weekends, I can tell it’s helped me become a better comic, who is ready for anything — even “Roadhouse.”Plus, I’ve seen many new comics come through, so nervous the first time that they talk into their beer instead of the microphone. And then I see those comics grow, find their funny, and find some gigs along the way.
The open mic I run is held every Thursday at the Harrisburg Comedy Zone. The show starts at 8 p.m. Check it out. You may just see the next big comedy star.

If you’re not familiar with it, one of the key points in “Outliers: The Story of Success” is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” in which author Malcolm Gladwell says success in any field comes down to 10,000 hours of experience.
If you’re a stand-up comedian, that’s a lot of time on stage. When you’re just starting out at open mics, you’re lucky to get 10 minutes, making that 10,000 hours seem out of reach, unless you start at the age of, say, 7. As funny as I thought I was in second grade, I don’t think those old booger and fart jokes would go over so well at a comedy club. Well, maybe in Philly.
But us aspiring comedians and comedy writers can still rack up those 10,000 hours. While we may enjoy disappearing into our own imaginary world of stories and jokes, much of our10,000 hours actually comes from all that real-life stuff that happened prior to the first time we got on stage, or typed “FADE IN.”
Most comedy writers had miserable childhoods. That may result in lots of therapy bills, but out of that, you get lots of potential material. And lots of hours.
Many of us were lonely, or felt people didn’t listen, which led to us being class clowns. Many hours of detention, yes, but also more hours toward that 10,000 mark as we learned how to make people laugh.
Do you remember the first time you got lost in a movie, absorbed by all those storytelling techniques you can only get from loving good stories? Throw that in with your 10,000 hours, funny people.
As a kid, I didn’t play baseball. But I played the hell out of G.I. Joe, He-Man, Star Wars and the Transformers.
For me, there was nothing more fun than getting together with my friends after school or on the weekend, and playing out a great story with our action figures.
And every summer, we would come up with a three-month-long saga where parallel universes merged, and the likes of Optimus Prime, Luke Skywalker and their friends fought side-by-side against the latest evil machinations of villains like Cobra Commander and Skeletor. We may have been playing, but we were telling the same story that has been told around campfires since before fire – the story of good versus evil.
Your 10,000 hours can come from many sources, so don’t let something as silly as time hold you back from doing what you want to do.
But more importantly, don’t forget to have fun in the process. 10,000 hours is a lot of time if you’re not enjoying most of it. While collecting my 10,000 hours began with misbehaving in the classroom, and coming up with elaborate action-figure stories, I did not spend all of that time alone.
I spent the best of those 10,000 hours with my friends.

Milton Berle.

He was a pioneer in early television, and for decades played to sold-out rooms. He appeared in numerous movies, including one of my favorites, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”  
Years ago, my great uncle, Joe Curci, was a barber in Philadelphia, working in a shop near Veterans Stadium. And years later, when I was a little kid, he owned his own shop in my hometown in northwestern Pennsylvania.
That’s where I got my first haircut as a little kid. I don’t know if all older Italians do this, or if it was just my family, but they loved to scare kids. My Uncle Joe kept saying “I hope I don’t cut off your ear.” Kids believe that stuff! Another “fun” game they played was when they would grab my nose, and, say “I got your nose!”
Now that they’re old, I get them back, go into their room at the home and say “Diabetes got your foot!”
Anyway, back to the Milton Berle story. Hanging on the walls of my uncle’s barbershop, he had photos of him as a younger man cutting the hair of many famous people from that shop in Philly. Most were baseball players, but there were a few actors and comedians in the mix. It was a long time ago, and I remember just three of them: Mickey Mantle, Art Carney and, of course, Milton Berle.
According to the story I heard, Milton Berle was a friendly enough fellow, and, happy with his trim, he gave my Uncle Joe $20 for a $5 haircut.
“That’s awfully generous of you, Mr. Berle,” my uncle said.
Well, it wasn’t much later when Milton Berle called from his hotel, and asked, “Did I give you a twenty or a ten?”
My uncle said he had graciously left a twenty-dollar bill.
“I meant to give you a ten,” Berle said.
According to the family story, Berle actually went back to get his change!
In my previous post, I talked about honesty in comedy, and being true to yourself. That’s why I love this story. It appears Uncle Milty was not just an early television pioneer. He was a pioneer of truth in comedy.

