About Mortified
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, Esquire, The Onion AV Club, Daily Candy, Entertainment Weekly, and E!, Mortified is a comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids. Witness adults sharing their own adolescent journals, letters, poems, lyrics, home movies, stories and more.
After all, where else can you hear grown men and women confront their past with firsthand 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 page, and the web. Its latest book, Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield, is in stores everywhere.
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 self-degradation.
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.
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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...
- Mortified collects artifacts of adolescent expression (writing, art, media) through open calls for participants
- Mortified collaborates with authors to organize presentations around unique personal themes and narratives that emerge from the material
- Material must be presented by its original author
- Material must be authentic; language is only altered to protect the innocent, awkward or angsty
