Watch or listen to the stand-up comedy special 'Joke Book' (2007) by Greg Proops on Comedy Buff. Transcript available. Tracks include: Donuts, Intro/Dinkytown, Hawaii, Cheney at the Hunt, and Barry Bonds.

Greg Proops

Joke Book

there's worse places than hawaii i expect uh my mother is from mississippi and uh i'm not from mississippi i didn't grow up in mississippi i didn't go to school well no one goes to school funky little state highest infant mortality rate lowest per capita income highest illiteracy rate it's a little slice of haiti right here on our shorts except they don't make baseballs and the music sucks now they've had a hard go they've had a hard go in the last year uh as have all the states down there it's difficult to sympathize though isn't it with people who insist on living in florida refuting the fact that god clearly has it in for florida and yet people persist in dwelling there a place where alligators thrive i think if dinosaurs still rule the earth where you live that's a good notion that maybe humans weren't meant to hang around what keeps people living in florida that's what i like well the weather i say you get up in the morning there's a giant alligator on your car people are like hey look honey there's a giant dinosaur in the pool look here comes another hurricane let's stay life's funny like that and they always ask you hey boy hey boy where y'all from i'm like uh me uh san francisco oh why y'all must be a total fagosaurus of course because as you know every single individual in san francisco is gay every single individual even the children are wildly wickedly savagely deliciously flagrantly gay you can see them skipping to school together and their little same-sex couples holding hands their buttless pink underoos flashing in the wind mother may i have an oatmeal carton for the gay freedom day kindergarten pageant that's how it goes there man some of you are taking a little more seriously than i meant it i told you there's a situation going on there it's an unfair presumption in my estimation i mean if someone from florida was here tonight and they said they were from florida you wouldn't go but you have all your teeth you don't have a shiny pointy hat but if you did it would be hilarious where my mother lived in uh brandon mississippi there was a donut shop called uh deeks and it had the best slogan of any business i've ever been in in my life their slogan was deeks you're one stop donut shop finally we've conquered the interminable adversity that comes with searching for a donut now one emporium has made it so simple to come in and get that donut you've been thinking about and just fucking leave i don't remember a time when it required more than one stop to obtain a donut although it is a zesty slogan one can but infer that before deeks one-stop donut shop that perhaps the ingredients to the donuts in brandon mississippi were loose and left to rome and that you had to do the rounds to get a donut together oh sure i could put the dough in a circle for you but i don't know who's going to cook it on a tuesday now you can go down the road to pearl mississippi to the old harker place they got a pig cooker they'll do you something Big round of applause for Greg Proops, everybody.
Give it up, you ungrateful fucks. Fabulous. It's fantastic to be here in Minneapolis during the... and Stapol. It's great here. I came at the right time during the Moisture Festival. And the Mildew Olympics, it's a combined event. Yeah, I was here last March, and it was resoundingly cold by my pussy West Coast standards. I'm from the West Coast, so anything below 65 is like a complete hypothermia situation for me.
There was a mammoth found in the permafrost in front of my hotel when I was here last year. I know you people are outdoorsy Vikings, and you hop in your canoe in the morning and take an ice bath or whatever and rub your genitalia with a snow cone when you get up, just so that you know that'll be the warmest thing you feel all day. And I see myself standing in front of my hotel crying. I'm so glad you can enjoy my bitter tears of pain and regret, as the wind always finds a way here in Minneapolis to go right up my trouser leg.
Chasing my gonads up into my body, where they sought refuge in an internal organ they had no business dwelling in. I don't want to say it was cold the last time I was here, but I kept finding the diaries of lost Arctic expeditions in front of my hotel. There's no one left but Meriwether and I, we've been forced to live on vitamins till we get to Dinkytown. Don't you think that Dinkytown would be better if everyone there wore green felt boots?
I've been there and everyone's perfectly normal-sized. I expected everyone to be diminutive like little Hummel figures running around the streets. That giant's a menace. Maybe make some delicious fudge cookies or something. So I set my sights on spring. I said, I'm coming back to Minneapolis. I'm coming back, but I'm going to schedule it in spring. Because then the robust Midwestern sun will shine down upon me.
Bringing fertile rebirth to the banks of the Mississippi. Instead, evidently God is angry. At the Minneapolis area. A biblical, unceasing, Noah-like torrent hitting the place. I'd like to ask you people a question. How does rain defy the properties of physics here in Minnesota? There was sideways rain yesterday. Surely the laws of gravity dictate that the water being heavier than the air around it should go to the ground summarily.
But no, sideways rain. And then at one point in the day, upside-down rain. What's up with that? Man. You guys must have messed with the fabric of the cosmos or something to enjoy this kind of bizarre weather. I guess when the North Stars left, that was it. God just went, fuck it. Okay? Rain's going to go in every direction. It's going to snow in June. Fuck y'all. You have some marvelous attractions here, I'm certain.
