Day: September 15, 2008

I’m back in Boston this week for the 2008 Boston Comedy Festival, which began last night and runs through Saturday, culminating in awards honoring The Smothers Brothers for 50 years together in comedy, local Steve Sweeney for his contribution to Boston comedy, and of course, the ninth annual winner of the Boston comedy contest. Because if you look at the schedule, the contest dominates the framework of this fest. Festival head Jim McCue has tweaked the format for the contest this year, allowing four comics to advance each night to a semifinal round, as opposed to two comics in previous years. That seems much fairer, considering some of these brackets are stacked and in past years, picking only two out of 12 to advance could seem quite arbitrary. McCue asked me to judge the first two rounds of preliminary action last night, so instead of dishing my own personal opinion on each and every stand-up who took the stage, let’s take a look at who advanced from Prelims 1-2 and offer insight into why they had that something extra to get them into the semis. Prelim 1 winners: Sean Sullivan, J-L Cauvin, Patrick Bulger, David Foster. Sullivan didn’t let his physical size become too cliche in terms of fat jokes, instead turning the audience’s impression into laughs by talking about his fiancee, a clever way of replying to all...