HA HA HARVEST COMEDY

virginia jones poster ha ha harvest

This Turkey Day, I return to my comedy home of Portland, OR to perform at the Ha Ha Harvest comedy festival! It’s three days of shows, short films, and laughs! Here’s a sampling of the shows on which I am scheduled to appear! Passes for all three days are available here.

virginia jones on poster comedy cornucopia

Opening the festival in the Show Bar in Revolutionary Hall is this “OOPS, ALL HEADLINERS” lineup, with my hilarious friends Lizzy Cooperman, Ron Lynch, Mav Viola, Janae Burris, and Adam Cayton-Holland. This show is like a taste-test for what’s coming the rest of the weekend. Tickets for this show here!

virginia jones on play along

This show features a band and audience sing-along and play-along, I’m bringing my guitar and I’m ready to rock! Grab an instrument and let’s make noise! This is an early show, and again, a nice warm-up to other shows over the weekend! Tickets here!

virginia jones on crapshoot

Chaos reigns supreme on Ron Lynch’s CRAPSHOOT, where random selection determines what happens all night! This show usually happens at midnight, so Portland is really lucking out with this show! Tickets here!

virginia jones on last supper

This is a loverly little closing show. The very funny and very lovely Riley McCarthy hosts hilarious friends Stephen Agyei, Mav Viola, and Geoff Tate! Tickets here!

I may be stuck onto another odd little show here or there, but rest assured I’ll be on these and I’d love to see you!

So, You’re Going To A Comedy Festival!

So, you’re going to a comedy festival! Congratulations!

It’s so exciting for a new comic to be accepted into a comedy festival! You’re going to travel, meet other comics, do shows, and have fun!

My Credentials

Who am I to tell you this stuff? I’ve done festivals like Sketchfest, Altercation, Bridgetown, LAFF, WICW in Boston, All Jane in Portland, Palm Springs Comedy Festival, Santa Cruz Comedy Festival, Big Pine Comedy Festival, NW Women’s Comedy Festival, Funny Women Festival, Chico Comedy Festival, and best of all, the Antelope Valley Comedy Festival.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Should I drive or fly?

A: If the festival is within a day’s drive of your home, many comics will drive their own car because this affords the opportunity to bring all the weed they need. You can also save some scratch by sleeping in it!

Q: How many times can I expect to perform?

A: In some festivals, you’ll get 3 shows! These are great festivals! Sometimes, you’ll pay to fly yourself across the country to do one show in a small room for twenty people. These are “Festivals Virginia Jones doesn’t give a shit about returning to”

Q: What will I get in my swag bag?

A: Your festival swag bag is a Shroedinger’s box of mysteries. It could contain valuable merchandise and secret information! What it is likely to contain is coupons and small items the sponsors didn’t want, as well as the booker’s 2010 CD and a map to find the afterparty.

If you get a t-shirt, that’s pretty good!

The one thing ALL swag bags will contain is a laminate. The laminate will have your name on it and it is your key to parties, your shows, and any other shows that aren’t too popular.

If your comedy festival doesn’t have a laminate, it’s not a real festival, and it might be a human trafficking ring. Go home.

Q: Will I meet famous people?

A: No. Famous comics don’t go to the afterparties, so you’ll be likeliest to meet comedy celebrities if they happen to be on a show with you, and are not going up too far ahead or after their slot. Don’t worry, you can still add “Opened for (famous comic)” to your bio right away!

Q: Will the festival bookers be super funny people who can help me in the industry?

A: In most cases, the people you are sending your thirty bucks and tape to, the people you are throwing yourself open to for judgement, are no funnier or more successful than you are. They’re just the people who got it together to throw a festival. Your thirty bucks bought them a couple days of burritos and weed.

Q: Will I get DISCOVERED at a festival?

A: There are a couple festivals that can be really good for your career! They are in Montreal and Edinburgh! Most other festivals will really just expose you to local comedy fans and other festival comics.

Q: If I’m not going to mix with the headliners, the bookers are just some dudes who live here, and I won’t get discovered, what am I doing the festival for?

