Nobody wants to hear about your buckthorn

As a person who is downtown-HyVee-famous*, sometimes people thank me for doing good things for the community, and that’s amazing because they aren’t even aware of my efforts to combat the dick humor that’s been creeping into the Sunday night comedy scene like so much common buckthorn.

Video below, and full text below that. Props and thanks to Greater Mankato Area Comedy Coalition host Dan Bacula, who’ll keep you updated on GMACC happenings if you ask.

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*That’s where you get recognized while shopping at the smaller of Mankato’s two HyVee stores, but only at the smaller store, definitely not an issue at the big HyVee on the hill, the one with the salad bar and the liquor store.

Hey thanks, Dan. And thank you, everybody. Boy, there have been some allusions to it tonight, but I’m just going to go for it, and say it, about us here as a comedy community: We have become quite scatological, here on Sunday nights.

It’s something I noticed after being away this summer, and then coming back this fall, and wow. And another thing I’ve noticed, I don’t know if it’s related, but we’ve become also quite a boys’ club. So, it’s a lot of men, getting up for five minutes or sometimes more, and talking about their privates and how they function. And in a way, you know, good for us, we’ve become a safe space for men finally to come up here and be vulnerable in that way, here at open mic comedy.

And I don’t say that to make anybody uncomfortable. I know that identity politics are very personal and very sensitive, so I don’t want to be putting a label on anyone who doesn’t own that. And I know that some of the people I’m thinking about, the comics who come up here, they might not identify as men who love getting up in front of a lot of people to talk about their pee-pee. But if they do, if you do identify as a man who loves getting up in front of a lot of people and talking about your pee-pee, I want you to know that I see you.

And I know a few things about respectful communication with people from other cultures. I think that’s probably obvious, because I’m a white lady with dreadlocks. And that’s not my only credential. I have attended a fair amount of diversity, equity, and inclusion webinars. And so from that, I know a few things about communicating with other cultures, and one of the most tried and true strategies that I will share with you tonight, is that a really powerful thing you can do to show empathy and ally-ship for cultures other than your own, is, try to speak in their language. And, it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be clumsy, you will step on some toes or crush some balls, but you do it. You do it because it’s how we show up, it’s how we do better. And so I’m going to do that tonight, as an offering between myself and those of you in this crowd who identify as men who like to get up and talk about your privates. I’m going to offer a bridge. I’m going to try to build a bridge, and I’m going to do that by trying to mansplain scatological humor to you.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help but overhear you tell a joke about your penis. Now, it’s a little-known fact that telling jokes about your penis is not really scatological humor. A lot of people think that that’s the case. That’s not really the case. What a lot of people don’t know is that telling jokes about your penis, that’s a small, small subset of scatological humor. It’s called ‘dick humor.’ Now, the origin of the term ‘dick humor,’ it originated with the British. British military. 1891. That’s something I know because I’m a bit of a language buff. I’m an amateur linguist. Some people might accuse me of being a ‘cunning linguist.’ That’s just me, that’s my humor.“

Now, what I’ve just done, is tell you that I was going to mansplain scatological humor to you. And then I effectively held you hostage while I talked about not one, but two things that no one asked me to talk about. On my way to explaining something that no one asked me to explain. So that’s an even better bridge than I was trying to build. That is even better than mansplaining scatological humor. That is mansplaining how to mansplain scatological humor. And so I hope I’ve built a bridge. Thank you.

Weekly Comedy Open Mic takes place every Sunday at The Circle Inn, North Mankato. Sign up is at 7:00 p.m., performances begin at 7:30ish p.m. Direct questions to Dan Bacula, danbacula@gmail.com.