I had the honor of being invited to Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement of NYC Service, a new effort to encourage volunteering in NYC. I have mixed feelings about this initiative, because, while I value volunteering, I don’t believe it’s a government’s job to encourage a way of life. 

Still, it was amazing to see hundreds of New Yorkers in a rainbow of volunteer tshirts gather to celebrate their (non-government-mandated) service.

This amazement was topped only by seeing hundreds of volunteers exit the arena, enter the subway station, and walk right past a homeless man asking for change.

I’m this week’s featured comedian for Time Out New York’s “Joke of the Week“.

Thanks to the folks at New York’s Mann About Town for featuring me in their January 2009 issue. It’s really a very nice article and you should subscribe to their magazine. Subscribe twice because some articles are worth re-reading.

Here’s the text of the article. Photos and more here.

Helping from the Heart

It’s fifteen minutes past midnight and a steady flow of fans exits Manhattan’s A-list Broadway Comedy Club. “Thanks for coming,” says a dapper 26 year-old with a dimpled smile and a bright glint in his eye. “Oh, man, you were great, do you ever travel?” says a fan, the fiftieth-or-so to repeat this in a row, this one with a British accent. “Thanks, if you’d like, join my fan list and I’ll let you know when I’m coming to your town.” And so Ari Teman’s fan list is filled with the names of fans who have gotten to know him through his refreshingly clever, personable and insightful act.

However, they only know a fraction about Ari Teman. In a typical day Teman acts as CEO of a hot startup company, the head of an international volunteer organization, a writer, blogger, inventor, and artist. He has seven email addresses, three phone numbers, and every social networking tool out there. Pick a career that would overwhelm anyone, and Teman does five of them. And he’s just getting started.

Two years ago, Teman founded JCorps, considered the world’s first “social volunteering” network. JCorps (http://JCorps.org) is a non-denominational network that groups Jewish adults ages 18-28 to volunteer. Starting with $300, Teman built it into an organization with thousands of members, operating in New York, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Montreal, and Toronto. In a typical year it feeds 21,000 meals to the hungry, comforts hundreds of seniors, and visits many children in hospitals. If you’re enjoying the park, there’s a good chance a JCorps volunteer helped clean it up. The amazing thing is, Teman runs JCorps as a volunteer.

While charities around the world are complaining about decreasing donations, JCorps is entirely volunteer-run and continues to grow rapidly. Using the latest technology and empowering Team Leaders to make decisions within set guidelines, JCorps grows as fast as volunteers want it to grow — which it turns out is very fast. JCorps is about to open in two more US cities.

JCorps has also been studied by Hebrew University and the Cohen Center at Brandeis University. It has received grants from Google, and counts companies like Verizon and McGraw Hill as donors.

For all this, Teman was named to The Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36″, recognizing the top innovators in the New York community. Teman is also deeply involved with other New York charities and events, and is often asked onto committees. Last year Teman was lauded in area papers for his use of psychology and high-technology to help the Sensi charity dinner raise almost half a million dollars online.

Teman is also the CEO of 12gurus, an award-winning innovation startup with a series of recognized services. One, GatherGrid (http://gathergrid.com ), was just called “the most useful interface I’ve seen to-date” by CenterNetworks, one of the worlds top technology magazines. It helps find you the ideal meeting or call time for a group of people, and it’s 100% free with no registration required. In keeping with his charity theme, GatherGrid even donates 10% of revenues to a charity you choose. Teman’s second startup, Contempe (http://contempe.com ), is poised to revolutionize the way you email, it will save firms millions of dollars a year in wasted time, and can increase email marketing response rates by double. But other than that, it’s a stealth company, so you’ll have to wait a few months to see its magic — or get in as an investor.

If you want to make things happen, you go to Teman. Last year Teman, who jokes with audiences, “I’m a Republican — It’s not a political thing. I just don’t like helping people.” invented a web-based system to connect and track political lobbying calls over the Internet. It was used to help rally on behalf of Jerusalem. The campaign, and the system it used, PhoneLobby (http://phonelobby.com ), also a 12gurus product, was covered by the Washington Post and Salon Magazine. For three days, the White House, State Department, and Israel Embassy call centers were overwhelmed and unable to handle the volume of callers Teman’s system drove their way. Both governments abandoned talks about dividing Jerusalem.

