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Comedians on psychedelic drugs


 
If you just want the tl;dr, feel free to skip to the bottom of this post where comedians George Carlin, Joe Rogan, Doug Stanhope, Bill Hicks and Duncan Trussell are heard discussing their experiences with psychedelic drugs. I won’t be offended.

There was a period of my life when I was in my 20s where I had no idea what to do next. I’d been in Los Angeles pitching TV show ideas around, without success, and had moved back to New York in an effort to shake things up and change my luck, but that was even worse. I was depressed and confused basically about what direction my career and life should take, working in a shitty job I hated and… things just sucked.

It was at this point fate intervened and presented me with a gram vial of DMT. Why not? It was a message in a bottle from God, I rationalized, as I went through that gram, and then a second, and about, I dunno, perhaps 45 grams of mushrooms in the coming two months. I could smoke DMT four times a day, easily. That probably seems just a little bit excessive, I realize, but I still held down a job even if I was carrying on a schizophrenic dialogue with my spirit guide, a wise-cracking raven with a voice like Eddie Murphy.

Just kidding. No, I’m not going to get into any of my “tripping stories” or anything like that (plenty of those—not mine—over at Erowid Vaults) but I will say that it did inspire me to change my act basically, like George Carlin talks about in his section of this video. Within a few months of my “psychedelic period”—this was in the mid-90s—the possibility the Internet seemed to offer as a place for my particular talents to prosper was becoming apparent to me and I started trying to get Disinformation off the ground.

I agree with Terence McKenna: If you go to your grave without having pierced the veil with psychedelics, it’s like dying a virgin. Yeah, I maybe went a lil’ ‘round the bend for a couple of months, but like the gentlemen in the video below, no regrets:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.10.2014
04:30 pm
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That’s disgusting: Sexual repulsion diminished by sexual arousal
09.18.2012
02:07 pm
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They need a good name for this, like “The Ron Jeremy Effect” or “The Hedgehog Syndrome” or something:

A small Dutch study, released Wednesday, set out to identify the psychology that leads women to willingly, and even enthusiastically, engage in sexual activities despite the ick factor. The results, published online in the journal PLoS ONE, indicate that arousal overrides feelings of disgust and facilitates a woman’s desire to do something that a woman who is not aroused might find flat-out repulsive.

“Women [who] were sexually aroused were more willing to touch and do initially disgusting tasks,” study co-author Charmaine Borg, a researcher in the department of clinical psychology and experimental psychopathology at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, told The Huffington Post.

Borg and her colleagues separated 90 female university students into three equal groups: one watched “female friendly erotica;” one watched a video of extreme sports meant to get them excited, but in a non-sexual way; and one watched a video of a train, meant to elicit a neutral response.

The women were then given 16 tasks, most of them unappealing. They were asked to take a sip from a cup of juice that had a large (fake) insect in it, to wipe their hands with a used tissue and to take a bite from a cookie that was sitting next to a living worm. The women were also asked to perform several sex-related tasks, like lubricating a vibrator.

Women in the “aroused group” said they found both the unpleasant tasks and the sex-related tasks less disgusting than women in the other groups. They also completed the highest percentage of the activities, suggesting that sexual arousal not only decreases feelings of disgust, but directly affects what women are willing to do, the study shows.

This “repulsion reflex” as it might be called, is there to inhibit women from having sex with men with poor hygiene, getting sexual diseases or I guess from being on the receiving end of some inferior baby batter. Or not.

The thing I kept thinking about, though, as I read this item, was this utterly genius bit by the godlike comedian and national treasure, Doug Stanhope:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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09.18.2012
02:07 pm
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Happy f’ing 4th of July: Doug Stanhope on American xenophobia
07.04.2012
03:42 pm
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Doug Stanhope is a national treasure, despite what he might think of nationalism (he’s agin’ it, sensibly).

An excerpt from his brilliant 2007 No Refunds set. Both it and 2011’s equally brilliant Oslo: Burning The Bridge to Nowhere (which absolutely slayed me) are on NetFlix to watch instantly.

What better way to spend the 4th of July than watching one of American’s finest comics? Right? Of course, I’m right.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.04.2012
03:42 pm
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