Gary Gulman dives deep on two of his greatest bits
Deconstructing his state abbreviations and Trader Joe's bits.
Here’s a podcast where Gulman breaks down the joke with James Altucher.
“When I was in 2nd grade, I got the arrow book of the states. I got it in 2nd grade but it must’ve been printed several years prior because the abbreviations was a new concept in this particular version of the Arrow Book of States. For whatever reason, I wanted to memorize the abbreviations. That’s when I noticed how difficult it was.”
Thirty years later, he turned that difficulty into a joke.
I notice this with comedians. They observe everything out of the ordinary.
Seinfeld once said that a regular person goes into Bar Mitzvah and says, “Nice buffet.” A comedian will go in and say, “Why is there pork?”
“You have to learn to be yourself but on purpose.”
-Line from The Color of Money
How a Brief Trader Joe’s Interaction Turned Into Gary Gulman’s Magnum Opus. discusses The Gul’s Trader Joe’s bit: “[It’s] about an entitled woman who parks her cart in the Trader Joe’s line and disappears to grab some frozen foods, is a true-to-life experience that reveals much more about privilege, politics, and depression than it lets on.”
I was at Trader Joe’s and there were two or three elderly women ahead of me, and then there was a woman ahead of them who left her cart and was gone for a while, and to the point where the line moved forward and we went ahead of her and then she came back and she insisted on getting ahead of us again. One of the elderly women — and this is the great line that I take for myself — one of the elderly women said to her, “You went shopping.” And she resisted and she was so hostile and they just gave in, and I was so incensed and had just been empowered by a good therapy session. I decided to yell, “This isn’t fair.” And then the woman turned back to me and she said, “You’ll get over it.” I try to get in front of her and she slammed her cart into my basket and it got ugly. I went onstage that night at the Comedy Cellar and told the story, and the only thing I really had was, “You went shopping.”
Listen to the podcast: