The HAHA HARVEST kicks off on Black Friday with a jam-packed showcase featuring me, Ron Lynch, Lizzy Cooperman, Mav Viola, Adam Cayton-Holland, and Janae Burris at the Revolution Hall!
This is going to be a HEAVY show, with some of my favorite comics from across the country. I’m super honored to be asked to join the HAHA HARVEST and the COMEDY CORNUCOPIA show! Tickets for this show are HERE!
Portland, I’m beyond stoked to return and do shows over Thanksgiving weekend 2024 at the HaHa Harvest, now in its 5th year- I’ll be performing with some of my funniest friends and new comics from the PNW!
In addition to the main stage shows, the festival also has a number of other events, including a comedy competition, a brunch show, a late-night comedy show, a comedy singalong, and a free outdoor comedy show.
The Haha Harvest Comedy Festival is a great way to see some of the best comedians in the world. It’s also a great way to spend Thanksgiving weekend in Portland.
Weekend passes are available NOW for early birds at only $70 – all the comedy you can eat with headliners like Ron Lynch, Lizzy Cooperman, Mav Viola, Stephen Agyei, and more- check it out here!
Comics, if you want to be a part of it, submissions are still open until Sept 21- check it out here!
This is a riveting, complete map of everywhere I’ve performed comedy. I update it when I perform somewhere new.
This map includes comedy performed at bar gigs, open mics, one-nighters, club weekends, tours, Tribble runs, festivals, and industry showcases. It’s like a trainspotter guide, but just for the comedy of Virginia Jones.
This map covers mostly West Coast comedy, but I’ve got a couple spots in the UK, HK, and New York/Boston.
If I’ve ever done your show or your town and you wonder what I thought about it, you can probably find out! Many of these venues have changed or moved or closed, but I’m still doing standup. I’m still Sisyphus, just pushing a comedy rock up a hilarious hill.
Don’t feel bad for Sisyphus, by the way. He was a real jerk. Did you know he only married his wife because he hated her dad? She had her own issues, she killed their kids when she found out. Neither one of them were great people.
Anyway, here’s a Google map of everywhere I’ve performed comedy!
I’ve written about the best karaoke in the world, Portland’s Baby Ketten Karaoke, many times. I’ve done it here and here and here and here. My friend Jay Horton wrote all about the new all-ketten all the time club here.
It’s big news! Baby Ketten Karaoke is on the scene 7 nights a week on SE Powell, where it all began! Where I met Brophy and his crew, where I sang my first song, I Want Your Sex by George Michael, while wearing a petticoat of some sort (I mean a lot of these are sense memories), where I got drunk and bought a painting of a pitbull, where two sisters waited for an ambulance after one of them bit the other one’s nose sort of OFF, where Klingon Karaoke happened for a while, where I DJ’ed a terrible goth night where an attendee asked me to play the I’m Dead I’m Dead song, all that spirit and magic has swirled together for all the Kettens to meet up. I am getting there as soon as I can and I’ll see you when that happens! Check out the best songbook in the world here!
I’m practicing spot gratitude.
Today is the 12th anniversary of my first open mike. It was under the expert hosting of Kevin-Michael Moore at the Boiler Room in Portland, which is now a Starbucks.
Since then, I’ve been graciously given spots at lots of places by lots of people.
From backroom bars to club sets to road rooms, they’ve all given me the spots that shaped my inscrutable comic persona.
Several of these people are famous now. A few are dead. Some quit doing comedy. But I thank all of ’em.
This is a real ghost story from Portland, OR.
I had a house there, in a nice neighborhood. There was a brunch place in walking distance where they’d just put a basket of scones on the table when you sat down. And when you got the scones, you’d need ‘em, cos you’d been standing outside for an hour, holding a cold coffee and a newspaper. You could grab a scone and leave, but that’s against Brunch Code.
Before it was Fancy Brunch Place, it was an old bar where they would fry something that was technically breakfast and you could eat it while smelling every drink from fifty years before, soaked into the wood paneling. So that was the neighborhood, it was getting gentrified. I’m sure it’s even nicer now, but ex-husband lives there with third wife, so I don’t go.
That’s not the awful thing I’m telling. This is about another awful thing.
Anyway. No matter how nice a place is, bad stuff happens there. A woman in my neighborhood had been kidnapped and kept in a basement for a couple of weeks, and she managed to stretch her restraints to one window and get one finger out of the blinds and was trying to signal for help, but nobody saw, not even my friend who lived next door.
My friend felt terrible, but in her defense, would have to be a pretty sharp observer to see one finger scratching at a basement window.
This is not about that awful thing. This story is about another awful thing.
My next door neighbor’s house had been rented to a few groups of people, and then it was renovated and sold, and when the woman who bought it moved in, I tried to introduce myself to her a couple of times, but she always seemed tired and upset.
When a friend looks upset, you can ask: hey, are you OK? But when it’s a stranger, you’re too embarrassed to say, hey, you seem fucked up, are you OK? Unhappiness is embarrassing. I avoided her. She just never seemed to be in the mood for a chat. I didn’t see her much anyway.
That Spring, I see her in front, planting flowers and looking like a different person, and I went over to say hi. I introduced myself and we talked about the really boring stuff people talk about who have nothing in common except for living next to each other, and finally I say, I’m sorry this isn’t my business, but you look so happy and different! I’m glad you’re feeling better? And she looked at me happily and said yes, I’m much better!
Then she explained: my house was haunted. How did she know? She said, the first night I slept there, a man appeared and beat the shit out of me. I said oh wow, did you call the police? And she said, no, because he was a ghost. And that’s true. Police don’t come out for ghosts.
It happened the second night too, she said, just for months, every night this ghost would appear and beat the shit out of me. And I said wow that sounds bad, because what else do you say? I didn’t know what to say.
She said, at first I thought I’d sell the house, or find out if I could cancel the sale, but then I thought, what if the next buyer has a kid, someone who can’t defend themselves, so I thought I’d have to take care of it myself. And I said, what did you do? And she said I found a great exorcist who smudged the house and BOOM! The ghost disappeared and I’m finally enjoying my house!
So, I’m planting these flowers, and the next thing I need to do is get rid of some furniture and stuff, because it’s really too crowded in there, and I said, isn’t it a two story house? And she said yes but. I couldn’t afford to get the upstairs smudged yet, and I’m worried the ghost just moved upstairs, so I just stay on the ground floor.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Today is 10 years since I first did stand up comedy in Portland at the Boiler Room with Gabe Dinger, Kevin Michael Moore, Bobby Hacker, Richard Bain, Kyle Harbert, Jimmy Newstetter, and Randy Mendez.
Hardly any of those guys do comedy anymore and the karaoke bar is now a Starbucks. I moved to Los Angeles and the beat goes on.
Ten years is thrown around as the time it takes to really find your voice as a comic and become consistent. I think I had my voice early on, but I will say I have a confidence in my writing that I didn’t used to have. We’ll see how the next ten years goes.
Here’s my stand up two years in.
Here’s my lid-blowing post about my first time.