Last week, I had the privilege of participating in the roast of departing Supervisor David Campos at the Brava Theater. MC Vivianne Forevermore and I were the only nonpoliticians who joined Mark Farrell, Tom Ammiano, Jane Kim, Hillary Ronen, Malia Cohen, and John Avalos. C.W. Nevius was scheduled to roast, but he was busy shouting at a homeless person.
Here are my remarks.
It was a classically San Franciscan roast. After every joke, the audience was allowed 10 minutes to process their feelings and decide whether they were triggered.
In Trump’s America, we could all agree that Farrell was the only person on stage who wasn’t going to jail.
Farrell is a San Francisco native. Cohen and I are, too. The thing about being a native is that other natives are just familiar. Malia is a black woman with a Jewish name who went to Lowell. I KNOW her. Same with Farrell. I look at him and immediately recognize the guy who beat me with his lacrosse stick when I was a kid.
Lately, we’ve been worried about fake news — but Nevius has been writing fake news for years.
Nevius and I are both proof that a white guy can write any manner of ill-informed propaganda and people will keep paying for your opinions. If we were women of color, neither of us would get published in scrawled sharpie in a McDonald’s bathroom stall.
Campos wanted to name San Francisco International Airport after Harvey Milk, which would have made it the first airport in the world named after an LGBT person. Instead, there was agreement for Mayor Ed Lee to convene a task force to consider naming terminals. Now, we’re waiting for the mayor to name people to the task force to make recommendations of names of people to name parts of the airport.
Meanwhile, Willie Brown got his name on the Bay Bridge by dropping a sack of nonsequential bills at Steve Kawa’s house.
Campos was born in Guatemala, grew up in South Central Los Angeles and graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law School. If his life story were any more inspiring, Disney would make it a cartoon. He’d be played by a singing and dancing bulldog.
Campos helped create CleanPowerSF. The program will create the nation’s first wind turbines powered by fog and hotboxing weed.
Campos passed legislation to provide free Muni passes to youth. That’s exactly what every commuter needs; more Young Thug coming out of cellphone speakers.
Google donated $6.8 million to Campos’ Free Muni program. If only Google had buses of some sort they could provide.
I’m not saying that Campos spits a lot when he gets fired up, but he is the only person who could solve the drought by yelling at it.
Campos wanted to protect the Latino character of the Mission. And he did. Some people would call all the rich people moving into the Mission gentrifiers; I call them conquistadores.
Latinos are being pushed out of the Mission so fast, soon the only way you’ll be able to see a Latina is while praying in an actual sanctuary, hoping for a vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
We only filled half of the 300 seats at the Brava Theater last week. When Ahsha Safai has a roast, there will be 2,000 people there, being paid below minimum wage to attend.
Some would look at a half-filled theater and call it a failure. But progressives call it a “spirited attempt that is a huge deal, considering what we were up against, that sends the message that San Francisco’s progressive heart still beats.”
Many comedians work with writers on roasts, and I wrote with Johan Miranda. Miranda is a great young Peruvian comic who went to John Muir Elementary. He’s undocumented. The DACA program let him lead a normal life, but now he’s writing jokes until Trump gets around to deporting him. Please send money.
Nato Green is a San Francisco-based comedian who will headline the Punch Line San Francisco on Wednesday, Dec. 28, with Janine Brito and special guest Kevin Avery.
