Hoaxes and Jokeses: examples, issue 1

by Rodney Marks | Mar 8, 2017 | Business, Comedian, Comedy, Corporate, Entertainment, Events, Hoax, Ideas, Keynote, Speaker, Speaking

I’m often asked for examples of comedy hoaxes that I’ve presented. This list is part of an ongoing series of examples of my comic corporate impostor roles. If I show 10 at a time, there will be about 300 posts.

I have a database with more material, including client feedback, occasional audio and video, and associated war stories. The thing with working ‘live’ is that the performance disappears into the ether; all that’s left are the memories.

Here are some topics, clients, and characters:

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Topic: Power, Politics and Democracy – The New Industrial Relations Climate and Affirmative Action

CSR Wood Panels, at a restaurant in Tumut, NSW

The character was Rodney Apparatchik – Acting Principal Private Secretary to the
Commonwealth Minister for Resources.

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Topic: How animals can help us better communicate: meaning, substance, and obloquy in everyday life

ANZ Bank, at a restaurant in Fitzroy, Melbourne

The character was Austin Tillbrooke – Professor of Comparative Anthropology, The University of Queensland

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The Five Qualities of Quality:

1. What is Quality?
2. How important is it?
3. How long has it been around?
4. Is it more significant than Excellence? and
5. How does it compare to Quantity?

CSR Wood Panels, at another restaurant in Tumut, NSW, for another audience

The character was Rodney Trait, a Total Quality Management Expert

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Demtel – TV Advertising, Ultimo Studio, with Bert Newton.

Demonstrator of A new frying pan with holes in the lid

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Australian Business Monthly at the Sheraton on the Park, Sydney

The character was James T. Kirk – Director, Commission for the Future, Melbourne

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Taking Opera to the Third World

Rotary – Sydney Cove, on a moored boat

The character was Gyles Hunter-King, Opera impresario

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Adult Development and Changes in Buyer Behaviour: a Psychoanalytic Approach

Young Business Network at a restaurant in Newtown, Sydney

The character was Phillip Pitt – Director, Corporate Psychiatry Clinic, Sydney Hospital

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How city plans mirror the sanity or otherwise of city planners

Urban Development Institute of Australia at the Hotel Lord Nelson in Sydney

The character was Bruno Faccetifino – Insure the Future

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MLC (Australian Eagle Insurance)

Adelaide Convention Centre: Hypothetical moderator

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Incorporation – Conflicts in State and Federal Requirements

Australian Society of Association Executives (AuSAE)

Sofitel Wentworth, Sydney

The character was Beau Rocraci – Acting Chairperson of the Quasi-Legal Organisations Task Force

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Rodney Marks

I’m an Australian comedian, comedy hoax speaker and corporate impostor. I present comic hoax keynotes at business events. If you like these examples of comic corporate hoaxes that I’ve perpetrated, you’ll like my live comedy. If you don’t like these blogs, you still might like my live comedy.

Add comedian.com.au to your bookmarks, and one day: book Marks. I don’t do cheap jokes, and I’m freer than you think. I’m comical not anatomical, economical not astronomical.

For more info – and to contact me directly – see my LinkedIn profile, and www.comedian.com.au, my website. I’m based in Sydney and travel widely.

31 pretty good jokes

by Rodney Marks | Feb 23, 2017 | Business, Comedian, Comedy, Corporate, Entertainment, Events, Hoax, Ideas, Keynote, Speaker, Speaking

If you don’t have a sense of humour, you may not have any sense at all. Here are some jokes to share around your real or virtual water cooler:

1. If vegetarians love animals so much, why do they eat all their food?
2. I’ve haven’t been to work for four days. I’ve almost forgotten how to play solitaire and minesweeper.
3. I hate daylight savings. I was 30 minutes early to work this morning.
4. I think that my assumptions are starting to annoy people.
5. If I were to ask you for a raise, would your answer be the same as the answer to this question?
6. The question that keeps me awake all night is: ‘Why can’t I sleep?’
7. You know your career prospects are dim when you can’t get a job volunteering at an op shop.
8. One comedian complains to another: ‘We’re so broke that we can’t even afford punch lines to our jokes’. And the other guy says …
9. I hate being a contrarian. It’s amazing.
10. I refuse to cut corners, which is why I lost my job as a carpenter.
11. I have a theory that it’s impossible to prove anything. But I can’t prove it.
12. The healthiest part of the bagel is the hole. Unfortunately, you have to eat the rest of it to get there, and by that time it’s too late.
13. If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
14. If you can’t be part of the solution, insist on being most of the problem.
15. What’s big, grey and unimportant? An irrelephant. Not the boss.
16. Capitalism: where pizza gets to your house before the police.
17. Money talks. Mine just said: ‘Goodbye’.
18. I always cry at the same spot at the opera – the box office.
19. Guillotine: a French chopping centre.
20. If you want to a leader with a large following, obey the speed limit on a long and winding road.
21. When the petrol pump asks me to select a grade, I usually give a B for quality and an F for pricing.
22. Why don’t we take this relationship to the next level and you lend me some money?
23. I may not be the only egomaniac in the world, but I’m the only one who matters.
24. I’m really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
25. I’m not awake until I’ve had two cups of coffee and a nap.
26. When it comes to charity, I stop at nothing.
27. You know you’re getting old when your bank sends your free calendar one month at a time.
28. In order to catch a bus, first one must think like a bus.
29. A high-stress job is one where you work with other people.
30. Sometimes I make a mental note and then forget where I put it.
31. The best way to have a friend is to be a friend. That’s why I have no friends.

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Rodney Marks

I’m an Australian comedian, comedy hoax speaker and corporate impostor. I present comic hoax keynotes at business events. If you like these blogs, you’ll like my live comedy. If you don’t like these blogs, you still might like my live comedy.

Add comedian.com.au to your bookmarks, and one day: book Marks. I don’t do cheap jokes, and I’m freer than you think. I’m comical not anatomical, economical not astronomical.

For more info – and to contact me directly – see my LinkedIn profile, and website: www.comedian.com.au. I’m based in Sydney and travel widely.

30 funny names

by Rodney Marks | Feb 16, 2017 | Business, Comedian, Comedy, Corporate, Entertainment, Events, Hoax, Ideas, Keynote, Speaker, Speaking

I’m a comiconomenclaturist, a connoisseur of humorous names. Each of my 350+ faux characters has an original nom de theatre, nom de plume, nom de guerre, pseudonym or alias.

Many people have inadvertently funny names, or names that at least one of their parents found amusing … so be careful who you laugh at.

Here are 30 examples of public domain binomial nomenclature, simply for fun:

1. Adam Zapel
2. Brighton Early
3. Cam Payne
4. Eaton Wright
5. Gene Poole
6. D. Clair
7. M. Boring
8. Justin Case
9. Lou Pole
10. Luke Warm
11. Marlon Fisher
12. Noah Lott
13. Orson Carte
14. Paige Turner
15. Penny Wise
16. Polly Ester
17. Ray Gunn
18. Rhea Curran
19. Robin Banks
20. Rose Gardner
21. Russell Leeves
22. Sally Forth
23. Sandy Banks
24. Sue Ridge
25. Sue Yu
26. Tamara Knight
27. Teresa Green
28. Wanda Rinn
29. Warren Peace
30. Winsom Cash

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Rodney Marks

I am an Australian comedian, comedy hoax speaker and corporate impostor. I present comic hoax keynotes at business events.

My comedy characters have joke names that should tip off the audience to the faux nature of my genre … but almost no-one catches on in advance. (Those who do enjoy the performance from a different stance.)

If you like these blogs, you’ll like my live comedy. If you don’t like these blogs, you still might like my live comedy.

