My friend Jim O’Grady is a Moth GrandSLAM contest winner — a great storyteller and a great guy. He’s been a reporter for the New York Times, and works for some mysterious think tank that he says is “physically located on Wall Street, but in no way associated with finance.”

The thing about these story shows is that they let anybody onstage, which gives the show its spirit and beauty. It keeps it from being the province of writers and actors and “who do you know” and lets the voice of the people come through. It also allows people to weep onstage and do some lame standup comedy from time to time. It’s always a crap shoot, and the surprises are the best part.

Jim’s reliably awesome — he has his nights when he kills, sure. But even when he’s not at his best, he’s still really really good, and whenever he gets picked to come to the stage the audience is in for a treat.

Here he is at a Moth StorySLAM this summer, on the theme of “Respect.”

You can see a story by The Moth’s Juliet Wayne here:

Juliet Respects ‘Mannequin Dan’

And two of my stories here:

Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band
Reverend Al Sharpton Hates Royal Quiet Deluxe, Chicken Band

There’s just something beautiful about the cultural dissonance created when something saccharine and innocent meets something…well… not.

Case in point - these stellar YouTube mashups, which pair old Muppet Show and Sesame Street footage with death metal songs:

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I was an extra in the pilot for a zombie romantic comedy this weekend — another one of my friend Eliza’s zany schemes to dominate Internet comedy. We filmed at Planet Rose Karaoke in the East Village, a small karaoke bar painted bright red with a lot of zebra-print furniture and a leopard-print carpet filthy enough to shock John Waters.

It looked like everyone in the bar had been simultaneously kidnapped by aliens at closing time the night before. There were beer bottles everywhere, the bar was all sticky, and a lashing of vomit festooned the edge of the men’s toilet. Using my highly trained sense of party forensics, I deduced that it’s pretty fun place to be on a Saturday night.

I played the bartender in a club scene where this guy nervously navigates a rebound after a bad breakup with a nightmare woman who talks in baby talk, drinks Sprite and tequila and hates listening to music. We spent all day shooting a scene that will probably take five minutes to watch, tops. We did a lot of taking and retaking, hearing the same lines again and again. That’s how it goes when you’re shooting pretty much anything — the difference being that since everyone on camera was a really good improv comedian, each take was funny in a different, distinct way while still using the same old words.

That’s why I love doing Eliza’s shoots — I always met really cool people. Like my new friend Lou.

Lou’s one half of a comedy duo called Greg and Lou Present Lou and Greg. You might recognize ‘em from their video Office Pornwhich did pretty well on Digg a little while back.

They’re putting on a show tomorrow night at UCB, too — here’s the info:

Greg and Lou Present Lou and Greg in: The Fuck-It List
Written by Greg Burke, Lou Perez, and AJ Morales

Thursday May 8th, 6:30 PM at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
307 West 26th street @ 8th Ave (map here)

Tickets are $5, reservations here

I’d be there my damn self if I weren’t booked solid already, for real. Lou was cracking me up all day Sunday, and he’s sure a nice young man who deserves five lousy bucks. Here’s Office Porn, just as a taste — more videos here.

I got on the wrong subway last night and it turned out so right — while navigating through the Times Square catacombs I heard this incredible clanking funk like a groovy factory or Tom Waits in the late ’90s. Turns out it was a spectacular pots-and-buckets drummer, the godfather of all buskers knocking out rhythms simultaneously organic and industrial.

I broke out my camera to take some video and the drumemr stopped the beat to point at me with a stick and shout “Five dollars for the video!” at the top of his lungs. I didn’t get it at first, and he had to shout a number of times, to the terrific enjoyment of the crowd. Then I got it and gave the guy ten bucks. He was that good by himself, but his dancer was amazing.

You can see the drummer and dancer in my video, below. The dancer is cold stole by the rhythm at first and it is giving him a sickness that is gonna turn real good. Like how a flu shot wears you out a little but toughens you right up — this man goes from a twitching rhythmic allergy into an incredible, fluid poet.

Again, I can only shoot 30 seconds at a time, so this is cut together from a number of smaller pieces.

I just discovered SoCalled about fifteen minutes ago and I’m smitten already. This video has the best things in the world all in one place: cowboys, retro robots, soulful singing and solid beats. It also would have scared the absolute whoopsies out of me when I was younger, along with mimes and certain department store mannequins. And the wind.

