The front entrance to Herman’s Hideaway looked like a hippie revolving door on a recent Friday night. A steady parade of dreadlocked white people danced to the music of Lion SoulJahs for fifteen to twenty minutes, then filtered into the shuttle bus waiting patiently out front in the loading zone,…
I have a goose. Well, my parents have a goose. But What’s So Funny thinks in terms of inheritance, and what’s theirs is mine; ergo, I have a goose. Ergo. Her name is Penelope, and she lives in the back yard. Neighborhood children often gather at the fence, poke their…
Loyal readers will appreciate just how hard it was for What’s So Funny to fox-trot through the doors of Home Depot on South Colorado Boulevard a few days ago. In a way, it was like trying to sex up a former lover since graduated from The Swan, now far too…
Silvia Johnson just wanted to be a “cool mom.” From September 2003 to September 2004, she held innumerable parties at her Arvada home, where she provided alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamines to kids from Arvada West High School — the school her elder daughter attended. She also had sexual relations with…
Some people would argue that the rise of the Internet, and e-mail, in particular, have killed the art of letter-writing. And those people would not be far off. Whereas scholars and biographers can still pore over the famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence and Mark Twain’s eloquent dispatches home from the frontier, contemporary…
You never know which Conor Oberst is going to show up. Last spring at the Ogden, it was the recalcitrant hero, tiny and hidden behind his aren’t-I-tortured bangs and a keyboard, reluctantly forging the indie electronica from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, backed by members of the Faint. Then,…
There comes a point in everyone’s life when you realize you’ve made it. I recently experienced such a moment. In a scene my future biographers will no doubt reconstruct in the glorious colors of autumn, I found myself standing in Kiki Vandeweghe’s kitchen, swigging cold Pabst Blue Ribbon with Ernie…
FRI, 10/28 Quick, somebody in the audience give me a profession. Don’t ask, just do it, because I’m going to act like I’m somebody in that profession, and then my partner, who will come on stage later, will have to guess what I’m doing. What do you mean, why? Because…
SUN, 10/30 Walking the line between sanity and madness — or pretending to do so — helps give Halloween its juice. Stripping that path down to classic literature heightens the experience in ways that slasher movies can’t, because written words conjure up images unique to each individual’s cranium. The scare…
The cover of I’m Sooo Screwed features a crude cartoon of a man begging for change on a street corner with a sign that reads, “I Wrap 4or Booz.” Surrounding said gristled man are cheap, unoriginal sight gags such as a condom trying to pick up a whore, a stale…
Looks like you were right about me, Old Man Abernathy, you toothless son of a bitch. I am no farmer. My potato gleaning yielded but ten sickly spuds; my wheat fields were disastrous. My innumerable rows of corn served not as a promising tract of bountiful maize, but as a…
“For those of you who made it into Colubrae House, congratulations,” says stone-faced Professor Bloodthorne, head of Colubrae, as he begins his lecture on potions. “For those of you who didn’t, well, nobody’s perfect.” This snide comment wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Professor Severus Snape, the dubious Harry…
FRI, 10/21 In the age of slasher films, sometimes it’s nice to reach back into the roots of horror and experience to something that is truly frightening and shakes the psyche. Edgar Allan Poe’s works come to mind. He’s considered the first master of horror because he penned works dripping…
Mother of pearl, it’s been one shitstorm after another this week at What’s So Funny. Seems like I can’t even blink without some player from the Nuggets blowing up my cell, begging for tips for the upcoming season. I just have to be like, “K-Mart, listen, you’re so money and…
FRI, 10/14 Heeeeeeey, girlfriend. Trying to land a man in Denver but don’t seem to be having any luck? Well, don’t waste your time squeezing into clothing three times too small for you. And forget about trying to cook that hombre a delicious meal. The way to a guy’s heart…
While the bulk of the Wu Tang Clan generally adopts a bullets-can’t-touch-us-because-of-our-Shaolin-sorcery approach to hip-hop, Ghostface Killah — in a Diddy-esque turn, now going as just Ghostface — has always been more of a if-you-shank-me-do-I-not-bleed kind of guy. Although Ghostface is not short on braggadocio or mad crazy, provocative, stoopid…
Fiona-philes will no doubt raise their wine to the heavens and toast their tortured troubadour for her latest burst of brilliance. Six years in the making, Extraordinary Machine, originally produced by Jon Brion, then scrapped (except for two songs) and retooled by hip-hop sage Mike Elizondo, was the subject of…
As the clock ticked down on the twentieth century, people prepared for the absolute worst. A simple timekeeping error called Y2K was about to crash all computers and implode the entire planet, thrusting the world into eternal darkness and ending life as we had come to know it. There was…
SAT, 10/8 Artists and the Hells Angels have a long and storied history. In 1965, freelance journalist Hunter S. Thompson introduced Ken Kesey to a few of the Angels he was writing about at the time. The grizzly road soldiers were smitten with the wide-eyed piper and accepted his invitation…
It’s a Thursday afternoon at 33rd and Blake, and the Flobots are at a screen-printing shop, talking T-shirts. A mere two weeks from their EP-release party, the clock is ticking. Gotta make sure shirts will be ready for the faithful fans they’ve amassed while barnstorming the Front Range this past…
The only funny clown is a dead clown. Because it’s so ironic. If some guy were to ask me, “Hey, What’s So Funny, how would you define irony?” I wouldn’t say, “An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.” I’d just say, “Dead clown.”…
FRI, 9/30 “Some of my greatest friends from college were people that I considered comedy hippies,” says Boulder-based writer and comedian Dave Burdick. “They got into worshiping Del Close and the Upright Citizens Brigade and the spirit of improv. Lately, I’ve been realizing I’m a comedy hippie, too. I just…
