"OK, this guy walks into a bar. The bartender sees that he has a big bulge in his pants. So the bartender says, 'Hey, it looks like you have a steering wheel in your pants.' And the guy says, 'Yeah, and it's driving me nuts.'"
Filmmaker Dan Griffin lowers his video camera and chuckles softly. "That was great," he tells the twentysomething comedian. "Got any more?"
Griffin, co-owner of Garthwait & Griffin Films, is trolling San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, accosting people and asking them to tell their favorite joke. His latest project, Laugh Rocket, is a service that delivers joke-of-the-day videoclips to subscribers on the Boost Mobile and Nextel cell phone networks for $6 a month. Griffin's budget is tight, and he needs five to seven new clips a week, so he often finds himself approaching complete strangers, Panasonic Proline digital camcorder in hand.
"You want me to tell you a joke?" asks a man with a goatee, clearly wondering whether Griffin's request is, well, some kind of joke. When the filmmaker insists he's serious – at least as serious as a joke collector can be – the man's face brightens.
"OK, I've got one," he says, as Griffin rolls tape. "What do you call it when a blonde dyes her hair brown?"
"What?"
"Artificial intelligence."
It's not exactly a side-splitter, but at this point in the mobile-video game, it just might be good enough. Despite a spate of partnerships that allow telecoms to deliver big-time TV shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives, consumers aren't exactly clamoring to watch TV on their phones. Of 207 million cell phone owners in the US, barely 3 million ever use their handset as a television. Nobody knows what the blockbuster app might be, which creates an opportunity for entrepreneurs like Griffin. "Laugh Rocket is perfect for this medium," he says. "This is for a guy who's, say, waiting for a flight at the airport."
Griffin ambles past gaudy tourist traps selling cable car refrigerator magnets and ALCATRAZ PENITENTIARY SWIM TEAM T-shirts, cornering people at random. The ones who are game cough up a series of lame riddles:
What did the monkey say when the train ran over its tail? It won't be long now.
Why doesn't an anteater ever get sick? Because it's filled with anty-bodies.
What kind of bees give milk? Boo-bees!
Finally, Griffin collars a 22-year-old from Columbus, Ohio. The man breaks into a sly smile and launches into a story seemingly tailor-made to push phonertainment to the edge of a mobile carrier's comfort zone and beyond:
"These two Middle Easterners come to America. They get separated from each other, and about a year later they get together to see who had become more Americanized. So the first guy says, 'I'm picking up my son from baseball practice, and then we're going out to McDonald's. And then I'm going home to watch some NFL football. How about you?'
And the second guy says, 'Fuck you, towelhead!'"
– Tom McNichol
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