The Definitive Guide to Comedy
Within the past 15 minutes, seemingly half of the capacity crowd has made their moves for the exits, following Jeffrey Ross toward the door at the end of his 50-minute set. I happen to be in the lobby when this happens, having filmed a short improvised riff with Rory Albanese …
Mike Birbiglia goes onstage and immediately fills the audience in on my presence liveblogging the event. The lights go up. A couple of hundred heads swivel my way. "So what’s been the highlight so far?" Birbiglia asks me. Pause. "Well, I guess this would have to be the highlight," I …
Gary Gulman opened with a quick quip about wanting "to set the record for beards of bees" before setting down his recording device on the stool onstage. "But first, I’m going to record this, so you can see where you can do better…because you might mail it in," Gulman said, …
I now have watched 24 hours of continuous stand-up comedy without napping, dozing or otherwise passing out from exhaustion. Our host, William Stephenson, has just told the audience that this not only will be a record-setting show, but also "the best f#%&ing comedy show in the history of the universe." …
There’s a nine-year-old boy in the audience, and that throws our host off until he realizes the boy is the son of Paul Mecurio, who has returned for his second set of the day. Mecurio is back to work the crowd, and a young Indian man beats him to the …
I entered the club 24 hours ago, we’ve seen 22 hours of stand-up comedy, and a new audience is beginning to trickle in before they begin charging (host William Stephenson, who has taken only a couple of quick naps, just said cover charges would kick in at 7 p.m.), and …
An up-and-down afternoon heads into everyone else’s Happy Hour with the departure of the young women from Baltimore via Israel (they’d been here since 2 a.m.), leaving the young guy with the pillow and headband as the other really longterm fan (here since 12:30 a.m.) still hanging tough in the …
It’s just before 4 p.m. and a cameraman from FOX 5 News has shown up during Joe DeRosa’s set. DeRosa tries to engage the cameraman in conversation, but he’s reluctant to do so. "Why, they’re not going to use the audio from this?" DeRosa says. "Why not?" the cameraman replies. …
Quotable from the 2 p.m. hour: "This doesn’t feel like a comedy show. It feels like something cataclysmic happened in the world…and this is the only place where we’re free from the zombies." — Christian Finnegan
This is no ordinary show, and certainly not an ordinary audience, and yet I’ve seen several comedians approach the stage without keeping that in mind. Comics who deliver their regular 20-minute low-energy set when the crowd isn’t having it, and needing the opposite. Comics who rely on crowd work with …