A Spoken Word Tour of the IAmEli's Comedy Factory

With the quarantine in place, all non-essential businesses have been shut down. Luckily, IAmEli’s Comedy Newsletter was deemed essential, and can therefore continue. 

But some of the other ventures under the IAmEli’s Comedy brand umbrella were not so lucky. For example, IAmEli’s Comedy’s Branded Duvet Covers can no longer humor people to sleep. The IAmEli’s Fortune Telling Booth at the Coronado Shopping Center in Albuquerque, NM has gone kaput for the foreseeable future, which, to them, is the entire future. In spite of its early shift to carside service, I fear the IAmEli’s Comedy Divorce Attorney LLC is a donezo law practice. Additionally, IAmEli’s Comedy’s Private Military Contractors may never recover from our late-February team-building retreat, which was filled with an all-personnel massage train and games of telephone.

But of all the amazing, inspiring IAmEli’s Comedy ventures, the one whose shut-down saddens me the most—even temporarily—is IAmEli’s Comedy Tours of the IAmEli’s Comedy Factory. I’m beginning to feel like Willy Wonka at the beginning of that documentary where a bunch of people tried to steal his chocolate recipe. And even though the comedy recipe thieves have been no match for my defenses (big thanks to IAmEli’s Private Military Contractors for that), we simply could not continue operating in good conscience at this time. 

The IAmEli’s Comedy factory is a crowded, mischievous place filled with sinister traps and fruitless dead ends. Plus it’s dangerous. Deeply, terrifyingly dangerous. The type of dangerous where if you go in, you come out drawing primitive colorful rabbits to the confusion of your peers. But what makes it so?

For the first time ever, here is a spoken word tour (if you read it out loud to yourself) of the IAmEli’s Comedy factory. I’d appreciate if you kept your hands and words to yourself for the duration of the tour.

As you step into the entryway, the first thing you’ll notice is the blaring speakers. You may find them somewhat disorienting, and I sincerely apologize. They’re constantly playing a loop of every off-hand critical comment I’ve ever received from strangers and friends, and I have yet to figure out how to control their volume. For now, I’ll just try to speak over them.

Follow me into the first chamber. As you’re walking, step around any icky piles of mushy brain. I know it’s yucky, and it’s everywhere, but the rules say I can’t get rid of it. So the brain is unfortunately here to stay—unless I can figure out a way to bend the rules.

Past all the gooppity brainy goop, feel free to peer through the window into that little room with all the mattresses turned up against the walls. Do you see all those gelatinous-looking stacks?  

Each one of those is a giant stack of repressed outbursts. People usually don’t expect there to be so many repressed outbursts due to the volume of unrepressed outbursts they see outside the factory. So I’ll just say there’s only one safety officer, and he gets 3 weeks paid vacation per month. Plus summers off. It’s a tough job, and he deserves at least that. 

As we step out into the next passageway, you’ll want to hang on to your hat because it’s very windy in here, with air moving every which way, but especially blowing directly into your face. Also for this passageway, leave a trail of breadcrumbs because it’s windy, like when a road twists and curves in such a way that it’s easy to get lost. Lastly, focus up and hunker down because it’s pretty windy, like when a speech uses countless multitudinous diverse innumerable unnecessary words, but ultimately uses all those abundant words to say almost not even a single gosh darn thing.

As we walk through this triple windy passageway, I’ll occasionally yell, ‘duck!’. If I yell ‘duck!’, you should hit the ground—fast—because there are automatic pitching machines scattered all throughout the hallway, and they pitch things—often. 

Hence why the walls are splattered with paint, half-finished thoughts, and youtube URLs. Sometimes I like to lay on the ground in here and watch which way the windy windy wind pulls the things that get thrown to it. But more often than that, I don’t duck quickly enough, and I end up getting bombarded by an endless stream of youtube URLs (pun intended, but retracted.). Somehow all the other stuff—the ~productive~ stuff—tends to completely miss me.

Follow me to this next door, but follow closely because the knob is quite tricky. You see, the sign says, ‘to open door, turn this knob’, but really the door’s hope is that you don’t wish for the knob to be turned. So if you need to rotate the knob to open the door, then the door will stay closed to you. As a matter of fact, the only way through this door is to prefer its knob unrotated. Ideally, you're perfectly content with the door and the doorknob, except for the fact that you’d prefer to be on the other side. But that’s really your issue more so than the door’s or the doorknob’s, hence why it’s okay. Anyway, sorry about the tricky signage, but it’s the only way that made any sense to me when I was setting everything up.

Okay, okay. Now we’re on the other side of the temperamental door (hopefully!), and, as it happens, we’re actually outdoors, as opposed to indoors. Isn’t the garden nice? The breeze? The stream? I like it out here. The only small issue I have with it is that the Wi-fi connection is somewhat slow. Plus, whenever I bring my computer out, the garden, the breeze, and the stream all disappear, and the entire area is replaced by an endless grey expanse of nothingness that smells faintly of sardines and confinement. Maybe that’s why it’s so relaxing when I don’t have my computer. But who can say for sure?

Now follow me around the outside of the building—I’ve got a real treat for you all. This is the comedy graveyard *lightning crashes*. It’s where unfinished or unfit jokes go to put everyone else out of the misery of hearing them. Before getting buried though, the jokes are painfully embalmed *thunder flashes*, then the embalmed joke, along with all the doodas and whatsits with which it came into the world get tossed underground and buried under  approximately 450 pounds of dirt, depending on the moisture content. *It begins to rain* 

As the rain kicks up the dirt, can you taste the stale premises wafting through the air? It rains often here at the IAmEli’s Comedy Factory’s Joke Graveyard. The rain keeps the dirt soft. Sometimes, when the rest of the factory inexplicably grinds to a halt, I’ll wander through the graveyard wondering what could have been. Then I’ll sit down in front of a gravestone—to get a closer look—and I’ll notice the soft wet dirt. And before I know it, I’m digging. Then I find myself holding the embalmed joke and wondering if I should have ever buried it at all. Was it just ahead of its time, and now it’s finally ripe? Probably not. But much of what the IAmEli’s Comedy Factory produces was once buried in this exact graveyard. Maybe if you look closely, you’ll get a sneak peek at the zombies to come.

Alright, that’s enough time with the future joke zombies. Let’s head back inside, where we’ll find ourselves in a room that, regardless of where you're taking a tour, always indicates that the tour finished: the gift shop! If you enjoyed the tour, pick up a comedy magazine, an IAmEli's Comedy's branded duvet cover, or a few armed guards (courtesy of the IAmEli’s Comedy’s Private Military Contractors).

Thanks for coming on the tour today!