Controlling My Kids With Comedy, A Love Story

By Michael Kornbluth

Stay At Home Dads get no respect. Controlling My Kids With Comedy, A Love Story, is a clown origin story about a Stay At Home Dad who fights back through punchlines in his quest to become a best selling author and podcast hero to make his Do It All Dad Year come true. Controlling My Kids With Comedy, is also a faith powered tale about God giving you unplanned kids to make sure you never give on doing you and how unplanned fatherhood, gives birth to bigger and better dreams than before like working from home, the best choice our dads never had. It's also about making the most of your stage with your kids and growing closer to them by making them laugh more than Ted from accounting. Controlling our kids with comedy, can make our kids great again. Do It All Dad's 3 fuss free kids, 98.7 percent of the time, are living proof of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Kornbluth
• Release date: Sep 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005610883

Michael Kornbluth

Michael Kornbluth is the author of a parenting memoir Controlling My Kids With Comedy, A Love Story, Do It All Dad Does Jokes, a spiritually powered, midlife crisis reinvention tale, The Great American Jew Novel and a pre-election comedy special Resist This. The Good Men Project made him a featured author, publishing 24 of his blogs about serving lady laugh and being an involved, stay at home dad and father of 3 in his quest to get paid as the star author voice behind the remote work revolution while hosting the Do It All Dad Year Podcast, which secures his good guy, non-divisive status but not really.Michael Kornbluth has also played the role of Hair Metal Comedian Historian, when he was hired to write all the TV host script reads for America's Hard 100, a music video countdown special, voted on by 1.5 million fans on VH1 Classic, hosted by WWE great Chris Jericho. Fire and Knives, voted best new food magazine in England, published his short food fiction pieces such as My Very Last Meal, I Don't Drink German Rieslings and Anthony Bourdain Rips My Frozen Lunch Apart. His 30 Rock script, the Kings of Comedy, placed 3rd in the THE SPEC SCRIPTACULAR, which made him a Recommended Writer on TV Writer.com.The Do It All Dad Year Podcast, what Gen X Dads understand, has generated more than 11,000 downloads and his Do It All Dad Year Blog has produced more than 15,000 pages views since his lucky number 3, Samuel Chosen Curls, Was Bound To Woo, was born. Controlling our kids with comedy, can make our kids great again, Do It All Dad's 3 fuss free kids, 98.7 percent of the time, are living proof of it. John Lennon wishes he was this productive during his stay at home dad years.

Book preview

Controlling My Kids

with

Comedy

A Love Story

Michael Kornbluth

Controlling My Kids With Comedy

Copyright © 2019 Kornbluth Michael

All Rights Reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents ei-ther are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitious-ly. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Formatting by Rik – Wild Seas Formatting

Dedication

To my home team—Natalia, Matilda, Arthur, and Samuel. I love that my world revolves around you. It helps knowing how much you adore me, especially you kids.

Introduction

Comic great Norm Macdonald once said, Comedy is where truth meets fiction. He’s great for a reason, folks. The majority of the punch line–driven quotes in this book showcase slices of real-life moments, coupled with an exaggerated truth, a deeply felt point of view, and a bit of over-the-top fiction, although my daughter would lead readers to believe she inspired the entire book and uttered the funniest lines without the need for any additional comedic polish.

1: My Clown Origin Story

Concerned texts from ex buds after seeing shades of me in The Joker film, spoiler alerts abound.

Are you still the only one laughing at your own jokes? You weren’t beaten up at sleep away camp in CT for faking your ankle sprain to get out of running suicide drills, so what’s your excuse?

They say you’re considered crazy until you make it. So how crazy does it make it you feel, knowing Pete Davidson can buy and sell you daily, when he’s your 20-year junior, you know the rebound boy toy pinup for Generation Z.

So, when the Joker suffocates his mother to death in a hospital pillow. Did you feel strangled by despair, knowing the Joker’s mother thought less of her son’s comedy ambitions than your own mom does?

Joker could’ve been Bruce Wayne. But you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth in Scarsdale, NY and got to take your SAT’s un-timed. So, what’s your excuse for taking so long to make it as comedian already?

Killing on Kimmel should be enough. So, he hired Bill Simmons ages ago to write jokes over you. Look at it this way, you never would’ve come up with 30 for 30 on your own.

What’s my clown origin story exactly? There was my guiding star, Judy Cook, the founding member of our Alternative School, in Edgemont, NY, who gave me the bright idea of becoming a comedian one day, after I came out of my shell Senior year in high school because I won the International Award for a hooking up with a couple of Israeli gals on the Kibbutz, a Jewish, community hippie farm, I stayed at during my Masada teen tour summer after my junior year in highs school.

I always was a late bloomer. Also, my younger brother of 3 years got into the puberty party before I did on top of losing his virginity before I did, which made me feel like a real big brother bust. Back then, I felt like Charles Smith on the Knicks, with an even shittier hook shot.

Back to Judy, so one time during one of our Alternative School barbe-que retreats, everyone is rehashing about their time away building homes for Habitats for Humanity and I made up something about in-terning with the Dali Lama, which forced me to quit smoking weed, so I could remember my mantra already, or something like that, which got laughs.

The million-dollar question is at 43 years old with 3 kids to feed and a wife to prevent from divorcing me, am I still slinging jokes on my podcast for free as a form of coping or clowning? I think it’s a combi-nation of the two. But coping sounds too psychological babble like for me.