A: Good question! There are three great reasons to go to festivals.

The Credit

At the start of your comedy career, being one of the 85 top applicants to the Pig’s Snout, Arkansas Crawdad Bake and Comedy Festival is a flex! Let everyone know. All the time.

The Shows

Especially if you are from a small scene, these festivals are an opportunity to do some big shows in front of people you don’t know! If you do well, it can feel really good, and if you don’t, it will be educational!

The Other Comics

Seeing the acts of comics from other places is really good for your development. Watching only the acts of the comics in your scene can limit your growth. Maybe you’ll learn that your scene really is the funniest there is! Maybe not! But connecting and networking with comics at or near your own level will give you opportunities to perform in their towns, and visit their scenes! This is, in my opinion, the most important thing about a festival. You’ll run into many of these people again and again through your life, and you can have a laugh and remember, years later, how excited you were to get the t-shirts with the little pig snout and crawdad on it.

All Jane, Meet All Dick Envy

The funniest thing about the poster isn’t its existence.

The funniest thing isn’t the claim that all penises will be severed on site.

The funniest thing is that the guy who made it doesn’t know it’s funny, and doesn’t want his last name to get out in case his girlfriend gets mad.

Postscript: OK, this guy didn’t wind up protesting because he was “frightened for his safety.”  It was a little bit funny for us, looking around at sweet, cute, smart lady comics, people who wear cardigans and glasses, and feeling like we were in the middle of a gender war, but he also might have stayed home because it rained most nights.  Who knows?  Anyway, we never saw him.

All Jane got lots of great press from this threatened protest, from revered feminist institutions like Bust and Bitch, as well as the LA Weekly, Willamette Week, Portland Mercury, etc.  However, with the added visibility, we also started getting spammed by transgender individuals who were offended at the cissexist name, All Jane, No Dick (meaning: assuming there are only two genders.)  Never mind that the festival, its organizers, and its participants are trans friendly and supportive, never mind that one of the performers on a short roster is genderfluid comic Rye Silverman.  A volunteer had to spend a whole day deleting negative comments from the public spaces about All Jane, and lots of comics and organizers were shame-faced to have raised ire from the trans community for our name, even though we know it’s “edgy” and funny.  That’s what comedy is.

But I wasn’t ashamed.  I was mad.  In my unpopular opinion, whether it’s straight men telling women what to do or transgendered persons telling us what to do, it’s still men telling women what to do, and I’m sick of it.  The MOST gender-specific trait for men is telling women what to do, how to be good girls and not offend anyone.  We can make whatever we want, we can call it whatever we want, and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want.  If we offend people?  Good.  Don’t come.  Life is not about never being offended.  Riot Grrl Comedy!  Rant over!  We had fun!  And Sizzle Pie and Montage fed us and it was great!

Postscript: This year, the festival is just called “All Jane.”

Bridgetown Comedy Festival Gets Its Own Twitter Troll

The Bridgetown Comedy Festival, founded in 2008 by Andy Wood, Matt Braunger, and Kim Brady, just celebrated its 7th year of bringing the finest comedy in the world to Portland, Oregon. This year featured over 200 comics, including Emo Philips, Reggie Watts, W. Kamau Bell, Nathan Fielder, and Dan Harmon, who drunkenly announced the end of “Community” on the afterparty dance floor.

Bridgetown features great programming, outings to donut shops and 80’s arcades, but has never had competitions or awards, which can take a group of people having a good time and make them bitter competitors.  

However,  this year a twitter account called @bridgetownfest claimed differently.

Bridgetown has always used @bridgetown to tweet show updates, promotions, gossip and important festival announcements to its 6000 followers.  Six days ago, @bridgetownfest started talking up the same shows and comics, and immediately amassed 60K followers, which made their posts more prominent than the official twitter account.  For several days, it tweeted innocuous posts, many of them copies of actual @bridgetown information.  Comics started tweeting to both, unsure of which was the real account.  Some followers, aware of the duplicitous account, started engaging in the alternate reality with the account.  On Saturday of the festival, the account started asking for votes on such categories as Best Podcast, Best Open Mic Set, and Most Fun To Be Around.

