Mortified: Angst Written

What Is It?

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ye olde dreck		live audience		horrifying comedy

Hailed a "cultural phenomenon" by Newsweek and celebrated for years by the likes of This American Life, The Today Show, The Onion AV Club, & Entertainment Weekly, Mortified is a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids. Witness adults sharing their most embarrassing adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, plays, home movies, and art... in order to reveal stories about their lives. Hear grown men and women confront their past with tales of their first kiss, first puff, worst prom, fights with mom, life at bible camp, worst hand job, best mall job, and reasons they deserved to marry Jon Bon Jovi.

The largest and longest-running project of its kind, Mortified produces comedic content for the stage, the screen, the page, and the web.

The project began in the late 1990s when founder Dave Nadelberg unearthed a notably awkward love letter and began sharing with friends. Formalizing as Mortified in 2002 with co-producer Neil Katcher, the project has since sifted through thousands of volumes of otherwise forgotten notebooks, photos, and envelopes in an effort crack the lid off our cultural shoebox and expose our inner geek. Participants include a wide range of people, from professional performers (comics, celebrities, singers) to total amateurs (architects, ad execs, salesmen) all in the noble pursuit of personal redemption through public humiliation.

There are a million stories buried in the pages of people's lives. Mortified's mission is to simply help people find them. Share the shame.

THE MORTIFIED METHOD: OUR GUIDELINES

Eveyone needs words to live by. Moses had ten commandments. Dogma 95 had ten vows of chastity. Fight Club had eight rules. The Babysitters Club had, well, something. Here's our approach...

• Material is collected through open calls for participants found at getmortified.com
• Matirial includes any writing, art, or media created before the age of 21
• Material must be presented by its original author
• Material is screened by Mortified producers to help authors select excerpts that reveal unique personal themes and narratives
• Material must retain the original wording; language only altered to protect the innocent, awkward or angsty