And here are the YouTube links, courtesy of the very funny Matt Woodland:

Part 1 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 2 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 3 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 4 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 5 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 6 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 7 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 8 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

Part 9 of Lynn B. Johnson's Comedy Hour

I've never tried this before but here's my NOT SAFE FOR WORK scriptnotes with post-mortems in parenthesis.

Opening Joke: I want to open a seafood restaurant called “Fishy.”

NSFW dirty jokes about Mr. Hugh Hefner and OTRs

(I told them the title after asking if they knew what NSFW meant, and one girl said “Not Safe For Work” into the mic for me. I asked if they liked my coat, that I was trying a new look, and the response was pretty positive. I asked if they could guess where my coat was from and [P. De Vries?] shouted, “Old Navy.” And I said,

“You’re right! Maybe that will be my thing. ‘Oh, yeah, she’s the one w/ Old Navy.’ I need some Navy jokes now.)

(Then I said that I’d written these pages last night and I was glad to be there. I read the title and then explained that there was a footnote because I’ve read a lot of David Foster Wallace, and if you’ve read even a little of DFW you’ve actually read a lot because that’s what reading him’s like, and that an OTR is an “on-topic related” and that's a real thing that I made up and you should tweet it so I can see it when I get a Twitter.)

I’m not saying Hugh Hefner is old and gets laid a lot, but his balls are retreads.

A retread, in case you’re from New York and don’t know, is a tire that was all used up but remanufactured in order to extend its useful service life.

Retreaded for an extended useful service life. Now, to me, that sounds like Hugh Hefner's balls.

Right on, Mr. Hefner. I believe every word of it.

I don't, however, know what Hef's balls look like in real life: never seen a picture or anything. Which is funny to me, because he publishes the *seminal* (ahem) magazine for naked-women peeping, and yet we’ve never seen his own goodies.

In the day and age of the sex tape of EVERYONE, where is Hugh Hefner's sex tape? What, there’s no videocameras in the Playboy Mansion?

The hilarious Nick Cårøn closed this joke with, “Hugh Hefner has tons of sex tapes; he’s just not IN any of them.”

Anyway, I demand equal play for equal wank. That’s got to be in Title IX, somewhere. (I asked, a few people in the audience knew Title IX enabled equal funding for men’s and women’s collegiate sports.)

Anyway, he was going to be married this weekend but now it looks like the wedding’s off. It’s too bad they couldn’t work it out, Hef and his twentysomething fiancée; you know, for the grandchildren’s sake. Hell, they’re not so different from one another… For instance, his brandy decanter is crystal and her name is Crystal. They enjoy long walks on the beach together: Crystal in her Shape-Ups, Hugh in his oxygen tent.

(Then I offered “Alternate Endings for this joke: Iron lung? Tanning bed? Pajama factory?” Pajama factory worked both with this crowd and my D&D adventuring party.)

They both have bald crotches: hers because she waxes, his because first it went gray and then all his pubes fell out. (When I wrote this joke I laughed so hard, I snorted. I made myself snort. Fucking awesome. So I told the audience, and they asked me to snort but I said I couldn’t do it on demand, that it was an organic thingy. )

This is merely to poke fun at a man who's had my respect for two decades. I'm a 20-year Playboy subscriber. (Told the young audience, “It’s OK to be pushing 40 because you can say you’ve been doing something for 20 years and when you started it wasn’t illegal) and there's a lot to be said for the magazine. Really. The longevity alone: December 1953 was issue one. That was 58 years ago. Some of you have great-grandmothers who are 58-years old. (I told the audience that after that sentence was a parentheses with “Holyoke?” therein and that got all the laughs whereas the great-grandmother part was met w/ crickets.)

Playboy publishes interviews, jokes, searing journalism. I read it for the pussy.

“Retreaded balls.” Funny. I don't think “retreaded cock” sounds as funny as balls. Maybe “prick.” What do you think? Are retreaded balls funnier than a retreaded cock would be? (Someone in the audience yelled, “Johnson!” I said, “Yeah, I’d use that, but my last name is Johnson and I wouldn’t want to seem self-aggrandizing”, which broke the place up and I snorted and they laughed even harder and someone (Matt Woodlawn?) yelled “there it is!”)

