Allie Brosh, Weirdness Decision Trees, and the Easels of Doom on JoCo Cruise 2016
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 07/08/2016

We love Allie Brosh (http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com) and she loves us. (I missed a few seconds as I stopped recording to zoom in.) She doesn’t actually know what she’s going to say, but she has some questions to ask herself, in our voice, to keep her on track. However, no sooner does she attempt to write one of the questions on the easel pad does it fall off the easel. Jonathan Coulton and Storm DiCostanzo come out and attempt to reattach it using an audience member’s Leatherman, until Sara Scrimshaw comes with duct tape to save the day. As they tape the pad up, the legs of the easel begin to collapse, but they leave the stage when they mistakenly think they have it under control. Everything’s fine until somebody asks her to turn the easel slightly more towards the audience, at which point it collapses again. Jonathan Coulton comes out to stabilise it while Paul and Storm remain to do the dirty work of holding it upright.

An audience member offers Allie her hairtie; I don’t remember what happened to Allie’s hairtie originally. As Allie finally writes the first question, ‘What is this???’ Jonathan Coulton secures the easel pad with more duct tape. The answer, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, is that this is weirdness. Allie is pretty far down a very strange decision tree, strange and bad, and she feels very weird and very uncomfortable, and is trying to deal with it in the only way she knows how, which is by talking about it.

As she talks about the many reasons that weirdness can happen, Paul leaves the stage and leaves Storm to hold up the easel by himself. She talks about the series of increasingly weird decisions that you make if you’re weird and you’re trying not to be, and how hard it is to explain once the weirdness finally gets out.

She has three pens, eight pieces of paper, and a banana. Sometimes you’ve just got to turn something over and look at the other side.

Allie’s boyfriend (I think? I forgot where I got that information) comes out to relieve Storm of easel-holding duties. Allie tells us about how getting on this boat was a categorically bad decision, like taking your kids to a midnight splash deck pool party during a full moon if you’re a vampire werewolf mermaid with toasters for arms. But most people’s weirdness isn’t that obvious.

Eventually it’s time to write more on the pad, so she folds the first page over her boyfriend’s head. She’s writing the questions in all caps because she assumes that we are alarmed. HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN? She explains how it happens by means of shapes and squiggles. She talks about being yourself, which is more difficult than it seems, but keep trying! It can’t get much weirder, or if it does, we’re exploring new frontiers. She talks about throwing out all her plans for this show, because she realised she didn’t know what she was talking about and was trying to make it seem like she did. So if she can’t tell us anything worthwhile, at least maybe we can explore these ideas.

With simplicity comes comfort, but it’s still difficult to live your life as if you’re something cool, like a triangle, when you’re actually a weird squiggle.

There’s enough weirdness within a single person probably to sink the entire universe.

She goes on to talk about spirals, and using mistakes as a crude form of echolocation (slightly superior to the running-into-things-with-your-face method.) She talks about trying to solve problems before you understand them, crying at dead puppies, etc.

While I was stopping and restarting my recording to get around the 4GB file size limit, a new easel is brought out, so Allie’s boyfriend can take the old one off the stage. The new easel survives less than a minute. Jonathan Coulton hands Allie a banana. Allie muses on the time when life gets so weird that you have to stop giving a fuck at all, and eats the banana on stage… backwards. She is warned not to slip on the peel.

“Don’t try to help; try to understand”

“There is no wrong data”

She goes on to ask if we want to share anything uncomfortable.

Getting back to the idea of ‘shoulds’, she tells us about the mandatory safety drill ruining the time she needed to reset her brain after getting back on the boat, and about taking a picture during it because they said not to.

She talks about being terrified of bees (fuck bees!) which people don’t seem to understand, even though “bees are basically spiders with wings that actually hate you.” Someone else in the audience had the exact same experience as her and is also afraid of bees though, so that makes her feel less weird. More bee stories come out, and we are revealed to all be very, very, very weird people.

“With weirdness comes opportunity”

We skip the intermission for one last question, but we’re told that if we need to get up and pee we still can, because Paul and Storm will be doing the same show they always do.

The full concert's at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0gKGzU1a0nIrbwmucW7fY2_