Guest Columnist

My favorite aspect of stand-up comedy is planning out each section of my performance when there are months before the actual show. No pressure, no fast-approaching deadline, just the creative process.

How all these topics will flow and eventually tie-in together is not the concern here. We have a clean slate, so what do we want to fill it with? I knew I wanted to do a bit about misheard song lyrics. I love music and before we had apps telling us everything about each song, we just had the music. Misheard lyrics happened constantly and some of the ones I remember are quite hilarious. 

I began the bit discussing the Wu Tang Clan, a hip-hop group from Staten Island that became popular in the early 90s and still remains very well-known. One of their first hit tracks was C.R.E.A.M. which stands for Cash Rules Everything Around Me. It’s another way of saying that earning enough money can build the status you’ve always dreamed of. At age 13, I heard the song and thought they were saying “Cashews Everywhere Around Me.” I thought maybe this snack was a sign that you had made it in life. Yes, I didn’t learn the correct version for 3 years. My bad. Understanding that the crowd I was performing for were mostly people also born in the early 80s, I knew they would be in on the joke.

The other 90s hit that has always bothered me was “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow.  This song was a massive success, but I still take issue with the fact that nothing rhymes in any of the verses. You can look it up. The hook does rhyme but the verses are just talking. I felt more people should be thinking about this. It’s also easy to play for laughs that the second verse begins with “I like a good beer buzz early in the morning...” and turn it into a rambling, slurred speech by someone who clearly needs a ride home and a nap. Both songs were right in the crowd’s wheelhouse, and I knew that it would be a fun way to critique 90s nostalgia.

The most pertinent part of your comedy set is how you open and how you close. You gotta deliver early and I wasn’t sure what to start off with. Inspiration came while watching The Simpsons with my mother. I put on the episode “A Fish Called Selma” which I personally love because it is centered around side character Troy McClure played, of course, by the late, great Phil Hartman. Troy is a washed-up actor whose appearance is usually noted by the things “you may remember me from.” That’s it! That’s the intro. I would open with my best impression of McClure and state the previous stand-up bits I had done. Perfect.

Of course, I now needed an ending that has a tie-in to an earlier joke, aka a callback. 

I then realized I could blend both music references into one joke. “If you have a good beer buzz early in the morning and you are just talking to random people you don’t know, it’s time to get something in your stomach. Maybe a wealthy friend has some cashews that can help you out.”

And that’s how its done. Or at least how I did it. And it killed.