On a Personal Note: Spanish Class Was the Best Comedy Workshop

In this segment I tell humorous personal anecdotes. If you hate personal blog posts, skip this; there's plenty of non-personal stuff on this blog as well.

Many kids got their start being funny in Spanish class. The teacher went around the room and you would have to read the one-liner sentence you wrote out loud. For the teacher this was a grammar excercise; for us, it was a comedy showcase with possible industry.

The hacks always went the obvious route and said something like "Yo quiero muchachas y cervesas."

Muchachas y cervesas son hackneyedos.

I took the road less travelled.

"Yo quiero tocar la guitarra, bailar con mismo y Slim Fast bars."

The pinnacle of course was the oral presentation. One semester in college we had to do a short one-act play in Spanish. I was paired up with this musclehead named Marco. He gave me the story idea (two guys are smooth and try to get ladies). I wrote the actual lines in Spanish. He was so serious about this he taught me how to fake getting a punch. During one of our stunt rehearsals, he suggested drinking beer during the presentation. I said "What? We're gonna drink beer during the oral presentation in our morning Spanish class?" He insisted that we had the right because we were both over 21.

So there we were doing some shitty knock-off of the Roxbury Twins in class, drinking our brews. When I put my Bud Lite bottle down it started overflowing onto the floor. In all my life I have never (albeit inadvertently) made a room full of people laugh so hard. The guy in the front row's face turned red.


So here are some comic Spanish excercises to get the creative juices flowing:

1) What do you like to put butter on (use the subjunctive).
2) No seriously, what do you like to put butter on (write "si" nervously throughout the sentence).