Joe DeVito

continued

After chatting for a bit with one woman in the audience, he suddenly exclaims, "Wow, you are knocked up! How did I not notice that?" He seems genuinely surprised and excited about her pregnancy, and then launches into a tirade about how spoiled kids are today. "I know you shouldn't hit your kids," he says, "but what about other people's kids?"

Near the end of his gig, DeVito shows us a gigantic, foam-board-mounted blowup of his eighth-grade school picture. I won't spoil it by describing it to you in detail, but I will say it made me wonder, "What was he thinking?" Then I realized what a brilliant idea it is. We should all be carrying a giant version of our eighth-grade picture around, for those dark moments when life doesn't seem to make sense.

Joe DeVito returns to the Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase Thursday through Saturday, November 20-22.   

[Originally published in November, 2008.]