There is a point in my act where I share my real life senior portrait with my audience. It is my actual high school picture and the joke comes at a time when I am talking about the fact that I turned down getting braces on my teeth because I was afraid of not “looking good” for my senior portrait. It’s at this point when I say to the audience, “Allow me to share with you my senior picture,” and I pull out this hideous photo of me from that era. My hair was permed at the time, I’m wearing glasses that automatically turned dark with the sun, a suit that looks to be made out of powder blue cardboard with a wild patterned shirt, and – if you look really close – you can make out just the hint of what is the beginning of a cheesy moustache. The saddest part of this is I actually walked the streets looking like that at one point in my life, and now it’s one of the biggest laughs in my act. The audience never fails to respond with waves of delighted laughter, prompting me to follow-up with the line, “Thank you all for your caring and compassion, I appreciate that.” I then put the picture away, saying, "But I digress...I'm not hear to regale you with tales from the days when I looked like Napoleon Dynamite..." and continue on with my act.
With that said, I’d like to relay something that happened to me during my recent week performing at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. This was on a Saturday night, which means I had been delivering that joke up to three times a night since Monday of that week. I had just finished my last show for the evening and now took a seat in the showroom to watch my friend Jonathan Levit begin his first of three shows for the evening. I happened to sit next to a man who had been to the club earlier in the week on Thursday. He mentioned to me how much he had enjoyed my act and that he had brought other guests in to see me, and that they had just been in my last show. I thanked him for the kind words regarding my performance, and then he asked me an unusual question.
“Did you know who was in your audience on that last show?”
I told him I had no idea. He then said, “Jon Heder was in the audience. He’s one of my guests tonight. He saw the show and thought you were very funny. He loved the Napoleon Dynamite joke.”
My brain was trying to comprehend what he was saying. For those of you who have never seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite, Jon Heder plays the lead character, and the film’s namesake, and I swear to you, the character looks exactly like I looked back then – and I have a senior picture to prove it!
“Jon was in the audience?” I repeated as a question, still not sure I was understanding him correctly.
“Yeah,” the guy says and points to his left. I lean forward to look where he’s pointing and, leaning forward about four people away looking back at me and waving, is Jon Heder. Well, I couldn’t help it. I just started laughing. I was laughing at the absurdity of it all, and at the chances of this even happening. The absurdity that I looked like this character twenty years before the film was even thought of, that the picture of me gets as big a laugh as it does, that a movie was made that features a character that looks so much like I did then, and that the lead actor who played that role would wind up in one of my audiences looking and laughing at the picture. The whole thing just seemed so surreal.
After my friend’s show ended, Jon and I talked, and I told him how funny I thought the whole thing was. He agreed and, again, complemented me on my show. A friend of his asked me if I had delivered that joke because I knew he was in the audience, and I assured them that I had no idea he was in the audience as the lights are very bright when performing in that showroom. I told them that I had been doing this joke for many years and it was not said solely on his behalf. It was, and has been said for all this time, because I truly looked like Napoleon Dynamite.
They had to agree, and, quite frankly, I’m not sure if that’s a compliment…
Shawn
Shawn McMaster
Conjured-Up Creations
P.O. Box 973
Newbury Park, CA 91319
(805) 480-0703
www.conjuredupcreations.com
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