BEN MORRISON
cont’d from pg 10
that. One person with the clean water charity will be a friend to someone on the human trafficking charity. They all know each other and are all crazy people and I love crazy people. So, that one Twestival I did led to from one organization after another. At this point I’ve worked with forty different organizations. I’ve been involved with raising over two-million dollars for all different types of charities. I’ve done two of my own charity shows. One of the shows was called Cause for Comedy which I did with Cause Cast that now runs the charity section of the Huffington Post. We did three of those shows at the Improve for Project Angel Food, another for The Aids Awareness Foundation, and Creative Visions Foundation that supports artists. At my second charity event called Laugh Aid we staged the last one for Autism Speaks. Right now we are in pre-production for the next staging of Laugh Aid in late March. I am also one of the featured speakers at the Idation concert/conference. I’m really sick about this…it’s like a conference with intellectuals, scientists etc. and I’ll be talking about the integration of technology and charity. It’s all because I’m a big dork and I know about live SMS donations. I can actually set up a system where people can pick up their phones, text donations to the charity and you can watch them come in, in real time during the show. It’s really cool and another nerdy way to push the cause.
“I call myself selfish because I believe doing charity work brings me good karma and I’m greedy for karma!”
killed it after season eight for about four or five years. Now they’re resurrecting it with Justin Bieber as the host, which hopefully means the ratings will fly through the roof. That fucker is more popular than water. The people who they had me punk were young stars that no one knew of at that time like, Zac Effron, Ed Benedeairy etc., so as they got more popular as the episodes continued in rotation. They’re still on…we shot that four years ago and that’s allowed me to have an ongoing, consistent TV credit. That’s been ongoing and very consistent. That’s been a blessing and Ashton was awesome to work with. He was actually the best part of the whole experience.
Q What are you doing now? A
Well, Laugh Aid is still off in the distance and I’m currently writing for two magazines. One of them is Mutineer. It’s a wine and food magazine kinda like G.Q. meets wine enthusiasts. They’re awesome guys and I’ve become good friends with all of them. We launched a comedy festival in wine country at a winery last December. It was a huge success. Like how cool is that? It was a great weekend. I’m also a columnist for Crohn’s Advocate Magazine it’s the only syndicated magazine dealing with what you think it would be. My column is about the Crohn’s diet. I was a bit pudgy in high school and when I got the Crohn’s, the What would you say was the real turning point in pounds just melted away. It’s the diet fad that’s sweeping the your career, the one that put you on the map? nation. So, I’m still doing my writing work and I have a TV thing I can’t talk about. That’s definitely what I’m working on now but like I said, I can’t talk about it. I’m also doing my As far as the mainstream career, when I did Punk’d, that stand-up and tomorrow I have an audition for the Montréal definitely was a blessing because it was six-months of con- Comedy Festival where I will do my multi-media comedy sistent work. What wound up happening was that I did the and I have other performances here in LA. Ya know, if I have final season of the show and although it’s coming back, they
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