Yes, I write jokes to process my rageful feelings in relation to disre-spectful slights. Dice, one of my role models calls himself a clown. Norman Lear, creator of All In the Family, called Redd Foxx one of the great clowns, so I don’t mind being lumped in with such star-powered company one bit. Larry Charles, writer on Seinfeld, said Larry David would actually kill people if he could get away with it. Adam Sandler’s funniest stuff for me as a rageful streak to it, so I totally believe com-edy is a coping mechanism for comedians to go for the retaliatory kill without actually killing for sport or the mere fun of it like Joaquin Phoenix does in The Joker with possessed, fun-filled relish.

Killing dream stompers loudly at the comedy club, on a podcast, WordPress blog or at the local deli, is what drives this comedy clown slave to make the most of his comedic gifts of expression. Comedy Clowns are slaves to the grind but become more obsessed with killing them all, the funnier, faster and more emboldened we get. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, especially bombing, which only kill-ing again can repair.

The clowns in my head, are permanent fixtures of me. Growing up before my voice hit puberty, my voice fluctuated between Dice and Rodney. And till this day, my quest to be recognized as a big deal funny man on the rise, stems from my guiding star who shined a light on a brighter, more kick-ass, rock and roll future I never dared imagine or entertain for myself.

Thanks Judy, for giving a painfully shy, Jewish boy at the time, some-thing to believe in.

2: The Stay-at-Home Comedian

For the record, I came up with the expression stay-at-home comedian before I had heard Garry Shandling use it to describe himself during a stand-up comedy set I saw on Judd Apatow’s HBO documentary on him. At the time, I had only one child, and I hadn’t yet received my TV-writing break at VH1 Classic. Now I’m an unemployed comedian and a father of three. So, despite Garry Shandling’s reputation as a re-clusive comedy whisperer to the stars during his post-Larry Sanders years, chances are he got out of the fucking the house to entertain and do more sets at the Hermosa Comedy and Magic Club than I ever did.

I met Garry Shandling once while I was doing catering work at an art event in Pasadena, California, around 2002. It was my first year of do-ing open mic stand-up comedy. Of course, I introduced myself. I told him I was doing stand-up and wanted to write for TV. He said, Keep writing, and you’ll look like me.

Always funny and kind—a class act till the end. God bless Garry Shandling. He lived out his dream and got to give Gina Gershon a foot massage on The Larry Sanders Show. So far, I’ve had to settle for passing Gina Gershon in the West Village with my wife, making heated eye contact with her along the way. She uttered a breathy hey. It was like watching lost treasure float off into the distance with One-Eyed Willy.

But this stay-at-home comedian tale isn’t about my nonexistent sex life, since the cumulative effect of three breastfed kids has turned our bed into a permanent 24-7 milk bar. The other night my daughter said, Mommy, you don’t love Daddy, because you’re never affectionate with him. For example, not once do I ever see the two of you kiss.

Meanwhile, my daughter doesn’t understand how hard it is for my wife to get up for some good old-fashioned bed-elevating boom boom circa 2010, which was our falling-in-love, sweaty sex period, especially when her husband fails to bring home any loot for the family for almost three years straight as a stay-at-home comedian and a father of three. Role playing gets uncomfortable fast when your wife feels that you’re starting to strangle her too hard financially.

So, what makes me a stay-at-home comedian? Well, I’m a pretty prolif-ic joke writer. For three years, my open mic has been a social media site called Comedywire and Twitter. On Comedywire I’ve banged out over seven thousand jokes, voted on by other comedians. On Twitter my grand total before I pulled the plug on my account was an accumu-lation of forty thousand jokes since hopping on the platform seven years ago, after my daughter was born. President Trump’s tweet output is around forty thousand. Obviously, native New Yorkers from Queens have zero problems expressing themselves, and they never run out of colorful things to say.

About a year ago I did an open mic at the EastVille Comedy Club in Manhattan. It was a good set, for the five remaining in attendance. I opened with, "Caitlyn Jenner wasn’t asexual, married to Kris Jenner, but I bet Bruce Jenner stayed harder longer after he got Kris to cut her hair short, so she looked more like a dolled-up Ralph Macchio. I don’t miss playing basketball in Queens. One time my brother and I were about to play a game of one-on-one, and five black guys showed up on the court, all wearing wifebeaters and jean shorts, looking like they all got dressed up for Coolio Appreciation Day. Then the leader of the ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ coalition barked out, ‘Yo, blacks versus whites.’

My asshole immediately tensed. It felt like my manhood was just shredded to pieces. I leaned over to whisper toward my younger broth-er, ‘Black versus whites. This basketball court turned into a prison-yard scene real fast. We better look around for some neo-Nazis to protect us. We didn’t watch every single episode of OZ for nothing. At least our bump-free noses work in our favor.’

I miss getting laughs on stage while performing stand-up comedy. Getting laughs is still the best feeling in the world, but you only get great at stand-up comedy by getting on stage all the time. I don’t want to abandon my kids for the road three hundred days per year to wait around forever for my allotted stage time just yet. Arsenio Hall took a break from showbiz at the height of his Coming to America fame to look after his kid, and he looks like a million bucks today. I’m forty-two and still get asked for ID, so I must be doing something right. Getting asked for ID at Target with my three kids makes me feel like a teen dropout from Tallahassee, whose LinkedIn profile should read crystal meth home maker. I’m a joke machine now. I couldn’t stop if I tried. Controlling our kids with