Having a disconnect between one’s natural, funny self, and one’s performance self is a common hurdle many beginning comics have to overcome. In the old days, comedians had a persona. Groucho Marx was cerebral and chaotic. Jack Benny was cheap. Milton Berle was, well, cheap. And stole jokes. (Not really, but that was part of his persona. He had a great line about it, too, and said a comic he saw made him laugh so hard, he dropped his notebook).
Then Lenny Bruce came along, and changed everything. He didn’t go up on stage as

Lenny Bruce.

some wacky guy in weird clothes. He was Lenny Bruce. Real, true and honest. He even went to jail for that honesty as some did not take kindly to him poking holes in society’s hypocrisies.
Without Lenny Bruce’s influence, George Carlin may have spent his career as the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman. Funny? Of course! Honest, and plumbing the depths of his comedic potential? No.
There is no better way to be a unique comic than to be honest and open about your life and outlook on the world.
The great Richard Lewis paces the stage, like a caged beast ravaged by insecurities and the memory of an overbearing, suffocating mother. By all accounts, he’s the same person offstage, just toned down a bit.
And Richard Pryor was so honest and so vulnerable, completely spilling his guts on stage, even talking about his heart attack and the time he set himself on fire while freebasing.
Painful. Honest. Funny.
Jay Sankey, author of  “Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy,” wrote that a good

"Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy" by Jay Sankey.

stage persona is you, times 15. The great comics don’t think about persona. They don’t start off by asking “what’s funny about this topic?” They start by telling the truth – no matter how angry the subject makes them, or how embarrassing or painful it is. Sankey also said the more personal something is, the more universal it is, too. When you dig deep down far enough, we’re all the same.
Learning how to be me is going to be a challenge. But as a comic, and I guess in all areas of your life, you should be challenging yourself. That’s how you grow.
Learning how to be me all starts with telling the truth.

On Friday, I went to the Strand-Capital in York, and saw comedian Lisa Lampanelli, completely intending to have a relaxing evening where I didn’t have to be “on.”

"It's showtime!"

But, waiting for the show to start, I saw the crowd, and got that familiar buzzing sensation. It’s hard to explain, but my fellow class clowns out there know what I’m talking about. You see a group of people, and you just want to explode in a Beetlejuice-like shout of “It’s showtime!”
I wanted to get some laughs, even if it was just from the couple people around me in the left-orchestra section.
I got to the theater about 15 minutes before my friends, and, by coincidence, another group of friends sat right in front of me. The two groups have never met, and one of the guys in front is a friendly-enough fellow, but he’s enormous — and sort of scary looking. Like, if we were in ancient times, he’d be a warrior king like Beowulf. Or Charlie Sheen.
My other friends arrived, and asked me how I was, and I said, loudly, “great, except for the fact I have to sit behind this (insert several expletives).”
It gave them a good scare – and then a laugh when they realized I knew him.
Then the show started, and Lisa Lampanelli did all right. Actually, she killed. And so did her awesome opening act, Mike Morse. I’d like to think I helped as a warm-up act in left-orchestra.

Comedy hotspots like New York and L.A. have tons of clubs, one-nighters and bars with microphones with nightly spots available for new and experienced comics working their way through the ranks.
For those of us who live in the rest of country, if you’re in a medium-sized city, chances are, you’ve got a comedy club, and most comedy clubs run an open mic to foster up-and-coming talent.
Not meaning to toot my own horn –
HONK.
OK, I just did, but I run Open Mic Night at the Harrisburg Comedy Zone.
Every Thursday night at 8, new comics, and some old pros, come in and try out their new stuff. It’s hard to believe, but Harrisburg actually has a bit of a comedy scene. We get sometimes as many as 20 comics, and most of them are pretty darn funny.
We’ve got a pretty good thing going at our open mic. If you’re looking for a fun Thursday night, check it out sometime. And the price is right – it’s free. There’s no cover charge, and the bar often runs drink specials.

Veteran comedian Steinberg sits down with comedy’s giants like Don Rickles, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock. Any aspiring comedian can learn a trick or two from this series, and any comedy fan will get a couple chuckles, and maybe even a guffaw or two.
Here’s a clip.

Sure, you’d get the concept, but you’d completely miss the experience. I find that kind of lack of faith disturbing.
When you’re at a club, there’s a personal connection between the comedian and the audience that you don’t get through your television or youtube clips. And for us comics, when you’re working with a live audience, you never know what’s going to happen.
Even after the show.
I had a great set Friday night, and felt pretty proud of myself. I should know right away that meant I was in for a humbling experience.
So, to set the stage:
John and Jim are in the lobby selling their T-shirts, and I’m at the bar having a drink, and talking to some folks, when this really cute girl walks up to me and says she and her friends want to get a picture with the comedians.
Great, I say, and follow her back to the lobby where the other comics are, and –
She hands me the camera.
I have to thank her, though, because a healthy self-esteem is a bad thing for a comedy writer.
But I still hope they all have red eye.