A Place for My Stuff: Vol. 4
"Just for Laughs" + Conversation Starters for Dogs + Throwback Tweet of the Week
In the summer of 2018, I attended my first Just For Laughs Festival (Juste Pour Rire) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. For decades, JFL was widely acclaimed as comedy’s preeminent industry event where the world’s most powerful chuckle tycoons and giggle barons gathered to plot the future path of laughs, and where the finest farting mimes got their biggest breaks — that is, until last year when organizers announced that the festival’s cancellation in the wake of its holding company’s bankruptcy.
As host of the then-viral HQ Trivia, I was invited north of the border, along with my trusty sidekick/dad Marty, to put on our Running Late Show — the late-night style talk show I had been producing and hosting in New York since 2011. We were given the primetime midnight Wednesday slot at a 100-cap, second-floor walk-up, black box theatre (permanently closing at the end of this month), and despite doing my best pandering in a vintage (game-worn!) Expos jersey, it simply wasn’t enough to please a blogger named Fagstein who included the show in his list of festival “lowlights:”
Thankfully, Running Late wasn’t my only call of duty during the festival. I had also been asked to moderate JFL’s “New Faces: Creators” showcase, a spin-off of their “New Faces” and “New Faces: Characters” showcases which in years past had helped launch the likes of Kevin Hart, Amy Schumer, Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj, and Kate McKinnon. Now-mega-famous Quinta Brunson had been among the inaugural class of “New Faces: Creators” in 2017 — exciting!
Before smelting my HQ-era MacBook Air for its rare earth metals, I excavated its ancient stored documents, which included the intro/monologue I prepared for those gathered at the showcase — published here EXCLUSIVELY on Rogo’s Modern Life. Don’t ever tell me your free subscription isn’t worth it!
2018 JFL New Faces: Creators Monologue
Everyone having a good fest? This is my first JFL, it’s very exciting. I flew in from New York, there was a ton of industry folks on the plane. The flight attendant made a joke about smokers having to “step outside” and did some interesting physical comedy with the oxygen mask demo; by the time we landed she had signed with 3Arts, UTA, and had a holding deal with Hulu.
I actually sold a show on the tarmac at Trudeau. Look for Comedians in Montreal Getting Their Hopes Up — coming next spring to SeeSo!
Had a slight issue getting through customs. The border agent asked me what I was doing in Canada. I told her “I’m here to kill, but there’s a chance I’ll bomb!” They shut down the airport for four hours.
Welcome to New Faces: Creators. What is New Faces: Creators? I’m still not entirely sure, but I can say with some degree of certainty that it is not a panel featuring Mickey Rourke’s plastic surgeons.
I was told this is meant to be a showcase of content creators. If that’s the case, then one key question remains: what is content? Content can be as simple as a tweet. It can be a screenshot of tweet, posted on Instagram. It can be a video of someone reading screenshots of tweets, posted to YouTube. Content could also be a four-part documentary about the Rwandan genocide.
Remember back in March when The Shape of Water won Best Content at the Academy Awards? Content buffs might be particularly fond of Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick’s content. Of course, content is not strictly a North American phenomenon. Contentphiles hail Akira Kurosawa as one of Japan’s all-time great content creators, for example.
The problem with content is that anything on the Internet can be considered it. Ipso facto, most content is pornographic — or simply bad (what I call “malcontent”). But that’s where JFL comes to the rescue with this showcase, bringing you la crème de la crème (the crème of the crème). Out of thousands, nay, dozens of submissions to New Faces: Creators, the selection committee has hand-picked seven non-pornographic starlets for today’s coveted exhibition to present their work and tell us a little bit about themselves.
But first a little about me! My name is Scott Rogowsky. I am a Jewish man of Polish extraction — although if my great-grandfather had stayed in Poland, I’d be of Polish extinction. Get it??? It’s because of the Jewish thing (all the Jews in Poland were killed, remember?).
By the way, Rogowsky is a Polish word that roughly translates to “overdrafted.”
Ok, that’s all you need to know. Now let’s get down to “les gritty du nitty” and get this showcase on the road! Allons-y!
The 2018 “New Faces: Creators” showcase featured Abby Feldman, Anwar Jibawi, Manon Mathews, Frankie Quinones, Josh Ruben, Molly Schreiber, Alex Wagner and Sydney Marquez
Conversation Starters for Dogs
What’s your go-to bark for fireworks?
What would you rather die trying: chocolate or grapes?
Think you could take Major Biden?
Let’s say you actually catch one of these squirrels… what’s your grand plan then, chief?
If you could sniff the anal sacs of any dog, dead or alive, who would it be? Balto? It’s gotta be Balto, right?
What do you really think of Balto, anyway? Kind of a fraud, right?
Why is it so remarkable that a Siberian Husky navigated fifty-something miles in whiteout blizzard conditions? Isn’t that their whole deal? They’re bred to sled!
What about Togo, who covered the longest and most dangerous leg (260 miles) of the heroic Serum Run? Where’s his Central Park statute?
Any interest in this Ballerina movie? Apparently it has something to do with John Wick?
Given Iran's historical reliance on asymmetrical warfare, what forms of proxy retaliation might we realistically expect following the recent Israeli strikes?
Piss on anything good lately?
Throwback Tweet of the Week
I went viral on Twitter last week.1
Well, first Brooks Otterlake went viral:
And then I piggy-bagged with an RT:
Thanks, Brooks!
I hadn’t checked in on my account since scrubbing my timeline in April, effectively mothballing my fourteen-year Twitter presence. It seems the software I used to mass delete my tweets hadn’t accounted for some ancient reposts, and thank goodness! It was a delight to reunite with this one, reminding me of a moment on HQ — sadly, like so many, lost to my porous memory — when I paid homage to the Scharpling & Wurster call that started it all, “Rock, Rot and Rule,” and insisted on air that the band Madness invented ska. And just as Ronald Thomas Clontle had done more than twenty years earlier, my intentionally idiotic take invited the wrath of an unassuming, ska-loving public:
Let this be your reminder that The Best Show is the best show, always and forever.
There is no X — there is only Twitter