Monday went by pretty fast. While Saturday had been beautiful, the weather stayed gray. We worked at the client site until about 8pm (eating pre-packaged chicken and pasta), and then headed back to The Talking Heads for their Candle Club open mic night.

It was okay (warning: foul language ahead).

A mediocre electric guitarist was on stage when we came in. Off to one side was a stoplight that progressed from green to yellow to red as each performer’s 10 minutes came to a close.

Instead of beer I decided to try hard cider. I probably won’t do that again. I can seem to drink English beer without any side effects, but the cider kept me up all night.

After the guitarist left the stage, the M.C. (a man who looked a lot like my friend Jonathan Sartin) came up to see if anyone wanted to see some “Hot, Girl on Girl, Joke Action”. Apparently lulled to sleep by the previous act, no one seemed to interested.

The way it works, I found out, is that someone gets up, tells a horrible joke, and the crowd votes to see if the joke teller gets a free pint.

The format was musical act, bad joke, poet, musical act, bad joke, etc.

The first poet wasn’t bad, although I don’t remember his stuff I do remember at least not hating it. The musical acts were forgettable, although I liked this one band that seemed to be channeling the ghost of Kurt Cobain. The jokes were so bad I do remember them, so I thought I’d share.

We finally got to see some “Hot, Girl on Girl, Joke Action”. Two young ladies got up on stage, and the first one told the following joke:

Two sausages are in a pan. One turns to the other and says:

“Man, it’s hot in here!”

the other replied:

“Auuuugh! Talking sausage!”

Not a good joke, and not a very good delivery. The second lady tells hers:

A man is going down on his girlfriend for the first time and says:

“You have a huge pussy”
“You have a huge pussy”

She asks him “Why did you say it twice?” to which he replies “I didn’t”.

I liked the shift from super clean joke to raunch, and when faced with two equally bad things I tend to go for the raunchy one. The second girl got the free pint.

Sometime during the evening, a friend of Craig’s named Stephen and his co-worker and/or girlfriend Emily show up. Apparently Stephen often gets up and tells long, bad jokes, and while he wasn’t going to perform that night, I think he decided to change his mind since I was there. This is his joke:

A man decides he wants a pet. In fact, he decides he want a parrot. He heads down to the pet store only to find that they don’t have parrots. The store owner, however, says that people have been going crazy for a particular breed of hamster, and he happens to have one left.

It’s a scrawny, mangy looking thing, but since it is the last one the man buys it and takes it home.

The next morning he wakes up to find that the hamster has died. Upset, the man heads back to the pet shop to demand a refund. The owner states that he is very sorry the hamster died, but he doesn’t give refunds. He does, however, mention that he has a great recipe for eating hamster in the form of a jam. With nothing else to do with a dead hamster, the man goes back home and prepares the jam per the recipe. He tastes it on toast and finds out that it’s horrible, so he tosses the whole batch out the window, vowing to head back to the pet shop the next day.

When he wakes up, he sees that the entire area under the window where he tossed it is covered with a profusion of flowers. He doesn’t understand why and stomps off toward the pet shop to demand a refund. We he gets there, he yells “I want my money back. I tried the jam recipe you gave me and it was awful, so I threw it out the window, and now the whole area is covered in tulips”.

The shop owner replied “I’m sorry you didn’t like the recipe, but I can’t give you your money back, and everybody knows the best tulips come from hamster jam”.

ouch.

There were a couple of “regulars” who also appeared. One guy sat at a small electronic keyboard and sang really bad songs, but the favorite seemed to be an old hippie named Kim.

Kim, be-speckled and bearded, had some sort of digital sampling machine on his lap that sounded something like a theramin the way he used it. It was the background noise to his poetry, which he read from a battered journal. I remember the first two lines he spoke:

Bin Laden,
didn’t put the chemicals in your garden

The crowd favorite started out:

I’m the skanky mother f*cker who doesn’t give a f*ck.

Not quite Vogon poetry, but he may have been the inspiration.