Over the weekend I went to the premiere of the Ron Artest Ultimate Comedy Tour at the Hollywood Improv. Or, rather, the person I was before I saw the Ron Artest Ultimate Comedy Tour did. Because the Ron Artest Ultimate Comedy Tour? It changes people. I’ll try to recreate the whole experience as accurately as possible, but I promise you I will fail.

The audience for the show was unexpectedly sparse, probably because the tickets were 35 dollars plus a two-item minimum. When everyone was seated and the lights went down, Ron was introduced by his “right-hand man,” a person who goes by “S” and looks like a young, unhealthy Lou Gossett, Jr.

S read an introduction off of some notecards that he was obviously seeing for the first time; then Ron joined him onstage, and S asked Ron some questions that had been submitted by the audience. When asked which actor he would have play him in the movie of his life, Ron chose The Game. Ron seemed to be pretty embarrassed by that answer and looked at his feet sheepishly, even as the crowd went completely nuts.

Then Ron excused S from the stage and explained to the audience why he was doing a comedy show. The story basically boils down to this: somebody asked him to do it and he said yes.

The show itself (I did not know this beforehand) was basically just Ron Artest introducing four different standup acts. After the first act was over, Ron told a short and completely untrue story about the time he was pulled over for driving while smoking weed. “I tell the media I don’t smoke,” he said. “But there I was, high as hell.” He mimed putting his hand on a steering wheel and theatrically puffing a joint, then he made siren noises and did the voice of a policeman who arrested him and took him to jail. “Make sure my blunt’s ready when I get out,” he said in the story. That was the punchline. Ultimately, the three most confusing things about the story were A) it wasn’t really crazy enough to be a joke, B) it did not actually happen, and C) it was still the weirdest, funniest story anyone had ever heard, although it was to be surpassed about ten minutes later.

A very good photo I took of Ron coughing.

At one point Ron’s phone went off in his pocket. “I’m a black man, so of course my phone’s gonna go off in the middle of a show,” he said, chuckling to himself. At another point he introduced somebody who was not in the show at all, walked off the stage, then bashfully walked back on to introduce the right person.

Nobody was ever not laughing when Ron was talking. He was uncomfortable and giddy and incredibly charming, and he smiled the entire time, except when one of the comics made a disrespectful joke about hos in church. “I do not want my daughters to become whores,” he said afterwards.

By about halfway through the show, everyone had comfortably gotten their money’s worth and was ready to go home and talk about this night forever. But then Ron told a personal story that was…just…let’s go with weird. It was very, very weird.

Here is that story as best I remember it. I wrote it down right after the show, and showed it to a bunch of people who were there, and all parties agree this is very close to what he said minus a lot of swears. Annotations included.

I was eight years old one time (1), and I had my first experience hearing my parents making sex noises. It was like this…(makes sex noises) (2). And so I thought my father was really hitting my mom. My father is a beast. He is a big man.

So I opened the door and saw my mother’s nipple exposed before me (3). And I thought, “Man, that’s a big nipple.” I had never seen a nipple like that before. Or I had, I suppose, because I drank from it. I drank her breast milk as a baby. But then I saw it and I was getting kind of thirsty, so I thought, “Maybe I should drink from my mother’s nipples.” But I didn’t. (4)

I walked up to the bed and pulled the blanket over my mom’s nipples. Then I looked over saw my dad’s taco meat (5). His taco meat was exposed. So I walked over and pulled the blanket over my dad’s taco meat. (6)

There was food everywhere (7), and I saw a frank. And I was hungry. So I grabbed the frank, and I pulled on it (8). And my dad goes “Owwowowow.” Because I had grabbed my dad’s dick.

And he goes, “Don’t be grabbing my dick!” And he punched me. I said, “Don’t punch me! I thought it was a frank. I saw the frank on the bed and I grabbed it.” And he said, “That’s not a frank. That’s my dick!” And he punched me in the head.

And that’s how I got so crazy. (9)

1) Huge laugh from the audience at the phrasing of this. Like everything else, it was impossible to tell whether he meant it as a joke.

2) Ron’s sex noises were very loud deep gulps of air. It was a major departure from any representation of sex I’ve ever heard.

3) An unfortunate thing for you is that you don’t get to hear this story in Ron’s voice. He talks quietly, breathily, and in short bursts, and he emphasizes unexpected syllables. It’s a little Robin Williams, a little Mitch Hedberg, and a lot the asthmatic kid in the wheelchair on Malcolm in the Middle.

