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Informationen zum Autor John Crist Klappentext "John Crist wasn't always recognizable as "the guy from that hilarious video in the grocery store." Growing up part of a homeschool family of ten in rural Georgia with Mennonite grandparents and a high-school job at Chick-fil-A, he was an unlikely candidate for internet fame. Despite all that, or perhaps because of it, Crist passionately pursued his dream of stand-up comedy. In his first book, Crist offers heartfelt, laugh-out-loud observations on the absurd ways we all try to make ourselves look better online: like how we all post filtered pictures of our super healthy kale salads but somehow neglect to post about our 1 A.M. Uber Eats Big Mac. Or how quick we all are to post our "I Voted" sticker pictures but fail to post about the ways we vote with our dollars every day in ways that don't align with our loudly and publicly espoused values"-- Leseprobe 1 Wanna Hear a Joke? It was June 12, 2012. I opened my eyes and knew something was wrong. I looked around and could tell I was in a hospital, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there. And I couldn’t move. My arms, my legs, and my neck were all strapped to the hospital bed. I legit thought I was about to meet the Lord. A nurse came to my bedside. She told me I’d been in a car wreck. My silver 1998 Honda Civic had been T-boned by a Dodge Ram—generally not a confrontation that ends well for the Civic. I’d been ejected through the passenger-side window and landed on the road. Hard. When I got to the hospital, I was having seizures, hence the restraints on my wrists, ankles, and neck. The nurse began to ask me questions. “What day is it?” Not sure. “What are your parents’ names?” I don’t know. “Who is the president?” No idea. Then I passed out again. When I came to, the scene had changed. Instead of one nurse, now there were at least five doctors and nurses, all gathered around my bed, all looking at me. And they were laughing. I mean, dying laughing. I was like, “What is everyone laughing at?” One of the nurses said, “You told us you were a comedian, and you’ve been telling us all jokes!” Me. Strapped to a hospital bed. Telling jokes. Semiconscious! And, apparently, I was crushing. Maybe that’s when I knew for sure I was on the right path in my life. I don’t know if I was born to be a comedian, but certainly, by that point, there was something so deeply ingrained in me that wanted, that needed, to make people laugh that I could do it without even being in control of my faculties. It was almost a primitive, involuntary reflex: See people. Make them laugh. It’s not lost on me either that it was a room full of people laughing that snapped me back into consciousness. Laughter, to me, was not just a pleasant diversion. It may have literally saved my life. More on that later. Thank You, Text That was the summer of 2012. At the time, I had recently gotten dumped by the girl I thought I was going to marry, quit a good job in Colorado Springs, and moved to Denver to pursue comedy full time. You ever see that movie Failure to Launch? That film was based on that period of my life. Okay, not really, but let’s just say that when I saw that movie, I could relate. I was not exactly setting the world on fire. The afternoon of the accident, I was on my way to a comedy club, the Denver Improv, to let them know my “avails”—essentially, when I’d be available to perform over the coming weeks. I was texting and driving, because, well, of course I was. Around that time, I even had a joke in my set about this: “You ever been texting at a red light and looked up to see that the light was yellow?” Meaning you were literally staring at your phone the duration of the green light and didn’t look up until it was too late. That was exactly where my head was back then: buried deep in my phone. And not just back then. In truth, if ther...
