Lucas Molandes

Cap City Comedy Club - www.capcitycomedy.com

Austin Texas – 02/29 and 03/01

Doors @ 7:00 PM

Show @ 8:00 PM

@lucasmolandes / @capcitycomedy

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I headlined Cap City Comedy Club  for the first time last year and it was easily one of the most fun experiences I’ve had while on stage. I’d spent several years as a spectator in the back of the main showroom, watching headliner after headliner performing for the great crowds that show up to support live stand up in Austin, wondering when I’d have my chance to prove myself at that level.

This will be my second time to headline the club, and a lot has changed since I was last there.  Without going into great detail, I will say that I am happy to be back and I hope you guys can come out and show your support at these shows.

Also, one of the funniest comics in New York will be on the show – Brooke Van Poppelen. Brooke has credits that keep piling up (Writer for MTV and truTV. Appearances onVH1 and TLC) , and it might not be long before she’s bringing in theater sized crowds to her shows, so this may be one of the few chances you have in Austin to see her in a club setting. Her humor? Well, it’s about everything, and if you don’t see a little bit of yourself in her act, then you’re probably too embarrassed to admit as much. And I say that in the most loving way possible. In the practical joke we call life, we’re always one misstep away from being the punchline. Right? Right.

www.brookevanpoppelen.com

@BVPcomedy

10/21 @ 11:30.

10/22 @ 9:30 & 11:30.

$10.

Hey guys. I’ll be in Austin this weekend with New York’s Brooke Van Poppelen. If you’re in the area, we’d greatly appreciate you coming out to throw some laughs our way. If you can’t make the recording, pass this info along like a lazy Christian handing out pamphlets? We’re charging 10 dollars at the door for this one – which is a little more than the usual, but we had to buy plane tickets and all that good shit. Sell your first born if you gotta, this show will be our finest hour.

Check out Stand Up Records’ back catalog while you’re at it. They are putting out some of the finest voices in comedy today.

Brooke recently did an interview with Austin360, here’s an excerpt:

How did you get started in comedy?

Before my 24th birthday, I blindly moved to Chicago from Michigan after giving up on roughly six years worth of a Frankenstein-ed college curriculum that kept falling short of any sort of degree. I felt stuck and hopeless, so I just left and signed up for improv classes at IO (formerly Improv Olympic) to see what would happen if I at least tried. Standup had always existed somewhere in a dusty corner of my mind, shackled to the wall and kept in the dark.

Read the entire interview here: Brooke talks to Austin 360.

Here’s a short clip of Brooke headlining Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York.

The future? Who needs a crystal ball when you can gaze into your toilet? Last weekend had rookie drinker written all over it. I forgot to eat. Didn’t drink enough water. Red Wine. White Wine. Cheap Beer.

Woke up the next day with all the pressure of life squeezing my sad little skull into a migraine that wouldn’t quit. I ended up shoulder deep in the toilet, thinking to myself that I should go back to church.

I didn’t go back to church. Throwing up helped. I felt better.

I spent the next few hours watching a show called Toddlers and Tiaras. It’s a show about baby pageants. I wonder if God looks at Evangelicals the way I look at these over-dressed kids.

I don’t know how you feel about baby pageants, but you shouldn’t. There’s no opinion you could ever have about baby pageants that would sound normal coming out of your mouth.

What are you going to do? Sit at a bar and yell out, “you know what the real problem with baby pageants is?”

You can’t say that without it sounding like you’ve put way too much thought into tiny girls wearing make up.

I don’t have an opinion about baby pageants because it’s a different culture. I don’t judge cultures who eat monkey’s brains for that exact same reason.  If I don’t understand it, I shouldn’t have an opinion about it.

I don’t have a child, so I don’t understand what it feels like to be willing to die for my child. Then again, I also don’t understand the impulse to spray tan your 3 year old child.

Maybe that’s my opinion: “If you’re willing to die for something, then I guess it’s okay for you put fake eye lashes on it and parade it around in front of southerners.”

That seems fair, but if that’s the case, the entry fee for putting your child on display like that should be taking a bullet. I’m saying pageant mothers should be shot. That also sounds fair.

But I don’t care. And that’s my point. There’s just so much information out there and I don’t have to have an opinion on all of it.

We have all the information available to us and people take it for granted.Sure, you might know some trivia, but information doesn’t equal intelligence. That’s like saying, “sleeping under a pile of bricks is like sleeping in a house.”

Critical thought is necessary to process information in a constructive manner, but a lot of people just want the gist. They want the fast-food sound bites to give them enough ammo to sound clever enough to bring a last call mistake home.

70 years ago, if you knew 10 things, you could be the smartest person in your town. You would have been the oracle. Information was rare. There were countries involved in WWII that didn’t even know what WWII was – (read Bowling Alone for more on that).

And now everyone’s a trivia expert because the facts are readily available at all times.

I was 12 when I found out what a whore was, and I had to have a clandestine, Deep-Throat style meeting in the back of a school bus to get that information. And I appreciated that information because I’d earned it. It was a better time for information, everything had that urban-legend quality to it because you couldn’t prove anything beyond hearsay.

The United States is like a television show that’s been on the air for 10 seasons. And what’s sad is that all those seasons are available for you to marathon your way through at any time, and most of the country has done that. But there are parts of this country that haven’t moved past season 5, when civil rights was still only making cameos and it was okay to fuck your first cousin in the name of rock and roll.