When Teman isn’t on stage or at some charity function, you can catch him speeding around Manhattan on his bike, hitting the latest restaurants with friends, or touring museums. Not one just to observe, Teman is an artist who sold a print last year at an auction by the renowned Simon dePury. Teman holds honors degrees in Studio Arts and Psychology from Brandeis University and will be honored at a Brandeis student dinner this year for his contributions as a student and alumni.

If there’s something magical about Ari it’s that you’d never suspect he had ten million plates spinning at once. Laid back and jovial, Ari will connect with you at an intense level and you’ll rapidly find yourself smiling and laughing. The fact that he’s got Edison’s brain cranking our solutions to your problems doesn’t hurt, but what’s reassuring is that no matter how difficult the problem is, Ari’s got a joke to help you smile about it.

And jokes he’s got! Ari is a regular at some of the country’s top comedy clubs. In New York, he’s a favorite at the Broadway Comedy Club (53rd and 8th Ave) and Stand~Up NY (78th and Broadway) and you can see him on the line-ups among comics from the Tonight Show, Letterman, Conan, SNL, and Comedy Central. He’s also a favorite at private events. After a recent performance at NYU, the vice president of the student organization that booked him called Teman, “comic genius”, and promised to have him back. Teman is a Jewlarious Magazine featured comic – putting him among Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Richard Lewis, Modi, Avi Liberman, and Robert Klein.

Teman’s style is endearing and mischievous at the same time. He can talk about racial and political topics and dance on the edge of the line and you’ll love him like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. He’s clean and innocent, and yet he’s got this inherent naughtiness to him that you notice as he walks the audience into realizing and laughing at their own biases. He’s Richard Lewis-meets-Lewis Black-meets-Larry David and he’s something entirely new. He has you laughing at the setups to his jokes and dying at the punch line. He’s strikingly intellectual and always five steps ahead of the audience. If you think you see it coming – you’ll always be pleasantly surprised. Amazingly, you leave the club after watching Ari, full of hope and wonder. Like the comic himself, you begin to see the world differently, and you smile.

Teman brings all of his passions together hosting charity comedy shows for organizations like BigBrothersBigSisters, the One Family Fund, and even JCorps, raising thousands for charities through laughter.

See when Ari is performing near you and connect with him at http://ariteman.com/schedule.

To learn more about JCorps, visit: http://jcorps.org

At the end of every JCorps event we take at least two group photos. We take one “normal” photo and one “silly” photo. “OK, everyone go crazy and pretend you’re having a good time!”, we tell the group. They laugh, and arms and tongues and legs go out and up and over. And everyone looks like they’re having a great time — because they are. Personalities and energies shine through. Except for one or two people, almost every week, who think, “no, that’ll make me look silly”, stand still, and hold their long-practiced pose. When the photo comes out, they look uptight, un-fun, and out-of-touch.

People who worry about looking silly look silly!

I’ve found that success only comes from running into the immense possibility of failure. Everything great in life takes risk. My greatest regrets are not the failures — those are easily forgotten or corrected, and often admired — they are the times I didn’t go for it. They are the times I didn’t ask for something, the times I didn’t speak my mind, the times I didn’t kiss the girl. I am kept up at night by the times I held back, in action, or words, for fear of looking silly.

JCorps works because we don’t have committees. We have Team Leaders, and each Team Leader has their own responsibilities. If they don’t do them, they don’t get done.

Committees are cesspools for breeding the lowest common denominator. The second you put a group into a circle and require a vote you get everyone held up by the dumbest person in the room, some tool that joined the committee because he or she “wanted to make a difference”, when anybody who’s ever made a difference knows you don’t do it by committee.

With JCorps, and all ventures, you give individuals responsibility, you and they know they’re accountable, and you and they know what happens if they drop the ball. There is no possibility for blaming a partner or co-worker: it’s all your fault.

It’s also incredibly freeing and inspiring: You can do whatever you need to do, within certain broad guidelines, to get the job done. You are in-control. You are the leader of this initiative.

On the contrary, nobody has ever walked into a committee meeting and thought, “Wow, this is going to be productive!” I go to committee meetings rarely, and only for free food (I count a meeting with sushi as “highly productive”), comedy material, and networking. Nobody’s really there to get anything done. That’s the job of individuals.