  On Sunday night, @bridgetownfest started announcing  Best of The Fest comics, with awards and thanks going to Nathan Fielder and Emo Philips for their great work. Kanye had robbed Ian Karmel of his rightful place.    T-shirt prices were reduced from $20 to 6 a pop.  And then, the account said there was a big announcement coming.

Andy Wood Posted:

@bridgetownfest tearfully announced that this was the last Bridgetown festival, which came as a big surprise to founder and organizer Andy Wood.  The twitter account thanked its followers, volunteers, comics, and audience members.

The account is now suspended, its tweets hidden, and the cover image has been revised to be about a festival in Australia.

Postscript:  Anonymous sources confirm that the owner of the troll account was indeed Randy Liedtke, who was behind the Pace Picante conversation with Kyle Kinane last year.

All Jane! No Dick!

~THE BEST OF THE BEST OF WOMEN IN COMEDY~
~~OCTOBER 17-20 IN NORTHEAST PORTLAND~~
Innovative, hilarious comedians coming together to perform, discuss, inform, and inspire. A four-day festival featuring stand-up, sketch, improv, panels, workshops, and a documentary screening.

The first and only festival of its kind, this four-day event presents a carefully curated blend of the best up-and-coming comedic performers and nationally headlining comics from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Chicago, and beyond.

This year’s lineup includes Bonnie McFarlane (HBO One-Night Stand, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Last Comic Standing), Lauren Lapkus (Orange Is the New Black, The To-Do List, Are You There Chelsea?), Cameron Esposito (The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, “Put Your Hands Together”), and Aparna Nancherla and Janine Brito (writers and performers on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell). Local performers include Portland staples Whitney Streed, Stacey Hallal, Barbara Holm, JoAnn Schinderle, Susan Rice, Amy Miller, and expatriate Virginia Jones.

The goal of this festival is to celebrate the unique voices of women in comedy, providing inspiration and increasing visibility for the top performers of today and tomorrow. It encourages collaboration and dialogue and highlights the great diversity of artistic approaches amidst female comedic performers today.

Competitive Erotic Fan-Fiction: Laura Palmer

Mom, pretty please don’t read this one either.  I’m sorry.

This was my entry for the second round of Bryan Cook’s amazing show, Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction at the Nerdmelt Theatre on 7/16.

 If you’re not familiar, it’s a show where the first half is talented writers and comics who have pre-written amazing prose, and the second half is crazy people who have had an audience suggestion assigned to them.  It is released in podcast form here, please go listen and attend this show!    Bryan is taking it to SF, and it’s been to Seattle, Portland, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and just all over.  It is hilarious and deeply disturbing.  My first show was just posted, which was a filthy story about Touched by an Angel.  This time, I wrote on a random pull of topic “Laura Palmer”, in 18 minutes.

First of all, the subject-I love Twin Peaks, it’s my favorite, it was the first show I saw every episode of, and there hasn’t been a second- but it’s a pretty weird topic for Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction.  Twin Peaks was pretty much erotic fiction on its own.  All in all, it’s like saying, write a really dirty version of Deep Throat.  So, this story will be the only one that doesn’t have an orgy in it.  Don’t be confused, you’re still at CEFF.

Laura Palmer’s postmortem diary- Fire, Go Fuck Yourself

I’m Laura Palmer and yeah, I’m dead, wrapped in plastic, sooo kinky, as imitated at Halloween by girls who want to sweat off a few extra pounds in Saran wrap. That’s the opening credits and the whole goddamned show is a smear campaign against me.  A lot of claims were made about be before, during, and after the show.  Recently the internet has claimed that I took off my top at the Glastonbury festival, but that was Amanda Palmer, who married Sandman creator Neil Gaiman, so fuck her. The whole two seasons are about how I f*cked everyone in the show and was eventually murdered by a malevolent spirit who took over my Dad, Leland Palmer, who used to sing as he went nuts, like Ophelia,

Does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?