Retread. Look it up! If you really want to know about it, you can also retread stairs, which is strange to me because tires and stairs are very different shapes to be associated by the same action verb. For that matter, so are cocks. END of SET

Despite tornadoes raging throughout Western Mass, I went to Bishop's Lounge to do my third-ever stand-up comedy set. I got there too early because I had a lot of material and needed to make an outline of what was going to go where. The sign-up sheet had 15 slots on it and I chose number 12, so that I could go on after people'd had enough booze but so I wouldn't have to follow anyone too funny (the funniest people sign up at the end). The audience was small (I blame the aforementioned tornadoes) so it was basically a whole lot of comedians and maybe five or six actual audience members. Tough room but we made it work.

A couple of interesting things arose last night:

1: Background: two Wednesdays ago, I met a woman who'd been kind of slandered in that day's newspaper — she managed a local restaurant. I was pretty outraged so I wrote a letter to the editor, which ran in that Saturday's paper. Then, about four days later, I went to that restaurant, and a few minutes after I sat down, a waitress approached me. “Are you the one who wrote that letter?” I said that I was, and she thanked me profusely. But I didn't know how she knew it was me until I saw her at Bishop's last night. After the comedy was over I talked to her. “Did you know I was the one who wrote the letter because you'd seen me do comedy here?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. Crazy!!!!

2: Even though there were plenty of available spots, nobody signed up to go on after me. Hmmm.

OK. As for my set, it went well. I had two friends in the audience, one of whom taped me until his batteries died. Here's the link for Lynn B. Johnson's June 1, 2011 tornado-day set. This is the first five minutes and it's actually pretty safe for work. The dirty stuff didn't come in until the end. So, except for some eff words, this video is pretty tame. Another comedian taped my whole set and I'll post that link when I have it.

I'm starting to think there's something to this, people…

I went back and did more stand-up comedy last night. Spoiler alert: I got more laughs than expected. I arrived at 7:36 and the list was already pretty full.

“Is there room on the list?” I asked Nick, the M.C.

“Just put your name down toward the end,” he replied. Score!

The place was super crowded and my friend Ruth showed up with a couple of friends in tow, so this time I knew someone in the audience. This made me a bit more nervous than I would have been, but it wasn't anything a Maker's Mark on the rocks with a splash of water couldn't cure. I had to sit through a lot of comedians because I was in the final four (final three, actually, but who's counting? Me.).

I'd prepared a bunch of stuff over the past week and then didn't use any of it, choosing instead to use the stuff I wrote in the car on the way over. It worked great: much better than expected, per the spoiler alert. I'm proud to say that I didn't recycle any jokes from the week before; it was all new material.

Once again I was the only woman to take the stage, so my opening line was, “I'm Lynn B. Johnson and let's give it up for all the guys who came before me (big applause) because I was on the balcony with them before the show and they ALL came before me (big laughs), which means they're all either really good at it, or really bad at it.

Then I talked about how it's my personal philosophy to set the bar low, except when playing limbo, and how I've lost 60 pounds since the day I gave birth to my second kid, and about my size 16 skinny jeans being like a one-night stand: you're not fooling me, and you're not fooling you, but you're saying what I want to hear, so yeah, I'll get in your pants, Old Navy. Then I talked about fast-food and I got to tell my filthiest joke, yay, and then I talked about BK's $1.99 apple fries (because when I buy an apple I want to pay extra for the packaging), and how God is smarter than us and how that was proved by my conversion to Christianity, and about this Saturday's alleged apocalypse, which everyone had heard about so really, not a bad return-on-investment for that guy's life savings, and then I closed with, “I'll tell you this one last thing: if on Saturday, I'm raptured away, and you loot my house, I will fucking haunt you.” Big laughs. Thanks, you've been a great crowd, goodnight!

Then, at the end of the night when the M.C. puts all of the comedians' names in a hat and the bartender pulls one out and a crappy prize is awarded, guess what? I won! I gave the M.C. shit about the sweater vest he was wearing — I accused him of stealing it from my mom but seriously, I would *never* let my mom wear that thing — and he gave me a credit-card-payment folio with a “happy anniversary” bean in it; I'm to plant it and then it allegedly will unfurl a blossom that somehow conveys a message of “happy anniversary.”

Well, we had already known each other for a week, so I suppose it's apropos. Got lots of “you're funny”s after the set and plenty of hearty handshakes from the other comedians. Nick told me how happy he was that I won tonight's mystery prize, and how he just grabs something crappy from his room to raffle off every week.