You have gambling. That's important. Of course, it's out on an Indian casino on Mystic Lake. The mystery being why you would go there unless you weren't looking at the last few golden hours of your life. I guess it's always on the water, the gambling with white people. Up and down the Mississippi River, you'll find casinos. But they're always in the river. And this isn't an accident. It was sacred to the Indians, too.
That was the only place that they would play games of chance. Most of the time, they were pragmatic and did what they had to do. The gathering of hides and whatnot. Then they'd get near the river, hunting a deer. Go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm getting a feeling. I got a little fucking lucky tingle going in my pouch here. Fuck this. Baby needs a new pair of fucking moccasins, baby. I'm going to roll those knuckle bones.
Because I spent time in Las Vegas. And by the way, you guys are doing great. I'd like to compliment you on being a respectful crowd. You're honoring everything I say with a moment of silence. And I appreciate that. I want you to know that you're not at all living up to the cliché of the NPR blue-eyed liberal fuckers that you come off like around the rest of the country. You're as lively as can be, aren't you?
Mind you, you've got water on the backside of your pants. So I don't understand how that would be discomforting. I went to Hawaii and uh do people from mini Opelio go to Hawaii or is there some sort of tropical island in a lake near here that you and I'm going back to Hawaii because I learned something when I was in Hawaii that I didn't know uh Hawaii is where fat people from the mainland go to hide in the herd yeah it's awesome uh I was Kate Moss on the beach there you know what I'm saying I don't know what your body image is like but everybody wants something different you know women are obsessed with oh my earlobes they're asymmetrical one's bigger than the other like what the who cares but you go to Hawaii and it doesn't matter how obese you are you're the thinnest person there it's fantastic I was running down the beach my male breasts flapping covered with tropical breeze cocoa butter I was surprised that the plane could get off the ground from Los Angeles and that we didn't just butt skip across the pacific ocean the whole splash we're here aloha everyone wades out the water rises up and fills up Kilauea the volcano goes extinct pterodactyls are flying out the top tyrannosaurus rex what the happened because the people who live in Hawaii are ginormous as well man so it's like meeting of the giant rotund helium filled people there and there is nothing to do in Hawaii but eat if you've ever been to Hawaii you know this is true if you've ever seen Hawaiian food they eat spam they fry spam in Hawaii they live in an island paradise where pigs roam up and down the fucking streets and yet they'd rather have the tinned version and so have you ever had Hawaiian bread it's sweetened because what bread is so bitter and unpalatable who could choke down the staff of life without mrs butterworth lying a golden landing strip of sucrose across the top to entice you and they're not bothered in Hawaii okay they're not the most edumacated people in the united snakes i mean it's paradise they don't give a shit it's not like manana in Hawaii it's like never is never okay because never is good for me when captain cook arrived there in 1778 i'm certain he forgot to bring books uh when i go back i'm bringing verbs because verbs are the action words like hey could you clean up this bunch of shit that's over here and could you cook me another fucking pig today even though i'm a holly asshole i was staying in kawaii which is the tiny the leeward most of the archipelago as i'm sure you're aware and uh a hurricane hit the place 16 years ago and it must have knocked over like one chicken coop because the chickens have been left to roam and promulgate and profligate and propagate and there are now a billion chickens on the isle of kawaii there's chickens fucking everywhere there's chickens when you open up the refrigerator there's a chicken inside you go into your hotel and there's a chicken standing there chickens are surfing at you down the beach hanging too there's a chicken running up and down the road the road well the muddier flatter area that's near the upturned washing machine and the dead refrigerator and the truck up on blocks it's fucking alabama with volcanoes okay so at the hotel they have a luau and the woman goes he's the best luau on the island well hippity skip and nipsy poo because on a place where if you have a room temperature iq you could be the governor it's not that hard to be the best of anything in hawaii and it was an orgiastic miasma of petronius proportions it was like a fellini satyricon feeding ritual helicopters flew over the beach and just dropped pigs down on the crowd people were eating food off of food okay i don't know how desperate you are to eat but when i get to the plate the show's over but you know what i mean there wasn't like that there there was a pig with a pineapple on top of it and then pui and then a chicken and people weren't even eating it they were just sitting on it they were just like butt sucking it into their body just you know just cut out the middleman so it'd go right into the central digestive system i was out of the country uh when uh dick cheney had his moment in the sun i was in england as i often am because i can't get work here thank you no one laughs at that okay all right and uh the english media is a little different than the american media for instance they have things like um news yeah no with facts and everything sometimes it's crazy although news isn't that great anywhere it's a little bit better in england because you know what news is like here is your grandmother a time bomb can cottage cheese kill you details at 11.
well yeah if you lay upside down and have someone cram it in your throat i suppose cottage cheese could kill you why is my grandmother a time bomb details at 11. could we have some news about that's happening and tonight on america's next top model so the news in england was different what i heard in england was that dick cheney had gone on a tri-state crime spree had knocked over a