4) At this point the room is very quiet except for these little heaves, because everyone has been laughing at full capacity since the beginning of the story and now nobody can breathe anymore.

5) He’s talking about chest hair. I wondered about this for two hours and finally looked it up on Urban Dictionary, but now I’m sort of nostalgic for the time when it was a wonderful mystery what the hell he was talking about.

6) At this point I’m certain I’m not being faithful to his story, because he said “taco meat” at least five times and I can only find room for three times. Ron practices comedy of repetition.

7) He really said this. No explanation provided, ever. He just continued on with his story like nothing was wrong, even though he had just said that his parents had been having sex in a bed where there was food “everywhere.”

8 ) He made a fist and lifted his right arm about five feet across his body to illustrate the frank-pulling.

9) I think I blacked out right after the punchline from being totally overwhelmed by the whole experience. The next thing I remember is waking up in my own bed. I’m not sure how much time had passed, or if any of this actually happened. I hope it did. I truly hope the Ron Artest Ultimate Comedy Tour was real.

• Red’s Army scored a plus-one ticket through a friend, and has a review with some photos and video:

There were some great moments in the film where Magic would recount how he tried to approach Larry here and there and Larry was… how do I put this delicately… a bit of douche.  And then they’d cut to Larry and he’d say “yeah… that was all me.  I didn’t want anything to do with him.”  Just fantastic.

• Dan Devine has a review up on BDL:

Bird does loosen up a bit, and to great effect. He repeatedly scores laughs with caustic lines — asked how he thought Magic felt after his Lakers fell to Bird’s Celtics in the 1984 NBA Finals, Bird deadpans, “I hope he was hurt; I hope it killed him” — and curt observations about the nature of his competitive drive, noting that nearly as important as defeating an opponent is “knowing the other guy’s suffering.”

Luckily for us, loyal C-Hub reader Marko Anderson (whose frequent comments liven up our little site) also scored a ticket and wrote up his thoughts. Take it away, Marko:

As a recent Boston transplant with dual Canadian-Finnish citizenship, Sunday was my fandom equivalent of death by a million papercuts. The Celtics lost a big game to the Nuggs, the Canadians got thrashed by the Americans in Olympic hockey, and, rather than quit while I was behind, I stayed up to the wee hours to witness the Finns get spanked by historic overlords Sweden.

So what better way to spend the Monday night than heading down to the Garden for the premier of the HBO movie “Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals”….at least your team can’t lose when it’s only a movie…..right?

Not knowing any background, I mistakenly thought the movie was based on the recent book “When the Game was Ours”—it wasn’t, but that book’s author, Jackie MacMullan, features prominently in the movie. Overall, I was just hoping for a glory-days highlight package of Bird, Magic & Co. beating each other into submission to lift my spirits.

They had a massive movie screen hovering over the freethrow line and the seating was limited to the section behind the baseline. The hoopla started with some words from C’s owner Wyc Grousbeck, the president of HBO Sports and Paul Pierce, as well as a brief intro and standing ovation for newcomers Nate Robinson and Marcus Landry. You could really feel the hope and anticipation that Larry might show up. He didn’t, but the Legend’s absence didn’t take any shine off the night.

Pierce (introduced as “the defending 3-point champion”) gave a really nice talk about how, as a kid growing up in LA as a Lakers fan, the Celts-Lakers rivalry had a powerful effect on how he connected to the game and got his competitive juices flowing at a young age. Pierce fondly told the story of his favorite Magic-Bird anecdote—the now infamous (first) meeting between the two to shoot a Converse commercial together in Larry’s backyard in French Lick (this moment is definitely one of the gems of the movie as well). Then with one group chant of “Beat LA”, the lights dimmed, and the film rolled.

Any basketball fan from those days already knows the basketball storyline that started with the highest-rated NCAA final and peaked with the popular breakout of the NBA through the Celtics-Lakers rivalry. But the movie was about much more than that; it was a story about Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson, the people. About how two individuals who appeared to be polar opposites in every way ended up coming full circle as yin and yang. The movie starts from their early childhoods and continues through to the present day, and was loaded with lots of classic clips, pictures and running commentary from Larry, Magic and others who were close to them.

The movie didn’t shy away from some of the big issues (including race) that stirred a lot of the perceptions of the Magic-Bird rivalry, but not at the expense of some serious servings of comedy (Larry’s deadpan and Magic’s infectious glow). I came away from the movie thinking that basketball just happened to be the common thread that brought these two very different—yet very similar—people together. Even if you are major fan and think you have read everything there is to read, the movie exposed the depth of the personalities in a way the printed word never could. It would be impossible to come away from this movie and not feel you know the guys a whole lot better.