Add comedian.com.au to your bookmarks, and one day: book Marks. I don’t do cheap jokes, and I’m freer than you think. I’m comical not anatomical, economical not astronomical.

For more info – and to contact me directly – see my LinkedIn profile, and website: www.comedian.com.au. I’m based in Sydney and travel widely.

46 great opening lines

by Rodney Marks | Feb 14, 2017 | Business, Comedian, Comedy, Corporate, Entertainment, Events, Hoax, Ideas, Keynote, Speaker, Speaking

When beginning a comedy performance, a keynote speech or a novel, a great opening line can capture the attention of your audience:

1. “The war in Zagreb began over a pack of cigarettes.”
   —Girl at War by Sara Nović
2. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
   —100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
3. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” 
   —Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”
   —Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
5. “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.”
   —On the Road by Jack Kerouac
6. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
   —The Stranger by Albert Camus
7. “Once upon a time, in a far-off land, I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones.”
   —An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
8. “The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crêpe paper—was written in her two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”
   —Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
   —Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
    —Ulysses by James Joyce
11. “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”
    —Orlando by Virginia Woolf
12. “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself.”
    —Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
13. “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.”
    —Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
14. “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation.” 
    —The Secret History by Donna Tartt
15. “It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.” 
    —The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
16. “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. The time matters, too.”
    —Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
17. “The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.” 
    —The Gunslinger by Stephen King
18. “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
    —The Luck of the Bodkins by PG Wodehouse
19. “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.”
    —The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
20. “With a strength born of the decision that had just come to her in the middle of the night, Avery Johnson forced the suitcase shut on the clothes piled inside and slid the lock in place.”
    —Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall
21. “It was a pleasure to burn.”
    —Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
22. “All this happened, more or less.”
    —Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
23. “It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.”
    —Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
24. “It was late in the spring when I noticed that a girl was following me, nearly the end of May, a month that means perhaps or might be.”
    —Dietland by Sarai Walker
25. “My father is gone. I’m slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from two men, one the manager of the hotel we’re staying and the other a policeman. They’re both waiting for me to explain what’s become of him, my father.”
    —The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
26. “My brain was drowning in grease.”
    —The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
27. “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
    —Moby Dick by Herman Melville
28. “‘You’ve no choice. Look back.’”
    —The True Story of Hansel and Gretel by Louise Murphy
29. “In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.”
    —The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
30. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”
    —The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. “One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.”
    —The Lover by Marguerite Duras
32. “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-runner hitter or fly bachetero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.”
    —The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
33. “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
    —Murphy by Samuel Beckett
34. “This morning Rino telephoned. I thought he wanted money again and I was ready to say no. But that was not the reason for the phone call: his mother was gone.”
    —My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
35. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
    —The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
36. “The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.”
    —Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
37. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
    —A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
38. “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
    —The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
39. “Quietly, like a shadow, I watch this drama unfold scene by scene. I am the lucid one here, the dangerous one, and nobody suspects.”
    —Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Triptych by Marie Vieux-Chauvet
40. “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.”
    —A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
41. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
    —Kindred by Octavia Butler
42. “Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate facedown on the steering wheel, hoping judgement would not be too heavy upon him.”
    —White Teeth by Zadie Smith
43. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”
    —The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
44. “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”
    —The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
45. “My name is Kathy H. I am thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.”
    —Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
46. “The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking over the footlights of an empty auditorium.”
    —Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

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Rodney Marks

I am an Australian comedian, comedy hoax speaker and corporate impostor. I present comic hoax keynotes at business events. If you like these blogs, you’ll like my live comedy. If you don’t like these blogs, you still might like my live comedy.

Add comedian.com.au to your bookmarks, and one day: book Marks. I don’t do cheap jokes, and I’m freer than you think. I’m comical not anatomical, economical not astronomical.

For more info – and to contact me directly – see my LinkedIn profile, and website: www.comedian.com.au. I’m based in Sydney and travel widely.