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Although, if you still insist on meetings, spare everyone the back-and-forth of finding a meeting time, and coordinate with GatherGrid.

For a country big on privacy, we spend a lot of time minding other people’s business.

I include in this all the time spent debating gay marriage. Why do we care who marries whom?

Have we solved all the more-pressing issues? Did we solve the education crisis only to realize kids aren’t learning to read because Bert and Ernie sleep together?

This is religion sticking its head where it doesn’t belong.  (Which is ironic, given that sticking things where they don’t belong is their main complaint.)

People are afraid of creating loveless marriages of convenience. Too late. People complain about children being raised without a mother or father. Too late. People worry about a skyrocketing divorce rate (Ha. You don’t want them to marry because you’re afraid they’ll get unmarried?). Too late.

We have an abundance of opportunity in this country to make a profound difference, and spending our time budding into personal lives is no way to get that done.

I’m often motivated by mustard.

When I first started doing comedy I’d have to follow Tonight Show comics, folks with their own Comedy Central and HBO specials, SNL cast members, and movie stars. If I listened to the voice in my head that said, “Oh my god, she’s so much better than me”, I’d never get on stage. So I remembered mustard.

It’s from this video of Malcom Gladwell at TED talking about how there’s no such thing as “better” mustard. Every mustard is someone’s favorite.

“Mustard does not exist on a heirachy. Mustard exists… on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustard that suit different kinds of people.”

So I get on stage and be the mustard that I am today. Fortunately, it’s usually someone’s favorite.

(And sometimes a girl tries to see if I’m a squeeze bottle!)

Chances are, you’re already dead.

You have so much you’d like to do in life, but you don’t do it. You put it off. You worry how it would look if you did it now. You worry how it would look if you failed. You worry it wont be what you really wanted.

You worry you don’t know enough, have enough, want enough to do it. You have too many things you have to do before you do it.

You see living as somewhere out there. You see life as distractions keeping you from living. You’re breathing, and moving, and fixing, but you’re not living.

Living is a decision. The decision to take the risk. The decision to pursue and persevere. The decision to make mistakes.

Regret is our most heavy pain. Going through life without making mistakes is the biggest mistake you can make.

Basically, Obama’s economic plan works like this:

If you’re good at making money, he’s going to take a lot of it away and give it to someone who isn’t as proficient. Then he’s going to take some of that person’s cash, and give it to someone even worse at making money. So, really, the only way to get paid under Obama is to be a total fuckup.

Obama calls this “Distributing the Wealth”, which is the same term the Soviets used. I guess it sounds scarier in Russian.

I wonder how far this concept goes in Obama’s plan for “change”. If you’re forcing the rich guy to share his wealth with the poor guy, let’s force the attractive guy to marry the ugly chick.

I can see Obama digging that. He’d call it “Distributing the Genes”: Tall people mate with short people, smart people mate with stupid people, and skinny people mate with Walmart shoppers. Of course, we won’t say they’re fat, we’ll say they “distribute the jeans”. (I’ll mate with someone who can resist bad puns.) To help gain support for the initiative, and jump-start the program, it would be legal for women to gang rape Patrick Dempsey.

Actually, that’s too much initiative. They’d just mail ugly women his genetic material. I just did a google-search and it turns out we’re very into artificially inseminating cows (If your steak tastes tense, perhaps it’s because the cows aren’t getting laid.) A search of “artificial insemination of cows” returns almost one million results! Those cow farmers sure have a lot of time on their hands. And also probably a lot of bull gunk. Never shake a cow farmer’s hand.

But I’ve digressed…

Here’s the major problem with Obama’s philosophy: He doesn’t think you can help yourself. In Obama’s world, you don’t make yourself successful; the goverment has to do it for you. Ah, the American Dream. Oh, wait, no, that’s Soviet Russia again.

And the problem with the government solving all your problems (besides that it’s never worked) is “learned helplessness“. Obama is creating a world where you are told you cannot make choices and you’re unable to care for yourself. You have no freedom and no ability. You have no motive for initiative. If you want to know what that’d be like, imagine your entire life took place at the DMV.

If that sounds good, vote Obama.

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Ari Teman, Oct 17, 2008, NYC
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