More comedy
During this past year, I was taken out to a few comedy nights to see amateur stand up comedians perform their acts before an audience. I fully admit, this was never something that I had patronized in the past, but these experiences left me with a sense of what comedy really is. Like the tragic and happy masks that are the symbol of theater, this went into these realms. In all happiness is sadness, and all sadness is happiness. Yin and yang. The first few rounds definitely had their share of sadness. We were in the basement of a building which doubled as a bowling alley / rock club with chairs assembled around a makeshift stage. Here the amateur, hipster comics would step onto the dimly lit stage, depending on their height would be brushing an air duct pipe with their heads, and entertain the modest group before them. As they were amateurs, their material was not delivered the best way possible, and more often then not their efforts were greeted with silence or an occasional cat call. My friend J said that he decided to put his comedy career on the back burners after many trials and fails in the spring, but he thought of trying it once again in the last few weeks. I agreed to go, and then we were off to another location to once again attempt.
The setting was different. Here we were in a more cheerful setting of a brightly lit sports bar on the east side. The drinks weren't as stiff, the bathrooms were cleaner, and they served actual food with tantalizing smells from the kitchen. The audience wasn't just the comics performing with an occasional tag along, but they were actual customers who came in to enjoy an evening out. A few were regulars, as some received a gift of store bought cookies from one of the first comics of the evening. Happy to say that the performances were better than they were in the bowling alley basement as one talked about his experiences as a father with his toddlers, one about being a mom and becoming a grandmother at age 42, and another about being morbidly obese. J had some new material, as he wanted to share with others his experiences with panhandlers and two stalkers in the recent past. There was a raffle with a cash prize of items in baskets. I mostly stayed on the sidelines, as I was not a participant in the festivities nor was I a true audience member. But still, I clapped as appropriate and sipped my ginger ale with gusto for J. He tries and that's what's important. On the way home in the car we discussed things that he might want to try in future attempts. I made the suggestion of his dressing up in overalls and a beanie with a propeller on his head so that he could be the character of Teen Giant, which would look rather funny on a man over six feet in height weighing in at 190 lbs. And the material needed to have more segway features, as he jumped from the panhandler stories to the stalkers to the kid who didn't know how to read. Still, it was a more positive experience rather than a sad one. And yes, comedy still is subjective.
The setting was different. Here we were in a more cheerful setting of a brightly lit sports bar on the east side. The drinks weren't as stiff, the bathrooms were cleaner, and they served actual food with tantalizing smells from the kitchen. The audience wasn't just the comics performing with an occasional tag along, but they were actual customers who came in to enjoy an evening out. A few were regulars, as some received a gift of store bought cookies from one of the first comics of the evening. Happy to say that the performances were better than they were in the bowling alley basement as one talked about his experiences as a father with his toddlers, one about being a mom and becoming a grandmother at age 42, and another about being morbidly obese. J had some new material, as he wanted to share with others his experiences with panhandlers and two stalkers in the recent past. There was a raffle with a cash prize of items in baskets. I mostly stayed on the sidelines, as I was not a participant in the festivities nor was I a true audience member. But still, I clapped as appropriate and sipped my ginger ale with gusto for J. He tries and that's what's important. On the way home in the car we discussed things that he might want to try in future attempts. I made the suggestion of his dressing up in overalls and a beanie with a propeller on his head so that he could be the character of Teen Giant, which would look rather funny on a man over six feet in height weighing in at 190 lbs. And the material needed to have more segway features, as he jumped from the panhandler stories to the stalkers to the kid who didn't know how to read. Still, it was a more positive experience rather than a sad one. And yes, comedy still is subjective.
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