Terrific, terrific, terrific. Maybe there's something to this, after all.

Not bad for halfway through my first cup of coffee this morning… this is a “how's it sound?” track as a warm-up to a little concert I'm giving at Teacher Appreciation Day this Wednesday. It helps me a lot to hear a recording of an in-progress song: completely revolutionized my rendition of “Fields of Gold,” though that's not what this song is.

Motormouth fans will be excited to learn that this is my first “New Music” post to feature Mr. Koa (my new tenor uke) as well as my alter-ego, Auntie Haole Badass. Enjoy!

And I know this because a jury of people 10+ years younger than I, with whom I was in no way personally acquainted, laughed their asses off at the stand-up comedy routine I performed at Bishop's Lounge last night. Twelve hours later and I'm still buzzing from the high of it all.

I'm particularly happy because boy oh boy did they set me up to fail. I got there late so I was #11 on the list. Number 10 was a guy who was obviously a crowd favorite, who started his set with the announcement that this would be his last night at Bishop's because he was moving to NYC, and then he went on to do a hilarious set that included jokes about how his grandma buys his clothes and how everyone in the room had measured their own penis at one time or another. Trust me, it was funny.

Then the M.C. took the mic and introduced me with, “I think this is this person's first time here, and I don't know anything about her, so don't feel like you have to react, just do what you'd normally do, it's cool. Please welcome Lynn B. Johnson.” Thanks dude. No blowies for you.

So I changed my opening line to “I'm Lynn B. Johnson and I have never measured my penis, that last guy is full of shit.” And the whole crowd laughed. Then I talked some more and they kept laughing. I couldn't even tell you about 25% of what I said, it just flowed from my hastily scribbled set-list outline. I talked about my Michelle Obama arms (yeah, OK, you got me, I'm not black), about childbirth, about Baby Safe Havens, about diaper changes, about allergies and married sex and snoring. Some girls in the front row had been eating pork paninis, and the M.C. had made much of this, so I referred to Monstro's tool as a pork panini and I thought those girls were going to fall down laughing. My final joke is a thinker, so people were laughing hard and then harder as I left the stage and went back to my corner in the back of the room.

A young woman at the bar got my attention and we went to the lounge area, where she told me that a guy she works with puts together comedy nights in Holyoke and she had to get him in touch with me because I'm “fucking hilarious.” It was about then that my friend Dana showed up (“Lynn, I was on the sidewalk three stories down and heard people laughing and clapping for whom I can only assume was you.”), and after the comedy was over and we were outside on the balcony, she was there to witness all the other comedians coming up to me and saying wow, how great I was, and how they hoped I'd come back next week, awesome set.

I feel like Cinderella. Well, Cinderella with a filthy mouth and no pumpkin.

When 9/11 happened, I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no TV. I read the news but didn't see it. While out the next night for Shannon's birthday at Original Joe's, I sat with my back to the news. Even now, I can honestly say I've seen a mere handful of video captures from that horrible day.

And now, today, Britain's Prince William married Catherine Middleton and she was so beautiful and his uniform was Irish and Westminster Abbey, hard to find a place holier, and the entire event choreographed to high pomp and… eyepiercingly lovely and right, a London fairytale.

And MFM's a total anglophile and would have loved to have watched it with me, and she started watching at 6:00, but I didn't set my alarm and I didn't end up coming downstairs until the young marrieds were happily-ever-after-ing to Buckingham Palace in the convertible coach.

And yeah, of course I DVRd it on the TV in the family room and maybe we'll watch it tomorrow, or this weekend, but I feel guilty. I never manned up to watch any 9/11 videos, the most violent images to be filmed on U.S. soil. What's my worthiness factor for commemorating the happiest and fanciest day of this new millennium?

(Linking my thoughts of the Royal Wedding with NYC mass murder. These connections will be a real boon to the stand-up I'm writing.)

I'd never clicked “slideshow” before, but then TA said she'd just done it and enjoyed it, so I clicked to the Lex in the Snow photo and right above the comments line where it says Posted to: you click the (View as slideshow) link. Some of the connections are funny-creepy but all the photos are safe for work yes, I promise and I have a BA in photojournalism so they mostly don't suck, and it goes pretty quick if you set it for two seconds a picture, and that's all I have to say about that.