This is a heavily whitewashed version.  What my Daddy really used to sing was:

Whores eat c*ck and mares eat c*ck and little lambs are fuzzy, my kid’ll eat p*ssy too, wouldn’t you?

Everyone thinks I fucked my Dad, and he went crazy from the guilt, but he was slowly going crazy because he spent most of his time licking mercury out of broken thermometers.  Everyone has a hobby.  Sexually, my father was ahead of his time, he was a Bronie.  He went mad drawing graphic illustrations on legal pads of Twilight the Pony being f*cked in all her pony holes, her tail held aside and grasped for purchase.

The only person in this town who I might have had sex with was the FBI agent assigned to my case, unfortunately he showed up after I died. I looked down through the Douglas Fir trees and I liked what I saw.  I’d like to just f*ck his chin, just once.  But it’s all over for me.  Dale Cooper had hair as black as shoe polish and was even hotter than he was in Dune.  He loved coffee and pie and poor little rich girl Audrey Horne, who appeared to be 17 and three quarters for their whole relationship.  I’d like to lick his licorice hairline and rummage through his files.

Audrey Horne, a busty brunette, had the sweetest cherry pie in all of Twin Peaks.  She nearly f*cked her dad one time when she was going undercover as a prostitute at One Eyed Jack’s, but that wasn’t her fault.  She was just trying to get a good review at work.

I supposedly f*cked James Hurley, the adorable boyfriend of my best friend Donna Hayward, but he wasn’t interested.  James was a furry.  He was only interested in people dressed as cum-covered wolves.

I supposedly f*cked Dr. Jacoby, my therapist, and honestly I tried, but he couldn’t maintain a hard on when he wasn’t wearing a lei and listening to the music of Don Ho, and I was simply not that kind of ho.

It’s true.  Sometimes my arms bend back.  It’s because I’m a contortionist and acrobat, which is part of my job as a cheerleader.

Supposedly I had an affair with Bobby Briggs, but honestly he was only interested in watching films of people in business suits taking a shower.  Reputedly I had an affair with his lover Shelly Johnson, the hot-ass waitress in town, who would put on a wool suit and get down in the shower for Bobby, with blonde hair cascading, and I was supposed to have slept with her murderous drug dealing brain dead new-shoes loving trucker husband Leo, but I didn’t have sex with them.  I couldn’t stand those guys.  Besides, Shelly was a fecal freak and Leo preferred to be beaten with footlong novelty gummy rat candies while being penetrated with a Tootsie Roll bank he had bought at Disneyland.

I was accused of having an affair with Diane, whom agent cooper sends microcassettes to.  She’s not even a person, she’s a figment of his goddamned imagination!  He’s a hot ass crazy person!

I supposedly had sex with Jaques Renault, the Canadian drug dealer, but he was only sexually interested in women farting onto cakes.  Also, as a Quebecer, he spoke French like a slow child and English like someone who once saw something in English.

I supposedly had sex with a backwards-talking dwarf who danced weird and was obsessed with gum, but honestly, who could?  WHO COULD?

One woman could.

But It wasn’t me.  I met my maker with a slit so tight you could whistle through it, like when you blow across a fresh green blade of grass pulled taught between your thumbs.

My c*nt looked like a goddamned paper cut on a crisp white business envelope and honestly it’s a waste.

I’m a scapegoat, when I died it was seen as a way to keep the peace and knit this broken little town torn apart by its secrets back together.

Do you know who it really was?  Who screwed all those people, who catered like a slave to their strange afflictions and affectations and who simultaneously brought this town together and tore it apart?

The log lady.  Her log saw things.  Her log did things.  Awful things.  There’s splinters from that log in every tw*t and a**hole in this town, and from skull f*cking poor Nadine Hurley’s empty eyesocket, her eyepatch abandoned on the couch.  she cradles her log and fingers the edges worn smooth from activity, sometimes smelling it and reliving memories and looking into the past and towards the future.

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, or in the city of Twin Peaks- It’s because, as  Pete Martell said, “There was a fish in the percolator.”