Here’s SoCalled’s MySpace page, and the video for ‘You Are Never Alone’:

I flew to LA with my writing partner a while back to pitch an idea for a Web-based TV show. More about that here, but suffice it to say that despite it being politely rejected almost immediately, we got some good advice and I had probably one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve had in my career as a writer.

My partner and I vowed to get back on the horse, and saddle up we have.

We’ve spent the past few weeks tearing out virtual hair out to re-craft a treatment for our story, one that reads “funny” immediately, as opposed to one that relies on gobs of wacky backstory to explain itself.

Or, in our case, gobs of wacky backstory delivered by me in a nervous monotone, too scared to look at the development exec but too proud to look at the floor. This results in a flat delivery from a bald guy in a necktie with a thousand-yard stare that would make the Son of Sam say “C’mon man, lighten up, jeez.”

So yeah, the two things I learned were: you got to SELL the funny, right there on the paper. And during the pitch, lighten up a bit your damn self.

That’s what a story treatment is, as I understand it: a two-page document that encapsulates the spirit of the show and all its characters, written magnetically and simply for people who are, in all actuality, too busy to read it themselves. Here’s one for “Freaks and Geeks,” a doomed and fantastic TV show that was also too smart for its audience. We’ve been pretty much using this as a Bible, really. The series Bible itself is pretty fascinating, too.

And that “as I understand it,” that’s the doozy right there. I didn’t even THINK about any of this stuff before January. January, 2007. So yeah, I have no idea what I’m doing. We’re just winging it here. Totally making it up as we go along. It’s terrifying and frustrating when there’s nobody to turn to, but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s jsut awesome enough to make everything turn four inches tall except us and this towering pile of golden copy … which will become compost in 24 hours. You gotta kill your darlings, man, and today’s golden egg is tomorrow’s shit-smeared goose fetus.

People have been saying to us “Why don’t you guys just make it yourselves and put the thing on YouTube? You know, generate some buzz?” And those people, they have a solid point. But I mean, look. I’m not an actor or a director. Yet. I just got into this in January, and my partner, he’s not a seasoned pro, either. We don’t have a camera, editing software, any of that stuff. But we got laptops and meager enough connections to pitch through. So to our way of thinking, why work for free when you can try to get paid along the way to developing it yourself?

I mean, shit. YouTube and the rest of Web 2.0 is making a lot of money off the great mirage of user-generated content. And to some extent, that’s fine. I mean, I don’t get a dime for this blog. But one day people are gonna realize it and say “man, we’re a bunch of suckers.” And how awesome would it be to get paid for writing now, rather than later?

That mindset, I think has been my greatest helper AND hindrance in my writing career. On the one hand, I get paid. Sometimes. On the other, I might not go out on limbs that I should.

Anyway. After working as an extra for my friend Meredith’s stellar Web-based TV show ‘Defenders of Stan’ this last weekend, my beat got turned right around. Please, if you have a few minutes, go check out the shows. They’re only 5 minutes apiece and they’re AWESOME. And you know what? These guys are just DOING it, for real, seat of the pants, not holding their breath for a damn thing, and it’s working out well for them.

That’s right: they’re becoming very successful by simply doing the exact opposite of what my partner and I think is a good idea.

So we started writing scripts this week. We’re moving forward again, and CHRIST is it ever cool. I forget, on a weekly basis, how much I love writing. Maybe blogging makes me a little tired sometimes. It’s a freaking treadmill. But just WRITING, creating stuff, making jokes, telling stories … there’s nothing like it in the world. One of my writing partners and I cranked out two 5-minute scripts this week. They’re rough. They might not be funny, and they probably completely suck. Just pixels on the hard drive, knowing you put in a solid couple days and made yourself laugh doing it … again, nothing like it in the world.

Now I’m exhausted and giddy. I’ve been consuming bourbon and coffee in a 1:1 ratio all night and it’s time to lie down and let them fight it out. Tomorrow, we’re going to talk. We’ve yet to cram these tattered little rags with stories on them into a real story structure, but I feel awesome all the same.

Now if I could just get PAID to feel like this …

This link will take you to a pretty awesome tutorial on the basics of story structure for Web video. It’s a fascinating read, and goes a long way toward explaining why some short films are worth re-watching and forwarding to your friends, and why a LOT of “user-generated content” in the video-sharing world completely blows.