I'm slowly trying to get rid of old junk that's cluttering my apartment. I'm currently going through old VHS tapes, figuring out what to throw out. I should probably just pitch it all, but like Chin and his light saber battles tape, maybe someday I'll regret throwing away season three of 'The Larry Sanders Show.'

I found some tapes of my old college sketch group, Comedy Corner. While I was getting a creative writing M.F.A. in Arizona I found myself less and less interested in writing the perfect literary short story and more and more interested in doing poorly written sketch comedy in front of an audience of freshmen and sophomores.

It's kind of painful to watch now. Most of the sketches are pretty infantile, undercooked and sometimes borderline offensive. But we did an original hour of sketches every week and you can learn a lot from writing and performing that much, even if most of what you write and perform is kind of crappy.

And some of it was not so bad. The tape I watched had an Othello-as-blaxploitation sketch I'm pretty sure I wrote, that at least had an amusing 'Shaft'-eque song in it ("Who's the Moor Venetian general who's a tuppin' machine to all the maidens?" "Othello!" "Tis true!"). Not the most original premise, but it made me chuckle.

I'd like to think I've come a long way since then, but I often still stand in that same Superman pose while on stage, and the two sketches I wrote this week (one a slightly dirty Shakespeare parody and the other simply called 'Always Pooping') would both be right at home in a Comedy Corner show .