I suppose I can’t help but feel like baby pageants came about as a result of society saying, “Hey, fucking your child is no longer acceptable.” And someone was like, “Well, how are we going to show dominance?” The answer to that question is always: put make up on it. You can’t find that on wikipedia, but you can see how I came to that conclusion.

We walked around San Antonio for a few days, taking inventory of the town. It’s out now!

WTF it UP!

I wasn’t happy to be back, but I haven’t been happy to be anywhere, frankly. The midwest was beautiful. Seventy degree weather. Green. Ponds and rivers and deer. Fighting back violent allergic reactions to whatever part of wilderness it is that I can no longer stomach. I woke up every day with a head full of snot and mucus, swollen eyes, pressure headaches, a nagging sense that somehow I’m losing touch with the part of my life that depends on society and my ill placement in it.

I rubbed my hand over my face and the taxi driver Pedro, a man who wouldn’t look out of place breaking someone’s knees over a past due gambling debt, asked me what was wrong. It was one of those moments where my words meant more than I could say. “Tired. I spent the last few weeks in the midwest, and this town is still here. Everything’s changed so much that nothing’s changed.”

“Well, sometimes it’s good to be home.” He said. The rest of the ride he talked about family and his younger days. We had an understanding. It was nice to shoot the shit. To open up with someone you’ll never see again. To know that 20 minutes is barely enough time to get to know someone, yet more than enough to lay some of life’s lessons out on the table like a gypsy selling jewels from a far off land. The night was like us: young, on the verge of getting old. The trip from Laguardia to the apartment cost 30 bucks. I handed him two 20 dollar bills. Tipped him 7 dollars and kept 3 so I could run across the street to Freddy’s and grab a cheap one. “It’s gonna take more than a beer to make things better,” he said.

“I’ll have two then,” I said back.

The more beer you drink, the more you can justify being in a bar. Bars are places that assault your better senses and give you the perfect reason to be there in the first place. I sat down and waited for a few minutes. The bartender stood outside, smoked a cigarette and engaged in conversation with some women who were last call pretty. In the few minutes it took for him to get inside, I had a moment where I told myself -

“I could go home and watch some television and call it a night and start tomorrow right.”

Not tonight. I didn’t want to be alone. Not yet. Maybe if I stay up till last call tonight, it’ll find me. Call me. Email me. Tell me. “I have everything you’ve ever wanted, and I’m going to give it to you finally.”

I ordered and drank quickly. Three times. There is a moment every night where I imagine throwing back enough shots in a short enough time so that tomorrow never comes. I can’t do that. Self destruction is not on the menu these days. I’d like to get drunk and set bars on fire and have tales of my adventures move from mouth to ear from generation to generation. I cant. There is tomorrow. I’m too big of a puss to go one way or the other. There’s gotta be a secret though. How can I implode the way that best says, “I don’t give a fuck…but I need benefits.”

I’ve been looking for work but my resume is filled with large, gaping holes. And that’s always the first question.

“Can you explain the gaps in your resume?”

“Yeah, those are times in my life when I had faith that my dreams would work out and I wouldn’t be in a position where I’d be begging for 8 dollars an hour. Feel better about yourself? Are there any other existential scabs of mine you’d like to pick at? Are you really going to make me feel like a pile of shit because I don’t know what Quickbooks is? Are you and your minimum-wage charisma really going to sit across from me and judge me? Who are you? This job of yours is the prize you got in the competitive shit eating contest called your life, fuck. … By the way, I have open availability if that helps.”

I imagine those people going home and being asked by their significant other, “how was work?”

“Oh it was great,” they say. “I ruined 9 people today because they couldn’t type more than 80 words per minute! HA! Reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator really relieves me of the responsibility of trying to be a better person who has understanding and compassion for his fellow man!”

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A while back, I was doing shows at this club and when I’d get there, I’d find out that a creditor had called the office looking for me. I figured they were looking at my schedule to figure out where I was performing next so they could get the drop on me. It was kind of amusing. I thought to myself that I’d have to start promoting my gigs like Harriet Tubman – on the down low. She was famous, and really, no one should have ever known who she was.

So, creditors, if you read this, I’m not ducking you. I don’t have money to give you. And yes, I feel bad about that. But you can go fuck yourself if you’re going to rub my nose in the shit areas of my life. I’m a human being – not a commodity. Plus, I feel like I ever had enough money to pay off my student load debt, I wouldn’t have to. So fuck off, and I hope you or your wives shit out cluster after cluster of Harlequin babies who choke to death on the vomit you hurl into their face when you gaze upon them with your spiteful eyes. I hope the ghosts of your babies haunt your dreams until the end of time. And, if I can ever get steady work, we can work out a payment plan. Deal? Deal.

Well, that’s life. City life? Who knows. I’m not really sure what it means to live in NY yet. I’d like to stay long enough to be at peace with whether or not I stay permanently. Any place I end up, really, I’d like to go there on my own terms. I feel like that’s the point of life – to have a sense that whatever is ahead of you is worth it, and that it is the product of the efforts you have made to put yourself in a better position.

And, I suppose that’s it for now…

I spend so much time trying to write things that I believe in — things that have meaning. And by the time I work them out on stage and get them memorized and ordered, they’ve lost all meaning.

Check out this clip – several friends from Austin TX involved in this one.