Disappointed

Paul Mooney's stand-up at The Improv was a bit of a letdown. A disappointment. Part of the problem is that he is rather soft-spoken in the first place. And if that's not enough, for some reason, last night, he would not bring the mic closer to his mouth when he was onstage. Now and then, he'd pull it closer and made it easier to understand, but not often enough. I wanted to yell at him to "Hold the mic closer you ... performer ... you!" But I didn't. I should have. It might have given him something to focus on.

As it was, I thought his bit was too short on current events. A lot of ragging on Hollywood, but no mention of the recent FOX/Glenn Beck/Teabaggers BS, guns at Town Halls, etc? Very little on Obama. Apparently, Paul still wants to kill every white person on earth. Just joking! And he resorted to some really old jokes towards the end of his bit, which I found odd. It's like, he's tired ... he ain't got it anymore. He's 68 years old. Maybe he's just gotten "too old." I can sympathize with that. Between what I could barely hear and not understand very well, his set was disappointing.

He did honor his pledge to not use the word "nigger" anymore, but he has seriously fallen off the wagon on his pledge to also not use the "bitch" word.

The white comic on before Mooney, can't remember his name (no big deal) was even less intelligible than Mooney was. Had a mountain hick sorta thang goin' on, amidst stringy hair, breathy mumbles and long pauses. This guy has a long way to go before he's "polished" bein' a hick. He turned me off when he started making fun of beatin' on wimmin. He looks the type. I'm a little surprised he didn't make any lynching jokes.

And the first act, the host, a tall, skinny black guy with another unmemorable name, got into some rather frenetic black-speak I had a hard time following also. How else to describe it? I am out of touch with a lot of the current dialect, or hip speech, or youth speech, or black speech; whatever it is, it is mostly unintelligible to me. And that's OK. I'm just an old white guy. I mumble a lot too.

Haha ... I felt pretty old last night. Can't hear, don't get the lingo, not a racist or a redneck ... I wish I had it all on DVR so that I could have paused and rewound the parts I couldn't understand live. No such luck.