bizarro

11 Things: Bizarro

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Dan Piraro's arrival in town completes a Bizarro summer trifecta that involved too much partying with Charo and too many reminders of Ferraro. So I contacted him. After some curious back and forth, I began to realize that the strangest part of Dan Piraro isn't that he's strange, but that he isn't. Like most of us, he loves:

1. Getting up too early: to be at the airport too early to stand in line at security and convince people in uniforms that he's not dangerous.

2. Flying across the country: for a comedy show while wishing someone would put that screaming toddler in an overhead compartment.

3. Watching his luggage: revolve around a crowded room while swearing he'll never do another show again.

4. Wishing obsessively: that he wasn't so obsessive.

5. Thinking: Angelina Jolie isn't nearly good looking enough to put up with living with all those children for.

6. Boring a fellow bar-stooled stranger: with his inner apprehensions about his pathetic need to make a roomful of strangers like him because he's funny.

7. Making sure: the gun in his pocket is fully loaded in case the roomful of strangers doesn't think he's funny.

8. Double-checking: his suicide notes for grammatical and punctuation errors and the proper mix of pathos and humor.

9. Praying: the seats fill up and the scotch doesn't wear off.

10. Listening: to applause and feeling supremely rewarded for all the effort, inconvenience and childhood trauma that led to his demented image of the world.

11. Beginning: to think of his next comedy show.

"Two Funny Heads" with Dan Piraro and special guest Brian Malow. 8 and 10 tonight. $20 (21 and older). Proceeds benefit the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. The Purple Onion, 140 Columbus Ave., San Francisco. (415) 956-1653. www.bizarro.com.

- Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/11/NS7B12P184.DTL

This article appeared on page G - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle