- I don't know why I like horror movies and stuff,
'cause in real life, I'm a coward.
Like, I'm not good in real-life scary situations.
I'll give you an example.
A few years ago I lived in Chicago
and yeah, it is pretty fancy.
I like the guy that woo'd, was like, "Woo,"
like you had that, "What am I doing?"
Sir, you did it.
There is no strings going up to the ceiling.
You're like, "What, come on!
What the fuck?
Making me look like an asshole."
I look up there, it's Julie Andrews.
That is a "Sound of Music" reference.
(audience laughing)
I lived in Chicago and I had three roommates.
Me, a guy, two girls.
This is about scary shit.
And we rented the whole house,
so we have the whole,
we have the basement, the regular floor, the ground floor,
and then the attic, and the attic is empty,
it's unfinished, nobody's up there,
nobody ever goes up there.
It's empty, you know?
One of my roommates, Katie, does not have a job.
Whenever we come home from work,
Katie's like, "Uh, whenever you guys leave the house
I can hear someone walking around our attic."
Yeah.
And we go, "Shut the fuck up and get a job."
Lies don't pay the rent!
For weeks she says this, we dismiss her.
One day I'm at home and Katie comes into my room
and she's like, "Hey, come here right now,
come into my room."
I go into Katie's room
and I hear someone walking around my attic.
Like, deliberate human, scary, hobo footsteps.
And I immediately start freaking out.
Like, immediately at a hundred, you know?
Just freaking out.
And we started doing that
yelling whispering thing, you know?
Like, "What are we gonna do?
What are we gonna do?"
And then I'm like, if there is somebody up there,
he's gonna know we're in the house, but we're whispering.
He's gonna know we're onto him.
He's gonna come down and kill us all.
So we decide to have, like, parallel conversations,
like a fake decoy conversation
just to throw him off, you know?
Like, we're like, "What are we gonna do?
We should bake a cake!
I am freaking out right now.
I like chocolate!"
(audience laughing)
So if there is somebody there,
all he hears is silence broken by "Chocolate cake!"
Just like panicked cries of "Chocolate cake!"
What could be more suspicious?
He's gonna murder all of us.
So I'm freaking out.
I don't know what to do.
I'm a beta male.
We're all betas.
This is a house of betas, you know?
So we have one friend, he's an alpha male,
his name's Joey, he lives in Alaska,
he hunts bear and then he makes jerky out of it.
Alpha as fuck.
So we call Joey and Joey goes, "Uh, go up there and check."
Yeah, which hadn't even occurred to us.
Our entire strategy was to talk about fake cake
until the lease ran out and then just move, you know?
Never speak of this again.
Somebody has to go up there and check
and we nominate me, cause fuck everything at this point.
So I have to go up and check
and I'm (chuckling) so scared.
And the only way up to the attic,
so the roof is, like, 12 feet high,
the only way up to the attic, there's a little door,
we need a stepladder to get up there.
House of betas?
We don't have a step ladder.
So I go into my room
and I push a chest of drawers from my room under there.
Like, I'm gonna climb over it and get up there.
And then my roommates give me a flashlight.
And I'm like, "What am I going to do with this,
if there is somebody there?"
So then they also hand me a butcher knife.
'Cause if somebody's there, I'm just going to murder them.
It's gonna be like, "Chocolate cake!"
Stab, stab, stab, slit.
"Guys, there was somebody there, but I've killed him.
I'm gonna go take a shower and pack my bags.
Give me 30 minutes before you call the police."
And then I spent the rest of my life
riding the rails and using payphones.
Whenever I try and sleep,
I see the light leave a hobo's face, you know?
You don't forget that.
Somebody goes living to dead by your hand?
And then I'm like, if there is somebody up there,
he's up there, he's just hanging out, regular floor for him.
And then a thing opens and just my head pops up.
Very vulnerable position for me.
He's just going to
whack-a-mole me on the head with a baseball bat
and I'm gonna die.
This is how I die.
So my roommates are like, "We have to find you a helmet."
(audience laughing)
House of betas, we don't have a helmet!
So I go into the kitchen and I get a cooking pot
and I put that on my head.
None of this is lies.
I put a fucking cooking pot on my head
but it comes down to here,
so I can't see anything.
So then I get a colander instead
and I put that on my head.
Which, if somebody
baseball bats me on the head with a colander,
I'm still going to die.
My roommates just have to buy a new colander
or feel really horrible any time they make pasta, you know?
"Isn't this the colander that Kumail died in?"
It was a very strange sentence to say out loud.
"Isn't this the colander that Kumail died in?"
I swear right before I get up there,
Katie's friends from out of town show up
and I'm there climbing over a chest of drawers,
flashlight in one hand, butcher knife in the other,
colander on my head.
I look like somebody whose parents
couldn't afford a Halloween costume.
"You're a spaghetti head!
He also has a butcher knife."
So I get up there and I am so scared, you guys.
It's like, I can't see anything, it's super dark.
You know, the flashlight is weak.
I'm looking at the world through holes
big enough to let water through, but not spaghetti.
Like.
(audience laughing)
Very small.
I get up there, shaking.
I don't see anything, I don't see anyone,
but there's one area around the corner,
like behind a corner, like that,
that I can't see from where I'm standing.
And I'm like fuck.
So I work up my courage,
I grip the knife tighter,
I put the colander deeper into my head,
I walk over and I see nothing.
Never found anything.
But right after that, the noises stopped.
What the fuck?
And I know it's super disappointing
that there was nothing there,
but if there was somebody there,
that woulda been the first thing
I would've mentioned when I came out.
I would have been like, "Fuck ugly duckling,
three years ago, I murdered a hobo."
(audience laughing)