A must see for any basketball fan, but definitely accessible and enjoyable for a much wider audience (read: very girlfriend/wife/nonhoopsjunkie-friendly).

But here’s the thing about trading Ray Allen: It would mean a huge adjustment to the C’s offense, because there are very few players in the league who can shoot three-pointers as often and as accurately as Ray. Defenders have to be constantly vigilant, and that vigilance creates space for the other four players to operate. The current roster has no player like him. Paul Pierce can shoot threes, but his come in transition or in those random moments where he finds himself with a few feet of space in the flow of the offense. Pierce rarely shoots threes by design. Eddie House can shoot ‘em with anybody, but he’s rarely going to play even 20 minutes in a big game.

Ray will play 40. And he’s a very, very unique weapon. How unique?

Only 15 players in the history of the NBA have hit at least 40 percent of their three-pointers in a season in which they attempted at least six threes per game and played enough to qualify for the scoring title–and they’ve combined to do that in just 19 individual seasons, according to Basketball Reference.

Here are the top 11 seasons, ranked in order of best three-point shooting percentage. (Why 11? Because Ray’s 2008-09 season was the 11th-best).

Ray did that last year, and he’s done it three times in his career–more than anyone else in the history of the NBA. Peja Stojakovic and Rashard Lewis have done it twice. No one else has made the cut more the once. Reggie Miller–once. Paul Pierce–once. Dennis Scott–once.

The list of players grows if you loosen the criteria a bit, but that only reinforces Allen’s rarity as a shooter. If you lower the minutes-played requirement to include all players who qualified for the three-point shooting title, you get 46 individual seasons. If you lower the minutes requirement even further by including players who launched six threes per 36 minutes (instead of per game), you get 61 individual seasons–the equivalent of about two guys per season.

(Side note:  If Simmons can be the Picasso of the Trade Machine, can I be the Rembrandt of the Basketball Reference Full Court function? Give me something).

Having a high-volume three-point shooter who can actually shoot has a dramatic effect on a team’s offense. Jon Nichols studied this for point guards recently, and found that a high-percentage, high-volume shooter at the PG spot sends an offense into the historically-elite stratosphere. An offense with that sort of PG significantly out-performs even an offense with an accurate shooter who doesn’t shoot as much, according to Nichols’ preliminary numbers.

The effect for shooting guards probably isn’t as statistically significant, since there are more good three-point shooters among two guards than PGs.

Still, when I thought about trading Ray Allen for Tyreke Evans or trading a Ray-Rondo package for Prince-Hamilton-Stuckey, my first thought was always: How are we going to replace the three-point shooting?

Because the offense would look an awful lot different without it.

A year later, it’s time to ask: Does the signing of Rasheed Wallace (and, to a lesser extent, Marquis Daniels) change your perception of Ainge’s decision on Posey? I think it should. Because right now, for this team, I’d rather have Rasheed Wallace than James Posey, and the C’s would not have had the mid-level free to use on Wallace had they reserved it for Posey. 

(Side note for collective bargaining agreement fans: If I’m reading the CBA right, the C’s did have the right to go over the cap to sign Posey without using their mid-level, but since they did not have Bird Rights on Posey, they could only offer a 20 percent raise on Posey’s 2008 salary plus future 8 percent raises–less than other teams could offer with their mid-level. So the C’s would have had to use their mid-level to sign Posey, even though he was technically their own free agent. End side note). 

Let’s put aside for a second that Posey is 32, coming off his worst statistical season since 2006 last year and fits the profile of a type of player who tends to decline quickly in this early- and mid-30s, according to a piece John Hollinger wrote last year criticizing the Hornets’s decision to sign Posey. With Kevin Garnett’s knee a potential problem for the rest of his career, the Celtics need a Wallace-type more than they need a Posey-type, and that’s even before considering that Marquis Daniels can at least approximate Posey’s unique value to the team (if not his three-point shooting). 

Ainge took a one-season gamble in 2008, and it (sort of) failed. He believed, correctly, that it would be unwise to tie up the team’s mid-level exception (its only real source of financial flexibility) in an aging perimeter player, even if that stance placed a larger burden on Tony Allen. If the team couldn’t find a better wing player than Allen, then it would be up to Allen to assume the role of Paul Pierce’s main back-up and ace defensive specialist. If he couldn’t step up, perhaps increased production from Big Baby, Leon Powe, Kendrick Perkins and Rajon Rondo could keep the team at a championship level.

