New York City

For those of you who have not been following the saga of my life as closely as you should be, I suppose you’re wondering exactly what it is that I’m doing with my life. I have been living in New York City since April, where I have found a previously unimaginable degree of prosperity. It didn’t take me long before I got a job with a major credit card as a “data analyst.” What that means is that I got paid to look up online to see if people take their credit card, which you’d think they’d know, but apparently they needed me to tell them.

But only three weeks into it, I managed to wrangle a job as head video editor for a small comedy studio. While the pay is insulting by New York video editor standards, it is easily the most I have ever made at a regular, full-time job, so it’s not hard to keep my spirits up, which is a nice change of pace. And what is more, it affords me the opportunity to get paid to work with comedy, my one true passion in life. Having been in the city for just a few short months, I had managed to find a great apartment and land my dream job, and I was able to do it all on my own. Needless to say, I was walking around the city with my head held high and a bounce in my step. The operating word here would be “was.” That all changed one day when I bounced my way into work and discovered that I now work for one of the largest porn companies in the US.

I am sure you have a question or two, but let me back up for one second. When I originally interviewed for this job, I had been told that they do a small amount of “adult oriented comedy.” I took this to mean that they did comedy with adult subject matter. Blue comedy, if you will. But shortly after I started working there, I discovered that they meant “adult” in the biblical sense of “porn.” (I read a very good bible.) They produce things like comedians doing “funny” commentary over Girls Gone Wild type videos. I hadn’t thought there was anything in life that could be more demeaning than taking your top off for beads on camera until I saw someone taking their top off for beads on camera while untalented comedians make fun of them. It’s hard to say whose life is going more poorly there. But at least the girls don’t have to admit that this is their career. The comedians do, and unfortunately, so do I.

After another short while, I got to see some of the other adult comedy they produce. Perhaps the most bizarre segment is one where they take old footage of unwitting stand-up comedians, put it on one side of the screen, and slap a girl stripping on the other side. The girl was probably equally unwitting, but to be fair, it’s probably less damaging for a stripper’s career to have her show juxtaposed with a comedian on TV than the other way around. I wasn’t especially happy about the voice-over segments, but I was okay with it, because even if it’s not funny in the most traditional sense, I can at least understand the theory that having a comedian make jokes about something is in fact comedy. So on a very, very theoretical level, I could see how the Girls Gone Wild stuff constituted humor. But no matter how hard I try to rationalize, I just can’t see how any humor is added to stand-up by simply slapping a nude lady over it. And whenever I tell people about it, they always laugh, but not in the way I think they’re meant to.

Oddly enough for a company that produces edgy porn-comedy, they’ve been having financial difficulties. To this day, I have yet to be paid on time, and after a month or so, I found out that I was the only person being paid at all. No one was being paid because there was no money, and I was only being paid because I make so little of it that even when they were going broke, they could still afford me. Point being, work had been a stressful environment, but I remained hopeful that they could turn things around, as my boss always talks up the connections they have. And of course, I have endless faith in the power of comedy.

But after I’d been with this company for a month or two, my boss walked up to my desk and said, “We’ve been bought.” Seeing my no doubt surprised expression, he quickly added, “And that’s a good thing.” He then proceeded to tell me that we had in fact been bought by an adult entertainment company. Fighting back the urge to ask, “And how exactly does that qualify as a good thing,” I tried my best to keep the frozen smile on my face from turning into a look of horror when I wasn’t paying attention.

He explained that the president of my company was in fact a huge porn mogul (“a junior league Hef” is the phrase he used). When asked to become vice president of this adult company and help them launch some new companies, he said he would accept on the condition that they buy and fund the comedy studio. I asked what felt like an obvious question: “How will this effect the content we produce each month?” After a good half-hour of him explaining the history of this deal and the history of everyone involved (coincidentally, everyone at this company but me has a background in porn), I finally stopped him and guessed, “So you’re saying, our content won’t be changing, and our company will continue to exist with its current business plan, but we can expect some bleed-over work while these other companies the president is starting get off the ground a bit?” And he said yes. And I died a little inside.

This was all several weeks ago. In the time since then, not only has my company made me shoot a series of events for a children’s charity, but porn has slowly become a more and more pronounced part of my day-to-day life. So far it has only been relatively low-end and uninvolved work, but the phrase “thin end of the wedge” keeps coming to mind. The other editor who works for me really hopes we’re going to actually start producing porn so we can get to do some camera work with naked girls. Or at least I think that’s what he said, all I could hear was, “I have no artistic ambition or future.”

It probably goes without saying at this point, but I have started applying for other jobs.

-TC