Description: “Time Travel Lover,” a short comedic film about a first date interrupted by time travel, was written by Elisha Yaffe.
City: Los Angeles, California
If you could give advice to your 16 year old self, what would you say?
Chill the fuck out. Don’t pretend to know what you’re doing. I was a real fucking go-getter of a 16 year old. After high school, I took a year off before college and tried out stand-up in New York at 18, which was crazy and weird, and I eventually shacked up with my girlfriend’s sister. Not shacked up in a sexual way. But I had to live somewhere, and she helped me out.
What was a memorable experience from that year?
Performing avant-garde stand-up to people who hated it. I was very influenced by Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin, and I had this one bit that stemmed from this book that Fabio wrote, the model. In the “About the Author” section, it was all about how sexy he was. So then — and again, this is as confusing to me as it was to the audience, looking back — I think what I ended up saying was “It sucks that you can use sex to sell books, so I’ll just use sex to sell jokes” and then I put on some jazz music and stripped into tights and read knock knock jokes to the audience, sexy-like. It didn’t go well.