Won’t Do Stand-Up in a Wheelchair follows the journey and life of Sandi Selvi, a Bay Area stay-at-home mom turned M.S. Society advocate turned stand-up comedian and author, through her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis and the stem-cell transplant that saved her life.

Selvi’s story sounds like an incredible one—and one that needs, desperately, to be shared to celebrate the benefits of stem-cell transplants. But Selvi should not have written it, at least not alone, and it shouldn’t have passed the editor’s desk as it’s written. It has all of the signs of a memoir that got the greenlight based solely on its topic, without any consideration to the craft or the audience. The richness lurking beneath the surface of this story was not explored because of Selvi’s amateurish writing and inability to plot a coherent storyline. Read the rest of this entry »

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(Evan Karp)

If you haven’t seen Joe Klocek invite some poor heckler onstage, now’s your chance (try not to get sucked in to the plethora of other heckling videos… they’re not as funny). But stand-up comedy is only part of the act at Previously Secret Information, where true stories are told by funny people. Without notes.

I recently spoke with Joe about the series over at KQED, and checked it out for the first time this past Sunday night at Stage Werx. If you haven’t been to that theatre, you should: it’s small enough to be intimate, but big enough to put on some really quality productions. PSI is certainly one of them. Although usually not all performers are comedians, this past installment featured three stand-ups who all, in their respective ways, told the story of how they became comedians.

Funny in spades, of course, but at times moving and far more fundamentally human than an assault of jokes, PSI is SF Weekly’s Best New Storytelling Series of 2011 with good reason. Check it out: Read the rest of this entry »

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