My Brand of Punk Inspired Comedy

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“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.” - Voltaire

I always love when a new face joins the Circle of Intimacy on the Joculation livestream, listens to the show for about fifteen minutes, and immediately either leaves without comment or asks, “WTF am I listening to?” while hanging out with the Circle of Intimacy for the show. It’s like the Great Filter moment from the Fermi Paradox that is Joculation.

In this spurious and oblique world obsessed with labeling and adopting subjective identities – I guess if I had to settle on a title to describe the comedy and satire I create, I would “identify” as a punk comedian.

My Punk Inspired Comedy Roots in the Humor of Punk Rock

I came across an incredible article written by Ian Ellis, titled The Rebel Rockin’ Roots of Punk Rock Humor that’s all about the use of humor in the punk rock musical genre which, I feel, captures my brand of comedy and satire pretty succinctly.

“Punk humor is humor with a purpose, even when it is at its most infantile or trivial. To operate it requires opposition, a source of conflict. That may be a social institution, cultural mores, or music itself, anything antagonistic to the point-of-view of the punk purveyor.”

“The best punk, like the best humor, packs a critical punch, and no music genre has unleashed the weapon of wit more regularly and eclectically than punk has. This should be of little surprise since punk inherited its aesthetic DNA from the most subversively humorous art: dada, surrealism, and situationism. Like those expressive art movements, punk does not so much employ humor into its critical arsenal as express it as its very essence and being.”

The absurd incongruities and cognitive dissonance of humanity might have sometimes either disappointed me or outraged me, but they never failed to make me laugh or inspire some punchlines. Punk simply took that Stockholm Syndrome - inspired dark humor born from the painful moments of glorified and willful human ignorance, and transformed it into performance art.

Discovering Punk Music and Finding My Punk Inspired Comedy Brand

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Hard to believe or even admit - but everything starts with one of those, “this one time, at band camp,” stories.

It was the summer before I started my sophomore year at high school, I found myself recruited by the high school marching band of all things. Don’t judge. I’m honestly not sure what convinced me to join, but sometimes the follies of youth can create some of the most profound, life-altering moments whose impact affects us deeply and whose echoes resonate with us the rest of our lives. The marching band gave me punk, and those echoes resonate with me still.

One afternoon during a lunch run to a Hardee’s burger joint in my friend’s VW bug, he popped in a cassette tape, and I heard I Wanna Be Sedated from The Ramones. I was hopelessly sucked into the world of punk rock from that moment - The Misfits, Black Flag, Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, The Meatmen, The Butthole Surfers, The Adicts, The Anti-Nowhere League , The Sex Pistols....

The personalities were brash, abrasive, and authentic to the point of offensive. The music was chaotic, fast, and imperfect – like a person rambling to blurt out a final confession on their deathbed or shouting some ugly truth into a microphone just before the jackbooted security goons take them away. It’s a gang of misfit, non-conformist troubadours on a stolen pirate ship, careening through a tumultuous course of discovery, without care, or apology, or permission – in search of their very own Port Royale – in this vast ocean of coerced and compelled conformity.

I found my tribe.

I see punk as a world of loud and radical authenticity. Strong individualism. Acceptance. A sharp and unapologetic focus on becoming the best, rudest, most unapologetic, and most authentic “you” without compromise. Alexander Wolke captured what I felt in his article The Philosophy of Punk from the Nonconformist Magazine:

“The other day, I was thinking about how quiet I was and how I could never seem to communicate what I thought or felt until I was introduced to punk and philosophy. They gave me the words to speak about what I was experiencing. Even if I misused those words, I still had the beginning of a vocabulary.”

Somewhere within all that punk-infused self-discovery, I found my voice - and LP started to coalesce.

Discovering Neil Rogers on AM Radio

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If punk music helped me discover my voice, it was Neil Rogers who showed me how that outrage, Gen X nihilism, skepticism, and deep sarcasm could be channeled into comedy and satire. Neil is, without a doubt, the single strongest influence on the punk comedy I produce.

Shortly after graduating from high school, I found myself stuck in a McJob as a delivery driver. I was caged in a mobile, solitary confinement sweatbox, in bumper-to-bumper traffic for an eight-hour prison sentence every day. One afternoon, after shouting through the windshield at drivers all morning long, and suffering continuous shitty pop hit remixes of shittier pop hit "originals" on the FM radio, desperation inspired me to take a chance on AM Radio. The universe intervened and the radio preset station landed me on 610 WIOD and The Neil Rogers Show.

Millions of South Florida listeners tuned in each day to hear Neil rant on the air, interact with the live callers - particularly the “chronics” whom he’d castigate as part of the show. Between each segment, Neil played parody commercials such as Jesus Christ for Dexedrine. He was educated, opinionated, brash, and abrasive - but always with a satirically playful comedic edge.

If punk rock helped me find my voice and was my Boardwalk sideshow, Neil Rogers was undoubtedly my Carnival Barker and my inspiration to discover and share the dark and inappropriate humor from my outrage.

Being and Becoming LP

Within the Empiricist branch of the theory of knowledge of philosophy, there is a concept called The Tabula Rassa (which translates to “the blank slate”) of which I am a strong advocate. It is the idea that individuals are born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences. In essence, a human being is an ever-evolving sum-total of their experiences at that point in their personal history.

My brand of punk comedy and satire truly is the sum-total of my shared and unshared experiences on this strange road of being and becoming LP.

Vincent Van Gogh used paint and color to channel his passion and pain into vibrant canvasses of abstract image and color. My brand of punk comedy channels observed incongruities, outrage, follies, glorified ignorance, hero worship of vapid celebrities, unspoken dark truths, and ignoble acts into its own canvass of GenX inspired dark humor and laughter.

Pull up a chair for a listen sometime to my Livestream or my Podcast and check out my art now that you have a little bit of the origin story. I hope to catch you in the crowd at a future show.