It was certainly a gamble. But you know what? It might have worked had Kevin Garnett stayed healthy. He didn’t, and with a knee that is likely in the early stages of an arthritic condition, the Celtics need to be very careful with KG going forward. Yes, Wallace is older than Posey, and, yes, he also put up some of the worst numbers of his career last season. But for this team, right now, I’d rather have an aging and declining Wallace than an aging and declining Posey. Especially with Daniels on board.

Look, I love James Posey. I’ll always have an affection for him. He hit monstrous shots in the playoffs, his three-point shooting and excellent defensive rebounding make him a more valuable player than the average 41 percent shooter and he is as entertaining a role player as their is in the league–in every sense. From his ridiculous pre-game hugs, to his occasional dirty frustration foul, Posey is the classic guy that is completely irritating to fans of every team but the one he’s on.

I attended a Raptors-Hornets game in Toronto last year, and I warned the girl I was with–not a basketball fan–that I would be cheering loudly for Posey every time he did something good. He ended up knocking down six three-pointers and finishing with a 20-10 line in a New Orleans win, and some  young Raptors fans behind me yelled at me to sit down at one point because I was standing and clapping after each Posey three. (I turned and applauded at them, and they had nothing further to say). He also delivered a hard foul on a Raptors player (I can’t remember which one) who was streaking down the lane for what appeared to be an open lay-in. It was clearly an intentional foul. 

I applauded. My companion for the game said something like: “That was mean. And doesn’t the other team get free throws now? So how is that a good thing?” I tried to explain about protecting the rim, sending a message to his teammates, etc. I’m not sure she got it. She did not come away a Posey fan.

This is just to prove my Posey-love credentials, I guess. I love the guy, and I’d love to get him back in a trade using our expiring deals–something the Hornets are unlikely to do, I’d guess. But I think we should all consider Ainge’s decision to let him go more carefully than we did at first in light of recent signings.

This win made the off season inherently optimistic. When a team has three superstars beating the Lakers convincingly in a game 6 clincher, everyone had to feel that the only way the Celtics could go was up. Well, they didn’t.

We all know how PJ Brown retired, Sam Cassell got a one-year deal no one felt good about, and Po-Z fled for greener pastures in New Orleans. Still, there were hopes on the horizon. Rumors started circulating about Corey Maggette coming to Boston. Not only that but fresh off his suspension, fan favorite energy player Chris Anderson came for a try-out.

These seemed like perfect candidates for what the Celtics needed last off season- a swingman to back up Pierce, and athletic big man to defend and spell KG.

What do we need this off season? See above.

The Celtics didn’t get either, opting to sign Patick O’Bryant and banking on him breaking out and Maggette took more (way too much) money to play for Golden State where he would be a starter. The kicker, of course, on the Maggette story was that he didn’t even end up starting for the Warriors by the end of the season. Still, had Maggette played back up minutes for the Celtics, rather than being relied on for major contributions, there’s no doubt in my mind we’d be in a different situation right now. Also, we all know what “Bird Man” is doing right now, and if you don’t tune in to ESPN tonight at 9.

The Celts further addressed the Po-Z departure in the draft when they bought Bill Walker from the Wizards and used a first round pick on JR Giddens. I still say these are great moves. Obviously neither were going to make an impact this season (although I did predict Bill Walker to make a few highlight reels). However, last year the Celtics addressed a major concern- age and athleticism. The Celtics are old and losing their athleticism. Walker and Giddens are young and athletic. These two are pretty much the prototypical player the Celtics want, both are slashers who are athletic enough to become elite defenders, should they ever see the court.

This off season I expect the Celtics to look for one more athletic wing player (preferably established), someone who can shoot to spread the floor, and one more athletic big man who can defend (Chris Andersen maybe?). I mean last year Mickael Pietrus was available, we didn’t want him, and now we’re scraping the egg off our faces given how badly he killed us last series with athleticsim, outside shooting, and defense. In another words, everything we were and still are looking for.

First, let’s get Big Baby sewn up, Marbury to come back, Leon Powe healthy and, oh yeah, rest. Regardless of how you feel about Doc’s injury explanation (Zach vs. Brian) everyone on the Celtics team deserves to rest up and get healthy.

When healthy, we still have a great team, but there also a lot of other great teams out there. Perhaps the loss this year is a blessing in disguise. If we want to win again with this team, we needed an ego check, and we need to always be thinking about ways to get better.

So aside from discussing what the Celtics need to do in the off season, why did I make you remember all that? Because I did, and misery loves company.